While children and adults alike don costumes and share in the scary fun of Halloween on the night of October 31st, few will be aware of its ancient Celtic roots in the festival of Samhain.
In Ireland and other Celtic countries thousands of years ago, Samhain, often called the Celtic New Year's Eve, marked the end of the harvests and the beginning of winter. Any fruits or grain left in the fields now would surely be bewitched and blasted by fairies and frost. Cattle were brought down from their high summer pastures, taken stock of, and those that would be slaughtered for the winter and the Samhain feasting were chosen.
The feasting and bonfires were at the center of these ancient traditions. The bones of the slaughtered cattle were cast into a huge communal fire, thus a bone fire or bonfire. And the hearth fires in every cottage were extinguished and started again from the Samhain fire. The people and their livestock would pass between two blazing bonfires as a saining or a cleansing ritual.
In Scotland, the borders of the fields were walked with burning branches from the bonfire, while its ashes would be used to bless and protect the fields during their winter slumber. As this was the boundary or the edge between the lighter half and the darker half of the year, it was a liminal, magical night of no time or between time. At Samhain, the border between this world and the other was truly at its thinnest, allowing the ghosts of dead ancestors and fallen warriors, as well as fairies, goblins, and nastier spirits, to pass through and mingle with the living.
The family's ancestors were honored and invited into the home where offerings of food and drink were left out for them. But the harmful spirits were tricked and warded off by turnips cut into smiling lanterns left out in the dark, spirit-filled night. Mumming and guising were traditional as people wore costumes and masks to disguise themselves as malevolent spirits and to confuse the real spirits.
In Scotland, boys' faces were blackened with the ashes of the great bonfire as they pranked their neighbors. And in Wales, a frightening wooden horse puppet evoking the evil pooka rambled the roads with the costumed villagers.
Samhain was indeed a night when time stood still and anything could happen, a time to visit with the dead and to let them go. It was a final blazing feast, a last night of color, magic, madness, pranks, and revels before going into the long, cold nights and the solitude of the dark northern winter, held by the Celts as a time of quiet study, of dreaming, and of reflection.
So celebrate well, and may the light of your own Halloween fires carry you through the coming winter.
For the Celtic Cultural Alliance, this is Kate Scuffle. Sláinte.
