History of Halloween

Dare you open the door to the dark mysteries of Halloween night? In these pages you’ll discover how today’s trick-or-treaters are the inheritors of some much older traditions. Discover the pagan – and surprisingly, Christian – heritage of All Hallows Eve and the ancient festivals that were its forerunners. Explore similar festivals from around the world that mourn and celebrate the dead and the end of the harvest season, and learn how trick-or-treating has roots deep in the past and across a variety of cultures. Find out about the folk magic rituals that became today’s Halloween activities, from the secret sorcery behind apple-bobbing to the reasons why we carve pumpkin lanterns. Explore the complex history of why witches are associated with Halloween and why it’s believed that spells become more…

While the festival we call Halloween today is a relatively modern phenomenon, its ancestral origins are ancient. Just like its annual trick or treaters, it has taken many guises: From the Irish Samhain (‘Summer’s End’) and the Welsh Nos Galan Gaeaf (‘Winter’s Eve’) to the Scandinavian Vetrnaetr (‘Winter Nights’) and Anglo-Saxan Blodmonath (‘Blood Month’), all are names for the great north European festival that took place at summer’s end and gave rise to the customs and rituals we perform today on the night of 31 October.. A pagan pageant Although Halloween’s origins have been widely disputed (and often miscredited), it is generally agreed that our modern day celebration owes a great deal to a number of reported pagan practices marking the end of summer that would take place between October…

The practice of mumming is recorded in Scotland at Halloween, where the poor would go door to door begging and performing tricks in return for food and money – an early version of trick-or-treating. Other popular folk practises at Halloween included divination games, snap-apple (the night was known as Snap-Apple night in some areas of the UK) and apple bobbing, cross-dressing, lighting bonfires, and burning nuts. Folk traditions took on a Christian meaning with the advent of Allhallowtide: the practises of mumming and guising became known as souling. Children were sent off in disguises to go door-to-door, often equipped with hollowed-out turnip lanterns (previously said to represent spirits, now thought to represent the souls trapped in Purgatory) and chanting in order to receive traditional ‘soul cakes’ in return. In Scotland,…

The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s entry for witchcraft in the 1929 edition must have surprised many readers of the time. In it the author boldly asserts that: “When examining the records of the mediaeval [sic] witches, we are dealing with the remains of a pagan religion which survived, in England at least, till the 18th century.” It goes on to describe how followers of this old religion can still be found in France and Italy. Despite the best efforts of the church this religion flourished for centuries. In fact, many priests “were only outwardly Christian and carried on the ancient rites.” The encyclopedia termed this movement ‘The Witch-cult’. Through all editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica until the 1960s, this authoritative definition of witchcraft remained in place. It influenced not only the casual…

Charles Leland was convinced that an ancient religion of witches existed. From this belief he concluded that there may well be a holy scripture used by them, and set out to find it. Published in 1899, Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, is the result of his research. The prose and poems of the book describe how the goddess Diana was impregnated by her brother, the light-bringer Lucifer. When Diana gives birth to a girl she names her Aradia. Aradia is given the task of teaching witches how to protect the weak against the strong. Aradia then departs, but calls her witches to gather naked each Full Moon in the forest to celebrate with a consecrated meal called the Sabbat. Back in the heavens with her mother, Aradia can…

According to the witch-cult hypothesis the central figure of veneration was a Horned God representing fertility. At meetings the leader of a coven would embody the god and even dress up as the deity. One of the reasons that Christians were so hostile to witch-cults was because the god of the witches so much resembled the Christian idea of the Devil. Images of horned gods can be attested well into prehistory. In the Cave of the Trois-Freres in France around 13,000 BCE, someone sketched high on a wall the image of a man with an animal tail and the antlers of a deer. The discoverer of this picture called it ‘The Sorcerer’ and Margaret Murray thought it the earliest depiction of a deity on Earth. Today the Horned God is…