Today, Halloween conjures up mental images of children in frighteningly Disneyfied fancy dress, carrying plastic jack-o-lanterns, knocking on neighbour’s doors and trick-or-treating themselves towards the dentist’s chair.
But this is a country mile from where it all started. Many of the traditions we associate with the end of October and the celebration of Halloween (All Hallow’s Eve) have roots stretching back to the pre-Christian Celtic world, particularly Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, where the ancient autumn fire festival of Samhain burned bright on the pagan calendar.
What is Samhain?
Samhain saw rural communities come together to eat, drink and celebrate the completion of the harvest – an incredibly important time, the success of which could determine the survival of a settlement over winter. Bonfires were lit and home hearths were rekindled. But this was also a time of encroaching darkness, tinged with fear and sodden with superstition.
According to folkloric beliefs, barriers between the physical and the spiritual worlds became porous around Samhain, allowing supernatural entities to make an awful appearance, and dead ancestors to come visiting.
To guard themselves against mischievous or malevolent spirits, people made offerings or dressed up in costumes. Others took advantage of the situation to pull tricks on each other and blame beings from the Otherworld.
Traditionally marked throughout the Celtic world, but especially in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, Samhain simultaneously celebrates the gathering of the harvest and welcomes the arrival of the darker months.
Although increasingly cold conditions and fewer hours of daylight might seem like a bad thing for rural communities living in relatively basic conditions, according to age-old Celtic beliefs, this cusp-of-winter time was a period when portals opened between the human world and supernatural realms such as Tír na nÓg.
Belief in Otherworlds populated by gods, giants, mythical warriors, fairies, nymphs, banshees and other spiritual beings was very strong in pre-Christian Celtic culture and still figures prominently in the folkloric and storytelling traditions of many Gaelic countries.
As an illustration of what a big deal this was to these ancient communities, a Neolithic passage tomb on the Hill of Tara (the Mound of the Hostages) in Ireland, where kings were once crowned, has been positioned so the main chamber is illuminated by the rising sun each dawn around Samhain.
When is Samhain?
The largest of four festivals that featured large in the calendar of the Ancient Celts – along with Imbolc (start of spring), Beltane (beginning of summer) and Lughnasadh (first harvest) – Samhain celebrations traditionally began midway between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice (so around the end of October) and lasted several days. Samhain is actually the word for November in Irish Gaelic.
What rituals are associated with Samhain?
Coming at the end of the harvest period, when rural folk would have been incredibly busy reaping crops, gathering fruit and preserving food to see them through winter, Samhain was a time when communities came together to celebrate their hard work.
In settlements, villages and towns, large communal bonfires were lit, both as a representation of the sun and as a way of rekindling home fires, which may have fizzled while families were out grafting in fields and orchards from dawn till dusk. Cattle were sacrificed, and in good years large amounts of feasting and drinking took place.
In some areas, attendance at community festivities was thought to have been virtually mandatory, in order to show fealty to both local chieftains and religious deities; failure to take part could result in various forms of bad luck.
This time, as days were shortening and shadows lengthening, was also associated with increased interaction between human societies and the spirit world, when some supernatural entities might make an unsettling appearance.
These demonic characters included the sluagh – hosts of the unforgiven dead, a haunting group of hunters who preyed on peoples’ souls – and the púca, an unpredictable shape-shifting creature, encounters with which could bring either good or bad luck. Dead ancestors might also cross back into the land of the living.
Often offerings were left out to please or appease such visitors from the Otherworld. Bonfires (called samghnagans) were lit around farms and homesteads to protect inhabitants, and some people disguised themselves as animals or monsters to trick the spirits into leaving them alone. The more mischievous (often younger) folk might go and play pranks on their neighbours, and then blame it on the fairies.
By the Middle Ages, the practice of going ‘mumming’ or ‘guising’ – regional variations on a theme of dressing up and going house-to-house looking for tidbits – had become popular, and it’s not hard to see how such behaviours have morphed into the modern tradition of trick-or-treating.
People also started carving impish and frightening faces into turnips and lighting them with embers, a practice that led to the pumpkin jack-o-lanterns seen on Halloween today.
How did Samhain merge with Halloween?
Such shenanigans were, of course, a complete anathema to the Christian church, and the Vatican attempted to quash Samhain traditions and beliefs several times. In the 5th century, Pope Boniface shifted the date of the festival by decree to May, a move which completely failed to stop people subsequently engaging with Samhain activities in autumn.
Four hundred years later, a slightly more successful plan was hatched by Pope Gregory, who reframed the first two days of November as, respectively, All Saints Day (also known as All Hallows Day) and All Souls’ Day. This meant 31 October was All Hallows Eve, which has become Halloween.
Do people celebrate Samhain today?
Several locations around Britain and Ireland still host traditional (and more modern) Samhain celebrations in late October and early November, including Hop tu Naa festival on the Isle of Man and the Púca Festival in County Meath, Ireland.
