Oasis October 2019

By Dominique Krayenbühl
Halloween, a fun autumn celebration,
brought to America by Irish
immigrants in the 19th century has
spread across the world. Although it
is fashion-prone in its modern guise,
acquiring its cat, bat and owl images,
and its orange and black color
scheme along the way, revelers may
be surprised to know that behind
the ghoulish costumes they may
have chosen to wear on
that day lies a very
ancient tradition.
The word
Halloween
derives
from "All
Hallows'
Eve" or
the eve
of All
Saints'
Day, a
Catholic celebration held on 1st
November. It was instituted to
replace Samhain, a feast that was
already celebrated more than 2500
years ago when the Celts, an Indo-
European population, reached
Ireland and adopted it from its earlier
inhabitants. Samhain corresponded
to the Celtic New Year's Eve. The Irish
Celts used a lunar calendar and the
new year celebration lasted three
days starting at sunset (beginning
of the Celtic day) of a full moon. This
period of the year also coincided with
the end of the harvest and the time
when animals were brought back
from the fields for winter as the light
season ended and the dark season
began. From a maximum daylight
of seventeen hours at the summer
solstice, the day length in Ireland end
October is midway to its shortest of
seven hours at the winter solstice.
The Celts believed in a world full of
spirits, human or not, some of them
with subtle bodies, others with
nobody at all. According to their lore,
at Samhain the threshold between
this world and the otherworld those
entities inhabited became porous
and could be crossed both ways.
Since it was forbidden by Celtic law
to write down religious traditions,
what we know about Samhain has
been pieced together from Celtic
legends that were consigned later
by Christian authors. On those days,
some spirits like those of benevolent
family ancestors were welcomed
home. Others were feared because
they could be harmful. As recently
as the early twentieth century some
Northern Irish families did not allow
children out on Halloween night
because of the fear that "little people"
or fairies might carry them away.
Babies were at risk of being stolen by
fairies and replaced by a fairy child.
Dressing up in a scary attire would
frighten bad spirits away.
What about today's beliefs in the
spooky entities party-goers in their
contemporary Halloween outfit
impersonate today? FATE, "the
world's leading magazine of the
paranormal" has been collecting and
publishing reports of encounters
with strange beings since 1948, and
a 2013 poll on belief in ghosts found
that it was held by 42 percent of
respondents in the US and 52 percent
in the UK. Even more amazing is the
story about a popular Irish Halloween
figure, the leprechaun, a male fairy
46 October 19 CSA
www.livinginegypt.org