As the weather turns cooler, the aisles at grocery stores are filled with orange-and-black packages of candy and toys, and seasonal costume shops are doing a booming business. Parents usher their little darlings up and down row after row of costumes, some cute and some grotesque, searching for the "perfect" look. Every grocery store, every other street corner, and half the churches in town have all set up their "Pumpkin Patches" to bring in revenue by selling pumpkins to be carved into Jack-O-Lanterns. Everyone prepares in their own way, even though many haven't got a clue what they're preparing for.
While some of us are preparing for one of the most spiritual holidays of our year, others are testing out various candy-carrying options to see which has the greatest capacity or weight limit. Personally, I don't expect everyone to view this holiday the same way. Certainly every holiday is celebrated by different people in different ways. But, I think that Halloween is one of the least-understood holidays commonly celebrated in America today.
Perhaps the one thing that annoys me the most is people who do not live their lives according to their professed beliefs.....and this is no different at Halloween. It seems to me that the same people who post scriptures and "God" statuses on Facebook almost daily and who, in less than two months, will be ranting and raving against the "commercialism of Christmas" are the same ones who are preparing to escort their kids to a local store to begin picking out Halloween costumes for Trick-or-treating and candy to hand out to the neighborhood kids who will come to the door one evening at the end of the month. Please be aware: Christmas isn't the only holiday being commercialized.
A friend of mine shared on Facebook today this link, which mirrors many of her own views as to why she and her family do not celebrate Halloween. While she and I are basically on opposite ends of the religious spectrum, I fully respect that she lives her life according to her professed faith, and I think that all professed Christians ought to read the article.
So, I thought that I would use this post to share a little bit about the origins of Halloween and how and where it began.
The Ancient Celtic Fire Festivals
Historically, there were four major holy days celebrated by the Paleopagan Druids, possibly throughout the Celtic territories: Samhain, Oimelc, Beltane & Lughnasadh (in one set of Irish-based modern spellings). Four additional holy (or “High”) days (Winter Solstice or “Midwinter,” Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice or “Midsummer,” and Fall Equinox), which are based on Germanic or other Indo-European cultures, are also celebrated in the Neopagan Druid calendar.
The most common practice for the calculation of Samhain, Oimelc, Beltane and Lughnasadh has been, for the last several centuries, to use the civil calendar days or eves of November 1st, February 1st, May 1st and August 1st, respectively. Since we have conflicting evidence on how the Paleopagan Druids calculated these dates, modern Neopagans just use whichever method is most convenient. This means, of course, that we aren't all doing anything uniformly on any given night, which fits perfectly with the Neopagan saying that, “organizing Pagans is like herding cats.” It doesn't match the Evil Conspiracy theories — which have us all marching to a strict drumbeat in perfect Satanic unison — at all.
These four major holy days have been referred to as “fire festivals” for at least the last hundred years or so, because (1) to the ancient Celts, as with all the Indo-European Paleopagans, fire was a physical symbol of divinity, holiness, truth, and beauty; (2) fires play important roles in the traditional customs associated with these festivals; and (3) several early Celtic scholars called them that. Whether in Ireland or India, among the Germans or the Hittites, sacred fires were apparently kindled by the Indo-European Paleopagans on every important religious occasion. To this very day, among Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholics, you can’t have a satisfying ritual without a few candles being lit — of course, the Fundamentalists consider them Heathen too!
Samhain or “Samhuinn” is pronounced “sah” (rhymes with bra) “-when” — not “Sam Hain” — because “mh” in the middle of an Irish word is a “w” sound (don't ask me why, it's just Irish). Known in Modern Irish as Lá Samhna, in Welsh as Nos Galen-Gaeaf (that is, the “Night of the Winter Calends”), and in Manx as Laa Houney (Hollantide Day), Sauin or Souney, Samhain is often said to have been the most important of the fire festivals, because (according to most Celtic scholars) it may have marked the Celtic New Year. At the least, Samhain was equal in importance to Beltane and shared many symbolic characteristics.
Samhain was the original festival to which the Western Christian calendar moved its “All Saints' Day” (Eastern Christians continue to celebrate All Saints' Day in the spring, as the Roman Christians had originally). Since the Celts, like many cultures, started every day at sunset of the night before, Samhain became the “evening” of “All Hallows” (“hallowed” = “holy” = “saint”) which was eventually contracted into “Hallow-e'en” or the modern “Halloween.”
Whether it was the Celtic New Year or not, Samhain was the beginning of the Winter or Dark Half of the Year (the seasons of Geimredh=Winter and Earrach=Spring) as Beltane was the beginning of the Summer or Light Half of the Year (the seasons of Samradh=Summer and Foghamhar=Fall). The day before Samhain was the last day of summer (or the old year) and the day after Samhain was the first day of winter (or of the new year). Being “between” seasons or years, Samhain was (and is) considered a very magical time, when the dead walk among the living and the veils between past, present and future may be lifted in prophecy and divination.
Many important mythological events are said to have occurred on that day. It was on a Samhain that the Nemedians captured the terrible Tower of Glass built by the evil Formorians; that the Tuatha De Danann later defeated the Formors once and for all; and that many other events of a dramatic or prophetic nature in Celtic myth happened. Many of these events had to do with the temporary victory of the forces of darkness over those of light, signaling the beginning of the cold and dark half of the year.
Samhain, from October 31st to November 2nd was a time of no-time. Celtic society, like all early societies, was highly structured and organized, everyone knew their place. But to allow that order to be psychologically comfortable, the Celts knew that there had to be a time when order and structure were abolished, when chaos could reign. And Samhain, was such a time. Time was abolished for the three days of this festival and people did crazy things, men dressed as women and women as men. [This happened at Beltane too.] Farmers' gates were unhinged and left in ditches, peoples' horses were moved to different fields, and children would knock on neighbors' doors for food and treats in a way that we still find today, in a watered-down way, in the custom of trick-or-treating on Halloween.
But behind this apparent lunacy, lay a deeper meaning. The Druids knew that these three days had a special quality about them. The veil between this world and the World of the Ancestors was drawn aside on these nights, and for those who were prepared, journeys could be made in safety to the "other side." The Druid rites, therefore, were concerned with making contact with the spirits of the departed, who were seen as sources of guidance and inspiration rather than as sources of dread. The dark moon, the time when no moon can be seen in the sky, was the phase of the moon which ruled this time, because it represents a time in which our mortal sight needs to be obscured in order for us to see into the other worlds.
The dead are honored and feasted, not as the dead, but as the living spirits of loved ones and of guardians who hold the root-wisdom of the tribe. With the coming of Christianity, this festival was turned into Hallowe'en (October 31st), All Hallows [All Saints Day] (November 1st), and All Souls Day (November 2nd). Here we can see clearly the way in which Christianity (particularly the early Christian missionaries and priests) built upon the Pagan foundations it found rooted in these isles. Not only does the purpose of the festival match with the earlier one, but even the unusual length of the festival is the same.
The Christian Church was unable to get the people to stop celebrating this holiday, so they simply sprinkled a little holy water on it and gave it new names, as they did with other Paleopagan holidays and customs. This was a form of calendrical imperialism, co-opting Paleopagan sacred times, as they had Paleopagan sacred places (most if not all of the great cathedrals of Europe were built on top of earlier Paleopagan shrines and sacred groves). So when Fundamentalists come to your local school board and try to get Halloween removed from the public schools because “it's a Pagan holiday,” they are perfectly correct. Of course, Valentine's Day/Lupercalia, Easter/Eostre, and Christmas/Yule also have many Paleopagan elements associated with their dating and/or symbols, as the Jehovah's Witnesses and others have pointed out for decades. So if we decide to rid the public schools of all holidays that have Pagan aspects to them, there won't be many left.
It's amusing that American teens and pre-teens seem to have instinctively expanded their seasonal celebrations to add another night before Halloween, one on which they commit various acts of harmless (or, unfortunately, not-so-harmless) vandalism, including pranks on neighbors. If we assume that All Saints Day was moved to co-opt the central day of Samhain which was associated originally with the Gods and Goddesses of the Celts, and All Souls Day was supposed to co-opt the worship of the Ancestors, then the modern “Cabbage Night,” “Hell Night,” or simply “Mischief Night” (which used to be April 30th — the night before May Day — in Germany — there's that Beltane/Samhain connection again) would correspond to a celebration of the often mischievous Nature Spirits. This then nicely covers the Indo-European pattern of the “Three Kindreds” of Deities, Ancestors, and Nature Spirits.
Trick or Treat
Where does the custom of “trick or treating” come from? Is it really ancient, a few centuries old, or relatively modern?
Kevin Danaher, in his remarkable book The Year in Ireland, has a long discussion of the traditional Irish celebrations of this festival. In one section on “Hallow-E'en Guisers,” he says:
A familiar sight in Dublin city on and about October 31 is that of small groups of children, arrayed in grotesque garments and with faces masked or painted, accosting the passers-by or knocking on house doors with the request: “Help the Hallow E'en party! Any apples or nuts?” in the expectation of being given small presents; this, incidentally, is all the more remarkable as it is the only folk custom of the kind which has survived in the metropolis. A couple of generations ago, in parts of Dublin and in other areas of Ireland, the groups would have consisted of young men and grown boys, who often traveled considerable distances in their quest, with consequently greater reward. The proceeds were usually expended on a “Hallow E'en party,” with music, dancing, feasting and so on, at some chosen house, and not merely consumed on the spot as with the children nowadays…
As I mentioned before, because it was an “in-between” kind of holiday, spirits (nice or nasty), ancestors, or mortals were thought to be more easily able to pass from This World to the Other World and vice versa. It was also a perfect time for divination or “fortune telling.” While some monotheists may consider these activities to be “evil,” most religions in human history have considered them perfectly normal.
Before and after the arrival of Christianity, early November was when people in Western and Northern Europe finished the last of their harvesting, butchered their excess stock (so the surviving animals would have enough food to make it through the winter), and held great feasts. They invited their ancestors to join them, decorated family graves, and told ghost stories — all of which may strike some monotheists today as spiritually erroneous, but which hardly seems “evil” — and many modern polytheists do much the same (though few of us have herds to thin). So where does “trick or treating” come in?
•At various times and places in the Middle Ages, customs developed of beggars, then children, asking for “soul cakes” on All Souls Day.
•At some other Medieval times and places, costumed holiday parading, singing and dancing at May Day, Halloween, and Yule (with different themes, of course, though sometimes with similar characters, such as the “Hobby Horse”) became popular in Ireland and the British Isles. Originally these costumed celebrants were adults and older teens, who would go from house to house demanding beer and munchies in exchange for their performances, which mixed Pagan and Christian symbols and themes. While many Neopagans may think these folk customs go all the way back to Paleopagan times, they are actually fairly modern.
•To the medieval householders, of course, being thought stingy (especially in front of the visiting ancestors and faery folk at Halloween) would be very bad luck, as it would violate the ancient laws of hospitality. Perhaps there were some inebriated paraders who might have decided to come back later in the night and play tricks upon those who hadn't rewarded them properly, but any references to such are fairly modern.
•In 1605 c.e., Guy Fawkes' abortive effort to blow up the British Parliament on November 5th, led to the creation of “Guy Fawkes Day,” celebrated by the burning of effigies of Fawkes in bonfires and children dressing in rags to beg for money for fireworks. As the decades rolled by, this became thoroughly entwined with Halloween celebrations and customs. This is not surprising, considering that bonfires were a central part of the old Samhain/Halloween tradition, and that Nov. 5th was actually closer to the astrological date for Samhain (thought by some Neopagans to be the original dating method) than Nov. 1st was! In the year 2006, the movie V for Vendetta introduced the image of Guy Fawkes to millions of Americans.
•In 19th Century America, rural immigrants from Ireland and Scotland kept gender-specific Halloween customs from their homelands: girls stayed indoors and did divination games, while the boys roamed outdoors engaging in almost equally ritualized pranks, which their elders “blamed” on the spirits being abroad that night.
•Also in mid-19th Century New York, children called “ragamuffins” would dress in costumes and beg for pennies from adults on Thanksgiving Day.
•Things got nastier with increased urbanization and poverty in the 1930s. Adults began casting about for ways to control the previously harmless but now increasingly expensive and dangerous vandalism of the “boys.” Towns and cities began organizing “safe” Halloween events and householders began giving out bribes to the neighborhood kids as a way to distract them away from their previous anarchy. The ragamuffins disappeared or switched their date to Halloween. The term “trick or treat,” finally appears in print around 1939!
•Pranks became even nastier in the 1980s, with widespread poverty existing side-by-side with obscene greed. Unfortunately, as criminologists, military recruiters and historians know, the most dangerous animals on our planet are unemployed teen-aged males. Bored kids in a violence-saturated culture slip all too easily from harmless “decoration” of their neighbors' houses with shaving cream and toilet paper to serious vandalism and assaults. Blaming Halloween for this is rather like blaming the Fourth of July for the many firecracker injuries that happen every year (and which are also combated by publicly sponsored events).
By the mid- 20th century in Ireland and Britain, it seems only the smaller children would dress up and parade to the neighbors' houses, do little performances, then ask for a reward. American kids seem to remember this with their chants of “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg,” and other classic tunes done for no reason other than because “it's traditional.”
To a great extent, the costumes worn by modern trick-or-treaters represent, as they might have in older times, an effort to entertain, amuse and/or scare the neighbors, and to compete a bit with others in beauty, ugliness, humor, scariness, and costuming skill.
Why Bother to save Halloween?
Halloween is a time that reconfirms the social bond of a neighborhood (particularly the bond between strangers of different generations) by a ritual act of trade. Children go to lengths to dress up and overcome their fear of strangers in exchange for candy. And adults buy the candy and overcome their distrust of strange children in exchange for the pleasure of seeing their wild outfits and vicariously reliving their own adventures as children.
In other words, the true value and importance of Halloween comes not from parading in costumes in front of close friends and family, but from this interchange with strangers, exorcising our fears of strangers, reaffirming our social bond with the people of the neighborhood who we rarely, if ever, see the rest of the year.
How Neopagans will Celebrate
Reporters are always asking what we Neopagans “do” for Halloween. Well, many take our kids around our neighborhoods trick or treating, as carefully as any other parents. Those who stay at home may hand out commercially packaged candy to those who visit our houses (we mostly would all prefer to give out homemade goodies, but paranoia has made such treats unwelcome). Over the weekend, our circles of friends will have rituals that might include “dumb suppers” (silent, salt-free meals) for the Ancestors, or separate “kid circles” and costume parties for our children — and we always wind up with at least as many kids as we started out with! Most of us will do some divination, give honor to those who have died in the past year, play traditional games, and meditate on our own mortality.
That's what American Neopagans will do on Samhain.
However, there will be no blood drinking, no baby sacrifices, no crimes — just good, clean, festivity with some ceremonial additions appropriate to the season and current events.
To sum up, in more personal terms, what Halloween means to many Neopagans:
•Halloween is the modern name for Samhain, an ancient Celtic holy day which many Neopagans — especially Wiccans, Druids and Celtic Reconstructionists — celebrate as a spiritual beginning of a new year.
•Halloween is a time to confront our personal and cultural attitudes towards death and those who have passed on before us.
•Halloween is a time to lift the veil between the many material and spiritual worlds in divination, so as to gain spiritual insight about our pasts and futures.
•Halloween is a time to deepen our connection to the cycles of the seasons, to the generations that have come before us and those that will follow, and to the Gods and Goddesses we worship.
•Halloween is a time to let our inner children out to play, to pass on our childhood traditions to our children, and to share the fun with our friends and neighbors of many other faiths.
Historically, there were four major holy days celebrated by the Paleopagan Druids, possibly throughout the Celtic territories: Samhain, Oimelc, Beltane & Lughnasadh (in one set of Irish-based modern spellings). Four additional holy (or “High”) days (Winter Solstice or “Midwinter,” Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice or “Midsummer,” and Fall Equinox), which are based on Germanic or other Indo-European cultures, are also celebrated in the Neopagan Druid calendar.
The most common practice for the calculation of Samhain, Oimelc, Beltane and Lughnasadh has been, for the last several centuries, to use the civil calendar days or eves of November 1st, February 1st, May 1st and August 1st, respectively. Since we have conflicting evidence on how the Paleopagan Druids calculated these dates, modern Neopagans just use whichever method is most convenient. This means, of course, that we aren't all doing anything uniformly on any given night, which fits perfectly with the Neopagan saying that, “organizing Pagans is like herding cats.” It doesn't match the Evil Conspiracy theories — which have us all marching to a strict drumbeat in perfect Satanic unison — at all.
These four major holy days have been referred to as “fire festivals” for at least the last hundred years or so, because (1) to the ancient Celts, as with all the Indo-European Paleopagans, fire was a physical symbol of divinity, holiness, truth, and beauty; (2) fires play important roles in the traditional customs associated with these festivals; and (3) several early Celtic scholars called them that. Whether in Ireland or India, among the Germans or the Hittites, sacred fires were apparently kindled by the Indo-European Paleopagans on every important religious occasion. To this very day, among Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholics, you can’t have a satisfying ritual without a few candles being lit — of course, the Fundamentalists consider them Heathen too!
Samhain or “Samhuinn” is pronounced “sah” (rhymes with bra) “-when” — not “Sam Hain” — because “mh” in the middle of an Irish word is a “w” sound (don't ask me why, it's just Irish). Known in Modern Irish as Lá Samhna, in Welsh as Nos Galen-Gaeaf (that is, the “Night of the Winter Calends”), and in Manx as Laa Houney (Hollantide Day), Sauin or Souney, Samhain is often said to have been the most important of the fire festivals, because (according to most Celtic scholars) it may have marked the Celtic New Year. At the least, Samhain was equal in importance to Beltane and shared many symbolic characteristics.
Samhain was the original festival to which the Western Christian calendar moved its “All Saints' Day” (Eastern Christians continue to celebrate All Saints' Day in the spring, as the Roman Christians had originally). Since the Celts, like many cultures, started every day at sunset of the night before, Samhain became the “evening” of “All Hallows” (“hallowed” = “holy” = “saint”) which was eventually contracted into “Hallow-e'en” or the modern “Halloween.”
Whether it was the Celtic New Year or not, Samhain was the beginning of the Winter or Dark Half of the Year (the seasons of Geimredh=Winter and Earrach=Spring) as Beltane was the beginning of the Summer or Light Half of the Year (the seasons of Samradh=Summer and Foghamhar=Fall). The day before Samhain was the last day of summer (or the old year) and the day after Samhain was the first day of winter (or of the new year). Being “between” seasons or years, Samhain was (and is) considered a very magical time, when the dead walk among the living and the veils between past, present and future may be lifted in prophecy and divination.
Many important mythological events are said to have occurred on that day. It was on a Samhain that the Nemedians captured the terrible Tower of Glass built by the evil Formorians; that the Tuatha De Danann later defeated the Formors once and for all; and that many other events of a dramatic or prophetic nature in Celtic myth happened. Many of these events had to do with the temporary victory of the forces of darkness over those of light, signaling the beginning of the cold and dark half of the year.
Samhain, from October 31st to November 2nd was a time of no-time. Celtic society, like all early societies, was highly structured and organized, everyone knew their place. But to allow that order to be psychologically comfortable, the Celts knew that there had to be a time when order and structure were abolished, when chaos could reign. And Samhain, was such a time. Time was abolished for the three days of this festival and people did crazy things, men dressed as women and women as men. [This happened at Beltane too.] Farmers' gates were unhinged and left in ditches, peoples' horses were moved to different fields, and children would knock on neighbors' doors for food and treats in a way that we still find today, in a watered-down way, in the custom of trick-or-treating on Halloween.
But behind this apparent lunacy, lay a deeper meaning. The Druids knew that these three days had a special quality about them. The veil between this world and the World of the Ancestors was drawn aside on these nights, and for those who were prepared, journeys could be made in safety to the "other side." The Druid rites, therefore, were concerned with making contact with the spirits of the departed, who were seen as sources of guidance and inspiration rather than as sources of dread. The dark moon, the time when no moon can be seen in the sky, was the phase of the moon which ruled this time, because it represents a time in which our mortal sight needs to be obscured in order for us to see into the other worlds.
The dead are honored and feasted, not as the dead, but as the living spirits of loved ones and of guardians who hold the root-wisdom of the tribe. With the coming of Christianity, this festival was turned into Hallowe'en (October 31st), All Hallows [All Saints Day] (November 1st), and All Souls Day (November 2nd). Here we can see clearly the way in which Christianity (particularly the early Christian missionaries and priests) built upon the Pagan foundations it found rooted in these isles. Not only does the purpose of the festival match with the earlier one, but even the unusual length of the festival is the same.
The Christian Church was unable to get the people to stop celebrating this holiday, so they simply sprinkled a little holy water on it and gave it new names, as they did with other Paleopagan holidays and customs. This was a form of calendrical imperialism, co-opting Paleopagan sacred times, as they had Paleopagan sacred places (most if not all of the great cathedrals of Europe were built on top of earlier Paleopagan shrines and sacred groves). So when Fundamentalists come to your local school board and try to get Halloween removed from the public schools because “it's a Pagan holiday,” they are perfectly correct. Of course, Valentine's Day/Lupercalia, Easter/Eostre, and Christmas/Yule also have many Paleopagan elements associated with their dating and/or symbols, as the Jehovah's Witnesses and others have pointed out for decades. So if we decide to rid the public schools of all holidays that have Pagan aspects to them, there won't be many left.
It's amusing that American teens and pre-teens seem to have instinctively expanded their seasonal celebrations to add another night before Halloween, one on which they commit various acts of harmless (or, unfortunately, not-so-harmless) vandalism, including pranks on neighbors. If we assume that All Saints Day was moved to co-opt the central day of Samhain which was associated originally with the Gods and Goddesses of the Celts, and All Souls Day was supposed to co-opt the worship of the Ancestors, then the modern “Cabbage Night,” “Hell Night,” or simply “Mischief Night” (which used to be April 30th — the night before May Day — in Germany — there's that Beltane/Samhain connection again) would correspond to a celebration of the often mischievous Nature Spirits. This then nicely covers the Indo-European pattern of the “Three Kindreds” of Deities, Ancestors, and Nature Spirits.
Trick or Treat
Where does the custom of “trick or treating” come from? Is it really ancient, a few centuries old, or relatively modern?
Kevin Danaher, in his remarkable book The Year in Ireland, has a long discussion of the traditional Irish celebrations of this festival. In one section on “Hallow-E'en Guisers,” he says:
A familiar sight in Dublin city on and about October 31 is that of small groups of children, arrayed in grotesque garments and with faces masked or painted, accosting the passers-by or knocking on house doors with the request: “Help the Hallow E'en party! Any apples or nuts?” in the expectation of being given small presents; this, incidentally, is all the more remarkable as it is the only folk custom of the kind which has survived in the metropolis. A couple of generations ago, in parts of Dublin and in other areas of Ireland, the groups would have consisted of young men and grown boys, who often traveled considerable distances in their quest, with consequently greater reward. The proceeds were usually expended on a “Hallow E'en party,” with music, dancing, feasting and so on, at some chosen house, and not merely consumed on the spot as with the children nowadays…
As I mentioned before, because it was an “in-between” kind of holiday, spirits (nice or nasty), ancestors, or mortals were thought to be more easily able to pass from This World to the Other World and vice versa. It was also a perfect time for divination or “fortune telling.” While some monotheists may consider these activities to be “evil,” most religions in human history have considered them perfectly normal.
Before and after the arrival of Christianity, early November was when people in Western and Northern Europe finished the last of their harvesting, butchered their excess stock (so the surviving animals would have enough food to make it through the winter), and held great feasts. They invited their ancestors to join them, decorated family graves, and told ghost stories — all of which may strike some monotheists today as spiritually erroneous, but which hardly seems “evil” — and many modern polytheists do much the same (though few of us have herds to thin). So where does “trick or treating” come in?
•At various times and places in the Middle Ages, customs developed of beggars, then children, asking for “soul cakes” on All Souls Day.
•At some other Medieval times and places, costumed holiday parading, singing and dancing at May Day, Halloween, and Yule (with different themes, of course, though sometimes with similar characters, such as the “Hobby Horse”) became popular in Ireland and the British Isles. Originally these costumed celebrants were adults and older teens, who would go from house to house demanding beer and munchies in exchange for their performances, which mixed Pagan and Christian symbols and themes. While many Neopagans may think these folk customs go all the way back to Paleopagan times, they are actually fairly modern.
•To the medieval householders, of course, being thought stingy (especially in front of the visiting ancestors and faery folk at Halloween) would be very bad luck, as it would violate the ancient laws of hospitality. Perhaps there were some inebriated paraders who might have decided to come back later in the night and play tricks upon those who hadn't rewarded them properly, but any references to such are fairly modern.
•In 1605 c.e., Guy Fawkes' abortive effort to blow up the British Parliament on November 5th, led to the creation of “Guy Fawkes Day,” celebrated by the burning of effigies of Fawkes in bonfires and children dressing in rags to beg for money for fireworks. As the decades rolled by, this became thoroughly entwined with Halloween celebrations and customs. This is not surprising, considering that bonfires were a central part of the old Samhain/Halloween tradition, and that Nov. 5th was actually closer to the astrological date for Samhain (thought by some Neopagans to be the original dating method) than Nov. 1st was! In the year 2006, the movie V for Vendetta introduced the image of Guy Fawkes to millions of Americans.
•In 19th Century America, rural immigrants from Ireland and Scotland kept gender-specific Halloween customs from their homelands: girls stayed indoors and did divination games, while the boys roamed outdoors engaging in almost equally ritualized pranks, which their elders “blamed” on the spirits being abroad that night.
•Also in mid-19th Century New York, children called “ragamuffins” would dress in costumes and beg for pennies from adults on Thanksgiving Day.
•Things got nastier with increased urbanization and poverty in the 1930s. Adults began casting about for ways to control the previously harmless but now increasingly expensive and dangerous vandalism of the “boys.” Towns and cities began organizing “safe” Halloween events and householders began giving out bribes to the neighborhood kids as a way to distract them away from their previous anarchy. The ragamuffins disappeared or switched their date to Halloween. The term “trick or treat,” finally appears in print around 1939!
•Pranks became even nastier in the 1980s, with widespread poverty existing side-by-side with obscene greed. Unfortunately, as criminologists, military recruiters and historians know, the most dangerous animals on our planet are unemployed teen-aged males. Bored kids in a violence-saturated culture slip all too easily from harmless “decoration” of their neighbors' houses with shaving cream and toilet paper to serious vandalism and assaults. Blaming Halloween for this is rather like blaming the Fourth of July for the many firecracker injuries that happen every year (and which are also combated by publicly sponsored events).
By the mid- 20th century in Ireland and Britain, it seems only the smaller children would dress up and parade to the neighbors' houses, do little performances, then ask for a reward. American kids seem to remember this with their chants of “Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg,” and other classic tunes done for no reason other than because “it's traditional.”
To a great extent, the costumes worn by modern trick-or-treaters represent, as they might have in older times, an effort to entertain, amuse and/or scare the neighbors, and to compete a bit with others in beauty, ugliness, humor, scariness, and costuming skill.
Why Bother to save Halloween?
Halloween is a time that reconfirms the social bond of a neighborhood (particularly the bond between strangers of different generations) by a ritual act of trade. Children go to lengths to dress up and overcome their fear of strangers in exchange for candy. And adults buy the candy and overcome their distrust of strange children in exchange for the pleasure of seeing their wild outfits and vicariously reliving their own adventures as children.
In other words, the true value and importance of Halloween comes not from parading in costumes in front of close friends and family, but from this interchange with strangers, exorcising our fears of strangers, reaffirming our social bond with the people of the neighborhood who we rarely, if ever, see the rest of the year.
How Neopagans will Celebrate
Reporters are always asking what we Neopagans “do” for Halloween. Well, many take our kids around our neighborhoods trick or treating, as carefully as any other parents. Those who stay at home may hand out commercially packaged candy to those who visit our houses (we mostly would all prefer to give out homemade goodies, but paranoia has made such treats unwelcome). Over the weekend, our circles of friends will have rituals that might include “dumb suppers” (silent, salt-free meals) for the Ancestors, or separate “kid circles” and costume parties for our children — and we always wind up with at least as many kids as we started out with! Most of us will do some divination, give honor to those who have died in the past year, play traditional games, and meditate on our own mortality.
That's what American Neopagans will do on Samhain.
However, there will be no blood drinking, no baby sacrifices, no crimes — just good, clean, festivity with some ceremonial additions appropriate to the season and current events.
To sum up, in more personal terms, what Halloween means to many Neopagans:
•Halloween is the modern name for Samhain, an ancient Celtic holy day which many Neopagans — especially Wiccans, Druids and Celtic Reconstructionists — celebrate as a spiritual beginning of a new year.
•Halloween is a time to confront our personal and cultural attitudes towards death and those who have passed on before us.
•Halloween is a time to lift the veil between the many material and spiritual worlds in divination, so as to gain spiritual insight about our pasts and futures.
•Halloween is a time to deepen our connection to the cycles of the seasons, to the generations that have come before us and those that will follow, and to the Gods and Goddesses we worship.
•Halloween is a time to let our inner children out to play, to pass on our childhood traditions to our children, and to share the fun with our friends and neighbors of many other faiths.
So…
Happy Halloween Everyone!
Happy Halloween Everyone!
Whether or not you choose to take your children out Trick-or-Treating, remember to be safe on Halloween night wherever you are. If you're out driving, especially in residential areas, keep on the lookout for children of all ages on walking on the sides of streets.
What a read!!!! Sarah, I hope that you find something in life to financially reward you for your talent to write. This reads like a term paper/magazine article/histocial account, but very interesting as well. That's a talent, you can improve and perfect it via a graduate degree, but you have to have the foundation first. You most certainly have it. However, the thing that strikes me the most is the fact that you do this "for pleasure" or "for release" you obviously feel the need and that is what a true writer does - they write because they "have to" not just "want to". Wow, is all I can say.
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