I have always heard that Halloween is from The Druids but on doing some research I have found that a book was written called “The Stations
of the Sun” by Ronald Hutton that claims that the whole Druid Halloween connection is wrong. So what is the real history of Halloween?
The History Channel will probably be showing their production The Haunted History of Halloween soon. Here’s what they say about the video they sell:
You can also go to http://www.thehistorychannel.com/ and enter “halloween” into the search engine. Click on one of the links provided (my server is about to crash, otherwise I’d post it) for a history.
There’s little doubt that Halloween can be traced back to Druids. I wonder if you’re thinking about specific modern customs – pumpkin carving, costume-wearing, trick-or-treating, etc. No, that stuff probably has nothing to do with Druids. Very few reputable scholars have ever claimed that they do, as far as I can tell.
I don’t believe that Hutton is claiming that the Druid Halloween connection is “wrong,” but if you have a quotation from his works that shows he is claiming that, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
this is what i got while doing a search on deja.com
i don’t know if this is from his book
At the end of the nineteenth century , two distinguished academics, one
at Oxford and the other at Cambridge, made enduring contributions to the
popular conception of Samhain. The former was the philologist Sir John
Rhys, who suggested that it had been the ‘Celtic’ New Year… Rhys’s
theory was further popularized by the Cambridge scholar, Sir James Frazer.
At times the latter did admit that the evidence for it was inconclusive,
but at others he threw this caution overboard and employed it to support
an idea of his own: that Samhain had been the pagan Celtic feast of the
dead. He reached this belief by the simple process of arguing back from a
fact, that 1 and 2 November had been dedicated to that purpose by the
medieval Christian Church, from which it could be surmised that this was
been a Christianization of a preexisting festival. He admitted, by
implication, that there was in fact no actual record of such a festival,
but inferred the former existence of one from a number of different
propositions: that the Church had taken over other pagan holy days, that
‘many’ cultures have annual ceremonies to honour their dead, ‘commonly’ at
the opening of the year, and that (of course) 1 November had been the
Celtic New Year. He pointed out that although the feast of All Saints or
All Hallows had been formally instituted across most of north-west Europe
by the emperor Louis the Pius in 835, on the prompting of Pope Gregory IV,
it had already existed, on its later date of 1 November, in England at the
time of Bede. He suggested that the pope and emperor had, therefore,
merely ratified an existing religious practice based upon that of the
ancient Celts.
“The story is, in fact, more complicated. By the mid-fourth century
Christians in the Mediterranean world were keeping a feast in honour of
all those who had been martyred under the pagan emperors; it is mentioned
in the Carmina Nisibena of St Ephraem, who died in about 373, as being
held on 13 May. During the fifth century divergent practices sprang up,
the Syrian churches holding the festival in Easter Week, and those of the
Greek world preferring the Sunday after Pentecost. That of Rome, however,
preferred to keep the May date, and Pope Boniface IV formally endorsed it
in the year 609. By 800 churches in England and Germany, which were in
touch with each other, were celebrating a festival dedicated to all saints
upon 1 November instead. The oldest text of Bede’s Martyrology, from the
eighth century, does not include it, but the recensions at the end of the
century do. Charlemagne’s favourite churchman Alcuin was keeping it by
then, as were also his friend Arno, bishop of Salzburg, and a church in
Bavaria. Pope Gregory, therefore, was endorsing and adopting a practice
which had begun in northern Europe. It had not, however, started in
Ireland, where the Felire of Oengus and the Martyrology of Tallaght
prove that the early medieval churches celebrated the feast of All Saints
upon 20 April. This makes nonsense of Frazer’s notion that the November
date was chosen because of ‘Celtic’ influence: rather, both ‘Celtic’
Europe and Rome followed a Germanic idea…”
Subject to the hstorical corrections provided by dave316, The Witch’s Voice - Hallowe’en… We Call It Samhain gives a pretty accurate description of how it developed in the U.S. I think the way they describe the Irish cultural traditions carrying on, without claiming a direct connection to an on-going religion, is fairly accurate as well. Obviously, dave316’s research calls into question some of the other aspects of their version, but the one presented is popularly (if not scholarly) accepted.
Here’s a little something on Samhain (pronounced sow-inn – I caught “Mulder” pronouncing it “sam-hain” on The X-Files once): http://ladyhedgehog.hedgie.com/samhain.html
Beaten again. Similar information, different link.
An earlier thread on this subject:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=7354
Ronald Hutton is the leading academic sceptic of the idea that modern English folk traditions can be traced back to the pre-Christian period. The Stations of the Sun is just one of a number of major monographs published by him on this subject in recent years. His view is pretty much that all such traditions developed much more recently. A Druid origin for Halloween is just the sort of hypothesis he would regard as implausible. The passages quoted by dave316 may well come from one of his works.
Hutton, who holds the chair in history at the University of Bristol (England), is a very serious historian. Assessing his impact on every field covered by his work is a bit difficult, but my impression is that most professional historians now consider him to have won this particular argument.
The passages quoted by dave316 are indeed extracts from the relevant chapter of The Stations of the Sun.
Nitpicks: People often say that a practice “goes back to the Druids” when in fact they really mean it “goes back to some time in pre-Roman British history.” The term “Druid” refers to a specific priestly class during a specific period of time, not to the entire pre-Roman civilization. Also, Druids were not confined to Britain; Caesar wrote about the Druids of Gaul.
We actually know very little about the Druids, most of our knowledge coming from a handful of Roman sources. Most of the “facts” you find on the Web about Druids are concocted out of legends, speculation, and completely anachronistic sources. (I was just looking at a site which recommened THE MABINOGION for its Druidic insights–never mind that it was written 13 centuries after the Druids. It’s rather like recommending BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY for its insights into the lives of medieval Welshmen.)