samhain
Music: Between Interval: Secret Observatory (2005)
Halloween marks the beginning of the Celtic new year and the convergence of the world of the living and the dead; according to those who study the pagan sun ritual of Samhain, tonight is the easiest night to contact and cavort with the dead, and also a time when the dead might voluntarily come for a visit. Of course, nothing today about Halloween has anything remotely do to with Samhain, but that doesn't stop certain angry Christians from declaring the horned god "Satan."
Today what we celebrate as Halloween is largely a commercial venture (rivaled only by Christmas, but not by much, as the aisles in Wal-Mart and Target should attest), a sort of white-washed Disnification of what was initially a Victorian era evening of divination, then a night to worry about vandalism. We know Halloween is a hodgepodge of celebrations that occur naturally at the beginning of winter and after the harvest, as all sorts of things start to change (so Halloween falls in the middle of seasonal tradition), and so it makes sense there would be various "pagan" holidays around this time of year. After Christianity took over much of the West and the popes had some power, the church re-christened Samhain activities as "All Saints Day." English revels had costuming. Blast through centuries and you get to the effigy-crazy Guy Fawkes day in Britain (this dude tried to blow up parliament, and was caught and hanged and quartered and so forth), also celebrating in the states. Somehow all of this evolved by the nineteenth century into doing things with apples in water, or throwing nuts in the fire, or scrying with mirrors, all for the purpose of answering the question: who will I marry?
Halloween was largely imported to the states, we know, by the Irish and the Scots, which perhaps is why here the holiday was about class division in the early twentieth century. The Great Depression made sure that the cushy Victorian ladies carving pumpkins and getting glimpses of their future beloveds at midnight would soon be under attack by rock-throwing ragamuffins, disgruntled youth, clad in rags, roving the streets. According to David J. Skal in his Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween (Bloomsbury, 2002), in New York city and related areas in the north east, apparently it became common practice to beg for change on Thanksgiving. For some reason the previously generous class stopped giving, and to the ragamuffins started "pranking" and vandalizing rich folks' homes (we're not talking TP-ing someone's yard here, but real damage). Apparently folks got the idea to open their doors on the night of pranks as an anti-vandalism tactic. They fed the kids apples and cider and what not. It's likely that civc groups and schools also started organzing similar kinds of events to keep the kids off the streets. Candy companies got into the gig---and presto, "trick or treat!"
It does seem the case today that celebrating Halloween is a "lower class" or "middle class" thing, that the license to transgress that the holiday now signifies (rivaled only by Mardi Gras, of course) allows one to temporarily escape roles and social position. I am reminded here of the Halloween episodes of Roseanne, which were always about working-class "fun" with blood and guts.
Ah, so, the moral of the story today ladies and gentlemen is a Marxian one: Halloween is a holiday about class antagonism. Too bad that has been "masked" by, well, by capitalism.
Happy Halloween y'all!