Every year on the evening of 31 October, in cities and villages across much of the English-speaking world and in many other countries besides, children dress up in costumes, knock on doors, and ask for treats, while adults decorate their houses with images of ghosts, witches, and jack-o’-lanterns and tell stories of the thin boundary between the living and the dead. The festival, called Halloween or All Hallows’ Eve, is one of the most widely celebrated of all the modern descendants of the older Celtic festivals, and it descends, in a direct and well-documented line, from the great Celtic festival of Samhain. To trace the origins of Halloween from Samhain is to follow one of the most remarkable cultural transformations in European history, the long passage from a sacred Celtic fire festival of late October to a secular holiday of the modern global age, and to understand, in the process, something of the enduring power of the older Celtic festivals and calendar and of the broader Celtic culture and daily life of which they were a central feature.
The Festival of Samhain
Samhain, in the older Celtic tradition, was one of the four great quarter-day festivals of the year, the others being Imbolc at the beginning of February, Bealtaine at the beginning of May, and Lughnasa at the beginning of August. The festival marked the end of the harvest, the beginning of the cold half of the year, and the opening of the new year itself, since the Celtic year, like the Roman, began in November rather than in January. The name Samhain, pronounced roughly SOW-an or SAH-wen, is the Irish and Scottish Gaelic word for the month of November and for the festival itself, and it is often translated as “summer’s end,” since the Celtic year counted the summer as the warm half of the year and the winter as the cold half.
The festival was, by general agreement of the medieval Irish sources, the most important of the four quarter-day festivals, and it was the occasion for a number of important religious and social observances. The great assemblies of the early Irish kingdoms, including the famous assembly of Tara, met at Samhain, and the festival was a time for the gathering of the people, the resolution of disputes, the celebration of the harvest, and the performance of the religious rites appropriate to the turning of the year. The bonfires of Samhain, lit on the hills of Ireland and Scotland, were among the most striking features of the festival, and the great central fire at Tlachtga, near Athboy in County Meath, was the focus of the royal Samhain celebrations of the kings of Tara.
The Opening of the Otherworld
The most distinctive feature of Samhain, and the one that has had the most lasting influence on the modern festival, was its association with the Otherworld and with the dead. The medieval Irish and Welsh sources are unanimous that Samhain was a time when the boundary between the worlds was at its thinnest, when the spirits of the dead could cross over into the world of the living, and when the living could, if they were brave enough or foolish enough, cross over into the world of the dead. The Fenian cycle tales, the Ulster cycle tales, and the Mythological cycle tales of early Irish literature are full of encounters with the Otherworld at Samhain, and the great tale of Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Fairy Host of the Dead, in which the hero and his men encounter a procession of the dead on the eve of Samhain, famous of these.
The Welsh tradition, recorded in the Mabinogion and in the work of the medieval Welsh bards, is similar. The tale of Pwyll and Rhiannon, in which the lord of Dyfed encounters the Otherworld at his hunting seat at Arberth, is set in a kind of perpetual Samhain atmosphere, and the references in the Welsh triads to the calennig and the nos calan gaeaf, the night of the winter calends, attest to the survival of the older festival in medieval Wales. The immrama and the echtrae, the Irish and Welsh tales of voyages to the Otherworld, are often set at Samhain or at the closely related festival of Beltane, and the association of these tales with the turning points of the year distinctive features of the medieval Celtic imagination.
The Survival of the Festival in the Medieval Period
The conversion of the Celtic-speaking regions to Christianity did not bring an end to the Samhain festival, although it did bring about a transformation in its religious character. The Christian church, following the practice of the early medieval missionary movement, often attempted to absorb older pagan festivals into the Christian calendar by associating them with Christian feasts that fell at approximately the same time. In the case of Samhain, the Christian feast that fell closest to the older festival was the Feast of All Saints, celebrated on 1 November and instituted by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century, with the eve of the feast, 31 October, becoming All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween.
The transformation of Samhain into All Hallows’ Eve was, however, a gradual and incomplete process. In many of the Celtic-speaking regions, the older customs of the festival, including the lighting of bonfires, the dressing up in costumes, the going from house to house asking for food or treats, and the telling of stories about the dead, survived the Christianization of the festival and continued to be practiced, alongside the Christian observances, well into the present. The medieval Irish, Scottish, and Welsh sources preserve a rich picture of the survival of the older customs, and the descriptions of Samhain in the writings of the early Irish saints and in the medieval Welsh poetry give a vivid picture of the negotiation between the older and the newer religious traditions.
The Festival in Scotland and the Isle of Man
In Scotland, the survival of the older Samhain customs is particularly well documented. The Scottish Gaelic tradition of Oidhche Shamhna, the night of Samhain, included the lighting of bonfires on the hills, the practice of going from house to house in disguise, the offering of cakes and treats to the visitors, and the performance of various rites of divination, in which the future, particularly in matters of love and marriage, was revealed by means of rituals performed at the festival. The Halloween of Robert Burns, the famous poem of 1785, gives a vivid picture of the Scottish festival in the eighteenth century, and the description of the various rituals, including the pulling of stalks of kail and the burning of nuts, attests to the survival of the older customs in the rural Scottish communities of the period.
In the Isle of Man, the Manx tradition of Hop-tu-Naa, celebrated on 31 October, preserves many of the older features of the festival. Children dress up in costumes made of straw or of old clothes, they go from house to house singing songs and asking for treats, and they perform various small rituals intended to bring good luck for the coming year. The Manx tradition, like the Scottish and Irish traditions, is a direct descendant of the older Samhain, and the Manx language name for the festival, Hop-tu-Naa, has been preserved in a number of folk songs and children’s rhymes that are still performed in the Isle of Man today.
The Festival in Ireland
In Ireland, the survival of the older Samhain customs is particularly strong, and the modern festival of Oíche Shamhna important dates in the Irish calendar. The festival is marked by the lighting of bonfires, by family gatherings, by the playing of traditional games, and by a rich tradition of food associated with the harvest, including colcannon, barmbrack, and a range of traditional cakes and breads. The barmbrack, a fruit bread into which various small objects have been baked, is particularly associated with the festival, and the finding of a ring, a coin, a cloth, or a stick in the bread is taken to predict the future of the person who finds it, with the ring predicting marriage, the coin predicting wealth, the cloth predicting a religious vocation, and the stick predicting a difficult year.
The mumming tradition, in which people dress up in costumes and go from house to house performing short plays or songs in exchange for food or money, is another important survival of the older festival. The mummers of the Irish Samhain, like the mummers of the Scottish and Manx festivals, are direct descendants of the older tradition of going from house to house in disguise at the turning of the year, and the practice striking examples of the survival of an ancient Celtic custom into the present.
The Transformation of Samhain into Halloween
The transformation of the older Celtic festival into the modern American and global festival of Halloween is a more recent and more complex process. The festival of Halloween as celebrated in the United States and in much of the English-speaking world today is a hybrid, drawing on the older Celtic festival, on the Christian feast of All Saints and All Souls, on the folk traditions of the British Isles, and on a number of more recent additions, including the carving of jack-o’-lanterns, the giving of candy to children in costume, and the popular culture of ghosts, witches, and the supernatural.
The carving of the jack-o’-lantern, the hollowed-out pumpkin with a face carved into it and a candle placed inside, is associated in the popular imagination with the Irish tradition of carving turnips or other root vegetables at Samhain, although the use of the pumpkin is an American innovation. The Irish tradition of carving turnips at Samhain, originally associated with the figure of Jack of the Lantern, a character from Irish folklore who was condemned to wander the earth with a lantern made of a hollowed-out turnip, is well documented from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the figure of Jack was carried over into the American festival, where the larger and more easily carved pumpkin gradually replaced the turnip.
The trick-or-treating tradition, in which children in costume go from door to door asking for treats, is similarly derived from the older Celtic and British traditions of going from house to house in disguise at the festival, and from the practice of souling, in which poor people, often children, would go from house to house at All Souls’ Day asking for small cakes or soul cakes in exchange for prayers for the dead. The American trick-or-treating tradition, which became widespread only in the twentieth century, drew on both of these older traditions and combined them with the broader popular culture of Halloween.
The Survival of the Older Tradition
The modern festival of Halloween, whatever its American and global innovations, remains a remarkable example of the survival of an ancient Celtic festival into the present. The associations of the festival with the dead, with the thinning of the boundary between the worlds, with the lighting of fires, with the wearing of costumes, and with the gathering of communities at the turning of the year are all features of the older Celtic Samhain, and the persistence of these features in the modern festival, despite centuries of religious and cultural transformation, is one of the clearest examples of the continuing influence of the older tradition.
The festival of Samhain, in the older Celtic world, was not a celebration of horror or of the macabre. It was a serious religious and social occasion, a time for the honoring of the dead, the marking of the turning of the year, and the gathering of the community in the face of the coming winter. The modern festival of Halloween, with its commercial imagery of ghosts, witches, and the supernatural, has lost much of this older meaning, but the survival of the older associations, in the popular imagination and in the surviving folk traditions of the Celtic-speaking regions, is a powerful reminder of the long and complex history of one of the most distinctive festivals of the Celtic year.