Friday, October 4, 2013
What is Halloween?
Halloween is a secular holiday combining vestiges of
traditional harvest festival celebrations with customs more peculiar to the
occasion such as costume wearing, trick-or-treating,
pranksterism, and decorative imagery based on the changing of the seasons,
death, and the supernatural. It takes place on October 31.
Though it was regarded up until the last few decades of the
20th century as primarily a children's holiday, in more recent years activities
such as costume parties, themed decorations, and even trick-or-treating have
grown increasingly popular with adults as well, making Halloween a celebration
for all ages.
What does the name
'Halloween' mean?
The name Halloween (originally
spelled Hallowe'en) is a contraction of All Hallows Even,
meaning the day before All Hallows Day (better known today as All Saints Day),
a Catholic holiday commemorating Christian saints and martyrs observed since
the early Middle Ages on November 1.
How and when did
Halloween originate?
The best available evidence indicates that Halloween
originated in the early Middle Ages as a Catholic vigil observed on the eve of
All Saints Day, November 1.
It has become commonplace to trace its roots even further
back in time to a pagan festival of ancient Ireland known as Samhain (pronounced sow'-en or sow'-een),
about which little is actually known. The prehistoric observance is said to
have marked the end of summer and the onset of winter, and was celebrated with
feasting, bonfires, sacrificial offerings, and homage to the dead.
Despite thematic similarities, there's scant evidence of any
real historical continuity linking Samhain to the medieval observance of
Halloween, however. Some modern historians, notably Ronald Hutton (The Stations
of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, 1996) and Steve Roud (The
English Year, 2008, and A Dictionary of English Folklore,
2005), flatly reject the popular notion that the Church designated November 1st
All Saints Day to "Christianize" the pagan holiday. Citing a lack of
historical evidence, Roud goes so far as to dismiss the Samhain theory of
origin altogether.
"Certainly the festival of Samhain, meaning Summer's
End, was by far the most important of the four quarter days in the medieval
Irish calendar, and there was a sense that this was the time of year when the
physical and supernatural worlds were closest and magical things could
happen," Roud notes, "but however strong the evidence in Ireland, in
Wales it was May 1 and New Year which took precedence, in Scotland there is
hardly any mention of it until much later, and in Anglo-Saxon England even
less."
It seems reasonable to conclude that the connection between
Halloween and the pagan Irish festival of Samhain has, at the very least, been
overstated in most modern accounts of the holiday's origin.
Earliest Halloween
customs
The earliest documented customs attributable to Halloween
proper grew out of the tandem observances of All Saints Day (November
1), a day of prayer for saints and martyrs of the Church, and All Souls Day (November
2), a day of prayer for the souls of all the dead. Among the practices
associated with Halloween during the Medieval period were the lighting of
bonfires, evidently to symbolize the plight of souls lost in purgatory,
and souling, which
consisted of going door-to-door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for
"soul cakes" and other treats. Mumming (or
"guising"), a custom originally associated with Christmas consisting
of parading in costume, chanting rhymes, and play-acting, was a somewhat later
addition to Halloween.
Again, however, despite the obvious similarities between old
and new, it's an exaggeration to say these medieval customs
"survived" to the present day, or even that they "evolved"
into modern Halloween practices such as trick-or-treating.
There's no direct historical evidence of such a continuity. By the time Irish
immigrants brought the holiday to North America in the mid-1800s, mumming and
souling were all but forgotten in their home country, where the known Halloween
customs of the time consisted of praying, communal feasting, and playing
divination games such as bobbing for apples.
The secular, commercialized
holiday we know today would be barely recognizable to Halloween
celebrants of even just a century ago.
