October 13th, 2008 · No Comments

But those who did try to ignore her or got careless – i.e., they left their livestock in the field or their harvest tools out in the rain – became the butt of not-so-neighborly pranks. Even today in places like Vermont  you can find towns where a farmer who doesn’t bring in his equipment along with his harvest might wake up one morning to find some trickster has relocated it to the town hall roof or lawn, Noyes says.

• Green Halloween Tip: You probably can’t put your neighbor’s tractor on the city hall lawn and wouldn’t want to if you could, but you can dress up your own lawn or front porch with seasonal décor. The easiest and most fun: Gourds, symbols of harvest and Halloween. Get a variety of sizes and colors and create a vignette on, say, that bench by your front door. Fatten up the design with straw and dried flowers, a nice piece of recycled fabric. Gourds also are good elements for a mantelpiece arrangement or table topper.

Arguably, the most common motif of Halloween is the ghost, the goblin, the spooky shapeshifter (the notion of disguise and costume is related to this). The ancient Celts, who populated all of Europe before the Romans, designated  Samhain as their “day of the dead” – which the now-Catholic Romans  renamed All Saints Day, which in turn gave rise to the Mexican “Dia de los Muertos.”

But this, too, was originally about the seasons, the earth, Noyes says.

Given that freezing weather and minimal daylight created uncertainty and dread, the superstitious Celts, who believed only a thin membrane existed between the living and the dead, made Nov. 1 a time to honor the deceased. It was the day when all of the “souls” who’d died that year crossed over to the spirit world, and the fearful Celts lit bonfires to help light their way. They also believed that when the door between living and dead opened, spirits entered the physical world, as well.

“How dressing up as ghosts came into this,” the Ohio State folklorist says, “was (later as the holiday evolved) these young men would come in the night and demand food and there was a disguise involved. It was a threatening sort of thing, and one thing you associated yourself with was nature and …the spirit world.”

• Green Halloween Tip: Rather than buy a costume this year, create one from what you have. Reuse, recycle! Use garish face paint to create a character, spike or tease or muss your hair to look spooky, dig through that bag of old clothes you were about to donate. An old dark skirt can be ripped and tattered at the hem to look like a witch’s outfit, for instance.. Let your imagination roam, like the spirits of old!

But the real point of all these traditions in ancient times was this: Nature is scary, very scary. Nowadays, though we consider nature volatile and have a healthy respect for it, it doesn’t represent the utter helplessness of man as it did it in much earlier times.

When the Christianized Romans began to convert the pagan Celts, the most effective way was to adopt the ancients’ holy days and rename them as Christian ones, and in the 6th century a papal decree designated Nov. 1 as All Saints Day, which did take hold in churches. But in one respect the move didn’t work to quell the old ways. Look at today’s celebrations, which are very much….boooohwwwwaaaahhhhh… alive.

So, over the millennia Halloween has evolved from a nature ritual to a Samhain/day of the dead to All Saint’s day to All Souls’ Day to trick-or-treating in malls, which Noyes says is a big trend in Ohio these days. And yet the eerie origins of Halloween have never quite diminished.

“The beliefs associated with Samhain never died out entirely,” says historian Jack Santino in a Library of Congress article. ”The powerful symbolism of the traveling dead was too strong, and perhaps too basic to the human psyche, to be satisfied with the new, more abstract Catholic feast honoring saints. Recognizing that something that would subsume the original energy of Samhain was necessary, the church tried again to supplant it with a Christian feast day in the 9th century. This time it established November 2nd as All Souls Day–a day when the living prayed for the souls of all the dead. But, once again, the practice of retaining traditional customs while attempting to redefine them had a sustaining effect: the traditional beliefs and customs lived on, in new guises.”

As Santino explains, All Saints’ Day had in the meantime become known as All Hallows (”hallowed” meaning “holy”), and the night before, All Hallows Eve, became known as the time when interactions between spirit and human were most amplified, most possible.

“People continued to celebrate All Hallows Eve as a time of the wandering dead,” Santino writes, “but the supernatural beings were now thought to be evil [the Catholic Church had successfully demonized the Celtic gods and spirits]. The folk continued to propitiate those spirits (and their masked impersonators) by setting out gifts of food and drink. Subsequently, All Hallows Eve became Hallow Evening, which became Hallowe’en- an ancient Celtic, pre-Christian New Year’s Day in contemporary dress.”

And so it goes. This enduringly spooky tradition might invoke ghosts and goblins and things that go bump in the night, but it all comes back to nature. And maybe some of those superstitious ancients were right about one thing: It ain’t nice (or smart) to fool with Mother Nature!

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media

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