Samhain

Samhain is genuinely attested in early Irish literature, which puts it in a better evidential position than most of the modern Wheel of the Year. What is attested is narrower than what is usually claimed.

The medieval Irish sources, the tale literature, the law tracts, and glossaries such as Cormac's Glossary, treat Samhain as one of four quarter days, with Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, and place it at the beginning of winter. The tales set major assemblies at it, notably the gathering at Tara, and a number of otherworldly incursions in the sagas happen at Samhain, which is the basis of the thin-veil claim.

Ronald Hutton, whose survey of the British ritual year is the standard scholarly treatment, argues that the earliest sources present it primarily as a harvest and herding festival, the point at which livestock were brought in from summer pasture and stock decisions made, and that a specific ritual connection with the dead is not evidenced in them. The otherworld episodes in the sagas are literary, occurring at a date that marks a boundary, and the sagas were written down by Christian monks centuries after conversion.

There is no evidence for druidic ritual at Samhain, none for human sacrifice, and none for a god of the dead named Samhain, a figure invented in nineteenth-century writing from a misreading, and repeated since in anti-Halloween tracts.

The name means, plausibly, summer's end. The suggestion that it derives from a deity's name is not accepted by Celticists.

The claim that the church placed All Saints on 1 November to overwrite Samhain is the standard explanation, it is old, and it is weaker than its currency suggests.

The sequence is documented. Rome kept a feast of all martyrs on 13 May, from the dedication of the Pantheon by Boniface IV around 609. Gregory III, between 731 and 741, dedicated an oratory in St Peter's to all saints, and the date of that dedication is itself uncertain in the sources. The 1 November observance is attested in Northumbria and Ireland by around 800, Alcuin, a Northumbrian, recommends it in correspondence, and in 835 Louis the Pious made it obligatory across the Frankish empire at the instance of Gregory IV.

The difficulty for the suppression theory is direction of travel. The November date appears in the insular and Frankish north and moves outward, rather than being imposed from Rome onto a Celtic fringe. James Frazer argued for the Samhain connection; Hutton argues the date is more plausibly a Germanic than a Celtic idea, and points out that the Irish church, which had Samhain on its doorstep, was not the source of the date.

It is also worth noting that the 13 May date has been argued to overlie the Roman Lemuria, a festival of restless spirits, which is the same kind of claim, made about a different date, and is no better evidenced.

What can be said is that a Christian feast of the dead and an older seasonal boundary ended up on the same days, and that the causal story usually told to explain it is not demonstrated.

The modern festival is a compound, and most of its parts can be dated.

All Souls' Day on 2 November, instituted at Cluny around 998, gave medieval Europe an authorised season of praying for the dead, and with it the practice of souling, the poor going door to door offering prayers for the dead in exchange for soul cakes. That is the ancestor of trick-or-treating, and it is a Christian custom.

Guising, children in costume performing for food or money, is documented in Scotland from the late nineteenth century, and Scottish and Irish emigration carried both practices to North America.

Trick-or-treating under that name is a twentieth-century North American development, first attested in print in the 1920s and 1930s and becoming general after the Second World War, from where it has been re-exported to Britain, Ireland and much of the world as an American custom, which it is, and which is a good example of a practice returning to its source unrecognised.

The jack-o'-lantern was a turnip in Ireland and Scotland. The pumpkin is American, being far larger and easier to carve.

The witch, cat and pointed hat iconography is nineteenth- and twentieth-century commercial imagery, developed in greeting cards and later in film, and bears no relation to early modern witch trials or to anything Samhain.

Modern Pagan and Wiccan Samhain, one of the eight sabbats, dates in its present form to the mid twentieth century and draws on the Irish material, on Frazer, and on the reconstruction of a Wheel of the Year that no single ancient culture kept in that form.