This Sunday, October 31, the annual holiday of Halloween will be celebrated in the US, Europe, and other places around the world. Across the country, you will see the symbols of Halloween, including witches, black cats, bats, Jack ‘O Lanterns, skeletons, and ghosts. Being a nerdy historian, I’ve always been interested in the origins of such things, and I used to incorporate some of this info into my classes.
The celebration of Halloween began many centuries ago. About the time of Jesus’ birth, the Celtic people of the British Isles celebrated a festival called Samhain (pronounced Sow-in) on October 31 on the Roman calendar. The next day, November 1, marked the New Year of the Celts (according to some sources). This holiday came after the summer, when the harvest was completed, and the dark, cold winter began. Because many people without adequate food or warm homes died during the winter, Samhain was also associated with death. It was believed that on the day before the new year began, the lines between the living and dead were blurred and ghosts of the deceased were able to return and roam the Earth. Thus the symbols of Samhain were ghosts, skeletons, and pumpkins, which representing the successful harvest. The pumpkins were often carved into grotesque faces, as might be seen on partially decomposed corpses of the recently dead.
Britain and Northern France, where Samhain took place, eventually came under the control of the Roman Empire. When the Empire fell, in the late 400s, the Catholic Church stood as the only unifying factor across Europe. Between the 600s and 1000, the Church devoted much effort to converting the Celts and other pagan people to Catholicism and getting them to leave their traditional beliefs behind. At some point, in an attempt to win over those people, Church officials hit upon the ingenious plan of combining Catholic holy days with the festivals celebrated by the non-Christian peasants. In late December, on a day near the Winter Solstice, when the tilt of the Earth made for short days and long, cold nights, superstitious, pagan people were worried that the sun would not return to help their crops grow. They made sacrifices to the gods to persuade them to bring back the sun and its life-giving warmth. No one knew exactly when Jesus of Nazareth was born, so the Catholic Church moved the celebration of his birth to the end of the year in order to coincide with this festival. They also moved Easter, the celebration of the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion, to the spring, at which time many pagans celebrated the planting of crops and the birth of livestock. Even today, many Christians will go to church services to celebrate the return of Jesus to life, then go home and hunt for colored eggs hidden by a Harvey-like bunny rabbit. Thus, we see a bizarre juxtaposition of symbols for Easter: sacred Christian ceremonies, followed by pagan rituals. Both the egg, representing new birth, and rabbits, animals known for their prolific reproductive abilities, were pagan fertility symbols.
So, how did Halloween fit into this pattern? I already mentioned Samhain and the various autumnal festivals celebrated by peasants. On that night, bonfires were lit and sacrifices were made to appease the gods and help the family and livestock survive the long winter. Moreover, it was believed that the souls or spirits of dead relatives walked the earth seeking hospitality that night, so a place was set at the dinner table for them. In imitation of this activity, people dressed in costumes (a practice called “guising, from which comes the modern word “disguise”) and went door-to-door reciting verses in exchange for food on behalf of the dead. That’s where we get the tradition of Trick-or-Treating. The Catholic Church, trying to convert pagans, moved two holy days to the beginning of November. In the 800s, November 1 became All Saints Day, the day to remember and celebrate those who had been canonized by the Church, and November 2 became All Souls Day, a day to pray for the souls of dead relatives. All Saint’s Day was also known as All Hallows Day in Britain, so the night before was called “All Hallows Evening.” This phrase was eventually contracted to “Hallows Ev’n,” and then “Halloween.” Once again, the sacred holy day fused with the pagan festival.
So we’ve covered ghosts, skeletons, and Jack ’O Lanterns, but what about some of those other venerable symbols of this fall holiday? Witches, with tall pointed hats, hunched over boiling caldrons of steaming liquid are forever associated with Halloween. This image of evil women with magical powers who consorted with the devil and put curses on people grew out of a practice that was much more innocuous. Along with other duties associated with the home, brewing beer in a large iron caldron was considered women’s work throughout the Middle Ages. In an age when most drinking water was tainted with various disease-inducing impurities, consuming beer was considered a healthy way to ingest needed nutrients. With a life-expectancy of less than 40 years, husbands often died young, leaving women to try to eke out a living by themselves. For many widows, the only marketable skill they had was making beer. So they made their way to the market place with caldron in tow, and sold beer in a booth, wedged between the wool producer and the cheese maker. In order to be seen among the crowds of men, they began wearing tall, pointed, black hats. Today, no self-respecting witch would be seen in public without such a chapeau. Often, brewers kept a black cat in their home to catch the mice and rats who ravaged their grain.
The Wizard-of-Oz image of witches as ugly hags who are up to no good started in the 1500s. In fact, if we’re being precise, it started on Halloween, October 31, 1517. On that day, Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper listing his 95 complaints about corruption within the Catholic Church onto the church door in Wittenberg, Germany. That seemingly simple act ignited a firestorm known as the Protestant Reformation which started new branches of Christianity and pitted Protestants versus Catholics in violent conflict for over a century. Hundreds of thousands died in these religious wars, each side believing that their view of Christianity was the true faith—and they were willing to slaughter each other to prove their point. (So much for “Thou shalt not kill.”) Caught in the middle of this sanguinary struggle were those poor women trying to make a living as they always had, by making and selling beer. Each side tried to show their religious purity by enforcing gender norms, including the one that said only males should be active in the marketplace. The Inquisition and various propaganda campaigns painted widows and single women as dangerous threats to the community and labeled them witches. Tens of thousands of people—most of them single women—were executed by burning, hanging, or being pressed to death under tremendous weight in the witch trials of the next century-and-a-half. One of the last of these incidents occurred in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts.
The final symbol that is ubiquitous at Halloween parties is that disgusting mammal, the bat. Remember those bonfires that people lit for sacrifices to the gods on Samhain? Those fires attracted nocturnal insects, which, in turn, attracted bats. Few people like bats, but they are actually valuable creatures on a number of levels. They devour insects, especially mosquitos, consuming more than 600 in an hour. As Bill Bryson, one of my favorite writers, puts it, “Without bats, there would be a lot more midges in Scotland, chiggers in North America, and fevers in the tropics. Forest trees would be chewed to pieces. Crops would need more pesticides.” In addition, bats pollinate many plants and disseminate seeds through eating and excreting them. A small colony (about 400) of Seba bats in South America, can produce 9 million new fruit trees every year. Without bats, some of our most desired plants would disappear. This includes bananas, avocados, peaches, and my favorite nuts, cashews. Yet, because of unwarranted fears about rabies and a lethal new fungus, many species of bats sit on the brink of extinction.
So, the next time you attend church services on a Holy day, drink a beer, carve a Jack ‘O Lantern, or see a cardboard cut-out in the shape of a black bat, remember where these traditions came from. Now, pass that bowl of candy over to me—but first take out those damned candy corns.