Image by Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images; hosted at history.com
What is this practice or tradition?
Rather than keep on the heavy content for this blog, we’re going to turn the wheel for a little while and look into the tradition of Halloween as celebrated in the West. Initial draftings even before I got sidelined by the potential of digging into the Supernova Motorsports analysis of NASCAR culture and those who partake of it were for holiday traditions, but I don’t want to even think about Christmas before Thanksgiving has passed; and I know by November 2nd, my ears will be mercilessly overwhelmed with Mariah Carey and Bing Crosby,so we’re looking into Halloween instead. We appreciate Spooky Month in this house.
What do other people say about it?
In the process of researching material for another assignment, I found a Spirit Halloween blog entry on a deep-dived history of Halloween. According to Hannah Lamberg, our modern practices where Halloween are concerned source heavily from the Roman festival of Pomona, named for the goddess the festival venerated (and yes, she WAS a goddess of apples and their harvest; the Jack-O-Lantern tradition comes from elsewhere); though there are mentioned circumstantials that can tie that Roman festival back to the Celtic festival of Samhain. Considering the Romans eventually conquered the Celts, it could be at least plausibly assumed that some level of ‘overwrite’ was attempted by a much more strict and authoritarian empire over those they conquered.
Image by Stuart McCall/Photographer’s Choice/Getty Images; hosted at learnreligions.com
What makes this practice or tradition interesting to you?
The interest I find in this tradition is in my having been an eclectic Pagan for the past 15 years. For years now, I’ve celebrated Samhain over Halloween with those in my more-extended circle; and based on all of the stories I’ve been told, both by elders I’d traveled with for a time, and from my peers, I’d always heard Samhain more tied to Halloween than Pomona– Pomona barely gets a notice from the circles I move in. This differing caught my eye, hard.
What would you still like to learn about this tradition?
A question I’ve still got is how this concept is celebrated across other cultures– given where I grew up, Dia de los Muertos is a favorite translation of the concept for me; but I’m interested in how other cultures address the concept of death, the afterlife, and the permeability between planes of life and afterlife.
How can you explore this tradition/practice through the blog format?
This tradition and how it translates to other cultures could easily be dived into via the blog formatting via a similar kind of cross between a question-and-answer format, and a researched micro-essay for each answer.
The Desk of S.A. 