RESEARCH
On October 31st the world celebrates Halloween. Kids dress up and trick or treat, while adults don costumes and party. Like many holidays Halloween is originally a Pagan based tradition morphed to fit modern day aesthetics. On the eve of All Souls Day (November 1st) Samhain, for the Celtics (and now Wiccans) marks the end of the light half of the year (spring, summer) and the beginning of the dark half (fall, year).
The only time the veil between worlds lowers and spirits, malevolent or good pass into our world. Mythology says that as the worlds collide even the Lord of the Dead rises from his shipwreck on the Skellig Islands to congregate with the souls of the dead and roam the Earth. (Hutton 1993, 179)
PART 2
The beginning of the fall also marks the harvesting of crops and meat to store fore for the winter, which is one of the many reasons the fall equinox is an important celebration.
The Celts believed that as the sun became weaker and nature began to decay so did the strength of man. Historically, for early man winter was a time of stress for our ancestors, because the winter was harder to survive.
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Pagan King Tigernmas of medieval Ireland gathered his followers each year to honor their twelve gods. The celebrations got so rowdy “they crushed their foreheads, and knees, and noses, and elbows, and “ten hundred and three thousands” perished”(Johnson 1968, 4).
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Celtic women also used this time to enact religious rituals of fertility. Some customs included: looking into a well or spring to view your spouse, or holding a mirror and walking down the stairs backwards. An excerpt from 1892 from an Irish woman in Maine details a fertility rite for All Hallows Eve night,
“At the hour of midnight, throw a ball of yarn into it, and rewind the ball while reciting:
I wind, I wind, my true love to find
The color of his hair, the color he will wear
The day he is married to me.
Then the true love will appear and help to wind the yew of yarn” (Johnson 1968, 2). These rituals, though not always practiced, variations are still known throughout Ireland today.