Samhain

Halloween is a fun holiday, with its classic decorations, its vast treasury of images and traditions, and its socially-acceptable candy binges.  But for some of us it also has a much deeper significance.

Halloween's true and original name is Samhain, somewhat surprisingly pronounced "SOW-win" (first syllable rhymes with "cow"), with some variation in different times and places.  The word is Irish Gaelic for "summer's end".  Ancient Celtic cultures recognized just two seasons, summer and winter, and Samhain was actually the first of November -- but they also counted each night as being part of the following day, so the night of October 31st was the true beginning of Samhain.  On that night, it was believed, portals between the real world and the "spirit world" were opened, allowing supernatural beings and the souls of the dead to roam the land.  Some of the rituals and practices meant to ward off or propitiate these frightening manifestations have evolved, over the intervening twenty-plus centuries, into the Halloween traditions that we know today.

Chalice Centre (where I found the charming image above) has an overview of how Samhain was observed in pagan times.  Hearth fires were extinguished and re-lit from a sacred source, and people danced around great bonfires into which goods sacrificed to the gods were cast.  The bonfires starred the nighttime landscape not only of the British Isles but also of Gaul and the Iberian peninsula, which were also Celtic lands in pre-Roman times.  The reverence for fire dates back to the Indo-European conquests of more than five millennia ago, and is found in many cultures sharing the same origin.  Fire was similarly held divine in Zoroastrian Persia, for example, and many modern-day Iranians continue to observe the fire-festivals in open defiance of the mullahs' dour edicts of condemnation.

In the British Isles, similarly, Samhain rituals survived the coming of Christianity.  As it did with so many other traditional European sacred days, the new alien faith out of the Middle East sought to Christianize Samhain and co-opt it, rather than eradicate it entirely.  In the seventh century Pope Boniface IV declared the first day of November to be "All Saints' Day", and the preceding night became "All Hallows' Eve", from which the modern name "Halloween" is derived.  Still, the bonfire dances continued -- in some parts of the British Isles, as late as the early twentieth century.

Samhain was observed under different names in various Celtic lands.  The practice of "apple magic", mentioned in the sidebar of the Chalice Centre post linked above, survived in the Cornish festival of Calan Gwaf or Allantide, and in more diluted form in the game of apple-bobbing.  Halloween costumes and trick-or-treating, which play such a central role in our modern concept of Halloween, are foreshadowed in the festival of Hop-tu-Naa on the Isle of Man, a small island between Britain and Ireland.

Modern Christian fundamentalists remain profoundly suspicious of Halloween, and with good reason.  Unlike Christmas, Halloween has never been successfully infused with Christian significance; to this day it remains, in its rich symbolism and imagery, the most boldly pagan popular observance in the Celtic- and English-speaking world.  Modern neo-pagans refer to Halloween as Samhain, and the holiday's growing popularity certainly has the outward look of a pagan revival.

I do not, of course, believe that beings from a "spirit world" will roam the land this coming night.  It's not about beliefs, but about a treasured connection with the true culture of my ancestors, before the Christian darkness descended.