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History of the modern Halloween. A Scholarly look from Salon. com
Editor's note: Salon presents a week of Halloween stories, beginning with today's history of the holiday. Over the next four days, watch for articles about the Salem Witch Trials, photographs of vintage Halloween costumes and, on Oct. 31, our dream -- or, rather, nightmare -- playlist for a marathon of the world's scariest movies. -
- - - - - - - - - - - Oct. 28, 2002 |
Of all today's holidays,
Halloween seems like the most primeval. Its bats, witches, spooks, skeletons and
monsters surely indicate roots reaching back before the dawn of science and
Christianity; the whiff of prehistoric campfires clings to its sable robes.
Well, guess again. Halloween has been
creeping up on Christmas to become the second biggest annual bonanza for U.S.
retailers, a Grim Reaper that harvests $6.8 billion per year in exchange for
candy, costumes, cards and party supplies. That success sets it up for the kind
of debunking that Christmas has endured recently, as historians have shown that
what we think of as time-honored Yuletide traditions are actually only about 100
years old. Likewise, as two new books document, the seemingly ancient customs of
Halloween turn out to be recent embellishments to a holiday that used to be a
pretty low-key affair. And forget those Transylvanian villagers and
superstitious medieval peasants -- Halloween is as American as the Fourth of
July. The basic elements of
an American Halloween -- pranks, treat-begging, masquerade and scary images --
aren't new, of course, but gathering them together and using them to celebrate a
holiday at the transition from October to November (from late summer to early
winter) is. As both Nicholas Rogers' "Halloween" and David J. Skal's
"Death Makes a Holiday" point out, those customs can be found
scattered here and there among various other holidays throughout history, yet
pinpointing the moment when they all came together to define Halloween as we
know it is a tricky matter indeed. It's often said that
Halloween originates with the Celtic festival of Samhain (show off your pagan
cred by correctly pronouncing it as "sow-an"), but it's hard to
recognize the modern world's gleefully ghoulish festivities in what one scholar
called "an old pastoral and agricultural festival" that marked the
beginning of winter. Rogers, whose book is at its best when digging up the
anthropological forerunners of the holiday, says that "there is no hard
evidence that Samhain was specifically devoted to the dead or to ancestor
worship," although in Ireland it was thought to be a time when mischievous
spirits were particularly frisky. (The ancient Celts are rumored to have engaged
in human sacrifice in some of their rites -- not Samhain specifically -- but
those reports came from the conquering Romans and may have been propaganda.)
Samhain was a time of reckoning when livestock were slaughtered for the winter
stores and the days became short, cold and gloomy. Despite the fact that
conservative Christians in America have protested the "pagan" revelry
of Halloween, the holiday owes its name and many of its trappings to
Christianity. "Halloween" derives from All Hallows Even, the night
before All Saints' Day (Nov. 1), which is in turn followed by All Souls' Day
(Nov. 2), an occasion for praying for and visiting with the dead. In Mexico, the
celebration of Los Dias de Los Muertos, or the Days of the Dead, closely
resembles the old All Souls rites of the Middle Ages. The most extravagantly
Catholic places had the grisliest practices: "In Naples," writes
Rogers, "the charnel houses containing the bones of the dead were opened on
All Souls' Day and decorated with flowers. Crowds thronged through them to visit
the bodies of their friends and relatives. Sometimes the cadavers were dressed
in robes and placed in niches along the walls." Leaving food out for the
spirits was a fairly common ritual, as it still is in Mexico today. In the British Isles,
where bloody conflicts between Protestants and Catholics disrupted the handing
down of All Souls' traditions (less so in Ireland than in Scotland), the
Hallowtide holiday became more secular in the 16th century. In some places it
was entirely replaced by the anti-Catholic bonfire celebration of Guy
Fawkes Day on Nov. 5. (Rogers observes that Hallowtide was always the most
persistent in the areas where underground Catholic sentiments lingered.) Guy
Fawkes Day
November 5th marks the
anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy to blow up the English Parliament
and King James I
in 1605. On that day, the king prepared to open Parliament. Uprising
of English Catholics It was intended to be the beginning of a great
uprising of English Catholics, who were distressed by the increased severity
of penal laws against the practice of their religion. The conspirators, who
began plotting early in 1604, expanded their number to a point where secrecy
was impossible. The group included Robert Catesby, John Wright, and
Thomas Winter, the originators, Christopher Wright, Robert Winter, Robert
Keyes, Guy Fawkes, a soldier who had been serving in Flanders, Thomas Percy,
John Grant, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, Ambrose Rookwood, and Thomas
Bates. Brought
to Light by Anonymous Letter Percy hired a cellar under the House of Lords, in
which 36 barrels of gunpowder, overlaid with iron bars and firewood, were
secretly stored. The conspiracy was brought to light through a mysterious
letter received by Lord Monteagle, a brother-in-law of Tresham, on October 26,
urging him not to attend Parliament on the opening day. The 1st earl of Salisbury and others, to whom the
plot was made known, took steps leading to the discovery of the materials and
the arrest of Fawkes as he entered the cellar. Other conspirators, overtaken
in flight or seized afterward, were killed outright, imprisoned, or executed. Fireworks,
Bonfires in England Among those executed was Henry
Garnett, the superior of the English Jesuits, who had known of the
conspiracy. While the plot was the work of a small number of men, it provoked
hostility against all English Catholics and led to an increase in the
harshness of laws against them. Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, is still
celebrated in England with fireworks
and bonfires, on which effigies of the conspirator are burned. One of the reasons Halloween, the American holiday, seems so un-Christian is that it appears to have been primarily brought over by Protestant Scots who had abandoned the religious element of the day while hanging on to its assorted folk traditions. Skal, in his cultural history, writes that when the fledgling greeting card industry of the 19th century first started churning out Halloween cards, they featured such Scottish motifs as "tartan plaid borders, thistles and heather, messages like 'Auld Lang Syne,' and the like." (The Scottish connection was cemented by the fact that one of the richest surviving sources of 18th-century Halloween lore is Robert Burns' long poem "Halloween.")
According to Skal, the "genteel" Victorian Halloween couldn't be more different from today's rowdy incarnation. The main tradition the Scots associated with the holiday was fortune telling, used for the most part to predict who the participants were going to marry. In some ways, the Victorian Halloween resembled Valentine's Day. People stayed home and played divinatory games to glean information about future spouses. Putting two nuts in a fire to see if they jumped apart when they popped (signifying an impending break-up) was a practice Burns wrote about. Others involved a blindfolded person dipping his or her hand into one of three bowls of water, apple bobbing or a young woman peeling an apple in front of a mirror in order to glimpse the image of her future husband in the reflection. (Maybe that's the origin of the scary "Bloody Mary" game American children play by reciting the ghoulish Mary's name nine times in front of a mirror in a dark room, daring her to come and get them.) The jack-o'-lantern,
now an indispensable Halloween motif, didn't emerge until the first decade of
the 20th century, although the Scots had a folk tradition of carving lanterns
out of turnips -- a much harder job with a much smaller vegetable. Those
lanterns were linked to a legendary figure named Jack who was so incorrigible
that neither Heaven nor Hell would have him, and so he was condemned to walk the
earth until Judgment Day, toting his turnip lamp. Like the Will-o-the-Wisp (aka
marsh gas) he liked to use his lantern to lure passersby to their doom in swamps
and bogs. He wasn't particularly linked to Halloween until the dawn of the 20th
century, and no one seems to know how pumpkins came to replace turnips. Hallowtide was
occasionally associated with prankish antics on the part of young boys and men,
but the custom of demanding food or money, what Rogers refers to as
"enforced charity," was more common at Christmas. Recent histories of
Christmas have detailed how many of the homebodyish Yuletide traditions we now
embrace were cooked up by wealthy and middle-class citizens who were sick of
being shaken down by the rowdy poor during the month of December. New York had
an early 20th century street festival in which "ragamuffin" children
dressed up in costumes and performed antics for shopkeepers and other affluent
adults in exchange for money, but it was Thanksgiving, not Halloween. The Macy's
Thanksgiving Day Parade, launched in 1924, spelled the end of the ragamuffin
racket, but in their heyday the revelers filled Times Square. As Christmas and Thanksgiving became cozy domestic holidays, it seems, all the mischief and misrule gravitated to the formerly homely Halloween. Both Rogers and Skal quote a late 19th century historian who lamented "the spirit of rowdyism" that "has in a measure superseded the kindly old customs" and the vandalism and racket generated by "gangs of hoodlums" in the streets. While many European cultures had a traditional "season of misrule" -- a festival in which the ordinary rules of decorum were overturned and figures of authority were mocked -- it usually happened in November or December as a prelude to the Christmas observances. Those rites sometimes involved costumes and processions (Rogers quotes a contemporary description of a troupe parading through the churchyards with "their Hobby horses and other monsters shirmishyng amongst the throng ... with such a confused noise that no man can heare his own voice"). By the 1920s, Halloween had become an occasion for adults to attend stylish (but still not macabre) masquerade parties and for children to wreak mischief.
Saturnalia By the beginning of December, writes Columella,
the farmer should have finished his autumn planting. Now, at the time of the
winter solstice (December 25 in the Julian calendar), Saturnus, the god of
seed and sowing, was honored with a festival. The Saturnalia officially
was celebrated on December 17 (a.d. XVI Kal. Ian.), midway between two other
agricultural festivals: the Consualia, which celebrated the opening of
the granaries and was in honor of Consus, god of the granary, and the Opalia,
honoring Ops, who personified abundance and the fruits of the earth, and was
the consort of Saturn. In the Roman calendar, the Saturnalia
was designated a holy day, or holiday, on which religious rites were
performed. Saturn, himself, was identified with Kronos, and sacrificed to
according to Greek ritual, with the head uncovered. The Temple of Saturn, the
oldest temple recorded by the pontifices, was dedicated on the Saturnalia,
and the woolen bonds which fettered the feet of the ivory cult statue within
were loosened on that day to symbolize the liberation of the god. It also was a festival day. After sacrifice at
the temple, there was a public banquet, which Livy says was introduced in 217
BC (there also may have been a lectisternium, a banquet for the god in
which its image is placed in attendance, as if a guest). Afterwards, according
to Macrobius, the celebrants shouted "Io, Saturnalia!" In Cicero's time, the Saturnalia lasted
seven days, from December 17-23. Augustus attempted to limit the holiday to
three days, so the civil courts would not have to be closed any longer than
necessary, and Caligula extended it to five. Still, everyone seems to have
continued to celebrate for a full week. The Saturnalia was the most popular
holiday of the Roman year. Catullus describes it as "the best of
days," and Seneca complains that the "whole mob has let itself go in
pleasures." Pliny the Younger writes that he retired to his room while
the rest of the household celebrated. Cicero fled to the countryside. It was
an occasion for celebration, visits to friends, and the presentation of gifts,
particularly wax candles (cerei), perhaps to signify the returning
light after the solstice, and small earthenware figurines (sigillaria).
Martial wrote Xenia and Apophoreta for the Saturnalia.
Both were published in December and intended to accompany the "guest
gifts" which were given at that time of year. During the holiday, restrictions were relaxed
and the social order inverted. Gambling was allowed in public. Slaves were
permitted to use dice and did not have to work. Instead of the toga, less
formal dinner clothes (synthesis) were permitted, as was the pilleus,
a felt cap normally worn by the manumitted slave that symbolized the freedom
of the season. Within the family, a Lord of Misrule was chosen. Slaves were
treated as equals, allowed to wear their masters' clothing, and be waited on
at meal time in remembrance of an earlier golden age thought to have been
ushered in by the god. This equality was temporary, of course; and
Petronius speaks of an impudent slave being asked at some other time of the
year whether it was December yet. Dio writes of Aulus Plautius, who was to
lead the conquest of Britain, cajoling his troops. But they hesitated,
"indignant at the thought of carrying on a campaign outside the limits of
the known world." Only when they were entreated by a former slave
dispatched by Claudius did they relent, shouting "Io, Saturnalia."
(If a time of merriment, the season also was an occasion for murder. Commodus
was strangled in his bath on New Year's eve, and Caracalla plotted to murder
his brother during the Saturnalia.) At the end of the first century AD, Statius
still could proclaim: "For how many years shall this festival abide!
Never shall age destroy so holy a day! While the hills of Latium remain and
father Tiber, while thy Rome stands and the Capitol thou hast restored to the
world, it shall continue." And the Saturnalia did continue to be
celebrated as Brumalia (from bruma, winter solstice) down to the
Christian era, when, by the middle of the fourth century AD, its rituals had
become absorbed in the celebration of Christmas.
The Lord of Misrule is one of the lost characters of
the riotous Medieval Christmas celebration. Sometime in November, it was
customary among the European peasantry to draw lots for the title of Lord of
Misrule. Wearing a paper crown and motley garments, the Lord of Misrule turned
the ordinary rules on their head for his appointed time. He was given full
licence to enjoy whatever pleasures he desired, and to lead the others down
the merry path of dalliance and delight. One can only imagine what sorts of
delight prevailed but certainly the kind that comes in a flagon must have been
especially indulged. The crowning of the Lord of Misrule is a tradition
extending back into ancient times, and was a feature of Roman Saturnalia.
Records from as late as the 3rd century suggest that the merry reign of the
king of the revels came to a rather unjolly end when the chosen one was
unceremoniously sacrificed on the altar of Saturn. In the Middle Ages, the
tradition was revived in a more moderate form, most sacrificial elements
removed or replaced by the less barbarous practice of burning the god in
effigy. A remnant of this ancient custom clings to the
current practice of pulling Christmas crackers: after the muffled explosion of
the cracker, the prizes are generally revealed to be a joke, a charm, and the
paper crown of the Lord of Misrule.
Eventually Halloween
pranks got so rambunctious that householders concocted the idea of bribing the
miscreants to leave their property alone. A woman named Doris Hudson wrote an
article for American Home magazine in 1939 that, according to Skal, is "the
first time the expression 'trick or treat' is used in a mass-circulation
periodical in the United States." (Cooper, who began hosting her Halloween
open house in the midst of the Depression, said some of the "tiny
lads" devoured their treats "with too much relish and nearly broke my
heart." By all accounts, Depression-era pranking often took on the aspect
of class war.) The 1950s and early '60s were the Golden Age of trick or treating, but no sooner had the new tradition taken hold than commentators were bemoaning the loss of inventive tricking and condemning the soliciting of candy as "a rehearsal for consumership without a rationale," to quote one sociologist. Still, Halloween pranks never entirely vanished and that's not necessarily a good thing. Rogers, one of those academics who is always hoping to find something "transgressive" or "subversive" to laud, describes seasons of misrule as a time when "flagrant violations of community norms might be addressed" and "rough justice" meted out. A friend of mine who grew up in a racially mixed urban neighborhood in the 1970s testifies that his Halloween often involved a lot of roughness and precious little justice. Asked what he associates with the holiday -- which he hates -- he says, "Eggs. Eggs and fear." It was really only in
the 1960s and '70s that macabre stories and films became firmly attached to
Halloween. Until then, for example, movie studios didn't make a point of
releasing their horror or monster films around Oct. 31. Skal, whose book excels
at outlining the popular blossoming of Halloween over the past 60 years,
observes that "Frankenstein" premiered on Thanksgiving in 1931. By the
early 1960s, Universal had learned the advantage of tying in their franchised
characters -- Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy and the Wolf Man -- to
Halloween, but the holiday itself didn't appear very often in films until John
Carpenter's groundbreaking "Halloween" initiated the slasher film
genre. In the 1970s, the scary
side of Halloween also reemerged with reports of candy tampering and widespread,
media-fueled paranoia about razors in apples and other sadistic
"tricks." These turned out to be urban legends. The sole documented
fatality from candy-poisoning was an 8-year-old killed by his own father, who
was trying to collect on a life insurance policy. Likewise, the rise of
Halloween celebrations in America's gay districts, with their fantabulous
costumes and sybaritic processions, were soon troubled by visits from
belligerent gay bashers looking for their own sinister notion of a good time. Both Rogers and Skal
decry the recent taming of Halloween by such domestic mavens as Martha Stewart,
whose television program and magazine each October are packed with recipes for
spider-shaped cupcakes, instructions for crafting ghostly party decorations and
tips on elaborately rigging out your ordinarily impeccable house as an equally
impressive haunted mansion. Skal rails against Halloween Martha-style as a
holiday "Perfectly Under Control," her monogrammed jack-o'-lantern an
example of "boomerish narcissism" and "a pure embodiment of
self-celebration with no connection whatsoever to any known form of communal
holiday observance." The modern history of Halloween seems to swing back
and forth this way, from charming fun to violent chaos. It's the most bipolar of
all holidays. The most original parts
of Skal's book concern the history of haunted houses -- not the literally
haunted kind, but the ones concocted to amuse one's friends and neighbors. Using
an Angeleno horror movie buff named Bob Burns as an example, Skal traces the
evolution of "yard haunters," the Halloween equivalent of those people
who erect elaborate Christmas light displays. One Rochelle Santopaulo, who
founded the Halloween
Global Alliance and edits its magazine, Happy Halloween, says yard haunters
are a cross-country folk-art phenomenon, but most of them had no idea that other
Americans shared their peculiar passion until Santopaulo informed them they were
part of a nationwide "movement." http://www.halloweenalliance.com/magazine.htm Another sort of haunted
house, the kind that invites paying customers to walk through a maze of spooky
and grisly scenes, began in the 1970s as fund-raising devices for charities like
the Jaycees and quickly spawned a profession. Who knew there was an entire trade
magazine, Haunted
Attraction, devoted to this subject? According to Skal, it's "a glossy
quarterly magazine" with articles explaining how to convincingly simulate
severed heads and ads offering "full haunted-house environments for
resale," complete with such interior props as "Fireplace, Piano,
Living Wall, Dancing Ghost, Canopy Bed with Body, Storm Window, Kitchen Cabinet,
Stove, Refrigerator, Meat Locker, Dining Table with Chairs, Metal Cage, Boiler
and Pipes, Lab Tables and Bodies, 8-foot Mechanical Spider, Sacrifice Table with
Body, Volcano and Pneumatic Devil." http://www.hauntedattraction.com/ There's something about
this practical list of bogus nightmares (I'd like to get a look at that
"Living Wall") that strikes me as quintessentially Halloween. Armed
with this kit, anyone can take an ordinary, new house and convert it into a
scary, fake "old" house -- just as the sequels to the slasher film
"Halloween" cobbled together a bunch of ersatz legends about Samhain
to explain the murderous rampaging of its masked villain -- or, for that matter,
as we disguise our suburban homes as "Tudor" cottages and decorate
them with new furniture that's been "distressed" to make it look old,
or buy new jeans deftly faded to make them look worn. Halloween looks ancient,
primal even, despite its relative youth. And that may be the most American thing
about it of all.
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