On the night of Samhain the household fires were put out and relit from one communal flame, the cattle were brought down from the summer pastures, and the door to the Otherworld stood open. The dead came back to the houses they had left, and the living set a place for them. This is the festival under the Halloween costume.
The festival under the costumes
Samhain, from the Old Irish for “summer’s end,” marked the close of the bright half of the year and the start of the dark. It was one of the four great seasonal assemblies of early Ireland, a time of gathering and feasting, and it carried a particular charge: on this night the boundary between the living world and the Otherworld of the sídhe thinned, and the dead and stranger things could cross. The early Irish tales set their hauntings and Otherworld journeys at Samhain for a reason.
This much is genuinely old. Unlike some of the festivals later gathered into the Wheel of the Year, Samhain has a real pre-Christian pedigree in the Gaelic world, attested in the earliest Irish literature and echoed in the Gaulish Coligny calendar’s division of the year.
The dark gate of the wheel
In the modern Wheel of the Year, Samhain is the great dark gate, the point opposite Beltane where the year tips from light into dark, and many who keep the wheel treat it as the year’s beginning. The historian Ronald Hutton, who traced the whole ritual year, is careful here: Samhain plainly mattered, but the tidy “Celtic New Year” label and a good deal of the atmospheric detail were firmed up in the Victorian period, when antiquarians and revivalists filled the gaps in the old evidence with confident reconstruction.
The older Irish layer is darker and more specific than the modern wheel’s. At Magh Slécht the Samhain rite reportedly turned lethal: the high king Tigernmas and much of his people are said to have died at the idol of Crom Cruach on one such night. The festival was never only a harvest party.
What it became
The Church set All Saints on November 1 and All Souls on November 2, draping the Christian dead over the older returning dead, and the folk practices carried straight through: the carved lanterns (turnip before pumpkin), and the guising and divination games that fill Maclise’s painting above. Halloween is not a commercial invention laid over a blank. It is Samhain, costumed, still doing in October what it always did: opening the door to the dark and the dead, and daring you to look through.
Image: Daniel Maclise, “Snap-Apple Night” (1833), a Halloween gathering in Ireland with its games and divinations. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford University Press, 1996)
- Early Irish literature, including the assemblies and Otherworld tales (Tochmarc Emire, the Echtrae)
- The Coligny calendar (Gaulish, c. 2nd century CE), on the Gaulish reckoning of the year