Unmasking Halloween

Abstract

Many cite the early Celtic festival of Samhain as the origin of Halloween’s traditions, but a lack of historical evidence makes this connection a tenuous one. While Halloween’s roots can be traced back over a millennium to this earlier agrarian festival, most of its traditions come from the Catholic celebrations surrounding All Hallows and All Saint’s Day. It was Catholic customs, which had developed around courtship, communication with the supernatural, and the reversal of class paradigms, which sowed the seeds of modern Halloween traditions. However, due to Halloween’s association with the supernatural and our society's muddied view of what paganism is and was (with many people conflating Satanism with paganism), the idea that Halloween has kept its pagan traditions over the centuries is broadly accepted despite limited evidence supporting this claim.

When the holiday immigrated to North America with the Scotts-Irish in the nineteenth century its traditions lost much of their Christian religious meaning. Later, during the twentieth century, the holiday was demonized by evangelical groups, falsely claiming Halloween traditions were rooted in pagan rituals, when in fact, nearly all of them can be traced back to Christian origins and were developed in highly Christianized societies. These twentieth-century evangelical groups went on to appropriate Halloween traditions, renaming and rebranding them, the very process they had condemned and claimed happened when All Saints Day and All Souls Day supplanted the earlier Celtic holiday of Samhain.