Why the Wait for Halloween Seems to Last 7000 Years.

In this series:

1) Why the Wait for Halloween Seems to Last 7000 Years.

2) Zombie Apocalypse & Trick-or-Treating: Halloween through History.

Since the fateful day that the British Judge Sir William Jones, seated in Calcutta, at the end of the 18^th Century, decided he must learn ancient Sanskrit in order to do his job, the world of historical scholars has been changed beyond recognition.  The study of ancient history suddenly used the tool of comparative philology as much as anything.  Some of the greatest names in the discipline of history were so by virtue of their discoveries in philology.

Sanskrit taught Jones, and those who came after, that a family of languages begun in the Anatolia region of southern Turkey spread to take over all the world from Ireland to Northern India.  Because of this range they were called Indo-European languages.

Knowing that the languages were all later off-shoots of the Indo-European progenitor, the “Chaldee” of the biblical Ur of the Chaldees, for example, could be shown to be the same as the much later Latin “Cultus Dei,” both meaning “the place of worship of the gods”.[1]

As complex as the subject is, it has a remarkable pay-off.  With philology’s help, cultural anthropologists can trace back all kinds of information to well beyond the beginning of written language.  They can trace progress across a wide range of social behaviors and  technologies by jiggering the pieces of an enormous jigsaw puzzle.

Put together with documents created after there was written language, like Julius Caesar’s account of the Celts of Gaul, and a great deal can suddenly be learned.  Caesar’s account rattles off the names of Roman gods worshipped by the Celtic Gauls:

Of these deities they have almost the same idea as all other nations[2]

They did not worship them by exactly the same names.  Nor did the “other nations”.  The same gods were worshipped under different names and different revisions in all nations because all were originally the same Indo-European dieties.  After the first great Indo-European migration, begun more than 7000 years ago, they grew apart through differing changes to the original behaviors and technologies that came with their differing environments.  The details changed but the overall belief-concepts remained much the same.  We call them “paganism”.

We see these same gods in the much earlier Jewish Biblical histories many of which are accounts of Yahweh repeatedly trying, over centuries, to convince the Jews not to worship Canaanite gods in sacred groves such as Caesar described in his Gallic Wars.  The Canaanites came from Ur of the Chaldees.  They were Indo-Europeans, Ka-In-Ana: “worshippers of the Moon Goddess Anna”.

Caesar refers to their sacrificial method of weaving giant wicker men and burning the human victims alive in them.  In Lucan’s history poem, Pharsalia, we get a look at how their gods were worshipped near Marseilles, France:

Not far away for ages past had stood

An old, inviolated sacred wood;

Whose gloomy boughs, thick interwoven, made

A chilly, cheerless, everlasting shade:

There, not the rustic gods, nor satyrs sport,

Nor fawns and sylvans with the nymphs resort;

But barb'rous priests some dreadful power adore,

And lustrate every tree with human gore.

If mysteries in times of old received,

And pious ancientry may be believed,

There nor the feather'd songster builds her nest,

Nor lonely dens conceal the savage beast:

There no tempestuous winds presume to fly,

Ev'n light'nings glance aloof, and shoot obliquely by.

No wanton breezes toss the dancing leaves,

But shiv'ring horror in the branches heaves.

Black springs with pitchy streams divide the ground,

And bubbl'ing tumble with a sullen sound.

Old images of forms misshapen stand.

Rude, and unknowing of the artists hand;

With hoary filth begrimed, each ghastly head[3]

Strikes the astonish'd gazers soul with dread.[4]

Sanskrit not having yet been discovered in the Western World, Lucan could not know that “the rustic gods,… satyrs… fawns and… nymphs” were only later advances upon the same Indo-European pantheon in less isolated countries that had managed to become more civilized.

Ireland, Scotland and much of England, however, had shared the dark isolation of the primeval forests of Northern Europe.  When the first Christian Missionaries arrived, around the 5^th century, in order to convert their peoples, the gods and worship they found were very similar to that observed by Caesar and by Lucan’s informants.  It would take hundreds of years to displace the most brutal and magical aspects of it.

The accounts written in the monasteries beginning in the late 7^th century are a fascinating resource telling us as much about the scribes as the  purported events they wrote about.  We will likely never be certain of the actual history but we are well informed about how much the early Christianity in these areas was being modified by profoundly Celtic perspectives.

Some of the pre-Christian traditions were so popular that distant versions of them still survive in All Hallows Eve, the evening vigil for All Saints’ Day —  the Catholic Church’s rebranding of the Celtic festival of Samhain — which we now call “Halloween”.  Deriving the age and original forms of many of our traditions of Halloween is possible and fascinating.

The most common example is the many ways in which fire is incorporated into Halloween.  By Tudor times, most priests and bishops forbade lighting the traditional bonfire on the highest hill.  Some saw it as a harmless enough pursuit, so long as it didn’t involve actual belief in the pagan gods, and bonfires could be seen in various places as late as the early 19^th century.

Where it was forbidden, the reason for the cleaning of the family hearth on the Eve of Samhain having  been mostly forgotten the practice was not challenged.  Where something must be found to replace the prophecies that once came from tending the bonfire, such traditions as carrying a candle around the hill beside Malkin Tower — the rendezvous of the Witches of Lancashire — went unchallenged by the parish priest.

Of course, the old ways peeped out from between the lines of literature.  In Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, it makes for just one more image the modern audience generally glosses over.

Valentine.            Why, how know you that I am in love?

Speed.   Marry, by these special marks: first, you have

learned… to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas.

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[1] Centuries later still, the cultus would come to mean the worshippers and their rituals rather than the place of worship.

[2] Caesar. The Gallic War (Loeb, 1919) Trans. H. J. Edwards.  341.  “De his eandem fere, quam reliquae gentes, habent opinionem…”

[3] The translator is being euphemistic here.  Lucan’s original reads “putrique” indicating not the vague phrase “hoary filth” but rather “rotting flesh”.

[4] Ritson, Joseph. Memoirs of the Celts or Gauls (1827). 92.  Citing Lucan's Pharsalia. Translated Into English Verse. By Nicholas Rowe. (1720). I.121.

Also at Virtual Grub Street:

• A Brief Introduction to Poisoning a Nobleman.  August 4, 2019. “As those who read the primary accounts whenever possible know, never were vagaries so vague as in the Middle Ages.”
• What Color Were Shakespeare’s Potatoes? July 27, 2019. “By the year 1599-1600, when Shakespeare’s play would seem to have been written, the potato was available in London.  It was considered a delectable treat and an aphrodisiac.”
• A Most Curious Account of the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth I: April 28, 1603.  April 28, 2019.  “Once it was clear that James I would face no serious challenges, Cecil and the others could begin to give attention to the matter of the Queen’s funeral.”
• The Battle Over Shakespeare's Early and Late Plays. September 24, 2018. “The answers to the post-Oxford dilemma, of course, are three.”
• Check out the Medieval Topics Article Index for many more articles about this fascinating time.
• Check out the English Renaissance Article Index for many more articles and reviews about this fascinating time and about the Shakespeare Authorship Question.