Photo by Robyn Beck for AFP/Getty Images; hosted at CNN
Where did this practice or tradition originate from?
Halloween as we know it in America tracks itself back through several different holidays and festivals across hundreds if not thousands of years of human history given where our holidays and cultures derive from, and what those cultures did to others around them during their own heyday. Both history.com’s post on the “History of Halloween” and Hannah Lamberg for Spirit Halloween’s “Ultimate Guide to Halloween” post track Halloween all the way back to the Celtic festival of Samhain; but make allusions to the Romans transposing their festivals of Feralia and Pomona over Samhain– and then, the Catholics transposing All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day over Samhain when the Catholics began their 9th century expansion into Celtic holdings.
Photo by Matt Cardy for Getty Images; hosted at History.com
What cultures or perspectives are represented in this practice? Describe them and their impact.
The perspectives here started from Samhain as a celebration of the end of the harvest season, and the onset of winter– a time where they believed the barrier between life and what comes after was at its thinnest. At times like these, it was believed that the spirits of the dead would rejoin them at these feasts– but at the same time, so could more malevolent things from the other side; which necessitated the disguises of that era meant to trick these more malicious entities that would over thousands of years, develop into the costumes that we know today; just with less superstition attached to the practice. (It is noted in Lamberg’s ‘Ultimate Guide to Halloween’ article that “someone could ‘prank’ another villager and then blame it on the spirits because the costumes made it challenging to differentiate the villagers from the supernatural entities.“ In that, we’re not so different from our forebears!)
This perspective holds until the Romans came, which Lamberg’s article makes reference of the Romans having created two new festivals to interpose over Samhain once their 43 CE expansion into Celtic territory had settled down– though these new festivals kept much of the same energy as their Celtic counterparts in that Feralia “represents a time in which Romans would traditionally honor their dead”, and Pomona as a festival was intended to “praise the Roman goddess of trees and fruits, Pomona”— where apples were a very big deal to the Romans of eld.
Oil Panting by Ferdinand Bol, “Vertumnus and Pomona”, 1644; hosted at wikiart.org
Lamberg’s article once more adds clarity; as even I at first took her to be little more than a harvest goddess on first research into her– but apples had a highly sacred symbolism in Roman society; apples from the area named for the goddess “were associated with life, death, love, and magic; all of which falls within Pomona’s domain”. Where Madeline Wahl and Kelly Kuehn’s article for Reader’s Digest on the origins of apple bobbing would imply that the tradition of bobbing for apples was a European courtship tradition, I feel that the more likely tie-together that was missed in this article comes from the Roman festival of Pomona, though it IS undeniable that cultural overlap and conversation occurred that brought more European and Catholic norms and mores into Celtic society after the Roman expansion.