The Logic And Belief Behind The Celebration Of Halloween Today
Many societies the world over celebrate a special day for the dearly departed
, and Halloween, or "Hallow Eve," is but one of these. Halloween is an expression of human nature's inclination to remember loved ones who had passed away. Days designated in memory of the honored and the esteemed stud societies down to the most basic family unit. And many prominent cultures in the world, in an effort to keep its people united in a single faith, appoint a solemn day of remembering the departed, especially those who have upheld the ideals of their culture during their lifetime. Generally understanding memorial days leads us to society's yearning to celebrate its departed members as successful and lasting examples of its ideals.But there is more to Halloween than just remembering the dead, in that it revealed how the ancients interpreted earthly phenomena. The Celts understood that a year constituted two seasons of harvest; and at the end of the second, which fell between September and October, the ground became crop-sterile. At a very specific October 31, it was said that the gates of the netherworld opened to the land of the living for visiting ghosts. The barrenness of the period, which we understand today as the intervention of winter, was attributed to the trampling of roaming ghosts.
The Celts also celebrated Halloween as the entrance of the New Year. Celts wore costumes and masks that resembled the ghosts in order to pacify these visitors. The popularly celebrated tradition of trick-or-treating is based on how the Celts understood the ghosts of the season who were pacified with food offerings to keep them from terrorizing inhabitants.
The few dark hours of the Celtic Halloween was also respected as a moment filled with spiritual power. Tribal priests called Druids solemnly assembled during these hours to discharge precise justice and extricate the most complicated legal cases. Spiritual guidance was invoked with the kindling of sacred flames, very characteristic of most Celtic festivals, including the spring festival of Beltane: the "fire of God." Halloween, on the other hand, was also called the festival of Samhain: the "fire of peace," and continues to be celebrated in great druidic detail in Ireland and Scotland.
Today as it originally was, Halloween is celebrated on the night of October 31 and the subsequent post-midnight hours of November 1. Incidentally, the first of November is the Christian All-Saints' Day. How this pagan-Christian setup came to be was a matter of diplomatic evangelization in that Dark Age Christianity chose not to take away from the people what they loved. Around 610 A.D., therefore, Pope Boniface IV inaugurated the celebration of Christianity's own day of the dead on May 13. More than a century later, Pope Gregory III (731-741 A.D.) moved the date to November 1 and 2 for All-Souls' Day, thus inadvertently welding the festivals of both worlds for us today.
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