Halloween, Children and Paganism
Halloween is a holiday celebrate by thousands upon thousands of teens and even adults. While not every country keeps the Halloween tradition, hundreds of thousands of children can be found trick-or-treating in the United States and in many other especially those of Anglo-Saxon background. While some love Halloween, there are some who are just as passionately in opposition to this holiday. Interesting are the pagan origins of the celebration the history of which stretches back thousands of years to the ancient pagans who existed even before Jesus’ day.
These are some historical facts about the roots of Halloween:
Halloween’s roots date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. It is said to have began with the Celts. The Celts lives around 2,000 years ago in what is now the United Kingdom, Ireland and northern France. The celebration at that time was on November 1 or October 31.
It was associated with the the beginning of the cold winter, dark and affiliated with fear of death. Celts had superstitious ideas and truly believed that on the night before, the boundary between the world of the living and dead became blurred. They believed that the souls of the dead returned to the earth revisiting their homes. In addition to the presence of these bad spirits, Celts felt that the presence of these spirits to be able to predict the future. These predictions were help much importance for a primitive and uneducated people, such as the Celts. They celebration took on sinister significance, with ghosts which were thought to be active on that night of malevolent activity.
People burned bonfires on hilltops to scare off evil spirits and demons, and people sacrificed both crops and animal sacrifices to pagan Celtic gods. Costumes were worn during these ceremonies, and they usually consisted of animal heads and skins.
The name Halloween itself has its origins with the Roman Catholic Church. By the 9th Century, the festival had been influenced a mixture of pagan teachings and Christianity that had become an integral part of the Catholic religion. Immigrants then brought the practice to the U.S., in particular the Irish. These then became popular around the late 19th century. Halloween has always been a holiday and fright. Because of the forgoing reasons and because of the pagan practices of Halloween, many Christians of various genres, do not participate in the the holiday or its customs.
This article was written by John Scott, a writer who has a BA in Social Science from Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, NJ.
Tags: Halloween