by Adam Nichols
The night between Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 was the Celtic New Year. Samhain (pronounced sah-win), meaning “summer’s end,” was a festival held to commemorate the coming of winter. Since the colder seasons were commonly associated with human death, it was believed that on this night, the veil between the spirit world and our own was thinner than normal and that spirits of people who passed the year prior could be found wandering the earth. Celtic people would celebrate the night with a “fire festival,” where they danced around massive bonfires in which they burned crop and livestock sacrifices as an offering to their deities. They wore costumes fashioned from animal skins as a way to ward off spirits who were looking for human victims. During this time, druids (Celtic Pagans) would also practice divination – often by casting sticks, bones, or rocks onto the ground and interpreting their positions – which was thought to be more effective on this night than any other, and was a great source of comfort for the people of the time as they prepared for the bleak winter. At the end of the night, every household would bring a flame from their sacred bonfire back home to light their hearth, to protect themselves from malicious spirits, and leave out small portions of their nicest crops for wandering spirits.
By 43 A.D., when Romans occupied most Celtic territory, two Roman traditions were incorporated into the Samhain festival. One was Feralia, a commemoration of the passing of the dead, which was celebrated similarly to Samhain with feasts and offerings for the spirits of the deceased. The other was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees; it is speculated that today’s Halloween game of bobbing for apples was rooted in this tradition.
After Christian Influence had spread onto Celtic land around the ninth century, Samhain was gradually supplanted by the church holiday known as All Saints Day, which was celebrated as a feast to honor Catholic Saints on Nov. 1. When they realized the traditions from Samhain weren’t dying out very fast, they decided to dub Oct. 31 “All Hallows Eve,” which eventually became known as Halloween, in order to impose their own church-sanctioned traditions on the day. The festivities remained similar; people dressed up in costumes (usually as angels, devils, or saints) and held parades, danced around bonfires, and carved pumpkins. The tradition of leaving food outside one’s door for spirits morphed into trick-or-treating for costumed children.
The celebration of Halloween quickly spread throughout Europe once it had been incorporated into church traditions, but in the colonial United States, the celebration of Halloween was more common in the Southern colonies because of the strict Protestant beliefs held in New England. It was not until the late 19th century that Halloween started to become more widely recognized throughout the United States. Today, people in Celtic Neo-Pagan communities still celebrate Samhain by hosting potlucks, making bonfires, decorating altars to honor the dead, and practicing divination.
