🎃🐈‍⬛🌾🥮👻. 🎄?

 Well, yeah, kinda:

No social plans tonight but I might head out onto the balcony in a bit and start screaming "DID YOU KNOW HALLOWEEN IS IRISH ORIGINALLY?" as loud as I can

The connection between Samhain and All Hallow’s Even is a tenuous one, at best. 

AND I WARNED YOU THIS WOULD TAKE MANY WORDS TO EXPLAIN! 👻

I’ve already quoted the history of All Saints Day. The idea was floated as early as the late 4th century.  But Gregory III finally did something about it in the 8th century.Well, again, I’ll just quote the pertinent language:

Gregory III (731-741) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary for 1 November. A basilica of the Apostles already existed in Rome, and its dedication was annually remembered on 1 May. Gregory IV (827-844) extended the celebration on 1 November to the entire Church. The vigil seems to have been held as early as the feast itself

Alright, three things there. 1 May in Ireland was Beltane, about 6 months prior to (or after; either way) Samhain, on 1 November.  These were the two most important holy days on the Irish Celtic calendar. And yet no one ever argues the Roman Catholic dedication anniversary was connected to Ireland. Mostly because no one remembers it anymore, but the connection is as solid as the connection to All Saints. Which is to say, not solid at all. Besides, All Saints displaced Samhain to the vigil, or eve. And Gregory III set the date on November 1, but Gregory IV made it a date for the entire church almost 100 years later. At which point is it clear when the Church acted in response to the Irish holy day? Which was important in Ireland, but not really in Europe? 

The best information I can find indicates observance of Samhain was connected to stories of gods and heroes not dissimilar from the tales in the Elder Edda. But we don’t associate those stories with ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night, so, again, the connection to contemporary Hallowe’en (“contemporary” as of Robert Burns) is suspect. Well, except for the date.

Stick with me, I do have a point, and it’s not to rehash the Hallowe’en/Samhain confusion a third time. I’m actually interested in the connection between All Hallow’s Even and Christmas Eve, and what it tells us about our celebrations. For that, we need to dig down to the roots.

I’d read this book before*, so I must have forgotten this reference from the late 16th century. The reference is to the “Lord of Misrule” being chosen on All Hallow’s Eve, for a celebration that extended to Candlemas (February 2nd, observance of the presentation of the Christchild to Simeon at the Temple). This connects more with the reason the Puritans banned Christmas in the New World than with Ireland per se. The “Lord of Misrule” indicates a raucous Christmas celebration probably like the “Feast of Fools” on the Continent. You may have noticed this makes Hallowe’en the gateway to Advent and Christmas, as well as nearly a month of Epiphany. (Candlemas was not a small thing. The tradition in England persisted for centuries that the Yuletide greenery could not be removed until Candlemas, lest demons beset you. Come back on Candlemas. I have poems about it.) The gateway because raucous celebrations were a common feature of British Xmastide (the famous “12 Days of “). With idle time on their hands and most of the food going up to the lords, singing assaults on fine houses expecting a treat in recompense became a social pacifier. The Lord of Misrule was part of that. If it started around All Saints, and continued until Candlemas, All Hallows Eve opened door in October that didn’t close until February. At least not in the British Isles. 

Raucous celebrations may have Irish roots, too, but especially at year’s end, they’ve been popular in many European cultures that long ago abandoned the Feast of Fools. My father was old enough to remember when the emphasis in “Trick or Treat” was on the trick, not the treat. Hallowe’en was a sanctioned day for tricks, not unlike Christmas Day (come back in Advent and you’ll see what I mean). I heard stories of tricks and treats in my childhood, but by then Hallowe’en was entirely domesticated. This is just a reminder it wasn’t always so.

Is Hallowe’en still Samhain? Except for the dates, it’s hard to say so. Some think Gregory III set the date to take over Samhain. But it was almost 100 years later before Gregory IV made the date “universal.” Was the church indifferent to Ireland and its holy days before then? Well, maybe; but there’s no record of it. Gregory III was probably looking at the Church Calendar, not the Irish one. Gregory IV was just as likely thinking of the Church, not Ireland alone. So the date is as likely to be coincidental as intentional. Besides, Samhain didn’t disappear; it just changed dates (unlike Brigid, who was utterly transformed into a saint of the Church; as a Celtic goddess she disappeared until the recovery of Irish folklore in the 20th century). And looking at the church calendar in Gregory III’s day, is it really so hard to see the connection to the Christ Mass, which eventually gave us Xmas Eve?

Samhain became more associated with the Lord of Misrule than ghosts or Celtic heroes, before it became a holiday for children seeking candy. The Feast of Fools was finally banned in England (and on the Continent) in the 1600’s (the Puritans hated its remnant: raucous Xmas celebrations, which involved a lot of drinking.). Hallowe’en persisted as the Eve of All Saints, though Henry VIII and Elizabeth I both tried to suppress it because it was a “papal holiday” (they had their own, non-Puritanical, reasons). But it was a witch trial under James I (the same fervor that jumped the pond to Salem), linked to an alleged incident on Hallowe’en night, that connected the day to witches thereafter. And then the Victorians using the Romantics interest in folklore (as the Industrial Revolution swept that world away) to take new interest in ghost stories, well…

So, is that Irish? It’s more a series of accidents of history, but it didn’t wipe out the celebration, as the Burns poem shows (the Scots have more in common with the Irish than the English). It just added witches to it; and other thing later on (via James I, albeit accidentally). The celebration of the holiday, mostly along the lines Burns memorialized, continued in the British Isles, mostly excluding England; but the festivities in England and Europe shifted to Michaelmas (12 November) and the slaughter of livestock as part of the festival, for the winter. No candy, though. The Scots and the Irish did bring Hallowe’en to America in the second half of the 19th century, with the diaspora brought by the potato famines. (How the Irish saved civilization. Again.) But it was received as a celebration for children, which probably explains how we ended up with the holiday we have today.

The interesting contemporary part is that, again, it’s an eve celebrating a Christian holiday. Granted, these days more of us think of Dias de Los Muertos than think of All Saints Day. But we have three holiday eves on our civic calendar, and Hallowe’en is the first of them. It is the beginning of the revelry that once carried from this celebration through to at least Candlemas in England, and Ash Wednesday in Roman Catholic Europe. It’s our dour Puritan heritage that makes us denounce it as demonic, or relegate it to children; and then lament more recently that the celebrations of our childhood are gone, and adults have turned it (back, historically) into drunken revelry.

Or is everything old just new again? And rather than complain about Xmas overtaking Hallowe’en, maybe we could recognize the 10 weeks or so of holidays that are trying to return, if only because in order to rejoice, we need to construct something upon which to rejoice; and that something doesn’t need to be too much of an abstraction.

Hallowe’en does have an Irish root, if only in the keeping of it to the 19th century. But the celebration we observe today (and, ironically, sent back to Europe), wouldn’t be recognizable in pre-Christian, or even Christian, Ireland. Which is not to discount the Celtic connection; but it’s hardly an observance that’s come down to us unchanged through the ages, only lately bastardized by candy merchants. Though I am intrigued by that reference in New Advent to the vigil being attached to the feast day almost from the beginning. Was Ireland that influential in Europe in the 8th century? And for the centuries between the 8th century and the 12th (when the Feast of Fools began to appear), what was that vigil like? 👻 What is it about these multiple eves, anyway?

Maybe we’re trying to find out. We’ve certainly been keeping them long enough, even long after Protestantism removed the Roman Catholic connections. Maybe we should look at the reasons for that more carefully, and perhaps construct new reasons to rejoice, if we need them. Or find a few good old ones, for all of that.

After all, Christmas and Hallowe’en are our two holidays when we especially want to do things as they’ve always been done. And they’re both meant to be for fun.

*Aside from the link, I relied on Trick or Treat; A History of Hallowe’en, Reaktion Books, 2019, by Lisa Morton, for much of this post.