Origins: Halloween

 

Halloween has got to be the weirdest holiday, and is now among the biggest.  At least it is here in northern California. The influence of the major Halloween parades and parties in San Francisco has spread, along with commercial exploitation, so I started seeing Halloween house decorations going up in mid-September.  In my youth in western PA it was mostly for children to toddle around cutely in stuffy costumes in the cold, mostly unable to see, then to stand mutely in the suddenly hot doorways of strangers while holding out a bag for candy.  That's steadily changed.  Young adult parties are more frequent, and their costumes can be very elaborate.

Halloween is weird because, among other things, it's about death and dead people.  That is indeed part of its origins, but it was also mixed up with harvest celebration, masking and mischief-making, the coming of winter, and treats.  These days it seems also to be about sex and death.  Weird.

Many cultures have designated days to commemorate the dead.  By tradition, they tend to be in late autumn, as winter approaches--the season of cold when plants are dormant, and food can be scarce. Today's Halloween on October 31 appears to be a very ancient tradition of Celtic Ireland and Scotland, dating to the fifth century B.C. That day was the official end of summer and the harvest season, with November 1 marking their New Year.  It was believed that this was a kind of liminal day in which the dead could visit the Earth.

There are different accounts of what this day actually entailed.  The tamer version suggests a festival, in which villagers appeased the departed with gifts of food left outside their homes, or places set at their tables for their honored dead.  Bonfires were lit to purify, as well as to ward off evil spirits.

The darker version suggests the belief was that those who'd died the previous year could return to choose the body of a person or animal to inhabit for the following year, before they passed over permanently into the afterlife.  This is the literal meaning of "haunting":  not to scare someone, but to inhabit them (as we speak of our old haunts.)

 To prevent this haunting, people dressed up as demons and witches to frighten the dead away. They had extinguished their hearth fires so they wouldn't attract the dead to their homes, and paraded wildly to a big bonfire outside of town, where some unfortunate (and probably mentally ill) individual whose behavior might suggest possession by spirits would be sacrificed in the fire, to warn the dead that possessing one of them wasn't going to work. As these traditions spread in Europe over the centuries, the human sacrifice transformed to the burning of effigies.  Halloween these days dilutes this a little more, with effigies but not much burning.

Whatever the mix was, it probably reflected the perennial twinned attitudes towards the dead: an empathetic desire to honor and help them on the one hand, and fear of them on the other, with malevolence towards the living projected on them.

A Celtic carved turnip--or space alien?

The Celts appear to have originated a few other lasting Halloween traditions.  In Ireland they hollowed out turnips and carved scary faces on them. In southern Ireland, young men would go door to door reciting verses.  If they were fed, the house could expect good fortune; if not, not.  In Scotland, this approach was modified to something closer to today: the youths would go to houses dressed in scary costumes with faces blackened by fire ashes, and threaten mischief if they weren't properly welcomed.  

It's said that these traditions accompanied the Irish and Scots to America.  Lacking the right kind of turnips, however, they turned to pumpkins.  

By then, the Catholic Church had long established its own ownership of this time of year for remembrance of the dead, stipulating October 31 as All Hallow's Eve (from which the name Halloween probably comes): like Christmas Eve, it was a vigil of an actual holiday, which in this case was All Saints Day on November 1, a holy day when Catholics are obliged to attend Mass.  And for good measure, All Souls Day was designated for November 2.  

Various countries and cultures have incorporated their folk traditions in ritual observances around these days to honor the dead.  But the biggest observance by far is Halloween, shorn completely of conscious intentions or comprehended ritual.  America has never figured out how to honor the dead beyond funerals (though that practice is itself waning), with the possible exception of those killed in wars.

But even in the guise of fun, Halloween reveals a lot of complicated if unconscious feelings about the dead and death.  Elaborate costumes and trick or treating (from which the tricks have largely disappeared) function as many other festivals did and do--they create a time and space outside the normal, a permitted indulgence in whimsy, allowing for expressing different identities and generally loosening the normal constraints: unrestrained life as the answer to death, perhaps.  

 The dance with death is complicated.  I once participated in an annual event in Pittsburgh, the "Night of the Living Dead" (Pittsburgh being where that iconic movie was made) in which various dead rock stars performed.  I was Buddy Holly.  I refused, however, to don the pale death makeup.  I wasn't going to make fun of one of my musical heroes: I wanted to honor him and the life of his music. I could do the voice. It was great fun. 

Loosening restraints and taking on new identities has led to sexy costumes.  In the 1970s I frequented a bar and restaurant where at least a dozen beautiful young women worked as waitresses.  At the restaurant's Halloween party they all showed up in costume: about half were dressed as provocative witches, with the other half as classic Ladies of the Night. 

 That may have been more a comment on their jobs, but it does seem that in sexy costumes and make-up, particularly in variations on the traditional horror figures of witches, ghosts, ghouls, vampires, zombies etc., there is again an uneasy convergence of sex and death. The thrill of the transgressive must be part of it, maybe even the mocking of death, but beyond bravado it's not clear there's much consciousness of the reality behind the techniques.

I've never fully understood the entertainment value of being scared, or especially of scaring people.  I get it that children (and others) learn to deal with their fears through experimentation, and that the rush comes not from the scare but from the moment afterwards, when it's clear there was no threat.  But haunted houses for kids, or bloody horror movies for adults--both now apparently part of Halloween--aren't anywhere near the top of my list for ways to have fun.  What I'd be afraid of is traumatizing a child--or myself.  Like many holidays, it is very far from its origins, while still raising profound issues but mostly without clear or meaningful rituals to explore them.  So Halloween as a holiday itself scares me a little.