Halloween And The Celtic Samhain Origins

By Author: Jamie Hanson
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People often think of the celebration of Halloween as a pagan tradition, while quite literally, it's not. That's true as far as historians of Western traditions are concerned, because it's simply a contracted version of All Hallow Even. In other places, the event is called the eve of All Saint's Day, which takes place every first of November.

What's your Halloween like?

In many regions of the world, Halloween was the time for people to remember the souls in Purgatory. The souls in Purgatory were the souls in limbo; those who are awaiting final judgment by performing acts of cleansing.

In Dante Alighieri's books, the souls in Purgatorio are individuals who are neither in Paradiso nor Inferno. In the modern appropriation, the day next to All Hallowed Even is All Soul's Day (carried out on November 2).

Samhain

Some scholars think that Halloween has its older roots in the Roman celebration of the Pomona, which is linked to the Roman goddess of harvest. Another Roman celebration that may have something to do with how Halloween is celebrated is the Parentilia. The Parentilia is a celebration of ...
... the dead.

As for the Celtic origin of Halloween, researchers point to Samhain or Samuin (sow-an), which is carried out when the summer days finally end. The celebration of Samhain is often paired with another celebration known as the feast of Beltane. The feast of Beltane is a celebration of the powers of life.

As you can already see, even the Celtic cultural tradition builds upon binaries, like Chinese medicine or Indian Ayurvedic tradition. There must be balance, so both the forces of death and life have to be in balance. Where there is balance of life and death energies, there is life. With imbalance, there is disease and famine.

Why the Samhain?

Why did the Celts celebrate Samhain? The summer months were usually the months when people gathered food; during the winter months, the food becomes scarce and the forces of Nature become more dominant. This was when humans bowed down to the superior force of the seasons, wind, ice and the unbearable cold.

Negative reaction to Halloween

In the past decades, there has been a negative reaction to the celebration of Halloween. Because the celebration is not completely Christian, many parents and school administrators think that the celebration should be banned completely in schools.

While it's improbable that the ancient Celts were really worshipping the Christian Lucifer, the fallen angel himself, the original rituals of Samhain are not really that palatable to modern sensibilities.

Records & strange, modern depictions

In movies like those that feature the character Michael Myers (the Halloween series of movies), the Samhain was used as a central category that encompassed how a person can sacrifice to oppose the forces of life and death. The ritualistic ceremonies that the main character espoused built an image of the Samhain that stank of 'evil' in the most modern (yet ironically, comic) sense.

More ironically, there are very few extant records of how the Druids really carried about their ritualistic festivities. Only a known personage, Pliny the Elder was able to provide a hint. However, there were no humans being sacrificed on a pointed stick. Rather, two white bulls were used, in a ceremony that appeared to be a run-the-mill offering for better fertility.

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