A specific time for the remembrance of the Dead can be traced back to the 6th Century on the Holy Day of Pentecost, also known as Whitsuntide in Britain and Northern Ireland.

In 993 A.D., Benedictine abbot Saint Odilo of Cluny declared in the Apocrypha that ‘Therefore he made atonement for the Dead, so that they might be set free from the sin’ (2 Maccabees, xii, 46). This request marked the beginning of All Souls’s Day. By the 9th Century, the date of All Saints Day was set to the 1st of November and All Souls Day was annually celebrated on the 2nd of November. This is for example written in the Irish text known as Martyrology of Tallaght, which may have been compiled and written by 790. Tallaght was a well known monastery near Dublin from the 8th Century.

The text mentions the declining pagan faith in Ireland and provides a list of Christian saints and martyrs and their commemoration feasts. (Follett, Westley, 2006, Ó Riain, Pádraig, 2006). Across western Europe, these days of feast have been called All Hallows’ Day, followed by All Hallows’s Eve and the third day of Allhallowtide (Davis Kenneth, 2005).

In Ireland, children were given fruits such as apples, nuts, in particular hazelnuts. After all, Autumn is the time when crops such as nuts, apples, potatoes and turnips are ripe and ready to be stored away for winter. The trick-or-treating may have come from either collecting food and firewood for the bonfires on Samhain. Another alternative explanation may derive from the collecting of soulmass-cakes during the practice of souling.

Professor Emeritus Henry Glassie from the University of Indiana Bloomington notes that the rural Irish population may have continued their former pagan customs in the privacy of their households long after the Christianization of Ireland. And so it may be that apples, nuts and the divination games associated with them could be traced back to pre-Christian symbolism (Glassie, 1982).

As for the Jack-o-lanterns, the carving of turnips and mangel wurzel was originally done in the small village of Hinton St. George at a festival called Punky night. It takes place on the last Thursday in the month of October, at a time when harvest is officially over and the days are about to be darker and colder. As written by the American author Lesley Bannatyne (2011), the first Jack-o’-lanterns weren’t made out of pumpkins or any kind of crop. Rather, there was a belief that natural swamp gas, or bog gas, were lanterns of dead wandering souls.

Another term for these lanterns is, for instance, the will-o’ -the-wisp. These gases, blue-ish and customarily sinister, would resemble departed Souls in Purgatory. Lesley also mentions that the Cluniac creed king Peter the Venerable called these “Lanterns of the Dead ” in 1200. They would represent the souls of Christians who died and are now in purgatory.

The American folklorist Stith Thompson included the will-o’-the-wisps in his Thompson-Motif-Index, which is a large database of relevant and widely distributed mythological motifs along with their character roles, narratives and descriptors. Stith Thompson regarded the Jack-o’-lanterns and will-o’-the-wisps as relatively synonymous. Historically, this 700-year-old will-o’-the-wisp phenomenon has been observed in many countries in Europe, such as in Norway as the Hessdalen lights, as corpse-candles in Wales, Irrlichter in the German-speaking regions of Europe, or as Ignis Fatuus in 1653 by the English Puritan William Fulke (Howell Edwards, 2014).

Anthropologist John G. Owens remained somewhat skeptical of the will-o’-the-wisps as bioluminescent gases found in marshes and swamps. He wrote in the Folk-Lore from Buffalo Valley (1891), published by the Journal of American Folklore:

This is a name that is sometimes applied to a phenomenon perhaps more frequently called Jack-O’-the-Lantern, or Will-o’-the-wisp. It seems to be a ball of fire, varying in size from that of a candle-flame to that of a man’s head. It is generally observed in damp, marshy places, moving to and fro; but it has been known to stand perfectly still and send off scintillations. As you approach it, it will move on, keeping just beyond your reach; if you retire, it will follow you. That these fireballs do occur, and that they will repeat your motion, seems to be established, but no satisfactory explanation has yet been offered. (Owens J.G., 1891, p. 9).

The term Jack-o’-lantern itself most probably derives from an Irish folktale, known as Drunk Jack, Stingy Jack, or Jack the Blacksmith.

The narrative of the folktale remains similar in many versions. Jack has suffered consequences for his misdeeds and is sent to either dark marshlands, the twilight netherworlds, or he was blocked from entering neither hell nor heaven. (Glassie, 1985).

There is, however, ethnographic literature on the existence of turnip lanterns in Continental Europe. Carved lanterns made out of turnips are  likewise crafted in Germany, where they are known as Rübengeister and in Switzerland, where they are called the Räbelichtli. As has been suggested, the carving of turnips may be found in the Roman festival Pomona and the Irish Samhain (Thomas Miedaner, 2014, p. 205), however, more sources are needed to further confirm this.

While the wood nymph Pomona was associated with fruits and cultivated orchards, it is difficult to date or reconstruct a Roman high-festival dedicated to Pomona. The tale of Pomona and Vertumnus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses does not reveal an exact dating (Gentilcore, 1995). The nymph of orchards and fruits Pomona may have played a part in the Vertumnalia celebrations that may have been linked to late autumn crops and fertility of the fields (D.G. Brinton, 1892, p.322)

As for the carving of turnips in Germany and in Switzerland, in both cases the celebrations are on the same day as the St. Martins parade, where children carry lanterns and join local parades. St. Martin’s feast day is now celebrated on the 11th of November. St. Martin died on November 8, 397, and was buried on November 11th.

St. Martin feasts and parades are well known throughout western Europe. Martin, the third bishop of Tours, was born in 316. He was stationed in Gaul, modern day northwestern France, in the Roman army as a soldier when he experienced a vision. He met a beggar in the cold and dark days. Martin cut his military cloak and shared it with the man in need. It was on that night that Jesus Christ appeared to Martin.

The 11th of November, however, also marks a time of autumnal feasts and celebrations, a time when meat is butchered and prepared for the community.  In Irish, Halloween is known as Oíche Shamhna, or November Night.

As written in an in-depth study regarding St. Martin feast in Ireland by Billy Mac Fhloinn, a goose or fowl was traditionally butchered on St. Martin’s feast. It doesn’t end here, however. Sometimes, cattle or pigs blood would be also used. The feast had to be carried out in highly specific ways in order to protect against bad luck. The blood of the animal was said to have magical-protective powers, to protect against disease, death and famine.

Overall, there were many rules and beliefs surrounding St. Martin’s feast in Ireland since the 7th Century. Its original interpretive framework may be found in the earlier processions of the Samhain prior to the advent of Christianity in Ireland (Billy Mac Fhloinn, 2016).

One question that arises here is how widespread such customs were throughout Europe, and if they followed similar cosmological narratives that informed the feasts.

Seasonal migrations of livestock and important times of the agricultural year, such as harvest season, have had a tremendous impact on rituals and beliefs throughout Europe, for example in Spain, and some of Spanish beliefs and customs among rural pastoralists do suggest a continuity from pre-Christian times into the present (Vidal-González, 2016, 2019). 

In the German state of Bavaria, for instance, the 11th of November is also known for the Wolfauslassen tradition, which marks the time that pastoralists bring the cattle and livestock from the higher meadows back into the barns and stables for the upcoming winter. Similar traditions take place elsewhere in Europe around the same time, from Austria to the Baltic, such as Latvia. Throughout Europe, there are autumnal feasts held in combination with the end of the agricultural year. 

The question that may be asked here is whether these feasts, at least in parts, descend from a larger cultural phenomenon of sacrificial feasts practiced in antiquity (Ramsay MacMullen, 1981, pp. 38 – 39). Could these traditions indicate that there were older layers of a pre-Christian origin present throughout Europe and the time of the Christian All Souls Day and Martinmas represent an additional, re-contextualized interpretation of pre-Christian rituals? This, however, needs significantly more research to be further explored. 

In the New World, the first pumpkin carving is recorded by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1837, where crafting a Jack-o’-lantern is mentioned in the Twice-Told-Tales (Rogers, 2003, pp. 53, 57, Hawthorne, 1837). Halloween did not become what we imagine it like today, with Jack-o’-lanterns and trick-or-treating, until the mid-19th Century when hunger and poverty drove many Irish immigrants to the USA.

In the 1920s, the town of Anoka in Minnesota had the first Halloween committee to prepare for the spooky event, where costumes and other festivities were taken to Main Street in order to celebrate. Since then, and especially to the turn of the 20th Century, Halloween has become an American celebration that many folks, whether children or grandparents, look forward to each year.

References:

Mullally, E. (2016). SAMHAIN REVIVAL. Archaeology, 69(6), 34-37. Retrieved July 6, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/26348788

MacNeill, Máire. The Festival of Lughnasa: A Study of the Survival of the Celtic Festival of the Beginning of Harvest. Oxford University Press, 1962. P.426

Meyer, Kuno (ed. and tr.). “The Oldest Version of Tochmarc Emire.” Revue Celtique (1890):433–57. Bannatyne, L. (2010). HALLOWEEN: An American Holiday, an American History. (n.p.): Pelican Publishing.

Hutton, R. (1997). The stations of the sun: A history of the ritual year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frazer, W and M’Cormick Mr H. M’Neili. ‘Harvest Rites in Ireland’. Folklore, 1914

Keating, Geoffrey, Geoffrey Keating: History of Ireland, 1709 (copy of 17th century original). Cambridge University Library. GB 12 MS.ADD.4181

Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). “All Saints, Festival of” . Encyclopædia Britannica. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 709.

Rogers, N. (2002). Halloween: From pagan ritual to party night. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Thomas Martz, (2010) The Adoption of Christianity by the Irish and Anglo-Saxons: The Creation of Two Different Christian Societies, Colonial Academic Alliance. Undergraduate Research Journal.