Samhain, the Celtic Festival which Gave Us Halloween

‘Tis the season to be spooky! Grab your pumpkin and your best witch’s hat, break out the skeletons for your front lawn and hope nobody puts anything dodgy in your candy. 

Halloween is indeed one of the most popular holidays in the American calendar, a playful time of pranks and ghostly scares built upon the Christian holiday of All Saints’ Eve. Which is why it is a little odd that nothing about the holiday in the popular depictions is Christian, and in fact there is much that looks decidedly pagan.

The Christian holiday is much more important in other cultures, the eve of a season where the dead are remembered and venerated by those that remain. And certainly the focus on the dead is what has galvanized the spooky reputation of this time of year.

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But there is more to this story than frights and tacky costumes. Underneath the trick or treating, underneath the Christian holiday, there is an ancient tradition which has a lot more to do with Halloween as we picture it than you might think.

Of course, this is not the first Christian holiday which has co-opted a pre-existing pagan festival (looking at you Christmas and Easter). But this festival, known in the Old World as Samhain, is particularly special.

And you can see it in Halloween almost wherever you look.

Samhain and the Looming Darkness

Samhain is, at heart, a harvest festival. Such events were a common fixture across many pagan cultures, a celebration of having enough food to survive through the coming months of darkness and cold and a defiant refusal to be defeated by this harder half of the year.

Nor is Samhain only found in the history books. It is celebrated to this day in Ireland and Scotland, and variants can be found in Wales and the Isle of Man.

These are places united by a Celtic heritage, and indeed Samhain would seem to have its origins in ancient Celtic paganism. It starts in the evening because, for the Celts, the day ended at sunset, and it formed part of a Gaelic calendar of four festivals held throughout the year.

We know from the archaeology that Samhain had deep roots in pagan Celtic culture. Celtic rock tombs have been unearthed which are aligned with sunrise or sunset on the date of Samhain, some dating as far back as the Stone Age, and ancient Irish texts, although few and far between, also contain references to the festival dating to the 9th century.

What does it involve, them? Well, here we are on shakier territory but the ancient texts agree that three things generally happened on Samhain: bonfires were lit, it was a time of communal feasting, and the tombs of the dead opened revealing portals to the Otherworld where the Celtic gods lived.

One of those seems a little more dramatic, to be sure, and it is hard to say what these portals actually looked like. We do not have any detail from the truly ancient sources to tell us what this meant, and by the time Samhain is recorded in detail the gods are replaced by fairies, and the opening of the tombs was recognized by setting a place at your feast table for them to join you.

Nor does the name “Samhain” itself furnish us with any clues. Its meaning is obscure: the Irish word for November is related, but Samhain came first, and suggestions such as a derivation from the ancient word for “summer” make no sense for a festival held on the 1st November.

It can tell us something about the people who celebrated it however. The date of the festival is telling, at least in theory.

The anthropologist Sir James George Frazer theorized that the date would not have mattered to a crop growing society: nothing important needs to happen on 1st November, and if your harvest isn’t done by that point in ancient Ireland then you are in a fair bit of trouble. However herdsmen would have been much more likely to shift their livestock from their summer pastures to their winter homes around this time: Samhain was a festival of pastoralists.

Samhain is also intertwined with the very oldest tales from Irish mythology, a time when great deeds are accomplished and where the gods, monsters and otherworldly beings need to be appeased. The Fenian Cycle has several stories of the great hero Fionn mac Cumhaill occur at Samhain, and there are stories of werewolves, of the Fomori, great enemies of the Irish gods, and of blood sacrifices.

Great kings of Irish legend routinely die at Samhain, and firstborn children are sacrificed to appease the looming threat of the dark gods. Some even make the link between the famous Irish Bog Bodies, ritual murders preserved for centuries, and the rituals as the world turned to winter.

All of this is entirely understandable. A pagan populace, facing months of winter cold and frozen land and entirely dependent on their stores of food for their very survival, would certainly feel threatened. Such festivals have always carried a threat of annihilation: the gods at this time of year do not join in celebration, they need appeasing lest they destroy you.

Hence the bonfires, a bulwark against the encroaching dark. Hence the feasting and the alcohol, a grand gesture to which the gods are invited as well as a defiant stand against the oncoming dark, a spectacle of community so that in the coming months people can remember they are part of a community.

Other traditions have built on this foundation. Mummers walk the land, disguised as ghosts or otherworldly beings. Different communities appease their gods in different ways, fisherman to the sea, herders to the mountains. Various devices were used to ward off evil spirits, for it was not just dead relatives who walked abroad on Samhain.

It is this festival on which Halloween is founded. And so, for those who are looking to share in a spooky holiday this year, remember that this is the time when the dead walk the earth again, when ancient tombs are opened and when the unwary could fall prey to ghosts and monsters.

Header Image: Samhain was a time when the dead walked the earth, a pagan precursor to Halloween. Source: Erik den yngre / Public Domain.