Dressing up and doing tricks are popular Halloween activities, but few people associate this fun fall tradition celebrated on October 31 each year with its origins in Samhain, an ancient pagan festival that continues to run. For 3 days he was known by the ancient peoples who spoke the Gaelic languages, Irish and Scottish.

And writer Cady Lang believes - in a report published by the American magazine "Time" - that the Celts who lived during the Iron Age in what is now Ireland, Scotland, the United Kingdom and parts of northern Europe, had "Samhain" (literally meaning in modern Irish "the end of Summer"), marking the end of summer and the beginning of the Celtic New Year.

The Celts or Qilts are ancient European peoples who lived in Europe and Anatolia, and entering a new year for the Celts is a sign of the moment of death and resurrection, an event that had double symbolism because it was also associated with the end of the bumper harvest season and the beginning of a cold and dark winter filled with many challenges.

Halloween and Pagan Origins

Historian Nicholas Rogers, author of "Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night," argues that Samhain was "a time of crop-counting and perhaps sacrifice - including animal sacrifice - in which pastoral societies prepared themselves to survive." surviving during the winter.

He asserts that little is known about the details of this celebration, because the limited sources available are either folkloric literature such as Celtic epics, or Roman authors who may have sought to "smear" the image of the traditions of a culture with which they were often in conflict.

To understand what is known about the festival - adds Time - it is important to realize how the structure of the annual calendar affected the religious practices of the Celtic peoples.

According to a report in The Guardian entitled Paganism, part 3: the wheel of the year, many modern pagan practices rely on the wheel of the year, a major determining factor in Celtic worship.

The Celtic year was divided into two halves, light and dark, defined by two festivals of 4 annual fire festivals, and in between is celebrated to commemorate periods of solstices (when night is the shortest or longest) or equinoxes (when night and day are equal), and Samhain falls It is the festival of fire that marks the beginning of the dark half of the year between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice.

The "Encyclopedia Britannica" confirms that during the festival it was believed that the world of the gods "appears to mankind", causing supernatural tricks and disturbances, and it is also believed that spirits and ghosts of the dead return from the other world to Earth on this occasion.

To please the gods at this time, offerings (generally of crops and animals) are thrown into burning fires as a precaution against evil underworld creatures, and others are left to guard against the evil of any harmful visiting spirits.

Plays and tricks are often played but the blame is placed on fairies and spirits during the three-day period during which the festival lasts and the line between the two worlds is blurred.

Samhain Festival

The spiritual whiffs of the Celtic Samhain festival also gave way to predicting the future, an activity that was perfectly suited to the start of the Celtic New Year.

A report by History website notes that Celtic priests believed that "the existence of afterlife made it easy... to make predictions about the future." At the moments of the festival's bonfires, fortune telling and predictions of the future were made along with sacrifices, and many participants were dressed in different costumes. They often disguise themselves as animals or monsters in the hope of deceiving spirits who might wish to harm them.

Time asserts that these fire festival practices developed over time, particularly with the spread of Christianity and the rise of the Catholic Church by AD 43 and after Rome had conquered most of the Celtic lands.

In his book Halloween in America: Contemporary Customs and Performances, author Jack Santino explains how many Celtic traditions were reformulated in that era with Christian narratives in an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of pagan practices to spread the new religion. This paraphrase many of the Halloween traditions that people still celebrate to this day.