In her book Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (2012), Lisa Morton writes that Halloween is no longer just day on the calendar; it has become a major commercial event and is “blossoming into a global subculture” Yet, as Morton points out, this outcome sits uneasily with his Halloween’s origins, which are distinctly religious. On the one hand, Halloween is derived from Samhain (pronounced SAH-win)—a Celtic festival that marked the end of harvest season and the beginning of the year’s period of darkness. Indeed, among Gaelic seasonal festivals, Samhain had a particular metaphysical meaning: it was on this night that a portal between the afterlife and the present world opened, allowing the dead (including goblins known as sídhe) to traverse the land of the living. In turn, various legends and myths, including one involving Irish folk hero Fionn mac Cumhaill, sprung up around Samahin, relaying fantastic tales of bloodthirsty monsters and talking corpses.
On the other hand, Halloween is also firmly rooted in Christianity. As the Roman Empire spread northward and westward, pagan culture was gradually assumed and transformed by the Catholic Church. Allhallowtide is a prime example of this strategy. Pope Gregory III (died 741 CE) moved the Church’s feast of the martyrs (later known as All Saints’ Day) to the first day of November—the traditional date of Samhain, which, according to Celtic custom, began at sundown on October 31 and carried into the next day. The pope’s goal, it seems, was to use Samhain’s popularity in Caledonia and Hibernia (Scotland and Ireland respectively) as a means of evangelizing and catechizing the Celts. A few centuries later, an abbot named Odilo (ca. 962-1049 CE), who presided over the influential Benedictine Abbey of Cluny, instituted the observance of All Souls’ Day. Set aside to encourage prayer and almsgiving on behalf of the souls in Purgatory, All Souls’ Day was conspicuously assigned to November 2—the day after All Saints’ Day. By the fourteenth century, these two feasts were celebrated throughout the Western Church, thereby distinguishing October 31 as a time of preparation. It was the evening before Hallowmas (All Saints’ Day) and, for that reason, came to be known as Hallowe’en. Morton notes that, by the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, parish records indicate that Halloween was already emerging as a time of merrymaking. One account recounts a fondness for baking on “All Halowen,” while another highlights time spent with “good frendes.” Other extant records also suggest that mischief and tricks were integrated into Halloween celebrations from the start. “Trick or treating” would come later—its current iteration began to take shape in the early twentieth century—but it seems that certain bell “ryngeres” were fond of raising a ruckus on “alhallow nyght,” so much so that Henry VIII criminalized the practice.
Still, however one chooses to look at it, Halloween is a holiday rooted in the supernatural. Whether one is talking about its links to pagan Samhain or Christian Allhallowtide, it serves as a reminder that earthly life does not exhaust life itself, that the dead remain with the living, that the dead are not even really dead. In centuries past, this was a presupposition embedded in the natural world itself. Caves such Oweynagat in Ireland were said to be gateways to Tír nAill, a divine realm populated by gods and monsters. Modern science, however, has largely stamped out any notion that nature and supernature are imbricated. There is, on this reading, nothing but nature—a natura pura. As Max Weber famously observed, ours is an era of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung), and, paradoxically, it is this phenomenon that Halloween both opposes and reinscribes. Like Christmas, Halloween harks back to a time of magic and mystery; yet, also like Christmas, its cooption by banal forces of commercialization and secularization are unmistakable. We see the jack-o’-lanterns; we note the holy day. But it is difficult to enter into a space of genuine transcendence.
Consider the shift in stories often associated with Halloween. In his A Social History of Ancient Ireland (1906), Patrick Weston Joyce recounts that, according to Irish mythology, “the shees of Erin are always open at Samhain.”1 Thus one could look into the Otherworld and see “fire in each of the duns,” but one also had to be careful for what would come out, for “demons would always appear on that night.” Speaking of Oweynagat, “the cave of Cruachan,” Joyce writes:
For immediately that darkness had closed in on Samhain Eve, a crowd of horrible goblins rushed out, and among them a flock of copper-red birds, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture: and their poisonous breath withered up everything it touched.
By the nineteenth century, however, elements of horror were more likely to be seen as byproducts of human hubris or transgression. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), an ingenious yet disturbed scientist named Victor Frankenstein fashions a monster (otherwise unnamed) from abattoirs and graves. As Frankenstein recounts:
I pursued nature to her hiding-places. Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay? My limbs now tremble, and my eyes swim with the remembrance; but then a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged me forward; I seemed to have lost all soul or sensation but for this one pursuit. It was indeed but a passing trance, that only made me feel with renewed acuteness so soon as, the unnatural stimulus ceasing to operate, I had returned to my old habits. I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, the tremendous secrets of the human frame. In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation; my eyeballs were starting from their sockets in attending to the details of my employment. The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials.
And yet, Victor soon comes to lament his creation, and, by novel’s end, he is determined to kill the monster. For Shelley, Frankenstein ultimately points to a hell of our own making—a world of fiends and malefactors loosed through humanity’s unique (and lamentable) combination of knowledge and foolishness. This perspective is neither druidic nor Christian, and thus it is alien to Halloween as such. But that fact makes it no less frightening. Perhaps that is why slasher films (including this year’s popular releases Terrifier 2 Halloween Ends) now constitute the core of Halloween-themed cinema. Even if such films sprinkle in supernatural elements, they have been largely shorn of metaphysical meaning. The real world is scary enough as it is.
It is here, however, that the crimson thread uniting the different perspectives on Halloween comes into view. For no matter how much we try to diminish or to ignore the holiday’s religious significance, the fact remains that death is an ineradicably mysterious aspect of human existence. We are terrified of it; we seek to overcome it; but we cannot get past it. In this sense, and as Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was wont to emphasize, death is not so much an opposition to life as a dimension of life: “Death is the face of life that is turned away from us, not illuminated by us.”2 If we only attend to what we can see, says Rilke, then the fullness of our lives is missed. Thus it is essential to carve out time to ponder that which we can't see, much less understand.
Death, sin, and evil, however unpleasant, constitute such a horizon of concern. As American novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-64) once put it, “Evil is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured.” This insight is hard to accept. As denizens of the modern West, we naturally assume that science and technology can fix anything. Moreover, when it fails, we take it as a setback that, over time, will be overcome. “We just need more data, more research; then we’ll sort this out.” Failures are explained away, attributed to others who seem responsible for impeding progress. “If only we could neutralize or even stamp out MAGA Republicans Woke Democrats [insert group name here], then society would be happier, healthier, and better suited to cope with the existential threats facing human beings.” Halloween fits uncomfortably into this techno-political milieu. It is strange, grotesque, and unflinchingly grim. But this is precisely why it’s important. No matter how one chooses to look at it—as a night in which spirits “com'st in…questionable shape” (Hamlet 1.4), as a holiday to remember “the faithful departed,” as an absurd festival of manmade depravity—Halloween keeps open the wound of negativity. Thus the danger is to let it idly pass by, doling out mini 3 Muskateers bars and sipping on Pumpkin Ale even as mystery, both beautiful and fearful, goes on all around us.
Here “shees” refers to “burial mounds” or “barrows.”
Briefe II, 374.
Very interesting insight on this overly famous celebration. Stores were stocked with Halloween paraphernalia many weeks ago. The yard art in our area begins earlier every year along with the daytime horror of deflated ghouls and goblins.
Regarding the mystery of death, I believe it was Tolstoy who said, “we live a stupid life and die a stupid death.” A pretty brutal account of the truth. I imagine you are aware of WH Auden’s lines from his Christmas Oratorio, “ For the Time Being?” “We who must die demand a miracle…”
Secularism’s absorption of religious festivals is always a fascinating one to watch - what is it up to and why does it need to buy itself this time to engage with a series of events that are utterly inimical to its fundamentally naturalist philosophy? I’ve always wanted to know what it must be like to live in the shared imagination of a culture for whom the festival really was a time when demons etc wandered the earth. In any event your comments made me think of John Bowker’s observation about how the naturalisation of death in a secular society leads to its trivialisation in forms of crass entertainment.