Halloween - Some thoughts

Posted on October 26th, 2006.

No doubt many of you will be preparing for Halloween and depending upon your view-point will either be finding ways in which Tesco (every-little-helps-our-profits) can turn your offspring into a suitable nightmareish freak; stocking up on sweets for the ‘trick-or-treaters’ or planning your own evangelical diatribe on the ‘evils’ of the season.Let’s face it Halloween is actually a bit of a joke isn’t it!

For most Halloween can be summed up by PUMPKINS, WITCHES, GHOSTS and fancy dressed thugs threatening to ‘egg yer house’ if you don’t offer some kind of sweet-treat payment. In some areas the ‘trick-or-treaters’ can be considered as tiny, later day extortionists…. kind of akin to the Kray’s in make-up. Their subtext - ‘pay up or we’ll have you!’.

I mean let’s be honest, apart from at Halloween when do you see a pumpkin, let alone know what to do with it save for carving some skeletal image into it and using it as a very inefficeint candle holder?

As for witches and ghosts, they only exist in the pages of stories - don’t they?

So, walking around the aforementioned Tesco this week, I was moved by one old dear who offering her disdain to a parent who had just brought a witches costume for her 5 year old, offered that “Halloween”, “was something else we’ve copied from those Americans - shouldn’t be supported!” - ummm, now not wanting to enter into some debate about Anglo-US partnerships, I decided to let the ignorance go… but thought I unburden myself here.

True the custom we know as ‘trick-or-treating’ owes a lot to Americana and the portrayal of the season, but the festival of Halloween is ancient.

Let’s get something sorted here…

Halloween, is said to be a shortening of “All Hallows Eve”… which is the evening before All Saints Day in the Christian calendar.

Halloween with all it’s symbolism however is just like Christmas - a pagan festival adopted by the Christian Church.

Bet that’s got the ‘born-agains’ riled - But it is a kind of truth.

Both Halloween and Christmas were originally pagan festivals and much of the ritual associated with them was co-opted by the early Church possibly in order to carry favour with the local people prior to their assimilation (conversion) into the Christian Church. We’ll save the discussion about Christmas till nearer the time (unlike current commercial trends which seem to insist on Christmas products and advertising begin in mid-September)…

So Halloween…

It has many names in other traditions, but the Celtic pagan tradition it is known as SAMHAIN.

Most pagan festivals were organised around celestial (Solstices and Equinoxes) or agricultural practices…. it kind of makes sense really. The land, the Earth, is the provider of those things we need in order to surive and it, like the Sun and the Moon, goes through various ‘phases’ or ‘cycles’.

Samhain may not have been set as a specific ‘date’, but marked the time when the cattle would be brought in from the fields to a place nearer to ‘home’; a time when the harvest was ‘in’ and a time when the people would settle for the long dark nights of Winter.

Now would be the time to draw close to the fire; stay near to home and prepare for the cold season ahead. It was a time for story-telling; a time of arbitration; a time when the year (the Harvest) was reviewed and reflected upon. In particular it was a time when people celebrated what was and planned for what was to be. Honouring of ancestors was also important to these people…. so what better solution than to have a party where all of this reflection, celebration and planning could take place. (The Celts loved their parties!).

This party was Samhain….

A point at which an old year ended and a new one was ready to begin. The spirts of the ancestors would be invited along with the spirits of the harvest (metaphorically and literally); resolutions would be made and contracts debated. Stories would be told and tribal lore would be passed on….

Traditionally Samhain is a ‘time between time’…. The old year has ended and the new one was yet to begin. I magical terms the ‘veil between the worlds was at its thinnest’ and so the presence of the spirits of the ancestors was more likely, but ensure they could find thier way back, a light was kept buring…

The celebrations involved the whole community… the day after the party was a ‘non-day’, a day which existed at the threshold of what had been and what was to be… a timeless day (yes and I have been to parties like that!).

When Christianity sought to convert the country folk it chose to absorb some of the traditions (the New Year rituals became part of the Christmas celebrations - a new beginning after the birth of Christ) and, since it wanted to dissuade not only ancestor worship but assert itself as the ONLY channel to connect between the mundane and the spiritual, started to whole thing about the need to ‘chase away ghosts’.

To further assert its ritual pre-eminence not only was there a need to tie down the date into the Christian calendar, but also sanctify it - hence All Saints Day.

So there we have it…

Halloween IS NOT an American tradition… It is most certainly one of our oldest festivals and existed in some form a long time prior to Christianity.

Interestingly one aspect of the traditional Smahain celebrations would have been bonfires and possibly some form of sacrifice in order to return to the Earth some of the bounty it had bestowed. Now sacrifice is a strong word, but it exists within all religious doctrine in some form or another. The return of grain and fruits to the altar at the Harvest festival in Christian churches is an example of this. Depsite the ‘press’ not all pagan celebrations involved human (or indeed animal) sacrifice - some did and that again is true for nearly all religions at some point in their history.

Perhaps in the UK the celebrations on Novemeber the 5th (Guy Fawkes Night) have supplanted the traditional fire celebrations and like so many of our stories we have forgotten something of what lies behind them. It is this forgetfulness which promotes the mindless adherence to customs and their eventual debasement…

So if you’re asked to ‘treat’ someone this Halloween perhaps you could treat them with a story that connects them to the meaning behind what they are doing…

AND if you get ‘tricked’ this Halloween by some mindless youngster who throws eggs or worse through your letter box, then sacrifice the little bleeder (after of course telling them they are fufilling a role which has exsited for thousands of years!)…