Well what do you know I registered months ago and forgot. Well, its about time I put my lurking days behind me and contibuted something.
It is very easy to dismiss folk traditions in the face of historical research. However, you have to remember that histories are often written by people with desire for things to be seen their way. When you think about it the foundations of British history, such as Bede, were writing centuries after the events and simply documenting the Folk traditions. The sensible view is that folk stories generally have some seed of truth which survives, if somewhat garbled by the generations of retelling. Historians can be awfully pig headed in defending their discipline, even when confronted with archeological evidence that contradicts it. Story telling appears to have been central to the Celtic religion, giving the druid classes power over the ordinary people, as keepers of the knowledge. A well tried technique for peasant control. Some say the Druids explicitly banned writing, a sensible tactic and supported by the lack of a Celtic script. What we do have, from GB is the surviving ‘Welsh’ poems. Most of these are full of metaphors, that we no longer understand, and many have been bastardised by Christianity, but we can tell a lot about Celtic values from them.
The Celts believed in a duality of worlds. The ‘other’ world was populated by fairies, elves, pixies whatever you want to call them. These were not the little toadstool squatting beasts of popular myth, but human looking, only more so. At least fairy lords did, presumably their was a whole under class of scummy peasant fairies, probably less scummy than their human counterparts. They are described as taller, better looking and more noble than us. They are credited with magical powers, in our world, but the converse is also true, we gained powers when in their world. Now, people and things were always crossing the divide between the worlds at opportune moments ( the Fisher King’s castle is one example). However, the night before Samhain was the time of the year when the party-wall was particularly thin and all sorts of mischievous elves could sneak across and play tricks; putting hens off laying, turning milk sour that sort of thing. The idea was that you leave out gifts for the elves to show your respect for them (Elves were big on respect) and hopefully they will leave you alone.
No Night of the Dead, no witches on broomsticks, just mischief! It would appear that a lot of the current iconography associated with Halloween comes form the Church demonising Celtic traditions, e.g. practitioners of traditional herbal healing becoming ‘witches’.
The Celtic New Year or Birth of the Year, as they regarded it, was in April. Samhain is the death of the year and was celebrated (it that’s the right word) with bonfires, moved to Guy Fawkes night in England. This tradition survives in Ireland, where it is a bit difficult to link it with the celebrating of the thwarting of a Catholic plot in England. The Celts were big on the death/rebirth cycle thing, the two events to not need to coincide, though.
There’s also a lot of evidence that ‘Trick or Treating’ originated in Ireland and was commercialised in the US. A friend of mine practiced Trick or treating well over 30 years ago in southern England. In the northern Midlands, where I grew up, it was gangs of youths, with sheets over their heads, up to no good. No tricks ‘bangers’ featured a lot, though.
I think it’s probably time I shut up now.