Halloween gets a bad press. Primarily as a result of trick-or-treat, it is accused of commercialisation, Americanisation and juvenile intimidation tactics. It also gets looked down on for being about ‘spooky nonsense’ and worse; being sacrilegious, ‘new-agey’ and downright occult. In this blog I want to examine what is known of the origins of Halloween, before its commercial incarnation; to peer at its pre-Christian origins, to a Celtic festival known, in Ireland at least, as Samhain.
What has any of this got to do with Dartmoor and landscape? The reason I wanted to write this seasonal blog post is not purely to understand the glamour and spine-chilling attraction of Halloween, but to use what I learn to situate it within ‘place’, with Dartmoor as my muse. This is, after all, a blog about landscape and so, I want to use this history to imagine what the practice of Samhain (as much as we can glimpse it) might mean in the context of my local landscape. I was also aware that this dark festival had a link to transhumance – moving with cattle between summer and winter grazing – and could therefore give a ceremonial and spiritual voice to the Dartmoor transhumance and dairying story I am plucking at (Landscape and Mammary).
What I have found out is too much for one blog post so I am going to present it in a series of four parts:
- In this first part I am going to provide a broad outline of what Samhain is, what is known about when it falls, and how it relates to the other key Celtic festivals.
- In the second part I am going to explore the myths that surround Celtic Samhain and what they tell us about the mindset and practices of the people who celebrated this pre-Christian festival. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 2 -Samhain Myths & Practices]
- Part three will look at Halloween folklore, to examine Samhain practice, but in the guise of its more recent and Christianised form. Here I will be particularly focusing on linkages of Halloween folk practice to earlier Samhain roots. .[Samhain Dartmoor: Part 3 – Samhain vestiges in All Hallow’s Eve]
- In the fourth and final part I will turn all this research into a sketch of Samhain Dartmoor; to imagine what parts of landscape were important and how they were being used.[Samhain Dartmoor: Part 4 – Tors on Fire?]
What is Samhain?
Samhain (Samin in Old Irish and Samhuinn in Scots Gaelic, pronounced ‘Sawin’, OED) is a pre-Christian Celtic festival celebrated at the transition from summer to winter. For centuries it has been held around the night of the 31st of October to 1st November, a night we would know as Halloween. Halloween, known as All Souls’ Day, is recorded from the 9th century, and is a Christianised version of the deeply embedded pagan celebration (Sewell Johnson, 1968).
The name Samhain translates as ‘end of summer’ (Hicks & Elder, 2003). The Celts divided their year into summer and winter. Their two prinicipal festivals were Bealtaine, that occurred around 1st May (May Day) to usher in the summer, and Samhain, to mark the beginning of winter. Samhain, significantly, was also the start of the Celtic new year (Armao, 2006, p480).
Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. wikimediacommons.org.
Boundaries – temporal and physical – were hugely symbolic in the past. Pre-Christians celebrating the coming darkness – the boundary in the calendar between summer and winter and their new year – saw this as a powerful divide. Samhain represented a temporal fissure where the frontiers of the physical world and the spirit world thinned and were crossed. This is why our Halloween is so full of death & darkness.
I will say more about the practices and nature of Samhain in a bit, but first, let’s look at how its timing was defined and how it fits with the other chief Celtic festivals …
The Timing of Samhain
Most of what is known about pre-Christian Halloween is from Irish sources. Records from Ireland show that Samhain was one of four festivals alongside Imbolc, Lughnasa and Bealtaine. Most researchers agree that these were found across the Celtic world (Armao, 2016, Sjoestedt, 2000, p52) based partly on the fact that they were the basis for the widespread major Christian festivals (see Table below).
| Date (and eve of that date) | Celtic | Christian |
| 1st Feb | Imbolc (Quarter-day festival) | Candlemas |
| 1st May | Bealtaine (Half-day festival) | May Day, St Walpurgis Night |
| 1st Aug | Lughnasa (Quarter-day festival) | Lammas |
| 1st Nov | Samain (Half-day festival) | Hallowmas, All Hallows, Halloween |
Whilst the existence of these four festivals is agreed upon, there is less consensus about the rationale for defining their timing; they ‘do not seem to correspond to any obvious astronomical event such as solstices or equinoxes’ (Armao, 2016 p325). The most convincing theory is that they occurred at the mid-points between solstices and equinoxes, and more specifically, on the first Full Moon after the mid-point (see the graphic below, Armao, 2016, p336). This method has a consistent rationale for identifying when they were celebrated. However, because they relied on the moon for their exact timing, they were not fixed dates. This system of identifying when to celebrate would also help to explain the later Christian traditions which often linked festival days to Mondays, because Monday literally means ‘Day of the Moon’ (Ibid). It was only later, as we developed the calendar of days, months and years, that these festivals became fixed to the eves of the first day of month.
Writing in October 2022, using this reckoning, Samhain 2022, will fall on 8th of November; eight days after our Halloween is celebrated.
Samhain and its place in the Rhythm of the Year
Various authors (e.g. Frazer, 1919[1]; Armao, 2006) have highlighted the way that the Celtic festivals wheeled between summer and winter in a pattern linked to transhumance – with our herding ancestors driving cattle to marginal ground for summer pasture, and ‘when autumn to winter resigns the pale year‘, back to more sheltered ground for wintering (Frazer, 1919, p269). Bealtaine marked the beginning of summer when herders went summering and Samhain marked the corollary, with these two festivals thought to be the most important of the Celtic calendar.
Interpretations of this transhumance linkage are based on records such as that from an early Irish collection of laws called The Senchus Mór (c 438 AD), which explains that transhumance started in May and ended at Allhallow-tide (Armao, 2016, p333), and specifying that ‘care had to be taken not to trample the cultivated fields and the arable land of its neighbours as cattle were moved (Armao, 2006, p250).
The major pre-Christian festivals can therefore be thought of as a pastoral calendar, in synchronicity with the cycling of the year through the seasons. Lyle (2003) represents this figuratively, showing the main meaning attached to each.
The Celtic new year kicked off with dark Samhain, a festival associated with endings, beginnings and death. Its new year associations are well-exemplified in Manx folklore. Here, mummers used to go around at Halloween , not at Christmas or New Year, and they used to sing a song that included the line ‘tonight is New Year’s night, hoganna!’. Land tenures also ended/began at Halloween, as did a servant’s service (Frazer, 1919, p268). Hoganna, is an unfamiliar word but it is one bearing great similarity to the Scottish word Hogmanay, an Old Manx word for new year (Moore, 1891, p124).
Gift of the Painting and Drawing Society of The Cleveland Museum of Art. Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication. wikimediacommons.org.
Imbolc, still in the dark winter, is about birth – a celebration of calves and lambs and kids being born and female stock coming into their milk. Then comes Bealtaine, the start of summer warmth and light, when people began (initiated) their transhumant journeys to summering pastures and initiated sexual encounters. Finally, the second half of summer (Lughnassa) is marked by trading, marriage and other alliances. The dark winter half of the year is characterised as passive, and the light summer half as active (Armao, 2008, p77). Seemingly the most important of these were Bealtaine and Samhain – the festivals that mark the most important boundaries – and in this twinning, this ying-and yang, these are the two great fire festivals that in terms of superstition, most closely resemble each other (Frazer, 1919, p267)
Simon Ainley. Cows [#landscape ,#sunset ,#cow ,#dartmoor]. Uploaded 9 June 2013. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. wikimediacommons.org
And what of Dartmoor? Just from this first indication, we can begin to sketch a picture of winter darkness closing in on the moor. Our herding ancestors (and they were virtually all herders) would have been watching the moon, and would be pre-empting Samhain in their preparations. But as we know, Halloween is a sinister festival, not a jolly knees up. How would the herding communities on the transhumant uplands of Dartmoor have been feeling as their new year approached?
In the next part, where we look at the myths and practices of Samhain, we will get a better feel for Celtic Samhain; revealing the how, why and where our Late Bronze Age and Iron Age forebears practiced Samhain on Dartmoor.
[1] Sir James Gordon Frazer was the author a book about pre-Christian beliefs, called ‘The Golden Bough’. It was initially published in the 1890s and then expanded to twelve volumes over a number of years. Hugely influential in popular circles, Frazer’s work was much criticised by academics at the time and over subsequent years. The book reflected the attitudes of its age. Frazer spoke of the beliefs of the ‘savages’ as their erroneous view of the world, he did not have a scientific/anthropological methodological framework; he interpreted ideas in relation to Greco-Roman and Hebrew traditions, and tried to fit his thesis around the myth of the priesthood of Nemi (Kumar, 2016). Despite all this, it is also true that his work was based on a ‘mountain of source material’ (ibid). It is not possible, without going back to his original sources, to be sure of how much re-working he did from his sources, but every academic, to some extent, has to interpret and re-word the meaning of the authors they are citing. As I am doing here! So, we may disagree with the story he builds around his voluminous research and sources, but that does not mean that the individual building blocks of traditions and superstitions are themselves individually fatally flawed.
| The Landscape and Mammary Approach For the Landscape and Mammary series, I am working with Sarah Boreham. Sarah uses a creative embodied processes of movement and sound as a tool for research and self-development. She works with ecological embodied phenomenology as a methodology to understand the hidden voices and movements of marginalised individuals, groups and species. She brings her ‘Eco Sound Movement’ approach which uses a multi-modal method including: dance/movement; improvisation; sound/song; film/photography; creative writing: and composition/decomposition. I approach the subject differently. I come from an academic science background. I draw on landscape, archaeological, historical literature and place-names to develop my understandings. I spend time within landscapes to develop my experiential conceptions and complement this with an obsessive love of map and aerial imagery data. Between Sarah’s embodied and creative approach and my natural and social sciences approach there is a place where we can help inform and be informed by each other’s way of experiencing, researching and discovering. |
References
Armao, F., 2006. O Samhain Go Bealtaine: Folklores, mythes et origines de la fête de mai en Irlande (Doctoral dissertation, Université de Lille).
Armao, F., 2008. The Women of Bealtaine: From the Maiden to the Witch. Cosmos. The Journal of the Traditional Cosmology Society, (25), pp.71-82.
Armao, F., 2016. The ‘Time of Ireland’: an Interpretation of the Four Irish Festivals. Time and Culture, pp325-338.
Frazer, J.G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Volume X of XII. Part VII: Balder the Beautiful. The Fire Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the Eternal Soul. MacMillan & Co: New York and London.
Hicks, R. and Elder, L.W., 2003. Festivals, deaths, and the sacred landscape of Ancient Ireland. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 31(3/4), pp.307-336.
Johnson, H.S., 1968. November Eve Beliefs and Customs in Irish Life and Literature. The Journal of American Folklore, 81(320), pp.133-142.
Kumar, V., 2016. To walk alongside: Myth, magic, and mind in The Golden Bough. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6(2), pp.233-254.
Lyle, E., 2003, January. The Celtic Seasonal Festivals in the Light of Recent Approaches to the Indo-European Ritual Year. In Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium (pp. 184-199). Dept. of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.
Moore, S., 2012. The Archaeology of Slieve Donard, Co. Down: A Cultural Biography of Ulster’s Highest Mountain. Down County Museum.
Sjoestedt, M.L., 2000. Celtic Gods and Heroes. Courier Corporation.
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