Halloween

When exploring the survival and evolution of tradition, one festival really stands out: Halloween. It is a time of scary stories, a chance to open the rusty gates on the dark side of our nature. The ancient Irish rejoiced in the return of death and darkness, personified by mythical figure of Donn, a shadowy personification of death in Irish folklore and literature.

Halloween is betwixt and between time. It is the end of one year, the beginning of another. Just like our own modern New Year, it’s full of possibilities.

The pagan Irish celebrated the beginning of their new year on October 31, welcoming the darkness that would envelop them, nurturing and gestating the light to come, the light of summer.

Imagine being in ancient times, in ancient Ireland. According to Irish mythology, Cailleach, the old hag goddess of the winter, the dark half of the year, is approaching. She will reign for the next six months. The summer, the ancient Irish goddess Brighid, who has ruled over the brighter part of the year, has graciously ceded her throne. In this time, on All Hallow’s Eve, people stood at the boundary, in ambivalent time. They were no longer a part of the old world, yet were not quite incorporated into the new.

Imagine being in ancient times, in ancient Ireland. According to Irish mythology, Cailleach, the old hag goddess of the winter, the dark half of the year, is approaching. She will reign for the next six months. The summer, the ancient Irish goddess Brighid, who has ruled over the brighter part of the year, has graciously ceded her throne. In this time, on All Hallow’s Eve, people stood at the boundary, in ambivalent time. They were no longer a part of the old world, yet were not quite incorporated into the new.

At Halloween, it was believed that the chambers of the fairy sidh spill open, and the vast, uncountable multitudes of fairies have free passage on this earth. The very thin space between our dimension, and the dimensions of the dead, becomes thinner, allowing our ancestors to return for one night. The future reveals itself in messages: rings in barm breac cakes, coins in the mashed potato and cabbage dish known as Colcannon, and apple peels thrown over your shoulder which reveal the first letter of your future spouse’s name.

In 601 AD, Pope Gregory I set about Christianising existing beliefs rather than destroy them. People saw divinity in the forces of nature, such as the sun, sky, trees, and rocks, respecting what these symbolised; the church consecrated them to Christ. In a similar vein, an attempt was made to Christianise the festival of Samhain, which we now know as Halloween, by introducing the festivals of All Saints day (to honour those saints without a feast day of their own) and All Souls Day (for people to honour their ancestors and their deceased love ones in a Christian context) at the same time of year. Both traditions now exist side-by-side.

Today, Halloween is a time for door-to-door “trick or treating”: the practice of disguise was originally held to confuse wandering spirits or fairies, while calling door-to-door to collect money or food for a party has a long provenance in Ireland. However, the specific practice of “trick-or-treat” is a peculiarly American phenomenon that has become popular in Ireland.

It’s a time of seasonal foods, including apples and blackberries, and vegetarian dishes such as Colcannon (associated with the Catholic prohibition on meat at All Saints Day). Pumpkins are carved in long-forgotten commemoration of a supernatural character from a popular folktale whose soul is doomed to wander the earth with a lantern until the end of time; Irish immigrants to the United States found that the pumpkin was much easier to carve than the turnips and cabbages they had used in their homeland.