After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Origins of Halloween

Episode Date: October 16, 2023

From its prehistoric origins until today, Halloween has always had the Shiver of Terror running through it. First as a pagan festival of Winter-the-Bringer-of-Death. Then as a Catholic holy day dedicated to lost Souls in purgatory. Now as a celebration of horrifyingly bad fancy dress!Maddy and Anthony speak to the one-and-only Professor Ronald Hutton, a national treasure who is the author of too many wonderful books to list here. His latest is Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe.Producer is Stuart Beckwith. Edited by Tom Delargy. Senior Producer is Charlotte LongDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here.

hello and welcome to this episode of after dark myths misdeeds and the paranormal in this episode we are absolutely thrilled to be joined by the utterly brilliant professor ronald hutton now for anyone who doesn't know ronald's work and frankly what have you been doing with your time if you don't. He's a specialist in British folklore, in pre-Christian religion and magic in the early modern period. In our chat with him in this episode we dive into some of the murky origins of Halloween and we attempt to trace the twisting shape-shifting history of a festival with which we are all familiar today. The evenings are closing in, the dark is coming over the horizon and it is time for Halloween. I am so excited. This is when I come into my own, I can get my turtlenecks out. It's sweater weather.

It's sweater weather, Maddy. It's sweater weather and I am delighted about it. It's time. It's the best time of year. Well, this Christmas. And God, summer is just so needy. It's anyway, look, that's just me going on a kind of a personal rant. What a surprise that we're both autumnal people. Yeah, no, this is all that coming. This is not a surprise, but it's actually what a what a privilege to be able to talk to Professor Ronald Hutton about this particular topic at this particular time of year. It just seems really apt. There is nobody who is better placed to talk on this topic. And listen, we won't

take up any more of your time. Let's go straight to the episode and hear what Professor Ronald Hutton has to say. hello everyone and welcome to this episode of after dark we are absolutely thrilled today to be joined by professor ronald hutton and we're going to be joined by Professor Ronald Hutton, and we're going to be chatting about the history of Halloween. So Ronald, thank you so much for joining us. You're very welcome today. Thank you. It's lovely to be with you. Ronald, it is coming to that time of year where things start to get a little bit darker in the evenings, the nights start closing in and there is talk of spookiness and you see the kind of commercialized trick-or-treating bits and pieces in the shops.

So we now have this kind of materialistic, performative version of Halloween, but can you tell us a little bit about the history where that comes from and how people understood this time of year in the distant past. Well, it's always been performative and there's often been a commercial element, but there are really primeval and ancient things running underneath all this. Basically, Halloween is the medieval English Christian name for a festival found right across ancient Northern Europe that marks the beginning of winter and is held by Northern European peoples around late October, early November. And it has two aspects which we still have today. One is that it's a time of celebration and fun. It's the end of the farming, the fishing,

the trading, and in old days, the fighting year. So everybody is back in the home community with the profits, the stories, everyone's re-engaging with each other, and they've got lots to eat and drink in a way that isn't usual at other times of the year. But you're right on the edge of the scariest and nastiest of all seasons in Northern Europe, which in good years is going to have boredom, cold, mud, claustrophobia, and a deprivation of light. And in bad years is going to bring influenza and typhus epidemics, hypothermia and death through it, and mass starvation. That's so interesting that Halloween, as we understand it, has these medieval and Christian origins. But of course, this fear of the darkness and winter and all the challenges that it brings

is a universal human experience, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. And of course, it goes back much further. So are we able to trace the origins of Halloween to anything pre-Christian? Does it exist in the pre-Christian ancient world in any way? It existed right across the pre-Christian ancient world. All that Christianity in the Middle Ages gave it was an English name, All Hallows' Eve, the eve of All Hallows' or All Saints' Day, and an association with praying for the dead, which is very much a medieval Christian thing to do.

But before then, right across Northern Europe, under different names, the twin aspects I've mentioned, that of community regathering plenty in celebration and stark fear of what's coming, were deeply embedded. Samhain, summer's end. Known to the Norse, the Vikings, as the winter nights. Known to the Welsh as Nosgallan, winter's eve. Known to the Anglo-Saxons as Blotmanath, the blood month, which sounds gory, but it's just about putting down livestock that you can't afford to feed through the winter. And by many other names across Central and Eastern Europe. And the spooky bit comes because of the reaction to the prospect of a terrifying season, that with the spirits of cold and dark and want closing in on you, mocking them by dressing up as them, by parodying them. It's a very good therapy

for coming to terms with what's coming. In olden days, to judge from the surviving folklore, people weren't concerned so much with those who are already dead, but one's own chances of dying before spring. So there is this, I guess, shared experience, although it manifests in different ways, but the shared experience, it seems to me, of fear. Would that be accurate, do you think? Yes, fear, definitely. At the very least, nervousness. Because you're in the grip of primeval, natural and invincible powers. Whatever happens, the light's going to carry on diminishing until midwinter. Whatever happens, the warmth is going from the sun, the life is going from the trees, the green is going from the land. You're entering the season

of death, deprivation, and menace. It seems to me that it's obviously a transitional period. And there's so much interest here in transformation, transformation of the landscape, transformation of the season, and also transformation of the human beings themselves that are experiencing this through costuming and ritual. So Ronald, can you tell us a little bit about the history of people dressing up at Halloween? We think of that today as, you know, these very sort of plasticky, slightly over-sexualized costumes that you can go and buy, you know, in the corner shop today.

But there is a real history of people donning different guises, right, in this festival. There certainly is. guises, right, in this festival? There certainly is. There isn't much sex in Halloween or whatever name you give the old festivals. In the old days, it's a bit too cold and creepy. The more erotic festivals are in early summer. But there is everything else. But there's also quite a hard economic undertow behind all this. And that is in most large or well-developed communities, you're going to have richer and poorer people, even in a medieval village. And so as for every festival, the poor need to have the means to celebrate it. They need to have the surplus food and drink, or in later centuries, the spare money to get it. And so what they do is go around the houses of the rich, the pubs, the streets, begging it from the better off, but to keep their dignity, providing a service, providing songs or plays or dances or jokes, and dressing up colourfully to entertain the people they're encountering. So this is what trick-or-treat is basically all about. It's redistributing wealth in a community and providing

a luxuriant growth of folk entertainment to justify doing so. This happens at all the winter festivals. It's just that it really starts around Halloween. There's something kind of enticingly chaotic about what you're describing, Ronald, I think, in terms of this idea that this underlying fear invites people to perform in such elaborate and coordinated ways. It feels like that is a real moment in a collective identity, if you're looking at villages or towns, as you're just describing there.

Yes, collective identity is what traditional communities are all about. Being an individual is really a modern luxury in many ways. And because this is the great time of regathering after the summer dispersal to different jobs, community is being reinforced and restated around Halloween in an even stronger way than at many other times of year. So Ronald, if Halloween up until the Christian medieval period is about fear of dying, and it's about celebrating or at least marking this transition from the summer into something else, when does it become associated with the dead? When does it become All Hallows' Eve as we kind of understand it today? become All Hallows' Eve as we kind of understand it today? The answer is the early Middle Ages, or to put a date on it, between around 800 and 1000, because that's when the Western Christian

Church, the one that's based in Rome and covers the whole of Western and Central Europe, introduces two major new festivals. And they're the very first Christian festivals that are big time and are in the second half of the year. It's the period from Christmas to midsummer, which is the time for the big Christian festivals until now. So this is an innovation. And in many ways, I think it's to enable people to cope with the coming of winter better. And one of them is All Saints, to commemorate the vast number of Christian saints for whom you can't find room in each community in the rest of the year. There are just too many saints days for anybody to get any work done. And especially early Christian martyrs who died for their faith.

And saints come into their own, whereas intercessors with the big three, Father, Son, Holy Ghost, they're the people you talk to to persuade them to ask God Almighty to do favors for you. And that's especially linked to the dead, because around this period, Christianity concedes that the idea that everybody on dying goes straight to heaven or hell, or does so at the last judgment, seems a bit counterintuitive, because very few people seem to be good enough to deserve heaven on a plate or bad enough to deserve being chucked straight into the flames of hell. And so the doctrine grows up of a halfway house called purgatory to which most people go, in which their sins are tortured out of them and they're rendered clean and fit for heaven. them, and they're rendered clean and fit for heaven. And the idea comes in with this, that living Christians can reduce the sentences of their beloved dead in purgatory, and even reduce

the pain they're suffering if they pray for them and ring bells for them. And that's why the Feast of All Souls is introduced just after All Saints on the 2nd of November for this to happen. But really, the two days together are 48 hours of commemorating the beloved dead and trying to help them and in doing so achieving some kind of closure. Interesting to me that the tradition of this festival being transactionary in some way is carried over into the sort of Christianization of England or Britain at this time. I'm wondering how ordinary folk, ordinary people feel about the, maybe co-option is not really the right word, but the transformation of Samhain or this festival before it becomes Halloween. How people feel about that being adopted by the Catholic Church, by Christianity. Is that a transition that is widely accepted by the broad populace?

Not in the least. I think people feel pretty good because this is not really a transformation, it's an add-on. Everything that's familiar, the celebrations of the community coming back together, and the mockery of dark and cold and fear remains. You just get an added bonus in being able to pray for your beloved dead. And the two things are side by side. The Christian church does not persecute these folk customs. In fact, it totally ignores those for the beginning of winter, just lets people get on. They aren't heretical. They don't threaten the church in any way. They don't cost it anything. And they don't imperil souls. Whereas if you add the praying of the dead to that, then it becomes a further sanctification of the festival.

So everybody wins. There's no sign of resistance. And for very good reason, which I think I've explained. You talk about the praying for the dead. And I remember I grew up in Catholic Ireland. So these are actually motions that I have moved through in terms of going to the graveyard, saying these prayers, offering up these things for the relief of the souls of our related dead. But is there something also in kind of evoking the dead or haunting of sort of kind of calling

on people who have passed over. So obviously there's a financial gain for the church when this happens in terms of some of the money that they're bringing in. And there's a gain for the souls who have departed in that they may have a shorter time in purgatory. But it also, to me, and this is potentially just personal, but it also used to feel like there was an invocation of the dead in those particular ceremonies where they would join you for a while. Is there any history to that at all? It's a really interesting point and question. Certainly your Irish experience would be par for the modern Catholic one, because Protestantism abolished purgatory and praying for the dead.

But Catholicism kept praying for the dead, which is why it's not just Ireland where you visit your ancestral graves. It's all over Latin America, hence the Day of the Dead in Mexico, where they've gone very big time on it. The answer to the question is a subtle one, which is that in Christian doctrine, is a subtle one, which is that in Christian doctrine, the dead don't come back. So you can't commune with them. They're stuck in purgatory or in Protestantism. They're in heaven or hell. There's radio silence. But the idea that at least some people can return at some times, is embedded in intuitive human response. It's embedded in folk tradition, hence the belief in ghosts, which to most Orthodox Christians simply shouldn't happen. But people have been meeting them and seeing them for millennia. And so there's a very strong popular feeling that at times like

Halloween, you can actually lay out food and drink in case the beloved dead want to come by. And this is frankly in defiance of anything Christianity has had to say about the subject. But again, it's not controversial. In practice, the church just seems to have ignored people doing it. And if it's made any comment, tends to talk about silly people and superstitions. In other words, they regard this as completely pointless and ineffectual, but Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and this month on Not Just the Tudors I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to

and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. we've talked about halloween's transformation from potentially its ancient origins through to the early medieval world and when we think of halloween today i certainly think of it as being quite americanized in terms of the material culture associated with it, in terms of popular culture, films, that kind of thing. Talk to us, Ronald, about Halloween in America. And does it have any roots in the Halloween of the medieval world? To survive in a modern world, any festival has to be commercialized. And that's how it prospers. And the American Halloween is connected by a direct stream of transmission from the ancient Halloween, the ancient feast of the beginning of winter under different names, largely because of massive Irish immigration to America, particularly in and after the famine, the 1840s, but also then continuing, which set up an enormous and influential Irish-American presence.

Just go to Boston or New York and hang out in the pubs there, or name the American presidents with Irish names and nationality, right down to the present one. And they take Halloween with them. They root it in America. And then for the vast number of Americans who aren't Roman Catholics, the transmutation is made into seeing it as a feast that mocks the dark and the scary. And mocking monsters and phantoms and ghosts and the wrong kind of witch is something that commercializes really easily. That's why we have the boom in American Halloween at the present day. The one thing that the American Halloween can

veer into, which disturbs quite a lot of devout American evangelical Protestants, is that it can appear to glamorize or glorify evil. This is a contentious assertion, and I'm not supporting it myself, but it's clearly a culture war. And it's kicked over into Britain as well with evangelical Protestants feeling that Halloween is somehow wrong. Glorifying and glamorizing evil or badness is something the Winter Festival never did. It's supposed to do the exact opposite. Yeah, it really struck me when you said that, that one word we hadn't said until now is evil. And that's one of the things that maybe a lot of people would associate with aspects of Halloween. And okay, there is fear, but that's definitely not equal to evil. And this idea of evilness, what is that connected to, Ronald, do you think? Is it a demonic connection? Is that what the evangelicals in the United States are linking it with? Well, the evangelicals in the United States do link it to demons because they link practically anything they think is wrong to demons.

it to demons because they link practically anything they think is wrong to demons. But again, this is not traditional. The fear that hangs over Halloween is not connected to cosmic evil. Nobody in the ancient world or middle ages thought that winter was engineered by a Satan figure. It just happens. It's part of the natural order, but it's one of its most forbidding characteristics. It's our fault for being up in this part of the world where the temperature drops dangerously at a certain time of year. And so evil was not part of it, but terror, fear, menace. One would not describe a hurricane or an avalanche as evil, but what it does amounts to the same kind of thing, mass loss of life, mass loss of property. So winter is out to get us reasonably enough, and it's up to us to try and stop it. One thing I want to pick up on there, Ronald, you mentioned the witch in relation to Halloween. And

I'm very interested in the sort of archetypal characters that we now wheel out for Halloween celebrations. And that in some ways, they are the manifestation of some of these fears. Now, obviously, as you well know from your fantastic recent book about the witch, witches have a very complex and long history of their own. But what's their role in relation to Halloween? Is that an entirely modern connection that's being made there? Is that something that has its roots in the medieval Christian period? Does the witch have a place in these celebrations? Witches arrive rather belatedly at Halloween. They begin to be

associated with it by the 18th, 19th centuries. But that's largely because they enter the package of menacing spirits and entities. In traditional societies, which is in the very limited and specific sense of human beings who work magic to hurt others, are the classic human bogey figures. They are feared in most parts of the inhabited world by most societies through most times, though not all. Their means of accounting for capricious fortune, people having uncanny bad luck. And if you attribute uncanny bad luck to other sources, you don't fear and believe in witches. And the other two sources are angry ghosts, ancestors you've annoyed, and malicious land spirits, fairies, or elves. But most human societies have come down on witches, and that there is no particular association with Halloween

until the relatively modern period, when witches become standardized folk figures, bogey figures, largely because you're no longer arresting them, putting them to death in practice. So they've come like cartoon characters, and so conjoined the other assemblage of cartoon characters that trot out at Halloween. That's absolutely fascinating. Thinking about some of the other traditions that we still practice today, I'm thinking in particular about pumpkins. To me, this feels like a more authentically, maybe pagan practice.

Does its history go that far back when it comes to Halloween? Jack-o'-lanterns hollowed out vegetables with candles inside feel very pagan, but they're actually not at Halloween. Rather like witches and Halloween, they're a modern connection. They can't be pumpkins in Europe because that's an American vegetable that arrives here in the 20th century. But you do have an association between Will-o'-the-Wisps, the strange lights that appear in marshland, and ghosts and phantoms. They're part of the general spookiness of the landscape.

if you're poor and you can't afford a commercial one, is to hollow out a mangle or a turnip and stick a candle inside and use that to light your way. And they're well-recorded right back into history. But actually, it's the Americans in the late 19th century who developed the Halloween custom hollowing out pumpkins, very often in fascinating shapes and lighting them up. This gets over to England, to Britain in the early 20th century. And sometimes turnips and manglewurzels are substituted. But it's basically an American Halloween idea. That's a little bit disappointing. Well, you can still keep the association with Will-o'-the-Wisps, because when people in Somerset, for example, begin imitating the American custom with mangle-wurzels, the names that they give to these are those of the Will-o'-the-Wisps in Somerset levels, which are immemorial, pagan, if you like, and really very spooky.

It's interesting that you mentioned the class element. I know you mentioned it in passing, Ronald, but for poor people to use the turnip, for instance. And I know when we were kids, we hollowed out turnips and there was always this kind of thing in rural Ireland that it was a poor thing to do, that if you didn't have the pumpkin. I just wondered if you could say a little bit about the kind of class elements to Halloween then. There are class elements to anything in a traditional society, and they come out fighting at every festival, because basically the rich can celebrate more than the poor. But the dynamic has usually been quite a cozy and reciprocal one. And it is

based on the arrangement I spoke of earlier, that what makes festivals exciting is that people do exciting things, like putting on theatre, like dancing, like bringing in garlands or naples, like lighting bonfires, like singing special songs, like Christmas carols. And if you're rich, the great thing is you have other people to do that for you. And if you're poor, the great thing is you can then do that, which gives you some kind of dignity and pride as you're providing a service for the community. And then you get rewarded, which saves you from begging. And so every festival has this built-in mechanism since history begins and probably long before, whereby the poor entertain the rich and the rich pay for it. And together you get a great show. Before we wrap up, Ronald, I want to ask about, in terms of this pre-Christian Samhain celebration, if we want to mark it today,

or our listeners want to mark it today, what kinds of rituals and rights should we be following? There are all sorts. Party games are a great feature of Halloween. They're a great feature of any winter festival because you're indoors. But bobbing for apples, or if you're really suicidal, trying to take apples in your mouth from wooden racks with candles burning on them. I've done this, and I don't recommend it to the faint hearted, but it certainly raises the stakes. All manner of regular party games, card games, charades, and the dressing up and going around to say hello to your neighbors. Fancy dress. That's one of the greatest single aspects of festivity as a whole, especially in winter.

But at Halloween, when you can pretend to be so much that's really exotic, really creepy, really dramatic, is the favourite time for it. Just as a very quick parting word then, I suppose we've looked at the history of Halloween. We've looked at the origins of some of these rituals and their performative elements. Could you leave us with an idea of what you think Halloween means today? Today, Halloween ruffles people. It makes people uncomfortable as well as gives them a great opportunity for enjoyment. Because really it forces people to confront two things, even if they don't realize it, with which humanity is still profoundly uncomfortable because it's powerless. One is the seasons, the fact that we're in the grip of a changing climate, even without mass climate change. And the other is death. And the two of them come together at Halloween and render it a festival for which the emotional stakes are raised

particularly high. That's just fascinating. And you know, I'm so excited for Halloween now this year. I feel fully equipped to enjoy myself. Well, Ronald, thank you so much. That was just the most fantastic discussion. And I know it's one that our listeners will enjoy. So thank you very much for coming on today. Thank you for such intelligent questions. You're a wonderful Anglo-Irish partnership. Oh, that's lovely.

We try, we try. We're building bridges, Ronald. Building bridges. If you enjoyed this episode of After Dark, please follow wherever you get your podcasts. And if you really liked it, and I know you did, you definitely really liked this, drop us a review. Go on, do it now.

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