Oct 31 st background

According to British historian Ronald Hutton, the festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the 'lighter half' of the year and beginning of the 'darker half' and is sometimes regarded as the Celtic New Year. According to folklorist John Gregorson Campbell and archaeologist Bettina Arnold, the ancient Celts believed that the curtain separating this world from the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both good and bad) to easily traverse the otherwise sturdy barrier. They dealt with this by inviting the good spirits in - usually family ancestors - and utilizing various techniques to ward off or scare away any bad spirits. It is suggested that this is the origin of wearing costumes disguising oneself as skeletons, ghosts, and goblins, the principle being that if you looked horrible enough, you could even scare away the devil himself!

Samhain was also the time when people in the old times took stock of their food supplies, butchered cattle and pigs, and prepared grains and other foodstuffs to put up for the winter.

Bonfires were an important part of the celebrations. Hearth fires were put out, the bones of the slaughtered cattle were tossed into the bonfire, and each home re-lit their hearth fire from the coals of the bonfire. Sometimes two bonfires would be built so that people could pass between them with their livestock for 'purification'. This practice may be a survival of the times when the ancient tribes purified themselves by burning alive: a) any members who were less than perfect so that the tribe could be cleansed of sinful elements, or b) those members who were actually perfect in some way and volunteered to be offered as a sacrifice to appease the gods so the rest of the tribe could live in peace for another year. This is, in fact, an interesting clue.

The name 'Halloween' is an old Scottish variant of 'All Hallows Eve', or the night before All Hallows Day, or the Feast of All Saints. What is interesting to observe here are the old customs regarding this day, and especially the following two days, from around the world that were later Christianized, but obviously represent something far more ancient. The symbols associated with Halloween formed over time and, just as the medieval church assimilated the ancient death-themed images and practices, many of the customs of contemporary times have assimilated the medieval practices. In traditional Celtic Halloween festivals, large turnips were hollowed out, carved with faces and placed in windows to ward off evil spirits. The American tradition of carving pumpkins was originally associated with harvest time in general, not becoming specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 1800s. The 'witch myth' was created in the late 1400s in reaction to the Black Death - com¬etary destruction on an almost unimaginable scale - and this 'myth' consisted of a whole, coherent system of beliefs, assumptions, rituals, and 'sacred texts' that had never existed until this time and that were created by a couple of psychopathic accusers! The Dominicans developed and popularized the conceptions of demonology and witchcraft as a negative image of the so-called 'true faith', and the Protestants