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All Hallows Eve Origin and History
A Quick Guide to the Origin and History
of Halloween
What we know (and don't really know) about the origin of All
Hallows Eve
By David Emery
Celebrated on October 31,
Halloween is a secular holiday combining vestiges of traditional harvest
festival celebrations with customs more peculiar to the occasion, such as
costume wearing trick-or-treating, pranksterism and decorative imagery based on
the changing of the seasons, death, and the supernatural.
Though
it was regarded up until the last few decades of the 20th century as primarily
a children's holiday, in more recent years activities such as costume parties,
themed decorations, and even trick-or-treating have grown increasingly popular
with adults as well, making Halloween a celebration for all ages.
What Does the Name "Halloween" Mean?
The name Halloween (originally
spelled Hallowe'en)
is a contraction of All Hallows Even,
meaning the day before All Hallows Day (better known today as All Saints Day),
a Catholic holiday commemorating Christian saints and martyrs.
According to the best available evidence, Halloween originated
in the early Middle Ages as a Catholic vigil observed on the eve of All Saints
Day, which is celebrated on November 1.
It
has become commonplace to trace its roots even further back in time to a pagan
festival of ancient Ireland known as Samhain (pronounced sow'-en or sow'-een),
about which little is actually known.
The prehistoric observance is
said to have marked the end of summer and the onset of winter, and was celebrated
with feasting, bonfires, sacrificial offerings, and homage to the dead.
Despite
thematic similarities, there's scant evidence of any real historical continuity
linking Samhain to the medieval observance of Halloween, however.
Some modern historians, notably Ronald Hutton (The
Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, 1996)
and Steve Roud (The English Year, 2008, and A
Dictionary of English Folklore, 2005), flatly reject the popular
notion that the Church designated November 1st All Saints Day to
"Christianize" the pagan Celtic holiday.
Citing a lack of historical documentation, Roud goes so far as
to dismiss the Samhain theory of origin altogether.
"Certainly
the festival of Samhain, meaning Summer's End, was by far the most important of
the four quarter days in the medieval Irish calendar, and there was a sense
that this was the time of year when the physical and supernatural worlds were
closest and magical things could happen," Roud
notes, "but however strong the
evidence in Ireland, in Wales it was May 1 and New Year which took precedence,
in Scotland there is hardly any mention of it until much later, and in
Anglo-Saxon England even less."
It
seems reasonable to conclude that the connection between Halloween and Samhain
has, at the very least, been overstated in most modern accounts of the
holiday's origin.
Earliest Halloween Customs
The earliest documented customs attributable to Halloween proper
grew out of the tandem observances of All Saints Day (November 1), a day
of prayer for saints and martyrs of the Church, and All Souls Day (November
2), a day of prayer for the souls of all the dead.
Among the practices
associated with Halloween during the Medieval period were the lighting of
bonfires, evidently to symbolize the plight of souls lost in purgatory, and
souling, which consisted of going door-to-door offering prayers for the dead in
exchange for "soul cakes" and other treats.
Mumming, a custom originally associated with Christmas
consisting of parading in costume, chanting rhymes, and play-acting, was a
somewhat later addition to Halloween.
Again,
however, despite the obvious similarities between old and new, it may be an
exaggeration to say these medieval customs "survived" to the present
day, or even that they "evolved" into modern Halloween practices such
as trick-or-treating.
By the time Irish immigrants
brought the holiday to North America in the mid-1800s, mumming and souling were
all but forgotten in Ireland itself, where the known Halloween customs of the
time consisted of praying, communal feasting, and playing divination games such
as bobbing for apples.
The
secular, commercialized holiday we know in America today would be barely
recognizable to Halloween celebrants of even just a century ago.
David Emery
· Noted
chronicler of folklore and urban legends since 1997
Experience
David
Emery is a former writer for ThoughtCo. David covered urban legends for
ThoughtCo for 19 years. He has more than two decades of experience as an
internet folklore expert and debunker of urban legends, hoaxes, and popular
misconceptions, winning recognition in the online universe as a
commentator on the outer limits of internet culture with Iron Skillet Magazine.
He has been lauded by Brandon Toropov in "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Urban
Legends" and Jan Harold Brunvand in "Encyclopedia of Urban Legends,
Updated and Expanded Edition." David
also has worked as a newsroom librarian, sitcom staff writer, freelance
journalist, and contributing editor to a satirical newspaper.
Education
David
Emery holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Portland State University.
Awards
· Named
to "Top 10 Sites to Debunk Urban
Legends"
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