Trick or Soul Cake! The Pagan Roots of Halloween

The roots of many of the customs of our modern cultural festivals lie with those of our pagan ancestors. Their cyclical rituals were very much attuned to the rhythms of the earth, their understanding of the “other realms”, their devotion to their ancestors, and their gratitude for life.

​This most certainly includes Halloween! The seemingly odd things we do at this time - dressing up in costumes, door-to-door candy collection, the “trick” in trick-or-treating, carving pumpkins, and general spookiness – are rooted in the traditions of the ancient Celtic seasonal festival of Samhain (pronounced Sow-when).

For the Celts, Samhain was one of four quarterly festivals that marked a very clear threshold time – that is the ending of one thing and the beginning of the next. This festival marked not only the changing of a season but also the changing of the year, making it a particularly significant threshold time as the doorways between the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, and the end of one year and the beginning of the next, were both waiting to be traversed.

Samhain was celebrated October 31st to November 1st, with the time between the setting of the sun on the last day of autumn (Oct 31), and the rising of the sun on the first day of winter (Nov 1), a time to be tended to with care! It was understood that this was a particularly liminal time, whereby the rules of neither past season nor next, nor past year nor next, applied. 

In this “space between” worlds, the veils (boundaries) between the worlds were thinner, and that liminal zone quite pronounced. You can think of it as both the thresholds being easier to cross, but also the hallway between the two spaces a bit more cavernous. Meaning that it was easier for the beings of the other realms (the dead, fairies and other creatures from otherworldly places) to cross over into our world, and for us to cross over into theirs, and for all of us to meet and mix and mingle in that cavernous zone of liminality between.
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Hence the “spookiness” of Halloween and the prevalence of little skeletons, zombies, witches, monsters, and other ghoulish creatures knocking on your door (well…until Marvel took over!)

Now, the Celts didn’t necessarily see the dead as “spooky”. They honored their dead, and certainly respected their power; they did not underestimate their ability to reach to us from the other side and so wished to only keep them happy! As such, at this time when the veils between the land of the dead and the land of the living was the thinnest, they engaged in rituals of acknowledging and nourishing their departed loved ones. Members from the community would be chosen to represent the dead, dressing up (in some kind of costume appropriate to represent the dead) and going door-to-door throughout  the community to receive food ("soul cakes") and drink on their behalf. Ancient trick-or-treating!

Ok, but what’s with the trick part? That likely runs parallel to the door-to-door imbibing, as this liminal space where normal rules do not apply would have given people a bit more room to be cheeky, playing tricks that they absolutely would not have gotten away with any other time of the year.

Tricks on their human friends, but NOT on the spirits or the elementals! Samhain was a time to ensure that one took extra precautions to keep the sidhe (the fairy people) away. Big bonfires were lit, and likely carving pumpkins may also have its roots in warding things away. The Celts would have carved faces and symbols into turnips (still a tradition in Ireland! If you think carving pumpkin is hard you should try you hand a turnip…phew) to ward off malevolent or trickster sidhe.

This was also the one time of year where the fires in the hearths of each home would have been allowed to go out. In this way such a ritual for the willingness to acknowledge, include and even enter the realm of the shadow. The hearth was relit before the dawn of the new season by taking a lit log from the community bonfire and placing it in the hearth of your own home. For the rest of the year the flames of the one shared fire would burn in all of those individual hearths.

Happy Samhain to all! May you feel the blessings of your ancestors as we move into this season of the dark together, with the knowledge that each of us carries within the light from our shared fire.

Curious for more? Check out my podcast on the history of Samhain, featuring a wonderful story from Celtic mythology "Finn and the Fire Breathing Fire"