All Hallows, or the Invention of an Ancient Night
2026-11-01
Oil painting of a crowded, candlelit Irish farmhouse kitchen at night: young people bob for apples in a tub and snap at apples hung from a beam, couples flirt in the corners, an old man tells a story by the hearth and children play on the floor
Daniel Maclise, Snap-Apple Night, 1833. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
Halloween is not the surviving skeleton of an ancient Celtic festival of the dead. It is something stranger: a night built over a thousand years by monks, poets, farmers, emigrants, printers, moral panics and twentieth-century witches, each certain they were only remembering.
Upon that night, when fairies light
On Cassilis Downans dance…
— Robert Burns, Halloween (1785)
Yesterday was the thirty-first of October, and the internet did what it does every year. It told us, with tremendous confidence, that Halloween is the old Celtic new year, that the Druids lit fires to frighten away the dead, that there was a god of death called Samhain, that the veil between the worlds grows thin, and that the Church, unable to stop the pagans, simply painted a saint over the top of it all.
It is a beautiful story. It has the shape of a myth, which is precisely the problem.
When we stop repeating the story and start reading the documents, the ancient skeleton becomes much thinner, and the living body grows far more interesting. What we call Halloween is a palimpsest. Under the plastic pumpkins there is a nineteenth-century greeting card, under the card there is an Irish farmhouse full of apples and nuts, under the farmhouse there is a medieval liturgy for the dead, and somewhere further down, faint and difficult to read, there is an Irish word: Samain.
Halloween is not an ancient night that survived. It is a modern night that keeps inventing its own antiquity.
That does not make it less magical.
It makes it more human.
[](#what-the-irish-monks-wrote-down "Jump to this heading")What the Irish monks wrote down
Let us begin with what we actually have. Samain (modern Irish _Samhain_) is the Old Irish name for the first of November and for the period around it. It appears in medieval Irish literature, written down by Christian scribes from roughly the eighth century onward, in manuscripts like Lebor na hUidre and the Book of Leinster. In those texts, Samain is one of the great hinges of the year, a time of assemblies, feasting and kings.
The tales return to it again and again. The Serglige Con Culainn, “The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn”, opens with the Ulstermen gathered for their festival at Samain. The Echtra Nerai, “The Adventure of Nera”, takes place on Samain night, when the hero walks out into the dark, carries a hanged man water to drink, and follows a host into the síd, the mound of the otherworld. Other tales place royal gatherings at Tara and at Tlachtga around the same season.
So there is something there. Samain was a seasonal threshold, the otherworld was imagined as close and permeable at that time, and the literature uses that closeness to make stories happen.
And that is very nearly all the medieval sources give us.
They do not describe a festival of the dead. They do not describe Druids performing sacrifices on that night. They do not name a deity called Samhain. They are literary texts written by Christian monks about a pre-Christian past they imagined, sometimes with affection and sometimes with polemic. They are precious, but they are not field notes.
There is also an older and more tantalizing clue: the Gaulish calendar of Coligny, a bronze tablet from the second century found in France, has a month called SAMON. Whether it has anything to do with the Irish Samain is debated, and the honest answer is that we do not know.
[](#a-god-who-was-never-there "Jump to this heading")A god who was never there
The “Lord of Death called Samhain” deserves a small funeral of its own.
As Ronald Hutton has pointed out, this deity does not come from any early Irish source. The figure goes back to the antiquarian speculation of the eighteenth century, especially Charles Vallancey, a British military engineer in Ireland whose enthusiasm for the Irish past was far greater than his discipline. From there it migrated into Victorian books, then into twentieth-century pamphlets, then into television, and now into your feed every October.
A few linguistic mistakes made with tremendous confidence can outlive empires.
[](#how-frazer-built-the-celtic-new-year "Jump to this heading")How Frazer built the Celtic new year
The famous idea that Samhain was “the Celtic new year” and “the festival of the dead” has two main fathers, and both were Victorian scholars.
The first was Sir John Rhŷs, the Welsh Celticist, who in his Hibbert Lectures, published in 1888 as Celtic Heathendom, argued that the Celtic year began in November. His evidence was largely nineteenth-century folklore, especially from Wales and the Isle of Man, and not ancient texts. The second was Sir James Frazer, who absorbed Rhŷs’s suggestion into The Golden Bough and gave it enormous reach. In Frazer’s grand scheme, a whole world of seasonal festivals became fragments of one primitive religion of death and rebirth, and Samhain became the night when the Celts honored their dead.
It was elegant. It was influential. It was mostly conjecture.
Ronald Hutton, in The Stations of the Sun (1996), his history of the ritual year in Britain, goes through the evidence piece by piece. His conclusion is not that Samhain had no importance, but that the early sources do not support the idea of a pan-Celtic festival of the dead, or even firmly prove that November marked the start of the year. The connection between the dead and the beginning of November is, in fact, much better documented in another place.
In the Church.
[](#saints-on-the-first-souls-on-the-second "Jump to this heading")Saints on the first, souls on the second
The feast of All Saints has its own wandering history. Christian communities had honored all martyrs together long before, on dates that varied from place to place. In Rome, Pope Gregory III (731–741) dedicated an oratory in St Peter’s to all the saints, and its commemoration was associated with the first of November. A century later, under Gregory IV (827–844), the November feast was extended across the Frankish lands with the support of Louis the Pious.
The intuitive story says the Church chose the first of November to swallow Samhain. Hutton is skeptical: the date seems to have reached Rome and the Frankish world from Germanic and English practice rather than from Ireland, and the Irish themselves had at one point observed a feast of saints in April. The “Christian conquest of a Celtic feast” is, at best, unproven.
Then came the dead. Around the end of the tenth century, Odilo, abbot of Cluny, established a commemoration of all the faithful departed on the second of November among the monasteries under his authority. It spread across Latin Christendom and became All Souls’ Day.
Here is the real engine of the season.
Not Druids, but Purgatory. A medieval Christian believed that the souls of the dead could be helped by the prayers, masses and alms of the living, and November became the time to do it. Bells were rung for the dead, candles were lit, and the poor went door to door offering prayers in exchange for food. In Brazil, the same old liturgy survives as Finados, on the second of November, when families still fill the cemeteries with flowers and candles.
[](#the-night-before "Jump to this heading")The night before
The name itself is the plainest clue. All Hallows is the old English name for All Saints; hallow means a holy person. The evening before a feast was its even or eve. All Hallows’ Even became, in Scotland, Hallowe’en.
The word is Scots before it is anything else. It was Robert Burns who gave it a literary life in 1785, with a long poem full of country divinations: young people pulling kail stalks, burning nuts in the fire, sowing hemp seed, all to learn the face or the name of a future spouse. Burns even added notes explaining the customs, already treating them as a rustic world worth recording.
Notice what is there and what is missing. There are fairies dancing on the hills, there is a little fear and a great deal of flirting. There are no Druids, no sacrifices and no festival of the dead.
The oldest Halloween we can actually read is about love.
[](#soul-cakes-and-guisers "Jump to this heading")Soul cakes and guisers
Two customs are often blended into “trick-or-treat”, though they come from different places.
The first is souling. In parts of England, people, often children or the poor, went from house to house around All Souls asking for soul cakes, small spiced cakes given in exchange for prayers for the dead of the household. Shakespeare knew the custom well enough to joke about it: in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Speed mocks a lovesick man who speaks “puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.” The beggar at Hallowmas was a familiar figure, and the reason he begged was theological.
The second is guising, documented in Scotland and Ireland from the later nineteenth century and probably older: young people in disguise, often with blackened or masked faces, going door to door and performing a song, a verse or a bit of mischief in return for food or coins.
Souling was a prayer that had become a request. Guising was a performance that had become a right. Together, after a long journey, they would become something else entirely.
[](#a-lantern-made-from-a-turnip "Jump to this heading")A lantern made from a turnip
Early twentieth-century Halloween postcard: two small boys in caps and short trousers carry an enormous grinning jack-o’-lantern pumpkin between them, lit from within, against an autumnal background with the words “Halloween Greetings”
“Halloween Greetings.” Postcard, unknown artist, circa 1910. Missouri History Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The jack-o’-lantern did not begin as a pumpkin, and it did not even begin as a Halloween decoration.
In seventeenth-century English, “Jack-with-the-lantern” and “jack-o’-lantern” were names for a night watchman and, above all, for the ignis fatuus, the will-o’-the-wisp, the strange flickering light over marshes that was said to lead travelers astray. The name was a nickname for a mystery.
In Ireland and Scotland, people carved lanterns from turnips, mangel-wurzels and other roots, hollowed out and lit with an ember or a candle, sometimes with faces cut into them. Surviving examples, preserved in Irish folk collections, are honestly terrifying: shrunken, wrinkled, pale heads with a light inside. Next to them, the American pumpkin looks almost sweet.
The Irish folktale of Stingy Jack explains the lantern with a cheerful theology. Jack, a drunkard and a trickster, outwits the Devil, sometimes trapping him up a tree with a cross carved into the bark, and makes him promise never to take his soul. When Jack dies, Heaven will not have him and Hell, bound by the promise, cannot. The Devil throws him a coal from Hell to light his way, Jack puts it in a hollowed turnip, and he wanders the earth forever.
It is a moral tale, a joke and a ghost story at once.
Then came the ships. During the nineteenth century, and especially after the Great Famine of the 1840s, millions of Irish people crossed the Atlantic. In North America they found a native squash that was larger, softer and far easier to carve than a turnip. The pumpkin had already been carved as a lantern in America, but the Irish and Scottish migrants gave it a night to belong to.
The most famous symbol of Halloween is an emigrant.
[](#the-witch-acquires-her-hat "Jump to this heading")The witch acquires her hat
Hand-colored Halloween postcard from around 1910: a witch in a tall black pointed hat, red cloak and long skirt flies across the sky on a broomstick, pulled forward by a flying grinning jack-o’-lantern, with a black cat clinging behind her
“Hallowe’en.” Postcard, unknown artist, circa 1910. Missouri History Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
The witches in the Renaissance prints I showed in an earlier post were often bareheaded, with wild hair, naked or half-clothed, gathered around cauldrons. They did not wear tall black cones.
The hat came later, and its origin is genuinely uncertain. In the seventeenth century, tall-crowned hats were common among ordinary people, especially women in the countryside, and as fashion moved on, that old-fashioned silhouette seems to have stuck to the image of the poor old woman of the village, who was also the usual suspect of witchcraft. Illustrated chapbooks, children’s books and pantomime then did the rest. Popular theories about medieval alewives, Quaker hats or heretics’ caps circulate widely, but I have not found any of them proven, and I will leave them where they belong, in the realm of the plausible.
What can be verified is the moment when the costume became official. Between roughly 1900 and 1920, the golden age of the picture postcard, American and German printers produced thousands of Halloween cards. In them, the whole iconography crystallizes: the pointed hat, the broom, the black cat, the moon, the owl, the bat and the grinning pumpkin, often all in the same frame.
The modern witch was not born at a Sabbath. She was born at a printing press.
[](#how-america-sold-the-night "Jump to this heading")How America sold the night
In the United States, Halloween started as a regional immigrant custom and became, between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, a national holiday. Its first great American phase was the party: magazines and etiquette books taught hosts how to arrange games, fortune-telling and decorations, very much in the spirit of Burns and Maclise. Its second phase was more chaotic. In the early twentieth century, young men treated the night as license for vandalism: gates removed, wagons put on roofs, windows soaped, fires set.
Towns and civic groups answered with organized parties, parades and, eventually, a negotiation: a gift at the door in exchange for peace. The phrase “trick or treat” is usually traced in print to the 1920s, with an often-cited early appearance in a Canadian newspaper in Alberta in 1927. Sugar rationing during the Second World War slowed things down; after 1945, with suburbs, television and the candy industry, trick-or-treating became the ritual we know.
So the thing that looks most ancient, children in costume asking for sweets, is in its present form younger than the automobile.
[](#the-poisoned-apple-that-never-was "Jump to this heading")The poisoned apple that never was
Every October, someone warns parents about razor blades in apples and poisoned candy from strangers.
The sociologist Joel Best investigated this fear. In a 1985 article written with Gerald Horiuchi, “The Razor Blade in the Apple”, and in his later updates, Best looked for documented cases of children killed or seriously harmed by poisoned Halloween treats given by strangers. He did not find any.
The cases that exist are of another kind. In 1974, in Texas, Ronald Clark O’Bryan poisoned his own son, Timothy, with cyanide hidden in a Pixy Stix, hoping to collect life insurance, and tried to make it look like the work of a stranger. In 1970, the death of a five-year-old in Detroit was first blamed on Halloween candy, until investigators found the heroin belonged to a relative. Some tampering incidents were hoaxes; some were pranks.
The monster from the urban legend disappears, and behind it we find something sadder and more ordinary: the danger, when it existed, came from inside the house.
[](#the-devils-night "Jump to this heading")The Devil’s night
In the 1980s, a much darker fear attached itself to the season. The so-called Satanic panic, fed by books such as Michelle Remembers (1980), daytime talk shows and long, chaotic trials like the McMartin preschool case, convinced a significant part of the American public that networks of secret Satanists were abusing and sacrificing children. Halloween was presented by some preachers as the high holy day of these cults.
The investigation that followed was patient and unglamorous. In 1992, the FBI agent Kenneth Lanning, who specialized in crimes against children, published a report concluding that he had found no evidence for the alleged organized Satanic murder cults. The terrible things that happened to children were real; the vast hidden conspiracy was not.
That is the pattern, again and again.
Fear is real. The cult is a costume.
[](#when-the-witches-came-back "Jump to this heading")When the witches came back
Now we must change tradition, and change it carefully, because this is where the history ends and the reinvention begins.
In 1921, Margaret Murray, an Egyptologist, published The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, arguing that the people executed as witches were members of a surviving pre-Christian fertility religion with its own festivals, including November Eve. Historians have since dismantled the thesis. But in the 1950s, Gerald Gardner presented Wicca to the public, in Witchcraft Today (1954), as precisely that kind of survival, and November Eve was among its great festivals.
Over the following years, Gardner’s circle combined the four “Celtic” fire festivals, which owe a great deal to Rhŷs and Frazer, with the solstices and the equinoxes, producing an eightfold calendar that would later be called the Wheel of the Year. Names such as Samhain were attached to it, and some of the other names (Litha, Mabon) were added in the American Neopagan movement of the 1970s.
The result is real. It is a living religious calendar, with its own beauty and its own theology, observed today by many thousands of people. In Wicca and in much of contemporary Paganism, Samhain is a time to honor the ancestors and to reflect on death.
But it is a twentieth-century creation, built from Victorian scholarship, folklore and imagination. To say so is not to mock it. Every tradition was new once. It only means we should not confuse the age of a feeling with the age of a festival.
[](#the-thinning-of-the-veil "Jump to this heading")The thinning of the veil
The most quoted sentence of the season is that on this night “the veil between the worlds is thin.”
The early Irish tales do show the síd opening at Samain, and the folklore of Ireland and Scotland is full of fairies abroad on Halloween night. Burns has them dancing on the hills. That is the honest seed.
The phrase itself, however, belongs to modern esoteric and Neopagan language. I have not found it in any medieval source, and it seems to have become a fixed formula only in the twentieth century, spreading together with the Wheel of the Year and then with the internet. It is a metaphor, and a powerful one, but it is a recent metaphor speaking in an ancient voice.
And what about ceremonial magic? It would be lovely to report that the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or Aleister Crowley kept a solemn rite on the thirty-first of October. I looked, and I found nothing I could verify. The Golden Dawn’s great ceremonial moments turned on the equinoxes, and Crowley’s own calendar had other dates. The marriage between the occult and Halloween is mostly the work of Wicca, popular culture and the horror film.
[](#a-night-that-remembers-forward "Jump to this heading")A night that remembers forward
So what is Halloween, once we take off the costume?
I. It is an Irish seasonal threshold, Samain, glimpsed through Christian manuscripts, where the otherworld was believed to come close.
II. It is a Christian vigil, the eve of All Saints and the prelude to All Souls, when the living prayed for the dead and the poor begged in their name.
III. It is a country night of apples, nuts and divination, preserved by Burns and painted by Maclise.
IV. It is an emigrant’s lantern, carried from the turnip fields to the American pumpkin patch.
V. It is a printed witch, a commercial night, an urban legend and a moral panic.
VI. And it is, since the twentieth century, a religious festival reborn under its old Irish name.
None of these layers is fake. None of them is the original either.
Each generation that celebrated it was convinced it was keeping something ancient alive, and in a sense it was right, but what it was really keeping alive was the habit of looking at the dark at the end of the harvest and asking who is still with us and who is gone. Tomorrow, here in Brazil, the cemeteries will fill with candles for Finados, and that question will be asked again, in another language.
Halloween is not an ancient night that survived. It is a modern night that keeps inventing its own antiquity.
Perhaps that is the oldest thing about it.
--
Chamber of Reflections
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