Samhain: Origins of the Celtic New Year

On the night of 31 October, in the older rural calendar of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Isle of Man, the year turned. The old year died, the new year was born, and the door between the world of the living and the world of the dead stood open. The festival was called Samhain — pronounced roughly SAH-win — and it is the oldest and best-attested of the four great fire-festivals of the Celtic year.

This article traces the origins of Samhain, from the older Irish tradition through the Christian overlay of All Saints’ and All Souls’, into the survival of the festival as Halloween in North America, and into the modern Wiccan and neo-pagan revivals. It also follows the connection between Samhain and the wider European Otherworld tradition and the Mexican Day of the Dead.

Samhain in the Irish Sources

The earliest literary evidence for Samhain comes from the medieval Irish texts, particularly the Lebor Gabála Érenn and the Fled Bricrenn, both of which describe Samhain as a great gathering of the kings. The Serglige Con Culainn places at Samhain the opening of the door to the Otherworld, when the hero is visited by a woman from the land of the dead.

In the older Irish tradition, Samhain was the moment at which the aes sídhe — the people of the fairy mounds — were closest to the world of the living. The fairy forts of Ireland were said to open on Samhain night, and the púca walked abroad. Offerings of food and milk were left at the door to placate them.

The Bonfires on the Hills

The central act of the older Samhain was the lighting of great bonfires on the hills. In the Cath Maige Tuired, the god Lugh arrives at Samhain to lead the Tuatha Dé Danann against the Fomorians. The bonfires were both ritual and practical. They marked the end of the harvest, the gathering in of the cattle, and the beginning of the cold half of the year. Each village would extinguish its own hearth-fire on Samhain eve and relight it from the great hill fire, a symbolic act of community renewal.

This hill-fire motif is found across the older Celtic world. In Scotland, where the festival was known as Oidhche Shamhna, the last sheaf of the harvest was called the Samhnag and was given a special place by the fire. In Wales, the night of Nos Calan Gaeaf is still, in some villages, a night of bonfires and divinations.

Mumming and Guising

A second great motif of Samhain is mumming and guising. Children and young people would go from door to door in costume — sometimes dressed as the dead, sometimes as spirits of the Otherworld — and recite verses in exchange for food or small coins. The underlying practice is found across the older Celtic world. The mummers’ plays that survive in the rural calendar of England, Ireland, and Scotland are, in many cases, descendants of the older Samhain guising, in which a hero is killed and brought back to life.

Food for the Dead

A third motif is the offering of food to the dead. In the older Irish and Scottish tradition, a portion of the Samhain meal was set aside for the ancestors, and a candle was lit in the window to guide them home. The custom survives in the modern Irish practice of báirín breac, the speckled bread of Samhain.

This offering of food for the dead is one of the most striking parallels between Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead. On the night of 1 November in highland Mexico, the family altar is set with the favourite dishes of the returning souls, and a path of marigold petals is laid from the door. The two practices have a similar shape: a night on which the door is open, and a meal that the living and the dead are thought to share.

Divinations of the Night

Samhain was also a night of divination. The moment when the year turned was thought to be a moment at which the veil between the worlds grew thin. Young women would peel an apple in one long strip and let the peel fall on the floor; the shape it took was the initial of the future husband. A ring would be placed in báirín breac; the finder would be married within the year. These practices were treated as superstitions in the medieval penitentials, but they survived in rural Gaelic-speaking districts well into the nineteenth century.

The Christian Overlay: All Saints’ and All Souls’

In 837 CE, Pope Gregory IV moved the feast of All Saints’ from 13 May to 1 November, deliberately placing it on top of the older Samhain. The feast honoured all the saints, known and unknown, and it was followed on 2 November by the feast of All Souls’, which commemorated all the faithful departed. The Irish church was quick to absorb the older festival into the new framework. The bonfires were re-read as the fires of faith; the offerings to the dead were re-read as prayers for the souls in purgatory; the mumming and guising were re-read as the begging of soul-cakes, in the medieval custom that survives in parts of England as souling — and that is one of the direct ancestors of the modern North American trick-or-treat.

Halloween in North America

The festival of Halloween, as it is celebrated in the United States, Canada, and Ireland today, is a layered inheritance. The older Celtic festival of Samhain supplies the bones: the bonfire, the offering to the dead, the guising, the divination. The Christian overlay supplies the date and the soul-cake. The American contribution is the pumpkin, the costume party, the trick-or-treat, the haunted house, and the commercialised holiday that has, in the last fifty years, become the second-largest commercial festival in the United States after Christmas. The pumpkin is a descendant of the older turnip lantern of the British Isles; the costume is a descendant of the mummer’s mask; the offering of sweets at the door is a descendant of the offering of food to the dead.

The Modern Wiccan and Neo-Pagan Revivals

In the twentieth century, Samhain was taken up by the modern Wiccan and neo-pagan movements, partly through the folklorist Margaret Murray, partly through Gerald Gardner, and partly through the older oral tradition of the Celtic revival. In these new contexts, Samhain is treated as the Witches’ New Year, the moment at which the goddess in her crone aspect is honoured, the ancestors are called, and the future is divined. The bonfire is lit on a hill, the dead are called by name, a portion of the meal is set aside for them, and a divination is performed. The festival has become, in many North American and British cities, a public event, with community gatherings, feasts, and a wider public attention that is, in some ways, the latest chapter of a two-thousand-year-old story.

Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead

The parallel between Samhain and the Mexican Day of the Dead has long been noticed by folklorists. Both festivals fall at the same moment of the year. Both honour the dead. Both involve the offering of food, the lighting of candles, the setting of an altar, and the welcoming of the returning souls. The two are not historically connected in any direct way — they belong to different cultural hemispheres — but they are recognisably the same response to the same human experience: the death of the year, the thinning of the veil, the desire to be with the dead.

Samhain in the Wider European Otherworld Tradition

Samhain belongs to a wider European tradition of the Otherworld. The Norse world had its own version in the Dísablót, the sacrifice to the dísir, the female ancestral spirits, in late October. The Slavic world had the Dziady, the night of the ancestors, observed in what is now Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. Across the older agricultural calendar of Europe, the death of the year was a moment at which the dead returned, and the festival gave the living a way to welcome them.

Sources and Further Reading

MacCulloch, J. A. The Religion of the Ancient Celts. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1911. Reprint. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.
Rees, Alwyn, and Rees, Brinley. Celtic Heritage: Ancient Tradition in Ireland and Wales. Thames & Hudson, 1961.
Hutton, Ronald. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press, 1999.
MacKillop, James. Fionn mac Cumhaill and the Finger of Finn: Folktales and Legends of the Gaelic World. Canongate, 2001.