The History of Halloween
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The word “Halloween” originates form the Catholic Church as a corruption of “All Hallows Eve”. November the first is a Catholic day of observance in honour of saints, named “All Hollows Day” (or All Saints Day). In the fifth century BC in Celtic Ireland, Summer officially ended on 31st October.
On 31st October, the disembodied spirits of all those who had died throughout the preceding year would come back in search of living bodies to possess for the next year. It was believed that it was their only hope for the afterlife. The Celts believed all laws of space and time were suspended during this time, allowing the spirit world to intermingle with the living.
Naturally, the living did not want to be possessed, so on the night of 31st October, villagers would extinguish the fires in their homes to make them cold and undesirable. They would then dress up in all kinds of ghoulish costumes and noisily parade around the village, being as destructive as possible in order to frighten away spirits looking for bodies to possess.
Maybe a better explanation of why the Celts put out their fires was not to discourage spirit possessions, but so that all the Celtic tribes could relight their fires from a common source, the Druidic fire that was kept burning in the middle of Ireland, at Usinach.
Leave a Reply