The Real History of Halloween

the spooky season is indeed upon us and as always it kind of peaks with the holiday of Halloween a really interesting holiday that over the 20th and 21st century has spread all over the world and become really really popular um in America it is actually the second most popular holiday in the entire year it's a season associated with everything from ghosts witches zombies horror movies uh parties and alcohol trick-or-treating candy Charlie Brown and much more and even though I'm not that old um I can confirm that since I was a kid it's been a major

thing even in Sweden you know Tri or-treating is pretty big here Halloween has been celebrated since well for a couple of decades at least but what is Halloween really there are often many theories and claims being thrown around Christian groups concerned about its practice calling it Satanism and paganism people being confused about its connection to other celebrations such as All Saints Day or Dia de Muertos in Central America and much more the origins and development of Halloween can be pretty confusing but it is a really fascinating story that can tell us a lot about how

these kinds of traditions and holidays um develop and how religions and cultures interact throughout history in different ways to create some of the most famous and popular festivals of the year in this case so in this episode to celebrate this year's Halloween we're going to dive into the history and development of this fascinating holiday as we ask the question what indeed is [Music] Halloween for most people Halloween falls on October 31st each year on the calendar this is right around the time when things start to get darker when the collar of the leaves have started

turning and they're falling to the ground and there's a certain chill and feeling to the Autumn air and it's no coincidence that Halloween takes place at this time of the year of course as you will see most people trace the origins of Halloween to an ancient Celtic quote unquote Pagan festival called sawin and while this theory is most likely true the history of the festival is also much more complicated than that we know very little about the ancient Kelts and their Customs they didn't really write things down and so all our information is essentially based

on later Christian writers describing the local quote unquote Pagan customs and already here we have run into a major problem since these Christian writers Were Us usually pretty critical of local customs and we're very much concerned with discrediting it in in different ways but that doesn't mean we have to discard everything indeed much of what Christian missionaries and writers have reported elsewhere have turned out to be somewhat accurate such as in the case of the nostics for example and modern scholarship is also increasingly allowing us to get a better picture of this fascinating pre-christian culture

sawin was the Celtic New Year an annual Festival that marked the end of the summer season and inaugurated the coming winter it's a transitionary moment in the calendar in other words and was accompanied by various celebrations because it was the end of the Harvest crops were gathered livestock was taken inside again and some animals were slaughtered so the year's summer Harvest was celebrated by eating and probably drinking alcohol which made the party pretty Rowdy there are also reports that bonfires would would be lit which would also involve the quot unquote Priests of the Celtic religion

which were called jids so when exactly did Sinn take place you guessed it the celebration began at sunset on October 31st the Kelts believed in a kind of afterlife which they called the land of Summer and sn/ October 31st was also important in the sense that they believed that on this day every year the boundary between this world and the next was broken temporarily which means that spirits and other beings from the other world could enter into this one alongside these celebratory and Rowdy aspect of the holiday there was thus also a certain spooky and

dangerous vibe to it as well which could of course be argued to have survived into modern Halloween now sawin has often been very misunderstood and misrepresented it's true that it is a pagan Festival but the word Pagan is a derogatory term used by the Christians to describe non-christians at this time so that term should be used very carefully and very sparingly but many reports have indeed falsely depicted the Kelts as being totally bloodthirsty evil people that sacrificed human beings left and right and did horrible things especially during the sawin season now it is possible that

there were some forms of human sacrifice performed in this region but not at all to the extent that some have claimed and any claims that sawin means the Lord of death which is a common claim in some circles and that therefore Halloween has its origins in worshiping a demon by this particular name these reports or these claims are simply false entirely made up essentially during the 19th century and yet this theory is still used by many to criticize the celebration of Halloween today so that is possibly the oldest history of Halloween that it somehow originated

with the Celtic Festival of sawin and while some dispute this claim it seems pretty likely even though the history is much more complicated too as we will see Lisa Morton argues that quote although historians have argued over how much saign really contributed to the modern celebration of Halloween it seems likely that the Celtic festival's peculiar mix of harvest Rowdy celebration and fearful Supernatural beliefs gave Halloween much of its character but that is only the beginning of the story after all because during the Middle Ages Christianity gradually made its way into Europe and into the um

to the to the Celtic regions as well and as Christianity became more dominant of a religion uh local Customs were of course Very Much affected by this they were changed and modified but something really interesting happened especially at this time with how the Christians chose to convert the people and to to um tackle these local Customs because they were rarely eliminated completely and this was partly thanks to the church itself you see the church very quickly realized that it was much easier to convert the population if uh already existing local Customs rather than being completely

eliminated and just destroyed that they were um appropriated in different ways that they were kept in a certain sense but were often given new Christian clothing this is a process often known as syncretism instead of eliminating local Customs you give it a Christian character so that there is still a level of familiarity to the the the local population but now with a new character that fits the Christian Theology and Christian religion old pagan gods could could be replaced by Catholic saints and celebrations were rebranded in Christian ways and in the 8th Century Pope Gregory III

decided to move the celebration of the martyrs and Saints to November 1st conveniently right at the same time as the Festival of sovn this new holiday which became known as All Saints Day became widely celebrated across Europe especially in Western Europe and still is to this day around the of the first Millennium another connected celebration All Souls day was added on November 2nd which had the purpose of remembering all the deceased souls and at that point the whole old custom of sawin had been basically replaced by the new Catholic festivals although many of the old

features of the Festival of course remained in some form for example the general theme of death and the afterlife and it is indeed from this context that Halloween and the Very name Halloween comes from it's an abbreviated version of the name all Hallow's Eve hallow being an old word referring to a saint or something saintly or sacred thus making all Hallow's Eve a designation of the Eve or night before All Saints Day and already by the 1400s and maybe earlier we start seeing sources indicating that Halloween was being celebrated as a thing of its own

so to say while of course being intimately connected with and part of you could say the larger All Saints Day and All Souls Day Celebrations during Halloween people would prepare certain kinds of food and it was customary to ring the bells to inaugurate the holiday in the 17th and 18th centuries we have plenty of sources talking about Halloween celebrations in the British Isles and the characteristic practices that are associated with it one common aspect of this holiday was the lighting of bonfires in different ways this could partly have practical purposes of Simply getting rid of

excess from the year's Harvest but would also often have more symbolic functions the fires were sometimes start to ward off witches fairies and other evil spirits that could roam the land on this night in particular maybe as a survival of this idea that um on this particular night the the the the boundary between this world and the next Were Somehow opened um or or blurred so that beings from that other World more easily could could sort of walk over into this reality during this night this seems to have sort of survived even into these Christian

Halloween celebrations another common theme for Halloween were different forms of fortune telling since the beginning Halloween seems to have been particularly associated with young people as many at this time would do different forms of fortune telling and divination to find out who their future spouse would be one popular way of doing this was to to burn nuts different nuts representing different possible people would be thrown in the fire and the nut that burned the brightest and longest would indicate that future spouse the poet John gay mentions the custom in one of his poems quote two

hazel nuts I threw into the flame and to each nut I gave a Sweetheart's name another popular practice involved a mirror and an apple a recurring fruit throughout the history of Halloween here a young woman would stand in front of a mirror with an apple on Halloween and while eating it in front of this mirror would eventually see the face of her future lover Lisa Morton reports that some of these practices would sometimes have frightening results as a Lady Jane wild tells in the ancient legends Mystic charms and superstitions of Ireland from 1888 quote a

lady narrates that on the 1st of November her servant rushed into the room and fainted on the floor on recovering she said that she had played a trick that night in the name of the devil before the Looking Glass but what she had seen she dared not speak of though the remembrance of it would never leave her brain and she knew the shock would kill her they tried to laugh her out of her fears but the next night she was found quite Dead with her features horribly contorted lying on the floor before the Looking Glass

which was shivered to Pieces spooky stuff other games and pastimes such as apple bobbing which is still associated with Halloween today seems to have been a part of the holiday even back in those days and in general in these accounts from around the 18th century it becomes clear that the holiday was also associated with what we could call spooky stuff there are stories of fairies kidnapping people on Halloween night of witches hiding in the landscape and terrorizing people but where indeed did these scary aspects of Halloween come from how did a holiday associated with remembering

the Catholic saints and the diseased turn into a spook Fest associated with spirits and witches well partly as we saw it's probably a remnant of the old sawin Festival where these features seems to have been pretty prominent many of these associations and folk practices probably survived in different ways across the centuries but this also come surprisingly from within Christianity itself and specifically as a result of the Protestant Reformation the whole idea of saints was kind of rejected in the Protestant churches and therefore there wasn't really any place for a celebration like All Saints Day we

thus see how there's a kind of campaign by Protestant Kings such as Henry VII and James I in the 16 Century to get rid of this popular holiday this was in the middle of the witch craze that was infecting Europe Hinrich Kramers malus maleficarum or the hammer of witches among other things had set in motion a hysteria about witches and the beginnings of the very dark period in European history that we call the witch trials in the midst of all this there was a massive witch trial in 1590 where King James I accused a bunch

of people of being witches and of gathering on Halloween night in particular to essentially curse him and these developments is what started the strong Association of witches or dark Forces with Halloween as part of a kind of campaign to discredit What was seen as an essentially Catholic holiday and lucky us right because that's after all what gives Halloween its spooky and cozy atmosphere and aesthetic that we all know and loves so much but so far when we look at this holiday we while we can recognize many features of Halloween many of the most characteristic aspects

of Halloween isn't really there yet uh where is the Jackal Lantern uh where is chick or treating when did these Traditions come about well while we don't see any direct examples of this in the earlier periods there are actually some precursors you could say to it even back then in terms of trick-or-treating that popular Pastime for children during Halloween of walking around in costumes from house to house asking for candy we do find a few different practices that remind us of trick-or-treating in earlier centuries Not only was it common for young people around this time

to go around to different houses at asking for firewood for the large bonfires we also have stories of people in the Shetland Islands close to Scotland that would dress up in costumes and visit houses in Halloween to ask for food and drink or these so-called straw Boys in Ireland which would also go around dressed in specific costumes and vandalizing in different ways but the most striking precursor to trick-or-treating is probably something that was called soing there was a particular food item associated with Halloween which was called the Soul cake and which was very popular and

soing was a practice when children and sometimes adults would walk around dressed up and walk from house to house asking for soul cake while often singing a Carol in in sort of payment you could say sometimes also with instrumental accompaniment this practice is indeed very old maybe dating back to at least the 1500s and one description from the 19th century says quote the children go around to the houses early and late on All Saints Day not on All Souls day and sing monotonously as dogal the lines vary little with groups of children three to six

in a group the most complete version I can give you is as follows soul soul a soul cake Good Mistress give us a soul cake one for Peter one for Paul and one for them as made us all an apple or a cherry or anything else to make is Merry Oh Good Mistress to the seller and fetch us a pale of water it is a good Fame to get a good name particularly on the aisle of man soing often involved the children carrying with them a carved turnip that was lit with candles in other words

possibly the precursor to the Jacko Lantern except it wasn't pumpkins that were used back then but while the traditional Halloween celebrations were centered on the British Isles it was during the 20th century and in America that Halloween would arguably take on the form that it has today indeed Halloween had actually faded from popularity pretty drastically uh in in the sort of native countries in the in the old country in in the British Isles and in England and Scotland and Ireland and so on uh By the 19th century it had basically almost faded to obscurity very

few people at that point celebrated Halloween but in America things were very different in some ways you could could say that it is in America that modern Halloween is born and develops a lot of the Aesthetics come from this context including of course the most famous symbol associated with Halloween the Jacko Lantern as we saw earlier there was some precursors to this in Europe but in that context it was usually turnips that were used as lanterns for the kids going around but it was in the new world that the pumpkin was to take on this

role as the primary mascot of Halloween The Jackal Lantern is often connected to a famous Irish story about the famous Stingy Jack there are a few different versions of Stingy Jack's story but in all of them he somehow tricks the devil in one he meets the devil and realizes that it is his time to die but he then tricks the Devil by asking for a last drink at the pub and then for the devil to turn into a coin in order for him to pay for it after which he then traps him in the form

of this coin whatever the case Jack always outwits the devil and as a result when he eventually actually dies he ends up in a strange predicament he can't end up in either heaven or hell so he's cursed to wander the Earth as a ghost with the only thing to light his dark path being a carved out turnip with an ember that functions as a kind of lantern in America the turnip was replaced by pumpkins since these were local growing squash and eventually this became a very popular decoration and symbol during Halloween pumpkins will be carved

out the top part is taken off and the insides are hollowed out to fill with a candle it's also customary to carve a face onto the pumpkin to truly make it into a Jacko Lantern thus was born the mascot of Halloween and the general color scheme of the whole holiday orange and black orange because of Jackal lanterns and black because of the holiday soci association with dark themes and death and nighttime for example and it's also in America that that other staple of Halloween develops trick-or-treating as we saw there are a few similar practices that

we find in earlier celebrations in Europe around Halloween time but it's not certain that there's a direct connection here there could be for sure but it's also quite possible and maybe likely that trick-or-treating developed independently in America during the 20 th Century this was the main practice of Halloween during that century and thus the holiday was primarily associated with children and practiced by them so to say the only role of the adults was to be the ones giving out the candy to the children CH or-treating and thus Halloween became very popular and arguably reached its

peak in the 1950s but it is a practice that is still very much popular in the Life today both in America and in other parts of the world as Halloween has in a really interesting way spread back into Europe where this holiday had essentially been abandoned for a long time but Halloween isn't just for kids of course especially from the 1970s and 1980s with a growing interest in things like horror movies and what is sometimes referred to as Monster culture the classic monster movies of the 1930s and 40s such as Dracula Frankenstein and the mummy

and the Wolf Man became associated with Halloween and incorporated into that aesthetic Halloween had always been a night when the kids could you know for one night of the year stay up late and do things that were a little more mischievous than on regular days and out of forbidden excitement in a certain way and the holiday kind of took on a similar role as became more popular with adults too it was a time of celebrating and indulging in dark culture in horror and in the maab in a general sense and on a psychological level this

is very much what Halloween is about too it's an opportunity to contemplate and approach the darker aspects of life such as death and evil in a way that is focused contained and often light-hearted and entertaining it's a time when we can face Darkness rather than ignore it which is pretty healthy after all in any case especially since the 1980s Halloween has also become a season very much associated with certain aspects of Pop Culture such as like we said horror movies and the Aesthetics that come with it this maturation of the holiday and its transition away

from children to more adult themes is perhaps most clearly sealed with the release of John Carpenter's classic horror film Halloween from 1978 where the psychotic killer Michael Myers goes on a killing spree on Halloween night wearing a William Shatner mask Halloween has become one of the great Classics of horror Cinema and kind of invented or at least popularized the slasher film and today all of this plays a role in Halloween celebrations from being originally a European holiday primarily celebrated on the British Isles Halloween was very much reborn raised from the dead so to say in

America and has in its American form and in the last few decades become popular all across the world it's celebrated in Japan in Sweden and in many other places across the world and when we look at this wonderful season and the way that it is celebrated we can see that all of the things that we have talked about today play a role in its character and its features it isn't as simple as just saying that Halloween is a pagan festival or that is directly related to sawin neither can it simply be said that it is

a Christian holiday either all of these features have played a role in Halloween it did probably originate in some way in the ancient Pagan Festival of sawin and it retains some characteristics from those roots such as the association with death and spirits and its General rowdiness at the same time perhaps most of the more concrete aspects of the celebration come more so from the Catholic Heritage of All Saints and All Souls day as well as unique Halloween features that developed in Christian Europe in the late medieval and early modern period at the same time much

of modern Halloween is also strongly connected to different kinds of Pop culture especially as it developed in the United States from the gothic aesthetic and literature such as Dracula and Frankenstein to witches Ghouls and ghosts classic horror movies and haunted house attractions it has all contributed to the shaping of Halloween as we know it today it is in other words a combination of all these historical and contemporary aspects and perhaps above all it's simply a lot of fun it's fun to immerse yourself in the dark atmosphere of the season to watch all those great spooky

movies and watch your favorite YouTuber make content about vampires and Halloween there is something about the atmosphere and vibe that just attracts a lot of people and possibly related to this it is also like we said an opportunity for us to encounter and approach those darker yet very real aspects of our lives and face them if only for a short period of the Year I hope you're enjoying the spooky season I know I am uh making these shocktober videos is one of my favorite things to do on this channel and I know a lot of

you in the audience also really enjoy it so um it's been so much fun this year as always and I hope you've enjoyed it happy Halloween everyone I hope you're careful out there however you choose to celebrate and that you're having fun in some way um if rather you prefer to celebrate the the old Festival of sawin then I wish you a meaningful and wonderful Sinn and if it's just a regular Tuesday or just regular day I hope that day still is filled with light and love and meaning um thank you all for watching this

video thank you all for tuning in for this year's shocktober uh look forward to more regular content on the channel going forward and I'll see you next time