2. Halloween - festival of darkness
There is no denying it – Halloween is more than a little bit odd. We have marked the coming of
winter and the end of the summer for many centuries, originally in the form of a pagan festival,
celebrated by the tribal peoples of what is now modern-day England and Scotland. This original
festival heralded in the 'dark part of the year' with an imagery of spirits, ghouls and darkness that
has come to be central to our modern festival. But the name? That is a curious question. Why do
we call a pagan festival
of darkness Halloween?
3. The etymology of the word
The question gets even odder if you look at the etymology of the word – that is, if you unravel its
story. Halloween—Hallow-e'en—is the evening, or e'en, before Hallows' Day. Hallows' Day, or All
Hallows' Day to be precise, was the Christian festival of Hallows, or Saints (the word comes from
the same root as "Hallowed be Thy Name" in the Lord's prayer). And E'en? Should that not be
Eve?
Well, up in Scotland the short-hand
eve is usually replaced with e'en.
Somewhere between the pagan
festival and the Christian one (the latter
name has been used since at least the
sixteen-hundreds)
the
Scottish
pronunciation must have taken root.
Otherwise, we would have celebrated
Halloweve or even Saintseve every
year.
4. Historical Origins of Halloween
There is plenty more to wonder at beside the strange historical origins and weird name of
the festival. Much can be made of the way that it bridges the last day of autumnal October and
the first day of wintery November. One can almost picture the ancient tribes of the British Isles,
as they watched the slow creep of the cold and barren weather that characterises the Atlantic
winter, wondering how to keep heart.
But their legacy of scary tales, images of the 'dark spirits' and focus on the coming winter
rather than the departing summer, seems odd. We could put it down to a sort of humorous
stoicism – apparently the cleaning experts Kilburn call in periodically to scrape the city clean
have been heard to joke that mops should come in brown, and sprays with 'stale grime' perfume,
so as to save them the trouble of adding them. Then again, a winter in pre-Medieval England
would have been no laughing matter. Add to that the assumption that may people would not last
until the spring, and then consider that many people must have genuinely believed in the ghosts
and ghouls of their stories – and it would take a hefty dose of stoicism to invent a festival like
Halloween.
5. In Conclusion
Perhaps the answer is that it is all less deliberate than it looks, this strange festival of
darkness, ghouls and Saints. Perhaps the elements of fearfulness and spooky ominousness
were not deliberately cultivated, but instead naturally seeped into a pre-winter feast that had
meant to be merely heartening. That says something even more interesting still about our distant
relatives, though: if they weren't consciously stoic (or cynical) to an intense degree, then they
certainly had an underlying attraction for all things eery. Which perhaps explains why, even
today, there is nothing like a good horror film to get us excited.
In short, whatever way you
look at it – the oddest thing about
Halloween is us.
