ANCIENT ORIGINS OF HALLOWEEN
Halloween's origins date back into the early Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago from the place that is now Ireland, the uk and northern France, celebrated their new year on November inch.
This afternoon at the conclusion of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the year, the boundary between the realms of their living and the dead became blurred. On the nights October 3-1 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead came back to ground.
Along with causing trouble and damaging crops, Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it simpler for the Druids, or Celtic priests, to make predictions in the foreseeable future. For many individuals entirely determined by the volatile natural world, these prophecies have been an important supply of comfort and direction during the lengthy, dark wintermonths.
To commemorate the event, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the party, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes.
When the party was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the upcoming winter.
Did You Know?
1 quarter of the candy sold yearly from the U.S. is obtained for Halloween.
By forty three A.D., the Roman Empire had conquered the majority of Celtic territory. In the course of the 400 years they ruled the Celtic lands, two festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain.
The very first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the death of the dead person. The next was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and timber. The symbol of Pomona is the apple, and also the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably explains the tradition of"bobbing" for apples that is practiced today on Halloween.
ALL SAINTS DAY
On May 1-3, 609 A.D., Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome in honour of Christian martyrs, and the Catholic feast of Martyrs Day was established at the Western civilization. Pope Gregory III afterwards enlarged the festival to include things like all of saints and all martyrs, and moved the observance from May 13 to November 1.
By the 9th century the influence of Christianity had spread into Celtic lands, even where it gradually combined with and supplanted the elderly Celtic rites. In 1000 A.D., the church would make November 2 All Souls' Day, a day to honor the deceased person. It really is widely considered today the church has been wanting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related church-sanctioned vacation season.
All Souls Day has been celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing in costumes as saints, angels and devils. The Saints Day party was additionally called All-hallows or even All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the evening ahead of the traditional night of Samhain from the Celtic faith, began to be predicted All-Hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween.
HALLOWEEN Involves AMERICA
Celebration of all Halloween was extremely limited in colonial New England because of the rigid Protestant belief systems . Halloween was much more common in Maryland and the southern colonies.
Since the beliefs and customs of different European cultural groups as well as the Western Indians meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween started to arise. The first celebrations included"play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share tales of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, sing and dance.
Colonial Halloween festivities also featured the telling of ghost stories and also mischief making of most kinds. By the middle of the century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween wasn't yet celebrated everywhere in the nation.
In the second half of the century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, especially the millions of Irish fleeing the Irish Potato Famine, served popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally.
Trickortreat
Borrowing from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became the"trick or treat" tradition. Ladies felt that on Halloween they could divine the name or appearance of the upcoming husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings or mirrors.
From the late 1800sthere has been a movement in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers than about ghosts, pranks along with witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most frequently encountered way to celebrate daily. Events focused on games, foods of this summer and festive costumes.
Parents have been encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to get anything"frightening" or"grotesque" out of Halloween parties. Because of those efforts, Halloween lost nearly all of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentiethcentury.
HALLOWEEN Events
From the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades along with town-wide Halloween parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many colleges and communities, vandalism started to plague a few celebrations in many communities during the time period.
By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the youngchild. As a result of elevated quantities of small children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or house, wherever they are more easily adapted.
Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old custom of trick-or-treating was revived. Trickortreating has been a comparatively inexpensive way for a whole community to share the Halloween celebration. Theoretically, families could also prevent tricks being performed on them by providing the local children with small treats.
Thus, a brand new American tradition was born, also it's continued to rise. Now, Americans spend approximately $6 billion annually on Halloween, making it the nation's second biggest commercial holiday following Christmas.
SOUL CAKES
The American Halloween convention of"trick or treating" almost certainly dates back to early All Souls' Day parades in England. During the festivities, poor citizens would beg for food and families would give them pastries called"soul cakes" in return for their promise to plead for the family's dead relatives.
The distribution of soul cakes was encouraged by the church for ways to displace the ancient practice of leaving food and wine for roaming spirits. The clinic, that had been known to as"moving a-souling" was finally consumed by children who would pay a visit to the properties within their area and be given ale, food and money.
The tradition of dressing in costume for Halloween has both European and Celtic roots. Hundreds of years back, winter was an uncertain and scary time. Food supplies often ran low and, for the many people fearful of the dark, the short days of winter were full of constant stress.
But on Halloween, as it was thought that ghosts came back to the earthly world, people believed that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. In order to avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their houses after dark so the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits.
On Halloween, to continue to keep ghosts away from their homes, people would place bowls of food out of their homes to appease the ghosts and keep them from wanting to get into.
BLACK CATS
Halloween has always been any occasion filled with mystery, magic and superstition. It began as a Celtic end-of-summer festival throughout which men and women felt especially near dead family members and family members. For these spirits that are friendly they set locations at the table, abandoned bites on doorsteps and across the side of the road and lit candles to help loved ones locate their way back to the spirit world.
Today's Halloween ghosts tend to be portrayed as more gruesome and malevolent, and also our habits and superstitions are scarier way as well. We stay away from crossing paths using cats that are black, afraid that they might deliver us bad luck. This concept has its origins at the dark ages, when many folks thought that witches avoided detection by turning them into black cats.
We make an effort never to walk under ladders for equal purpose. This superstition may come in the ancient Egyptians, that believed the triangles have been sacred (it may also have some thing to do with the fact walking under a leaning ladder tends to be fairly dangerous ). And around Halloween, notably, we make an effort to avoid breaking mirrors, stepping on cracks in the highway or spilling salt.
HALLOWEEN Match Making
But what about the Halloween traditions and beliefs today's trick or treaters have forgotten everything about? Many of those obsolete rituals focused about the future instead of the prior and the alive instead of the lifeless .
Specifically, numerous had to complete with aiding women determine their future husbands and reassuring them they might --together with luck, by future Halloween--be married. At 18th century Irelanda match making cook could spoil a ring within her mashed potatoes on Halloween night, trusting to attract true love to the diner who detected that it.
In Scotland, fortune-tellers advocated that an eligible young woman title a hazel nut for each of her suitors and then toss the nuts into the hearth. The nut that burned to ashes rather than bursting or popping, the narrative wentrepresented the woman's future husband. (In some versions with the legend, the opposite has been true: The nut that burned off revealed a love which would not last)
The other narrative had it if your youthful lady ate a sugary concoction crafted from walnuts, hazelnuts and nutmeg before bed on Halloween night she would dream about her upcoming partner.
Young girls pitched apple-peels above their shouldershoping the lotions would fall on the floor inside the form of their prospective husbands' initials; strove to learn about their stocks by glancing at egg yolks floating in a bowl of plain water ; and burst in front of mirrors at darkened rooms, holding candles and looking over halloween costumes at their shoulders for their husbands' faces.
Other rituals are somewhat competitive. At certain Halloween parties, even the very first visitor to work out a burr onto the chestnut-hunt would be the very first to marry; in others, the very first powerful apple-bobber are the down the aisle.
Needless to say, no matter if we are searching for amorous info or trying to avoid seven decades of lousy fortune, every one of those Halloween superstitions relies on the character of their exact same"spirits" whose existence the ancient Celts felt keenly.