10/28/2024
Allow me to share the 2000ish-year-old roots of this surprisingly complex holiday. Halloween’s origin story begins with the Celtic celebration of Samhain (translation: “summer’s end”). Samhain was an agricultural festival that started at sundown on October 31 and ended at sunrise the next day. It marked the transition from harvest season to the “dark half” of the year, which was traditionally associated with death (today, we call it “winter”).
The Celts believed that on this liminal night, the veil between worlds was at its thinnest — a moment “when the normal order of the universe is suspended,” according to historian Nicholas Rogers. What unfolded during Samhain is up for debate: As writer Nyx Shadowhawk points out on Medium, much of ancient Celtic history was “recorded by medieval Christians. That means it’s tough to tell how many of the ideas associated with Samhain are authentically pre-Christian and how many arose after Christianization.”
There’s no denying Halloween’s ties to Christianity: It was established by the Pope to accompany All Saints’ Day, a holiday honoring saints and martyrs (Halloween is short for “All Hallows’ Eve” — “hallow” being another word for “saint”). Initially celebrated in May, Pope Gregory III elected to move All Saints’ Day to November 1 in the mid-eighth century — and Halloween moved along with it, forever linking it with the pagan celebration.
The reasons for this move are contested, but either way, it served an essential purpose: with Samhain and Halloween now sharing a date, descendants of the ancient Celts began practicing a combination of folk and religious traditions on and around October 31 — and through this fusion, they managed to preserve pagan beliefs and rituals that may have otherwise been lost. It also resulted in something new: “What’s […] likely,” Shadowhawk writes, “is that the superstition that the doors to the Otherworld are thrown open on Samhain got mixed in with the prayers for the dead on and around All Saints’ Day, becoming a single belief — that the spirits of the dead return on that day.”
Catholicism’s early influence on Halloween may come as a surprise to some, given the church’s position on the occult (spoiler: they don’t like it). Indeed, the Pope didn’t intend to popularize supernatural beliefs or their accompanying rituals. But ultimately, the people practicing a tradition determine whether it lives or dies — not the church or any other authority.
The “why” behind Halloween is complicated — but perhaps that’s a good thing? After all, the result is a modern holiday simultaneously secular, spiritual, and supernatural. In that way, Halloween continues to dissolve the boundaries of the ordinary world — and what better way to celebrate the liminal?
It’s impossible to consider Halloween's symbolic meaning without associating it with the shadow, the aspects of the self that have been rejected from the light of consciousness and thus dwell in the darkness of the unconscious, taking on a life of their own and occasionally coming to haunt us. As the ancient traditions focused on the dead gradually transformed over time into various witches, vampires, and other monsters, the prominent figures and symbols of Halloween have come to be multiple manifestations of shadow aspects of the psyche.
The werewolf, for instance, is a representation of our wild and beastly selves, particularly those aspects that are hidden during the day but emerge at night. The witch is naturally the feminine powers of intuition and magic, twisted and gnarled in its rejection from the masculine-dominated consensus world of daylight. Vampires are the parasitic and predatory aspects of the self, particularly when it is disconnected from its own natural life force, which, of course, burns if it is touched by the light of day. Frankenstein can be seen symbolically as the monstrous alter-ego created by the intellect in its rejection of the mysteries of femininity, spirit, emotion, and the need for human relating.
Our willingness to celebrate, dress up as, and thus embody these shadow elements can then be seen as a way of facing and embracing these various neglected or rejected aspects of ourselves and thus transforming them with the Light of consciousness. Understanding their symbolic meaning is the next step beyond simply reveling in their spooky stories and ghoulish aesthetic. Thus, although the two are not often connected, we can find in Halloween the sacred Masonic principle of turning from darkness to Light.
