Keep reading, they're in there. Oh, and don't let Ivan the Impaler fool you. I think he was Vlad's cousin.
Modern Pagans
by Alan Hindle
Halloween, Samhain, Pope Gregory’s All Saints Day
Of all the holidays celebrated in the West, Halloween is the least co-opted by Christianity– though not for lack of trying. While Pope Gregory in 601 AD exhorted his missionaries to remould Pagan events to more malleable themes, there were just too many powerful human themes underlying Halloween to cast even the subtlest veneer of “respectability” over it. The Celtic Druidic festival of Samhain (“Sow-een”) was the principle date in the Pagan calendar, effectively their New Year, marking the end of summer and the time of harvest. Also, it was believed to be the time of the year when the boundary between this world and the next was the thinnest, and the dead could be felt walking amongst the living on their journey to the next world. All Saints Day, which had previously fallen in May, was moved to November 1st as a shout out to all the saints too obscure to warrant their own day. All Hallowed Saints Eve, falling now on October 31st ( the night of Samhain), was therefore modified by the church to emphasise the dead spirits as evil.
Punkie Night, and Trick-or-Treating
In Hinton St. George, Somerset, England, a bunch of wives started getting worried, and maybe even a little pissed off, about their wayward husbands hanging out at the bar getting wasted. Carving lanterns out of mangel-wurtzels, a type of beetroot, the women went hunting. The men, their brains floating in cider, saw the lights and became terrified the little floating lights were actually Goolies, the malevolent spirits of children who died before they could be baptised. Trick-or-treating was originally known as Soulling, when beggars could wander between villages, going door to door receiving wine and curranty soul cakes in exchange for praying for the safe passage of recently departed souls. Today children still go soulling in some places in the UK still carrying carved pumpkin or turnip lanterns.
Bonfires
While bonfires are primarily ignited (at least in the UK) to mark Guy Fawkes Night, when a Roman Catholic conspiracy attempted to assassinate King James I and the entirety of parliament with a gunpowder bomb, they are also associated with Halloween. Today children all across Great Britain steal their parents’ clothes and build Guy Fawkes effigies to solicit spare change from strangers (“penny for the Guy?”) on the pretense they need to pay for the clothes they stole. Then they buy candy and rockets and fire small artillery in random directions, occasionally into neighbours’ windows or blowing their small, almost human hands off. However, the history of bonfires goes back, once again, to Celtic prehistory, when druids would burn the bones of sacrificed cattle in enormous fires, or “Bone Fires”, as a gift to nature in exchange for the plentiful harvest.
All the Wee Beasties
While All Saints Day was first instituted in 609 AD, once again by Pope Greg, it wasn’t moved to Nov 1st until 834 AD and was never really very successful. The Celtic and Pagan deities were reduced under the onslaught of saints with dubious hagiographies and criminal records to being little more than pixies, brownies, pookhas, faeries, leprechauns, dryads, hamadryads and trolls. Goblins, Red Caps, Bogies, Boogie Men quickly followed, although there were already precedents and early wee beasties living in the nooks and crannies of folklore.
Zombies
It is an established and entrenched aspect of Haitian culture that zombies wander or work in the service of an enslaving Houngan, or Voodoo doctor, and it’s interesting that those rendered zombies are almost always evil people who harmed in some way their local community until one or more citizens paid for the malefactor to be so punished. In Medieval Europe there existed also the idea of sinners who have committed a crime against their community or family punished by becoming undead. These were called Revenants and were often also associated with disease and vampirism.
Vampires (and werewolves)
Do we even need to bring Ivan the Impaler into this and the whole overworked tale of Count Dracula? The original vampires were the Babylonian Lilu and the Jewish myth of Lilith, mother of vampires. The Egyptians had Sekhmet and Greek mythology told of Odysseus placating the Shades of dead friends and colleagues with fresh blood from sacrificed oxen. The Romans had tales of the Strix, blood-sucking birds represented by screech owls of all things, and this developed in time to the Romanian Strigoi and the Albanian Shtriga. The Slavic peoples, and especially the itinerant gypsies, hold the richest folklore of vampires, including one variety called Varcolac, which were more closely related to wolves. Their bite would turn a victim into a lycanthrope or werewolf. The oddest specimen in the vampire tradition however, has to be the Vampire Watermelon.
In South East Europe, around the Balkans, grew the myth that watermelons, or any kind of pumpkin, if left out during a full moon, or for ten days after Christmas, would turn into a vampire and roll around annoying people by bumping maliciously into their ankles. Also, it was always inevitable two pumpkins would turn into vampires if they ever got into a fight with each other. Folks weren’t too bothered by toothless vampire pumpkins, but it’s possible our tradition of carving pumpkins derives from this (although tradition tells of Jack, a lazy Irish farmer who tricked the devil into a tree and wouldn’t let him down unless the devil agreed never to take him to Hell. After he died Jack was too sinful to go to Heaven and the Devil wouldn’t let him into Hell, so Jack carved himself a pumpkin to live in and wanders the world looking for a place to rest).
Only’s trick-or-treating tips
Every year a fresh spate of urban myth crops up regarding poisoned and needle-infested candy doled out by some neighbour on your block, apparently convinced nobody could possibly trace the stuff back to them. I remember when I was about ten, growing up in Edmonton, the city actually cancelled Halloween over fears we were all going to be killed by local psychotics. There has, of course, never actually been a case of murderous candy doing the rounds. However, like all publications everywhere at this time of the year, may we make a few suggestions? Like, wear make-up rather than masks. Always check the mini bar-sized bottles of Jack Daniels you hand out to the kids have their seals intact. We wouldn’t want psychotics out there slipping needles into any jars of whiskey intended for children! Wear something bright, because nobody in this town can drive sensibly. Finally, for Christ’s sake, if you are going to toilet paper peoples’ trees, use single ply or the cheap waxy stuff if you can find it recycled. Double and triple ply is just an insult to the trees you are papering, and Halloween is, ultimately, a celebration and giving of thanks to Nature. Don’t be rude about it.