Happy New Year!
(an article by Gregour, based on extracts from GregNotes of
ca: 96-11-01)
(all three parts of this article might
run about six pages if printed out)
...............the
meaning of Halloween
pumpkin heads
(bibliography)
Halloween in this country is a colourful festival to say the
least, but one that seems to strangely celebrate the opposite of everything
"good". It’s imagery promulgates death and horror, and depicts
haunted ghosts and evil witches flying off to commit malevolence! (Probably,
that’s how all that toilet paper wound up on your trees!) It’s practice
sets flames inside of pumpkin heads and impels pranks involving soap, decorates
the halls with boughs of phony human bones and garlands of fake cobwebs
(or maybe some of yours are real, like mine *blush*),
and inspires parties based on the idea of hiding our real life personae
inside of award-winning facades of hideous monsters, mutants, miscreants,
or vicious and brutal animals. (And a fairy princess, shining knight, teddy
bear, or silver screen idol or two for good measure.) And the other side
of "Trick", is "Treat", where young children are encouraged
to don the masks of our darkest side, for the odd reward of massive quantities
of unwholesome candies!
As happens with several of our holidays, in the present age, I have
heard the question posed many times, "What DOES
this MEAN?" It would seem that we fear
these festivals might be dangerous, or that we have lost all clues about
our traditions. But in each case I have examined, I find not merely clues,
but copious material. (The library is a wonderful place!) Because my own
ancestry is a nice blend of Celts from Scandinavia, northern and north-central
Europe, and the Isles, most of what I’ve pursued has been on that pathway.
On this pilgrimage I have learned that Halloween is a seminal point on
the ancient calendar.
Pastoral cultures divided their calendars according to the seasons
of the year, and heavily influenced of course by the weather – which lags
behind the factors in the Earth’s real orbit. It is a spectacular testament
to the intelligence of most every ancient culture, to see how often an
awareness of astronomy informed their notions of time. But in pastoral
cultures, practicalities were of natural importance, and we often see holy
days appearing on "the wrong day" of the year as WE
observe it now. The ancients divided the year by the seasons rather than
standardized clock-hours, for earthly hours were longer or shorter with
the seasons, and the day was born in the night before and died with the
setting Sun.
We forget the traumas that resulted when the calendar was corrected
in 1752, which added confusion. We must also remember the way they would
have defined "science", or Knowledge. Science was born recently,
under the name of "Philosophy of Nature", and an honest appraisal
will still find: what we call "science" remains essentially a
Faith System. We may think the ancients’ beliefs superstitious, and their
methods ignorant, and call them barbarous; but their shamanic styles of
ritual and spirituality did the work of technology, medicine and psychology
– sometimes more effectively than our ways do, today!
We observe the night of October’s last day, for Halloween, with the
mid of that night as the special hour; and the Church has taken this and
the days adjacent to pin down part of its own rituals. Elder folk customs
have barely died out, which we would recognise as entirely apropos of a
Halloween, including tell of frightening encounters with malevolent spiritual
effigies, auguries about death and the future, and bonfires. There were
also progressive marches to collect gifts to help pay for the prayers for
the souls of the dead in Purgatory. (Sound familiar?)
The age-old emphasis of this ritual, on Death and Darkness, was retained
when the Church authorised the Feast of All Saints (Nov 1st) in the 17th
century (1600's), with the Feast of All Souls being celebrated on the next
day. Really then, the day in question was November the first. What IS
the story on this strange and Hallowed-Evening-before, then? Since the
day is born in the night, and midnight of the 31st would begin this holy
day, what exactly was coming at midnight on Halloween, to inspire such
remarkable behaviour?
The Celts called it Samhain, and our ears might hear it pronounced
"SHAH-vin" or SAH-win"; there are several ways to spell
it. It falls at the season when Summer ends, a time for harvesting and
slaughtering, moving the herds, preserving what can be saved against the
lean times coming. The eve of the turn of the seasons would naturally be
spent in observance and preparation. But this Samhain was a day, and a
word, that could strike a chill worthy of deadly Winter through the heart!
For that first day of (what we call November) was indeed also the beginning
of Winter, and apropos of the season, the festival for that turn of affairs
was associated with the Dead. And as Light is born in the Darkness, Day
is born in the Night, so Summer is born in the Winter – and that means:
it is New Year’s Eve!
The name itself for Samhain may be related to "Summer's end",
or somehow to an almost forgotten ancient deity with the same name. Famed
Cernunnos is likely to have been one such, and as a god of life and rebirth,
he was depicted as wearing the horns of a stag. Since antlers are shed
and re-grown every year, that is a symbol of the cycle of Life and the
redemption of Rebirth; he was a god of fertility, abundance, and renewal.
The sacred stag image is ancient in the extreme, and goes back to the oldest
stories we know of about Creation from out of the sea. In the inevitable
clash of religions that came later, he had to be put behind, and these
horns were naturally associated with the Devil. Devils are always among
the figures seen at Halloween.
Others interpret the name for Samhain to mean "the gathering",
and suggest a big outdoor festival of feasts and sacrifices, usually indicating
rituals regarding reconciliation of the king and the Goddess, for the sake
of fertility and life : justification and survival. The motivation to venerate
a union of opposites was to restore Cosmic Balance and sustain the force
of Life, and this might well be done at such a critical juncture in time.
By some accounts, bizarre and terrible practices once accompanied this
night. Those accounts were often exaggerated for political reasons (they
were usually based on Caesar’s accounts which were motivated partly by
the money and power he needed from -- and then for -- his wars on
Celtic tribes) ... on the other hand, the ancient value on life, and worship
of individuality, certainly differed from our current cherished notions.
No doubt we would find some practices horrifying, and perhaps in bad times
fear might have motivated costly -- and deadly! -- propitiations to be
offered to the gods, but my reading says there is no archaeological evidence
that human sacrifice was committed on any massive scale.
Scandinavian myth is far more interesting and poetic than one might
think from what little is promulgated … but Norsemen were also reported
to practice terrible rituals to honour god, practically every Halloween,
or at Uppsala each nine years … but of course, the Vikings did not exactly
endear themselves to my other ancestors, either, and they are not likely
to have been given a cheery good press!
Winter’s approach, especially in a land of snow and cold, makes an
obvious reason for anxiety, and even a strong motivation to secure supernatural
aid. But can that fully explain this rank fear of a New Year? We are used
to a party-like celebration at our present-day, night-before-January anniversary,
despite all the mixed emotions of the moment, and we consistently expect
to make stalwart resolutions and begin a "happy new year". What
else fueled the full fury of the ancient terror of this other new-year’s-night?
It was once understood by my forbears that there were three nights
in the year, where the nature of time had to pivot on the pinions of the
order imposed by gods, and at those times the spirit world and the "real"
world intersected! Any border between "ours" and the Otherworld
was already insubstantial, much as our political map divisions are not
found on the actual real estate of our planet. It was not necessarily a
bad state of affairs, since all of Nature was perceived to be alive, and
the Afterlife was generally considered to be a Better Place. We live life
here, but it’s source, and the Illumination to see that, come from Beyond
and Within. Legends tell of both violent contentions and cooperative ventures
between mortals and Otherworld figures.
But to have these borders overlap?! For the ancient Celts this was
tantamount to the loosing of Chaos itself. To face this threat, on the
very day when the time we have had dies, and the new year is not yet begotten,
was the greatest possible threat to the hard won and precarious Cosmic
Balance that had so far indulged the continued existence of humanity! (Remember,
"precarious" means "hanging by a prayer"!)
On this night when one year passes the baton to the next, it is no
longer last year and not yet next year. With time swept aside, space loses
form. Order is a mere echo in the void, and that scepter might be dropped
into the ocean from which it came, and disappear. Living mortals would
become mere spirits, and the spirits are free to walk among mortals --
a possibility that genuinely unnerved my Celtic ancestors. This delicately
balanced point was directly connected to the Chaos from which we came and
must never return, and made a night when magic would ring out most potent.
It was most important to know what you believed in and whose side are you
on, and to make your magic heard.
Many of the supernatural adventures of ancient heroes are said to have
taken place at this time (although of course many of the others repeatedly
connect to the May Day fire festivals and holy day for Spring). Folklore
places great emphasis on Halloween as a time when ghosts are abroad, and
the Fairies, too, are moving from their Summer to their Winter quarters.
In famous epics of some of my ancestors, when humankind won the land
of the Living away from elementary powers born with the Creation, one property
line, for the separation of territories, defined the Otherworld to be "everything
outside the circle of the light of the fires of men". It seems obvious
bonfires on the eve of the new year would be critical. On this pivotal
eve before the new cycle, in limbo between the years, when time is neither
here nor there and the worlds all hang unhinged -- Time is in no man’s
land! Fire is re-made and thus purified, it might be employed to purify
and protect the herd animals, and the bonfires might help protect the community
from that timeless darkness, by laying claim to a piece of that special
night, and lighting a beacon to attract and warm the heart of the new year.
It seems clear that there is a continuum for the rites of Halloween,
and that their meaning was once well understood as a profound part of our
concept of the meaning of human life. Certainly ancient imageries celebrate
righteous heroism in the battle of Light vs Darkness; they also face our
Other side, and produced effigies for many another quality of our subconscious
and the graces of our spirit. There can be little doubt that the religions
and faith systems of contemporary America need to address these things
with at least equally potent effect, or that any modern religion that hopes
to prove relevant and useful must address both the spark of Godhead and
the Other within us. After all of this, the only thing I still find strange
about Halloween, is how so many of us could have been left untaught about
its meaning!
© 1997 Gregour Beatty