The modern celebration of Halloween has ancient and paradoxical roots. All Hallows Day (also known as All Saints Day) was proclaimed by Pope Gregory III in the eighth century. The new holiday was created for a practical reason: the church had more martyrs and saints to honor than there were days of the week But long before the Christian celebration took hold, Druids had observed October 31st as Sambain (summer's end), the end of the Celtic year, a celebration of the summers harvest, and an appeasement to the sun god and god of the dead. The Druids believed the the souls of everyone who died in the last year dwelled in the bodies of animals. Only on October 31st would there souls reappear to visit their relatives. Unfortunately, these revisits weren’t congenial family reunions. Rather, the dead were thought to come back as witches, ghosts, and hobgoblins, and they were to wreak havoc across the land. The tradition of lighting bonfires on Halloween stems from the Druids’ belief that the fires would frighten away evil spirits. As Christian belief overcame Pagan superstition in Ireland and Scotland, celebrants took over the role of mischief makers from supernatural apparitions. In the early U.S. Halloween was not a big deal. Early settlers were mostly Protestants who didn’t observe All Saints Day back in Europe. But with the Irish immigration of the 1840’s America received citizens steeped not only in Catholic educations but with remnants of some of the Druid practices of Sambain. One of the oldest Sambain traditions was for celebrants to carry a jack-0-lantern. In Scotland, turnips were used: in Ireland, large potatoes and rutabagas were popular. But in the United States, pumpkins were much more abundant. The jack- o -lantern was carried all during the night, not left on a window sill as a sitting duck for roving kids. The scary faces carved on the the pumpkins were presumably there to replicate the goblins and evil spirits once believed to rule on Sambain.
Why is the the lantern called Jack? Nobody really knows for sure, although Irish legend claims that the Devil once came to claim the soul of a no good man named jack. But Jack out smarted the devil several times and stayed alive. When Jack eventually died, neither heaven nor hell would claim jack.
Consigned to an afterlife
without a home, jack begged the devil for a live coal to provide light so he
could navigate in limbo. The devil, who, as always, was a soft touch when it
came to jack gave him a piece. Jack put the coal into a turnip. And jack is
still walking around with a his lantern until either heaven or hell open its
door to him. |
