Why I hate the modern Hallowe’en

Back in 2007, about a week before Hallowe’en, the BBC reported from Scotland that the organisers of a Hallowe’en event had banned pumpkins and trick-or-treating on the grounds that they were “too American” and had no place in the traditional Scottish celebration of that festival. “We will be having none of that pumpkin or trick-or-treat rubbish. Pumpkins are banned and will not be allowed beyond the front gate,” said one of the organisers. Those attending were to take part, instead, in traditional Scottish Hallowe’en activities such as apple-dooking (apple bobbing) and making turnip (ie swede) lanterns.

I confess to being somewhat surprised by one aspect of this – the idea that apple bobbing and turnip lanterns are a specifically Scottish thing. I grew up with both in the urban north east of England during the 1960s – which far from being Scottish or “Celtic” was firmly part of the English/Germanic cultural sphere, and especially part of the Danelaw, as place name elements in the area show. For us it was a week of festivities starting with Hallowe’en, running through Mischief Night and ending with  Bonfire Night.

It’s a measure of how much we have lost, or perhaps more accurately surrendered without so much as a whimper let alone a (Guy Fawkes) bang, that Hallowe’en today, for all its wide popularity in Britain, bears no recognisable resemblance to the darker and more raw festival of a few decades ago. Today’s Hallowe’en, and almost entirely plastic it is too, is bought off the shelf at a supermarket from promotional displays which make their appearance as soon as the kids go back to school in September.

Go back only 40 years, however, and it was a cottage industry in which turnips were bought a few days before the actual festival, hollowed out painstakingly by the child with some assistance by the parent, with a blunt knife and a teaspoon, and eventually carried around neighbouring houses with a candle in for gods’ sake. Woe betide the wretched child whose parents insisted on putting a small torch in their lantern instead of a real candle; but what parent today, in abject terror of the Health & Safety Nazis, would dare to send their child out with the means to set fire to themselves – even though they or their parents happily carried a candle lantern year after year without ever suffering even superficial burns, let alone turning themselves into a self-propelled wicker man?

Cottage industry, too, were the costumes of those who insisted on dressing up for the occasion. Most of us didn’t, but for those who did insist it was mostly a hastily-made ghost costume cobbled together from a worn out sheet; and wonder of wonders! – no-one ever set fire to their sheet with their candle! However did we manage to reach adulthood in significant numbers without the Health & Safety plonkers breathing down ours and our parents’ necks and protecting us against things that it had never occurred to anyone previously that we might need protecting from?

Last Hallowe’en I arrived back from work to find occasional small children dressed head to foot in plastic tat being led from house to house by a parent. The little darlings, inevitably one per adult, had obviously been kitted up from Asda and bizarrely they were each carrying a handbag-sized black plastic cauldron into which householders were clearly expected to drop sweeties. It seems that the days of a child carrying a lantern, even one with a torch inside, are long gone. And why only one child per adult? Have people completely stopped having more than one child per family – a trophy as proof that their naughty bits work? Whatever happened to the days when families comprised several children, with the family’s offspring being led around the neighbourhood on Hallowe’en by the eldest without an adult present? And whatever happened to “A penny to keep the witch away”? Presumably that went the same way as everything else deemed by the Blair government to be socially exclusive – or was there a PF campaign to rehabilitate witches that I missed somehow?

Once again, as I have for many years, I am ignoring Hallowe’en this year. I will be ignoring it until parents and children do it properly.

Bah humbug and break out the toffee onions.

The Yew : Sacred Tree of Transformation and Rebirth

The Yew, Taxus baccata , is an ancient tree species that has survived since before the Ice Age and as such as been revered and used by humankind throughout the ages. All races of the Northern Hemisphere, especially the Celts, the Greeks, the Romans and the North American Indians, have a right and powerful understanding of this unusual and remarkable tree. Because of its longevity and its unique way of growing new trunks from within the original root bole, it has now been estimated that some English Yews are as much as 4,000 years old, their presence spanning ages of time and history. No wonder the Yew is associated with immortality, renewal, regeneration, everlasting life, rebirth, transformation and access to the Otherworld and our ancestors.

There are about 10 different species of Yew in the northern temperate zones of Asia, Asia Minor, India, Europe, North Africa and North America. They are all thought to have descended from Paleotaxus rediviva , which was found imprinted on a Triassic era fossils laid down more than 200,000,000 years ago. Recently, more fossils of the Yew have been found from the Jurassic era, 140,000,000 years ago. So the Yew has managed to survive the great climatic changes of our planet, adapting and finding ways to live longer than most species alive today. According to pollen counts taken from peat bogs of Europe, the Yew trees grew in greater abundance at the time of the Ice Age than they do now. As the glaciers receded northwards, the great forests of Europe contained up to 80% of Yew trees, and since these times have been in continuous decline.

The rest of this article by Glennie Kindred, which was published in White Dragon at Samhain 1997, can be read on the White Dragon website.

The Yew : Sacred Tree of Transformation and Rebirth

Samhain and pagan platitudes

Some years ago, by one of those strange coincidences, I had just finished typesetting Tony Roe’s article on psychopomps for the Samhain 2006 edition of WD and headed off to Sainsbury’s. Driving towards town I became stuck behind a column of slow-moving vehicles in the inside lane of the dual carriageway. Since the outside lane was empty it didn’t seem likely that there had been an accident so I cautiously pulled out and overtook the column. As I came over the brow of the hill I realised I’d been following a funeral cortege, which should have been obvious from the start. Reaching the front of the procession I saw that it was being headed by a horse-drawn hearse: two black horses with black plumes on their heads drawing a black, glass-sided hearse with three entirely black-clad undertakers, complete with shiny toppers, on the box of the hearse.

I have lived in Redditch for over 20 years but this was the only time I had seen this horse-drawn hearse, and very impressive it was too. Indeed, seeing any funeral procession in the town is fairly rare – I suspect many of the townsfolk put their dead out for the binmen rather than squander their booze and bingo money on life’s non-essentials.

Now one of the things which drives me completely bonkers is the annual outpouring on mailing lists and discussion forums (and for that matter in magazines) of the standard pre-Samhain platitude about “the veil between the worlds being thinnest at this time of year”, and variations upon this sentiment, and seeing the hearse that October reminded me that this Season of Platitudes would soon be upon us once again.

I’ve referred to it as a platitude and no doubt that will offend some but I do so because to refer to one particular moment in the year as somehow uniquely dangerous in terms of interaction with the other worlds suggests to me a profound and ultimately thoughtless ignorance of the wider folklore of the British Isles (including Ireland) on the part of the platituder.

It irritates me all the more because almost inevitably the individual who at any other time of year throws his or her (but almost certainly her) hands up in horror at the mere mention of necromancy, which they will tell you is evil and dangerous and has absolutely no place in paganism or wicca, is precisely the same individual who at Hallowe’en or Samhain will blithely set an extra place at the dinner table and “summon the ancestors” or do little rituals in an attempt to contact her deceased grandmother to find out where Granny left that book of spells and rituals that she must have had hidden somewhere. No joined up thinking there then.

As Ronald Hutton has pointed out (Stations of the Sun, p362) the original association of Samhain with supernatual goings on seems to derive from early Medieval Ireland and that this was later carried to Scotland by Irish migrants. Additonally he suggests that the idea of supernatural happenings and fairy gatherings at Samhain may simply echo the gatherings and festivities going on in the real world at that time of year. He also points out that the earliest Welsh literature ascribes this period of supernatural danger to Beltane and to a lesser extent to New Year but is silent about the period around Samhain. We cannot, therefore, even say that this idea of Samhain as a supremely dangerous period is pan-Celtic so to subscribe to the popular belief is to accept one very particular view to the exclusion of all others.

So much for the Celtic world – what about the Germanic one? Germanic tradition and folklore has its own very specific season of supernatural danger – the intercalary period necessary each year to align the lunar and solar calendars, which since the arrival of Christianity at least has fallen between Christmas and New Year. In many respects these few days, between the ending of one lunar month and the 5 or 6 days which must elapse before the beginning of the next if the two astronomical years are not to get out of sync, represent more truly a “time between times” than Samhain. It is during these days and nights that the Wild Hunt, the spirits of the dead led by Odin, Herne, Gwyn ap Nudd or, indeed, Edric and Goda, was most commonly thought to ride, arriving howling on the storm with its yelping hounds to snatch up the souls of the dead and those unwary living foolish enough to be out and abroad when they shouldn’t be. Yet I would hazard a guess that very few of the pagans who make such a fuss about their ancestors and the weirdness of Samhain, and make offerings to the fairies then, ever bother to take magical and protective precautions during the dark and ominous intercalary days – or leave out a stirrup cup for the Wild Hunt.

 

Exhuming the Vampire

The vampire has long been a source of morbid fascination, particularly for authors of gothic fiction. Although The Vampyre – Polidori’s uninspired pilfering of an unfinished tale by Lord Byron in 1819 – sparked a hugely popular revival in vampire literature that eventually led, in 1897, to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (and its subsequent exhaustive film adaptation), vampire fiction can be traced back as far as classical Greece.

Many attempts to explain the vampire myth have been cursed by the difficulty in separating the genuine folklore from the lurid fiction it inspired; Stoker, for example, seems to have added several qualities to the vampire which were subsequently adopted into the literature as genuine – such as the idea that a vampire has no reflection. Some researchers have plumped for psychological interpretations of the vampire, others have suggested rare blood diseases (such as Dr Dolphin’s porphyria hypothesis), but all are flawed and inspired more by the fictional vampire than his folkloric archetype.

The ‘vampires’ exhumed and dispatched throughout eastern and central Europe during the middle ages are not really the subject of this discussion. Paul Barber (1) studies these cases in some detail, and shows how corpses can be expected to appear in the ‘vampiric’ condition – bloated, with blood at the mouth. Such outbreaks are undoubtedly largely brought about by the plague, which was also a factor behind the witch hunts.

The rest of this article by Liam Rogers, which was published in White Dragon at Samhain 1997, can be read on the White Dragon website.

Exhuming the Vampire