An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Halloween

Hey, hey, for Halloween!

Then the witches shall be seen,

Some in black, and some in green,

Hey, hey, for Halloween!

Horse and hattock, horse and go,

Horse and pellatis, ho! ho!

These are the words of an old folk-song referring to the festival of Halloween, on 31st October. This is the one of the four Great Sabbats of the witches that everyone has heard about. It is traditionally a weird and ghostly season, when spirits of all kinds walk abroad, as if released for one night of the year to hold communication with mortals.

In America the celebration of Halloween, by both children and adults, is more popular than it is in Britain. The children dress up in fancy costumes and masks, and go round knocking on people’s doors and calling “Trick or treat?” If the ’treat’ is not forthcoming, in the shape of sweets, apples or pocket-money, then the house gets the ’trick’ by having the maskers play some prank upon its occupants.

Adults, too, often dress up for Halloween parties in America, to dance by the flickering light of candles in pumpkin lanterns, and scare each other with spooky frolics.

To witches, however, Halloween is a serious occasion, however merrily celebrated. It is the old Celtic Eve of Samhain (pronounced something like ’sowen’). Samhain means ’Summer’s End’, when the winter half of the year begins on 1st November. This night and all the first week of November once blazed with ritual bonfires. This is the real origin of our Bonfire Night on 5th November, which is much older than Guy Fawkes and his abortive Gunpowder Plot.

On the blazing fires, the Celts symbolically burned all the frustrations and anxieties of the preceding year. Such rituals in pre-Christian times were organised by the Druids, the Celtic priest-philosophers. (See DRUIDS.)

With the coming of Christianity, the Church tried to Christianise the old festival by making 1st November All Saints Day, or All Hallows as the old term was. Thus Samhain Eve became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween. But the attempts to discourage the pagan celebrations were so unavailing that the festival was eventually banned from the Church calendar.

It was not until 1928 that the Church of England formally restored All Hallows to its calendar, on the assumption that the old pagan associations of Halloween were at last really dead and forgotten; a supposition that was certainly premature.

The many kinds of divination associated with Halloween have been immortalised by Robert Burns in his poem of that name. These are mostly directed to discovering the person one is fated to marry, and hence were usually practised by young people. Nuts and apples were the popular fare for these family fireside celebrations; in the north of England Halloween is sometimes called Nutcrack Night, for this reason.

The witches’ magical gatherings on Halloween were (and are) taken more seriously than the fun and mischief of popular folklore. To them, Halloween is the festival of the dead. This is not as grim as it sounds, Death, to the pagan Celt, was the door which opened on to another life. The idea that those who have gone before still retain an interest in the living, and are willing to aid them, has for centuries been part of the witches’ creed. The Church has given a kind of back-handed recognition of this fact, by the way in which Spiritualism has often been denounced by clergymen as witchcraft.

It was believed that not only the souls of the dead, but also spirits and goblins of all kinds, were abroad on Halloween. The witches took advantage of this belief as a cover for their meetings; and one of the ways in which they did this was by using the pumpkin and turnip lanterns that have come to be a part of Halloween decorations.

The big orange-yellow pumpkins, that ripen around this time of year, were plentiful in cottage gardens. It was easy to hollow them out, cut a grinning face on them, and then put a candle inside to shine through. Slung from a pole, they would look at a distance in the dark like a procession of goblins, In a similar way, hollowed-out turnips would provide smaller pixy faces. They served the double purpose of a lantern to light the way through woodlands and across fields, and an effective scaring device to frighten off anyone who might get too curious.

The black cloaks and hoods worn by the witches would be invisible in the dark. The goblin lanterns would be all that could be seen, and the effect of a cluster of them bobbing along through the misty autumn night must have been hair-raising indeed to anyone not in on the secret.