Halloween symbols

Samhain, and the argument over it

Samhain was the Gaelic festival at the onset of winter, when, Pamela O’Neill of the University of Sydney writes, the harvest was over and the last livestock were brought back from the summer pastures. Even its pronunciation varies: Lisa Bitel gives SAW-en, O’Neill sah-win, and Jack Santino Sah-ween.

The account most readers know is Santino’s, from a lecture at the Library of Congress in 1982: “Halloween had its beginnings in an ancient, pre-Christian Celtic festival of the dead”, which the church tried to replace by setting the feast of All Saints on 1 November. The Library’s research guide on Halloween still opens with it. James Frazer, in The Golden Bough (1922), thought the Celts dated the beginning of their year from Hallowe’en, and that the souls of the dead were once believed to revisit their old homes that night.

Lisa Bitel, a historian of medieval Ireland at the University of Southern California, disagrees: “Samhain is Irish. Halloween isn’t.” What the pagan Irish did on 31 October is lost, she writes, because the only evidence is legends written by churchmen around AD 800, some 400 years after the Irish began turning Christian. Those tales treat Samhain as a night when the otherworld, the sí, opened to mortals, but they do not link it with death and horror, and they describe bonfires at Beltaine, not at Samhain. In her account it was 19th-century folklorists, John Rhys at Oxford and Frazer at Cambridge, who drew the line from Samhain to Halloween.

Stephen Winick of the Library of Congress, updating Santino’s essay in 2013, takes a middle position: it remains “pretty certain” that Halloween began with Samhain, but the idea that Samhain was the Celtic new year “only arose in the late nineteenth century”. O’Neill writes that Halloween “seems to have been layered with” the older festival.

All Hallows’ Eve and souling

The name is Christian. All Saints’ Day, 1 November, became All Hallows Day in English, and the night before became All Hallows Eve. Bitel credits Pope Gregory IV with fixing the feast on 1 November in 834, and says he “knew nothing of ancient Irish seasonal holidays”. Regina Hansen of Boston University puts the move under Gregory III in the mid-eighth century, “so that it coincided with the date of Samhain”, though she adds that there is disagreement about whether that was the purpose. On 2 November, All Souls’ Day, people prayed for the souls of the dead.

In Staffordshire, John Brand’s Popular Antiquities records, the poor went “a souling” from parish to parish, begging soul cakes; a note in the 1853 edition adds that the custom continued in parts of the county, with peasant girls going to farmhouses singing “Soul, soul, for a soul cake”. Santino traces trick-or-treating to souling and to mumming, performing antics in exchange for food and drink. Hansen calls the link a popular belief that not every scholar accepts.

From turnips to pumpkins

In Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland writes, turnips were carved into scary-faced lanterns, carried about or set on windowsills. In 1943 a teacher near Fintown, Co. Donegal, gave the museum one of the type always made there around 1900. The light inside, O’Neill adds, was usually a smouldering peat or ember. The name comes from the tale of Jack, welcome in neither heaven nor hell. A pupil at Clonfinlough, Co. Offaly, wrote a version down for the Schools’ Collection in the late 1930s: turned away from heaven and purgatory, Jack struck the devil, who left a red mark on his face, “and the red mark is a light”.

Bitel accepts the turnips and disputes where they began: jack-o’-lanterns, she writes, are “neither ancient nor Irish”, and carving turnips in early November probably started in England, with All Saints’ Day and Guy Fawkes Day. On the museum’s account and on hers, the pumpkin is the American part. In 1844 John Greenleaf Whittier remembered carving “wild, ugly faces” in pumpkins as a New England boy, “with a candle within”, in a poem in praise of the Thanksgiving pumpkin pie.

Across the Atlantic

Hansen dates Halloween’s arrival in the United States to the 1840s, with immigrants from Ireland and Scotland who brought dancing, masquerading, fortune-telling games and, in some places, parading the neighbourhood for treats. O’Neill points to the Highland Clearances and the Great Irish Famine, which moved much of the rural population of Scotland and Ireland to North America, often against their will. Bitel counts the English and many other immigrant groups among those who brought the customs over. In North America, she notes, pumpkins were plentiful and easier to carve than turnips.

Guising, and trick or treat

Guisers went from house to house in disguise. On South Uist, O’Neill writes, their masks were made of sheepskin with painted features, sometimes with a sheep’s skull added; householders had to guess who they were, and the guisers left with a scone or other food. The National Museum of Ireland says trick-or-treating “stems from this tradition”. Bitel says the guisers of medieval Scotland, who begged for soul cakes on All Souls’ Day, “probably became” the costumed children. In America, Hansen writes, towns and churches of the early 20th century tried to curb Halloween pranks with parties for children and, eventually, trick-or-treating. In 2012 researchers cited the Lethbridge Herald of 4 November 1927 as the first to print the words “trick or treat”; Belinda Crowson of the Lethbridge Historical Society later said an earlier printing had turned up, she believed somewhere in western Canada.

Witches, cats, bats and skeletons

“To this day, witches, ghosts, and skeleton figures of the dead are among the favorite disguises,” Santino said in 1982. A tract Brand quotes gives the witch of a nurse’s tale “a black cat, two or three broomsticks”. The Bat’s place in Halloween, the US Fish and Wildlife Service says, comes largely from the vampire myth, though only 3 of more than 1,300 bat species are vampire bats. The Skeleton and skull and the Grim Reaper go back to the Dance of Death, a drama of the mid-14th century that Hans Holbein the Younger made into a series of woodcuts. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the ancient Romans believed an Owl could tell of a coming death, and a spider’s web is easiest to find in September and October, when many spiders start mating.

Día de Muertos is its own holiday

The Library of Congress calls Día de Muertos “a related but different holiday”. It formed in colonial Mexico, where All Souls’ Day mingled with several Indigenous celebrations of the ancestors, and its name means “Day of the Dead” but also “Day of the Ancestors”. It is kept across most of Spanish-speaking America, especially in Mexico. Among Mexican Americans, Winick writes, All Souls’ Day, or Día de los Muertos, is the day most widely celebrated, and each November the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room sets up an altar for it. These pages don’t treat it as part of Halloween; the skeleton page names it only to tell the two apart.