Celebrating Hallowmas

I love Halloween. It’s one of my favorite holidays. When my daughter was young enough to go trick-or-treating, I loved wandering down dark streets in the crisp air, with the leaves crunching under my feet, passing strange apparitions, always with a hint of fear, the sense that something was lurking in the darkness. I remember the edge of wildness I felt in the air when I went trick-or-treating as a child. I like putting on a costume, displaying some aspect of myself (usually glamorous) that I normally hide. But over the past few years, my attention has shifted away from trick-or-treating and parties toward the main theme of this dark festival: death.

Halloween is one of the great quarter-days or pagan festivals that fall midway between the solstices and the equinoxes. That makes it an agricultural festival—it marks the time of the last harvest, the winter slaughter, the death of the crops and the rest cycle of the land.

The Saxons called it Winter's Eve. The Celts called it Samhain, which is usually translated as "summer's end." To the Celts, the day began with nightfall. Thus it was natural for the year to begin at the start of the darkest time of the year. Celtic feasts were celebrated from sunset to sunset, so Samhain began at sunset on October 31 and continued until sunset November 1.

As with other great pagan holidays, the Catholic Church found a way to claim it. The Feast of All Saints, which came into existence in the seventh century, was commemorated on November 1 under the name of All Hallows Day, from which we get the name Halloween (the eve of Hallows). The following day, November 2, is All Souls Day, a day when the priest wears black, the church is draped with mourning, and the faithful pray for the souls of their departed, with the hope of shortening their time in Purgatory.

The Month of Blood

There are some obvious reasons why this place on the Wheel of the Year is associated with death. The sun is approaching its nadir, the leaves are falling from trees, the death and decay in the natural world remind us of our own mortality. Martinmas, November 11, was the traditional time for slaughtering the cattle, sheep and pigs that could not be cared for during the winter. The Welsh called November the month of Slaughter while the Saxons called it the Month of Blood.

In "The Odyssey," Odysseus summons the shades of the dead by sacrificing animals. Their blood drains into a pit, and the restless shades come eagerly crowing up from the underworld. Odysseus holds them at bay with his sword until the particular spirit he wants comes forward, laps up the blood, and then prophesies what will happen in the future. This scene combines the themes of fear, slaughter, death, the Underworld, ghosts, and divination which are common to Halloween.

The Days of the Dead

In Mexico, All Souls Day is called Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead) and is a time of commemorating the dead by decorating their tombs (with marigolds, a flower sacred to the Aztecs) and inviting them to a feast in their honor. Families go to the cemetery for a picnic and eat skeleton cookies and sugar skull cakes.

Trick-or-treating derives from an ancient British custom of going from house to house begging for soul-cakes. Some say the soul-cakes were given to the priest to buy Masses for the souls of relatives in Purgatory. Others believe they were offerings to the dead. Candles flickering in the windows (or pumpkins) were meant to serve as beacons for the dead, just as on the similar holiday in Japan, lanterns are hung by the garden gates.

Continued on page 2: set the proper tone of mortality... »