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halloween,history,good or bad

Halloween is the Scottish/Irish contraction for All Hallows Eve which means All Saints Eve. That is because it is a Catholic holiday, which originated in Rome, to honor the Christian saints. The first version of the holiday to be held church-wide was established in the 7th century on May 13 (which was the last day of the pagan Roman holiday of the dead, Lemuria, but no one knows if this is coincidence) and was dedicated to "Mary and All the Martyrs". Not long after, All Saints Day was established on November 1, and the night before, October 31, became All Saints Eve. Later, around the late 10th or early 11th century, All Souls Day was added to pray for the souls in purgatory and honor all the faithful departed (this is where Halloween gets its connection to death and ghosts).

When All Saints and Souls mixed with the customs of the feast day of Samhain in Ireland it began to change character. Things like divination and visits from the fairy folk became a part of the holiday. It took on a harvest party atmosphere, and became even more strongly associated with the supernatural, although the returning dead was a part of it pretty much everywhere because of folk beliefs surrounding All Souls. Samhain was not a day to honor the dead, but it was considered a time for a lot of supernatural activity involving the fairies (these were not the little winged fairies of today, but powerful and beautiful semi-divine beings). It was a also a time for feasting, games, divination, and heroic deeds and battles. Many Medeival stories and historical accounts talk of these things.

In North America it was this Irish/Scottish version of All Hallows that was adopted and became popular. America has added a lot to Halloween, and done away with some of the old Irish influences that were popular in its early days in America, such as divination games. America added things like commercial haunted houses, greeting cards (which were very popular in the early 20th century), Hollywood influences, and trick or treat (although costuming and begging activities, such as souling, were associated with Halloween as far back as the Middle Ages), there is no direct evidence to show that is where trick or treat came from. Christmas and other holidays also involved dressing up and going door-to-door). A combination of Hollywood movies and religious extremism gave rise to the idea that things like Satan and serial killers are the purpose of Halloween. In reality, Halloween is not a day to honor Satan and never was. Today people think only of Halloween as having supernatural overtones, but in the past many holidays did, and still do in some countries: Christmas, Saint John's Eve, Saint Mark's Eve, New Years, Candlemas, Beltane & Walpurgisnacht, and many others.

The evolution of both All Saints & Souls and Halloween is complicated, as different influences have aded to the holidays and changed them over the centuries. There is much more to this than I could possibly type here - it would take an entire book. However, I will point out a few basics: The anti-Catholic view of the Puritans after the Reformation, the changing attitudes of the Catholic church itself, the witch trials, local folkore, native customs of different countries, religious extremism, a variety of writings with different agendas and some of very poor scholarship, the neo-pagan revival, ancient Roman traditions, and many other influences have affected Halloween, or things associated with Halloween. Many customs cannot even be traced to their origins.

Halloween was pretty much eliminated in England and replaced with Guy Fawkes Night, although they are readopting the American version now. All Saints is still celebrated as a Catholic holiday in many European and South American countries, and is even a public holiday in most of them. In Mexico it became Day of the Dead and contains strong influences from the pre-Columbian cultures that existed there before. Some Native American tribes in the U.S. celebrate different versions of All Saints as well. In the northern part of the country some tribes hold Ghost Suppers which are a mixture of their traditional Feast of the Dead beliefs and the All Saints/Souls that was introduced by the Jesuit missionaries.

False histories of Halloween have become so popular, and the silly religious and cultural wars over the holiday so heated, that very, very few people bother to look up the facts. If you would like books and websites to read please edit your question to let me know and I will add them. Also let me know if there is anything specific you would like because my list is pretty long.

The Celtic Connection

Our modern celebration of Halloween is a VERY distant descendant of the ancient Celtic fire festival called Samhain. (The word is pronounced "sow-en" rhyming with cow, because "mh" in the middle of an Irish word has a "w" sound.) It was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year. The Celts lived more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Great Britain, Ireland, and France. Their new year began on November 1.

Celtic legends tell us that on this night, all the hearth fires in Ireland were extinguished, and then re-lit from the central fire of the Druids at Tlachtga, 12 miles from the royal hill of Tara. (The Druids were the learned class among the Celts. They were religious priests who also acted as judges, lawmakers, poets, scholars, and scientists.) Upon this sacred bonfire the Druids burned animals and crops. The extinguishing of the hearth fires symbolized the "dark half" of the year. The re-kindling from the Druidic fire was symbolic of the returning life that was hoped for in the spring.

In the Celtic belief system, turning points, such as the time between one day and the next, the meeting of sea and shore, or the turning of one year into the next were seen as magical times. The turning of the year was the most potent of these times. This was the time when the "veil between the worlds" was at its thinnest, and the dead could communicate with the living.

The feast of Samhain is described by MacCane as order suspended. "During this interval the normal order of the universe is suspended, the barriers between the natural and the supernatural are temporarily removed, the sidh lies open and all divine beings and the spirits of the dead move freely among men and interfere sometimes violently, in their affairs".

The Celts believed that when people died, they went to a land of eternal youth and happiness called Tir nan Og. They did not have the concept of heaven and hell that the Christian church later brought into the land. The dead were sometimes believed to be dwelling with the Fairy Folk, who lived in the numerous mounds or sidhe that dotted the Irish and Scottish countryside.

The Celts did not actually have demons and devils in their belief system. Some Christians describe Halloween as a festival in which the Celts sacrificed human beings to the devil or some evil demonic god of death. This is not accurate. The Celts did believe in gods, giants, monsters, witches, spirits, and elves, but these were not considered evil, so much as dangerous. The fairies, for example, were often considered hostile and menacing to humans because they were seen as being resentful of men taking over their lands. On this night of Samhain, the fairies would sometimes trick humans into becoming lost in the fairy mounds, where they would be trapped forever.

Folk tradition tells us of some divination practices associated with Samhain. Among the most common were divinations dealing with marriage, weather, and the coming fortunes for the year. These were performed via such methods as ducking for apples and apple peeling. Ducking for apples was a marriage divination. The first person to bite an apple would be the first to marry in the coming year -- like the modern toss of the wedding bouquet. Apple peeling was a divination to see how long your life would be. The longer the unbroken apple peel, the longer your life was destined to be. In Scotland, people would place stones or nuts in the ashes of the hearth before retiring for the night. Anyone whose stone had been disturbed during the night was said to be destined to die during the coming year.

When England was ruled by the Romans ie Britania I think they celebrated Samhein mixed in with Roman beliefs. I am wondering when did the modern celebration of Halloween start to appear in England.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/4408078.stm

i think halloween was celebrated more in America but has now filtrated over to the U.K.

I heard that if you cut an apple in half you see a 5 pointed star,well
I tried that and I didn't see the star,why is the apple a strong symbol of Halloween besides the pumpkin?
Happy early Halloween.

The connection between apples and the originally Christian Hallowe'en is lost. There is no historical evidence linking it to any supposed pagan practices, the stories about celtic customs are recent inventions.

So the likely connection is simply the time of year - end of October, tail end of the apple harvest.

To see the star, you have to cut the apple in half across the middle - not down through the stalk.