An Ancient Celtic Festival
Facts And History About All Hallows’ Eve And Its
Connection With Samhain –
– On October 31, many
of us celebrate Halloween, a tradition that is thought to have originated with
the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain.
It is a time of celebration and superstition. On the streets
we see carved, decorated pumpkins, people of all age wearing scary costumes and
children wandering the neighborhood knocking on doors demanding treats.
Seeing through the eyes of an outsider who is not familiar
with the tradition and history behind Halloween, this behavior can appear
rather peculiar. So, how did it all start? What is the true meaning of
Halloween and why is the celebration associated with a 2,000-year-old ancient
pre-Christian festival?
Samhain: An Ancient Celtic Festival
Most historians agree that Halloween dates back to the
ancient Celtic festival of Samhain celebrated 2,000 years ago in the area that
is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern France. This was a time when
people living there celebrated their New Year on November 1 Samhain (pronounced
“sah-win”), which means “summer’s end” in Gaelic and this was a day marked the
end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter.
The worlds between the death and living became blurred.
Ancient Celts this was a time when ghosts of the dead returned to earth.
The ghost of the dead were believed to damage crops and to
combat the threat, ancient Celts often held raging bonfires – fire being a
common way to ward off evil spirits.
Halloween: The History of America’s Darkest Holiday
Acclaimed cultural
critic David J. Skal explores one of America’s most perplexingly popular
holidays in this original mix of personal anecdotes and social analysis. Skal
traces Halloween’s evolution from its dark Celtic history and quaint,
small-scale celebrations to its emergence as mammoth seasonal marketing event.
Skal takes readers
on a cross-country survey that covers remarkably divergent perspectives, from
the merchants who welcome a money-making opportunity that’s second only to
Christmas to fundamentalists who decry Halloween a form of blasphemy and
practicing witches who embrace it as a holy day. He also profiles individuals
who revel in this once-a-year occasion to participate in elaborate fantasies.
Their narratives, combined with the author’s cultural analysis, offer a
revealing look at an intriguing aspect of our national psyche. Read more
The practice continued throughout the region even after
Christianity took hold in the Middle Ages and the festival was renamed All
Hallows’ Eve. Later, in towns, the fires shrank and were instead placed within
turnips or gourds, which were inexpensive, readily available and safe
“containers.”
“Originally they were
simply pierced to emit light, and were carried to scare away the spirits from
the Otherworld who could enter the mortal realm,” said Verlyn Flieger, a
mythology specialist at the University of Maryland. Carving the gourds became
common over time, Flieger explained. “Designed to ward off scary faces, they
gradually took on the aspects of the very foes they were supposed to
forestall,” she told LiveScience.
Halloween And All Souls Day
By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of
Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the
Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional
Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October
when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second
was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of
Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain
probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for apples that is practiced today
on Halloween.
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon
in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of All
Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory III (731–741)
later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all martyrs, and
moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
All Souls Day
By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread
into Celtic lands, where it gradually blended with and supplanted the older
Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a
day to honor the dead. It is widely believed today that the church was
attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but
church-sanctioned holiday.
All Souls Day was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big
bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels and devils.
The All Saints Day celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas
(from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints’ Day) and the night before
it, the traditional night of Samhain in the Celtic religion, began to be called
All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
Pumpkins Replaced Turnips
When Irish immigrants and descendants of the Celts came to
America in the 1800s they brought with them the tradition of Samhain. They soon
noticed there were not enough turnips in America, so instead the settlers
started using pumpkins. Soon a new tradition was born and people started
carving out faces and placing candles in pumpkins.
Halloween pumkins
The pumpkins had a special meaning to the Irish who believed
that a dead headless man could rise from the grave, chop the heads of the
living and put it on himself. Therefore, the Irish placed a pumpkin with a
candle on the graves to scare away the headless man.
American Halloween Tradition Of “Trick-Or-Treating”
According to folklorist John Santino, “the tradition of
dressing in costumes and trick-or-treating may go back to the practice of
“mumming” and “guising,” in which people would disguise themselves and go
door-to-door, asking for food. Early costumes were usually disguises, often
woven out of straw and sometimes people wore costumes to perform in plays or
skits.
The practice may also be related to the medieval custom of
“souling” in Britain and Ireland, when poor people would knock on doors on
Hallowmas (Nov. 1), asking for food in exchange for prayers for the dead.
Trick or treating
Trick-or-treating didn’t start in the United States until
World War II, but American kids were known to go out on Thanksgiving and ask
for food — a practice known as Thanksgiving begging.
Some Christians have expressed concern that that Halloween
is somehow satanic because of its roots in pagan ritual, but ancient Celts
never worshipped a creature resembling the Christian devil and they had no
concept of it. In fact, the Samhain festival had long since vanished by the time
the Catholic Church began persecuting witches in its search for satanic cabals.
Today we continue to celebrate Halloween and the festival’s
popularity has increased. It is now celebrated in more countries across the
world, but we often tend to forget the meaning behind the festival.
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