The Deathly Hallows of Halloween
It is no coincidence that Samhain, the precursor to Halloween, occurred in late fall, after the harvest was complete, just before the onset of bitter winter cold.
The subject of this essay is Halloween and the origins of the peculiar and ancient holiday many Americans will celebrate tomorrow. In a few weeks, I will publish a commentary on Lincoln’s brief remarks at the Gettysburg cemetery, the anniversary of which is November 19.
At first glance, Halloween and the Gettysburg Address seem wholly unrelated to each other. Yet, there is something important that connects them: the dead.
Changing Seasons
It’s no secret that most of what we today consider “holidays” are modern co-options and transformations of ancient pagan festivities and sacrificial rituals, all of which were holy days of one kind or another.
These ancient practices often focused on two phenomena that dominated life in every ancient regime: the endless, cyclical changing of the seasons—from spring to summer to fall to winter—and the ancestral dead.
I suggested above that even though Halloween and the Gettysburg Address seem unrelated, they are. So too, from the ancient point of view, the seasons and the dead—which might appear disconnected to us—were seen by ancient people as parts of an indissoluble whole intrinsically tied to each other.
The seasons, which we now consider to be natural—mere functions of the Earth orbiting the Sun—were viewed back then more as the work of often nefarious ghosts, spirits, gods, and other supernatural beings.
Ancient peoples understood that spring had always followed winter, but there was a lingering doubt whether this time the icy grip of winter might remain. As the sun sank lower on the horizon toward winter, would it disappear forever? Or would it return to a high place in the sky, rejuvenating life and making the world green again? No one knew for sure.
That’s why it made sense to offer sacrifices and gifts to the gods, spirits, and ghosts as insurance policies—perhaps even bribes—to ensure the return of spring and then summer.
Strange as it may sound to us today, nature—though it surrounds us, and we are part of it—had to be discovered and explored.
There was a time when the concept of nature was unknown to human minds. For a thinker such as Aristotle, the endeavor to understand what nature is and to know the natures of various beings was the original purpose of the what they called philosophy.
The philosophical quest for knowledge and the study of nature, for the Greeks, were seen as two sides of the same coin—united and inseparable.
Aristotle, along with his teacher Plato, and Plato’s teacher Socrates, were deeply interested in understanding that which is natural, contrasting it with what is conventional or made by human invention and craftsmanship. The insightful scholar Jacob Klein once gave a lecture and later published an essay titled "On the Nature of Nature," in which he described the discovery of nature as one of the greatest human discoveries ever.
Samhain
What we now call Halloween originated as the Celtic holy day of Samhain (pronounced saw-win). Some Christians refer to it as All Hallows' Eve, which precedes All Saints' Day.
It is no coincidence that Samhain, the precursor to Halloween, occurred in late fall, after the harvest was complete, just before the onset of bitter winter cold. Ancient pagans believed that the Spirit of Death was particularly active at this time, roaming the Earth in search of prey as they witnessed the vegetation wilting and dying before their eyes.
Of course the Spirit of Death was close at hand!
If the Spirit of Death was nearby, they reasoned, then the spirits of those whom Death had already claimed might also be close. What was uncertain was whether those spirits had good or ill intentions. To avoid being marked for early death, many ancient pagans dressed as if they were already among the dead—hence the origin of dressing in “costumes” as ghosts and other spirits of those who were once alive.
(The best account I know of regarding the central importance of the ancestral dead for every ancient regime is Fustel de Coulanges’s beautiful little book, The Ancient City, first published in 1864.)
To appease the ghosts and spirits, including the Spirit of Death itself, many ancient people would leave offerings, gifts, and sacrifices, such as food or slaughtered animals. Unsurprisingly, Death typically accepted these offerings, evidenced by the decay of the food and dead animals left as gifts in the days that followed. Smoke from the burned animal sacrifices rose up to the heavens, while the unburned food gifts soon deteriorated into nothing.
This practice laid the groundwork for offering “treats” on the night that would later become known as Halloween.
Halloween
Before we mock the rituals of ancient peoples, consider their remarkable and frequent successes: Through ritualistic sacrifices every fall, such as Samhain, and more during the winter (many of which contributed to later Christian practices, such as decorating evergreen trees for Christmas), the Spirit of Death was indeed appeased.
Spring eventually returned and with it, the Sun. The return of vegetation in the Spring meant the Spirit of Life had returned, and the ancients rejoiced with celebrations including signs of new life, such as baby bunnies and fuzzy little chicks (Easter, anyone?), as well as fertility rituals to ensure the perpetuation of one’s own city, tribe, or clan.
And so the seasons revolved, round and round, over and over, like a wheel in endless motion, just as the regular human rituals were practiced over and over for centuries that eventually blurred into millennia.
The only hope of escaping this seemingly endless pattern was the idea of a Savior who might offer a way to avoid death: eternal life. And indeed many people in the West thought such a Savior had finally come with the humble events that began in Bethlehem and concluded with the blood-drenched tragic drama at Gol’gotha, otherwise known as Calvary.
And henceforth Christianity transformed and re-purposed many ancient pagan rituals, including Samhain, the ancient predecessor of All-Hallows’-Eve, marking the night before All Saints Day, and then Halloween.
Still, the concern for the ancestral dead—one’s own predecessors who lived and died, and what they mean for the living—is an ancient theme that remains with us. Graveyards are still important, to many people, because graveyards represent special, hallowed ground that is a bridge of sorts connecting the living and the dead. And as we will discuss in a few weeks, the theme of the ancestral dead is the framework of one of the most unforgettable of all speeches, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.