Tomorrow is Halloween, for Americans one of the most persistant yet least understood link to a distant, murky past. It's a night when we and our children acknowledge and celebrate, if only jokingly, the existance of things outside of modern rationalist sensibilities. Some very religious people do not treat Halloween as a joke, recognizing it as a pagan holiday that simply will not go away or become "Christianized." Despite repeated attempts throughout the centuries to divert the people's attention away from the night of the dead, the lure of Halloween and what it represents will not go away.

So, what does Halloween really represent? To get a handle on that, we must consider its three basic stages in history: what it was, what it became and what it is now.

What It Was
Halloween originated long, long ago. It was a festival of pre-Christian Celtic peoples known with certainty to have been practiced by the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland and likely by non-Gaelic Celts in the British Isles as well. The Gaels called the festival Samhain, which most likely is derived by a word that meant "Summer's End," and which is, to this day, is still the name of the month of October in the Irish and Scots Gaelic languages. The Gaulish Coligny Calendar contains a month called Samonios, which is taken by many of scholarly and not-so-scholarly persuasion to be evidence that the Continental Celts also celebrated the festival.

What the festival celebrated is nicely summed up in the Samhain entry on Wikipedia:

Like most Celtic festivals, Samhain was celebrated on a number of levels. Materially, it was the time for gathering food for the long winter months ahead and bringing people and livestock into their winter quarters.

[...]

Samhain was also a time for contemplation. Death was never very far away, yet to die was not the tragedy it is in modern times. Of signal importance to the Celts people was to die with honour and to live in the memory of the tribe and be honoured at the great Feast of the Dead (in Ireland this would have been the Féile na Marbh) which took place on Samhain Eve.

This was the most magical time of the year; Samhain was the day which did not exist. During the night the great shield of Scathach was lowered, allowing the barriers between the worlds to fade and the forces of chaos to invade the realms of order, the material world conjoining with the world of the dead. At this time the spirits of the dead and those yet to be born walked amongst the living. The dead could return to the places where they had lived and food and entertainment were provided in their honour. In this way the tribes were at one with its past, present and future.

The core component in latter-day Halloween observances, the idea of ghosts and spirits out and about on the one night of the year, is still intact 2500+ years later, although in a much debased fashion. Therefore, the trepidation of many devout Christians and others about Halloween being the remains of a pagan holiday, even in its current secular form, is not unreasonable. However, most of the notoriously hysterical scare stories about Samhain/Halloween passed willy-nilly throughout the Christian community are certainly unreasonable.

How, exactly, was Samhain celebrated in pre-Christian times? Little is known about the specific customs of the ancient Celts. We do have information on broad generalities. In Ireland, the festivites are known to have centered around the locality of Tlachtgha (the Hill of Ward) in Co. Meath. Massive earthworks can still be seen on the hill. The festival lasted for at least several days, and games were probably involved. Evidence suggests that the god Lugh was the chief honoree along with the ancestors. John Gilroy's little-known book Tlachtga: Celtic Fire Festival is an excellent summation of all we know and don't know about what Samhain was in its pagan form.

What It Became
If (as is likely) Samhain was originally a pan-Celtic festival, its traditions died out on the European continent in the wake of Roman conquest and domination. The British tribes were slower to Romanize than the Gauls, and the old festivals remained strong in folk memory - even after Christianization, the Roman abandonment, and the influence of Norse/Germanic pagan culture.

In the small areas of the Celtic lands that were relatively untouched by foreign invasion, however, the old festivals continued to be celebrated, and they evolved along with the ideas and beliefs of the populace. For instance, in Ireland, Christianity did not conquer the people but instead adapted itself to their traditions. The festivals evolved into cultural events that did not entirely discard the original ideas of the pagan past. Among the Gaels, reverance (although not outright worship) for ancestors remained strong and therefore Samhain retained its relevence.

Folkloric and popular customs and beliefs occasionally clashed with church doctrine, and the church invariable responded by attempting to replace a former pagan holiday with a new, Christian holidays. In the case of Samhain, many of the specific customs we now associate with Halloween originated with practices that arose around these hybrid festivals. Good discussions of these various customs can be found here and here.

What It Is Now
It's this blogger's opinion that Halloween grew to have the huge influence it did in the United States because of the huge influx of displaced folk from the Gaelic lands - first from the Scottish Highlands in the 1700's, and then from Ireland in the 1800's, bringing with them their folklore and their customs. The gutting of Gaelic culture by the English rendered observances of the old festivals closer to extinction than any of the various Christian edicts ever could. But free from oppression in a new world, the descendants of the Gaels began to give Samhain a whole new lease on life.

Not suprisingly, Halloween is now many things to many people. It's a children's fantasy celebration. It's a time when adults can unashamedly indulge in escapism. It's once again an openly pagan holiday, back under its original name of Samhain, celebrated differently by various groups of neo-pagans and pagan religion reconstructionists.

The reconstructionists, perhaps the smallest group of modern Halloween revelers, are doing the most active investigation into serious restoration of an extremely ancient pagan holiday with the goal of focusing on the remembrance and honor of our ancestors.