From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Halloween or Hallowe'en is a holiday celebrated in much of the Western world on the night of October 31, the night before All Saints Day (Nov. 1), hence its alternative name as All Saints Eve or All Hallows' Eve. Long surviving in Ireland, it was brought to the United States by Irish emigrants in the 19th century. A variation is "Punkie Night" which is observed the last Thursday in October in the village of Hinton St. George in the county of Somerset in England (see under "Jack o"Lantern' below).
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Halloween is a holiday that is based around embracing scary things, particularly those involving death, the undead, "evil" magic, and mythical monsters. It is a liminal or threshold occasion, when the distinctions between the daylight world of reason and the spectral nightworld are blurred.
Commonly-associated Halloween "characters" include ghosts, witches, black cats, goblins, banshees, zombies, and demons, as well as certain literary figures such as Dracula and Frankenstein's monster.
Black and orange are the traditional colors of Halloween. There are also elements of the autumn season reflected in symbols of Halloween, such as pumpkins and scarecrows.
The jack o'lantern is one of Halloween's most prominent symbols. In Britain and Ireland, a turnip was, and sometimes still is, used but emigrants to America quickly adopted the pumpkin since it is much easier to carve. Families that celebrate Halloween will carve a pumpkin into a scary or comical face, and place a candle inside the hollowed out shell, creating a crude lantern. This is then placed on the home's doorstep on Halloween night in order to scare evil spirits away.
A variant of a Jack o'Lantern carried on a string is a feature of Punkie Night, celebrated the fourth Thursday of October in the village of Hinton St. George, Somerset. (In England, Celtic customs and language have lingered longest in the southwest.) For Punkie Night, children carry lanterns made from hollowed-out mangel-wurzels (these days pumpkins are used) with faces cut out of them around the village boundary, collecting money and singing the punkie song. Punkie is derived from pumpkin or punk, meaning tinder. Though the custom is only attested over the last century, and the mangel wurzel itself was introduced into English agriculture in the later 18th century, "Punkie Night" appears to be much older, older even than the fable that now accounts for it, in which the wives of Hinton St. George went looking for their wayward husbands at the fair held nearby at Chiselborough, the last Thursday in October, but first hollowed out mangel wurzels in order to make lanterns to light their way. The laboriously improvised lanterns are not so easily explained, but the reaction of drunken husbands to the eerie lights is perhaps more telling: they immediately identified the lights as "goolies," the restless spirits of children who had died before they were baptized,&mdash and fled in terror! Children carry the punkies now. The event has spread since ca 1960 to the neighboring village of Chiselborough.
Sources: on-line report from the Western Gazette and a National Geographic radio segment. Chiselborough Fair is memorialized by Fair Place in the village. The National Gazetteer of Great Britain and Ireland (1868) reported that there was "a fair for horses and cattle on the last Thursday in October."
The main event of Halloween is trick-or-treating, or guising, in which children dress up in costume disguises, and go door-to-door in their neighbourhood, ringing the bell and yelling "trick or treat!" or "Halloween apples!" The occupant of the house then gives the child some small candies, miniature chocolate bars or other individually wrapped treats. Children can often accumulate quite a lot of treats on Halloween night, filling up entire pillow cases or shopping bags.
Typical Halloween costumes have traditionally been monsters such as vampires, ghosts, witches, and devil.In 19th century Ireland the reason for wearing such fearsome costumes was the belief that since the spirits that were abroad that night were essentially intent on doing harm, the best way to avoid this was to fool the spirits into believing that you were one of them. In recent years however, more contemporary costume ideas have also become popular, such as dressing up as a character from a popular TV show or movie. It's not uncommon for Halloween participants to celebrate by wearing costumes related to a specific theme or time. In 2001, after the September 11 Attacks, for example, costumes of firefighters, police officers, and US military personnel became popular amongst children.
Trick or Treating usually ends when a child enters his or her teenage years. Teenagers and adults instead often celebrate Halloween with costume parties or other social get-togethers.
There are several traditional games associated with Halloween parties. The most common is bobbing for apples, in which a tub or a large basin is filled with water in which apples float. The participants must remove an apple from the basin using only their mouths. Naturally everyone gets wet. Another common game involves hanging up treacle or syrup-coated scones by strings. These must be eaten without using hands while they remain attached to the string, an activity which inevitably leads to a very sticky face.Another game, Púicíní (pronounced "pook-eeny"), a form of "Blindfold", is played in Ireland. A blindfolded person was seated in front of a table on which are placed several saucers. The saucers are shuffled and the seated person then choses one by touch. The contents of the saucer determine the person's life for the following year. A saucer containing earth means someone known to the player will die during the next year. A saucer containing water foretells travel, a coin means new wealth, a bean means poverty, etc. In 19th century Ireland young women placed slugs in saucers sprinkled with flour. The wriggling of the slugs and the patterns subsequently left behind on the saucers were believed to portray the faces of the womens future spouses.
A Halloween custom which has survived unchanged to this day in Ireland is the baking, or, more often nowadays, the purchase of a barm brack (Ir. "báirín breac"). This is a light fruit cake into which a plain ring is placed before baking. It is said that whoever finds this ring will find his or her true love over the following year.
Bonfires played a large part in the festivities and hundreds of fires are lit each year in Ireland on Halloween night. Villagers cast the bones of the slaughtered cattle upon the flames. The word "bonfire" is thought to derive from these "bone fires." With the bonfire ablaze, the villagers extinguished all other fires. Each family then solemnly lit their hearth from the common flame, thus bonding the families of the village together.
Like most Celtic festivals, it was celebrated on a number of levels. Materially speaking it was the time for gathering in food for the long winter months ahead, bringing people and their livestock in to their winter quarters. To be alone and missing at this dangerous time was to expose yourself and your spirit to the perils of imminent winter. In present times the importance of this part of the festival has diminished for most people. From the point of view of a tribal people for whom a bad season meant facing a long winter of famine in which many would not survive to the spring, it was paramount.
From an astrological perspective, the rising of Pleiades, the winter stars, heralds the supremacy of night over day, the dark half ruled by the realms of the moon.
In the three days preceding the Samhain month the Sun God, Lugh, maimed at Lughnassadh, dies by the hand of his Tanist (his other self), the Lord of Misrule. Lugh traverses the boundaries of the worlds on the first day of Samhain. His Tanist is a miser and though he shines brightly in the winter skies he gives no warmth and does not temper the breath of the Crone, Cailleach Bheare, the north wind. In this may be discerned the ageless battle between the light and dark and the cyclic nature of life and the seasons.
It was the time to placate the supernatural powers controlling the processes of nature. In addition, Halloween was thought to be the most favorable time for divinations concerning marriage, luck, health and death. It was supposedly the only day on which Christians imagined that the help of the devil was invoked for such purposes.
Pope Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary, not by chance, for 1 November. In 835, Pope Gregory IV extended the celebration for all the martyrs (later all saints) on November 1 to include all the churches. The Christian establishment successful co-opted the Samhain season by shifting the emphasis. When November 1 became the new date for the feast of All Saints, all the Saints and Martyrs being called upon to sanctify the season, the pagan Celtic Samhain became merely 'Hallows Eve' It turned into a vigil of preparation for the morrow, which was made a day of obligation, when Christians were obliged to attend mass.
Even later, in the 11th century, the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor all the dead: all the Christian souls in the half-world of Purgatory. Catholic doctrine most clearly reveals the liminal or threshold connection between the two worlds: "that the souls which, on departing from the body, are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins, or have not fully atoned for past transgressions, are debarred from the Beatific Vision, and that the faithful on earth can help them by prayers, almsdeeds and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass." (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1910: 'All Soul's Day').
Pope Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November, in accordance with German practices, not Irish. In 835, Pope Gregory IV extended the celebration for all the martyrs (later all saints) on November 1 to include all the churches.
All Soul's Day was accepted and Christianized by Odilo (died 1048) in the Cluniac monasteries, and its observance spread through the Celtic north before it was introduced into Italy.
Later, in the 19th century, James Frazer and John Rhys claimed that the Christian establishment had successfully "co-opted" (not their word) the Samhain season, although neither of them had any written record available of any such "Samhain" festival, beyond the existence of a month in the old Irish calendar with that name. The truth of the matter is that in the very lands where Samhain might have been celebrated, there was no co-optation until it coincidentally occurred due to a regularization of a feast that had been celebrated at several different dates--including the month of April in Ireland. It should also be noted that Christians often denigrate suggestions of any mythic or pre-Christian content in Christian observances.
The custom survives most accurately in Ireland, where the last Monday of October is a public holiday. All schools close for the following week for mid-term, commonly called the Halloween Break. As a result Ireland is the only country where children never have school on Halloween and are therefore free to celebrate it in the ancient and time-honoured fashion.
The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have evolved from the European custom called souling, similar to the wassailing customs associated with Yuletide. On November 2, All Souls Day, Christians would walk from village to village begging for "soul cakes" - square pieces of bread with currants. Beggars would promise to say prayers on behalf of dead relatives helping the soul's passage to heaven. The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church as a way to replace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits at the Samhain. See Puck (mythology).
In Celtic parts of western Brittany. Samhain is still heralded by the baking of kornigou. Kornigou are cakes baked in the shape of antlers to commemorate the god of winter shedding his "cuckold" horns as he returns to his kingdom in the Otherworld.
On this day, Neopagans celebrate the sabbat of Samhain. Many Neopagans also take part in secular Halloween activities.
See also: Day of the Dead
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