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Much of Halloween’s original meaning has been lost to us; its pagan aspects were papered over by the church to make it a suitable holiday for christians. It is probably a tribute to the strength and significance of this highest of holy eves of the old religions that in this super-advanced, technological, materialistic, antiseptic, sophisticated culture, we acknowledge and celebrate the ancient festival of the dead and the new year using some of the most primordial forms of that celebration.
The pagan belief was (and is) that the change of seasons (a point when the wheel of the year turns) opens the crack between the worlds, allowing contact between the spirit world and the mortal one. The ancients believed that at this time of year the dead walked in this world again for a brief visit.
This led to a variety of interesting customs. Most involved setting out food for the spirits and providing for their comfort during their visit. In the Vosges mountains of France, for example, not only was a feast laid for the family ghosts, but the head of the house also turned back the covers on the beds of the house so that the spirits could rest if they chose.
In Celtic lands, the clans invited dead ancestors to their feast of Samhain (New Year, Hallow’s Eve, Hallowe’en). If the feast pleased the guests (ghosts), they might give oracular advice or some blessing on the tribe. (Barbara Walker notes that “guest” and “ghost” were once the same word.)
In parts of Germany and Italy, it was thought that the dead issue from their graves and stalk in procession through the village. The first to pass are the souls of the good, then those of the murdered and the damned.
While these examples are taken from primitive cultures of Europe, the customs of acknowledging, propitiating, worshiping, and socializing with the dead at the new year, when they walk once more in this world, are found on every continent and in all indigenous cultures.
As the holiday evolved through the Dark and Middle Ages, care for and propitiation of the departed was transferred to giving alms to the living poor. It was thought that the dead borrowed the bodies and voices of the children and the poor, and it became an act to insure good will from the “other side” to give food and drink to the poor and/or children on All Hallow’s Eve. In some quarters those playing the part of the spirits became quite brash. They felt they could righteously demand quality and quantity on behalf of the supernaturals they represented. It is recorded that some north European villages experienced riots on Halloween when the begging got out of hand.
Plainly, our present day customs of trick or treating, Halloween parades, and costume parties are a direct throwback to the old new year’s festivals of the dead.
Samhain (we have heard it pronounced Sow-an) is the name by which the Celtic pagans called Halloween. The festival was named for the Aryan lord of death, Samana, or Saman as he was known in Ireland. In our present-day new year celebration, we often see the figure of Father Time—an old man with a beard carrying a scythe over his shoulder. That is also the image of the grim reaper. He is actually the representation of oldIrish Saman, lord of death; he earlier belonged to Halloween when it was also new year.
In Celtic lands, those who followed the wiccan tradition held their rituals and ceremonies in the woods at night, and found it necessary to carry torches to light their way to the place of meeting. In the burning times, when it was no longer safe to practice wicca (witchcraft) openly, these folk needed a way to get to meetings in the dark. Out of this need, the jack o’ lantern was invented.
The first jack o’ lanterns were made of large hollowed out turnips carried on sticks (pumpkins were unknown until they were brought back from the new world). The celebrants carved ghoulish, frightening faces on them to scare the living daylights out of the superstitious and uninitiated (remember Ichabod Crane and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow), who would not realize that they had actually seen a witch on her way to a secret sabbat. Thus, ghoulishness came to be associated with witches, and with Halloween.
Witches were out and about on All Hallow’s Eve because they were on their way to a ritual deep in the forest. There, they would cast a circle (which means they would turn their circle into a sacred space for the time of the ritual), they would enact the mystery of the season, and they would raise power, sometimes referred to as raising a cone of power. To raise the power, techniques of chanting and visualization were employed. While chanting and/or drumming, they imagined (visualized) that a stream of light rose from the ground up through each person’s body, swirled around the group and finally spiralled into a cone which eventually shot up into the sky or to whatever destination the group intended for it.
In the modern caricature of the witch, she is dressed in black and wears an exaggerated conical hat. This does not suggest a style of dress once common to those who practiced wicca; rather, that hat is a recognition of the cone of power witches were known to raise at their sabbats. The black attire suggests her connection to the Crone Goddess, the aspect of the Triple Goddess appropriate to Halloween.
Bats! Pagans believed that people’s souls took the form of bats to travel while their bodies slept. That is why bats flew at night, and disappeared during the day when people were awake. Later, the connection was made that dead souls could also take this form for traveling.
Owls! The owl appears with witches at Halloween because of its many associations with the Crone Goddess, who embodies wisdom and mortality. To the Algonquin Indians, the owl represented death, winter, and the north wind.
Cats! Cats were sacred to the Egyptians and one of their major deities was the cat Goddess, Bast. The Greeks identified Bast with their Artemis, whose Roman name was Diana. By the time of the Middle Ages, Diana was widely known as Queen of the Witches, and the cat was said to be a witch’s familiar. When a cat was seen traveling around, it could be just a cat doing cat things, but it could also be out on an errand doing a witch’s bidding. So cats , particularly black cats, became the subjects of many superstitions. Superstitions concerning cats persist even today: there are those who will turn and go another way if a black cat crosses their path.
In pagan thinking, masks have a personhood of their own, an innate power. One who dons a mask or costume takes on the characteristics it represents, and becomes a conduit for the god or being of the mask. The person becomes the mask and dances or acts out what she has become. A shaman wearing a lion mask isn’t pretending to be a lion; she is convinced that she is a lion, sharing a psychic identity with the animal.
Similarly, in pre-christian Europe, anyone wearing the mask of a goddess, became the goddess. In the Middle Ages, Sufi magicians wore spirit masks and became maskhara “revelers” at their sabbats. The word mask occurs in many Indo-European languages and may be traced to the Sumerian word maskim, which means spirits of the nether spheres, or ancestral ghosts.
All over the Indo-European culture complex, the Goddess’s many western paradises grew the apples of eternal life. The Celts called this western paradise Avalon (apple land).
One reason for the extreme reverence paid the apple can be seen by cutting an apple crosswise, as the gypsies and witches did. This reveals the pentacle hidden in the apple, which is a symbol of rebirth or eternal life.
Apple games at Halloween come to us from the Celtic feasts of Samhain. Bobbing for apples or catching at apples suspended on a string may have invoked the departed, particularly departed witches.
Hecate, Kali, Caillech—all these are names for the Crone Goddess in her destroyer aspect. In this form, she is known as the dark mother or the black queen. She is the hungry earth who devours her own children and fattens on their corpses. But it must be remembered that she is also the goddess who presides over the cauldron of rebirth. In a profound way, life and birth are always bound up with death and destruction.
Hecate was her name in Greece. In India she was called Kali, and the Celtic peoples knew her as Caillech (pronounced Kali).
The ancient Celts associated the color black with death. Other cultures assign different colors, but ours retains the Celtic strain.
The less obvious connection is with the color orange. As far back as the stone age and the neanderthals, people used the color derived from red ochre (actually as nearly orange as red) to symbolize birth and the womb. People were buried with red ochre smeared over their bodies. Graves, caves, and other burial vaults were painted inside with red ochre, symbolic of returning to the womb of the goddess to await rebirth.
So at Halloween, as the wheel of the year turns to winter, and the wheel of life turns to death, we celebrate the event with the colors orange and black, confident that the great wheel will continue to turn and bring us to spring, and new life.
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Miles, Clement A., Christmas Customs and Traditions, 1976, Dover ISBN-0-486-23354-5, originally published by T. Fisher Unwin in 1912 under the title Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan.
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This article was written by Shirley, and she holds the copyright.
Along about Susan’s 113th question -- “Shirley, what do spiders have to do with Halloween?” -- Shirley threw up her hands and announced, “Everything is connected to everything else, and it all means the same!”
