Professors Discuss Halloween’s Past, Present And Future

Halloween is more popular than ever, but where did we get traditions like costumes or trick-or-treating?

Chris Schulz talked to West Virginia University (WVU) religious studies professors Aaron Gale and Alex Snow to learn more about Halloween’s rich history.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Halloween’s Past

Schulz: Professor Gale, how old is Halloween?

Gale: The origins of Halloween, traditionally, most scholars will say, goes back some 2,000 years to the time of the Celtic druids. This is right around the infancy of Christianity, probably traces its roots back before Christianity. Christianity’s link to Halloween will come in the middle ages. But going back to the Celtic druid some 2,000 years ago, this was a very interesting time of year and a very scary time of year. As I tell my students, there was no internet, there were no street lights in the ancient world. There were no refrigerators. So when summer and the harvest season sort of began to melt into winter, it was a very scary time of year

That was sort of where the tradition of Halloween comes from was this old druid holiday, this Celtic holiday of Samhain, which was sort of a minor holiday. [It] was kind of almost like a new year, but really what it became known as was sort of that time when we transitioned from the warm, prosperous summer time of year to the cold, dark winter time of year. And that’s where the whole theory of spirits and the planes of existence melding together. So the druids believed that this time, the Samhain, this end of October, early November, this was the time when the sort of the realms of the living and the realms of the dead sort of blurred together. And some scholars say then that that is the beginning of the idea of spirits coming down to earth, people being afraid of the spirits coming down to earth. And that is sort of the very origins a lot of scholars say of where Halloween came from.

Schulz: I’ve heard people talk about it being a harvest tradition as well.

Gale: Yeah, even the colors associated with Halloween, orange and black, some say it comes from the orange leaves, the corn husks and everything changing color and then transitioning into black, the darkness the night, the time of cold, the time when you didn’t know if your family would live or die. So a lot of this does come from the idea of harvesting, the idea sort of the end of the bounty and the beginning of survival. And that’s where they say a lot of Halloween came from. 

On the night of Samhain, when those lines were blurred, the planes of existence were blurred between the living and the dead. People were very afraid that the dead would come back down, and especially if you hadn’t gotten along so well with the dead, with the spirit or family member, that there was this fear that they could come and get you. So there was this tradition among the druids to have this somber dinner on the night of Samhain, and then leave extra food and sort of put it outside for the spirits, to placate the spirits and sort of keep them away from your house. And there’s some traditions that say that you would also dress up and disguise yourself so if you had a grudge with old Uncle John and you thought he was coming back down to get you, maybe he wouldn’t recognize you. So some scholars say that might be the very, very origins of trick or treating and and leaving food out and things like that, placating the spirits with food.

Schulz: Professor Snow, anything to add to the origins of what we today celebrate as Halloween?

Snow: Yeah, I’m actually going to dovetail onto the back of Aaron’s statements about change and sort of ritual traditions of festival harvest, which you’ve already brought up, in the Chinese context and in the Buddhist world, that I’m going to continue to sort of put some emphasis on. 

There’s this idea that everything in the universe is constantly changing. Many of us are affiliated with the ideas of yin and yang. But just one of those ideas, yin, is an idea of sort of a darkness and something that settles into the earth, so to speak. And so the ghosts that we’re going to continue to talk about are this idea that things come and go, things are born and they die, and that when things die in a very yin-like fashion, they settle into the earth, they don’t go anywhere, and we’re not separated from them. They’re still very much a part of our community. And this is the way China and Japan will start talking about worshiping of the ancestors to a certain extent. So the relationship between ancestors and ghosts, even, is very, very similar. And so I think as we continue to have this conversation, it’s this emphasis, at least for me, on even natural, almost cosmological processes that this festival is also trying to recognize.

Schulz: Professor Gale, getting back to where you left us off, where do some of these traditions that we will be seeing kids and families celebrating in the coming days come from. I’m thinking about costumes, trick-or-treating. I think you touched on just now, pumpkin carving. 

Gale: It’s interesting that you bring up Jack O’ Lanterns. Initially it was not pumpkins that were carved. It was actually turnips and potatoes that were probably carved, probably from an Irish tradition coming from the story of Jack, which takes about two minutes to tell. 

Traditionally, from Ireland, there was the story of this wicked guy named Jack, and he was a bad guy, and the devil wanted his soul. So as the story goes, the tradition was that Jack is sitting in a bar, the devil comes up to him and says, “I want your soul.” 

And there’s different versions of the story, but the devil came up to Jack and said, “I want your soul.”

Jack’s like, “Fine, but buy me a drink first.” 

The Devil’s like, “OK.” 

And Jack’s like, “You know what? I don’t have any money. You don’t carry currency, because I don’t think the devil really needs currency. But can you turn yourself into a coin and pay for my drink for me?” 

So the devil turned himself into a coin and Jack put it in his pocket next to a cross, and the devil’s like, “You bound me. I can’t get out now.” 

And there’s some varying years on how long this was, but according to one version of the story, Jack said, “You can’t touch me for 10 years. You can’t take my soul.” 

Ten years later, or so, Jack is sitting by a tree. The devil comes along and says, “Jack, time’s up, buddy. You owe me my soul. Now. You owe me your soul.” 

And Jack said, “You know what, you’re right, but can you just go up, climb up that tree and get me an apple real quick?” 

And the devil climbed up the tree to get him an apple, and Jack carved the cross in the tree and said, “Okay, now you can’t come down. So now you have to promise to leave me alone forever and ever and ever. You can’t take my soul. All right?” 

So he tricks the devil twice. Long story short, Jack dies. Heaven doesn’t want Jack because Jack was a rotten guy. The Devil’s like, “I can’t touch you, dude. And pretty much, I’m pretty much sick of you anyway, so you can’t go to hell.”

So the story sort of ended with the devil giving Jack this one like coal ash light, and said “Here, this is what you have to do. You can wander the earth the rest of your life – the rest of your death, actually.” 

So according to the story, Jack found a pumpkin, which became the tradition, found a pumpkin or a turnip, probably in the original story. But for us, we’d say Jack O’ Lantern. He found a pumpkin and put the light in a pumpkin, and was doomed to sort of wander the earth. So they say on Halloween night, if you see somebody with a Jack O’ Lantern and a light roaming around, it’s probably Jack still wandering the earth. 

So that’s what the story of Jack O’ Lanterns probably originated from, probably an Irish tradition. 

The very word Halloween comes from, of course, All Hallows Eve. The night of Oct. 31, the night before All Saints Day, in the Catholic tradition, All Saints Day, All Souls Day, those were basically middle age Holy Days, I think All Saints Day was around 609, by Pope Gregory established All Saints Day. So the night before Nov. 1, All Hallows Eve, was a hallowed eve. That’s where the very word Halloween comes from.

Many of the images: broomsticks, witches. That probably came as late as the European witch craze in the middle ages, from around 1300, 1400, 1500s. As you may know, there was this horrible persecution of witches that took place primarily in Europe. I know the Salem Witch Trials were like a day’s work in a German village. There really wasn’t a witch craze in the New World, so to speak. Although Salem, it was very tragic that 20 people died or so, but in Europe, thousands and thousands of people were being killed. And primarily the people accused of being witches were women. Probably 75%-80% of the people accused of being witches were women. And furthermore, not just women, but single women, assertive women, widowed women who lived alone. What did you find in a woman’s house? Broomsticks, cauldrons, cats. So a lot of the images of Halloween today, bats, cats, broomsticks, things like that, probably were actually coming from the witch craze in Europe, where women were accused of being witches, and any of the objects associated with them were probably also believed to be evil and sinister. And that may be, then, where some of these images have come from concerning Halloween. 

The idea of dressing up. I already stated there was probably an ancient druid tradition, but there were traditions in England, this thing called souling, where you would knock on doors and beg for food. So a lot of people say the English tradition of souling sort of carried over into the United States through immigration, also in the 19th, maybe early 20th century, and that’s where kind of the modern idea of trick or treating came from. 

Halloween, in the sense that we understand it, is kind of a modern, evolved holiday, but the origins of it do go back 2,000 years. But as many holidays do, and I think Alex would agree with me, many holidays that we’re familiar with, whether cultural or religious, certainly go through a long evolution. And Halloween certainly. Bonfires, probably Guy Fawkes Day, perhaps in England, which was celebrated on November 5, and again, people burn fires and things like that. So a lot of the traditions we have are probably middle aged, maybe even slightly newer. And the sort of all molded in as the United States is the great melting pot, sort of all molded into the modern understanding of Halloween.

Halloween’s Present

Schulz: Professor Snow, we heard a lot about traditions primarily coming from the British Isles  just now. What if anything, do we see these days from the broader global community in our Halloween traditions?

Snow: I think the overwhelming intrigue of mine would be Japanese immigration, especially in the late 19th, early 20th century, especially first on the West Coast. I did a lot of my research on early Japanese Buddhist monks coming to the United States and trying to literally – and think about this from a business perspective – trying to sell their product, trying to sell their worldview to a country that didn’t know much about them, as Japan was just opening up to the world at that point in time. And one of the ways in which Japanese scholars were doing this, there was a large gathering of scholars in Chicago called the World Parliament of Religions. People from India, like Vivekananda, were there, and Japanese scholars and Chinese scholars, and they were actually trying to package their worldview in ways in which Americans would consume them, buy them, become interested. 

The two ways they did that were through science, the ways in which Asian philosophy and culture would describe their worldview being very attuned with modern day science. But more particularly popular culture, and the ways in which we Americans have consumed things like Japanese anime, for instance, Ghibli studios, Miyazaki and all of his kind of work. 

If you start watching something, for instance, like a movie like “Spirited Away,” which the last time I saw something like 100 million U.S. kids have watched or something like this. It’s a world of hungry ghosts, as they call them. And one of the problems with those ghosts is that they’re considered to have a desire that can never be fulfilled. So they’re oftentimes very ugly. They have these swollen bellies and these gigantic mouths, and they’re forever feeding, but they’re never able to quench their thirst or their hunger. And this is just a metaphor for many Asian ideas of what the human condition is, including the social condition of poverty, injustice, not having access to resources when we need them. 

So in this context, I think you see in cities all across the United States, but particularly for me, in places where Japanese immigration is very, very dense, you see an uptick in this conversation of how we can feed the ghosts, feed the poor, feed our neighbor. But the fact that this feeding process will never end, and I’m just going to quote a fortune cookie, and then we can change subjects. But Confucius, very famously said, “Respect ghosts and spirits, but keep away from them.” And it’s a really interesting thing for him to say. And in fact, he says to learn how to keep away from these spirits is what he actually calls wisdom. And so the celebration of Halloween, I would argue, by non-western immigrants in the United States, is also about being very wise about the world around you, socially, politically and philosophically.

Schulz: I just couldn’t stop thinking about that one scene in Spirited Away where they’re feeding the creature in the sauna.

Snow: It always makes me think of it, too, and I talk about this in class all the time, because so many Americans have seen the film. So the little girl in the film Chihiro, in Japanese, she’s called a shojo, S-H-O-J-O, and what’s so interesting in so much of Japanese popular culture is that most of the adult world doesn’t understand what’s going on around them. So at the beginning of that film, “Spirited Away,” little Chihiro and her parents make it into this park, this theme park, and if we all remember, Chihiro’s parents turn into gluttonous pigs. They sit down at this bar and they just eat and they eat and they eat. These are the hungry ghosts. And yet Chihiro, whose eyes are always wide open, are the only ones that see the spirits all around her. Celebration of Halloween in Asian cultures is about that awareness being present, and I would argue Chihiro is a great example.

Gale: I have a question for Professor Snow. Do Asian Americans celebrate Halloween? 

Snow: I don’t have any good stats to back it up, but I’m almost positive that they must, and it’s mostly because of their love of costumes and their love of masks. I’ve got all kinds of images here, not only of the hungry ghosts, but also the costume masks that they parade around in the streets in various places. I’ve got images from Hong Kong. I’ve got images from Chicago. 

So I think it’s that desire, and I’ll be a little bit academic, to play, to act, and let’s go back to Greek theater and tragedy and comedy and what it means to play the role of the gods. And so I think it’s that ability and desire to play within a realm, and at least from my perspective of spirits, gods and ghosts, that are not separate from the normal human realm. And that’s the important thing for me, from an Asian perspective, is there’s not these different realms transcendent and eminent, everything’s right here and that we have to appease them. 

Gale: To some extent, I think there are some blurring of the lines, even in United States, then, between the cultural impact of Halloween versus a still religious impact of Halloween. In Western culture, my specialty, I think most of us would be very content to say Halloween is cultural. It’s not a religious observance among some maybe pagan traditions. It may be, I’m not aware, but it may be religious among some populations. But you know, among many of the more popular religions in the United States, Halloween is more cultural. It’s a cultural thing, where as I think Dr. Snow, maybe it is still, there’s still some religion. 

Snow: I think it’s religious, but it’s also the way that we define religion, east and west. So from a Chinese perspective, let’s say we could argue about this later, but there aren’t even really notions of gods in some ways, and so you’re using the word cultural, but I would also argue sociopolitical. And so for Confucius and for other scholars, when they tell their people to revere and be aware of the spirits and the ghosts and the ancestors, that’s also a symbolic and socioeconomic and political message for revere your father, which is, you know, a Confucian right relationship. So Confucianism, we’re going to call it a religion, but it doesn’t have any gods in it, and so it’s a sociopolitical, secular, religious attitude that combines holiday reverence of parents and the way in which a Confucian scholar would say a human being should act every second of their life, brilliant.

Schulz: Professor Snow, do we have examples of Halloween as we understand it, being celebrated elsewhere in the world?

Snow: My quick response is going to be absolutely no. Especially in colonial contexts. So again, most of my work is in southeast and far East Asia, a long history. So for instance, let’s think about Vietnam for a second, colonized by France, fought over by multiple countries, but left a lasting effect on Vietnamese culture, especially their food, their ban me, and their bread and all that kind of stuff. But as we see in the academy, and as we look at the ways in which cultures and religions move all throughout time, because they do, I teach a class called religion across culture, and what I enjoy about that course in particular is that it follows ideas, let’s say Christian ideas, Muslim ideas, or Buddhist ideas, but then it follows them historically and geographically, as they move across borders and boundaries, across cultural divides and linguistic separations. 

To answer your question, one of the most famous American holidays I’m going to make the analogy that I see being practiced in the east is Christmas in Japan, but they do it their own way, but they spend millions and millions of dollars in big Japanese cities buying Christmas cakes and doing everything that we would associate almost exactly the way that we do it here in the States. But they don’t call it Christmas. They appropriate an idea, just as all cultures do. I think the word appropriation is sometimes a dirty word for some people. I did my MA on Native American stuff, and so to appropriate ideas, I understand is a problematic idea. 

But what we’re really talking about are the ways in which, under colonial contexts, cultures that didn’t grow up with Halloween, appropriated the idea under those situations, and that is the Hungry Ghost festival in China, in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand. And so from their perspective, they’ll just do the same thing and spend, I think this is the important part the set the same amount of money, equivalent to what they have access to, let’s say, in the Thai countryside or something like that. But it will be just as important. It will be just as big a period of their yearly ritual calendar, and they’ll just call it something else and celebrate it in a way that draws importance and attention to histories and myths and stories and their tradition. Six, 8, 10, 15, generations later, you can’t even recognize it anymore as the original celebration of Christmas or Halloween or anything else, because it’s now been fully enculturated and incorporated into those new cultures.

Gale: In the United States, Halloween really wasn’t much of a thing before the 19th probably into the early 20th century, supposedly. Dr. Snow mentioned colonial times. Of course, I was thinking of colonial times in the New World, in the United States, I think some of the southern colonies, before the United States was a nation. So we’re probably talking 16-1700s, they would tell ghost stories and things like that on Halloween. But there really was no modern understanding of Halloween. Halloween became really big in the United States, early 20th century, 1920s for example, in the United States, was said that things the children were becoming so rowdy that they literally that’s when the idea of Halloween parties. Parents wanted to get the kids off the streets because the kids were out of control. World War Two tempered all that. World War Two sort of, you know, Halloween was put on hold, and then it just sort of started up with a fury in the 1950s and 1960s. So when we think of Halloween in the United States, I’m sort of following Dr. Snow’s line of thought here, where it evolved through the centuries, evolved and changes, but it took a long time in the United States for Halloween to become a holiday. So Halloween in the United States, I would argue, is primarily a 20th century holiday, as far as how we understand it today from the generations that came immediately before us.

Snow: And I wouldn’t even be surprised, and I didn’t think about it until you said this. I said previously I did my MA on Native American traditions. I wrote about trickster stories amongst American Indians. And so thinking about trick or treat and the ways in which these figures, for me amongst the Crow Indians of Montana, it was called Old Man Coyote. But the coyote or grandmother spider in southwest parts of the United States or on the East Coast would have been fully incorporated stories and tales and myths in the indigenous communities of the United States that then probably would have found a way, over 200-300 years, to fully incorporate themselves into American pop culture. I haven’t been on a reservation lately, but I am betting that the celebration – I can’t prove this – but the celebration of Halloween is met on Lakota reservation or Crow Reservation, with the celebration of those trickster stories. I’m going to have to go do some research on this, but this is what all cultures do. They find a way, oftentimes, under colonial pressure, to accept new ideas and preserve their old traditions through those new ideas.

Halloween’s Future

Schulz: This is such a fascinating conversation. I appreciate you both indulging me, and I have so many more questions about how Halloween is changing. 

Gale: The idea of these enormous blow up skeletons, which are on my street. I don’t think we saw those before, 10 or 15 years ago. So Halloween continues to evolve, and people continue to spend hundreds and hundreds and thousands of dollars on it. So Halloween, I think we both would argue, is still evolving as many holidays are, and we’ll continue to see changes in the upcoming decades and centuries, long after you know we’re gone. 

Snow: I’ll be a bit philosophic on that, mode. Halloween is a celebration of change, as we started this conversation a half an hour ago with festivals and harvests and all that kind of stuff. But let’s say change is rampant and change is permanent. Change is universal. For a lot of people, that’s scary, and Halloween is a recognition of scariness and boundaries and borders and constant change and access to realms of reality that we might not know or be able to understand, and that’s more real than just one day a year. It’s every single second of our lives.

Schulz: Do you have any parting thoughts, anything that we have touched on that you’d like to highlight, or anything that we didn’t that you’d like to speak on now? 

Gale: I think Dr. Snow summed it up perfectly. I can’t follow that. That’s like the perfect closing statement. I think it’s just important for us to understand that the roots of Halloween do go back a long time, but our cultures, our traditions have, of course, impacted how the holidays become today. But beyond that, I defer to my colleague. That was a brilliant closing.