A pagan celebrant guides a procession up the hill of Tlachtga in Athboy, Ireland, at 2018's Flame of Samhain festival. In Irish tradition, Oct. 31 the end of the old Celtic year.Photography by Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
Eamonn McKee is Ireland’s ambassador to Canada.
Throughout history, festivals have changed their outward form, adapting to changes in society, religious beliefs and culture. At their heart though, they draw their strength from their unchanging alignment with the year.
Christmas may be Christian but since time immemorial we have acknowledged that, at midwinter, the sun is at its weakest. We light up our homes and towns to remind it to come back.
Easter is also a significant celebration for Christians but at its heart is a celebration of spring, when short days become long and the summer beckons.
So too Halloween is one of those liminal moments in the year, the flip side of Easter, when days become short and winter is on the way. Yet Halloween has resisted Christianization. It retains its pagan power. Halloween is quintessentially an ancient Irish celebration of the autumnal equinox.
Samhain festivities sometimes include the extinguishing of the old year's fire and the lighting of the new year's.
The people who lived in Ireland 5,000 years ago organized their festivals around this and other liminal junctions in the year.
The “quarter-days,” marking halfway between equinoxes and solstices, have been celebrated for millennia in Ireland as crucial pivot points in the year and the agricultural cycle.
This included bonfires and festivities at Bealtaine in May, the traditional start of summer, and at Lughnasa, the traditional end of summer and the start of the harvest. Imbolc in February celebrated St. Brigid. Halloween (Samhain in Gaeilge/Irish) was another pivot point between the seasons.
The ancient Irish believed this opened up our world and the spirit world to each other. As the world tips into darkness and shuttered winter is not far away, this is the time of year to acknowledge the world of spirits.
Today, ghouls and goblins and every kind of otherworldly creature walk among us. Whether inspired by native lore or Hollywood, they materialize in masks and costumes, offering us tricks and menace, demanding their dues.
The Flame of Samhain procession, top, ended in 2018 with the lighting of a wheel to mark the start of the new year.
We do not know how the pre-Christian pagan Irish celebrated Halloween. Druids interpreted these events and supervised their celebration. They lost the battle with Christianity and faded from our consciousness. The monks repressed this history deliberately. They brought writing to Ireland in the fifth century and assiduously recorded every aspect of Gaelic laws and culture, save anything to do with the Druids.
However, we do know that the pagan celebrations of Halloween were deeply enough engrained that Christianity had to tolerate them, if not lovingly embrace them. Even conversion sometimes involves compromise.
Just as the early Christian monks converted Brigid from a pagan goddess into Saint Brigid, so too did they convert Halloween into All Hallows Eve (All Saints Day) and All Souls Day. It did not quite catch on however. Unlike Christmas and Easter, the pagan gods proved more powerful than the Christian church. Halloween is their day, when the church must turn a blind eye as we try to scare ourselves into believing that the bogeyman exists.
A pumpkin sits along the route up Tlachtga. Jack o'lanterns are another Halloween custom of Irish origin, though theirs were more often carved with turnips, not pumpkins (which were introduced to Europe from the Americas).CLODAGH KILCOYNE/Reuters
Halloween is now a global phenomenon, with its roots in the long autumnal twilights and fabulist world of Irish fairies, spirits and banshees. You can easily imagine those pre-Christian pagans, reciting supernatural tales at dusk, their eyes playing tricks on them, and the mythical beings appearing before them in the low light of evening.
The Irish took Halloween with them when they emigrated. America pumped it up as a social and commercial phenomenon. Hollywood helped spread it around the world, Ireland included. Altered and enriched, Halloween is still recognizably ours.
Like Christmas and Easter, Halloween’s annual celebration links us to the rhythms of the Earth as it spins through space, leaning into the sun in summer and into the void in winter. We should perhaps pay more attention to this dimension of our annual festivities. The timing of these festivals reminds us that we are part of nature and subject to its spinning rhythms. They remind us that we are nature’s guests here. Thinking we are nature’s masters is the kind of spin that gets you into trouble.
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