image from The Wicker Man

Some have claimed that humans were among the offerings on Samhain. Writing of Celtic rituals in general, the famed Julius Caesar asserted that victims were placed in "wickerwork images of vast size," which were then set afire. This practice was depicted, in a contemporary setting, in the 1973 cult film The Wicker Man. Yet, in his exhaustive study The Druids, Peter Ellis argues, "The deduction one is really drawn to is that the idea of widespread human sacrifice among the Celts was mere Roman propaganda to support their imperial power in their invasion of Celtic lands and destruction of the Druids."

While we will probably never know whether such nasty practices took place, we can put to rest the idea that Samhain was a bloody rite dedicated to "Samhain, the Lord of the Dead," a claim perpetuated by some Catholics and fundamentalist Christians. There was no "Samhain" deity in Celtic mythology, notes Isaac Bonewits, a specialist in ancient and modern Druidism. There may have been an obscure character named Samain or Sawan, renowned for his magical cow. He was not a god or "lord of the dead," however.

Celtic sagas tell of many important heroic and prophetic events occurring on Samhain. It was a sacred time, during which warriors were ordered to lay down arms and observe a peace. Great feasting and ritualized drunkenness were the rule: revelers consumed huge quantities of mead and beer. Yet it was a serious event: anyone who missed the festival ran the risk of going mad and dying, according to legend.

"In marking the onset of winter, Samhain was closely associated with darkness and the supernatural," adds Nicholas Rogers, a York University history professor and author of Halloween: From Pagan Ritual To Party Night. "The festival was closely related with prophecy and story-telling." It was a time out of time, "charged with a peculiar preternatural energy."
 

sidhe (burial mound) in Ireland

 Samhain was considered a period "between years," a magical interval during which the spirits of the dead spilled out of the sidhe, the ancient burial mounds of the Celts, and walked among the living. "It was an intensely spiritual time, for it was the one period when the Otherworld became visible to mankind," writes Peter Ellis in The Dictionary Of Celtic Mythology.
 

bronze statue of Pomona, British Museum

The old ways began to change with foreign influence. The Romans invaded England in the first century A.D., and their festivals for Feralia (which commemorated the dead) and Pomona (the Roman goddess of fruits and trees) may have added light-hearted traditions such as apple-bobbing to Samhain.

Next, the Celts converted to Christianity, a process that began in England in the 4th century and in Ireland (with the arrival of St. Patrick) in the 5th century A.D. The Christian Church could not utterly abolish Samhain celebrations, so they co-opted them. Ultimately, they absorbed the Celtic holiday into the Catholic calendar.
 

St. Peter's Church, Rome

Pope Gregory IV (827-844 A.D.) changed the date of a festival honoring Christian saints to November 1 and called it the Feast of All Saints. The celebration of All Saint's Day became known as All Hallow Mass or Hallowmas in England. Accordingly, the night of October 31 became All Hallows Eve and absorbed the spirit of Samhain. "Hallows Evening" was eventually condensed to Halloween."

In 998, the French monastic order of Cluny initiated a mass for the souls of the Christian dead, later moved to the day after All Saints Day. The new feast day of All Souls held further resonance for Celts accustomed to Samhain, a time so linked to the spirits of the dead. By the end of the twelfth century, the festivals of All Saints and All Souls (together called Hallowtide in Great Britain), were well-established highlights of the Christian year. And Hallows Eve, which preceded them, had taken the place of Samhain, retaining its aura of eerie mystery.
 

Part Two: All Hallows Eve

Samhain's idea that spirits were on the loose, and that communication was possible between this world and the underworld, survived in All Hallows Eve. On that night, "the world of the dead was open to the living and vice versa; time was abolished; and ghosts, a convenient term for spiritual entities seeking contact with humans, could temporarily materialize and engage in dialogue with their relatives, friends, and even strangers who had the gift of second sight," adds Markale. A few rituals of Samhain, like fire rites and divination, were also transferred to All Hallows Eve. 

The church masses of Hallowtide served as insurance against hauntings, according to Rogers, "for ghosts were generally understood to be dead relatives who visited their kin to rectify wrongs committed against them while alive and to enforce the obligations of kinship." As night fell and All Souls' Day arrived, "bells were rung for the souls in purgatory." Across Catholic Europe, "food was laid out for the dead, whose souls were expected to return to their former abodes on All Souls' Day," a practice we see today in Mexico's Day Of The Dead. In England, candle and torch-lit processions honored the deceased and bonfires in graveyards discouraged the visitation of malicious spirits.

In England and elsewhere, it was a custom for the rich to give out food in return for prayers, a practice called "souling."  "Soul cakes" (square biscuits with currants) were baked and given to relatives, poor neighbors or beggars on All Souls' Day. In return, the recipients promised to pray for the dead relatives of the donors. It was felt their prayers could speed a soul's passage to heaven. While "soulers" went door to door during Hallowtide, less solemn revelers also took to the streets.

Costumed folk began a "season of misrule" full of "disguisings, masks and mummeries" (folk plays or skits), according to Rogers. They sang, danced, drank, rode hobby horses, cross-dressed, and impersonated officials, inverting the established order. Full of masquerades, role reversals, shaming rituals and street music, Hallowtide had a little of the atmosphere of Carnival or Mardi Gras. Celebrants demanded food, ale, and coins from their neighbors and mocked those who wouldn't comply. The use of masks on Hallows Eve probably started with these merrymakers; and mummers and soulers asking for donations may have been a precedent for trick-or-treating.

Hallowmas fell out of favor in England during the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, and All Souls' Day was eliminated from the calendar. Yet devotions to the dead persisted, and Catholics continued to light bonfires on hilltops and ring church bells for the departed. Souling was important to the hungry poor and survived in many parts. All Hallows Eve, which became popularly known as Halloween in the 18th Century, continued as a time of "supernatural intensity," notes Rogers.

In Ireland and Scotland, "Halloween was largely untouched by the Protestant Reformation," writes Rogers. "From the seventeenth century onward, the folklore associated with Halloween flourished without much intervention, sometimes accenting and rejuvenating older pagan customs. In the Scottish highlands, Hallow fires blazed from cairns and hilltops. Their ashes were later placed in magical circles around with people danced. In some areas, there were torchlight processions around the fields to ensure their fertility or to ward off evil spirits and witches...many of these customs recalled the fire rituals of Samhain that were to be found in the ancient Celtic sagas."

Witches, said to be in league with the devil, were feared because of the teachings of the medieval Church. Actually, in "pagan times" (i.e., pre-Christian), witches practiced healing, herbalism and magic, and had nothing to do with Christian belief systems. Eventually, the witch with the black hat and broomstick would become an indelible Halloween motif, their images further developed by literature and movies.
 

Mummery and begging for treats on Halloween continued. In Scottish villages "it was not the deceased themselves who returned but young people who personified the spirits of the dead by hiding their faces under masks and wearing long white robes or grotesque costumes made from straw. Little by little it was the children who picked up the baton in these masquerades...they went in search of treats, treats that, of course, represented the offerings made to the deceased," writes Markale.

He adds that some carried hollowed-out turnips with a candle inside, representing a wandering spirit. These were called "jack-o'-lanterns" after an Irish legend about Jack, a man unwelcome in both heaven or hell, who was doomed to wander the earth eternally.

Halloween was associated with divinatory rituals, omens that foretold marriages or deaths, and premonitory dreams. Over time, it underwent a transformation into ritualized amusement, albeit with eerie undertones. Families and young woman enjoyed fortunetelling games in the parlor. Rogers notes, "Halloween acquired a special significance as a courtship ritual or augury for marriage. The way stones settled in bonfires, the way nuts cracked in the heat, the shape of kale stalks pulled from the ground, the people or sounds one encountered at the midnight hour at a crossroads or stile -- all were windows to the future." The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-1796) described many divination games in his famed poem "Halloween."

Meanwhile, outside the warm parlor in the dark night, high-spirited boys were on the loose. They assumed the roles of mischievous goblins, fairies and witches, moving horses to different fields, and playing other jokes on their neighbors. Many of the pranks were "threshold tricks," wherein "doors were nailed shut, windows broken, gates taken off hinges and fences de-picketed," according to art scholar Mark Alice Durant, who speculates that such vandalism perhaps signified "the holiday's origins as a marking of the line between life and death."

The pranksters understood that Halloween "was a night of a different order," adds Durant, "At a time of year when the light was fading and the cold was threatening, the line between the sacred and the profane, between abundance and scarcity, between the material and the ghostly, between the pagan the Christian had blurred." In the mid-19th century, this spooky and high-spirited celebration began to increase its presence overseas.
 

Part Three: Halloween In America

In North America, Halloween began to arrive in force in the 1840s. Rural immigrants from Ireland flooded into America and Canada because of the Great Potato Famine, and brought Halloween customs from their homeland. Nearly two million Irish men and women lived in the United States by 1890. A steady stream of Scots also carried Celtic traditions to the New World. The restless energy of "mischief night" found expression in new surroundings: rowdy boys knocked down fences, tipped over outhouses, and wreaked other havoc. Families upgraded a harmless custom, thanks to the new land's plant life, making jack-o'-lanterns out of pumpkins, easily carved into large, grinning demonic faces.

By the late 1800s in North America, Halloween had developed into a family festival full of parties, seasonal foods (pumpkins, maize and apples), and costumes. Ghost stories were told, contests were held, and games were played. Masks for Halloween were on sale in Ontario, Canada as early as 1874, notes Rogers. Retailers advertised candies and nuts for the night. Black cats and bats became Halloween motifs, apparently because of the influence of Edgar Allen Poe and gothic writers. 
 

Halloween lost its religious overtones and changed into a secular, community-oriented celebration. It was no longer regarded as primarily an Irish or Scottish festival, and became a fixture in the North American calendar. Such acceptance did not diminish the pranking committed by young males that night, who now saw Halloween as their best opportunity to let loose. Other American and Canadian holidays had become all too respectable, tame and institutionalized. By the 1920s,  there was public concern about how wild the night was getting. Mischief often veered into vandalism: signs were removed, roads barricaded, street lights knocked out, and automobile tires deflated. There were even youth riots in a few cities. Towns and clubs began to organize "safe" Halloween events -- carnivals, dances and street fairs -- to keep youngsters occupied.
 

Depression-era Halloween mask,
photo by Phyllis Galembo, Dressed For Thrills