October

October keeps the number eight from the old March year, and like September it survived an emperor's attempt to take it, Domitian's Domitianus vanishing with his memory. In the Roman religious calendar the month closed what March had opened: the campaigning season of Mars. On the fifteenth of October a two horse chariot race was run on the Campus Martius and the right hand horse of the winning team was sacrificed to Mars, the October Horse, the only horse sacrifice in the Roman year. The inhabitants of two neighbourhoods fought for possession of the severed head, and the tail was carried at a run to the Regia so that its blood could touch the sacred hearth, a rite so archaic that Roman antiquarians already argued about what it meant. On the nineteenth the Armilustrium purified the army's weapons before they were laid up for winter, the mirror of the March rites that had readied them.

The gentler festivals of the month belonged to the harvest of the vine and the water supply: at the Meditrinalia of the eleventh the new wine was tasted with an old healing formula, and at the Fontinalia of the thirteenth the springs and wellheads of the city were garlanded with flowers, small courtesies to the powers that kept Rome alive.

Nothing in the pagan month, however, has shaped the modern October so much as a Christian vigil: the eve of All Saints, which gave the month's last night its enduring name.

The thirty first of October is one of the most layered dates in the Western year. In the Gaelic reckoning it was Samhain, summer's end, the night the cattle came down from the summer pastures and the boundary between this world and the otherworld stood thin, when the aos si walked and places were laid at table for the returning dead. When the Western church fixed All Saints on the first of November, the old night became the feast's vigil, All Hallows' Eve, and the compound of vigil customs and older dread travelled with emigrants to America and returned to the world as Halloween. Modern Pagans keep Samhain itself as the most solemn of the four cross quarter festivals of the Wheel of the Year, a night for honouring the dead.

The same date carries the founding anniversary of Protestantism. Reformation Day commemorates the thirty first of October 1517, the day on which Martin Luther's Ninety Five Theses against the sale of indulgences were dated and dispatched to the Archbishop of Mainz, by tradition also nailed to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, and Lutheran and Reformed churches keep the day as their hinge of history.

Catholic devotion gives the whole month to the rosary. The feast of Our Lady of the Rosary on the seventh of October began as Our Lady of Victory after the battle of Lepanto in 1571, credited by Pius V to the rosary confraternities' prayers, and October's daily rosary remains a living parish custom. The great Hindu autumn sequence of Navaratri, Durga Puja and Dussehra falls most often within the month as well.

Sources Celtic Culture: A Historical EncyclopediaJohn T. Koch (ed.) with The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and PracticesJulius Lipner