So, as you all know, we're coming up to Halloween, which is on the 31st of this month. Now, a lot of people would not know what Halloween is really about or what it's based on. So, I’m going to try to explain that in a short blog post. So Halloween it is basically means All Hallows’ Eve. So it’s the night before uh All Hallow's Day, otherwise called All Saints' Day, which is one of the most holy days in the Roman Catholic calendar and that was carried forward sort of into the Protestant calendar as well in an unofficial way, but its origin is in the Catholic church.
Som following on from All Hallow's Day, the following day (2nd November) is All Souls’ Day. So, you have these two holy days put together. And it's no accident where they fall - to coincide with an ancient Irish Pagan festival - because um at this time of year (dates can vary. anything between 20th of October through to the 7th November), you have a much older Pagan festival called Samhain, which originates in pre-Christian Ireland. Also the month of November in Ireland is in the Irish language or Gaeilge called Samhain even today. In Irish name for Halloween is Oíche Shamhna.
So this originally, as I said, was a Pagan festival associated with death and the dead and really about venerating the ancestors - that was primary the purpose. The belief was that at this time of year the veil between the Otherworld and the ordinary world that we live in and our consciousness is in most of the time - that veil between the two was said to be very thin and it would be much easier to contact your your deceased family members etc. And then you also have spirits roaming the land and Aos Sí, generally known as the fairies, also being more present or visible than normal.
So there's a whole bunch of traditions that have been transferred from what was an ancient Pagan festival into Halloween and Halloween was put there deliberately by the Roman Church to try to eradicate this Pagan festival. Although what actually happened was that a lot of these traditions ended up being in many cases semi-christianized and still practiced by most people even though the Church prohibited them and then actually tried to ban of all the Halloween festivities at one point in Ireland and also and other places, but of course this failed. So the Church had to really just try and bring it in into the celebrations of All Hallows’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
So you got all this high jinks going on on the night before All Hallow’s Day and the Church sort of just reluctantly accepted it, as it had no real choice about it. But the Church, at the same time, did undergo quite a process of scaring people and demonizing a lot of these traditions and certainly demonizing the spirits of the land and the Aos Sí and ancestors, thereby creating fear and making people fearful of ghosts, fearful of the dead generally, their dead ancestors and obviously terrified about Satan or the Devil being abroad at this time.
So, a. lot of the scary stuff associated with Halloween has come from from that from the Church's attempt to demonize a much older cultural tradition than what the Catholic Church uh has practiced in uh its own rituals and rites. So, you've got this kind of weird combination of leftovers from the Pagan times combined with earlyChristian and later Christian ideas. And then you've also got an overlay of returning traditions from from the Americas and other places, although particularly the Americas. So that's where things like pumpkins come from and the the zombie that’s obviously from the Caribbean, from Haiti in particular, and various other sort of ghostly creatures that a feature in modern Halloween. Some of them have come from Ireland and Britain and Europe, and some of them, uh, have come from, uh, further afield in the world.
In addition, there's a few odd odd things as well that survived the Pagan period into modern times, like ‘Bleeding For St.Martin’, which happens on St. Martin’s Day, which is on11th November, just after sidereal Samhain. I'm not entirely sure of where it arises from, but it is a strange ritual involving killing a chicken and scattering its blood on the four walls of the house, which has got very little to do with St. Martin, but it's a tradition that would have had more to do with this festival of the dead and protecting the home. And at this time, you would have done a lot of slaughtering of of your beasts or cattle or pigs, etc. and chickens, going into the winter because part of the tradition is about not just asking your ancestors for their support but also the support of the gods or in the case of later times God or the Virgin Mary or Jesus to help you through this difficult time through to the spring.
Of course winter is a big time for deaths, particularly for the young and the elderly. But if you go back in time, before the modern age that would have been much higher again. So people were a somewhat fearful of winter and if you hadn't prepared for winter, if you hadn't laid in food and firewood and whatever else needed and prepared for what could be very harsh conditions then you might not survive.
So really that's the core of what what Halloween is about. It's not about plastic trinkets and trick or treat or running around dressed up in costumes, although there are precedents for that in the past which can in many cases be traced back to ancient times. It's clear that they’ve been distorted and reinterpreted over time and people have often lost the context of why these things are done.
Clearly it was originally a festival for the dead, which always did involve and does today a bonfire. In the UK that's been moved to the 5th of November because of the gunpowder plot, but in Ireland and other places it's still celebrated on whatever the traditional Halloween date is in that locale, which is not always the same. As I said before, it could be some people will be celebrating with this new moon on the 21st of October. Other people will be celebrating on the 31st. Other people again will be celebrating on the midpoint of the sidereal calendar between the equinox and the winter solstice, which would be around the 6th or 7th of November.
So, that's basically it in a nutshell and you can find out a lot more about that if you if you want to look online and you may also be interested in my book that I wrote about the subject of Halloween and Samhain. There it is. Halloween was never intended to be a commercial festival, but that's pretty much what it's become today. So, I would hope that lots of people would be interested inwhat it's really about and not just interested in buying loads of plastic junk from China. However, it's great that there's a fun side to Halloween and it should be fun, but there's also a serious side to it and I think people often forget that.
Luke Eastwood
