The night when all souls – the living and the dead – roam free

By BILL CHAISSON
In Gaelic the words on the page don’t relate all that clearly to their pronunciation, so it is no wonder that we celebrate Halloween instead of Samhain, which is pronounced “SOW-en.” It is a holiday, perhaps unique in this respect, that we have inherited from the British Isles, our former colonial power. 

In the Celtic cosmogony the land of the living is represented by a square and each of the four corners touches the inside of a surrounding circle. That circle is the realm of the dead and its unending shape signifies the eternal revolution of the seasons. As our pre-scientific forebears watched the arc of the sun move through its annual cycle, they assigned names and significance to the high and low points of the arc, the summer and winter solstices, and to the points at which the length of day and night were the same, the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. These four intervals are assigned to the four points of the circle that are furthest from sides of the square.

Samhain is one of the “cross-quarter” holy days, which are those at the points where the circle touches the corners of the square. On these days the existential distance, symbolized by geometry, between the realms of the living and dead is said to be at a minimum. The other cross-quarter days — as they fall on the modern calendar — are Feb. 2, May 1, and August 1. The Irish call them Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh (spelled various ways). We call them Groundhog Day, May Day, and well, we don’t have a name for Lughnasadh, but the neo-pagans make a big deal out of it anyway.

So, if the realms are close together on all the cross-quarter days, why is Samhain/Halloween so much more strongly associated with the dead? The Celts also divide the year in a light half and a dark half with solstices at the center of each. That means that Samhain is the day that we cross from the light into the dark half of the year. The dark was a much more serious business in the days before oil lamps. Not only that but it was pretty obvious — in the British Isles during the Bronze Age — that significant portions of nature were dying all around you this time of the year. Death was on the collective mind, as it were.

Halloween, the modern descendant of Samhain, was once a holiday for children, but through the 20th century more and more adults embraced it. When I was a child in the 1960s, I almost always went trick or treating dressed as a ghost. Which is to say, my mother cut three strategically placed holes in an old sheet and voila, Halloween costume. The pagan-themed costumes — witches, goblins, werewolves etc. — were a lot more common back then. But the combined commercial might of first Disney and now Marvel and DC Comics has broadened the palette of costumes and moved them away from the darkness.

But there is, of course, a persistent reveling in the association between death and Halloween, especially among adults. The entire “Goth” subculture essentially celebrates the aesthetic of Halloween 365 days a year. This aesthetic grew out of a strain of post-punk music pioneered by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Bauhaus in the early 1980s. It revived fascinations with 19th century Gothic literature and with early 20th century horror films. All three of these movements are classified as “decadent.” Literary and social critics often characterize society as going through ascendant and descendant cycles. During ascendant periods moral and aesthetic principles are embraced and celebrated. Inevitably this leads to a period of ossification, when principles are observed because they are principles and the reasons for their importance are forgotten. This breeds cynicism, and decadence sets in. Principles are questioned, lampooned, and dismissed as meaningless. In effect, they are ritually killed.

The Goth movement born in the 1980s is said to represent the beginning of a descending arc. The wealth and hope of the post-World War II era ossified in the 1970s into self-absorption and bloated materialism. Punk music represented a rebellion against all this. In the post-punk era since then, much counter-culture rhetoric and the aesthetics that manifest that rhetoric paint a picture of a society with broken institutions and principles spoiled by hypocrisy.

It is in this cultural period that Halloween has become immensely popular. It is a holiday that invites you to consort with the dead, who after all represent the past, and to put on a costume in order to be someone other than who you are from day to day. 

The true beauty of Halloween is that it represents a pivot point in a passage through an eternal cycle. Yes, we pass into the dark half of the year and yes, our society is in a muddled period, but just as the light returns in the next half of the year, a society can pick itself up, dust itself off, and ascend again. 

And that is what Halloween is really about.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times and has not been trick or treating in a long, long time.