A strange festival of faith and foreboding

Country Living with Francis Farragher

There never was too much made of Halloween in our house as children. As a festival it general slipped into anonymity, although at national school there were tales from classmates of ‘ducking and diving’ with a blindfold on as they put their heads into basins of cold water to fish out apples or coins: what they could retrieve from the vessel with their lips and teeth was their reward, although the coins would inevitably be of a brown rather than a silver hue

Halloween, or Hallowe’en to revisit an older spelling of the title (usage of the word has now led to the dropping of the apostrophe), is a strange kind of festival with a mixture of fear, celebration and a strong hint that spirits and inhabitants of another world tend to feel free roam about at this time of year and revisit their past, not always in a spirit of philanthropy.

The time of the festival, coinciding with the arrival of the rapidly diminishing daylight hours, fed in quick nicely to the fear element of Halloween, and especially in the pre-electric days when all kinds of spooks, banshees and boogie men enjoyed something a free run.

Historians will point to a Celtic origin to the festival back as far as 400BC when the year had four main points of celebration namely the first day of February, May, August and November. The festival of Samhain (November) always had a bit of an atmospheric ring to it with the night of October 31 regarded as the year’s end, with all the crops gathered and stored for the arrival of the winter season.

Being the end of the year and with darkness generally in charge, the belief grew that the spirits of the dead would take this opportunity to revisit their families and old homesteads. There were probably ‘good spirits’ included in the bunch but where the ‘bad eggs’ prevailed in life, they would use the night of All Hallows Eve, to wreak vengeance on their successors, so hence that sense of malevolence and danger on the night of October 31.

Like a lot of the pre-Christian festivals, the Church weren’t behind the door when it came to hijacking the occasion and back in the early part of the 7th century, a Pope Boniface (not a bad name for a pope) established November 1 as All Saints Day and the day after as All Souls Day. Shortly after, November 1 became a special holy day in the Church and nothing much has changed since as regards that.

The Church strongly maintained the tradition of the link between the living and the dead around November 1 and we are all familiar with the listing of the dead family members to be remembered and prayed during the 11th month of the year.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.