A Very Deep History of Halloween

A very deep history of Halloween

Or, how far back can historical analysis take us?

You know the holiday: the one where people wear outlandish costumes and sweet things are eaten. It’s fun, but also otherworldly, with roots in an ancient belief that this evening — this one night at the change of the seasons — is when spirits roam the earth.

I’m referring, of course, to qāšoq-zani, celebrated in Iran on the eve of Chaharshanbe Suri, the beginning of the Persian New Year festivities.

And also Halloween.

And Día de Muertos.

The days of the calendar differ. But it intrigues me that there is a wide swathe of the world which celebrates a holiday marked by sweets, blurred boundaries between the living and the dead, votive candles or bonfires, and costumes.

How much can we really know about things like this — cultural patterns which might share a common origin in the distant past, but which have no documented historical connection?

One of my favorite historians, Carlo Ginzburg, is a specialist in this very question.1Much of Ginzburg’s work explores what you might call the history of liminal states — moments when the perceived divisions between the ordinary world and the spirit world (or between rule and misrule, or consciousness and unconsciousness) fall apart.

Ginzburg’s first book, The Night Battles (1966), dove into one specific example: the benandanti (“good walkers”) of the area around Renaissance Venice, a kind of agrarian secret society who believed that they battled witches in their sleep. At the end of the book, Ginzburg argues that these benandanti were likely a survival from a Neolithic fertility cult. This, in turn, may have had its origin in shamanistic practices from the Central Asian Steppe.

Is he right? There’s no smoking gun source. But Ginzburg is an extremely careful scholar, and he has spent decades amassing evidence. Personally, I find the evidence compelling. Familiar things are sometimes much older than we assumed.

For the rest of this post, I’ll be doing something in Ginsburg’s spirit — but more slapdash — as I do my best to follow the thread of Halloween back as far back as possible.

One thousand years?

Meanwhile, in 16th century Mexico, Aztec devotion to Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead, merged with the Feast of All Saints. This produced yet another variation on these customs: Día de Muertos.

So far, so good. But is this really the furthest back we can go?

The earliest reliable written reference that I could find is in a tenth century Irish epic poem which speaks of “Samhain, when the summer goes to rest.” A 12th-century Irish source records a week of feasting during this time, when “there would be nothing but meetings and games and amusements and entertainments and eating and feasting” (sounds fun!).2 There is talk of kindling sacred fires, and of spirits and ghosts wandering the earth. But very little detail.

This is where archaeology lends a hand. Because it turns out that several passage tombs from Neolithic Ireland are oriented such that their entrances would’ve been lit by the sun on the exact day of Samhain. Here we have a fascinating example of two different types of historical evidence working in tandem to make a compelling case for a link across several millennia.

The archaeological evidence for this seems pretty robust, and at times is surprisingly detailed — for instance, this study theorizes that a specific standing stone in Scotland was a place where “local chieftains, titled after the [cuckoo] bird and ‘married’ to the local goddess of sovereignty that personified Venus, were tied to the stone and ritually sacrificed.” This, it is claimed, happened on Samhain “at eight-year intervals from the Bronze Age until the late Iron Age.”

That same study includes a fascinating detail:

The evidence suggests that as part of the ritual the victim was given a drugged drink which reduced him to a state of semi-consciousness; tied to a standing stone and despatched with a sacred weapon.

Now we’re getting somewhere. Because both of those things — the ritual drug and the ritual weapon — sound distinctly proto-Indo-European.

Meaning very, very old.

This article (A very deep history of Halloween) was created and published by Res Obscura and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Benjamin Breen

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