Inés Durán Vega FL2111 Aspects of Irish Folklore

114106434 Ciarán Ó Gealbháin & Shane Lehane

Custom and Tradition:

A festival in Irish folklore

SAMHAIN
The roots of Halloween

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Inés Durán Vega FL2111 Aspects of Irish Folklore
114106434 Ciarán Ó Gealbháin & Shane Lehane

In this essay, we are going to talk about the festival which inspired one of the most
celebrated festivities of the year, Halloween. We are going to dig in its Celtic roots and
discuss about Samhain.

This festivity takes place the night of the 31st of October, which is also called ‘All
Hallows Even’. This name evolved and from the contraction of ‘All Hallows Even’ we
get the name of ‘Halloween’. It preceded the ‘All Saints’ Day’ and it was the night in
which autumn ended and winter started. It was also the witching hour when the
boundaries between the upper world and the underworld were not so well defined and
the time to remember the people who had recently passed away. But let’s look into it a
bit more deeply.

Roots and Origins

It is common and generally believed that Halloween is a pagan tradition, even though its
etymology is Christian as it has been mentioned above, and alongside the All Saints’
Day and Eve and the All Souls’ Eve conforms the period of the year dedicated to
honour the dead and saints. In ancient times it was also the time for praying for those
souls who had got stuck in the purgatory waiting for their redemption and salvation or
for their eternal condemnation. Just because Halloween is popular and generally
associated with the supernatural, it is usually believed that it has a pagan roots that were
never completely erased by the latter Christianization of the festivity.

Some folklorists have established the origins of this feast in the roman festivals
dedicated to the goddess Pomona -deity of the seeds, the fruits, the fruit trees, the
gardens and the orchards- or in the festivals of the Parentalia -feasts dedicated to the
dead that were held in February-, but most frequently is related to the Celtic festival we
are going to talk about, Samhain, which would set the origins of Halloween in the Celtic
tradition.

Samhain (also called All Hallows Eve, Allantide, Ancestor Night, Apple Fest, Candle
Night, Day of the Dead, Devil Night, Ducking Knight, Feast of the Dead, Feile na

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Inés Durán Vega FL2111 Aspects of Irish Folklore
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Marbh, Geimredh, Halloween, Hallowe'en, Hallows, Hallows Eve, Hallowtide, Harvest
Home, Hollantide, Mischief Night, November Eve, Nutcrack Night, Oiche na n-úll,
Oiche na sprideanna, Oiche Shamhna, Oidhche Shamhna, Púca, Samain, Saman,
Samuin, Santos, Sean-Shamhain, Snap-Apple Night, Shadow Fest, Spirit Night and
Third Harvest) means literally ‘end of summer’.

In a Gaelic text of the tenth century entitled ‘Tochmarc Emire’ this festival is originally
mentioned by the heroine Emer as the first of the four quarter festivities of the year that
conform the Irish calendar, and it is described as the moment when the summer comes
to its rest. Its equivalent festivity is the festival of Beltane (also spelled Bealtaine) which
is held the 1st of May and marks the start of the livestock summer with the rise to the
pastures of the cows as well as it is celebrated the life generator powers of the sun,
while Samhain attracts the winter and the darkness that is about to come. Samhain is the
time for collecting the harvest, taking stock and redistributing the profits for the winter
months, taking into account that there had to be reserve for warriors and shamans. It is
also a period of intense supernatural activity, when the dark forces and fairies come out
from the sidhs -the place where they live, in the hills-. To shoo away these spirits, the
Irish people used to build a bonfire and invoke the help of the gods through animal or
even human sacrifices.

Not all the scholars agree with what exactly happened during this festivity of Samhain,
but most of them remark its elementary primitivism and its lasting legacy to the
character of Halloween, particularly in terms of forebodings, auguries, omens and links
to the other world. Despite the divination practices related to Halloween have
disappeared long time ago, the echoes of the underworld are still present through the
jack-o’-lanterns and the scary disguises. Certainly, in the late years the supernatural
qualities of Halloween have been revitalised by two completely opposite groups: the
Christians and the newly pagans. The most conservative Christians have stated that it is
satanic and glorifies the devil. Some of them have also assured that Halloween is the
occasion for the witches to worship the Demon and they even have urged some school
committees to remove the Halloween celebrations because of its supposed antichristian
values. Meanwhile, the newly pagans have remarked the therapeutic qualities of

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Inés Durán Vega FL2111 Aspects of Irish Folklore
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Halloween in fighting the fear -of death and changes, mostly- and developing the
creativity and imagination by getting in touch with the folklore and the mythology.

In the meantime, the entrepreneurs, who are eager to take advantage of the feast to make
profit, do not mind bringing to light the most bloody and creepy stories of Samhain, like
in the horror Halloween films of the last forty years, where at least the name of this
festival has appeared. Maybe not in the first but surely in the sequels of John
Carpenter’s Halloween a mention to Samhain has been made.
In Halloween II the word ‘SAMHAIN’ appears written in blood on a blackboard and it
is said that it is a Celtic word for ‘lord of the dead’, ‘end of the summer’ and ‘31st of
October’.
In Halloween III there is a lunatic Irishman called Conal Cochran who runs a mask
factory called ‘Silver Shamrock’. The creepy thing about it is that every mask he
produces contains a chip made from a flake of a stone taken from Stonehenge that is to
be activated the 31st of October through a TV commercial, killing everybody who is
wearing the mask at the moment. With this he wants to sacrifice children in order to
bring back to life the macabre aspects of the Celtic festival of Samhain.
In Halloween: the Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth sequel, there is this virus called
‘Samhain’ which takes away the vital strength through a black mass and the sacrifice of
a child. This part of the film plays with the idea of Samhain as a festivity in which the
firstborn children were sacrificed to the gods of the darkness. Any other thing that the
newly adepts can say about the beneficial qualities of Halloween is nonsense because
the image that the big productions have sold about Halloween is its brutalism and
savagery.

The argument of Samhain being satanic can be discarded because the Satanism is a
Christian creation. The Christianity invented the dualist fight between the god of the
light and the god of the darkness, which is the fallen angel, Lucifer. Certainly, the
polytheistic beliefs of the Celts were not compatible with the idea of Satanism because
to have a ‘bad god’ there has to be a ‘good god’ who prevails over everything in the end
and the Celtic people had many deities, there was not such dichotomy. The fame of
being a satanic ritual started in the late Middle Ages with the prosecution of witches and

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heretics. Witches were thought to be in contact with the devil and also to celebrate
feasts like Samhain, so consequently Samhain was related with devilish practices.

The matter of the sacrifices (animal or human) is quite more polemical. Even though
there are some clues in Irish folklore about human sacrifices, we find written evidence
in the texts of the scholars of the first century before Christ. These scholars included
Diodorus, Strabo or even Julius Caesar, who denounced the practice of human sacrifices
in a time in which the roman world considered itself as the standard bearer of the
civilization, so they saw these practices of the people from the northern part of the Alps
as barbaric. Their vision was obviously biased as they considered the barbarians their
enemies and the barbarian beliefs a menace to the roman way of life and culture, so they
used their texts as propaganda against them and also as a justification for the wars they
were carrying out. It can be said that these texts show us more about the Romans than
about the barbarians, but none of these talk about Samhain because they describe the
barbaric customs in a very general way. It is through the druids, who were thought to be
the performers of the sacrifices, how we find the link to Samhain, because the sacrifices
were believed to be a part of the Samhain festivals. The druids were thought to practise
sacrifices in order to predict the future, and as Diodorus stated, they used to stab their
victims and foretell the upcoming by the way the blood came out from their bodies and
by their last attempts to fight the death, as well as by the observation of their organs
once they were completely dead and gutted. Tacitus also made references to these
specific practices to foresee the future.

But without a doubt, one of the worst practices of all, described by the mentioned
Diodorus, Strabo and Julius Caesar was the one which inspired the British horror film
The Wicker Man. It consisted in building huge structure made of wicker with the shape
of a man, putting alive men inside and then setting fire to it to worship the gods. Strabo
even attributed cannibalism and incest to the Celtic barbarian people. But again, these
arguments were an excuse to show how barbaric they were (even though they were not
so) and to justify the wars against them. As they would say, it was their ‘casus belli’.

Therefore, there are some Celtic resources, like a poem in the Dindshenchas, in which it
is mentioned that newborns were sacrificed every Samhain to worship the god Cromm

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Crúaich in Magh Slécht (County Cavan) but Saint Patrick himself in his own story
about how he extinguished the pagan traditions in Ireland makes no mention of human
sacrifice at all, so maybe the poem was embellished to magnify the greatness of the
saint. In consequence, without accurate evidences it gets quite difficult to establish
whether the Celtic druids made human sacrifices or not.

So there is no definitive proof of Samhain being a bloody festival, even though that is
the image that Hollywood has sold of it to the world. The only murders that can be
attributed to this festival are the ones committed against animals due to the excess of
them. Maintain an animal was expensive, so this measure was taken to avoid an excess
of expense during the austere winter months. Consequently, the pagan roots of
Halloween come from a completely different set of symbolic practices that revolve
around the notion of Samhain as a festival of the dead and a time of supernatural
intensity proclaiming the beginning of the winter. Long ago it was believed to be the
period of the year when the souls of the ones that had passed away supposedly revisited
their homes to warm themselves up and to cheer up with their loved ones in the kitchen
or in the living room in front of the fire. In fact, there is no sound proof of Samhain
being especially dedicated to the dead or to the worship of the ancestors. Some
folklorists have stated that the festivity was dedicated to Saman, god of the dead, and
some others have settled that it was associated with the main god of the ancient Irish
tradition, Dagda, sometimes referred as Cera, Crom-Eocha, Easal, Ebron, Eochaid
Ollathair, Eogabal, Fer Benn, Ruad Rofhessa or Samildanach.

Concerning the establishment of the beginning of winter, Samhain was closely related
with darkness and the supernatural. According to the Celtic folklore, winter was the
dark time of the year, when nature was asleep, the summer came back to the underworld
and the earth was desolate. In Ireland, the féth fíada -the magic mist that used to turn
people invisible- rose in Samhain and the elves emerged from the fairy forts, erasing the
boundaries between the real world and the other world. It was a feast related also with
prophecies, divination and storytelling. Not by accident most of the mythic events of the
ancient sagas happened during the night of Samhain.

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What is especially noteworthy about Samhain is its condition as a frontier festival. It
takes place between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice. As the Celtic lore
stated, it marked the limit between summer and winter, between the light and the
darkness. In this aspect, Samhain can be seen as a threshold, a moment of ritual
transition and altered states. It represents a time out of time, a brief interval when the
normal order of the universe is suspended and is charged with a peculiar energy which
exceeds the capacities of the human nature. These attributes keep on echoing through
the celebration of Halloween.

Celebrations

The festival of Samhain was celebrated with a lot of merrymakings. There were
divination customs, games were played, traditional food was eaten and protection from
the fairies was taken.

In relation to protecting themselves from the fairies (who were thought to be all around
that specific night of the year) and the ghosts of the dead (who were believed to come
back), people used to make offerings of food and water and leave them near the doors of
their houses to ensure the favour of the fairies the next year. Crosses were settled
outside the houses on the ground or inside on the thatch and holy water was scattered on
the door as well. Animals were blessed and sprinkled with Holy water too, and if one of
them had died on October 31st, a cross was affixed to the stable door and the place
where the death happened was also sprinkled with Holy water or otherwise a gob was
spat. There were church offerings for the Holy Souls and one candle was lit for every
loved one that had died. The candle was put in the window of the room where the death
occurred, in a window facing the graveyard or in the grave of the dead one.

Concerning the divination customs, people used to roast bean or nuts by the fire, and the
direction it took when leaping was taken as a sign. If a woman had put it in the fire and
it leapt towards a certain man, it was believed that the fate was telling them that they
would marry. Moreover, the nutshells were burnt to foretell the future by looking at the
ashes they left.

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They also used to melt lead and pass it through the ring of a key into a vessel filled with
clean water. The form it took symbolised the profession of the future spouse that the
person that had poured the lead would marry.
Young people used to leave their shifts and shirts by the fire to see who would take it
later, because it symbolised a mutual liking and therefore a possible future marriage.
Girls would eat a salty herring so their future husband would appear to them in a dream
offering them a glass of water and they also used to put rings in cakes. The boy who
found it was meant to be the husband of the girl who had prepared the cake and placed
the ring into it.
Elder people used to put a stake in the junction of two beams and, by how it looked the
next day, November 1st, they would predict how the weather in winter was going to be.

People during Samhain liked to have great feasts, so they prepared special plates like
colcannon, which was prepared with smashed boiled potatoes, cabbage and raw onion
and eaten with butter and a spoon. There was never a lack of apples, butter, milk, nuts,
vegetables, apple cakes, batter pancakes, blackberry pies, dumplings, oatcakes,
puddings, tea and punch. But they never had meat because the days afterwards were
Holy days.

And finally they loved to have fun. They played games like ‘blind man’s buff’, ‘four
corner fool’ or ‘shuttle the brogue’, but they would play ducking for apples and coins in
a tub as well. The youth used to make contests of agility, dexterity or strength and they
would also make dares and pranks, so, for example, they would take the wheels of the
carts and place them in the roof of a house, paint some drunkard’s face and coat or dress
themselves up to scare somebody. Elder people preferred storytelling, reciting poems,
riddles, tongue twisters and card games. One of the most popular games was the one
which consisted in fastening two sticks as a cross and putting them on the ceiling like a
ceiling fan with an apple in one stick and a candle, a potato or even nothing in the other
stick, so it was made spin and the aim was to take a bite of the apple, avoiding the
candle or the potato. But, without a doubt, everybody loved telling jokes and singing
songs all together by the fire.

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Bibliography:

 Danaher, K. (1972) The Year in Ireland: Irish Calendar Customs. Cork: Mercier
Press.
 Narváez, P. (2003) Of Corpse. Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular
Culture. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.
 Rogers, N. (2003) Halloween: From pagan ritual to party night. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.