THE PRACTICE of dressing up as ghosts at Halloween may come from the Celtic festival of Samhain, when people believed that changing their appearance could protect them from the spirits of the dead, a convention on ghosts heard last night.
Jenny Butler told the 8th World Ghost Convention in Cork City Gaol that Halloween possibly has its foundations in the pre-Christian Celtic festival of Samhain which was celebrated with feasting and by wearing disguises.
“One theory on the origins of ‘guising’ and dressing as ghosts may be in the notion that the dead are returning on this night and the change of appearance may protect the human from being recognised by the returning spirits of the dead. The sense of things being topsy-turvy and inverted may have given rise to people having fun and using an opportunity to change their appearance into something they are not ordinarily,” said Ms Butler, of the Department of Folklore and Ethnology at UCC.
While the habit of carving faces on pumpkins was an American import, in Ireland long ago, jack-o’lanterns would similarly have been made by hollowing out a turnip or sugar beet, carving a face on to it and placing a candle inside. “The dual idea behind this may have been to at once light the way for the souls of the dead ancestors who are returning to visit the human world, and to frighten off any supernatural forces that might be about on this night,” she said.
Ms Butler’s colleague Dr Margaret Humphreys said Halloween had in the past been a time for gathering fuel, food and fodder for the long winter ahead. She suggested that Ireland’s geographical position at the edge of Europe might help explain the tradition of belief in fairies and other worldly beings which came to the fore at Halloween, when barriers were down between the ordinary world and the other world.
