Samhain: The Irish Roots of Halloween

Before it was Halloween, it was Samhain — the Irish festival that opened the dark half of the year, when the door to the Otherworld stood ajar. Here’s where our Halloween really comes from.

Long before trick-or-treating, before pumpkins, before the word "Halloween" existed, the people of Ireland lit fires on the last night of October to see out the old year. The festival was Samhain (pronounced SOW-in, to rhyme with "cow") — the turning of the Celtic year, the night the harvest ended and winter began. It's the direct ancestor of modern Halloween, and a surprising amount of what we still do on 31 October leads straight back to it.

The turning of the year

Samhain was one of the four great festivals of the Irish year, falling on 1 November and marking the start of geimhreadh, the winter — the "dark half" of the year. (You can read how all four festivals shape the calendar in The Irish Calendar.) The harvest was in, the cattle were brought down from the summer pastures, and some were slaughtered to lay in meat for the cold months. It was an ending and a beginning at once — in many ways the Irish new year.

To this day, Samhain is simply the Irish word for November, and Oíche Shamhna — "the night of Samhain" — is the Irish for Halloween.

When the door stood open

What made Samhain uncanny was its place between things — between the light half of the year and the dark, between harvest and winter. The Irish imagination held that at such a threshold the boundary with an saol eile, the Otherworld, grew thin. On this one night the dead could return to visit, and the aos sí — the fairy folk, the people of the mounds — could pass freely into ours.

Households set a place at the table and left food out for returning relatives. But not every visitor was welcome, and that fear shaped the customs that followed.

Fires, disguises and turnips

• Bonfires. Great communal fires — tine chnámh — were lit on hilltops. Hearth fires at home were quenched and then relit from the communal flame, binding the community together for the winter to come.
• Disguises. To move about safely among the spirits, people went in disguise — costumes and masks to hide from, or blend in with, whatever was abroad that night. This is the true root of the Halloween costume, and of mumming and guising traditions still alive in parts of Ireland.
• Carved lanterns. Faces were carved into turnips (not pumpkins — those came later, in America) and lit with an ember, tied to the folk tale of "Stingy Jack," doomed to wander with a coal in a hollowed turnip. That is your jack-o'-lantern.
• Divination. With the future briefly within reach, Samhain was a night for fortune-telling — games with apples and nuts to reveal who you would marry, and the báirín breac (barmbrack), a fruit loaf baked with a hidden ring, coin or rag, each foretelling the finder's year.

Samhain in the myths

The old stories knew Samhain as a hinge of the year, and set some of their biggest moments there. It's at Samhain that the god-race the Tuatha Dé Danann fight the Second Battle of Mag Tuired. It's at Samhain, year after year, that the fire-breathing Aillen lulls the court of Tara to sleep and burns it — until the young Fionn mac Cumhaill stays awake and kills him. And at Oweynagat, the "cave of the cats" at Rathcroghan in County Roscommon, the Otherworld was said to spill out each Samhain, a gateway watched over by the war-goddess the Mórrígan.

From Samhain to Halloween

When Christianity came, the old festival wasn't erased so much as overlaid. The Church placed All Saints' Day (All Hallows) on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November — days for the dead, set right on top of Samhain. The evening before became All Hallows' Eve, contracted over time to Hallowe'en.

The customs travelled, too. Irish and Scottish emigrants carried Samhain's bonfires, guising and lantern-carving across the Atlantic in the 19th century, where the turnip became the far easier-to-carve pumpkin, and the modern festival of Halloween took shape. When children knock on the door on 31 October, they're taking part — without knowing it — in something more than two thousand years old.

A few words for the season

Samhain is the first of four festivals that turn the Celtic year. Next in the cycle comes Imbolc, the first stirring of spring — but that's a story for February.