Assalamu'alaikum my friends...
Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats
Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints and martyrs; the holiday, All Saints’ Day, incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows’ Eve and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a secular, community-based event characterized by child-friendly activities such as trick-or-treating. In a number of countries around the world, as the days grow shorter and the nights get colder, people continue to usher in the winter season with gatherings, costumes and sweet treats
ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween’s origins date back to the ancient
Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000
years ago in the area that is now Ireland, the United Kingdom and northern
France, celebrated their new year on November 1. This day marked the end of
summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of
year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the
night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and
the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain,
when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. In addition
to causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the
otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make
predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile
natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and
direction during the long, dark winter.
Did You Know?
One quarter of all the candy sold annually in
the U.S. is purchased for Halloween.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge
sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as
sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the celebration, the Celts wore
costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell
each other’s fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth
fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred
bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
By 43 A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered
the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the four hundred years that
they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with
the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in
late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the
dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and
trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this
celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of “bobbing” for
apples that is practiced today on Halloween.
On May 13, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV
dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honor of all Christian martyrs, and the Catholic
feast of All Martyrs Day was established in the Western church. Pope Gregory
III (731–741) later expanded the festival to include all saints as well as all
martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1. By the 9th century
the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, where it gradually
blended with and supplanted the older Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church
would make November 2 All Souls’ Day, a day to honor the dead. It is widely
believed today that the church was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of
the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. All Souls Day was
celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in
costumes as saints, angels and devils. The All Saints Day celebration was also
called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning
All Saints’ Day) and the night before it, the traditional night of Samhain in
the Celtic religion, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
HALLOWEEN COMES TO AMERICA
Celebration of Halloween was extremely
limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems
there. Halloween was much more common in Marryland and the southern
colonies. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups as
well as the American Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween
began to emerge. The first celebrations included “play parties,” public events
held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead,
tell each other’s fortunes, dance and sing. Colonial Halloween festivities also
featured the telling of ghost stories and mischief-making of all kinds. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but
Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.
In the second half of the nineteenth century,
America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the
millions of Irish fleeing Ireland’s potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize
the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English
traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house
asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today’s
“trick-or-treat” tradition. Young women believed that on Halloween they could
divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with
yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
In the late 1800s, there was a move in
America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly
get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks and witchcraft. At the turn of the
century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common
way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season and festive
costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take
anything “frightening” or “grotesque” out of Halloween celebrations. Because of
these efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones
by the beginning of the twentieth century.
By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become
a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties
as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and
communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many
communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully
limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at
the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby
boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where
they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the
centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating
was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween
celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them
by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American
tradition was born, and it has continued to grow. Today, Americans spend an
estimated $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country’s second
largest commercial holiday.
TODAY’S HALLOWEEN TRADITIONS
The American Halloween tradition of
“trick-or-treating” probably dates back to the early All Souls’ Day parades in
England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families
would give them pastries called “soul cakes” in return for their promise to
pray for the family’s dead relatives. 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. The practice, which was referred to as
“going a-souling” was eventually taken up by children who would visit the
houses in their neighborhood and be given ale, food, and money.
The tradition of dressing in costume for
Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years ago, winter was
an uncertain and frightening time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the
many people afraid of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant
worry. On Halloween, when it was believed that ghosts came back to the earthly
world, people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their
homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when
they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for
fellow spirits. On Halloween, to keep ghosts away from their houses, people
would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent
them from attempting to enter.
HALLOWEEN SUPERSTITIONS
Halloween has always been a holiday filled
with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer
festival during which people felt especially close to deceased relatives and
friends. For these friendly spirits, they set places at the dinner table, left
treats on doorsteps and along the side of the road and lit candles to help
loved ones find their way back to the spirit world. Today’s Halloween ghosts
are often depicted as more fearsome and malevolent, and our customs and
superstitions are scarier too. We avoid crossing paths with black cats, afraid
that they might bring us bad luck. This idea has its roots in the Middle
Ages, when many people
believed that witches avoided detection by turning themselves into cats. We try
not to walk under ladders for the same reason. This superstition may have come
from the ancient Egyptians, who believed that triangles were sacred; it also
may have something to do with the fact that walking under a leaning ladder
tends to be fairly unsafe. And around Halloween, especially, we try to avoid
breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the road or spilling salt.
But what about the Halloween traditions and
beliefs that today’s trick-or-treaters have forgotten all about? Many of these
obsolete rituals focused on the future instead of the past and the living
instead of the dead. In particular, many had to do with helping young women
identify their future husbands and reassuring them that they would someday—with
luck, by next Halloween—be married. In 18th-century Ireland, a matchmaking cook
might bury a ring in her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, hoping to bring
true love to the diner who found it. In Scotland, fortune-tellers recommended
that an eligible young woman name a hazelnut for each of her suitors and then
toss the nuts into the fireplace. The nut that burned to ashes rather than
popping or exploding, the story went, represented the girl’s future husband.
(In some versions of this legend, confusingly, the opposite was true: The nut
that burned away symbolized a love that would not last.) Another tale had it
that if a young woman ate a sugary concoction made out of walnuts, hazelnuts
and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her future
husband. Young women tossed apple-peels over their shoulders, hoping that the
peels would fall on the floor in the shape of their future husbands’ initials;
tried to learn about their futures by peering at egg yolks floating in a bowl
of water; and stood in front of mirrors in darkened rooms, holding candles and
looking over their shoulders for their husbands’ faces. Other rituals were more
competitive. At some Halloween parties, the first guest to find a burr on a
chestnut-hunt would be the first to marry; at others, the first successful
apple-bobber would be the first down the aisle.
Of course, whether we’re asking for romantic
advice or trying to avoid seven years of bad luck, each one of these Halloween
superstitions relies on the good will of the very same “spirits” whose presence
the early Celts felt so keenly.
Greetings From Me,Rian
Wassalam....