The History of Halloween

[Applause] [Music] it's that time of year Spirit Halloween stores have appeared everywhere seemingly out of nowhere and your kids start planting their candy Roots already some of you young parents are forced to dress up with your kids though you'd probably rather not and that one weird neighbor creates a horror house to scare all the local children or maybe you are that weird neighbor the national retail Federation estimated that about $10 billion was spent on Halloween in 2021 that's billion with a b and that's only one country historically of course only English-speaking countries celebrate Halloween more on that in a minute though now it has gone Global we have now Halloween increasingly being celebrated in other European countries though that practice is pretty new and we now have Halloween in places like Japan China and around the globe though each puts their own spin on it culturally and all of this for a night that's not even a holiday so let's talk about where this comes from this subject the history of Halloween and subjects like it is a different branch of History than most people are familiar with I enjoy it though it's not my main focus my focus technically would be called intellectual history though that term is a little bit overused but obviously I tend to spend a lot of time discussing the history of ideas folk history is what we are doing here and for some folk history is either frustrating or exhilarating I suspect it comes down a lot to your temperament if you're the kind of person that likes Mysteries where you have to piece together only fragments of information and read between some lines and you still in the end have significant gaps in your knowledge well folk history is for you rarely do you have chapter and verse to site when it comes to folk history almost always you are contending against so many urban legends that you wonder if anyone is listening to actual historians on the subject everyone knows that one person on social media who around this time of year starts spouting out their vague internet assembled philosophy on history and the Divine Halloween works like this in fact just about all of our holidays work like this when you ask where does Halloween or Christmas or Valentine's Day or some other holidays come from historically you usually cannot get a straight answer or at least a trained historian can't give you a simplistic answer pop culture and people who love to troll each other love simplistic answers however we all hear that saturnalia is the origins of Christmas Even though it's not aostra is the goddess of fertility which gives us Easter even though no such thing existed and that's not the origins of Easter the feasting of pilgrims and Native Americans pleasantly by the fire is where we get popcorn and Thanksgiving and of course Halloween is related to some druidic practice of warding off demon fairies real folk history though doesn't give us simple answers like this folk history you might say looks at all the ingredients that when brought together are always greater than the sum of their parts rather than finding X that marks the spot where something started where it comes down to today it's rather noticing let's just use the word Echoes or themes different sensibilities that come down through the centuries or even over Millennia as in the case of Halloween to create a modern practice that you really can't pull these things apart so the history of Halloween is exactly like this we have several ingredients not all of them ancient that make up the story if I were to ask you for example is Halloween a practice that Echoes back to the ancient Celtic practices or is it a Catholic holiday concerned with remembering the recently departed and praying for souls in purgatory or is it a Harvest Festival celebrating the coming of fall and the end of summer is it the product of Victorian horror literature in Hollywood is it a night of drunken parties and debauchery is it associated with neopagans like wians and others in the modern world or is it a wild ly expensive night for parents as they burn money on costumes and Candy the answer is yes and that's how folk history works and by the way I could do the same thing for Christmas is it secular celebrating elf culture is it part of the Catholic liturgy is it part of American culture and other cultures as they add their own flavors along the way yes all the way down the line and don't even get me started on Valentine's so what I want to do here is give you the big picture I want to do a little bit of folk history and tell you the story of Halloween and all of these little ingredients that make up the modern practice I'm not going to get into the question of should you participate in Halloween what's your opinions is it dangerous is it too much for young kids to see all the spooky stuff that type of thing the question here is rather where does it come from how do we go from something that is several thousand years old all the way down until today where you have candy corn and pumpkins and a lot of modern practices okay let's start quickly with some of the more mythical story of the origins of Halloween you can find this usually online sort of Pop Culture ways of describing Halloween but the normal way that you hear it is something like the following the ancient Celtic peoples of Ireland used to celebrate seen and yes it's spelled samhan or saman but it's pronounced SE and SE was the night when the door to the other World opened and the Fay creatures ENT entered the mortal world wraiths and demons and shadowy Things That Go Bump in the night and they dressed up in skins to ward off the evil spirits November 1 was the Celtic New Year and so this was the night of darkness and spiritual danger and according to that same pop history the Catholic Church comes along and they just say hey why not and they adopt the same practices into the liturgical calendar and they start calling it All Saints Day instead of Waring off the demons they're now somehow praying for the souls of those dead and so November one becomes all Hallow's day or All Saints Day and the eve the day before that is all Hallow's Eve or Halloween that's about the big picture you often hear it was Pagan centered around Druids offering blood sacrifices and the Catholics just syncretistic took it on as part of their practice but I think it's pretty obvious there's a lot missing in that story but for some that quick synopsis that pop history is enough to make the them forever enemies of Halloween when that Ninja Turtle and that Disney princess ring the doorbell they shut off the light might as well open the door and tell The Druids to get off your doorstep okay maybe that's a bit much but there are some who can't believe Halloween is anything but ancient demon worship a lot of this myth comes from frankly one person and that's where we're going to start a man by the name of Charles valency a British civil engineer in the 1760s is the origin of a of this type of demon worship idea he was stationed in Ireland and he was enamored with what he assumed was Celtic culture and despite not being a scholar he wrote a rather terribly researched and laughably written book on the primordial origins of the Celtics I don't have time to go into this too much but historians of Halloween often either laugh or hate this book because it gives us so many of the big myths that are often repeated online the biggest Hower is he mistook Sean for the worship of a deity called balab the Lord of Darkness and he said that around seen or what we would call Halloween the Celtic peoples are worshiping this Lord of death the problem is that the name balab or Lord of death appears in no ancient text and there is no reason to have said this we are still a bit mystified as to where this comes from in his writings but it does seem to confuse the ancient Mesopotamian deity Baal which you sometimes see in the Old Testament ba worship and he seems to have brought that into Celtic history ba Saab is ba Lord SOB death and that speaks a bit to the problem here which I'm about to go into which is this must have come from something dark and Sinister so if we find the origins of something dark and Sinister that's the Smoking Gun the problem though is that nearly all the practices related to Halloween today save only the date derived from either Christian medieval practice or from Modern American history it doesn't come from balab or things like this at least not fundamentally so for example in this video so far I've shown lots of pictures of things we associate with Halloween pumpkins corn candy trick-or-treaters but all of these are American inventions and pretty recent ones too so the fact that all of this is associated with Halloween and yet it only arrives in the new world should tell you a bit that Halloween is as much modern as it is ancient so what I want to say is that simply telling one part of the story the part of sewing and trying to make it entirely Celtic is a bit like saying that a cake is nothing but eggs simply because it has eggs in it in folk history it's the mixture of the ingredients that matters most yes SE is part of the story and I'm going to tell that story but in fact Hollywood and American culture are the more dominant factors when it comes to the rise of Halloween okay I haven't gotten all that out of the way let's go through the actual ingredients that make up Halloween the academic study of Halloween is actually a phenomenon that's pretty new it's about 30 or 40 years old old but we have a fairly strong grasp on all the different ingredients first we do have a vague history of the Celtic practices surrounding the celebration of seen and when I say vague I don't mean that condescendingly second we have the development of Catholic lurgical practices in the calendar over about a thousand years and it gave rise to what we today would call hallow tide or the celebration of the Saints and praying for the dead in purgatory third we have colonial American culture which eradicates major portions of the history and makes it more about Harvest festivals fourth you have the influx of Irish and Scotch Irish into the new world and with them comes the old cultural Legacy of SE and fifth you have the rise of the modern middle class pop culture horror movies candy corns and the start of this costuming trick-or-treating practice that kids love today there are twists and turns to each of these pieces of the story and each has an opportunity to go really deep I'm not going to do that though I just want to give you the big picture and to point to the ways that this history is again a bit more of an echo down through time and show how the practice of Halloween is a mixture of lots of different elements okay first Celtic history when we discuss Celtic history we need to have a bit of caution here as I've said in other videos the Celtics were not simply Irish though they later would be associated with Irish heritage but as far back as the writer of Julius Caesar in his history of the G War there's always been only a vague understanding of those tribes to the north and I don't mean that we know nothing but the ktoy as the Romans called them spread throughout much of modern Ireland Britain and down into Germany and France they are the general people who live north of the Roman boundaries and they were some of the so-called barbarians who later came to conquer Rome in later centuries they left left no writings though they probably were literate and more importantly most of what we know about them is written down later by Christian missionaries in the high to later Middle Ages it's quite a bit of a gap between their existence and the writing down of their Heritage what we know about their practice in Ireland specifically however does relate to Halloween the Celtic people there were of course Pagan believing in a variety of deities they were LED in their practice by an Elite Class of Druids though you have to see Druids in the Celtic World less as Dungeons and Dragons and more as say the Royal and spiritual advisers in the court of pharaoh they were equally in charge of giving counsel to the king as they were of Performing rituals and sacrifices the Celtic afterlife was called the land of Summer and the passage between Summer and Autumn was a big deal for their culture and that day was Sundown October 31st or seen on that night the passage between the afterlife and the Mortal World opened up so that part of Sean is true this idea that October 31st is when the spiritual creatures largely negative come into our world but it was more than just a spiritual time so and was also a Harvest Festival to use our language for the Celtic people I often point out that for those who think that Harvest Festival is somehow less Celtic or Pagan than Halloween well I'm sorry they're all Pagan at least if you want to point to the origins of these types of things the celebration of the end of Summer and the passing into Autumn but this was a time for Slaughter and a great feast and probably as one historian pointed out the only time that most Celtic people had access to alcohol it was a wild night to say the least it was also a politically important night there was for example a gathering at Tara sort of a seat of Kings for Celtics back then where a giant bonfire and rituals were performed judgments would also be rendered against enemies people who had committed crimes and the like and those who were found guilty were executed there were also sport and festivals laughter the young and unmarried flirting looking for a potential partner in my mind I don't know why I always have that image from the scene of the movie Brave where all the kings are drinking and sporting and handling business and trying to find suitors for marrying the young I mean the movie is based in Scotland it kind of fits that's what SE would have been more like equal parts rockus party politically important Gathering of political leaders and a story of magic and fairy creatures and the spirits of those around them the big bonfire that The Druids tended was also a form of attacks people would extinguish the hear Fires at their homes and they would come to seen and they would pay their yearly tax to The Druids and receive an ember from which they would go back and light the the hear again sort of a convenient way of taking a census keeping track of everybody and making sure that everybody pays their due in other words October 31st for the Celtic people was more than just spooky goblins and warding off the dead and that's the important factor we spend way too much time talking about the other world opens up and all these spirits come in and they would dress up in animal skins and the like in order to W this off it's more than that it is significantly important for the Celtic people it is a time where they gather and have a festival you might say it was culturally rich with everything from Mart to Mischief to blood sacrifice and that's the important thing that a lot of Pop history doesn't understand you can remove the Pagan practice of Druid worship blood sacrifice and many of these elements and still retain the cultural importance of SE for the Celtic people and that in fact is essentially what happens when the Catholic faith came to Northern Europe by the 7th Century after the work of St Patrick in the 6th Century Of Course St Patrick is the patron saint of the Irish Ireland and other countries to the north become Catholic like many countries north of Rome however including the Scandinavian regions Germanic and frankis tribes certain cultural practices were still held on to it's a bit like saying if you remove the religion you still have essentially a Fourth of July party around the time of October 31st now yes it's very simplistic but the cultural significance of that night and those parties and those Gatherings remains long after Ireland and Britain become Christian but also within the cathic church you have the evolution you might say of the lurgical calendar about the mid 8th Century Pope Gregory III moved the traditional Feast Of Martyrs to November 1st this Feast was a Memorial Day for those who had died for the faith in the ancient Church however two things are at play here first November was as one scholar said the most boring time in the Roman Calendar there just was not a lot going on meanwhile the Celtic folks and those to the north are continuing their history of celebrating the end of summer with essentially a cultural Harvest Festival so Gregory officially makes All Saints Day as it came to be known November 1st moving dates around like this by the way is not a big deal in the Middle Ages November 2nd then about the year 1000 becomes All Souls day it's a long process in that happening but it becomes another day in the calendar so what happens is that by the 1300s a very long time mind you after the conversion of Ireland and Britain you now have what we call hallo tide but notice how relatively late and how relatively uncel a lot of the history of hallo tide has become it's actually heavily Catholic there is certainly some of what we would call syncretism or the mixing of pagan and Christian elements here though it is questionable how some simply say well Celtic paganism is the same as medieval praying to the Saints it shouldn't take much to realize the difference between blood sacrifice and warding off spooky demons is different than a Catholic mass where you're praying for the dearly departed in purgatory on their way to heaven I find some of that to be a bit disingenuous it takes a modern sort of cynicism to say that well all engagement with the spiritual afterlife must be the same and it must be Pagan in Origins there is however a practice in the Catholic church in the Middle Ages of what you might call taking over or you might even call it conquesting the Pagan world fameless it was believed that whenever you convert an area to Christianity you don't knock down their Pagan shrines rather you go in there take out everything that is Pagan and put a cross and an altar up there's a sort of This Is Our Land now our church now and these are our dates now I question whether or not that's fully syncretism or not also by the time of the Renaissance which is about where where we are now you don't really have a lot that we would call Modern Halloween yet other than the dates you have a time of remembering those who have pass you have a time of praying for the dead in purgatory and you have for those in Britain and Ireland a cultural heritage of seen that has now become a time of mischief and partying and a big bonfire but throughout most of Europe there is nothing that is associated with what we would today call Halloween in its sort of fine details the one thing that is close is something called soing and this is a practice where children would go around singing knocking on doors and asking for treats or ale or something like this on all Hallow's Eve think of it a bit as a cross between trick-or-treating and carolling kids want the good stuff they go around knocking on a holy day and by the way people act like that is something abnormal that happened on all holy days that's often forgotten a holy day was when you were supposed to be actually generous to the least of those around you giving Ms and giving food out to to those in need children like to go of begging so to speak but it's not exactly trick-or-treating it's soing but it's very similar and it's around this same time of year so to summarize at this point you have the ancient Celtic practice of seen the Catholic Church converts those regions become Catholic but the cultural memory of SE Remains the calendar then gets developed to where those same dates become an important time of the memory of those who have died and so they become High holy days you had a practice of soing and ringing of bells and it was you might say a several days off and a bit of a rockus time there would be drinking and feasting but it's not Halloween as you and I know it so where did that come from okay so looking at the Modern practice of Halloween we're going to start making some jumps here there's a lot that I'm going to skip over but again I'm staying big picture for example there's guy Fox night November 5th which my friends in Britain still celebrate today another big bonfire another big Festival around the same time there's also little twists and churns in Scottish and Irish history as lots of pieces and their Heritage about Halloween remain what I want to jump to though is the question of how does this lurgical practice in Catholic Europe come to the new world in America which for most of its history has very very anti-catholic Tendencies it's very strange if you think about it that way not a lot of people notice that jump Halloween is Catholic because is related to All Saints Day and All Souls day and you have to be Catholic to be praying for those in purgatory how does Jolly Old Protestant America start to take this on so I want to talk about that real quick the simple answer is that colonial America strips Halloween or that first week of November of all of its Catholic sensibilities it's worth remembering that those who first came to the colonies were not Catholic in fact they were almost universally staunchly anti-catholic as I'm going to say in a minute this will change but the important part of the story is that what happens to Halloween in America is not that it's a pagan holiday that takes root in the new world rather it's a formerly Catholic practice part of the lurgical calendar that in America loses all of its traditional catholic flavor also as you can imagine it loses its British and Irish flavor in the colonial days as well as the new ferment of American Pride begins to grow there were few to no Irish immigrants in the early days and so anything that would be traditionally Celtic was very minimal in other words in America Halloween in the colonial days is stripped of almost all of his traditional practices this happens by the way with Christmas as well that's another video that's another conversation but P at New England for example outlawed both of these days no Halloween no Christmas no fun what America did excel at though was an appreciation for the fall Harvest looking ahead this is where the idea of Thanksgiving will also start to come about most cultures do this by the way the end of summer we live in a day of supermarkets and easy food so it's easy to forget just how important Harvest is but what begins to happen is as the fall Harvest idea in America begins to take shape some of the things that we will eventually associate with Halloween are all American pumpkins corn these types of things are all Native to the new world but in American Colonial day this is wrapped up in the idea of the Harvest however by the 1800s you start to have for the first time Irish and Scottish immigrants coming over and bringing with them the more rockus fun-loving ideas associated with Halloween and SE so the American practice of harvest festivals now gets injected with a more Irish sensibility of the heritage of the past it still doesn't take on Catholic elements but the cultural Irish elements do come into play and so it is in the 19 Century that some of the more mischievous elements of Halloween start to come about those Irish pranksters would come over and on Halloween night would start to pull trick-or treat pranks it's just part of the old world coming to the new and with the rise of Catholics in America which begins about the same time you do have a greater appreciation in America for the Hallow tide season but Halloween is now its own thing it's neither Pagan nor Catholic it is now part of Americana you might say and of course yes I'm leaving out a lot of history of Britain and Ireland during the same time but I'm focusing on America right now the last two ingredients in this are the two that become the most immediately recognizable for modern folks first and foremost you have the rise of the horror genre in entertainment we often call this Victorian Gothic this is the late 1800s or the Victorian horror literature genre and it's easy to forget how common horror movies and scary movies and spooky ghost stories and entertainment of this kind are for us today but this comes from the Victorian era Frankenstein's monster and Dracula are the two most commonly recognizable stories from that period but there are plenty of others and then with the rise of Hollywood the natural thing was to bring some of that Victorian horror genre onto the big screen and that form of entertainment has been with us ever since and so over time horror movies became associated with the fall it wasn't Pagan it was entertainment driven and lastly it is only in the 1900s the 20th century with the rise of the middle class after the world wars and the increased consumer spending that happens that you finally get the crystallization of Halloween celebrations of the Fall were common only now we have suburbs and that agrarian life is largely lost but we have the rise of the entertainment industry and we have this middle class that wants to have fun rights of Passage fun moments for their children in the practice of trick-or-treating around the time of Halloween began to grow as well probably the earliest is in the early 1900s but it quickly catches on as I said when my kids were young they like to dress up and eat candy every day of the year and the fact that there's one day of the year where they can do it without any problem was AOK in their book but it's around the 1950s the Leave it to Beaver age where you have the M production of Halloween costumes where you have trick-or-treating and you have this concept that the Suburban life is one on Halloween where you go around to the neighbors you knock on doors and in a very polite way you get candy but built into it as well is the spooky idea that is driven by Hollywood and entertainment and needless to say that by the 1950s most of the long twists and churns throughout history from SE to Medieval Catholics to the Renaissance to colonial America had been largely lost now in the 1900s Halloween was in American culture its own thing and now in the 21st century the idea that October 31st is a time of dress up partying candy fun with your kids is all bit cemented okay so this has been a big picture of the story of Halloween you can go into the comments and list all kinds of things that I've left out there's tons but this is what folk history is the story of Halloween is more of a story of lots of different ingredients going down through history that make up the modern practice from one Vantage Point Halloween is modern candy corn superhero costumes Tim Burton movies and the like but there's a long history that goes back hundreds if not thousands of [Music] years [Music] [Music] oh

Channel: Ryan Reeves

Views: 168,322

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Id: M9zWAAFiwV4

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 03 2023