Ancestors may visit on Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday.

While I love dressing up (I make a great “bad fairy”—watch out on the 31st, if she appears this year, she’s likely to sour your milk for a month...really) and watching bad old horror movies, it’s the original tradition and lore behind the holiday I like the most.

Across Europe, in pre-Christian times, Halloween, then known as Samhain (pronounced properly “Saw-when” and having nothing but an unfortunate mispronunciation to do with umpteen horror movies), was a time when the worlds of the dead and the living intersected. The belief was that time is cyclical, and that once a year, at the “seam” of time (think of a band sander here), the veil between the worlds grew thin, and the dead could travel among the living. Since it was where the band was “joined,” Samhain was also marked the end of the year. Now just celebrated for one day, then Samhain was often considered to be three, and often began on the first night of the full moon in Scorpio. (Yes, I know about All Saints Day and All Souls’ Day, but that’s just not the same.)

This isn’t as scary as it sounds. While the concept of dead people breezing through the world of the living is a bit unsettling to the modern mind, consider for a moment all the people you have personally loved that have passed on.

As far as most ancient European people were concerned, Samhain was a great time to invite them in for coffee and catch up on things. Various regional customs included leaving food out for spirits, in case they got hungry while traveling, and lighting candles to help guide them on their way.

No one was afraid of the traveling spirits, except perhaps those who wronged a person greatly in life and feared retribution from their spirit.

Other Samhain traditions included various divination techniques, to see what the coming “new” year would bring.

Fast-forward a few hundred years to the conversion of Europe to Christianity. Some Samhain traditions would remain in Halloween, but most would be hopelessly bastardized. Divination, or fortune telling was against church doctrine, so that definitely had to go. And “trafficking with spirits,” even if one voluntarily comes and visits you or happens to be your grandmother, is also a big church no-no. With no “Land of the Dead” and the idea that the saved went directly to Heaven never to be heard from again since they were sitting in the glory of God, any wandering spirits must have been rejected by the Holy Father and thus must therefore be in the employ of the devil. So while the church couldn’t stamp out Halloween entirely, it did everything it could to demonize the traditions of the former religion and went to lengths to outlaw them.

Eventually it almost worked. Other than a few pockets of Wiccans and other pagan-types, few realize the costumes are to scare away or confuse the wandering spirits away from who they’re looking for. Jack-o-lanterns, originally made with a rush light in a turnip to guide the way of the wandering spirits, were carved with terrifying faces, again, to scare the spirits away.
Interestingly enough, several other unrelated cultures have a “Day of the Dead” also around the same time as the Western tradition of Halloween. The tales of how and why are also remarkably similar. The Mexican Day of the Dead, celebrated on Nov. 2, is the remnant of this very similar Aztec holiday. Mexican families event clean the bones of their deceased relatives in preparation for their arrival, prepare their favorite foods, and generally treat the occasion as though they are expecting company.

I still love the excuse to dress up on Halloween (and I figure my grandmother would know exactly who’d dress as a bad fairy for Halloween anyway). But every year, I make certain to set aside a little quiet time, just to say ‘hi’ to those I miss, who have passed on. With the veil between the worlds a bit thin, I’m hoping they can hear me or may even come to visit.

(Originally published in The Easton News, October 12, 2006)