Does anyone know what the true meaning and history behind Halloween is?

Answer 1

The Celtic Connection

Our modern celebration of Halloween is a VERY distant descendant of the ancient Celtic fire festival called Samhain. (The word is pronounced "sow-en" rhyming with cow, because "mh" in the middle of an Irish word has a "w" sound.) It was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year. The Celts lived more than 2,000 years ago in what is now Great Britain, Ireland, and France. Their new year began on November 1.

Celtic legends tell us that on this night, all the hearth fires in Ireland were extinguished, and then re-lit from the central fire of the Druids at Tlachtga, 12 miles from the royal hill of Tara. (The Druids were the learned class among the Celts. They were religious priests who also acted as judges, lawmakers, poets, scholars, and scientists.) Upon this sacred bonfire the Druids burned animals and crops. The extinguishing of the hearth fires symbolized the "dark half" of the year. The re-kindling from the Druidic fire was symbolic of the returning life that was hoped for in the spring.

In the Celtic belief system, turning points, such as the time between one day and the next, the meeting of sea and shore, or the turning of one year into the next were seen as magical times. The turning of the year was the most potent of these times. This was the time when the "veil between the worlds" was at its thinnest, and the dead could communicate with the living.

The feast of Samhain is described by MacCane as order suspended. "During this interval the normal order of the universe is suspended, the barriers between the natural and the supernatural are temporarily removed, the sidh lies open and all divine beings and the spirits of the dead move freely among men and interfere sometimes violently, in their affairs".

The Celts believed that when people died, they went to a land of eternal youth and happiness called Tir nan Og. They did not have the concept of heaven and hell that the Christian church later brought into the land. The dead were sometimes believed to be dwelling with the Fairy Folk, who lived in the numerous mounds or sidhe that dotted the Irish and Scottish countryside.

The Celts did not actually have demons and devils in their belief system. Some Christians describe Halloween as a festival in which the Celts sacrificed human beings to the devil or some evil demonic god of death. This is not accurate. The Celts did believe in gods, giants, monsters, witches, spirits, and elves, but these were not considered evil, so much as dangerous. The fairies, for example, were often considered hostile and menacing to humans because they were seen as being resentful of men taking over their lands. On this night of Samhain, the fairies would sometimes trick humans into becoming lost in the fairy mounds, where they would be trapped forever.

Folk tradition tells us of some divination practices associated with Samhain. Among the most common were divinations dealing with marriage, weather, and the coming fortunes for the year. These were performed via such methods as ducking for apples and apple peeling. Ducking for apples was a marriage divination. The first person to bite an apple would be the first to marry in the coming year -- like the modern toss of the wedding bouquet. Apple peeling was a divination to see how long your life would be. The longer the unbroken apple peel, the longer your life was destined to be. In Scotland, people would place stones or nuts in the ashes of the hearth before retiring for the night. Anyone whose stone had been disturbed during the night was said to be destined to die during the coming year.

Answer 2

Halloween is an observance celebrated on the night of October 31, most notably by children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting sweets or money. It is celebrated in much of the Western world, though most common in the United States, Puerto Rico, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Canada. It's popularity is increasing widely in Australia, and is often observed by many in the country. Irish, Scots and other immigrants brought older versions of the tradition to North America in the 19th century. Most other Western countries have embraced Halloween as a part of American pop culture in the late 20th century.

The term Halloween, and its older spelling Hallowe'en, is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening before "All Hallows Day".[1] In Ireland, the name was All Hallows Eve and this name is still used by some older people. Halloween was also sometimes called All Saints' Eve. The holiday was a day of religious festivities in various northern European pagan traditions, until it was appropriated by Christian missionaries and given a Christian interpretation. In Mexico November 1st and 2nd are celebrated as the Day of the Dead.

Halloween is also called Pooky Night in some parts of Ireland, presumably named after the púca, a mischievous spirit.

On Great Britain and Ireland in particular, the pagan Celts celebrated the Day of the Dead on All Hallows Day (1st November). The spirits supposedly rose from the dead and, in order to attract them, food was left on the doors. To scare off the evil spirits, the Celts wore masks. When the Romans invaded Great Britain, they embellished the tradition with their own, which is both a celebration of the harvest and of honoring the dead. Very much later, these traditions were transported to the United States, Canada and Australia.

Halloween is sometimes associated with the occult. Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when the spiritual world can make contact with the physical world and when magic is most potent (e.g. Catalan mythology about witches).

Answer 3

I do.

Halloween is a time where the dead passed into the living world, evil spirits would come about and monks and priests would carry masks to frighten the spirits away, they would also carry turnips hollow with a candel, it's ceremonial.

Halloween is usually celebrated in North America which started with the celts and the Irish immagrants who came here because of potato famine.

But in the eighth century there were so many saints that there where not enough days to celebrate them all, so Pope Gregory III built a chapel to honor all of those saints and near 850 Pope Gregory IV created All Saints' Day to honor the saints. All Hallow Even was the evening before All Saints' Day, hallow means "saint". All Saints' Day was formerly called Hallowmas. The name Hallow Even eventualy shortened to Halloween.

= ) There are little tid bits of info, but the whole holiday started out in many culters like the Romans, Celts, British, and Irish.

Answer 4

The 1910 edition of The Encyclopædia Britannica states: “All Souls’ Day . . . the day set apart in the Roman Catholic Church for the commemoration of the faithful departed. The celebration is based on the doctrine that the souls of the faithful which at death have not been cleansed from venial sins, or have not atoned for past transgressions, cannot attain the Beatific Vision, and that they may be helped to do so by prayer and by the sacrifice of the mass. . . . Certain popular beliefs connected with All Souls’ Day are of pagan origin and immemorial antiquity. Thus the dead are believed by the peasantry of many Catholic countries to return to their former homes on All Souls’ night and partake of the food of the living.”—Vol. I, p. 709.

The Encyclopedia Americana says: “Elements of the customs connected with Halloween can be traced to a Druid ceremony in pre-Christian times. The Celts had festivals for two major gods—a sun god and a god of the dead (called Samhain), whose festival was held on November 1, the beginning of the Celtic New Year. The festival of the dead was gradually incorporated into Christian ritual.”—(1977), Vol. 13, p. 725.

The book The Worship of the Dead points to this origin: “The mythologies of all the ancient nations are interwoven with the events of the Deluge . . . The force of this argument is illustrated by the fact of the observance of a great festival of the dead in commemoration of the event, not only by nations more or less in communication with each other, but by others widely separated, both by the ocean and by centuries of time. This festival is, moreover, held by all on or about the very day on which, according to the Mosaic account, the Deluge took place, viz., the seventeenth day of the second month—the month nearly corresponding with our November.” (London, 1904, Colonel J. Garnier, p. 4) Thus these celebrations actually began with an honoring actually began with an honoring of people whom God had destroyed because of their badness in Noah’s day.

Answer 5

Halloween's origins date again to the old Celtic pageant of Samhain (reported sow-in). Door The Celts, who lived two,000 years in the past within the subject that's now Ireland, the United Kingdom, and northern France, celebrated their new yr on November a million. This day marked the top of summer season and the harvest and the starting of the darkish, bloodless iciness, a time of yr that was once ordinarily related to human demise. Celts believed that at the night time earlier than the brand new yr, the boundary among the worlds of the dwelling and the useless grew to be blurred. On the night time of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, while it was once believed that the ghosts of the useless lower back to earth. In addition to inflicting obstacle and unsafe vegetation, Celts inspiration that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it simpler for the Druids, or Celtic clergymen, to make predictions approximately the long run. For a individuals thoroughly stylish at the risky usual international, those prophecies have been an essential supply of alleviation and course in the course of the lengthy, darkish iciness. To commemorate the occasion, Druids developed tremendous sacred bonfires, wherein the individuals accumulated to burn vegetation and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities. During the social gathering, the Celts wore costumes, usually which includes animal heads and skins, and tried to inform every different's fortunes. When the social gathering was once over, they re-lit their fireside fires, which they'd extinguished prior that night time, from the sacred bonfire to support guard them in the course of the approaching iciness. By A.D. forty three, Romans had conquered the vast majority of Celtic territory. In the direction of the 4 hundred years that they dominated the Celtic lands, 2 gala's of Roman starting place have been mixed with the conventional Celtic social gathering of Samhain. The first was once Feralia, an afternoon in overdue October while the Romans customarily venerated the passing of the useless. The moment was once an afternoon to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and timber. The image of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this social gathering into Samhain in general explains the culture of "bobbing" for apples that's practiced in these days on Halloween. By the 800s, the impact of Christianity had unfold into Celtic lands. In the 7th century, Pope Boniface IV specified November a million All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is broadly believed in these days that the pope was once making an attempt to interchange the Celtic pageant of the useless with a similar, however church-sanctioned excursion. The social gathering was once also known as All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse that means All Saints' Day) and the night time earlier than it, the night time of Samhain, started to be referred to as All-hallows Eve and, ultimately, Halloween. Even later, in A.D. one thousand, the church could make November two All Souls' Day, an afternoon to honor the useless. It was once celebrated in a similar way to Samhain, with huge bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the 3 celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', have been referred to as Hallowmas.

Answer 6

It comes from ancient farmers, Halloween is celebrated because it is the End of Summer, I'm think thats the time that they rake in the money from their crops.

Answer 7

Yeah,in a nutshell, it was a celebration of the last harvest, and believed to be one of the days the spirits roamed the earth( the other is april 30th), so they carved pumpkins in scary faces to scare the bad spookies away.

Answer 8

Check this out, it should help clarify:

http://wilstar.com/holidays/hallown.htm

or

http://www.theholidayspot.com/halloween/history.htm

Answer 9

All I know is that it was called All Hallows Eve.

Answer 10

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