What Samhain Actually Is, and How It Became Halloween

Samhain is the old Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest and the first night of winter, kept from sunset on 31 October. Halloween is what it turned into after a thousand years of church feasts, turnip lanterns, emigrant ships and American sweets.

When

Sunset on 31 October to sunset on 1 November

Say it

SOW-in (sow as in cow)

What it marks

Harvest done, cattle home, the start of winter

Also called

Halloween, All Hallows' Eve, November Eve, Nos Galan Gaeaf, Hop-tu-Naa

There's a lot of confident nonsense written about Samhain, and a fair bit of it gets repeated every October by people who should know better. We've stuck to what can be shown. Where the evidence runs out, we say so.

What Samhain is

Samhain is one of the four seasonal festivals of the old Gaelic year, alongside Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh. It was kept in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, and it marked the point where the light half of the year handed over to the dark half.

It's also one of the eight festivals in the modern pagan calendar. If that calendar is new to you, start with our guide to the Wheel of the Year and its eight sabbats.

The word is still in everyday use. In modern Irish, Samhain is simply the month of November, and Halloween is Oíche Shamhna, Samhain night. Medieval Irish writers explained the name as "summer's end". Modern linguists are less sure, and some prefer a root meaning an assembly or gathering. Either reading fits, which is a rare bit of luck in this subject.

How to say it

SOW-in, with the first part rhyming with cow. You'll also hear SAH-win, and it varies a little between Irish dialects and Scottish Gaelic.

Whatever the spelling suggests, it's not "Sam-hane". In Irish spelling, mh together makes a w or v sound. Plenty of people get it wrong for years, usually because they met the word in a book first. There's no shame in it.

You'll also meet it spelled Samain or Samuin (Old Irish), Samhuinn (Scottish Gaelic) and Sauin (Manx). Same festival.

When it falls

From sunset on 31 October to sunset on 1 November. In the old Gaelic reckoning a day began at nightfall, so the festival of 1 November started the evening before. It's the same logic that gives us Christmas Eve.

The date doesn't move. Some modern pagans prefer the exact midpoint between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, about a week later. In the southern hemisphere most people keep it at the end of April.

Cattle, harvest and the start of winter

Forget the ghosts for a minute. The root of Samhain is farming, and in early Ireland farming meant cattle. Wealth was counted in cows, and the year turned on where the cows were.

Glosses on the early Irish law texts speak of herds being driven out to the summer pastures around May Day and brought back around the first of November. By Samhain the grain was in, the hill grazing was finished, and everyone was back under one roof for the winter.

It was also the time to decide which animals could be fed until spring and which could not. Bede, writing in the eighth century, says the English called November Blodmonath, blood month, because that was when the cattle to be slaughtered were offered to their gods. So the first hard fact about Samhain isn't a glamorous one. It was the end of the working year, with a lot of fresh meat about and a long dark stretch ahead.

Wealth was counted in cows, and the year turned on where the cows were.

What the old Irish texts say

Almost everything we know about early Samhain comes from medieval Irish sagas and law texts, written down by Christian scribes between roughly the eighth and twelfth centuries. They were recording older stories, but several hundred years after Ireland converted. There is no surviving account of Samhain written by a pagan. Bear that in mind. Even so, the texts agree on a few things.

• It was one of four quarter days. In Tochmarc Emire, The Wooing of Emer, the year's four festivals are listed, and Samhain comes first.
• It was a time of great assemblies. The Ulster tales describe a royal feast lasting a week, Samhain itself with three days before and three after.
• The Otherworld stood open. The story of Fionn's boyhood says plainly that the fairy mounds of Ireland were open at Samhain. In Echtra Nerai, a warrior out on a Samhain night dare follows a host into the mound at Cruachan, and comes back carrying summer flowers to prove it.
• It was dangerous. Every Samhain a being called Aillén lulls Tara to sleep with music and burns it down, until Fionn stops him.

What the texts do not say

They don't describe a festival of the dead. The visitors in the sagas are the people of the Otherworld, the áes sídhe, who are a good deal more alarming than anyone's late grandmother. The tales show feasts and assemblies, and the rites are simply missing. The historian Ronald Hutton, in The Stations of the Sun, concludes that the medieval records furnish no evidence of religious ceremonies at Samhain, even where it was kept.

The famous account of druids lighting a sacred fire on the hill of Tlachtga in County Meath, with every hearth in Ireland relit from it, comes from Geoffrey Keating. He was writing in the 1630s, a thousand years after the druids, from sources nobody can check.

The idea that Samhain was the "Celtic New Year" is later still. Sir John Rhys proposed it in the 1880s, working back from the folklore of his own day, and Sir James Frazer made it famous in The Golden Bough. It may even be right, but no medieval text says so.

Where the thinning veil comes from

You'll read everywhere that at Samhain "the veil between the worlds is at its thinnest". We've used the line ourselves. Only part of it is old.

The idea underneath is old and well attested. In the Irish tales the Otherworld is inside the hills and the ancient burial mounds, and at Samhain the mounds open. Later folklore kept that going. The fairies were abroad, so you stayed off the paths and left something out for them.

The wording is another matter. You won't find a veil in any medieval Irish text. People who have gone looking have found no example older than the Victorians. The image seems to belong to the nineteenth century, when spiritualists talked of a veil between the living and the dead, and to have been laid over Samhain afterwards. Modern pagans took it up because it describes how the night feels.

The human dead mostly arrive by another door. That one belongs to the church.

All Hallows and the church calendar

Halloween is a Scots shortening of All Hallows' Even, the evening before All Hallows' Day. A hallow is a saint.

Bear with us for a few dates, because they matter in a minute. The early church in Rome kept its feast of all the martyrs on 13 May. By about 800 a feast of all the saints was being kept on 1 November in parts of England and Germany, and in 835 the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious, with Pope Gregory IV behind him, made that date official across his empire.

It's often said that the church moved All Saints to 1 November to take over Samhain. It might not be true. Hutton argues that the November date began in northern, Germanic Europe, and points out that early Irish church calendars put the feast of all saints on 20 April. If the plan was to smother an Irish festival, nobody told the Irish.

Then came All Souls. Around a thousand years ago Abbot Odilo of Cluny set aside 2 November for prayers for all the faithful departed, in his own monasteries at first, and the custom spread across western Europe. That made a three day season, Allhallowtide, with bells rung for the dead and candles lit.

In England the Reformation cut most of this away. Prayers for the dead were out, and what survived did so as folk custom.

British and Irish customs

From the 1700s people began writing down what their neighbours did, so this is the best documented part of the story. Robert Burns's poem "Halloween", written in 1785, is practically a field report from Ayrshire.

Bonfires

Fires at the start of November were common in the Scottish Highlands, the Isle of Man, north and mid Wales and parts of Ulster. People carried burning brands around their fields to protect them. In Lancashire, Catholic families prayed for their dead on the hillsides with burning straw held up on pitchforks, a custom called teanlay. Derbyshire had its tindles.

A flame on a dark night is the oldest part of the whole thing. A windowsill of candles is about as close as most of us get to a fire on the hill now.

Souling and soul cakes

Souling is the English and Welsh custom of going door to door at Allhallowtide, singing for a soul cake, which was small, round and spiced and often marked with a cross. Originally the cake bought a prayer for the dead of the house. It is on record by the early 1500s, and Shakespeare has a character "puling, like a beggar at Hallowmas".

After the Reformation the prayers faded and the cakes and songs carried on, mostly in Cheshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire, Lancashire and the Peak District, in places into the 1930s. In Antrobus in Cheshire the soulers still perform their play, horse's skull and all.

Guising

In Scotland and Ireland, going house to house in disguise at Halloween is recorded from the sixteenth century. Guisers were given apples, nuts or coins. A guiser was expected to earn it with a song, a rhyme or a joke first, which is a higher bar than shouting three words through a letterbox.

Turnip lanterns

The original Halloween lantern is a turnip, a swede, or in Somerset a mangelwurzel. They are recorded in Ireland and the Scottish Highlands in the nineteenth century, with faces cut to look like the things you were hoping to avoid.

Carving one is like hollowing out a cricket ball with a spoon. They look far more frightening than a pumpkin, and they smell of burnt turnip, which is an atmosphere of its own.

The Irish tale of Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil and was left to wander the dark with a coal in a hollowed turnip, gave the jack-o'-lantern a story to go with it. It isn't as ancient as it's usually made out: the earliest printed versions are from the 1830s. If you like the look but not the carving, there are kinder options among our lamps and lanterns.

Divination games

Halloween was the great night for fortune telling, nearly all of it about who you'd marry, and the kit was whatever the season provided. Parts of northern England called it Nutcrack Night.

• Nuts on the fire. Two nuts named for a couple and set on the hearth. Burning quietly together was good. One jumping away was not.
• The apple peel. Peeled in one long strip and thrown over your shoulder, to land in the shape of an initial.
• The cake. In Ireland a ring and other tokens were baked into the barmbrack, and your slice told your year. Irish bakeries still sell it that way.

It was a game, played for laughs and nerves in a crowded kitchen. The modern descendants are a tarot or oracle deck or a bag of runes brought out after dinner.

Regional names and nights

Halloween was never one custom. Most regions had their own, and here in Nottinghamshire we sit between the Derbyshire tindles to the west and Mischief Night country to the north.

To America and back

The night only took root in North America with mass emigration from Ireland and Scotland in the nineteenth century. The guising, the lanterns and the games went with them, and then America did what America does and made it bigger.

• c. 700 to 1100 Irish scribes write down the Samhain tales. The church settles All Saints on 1 November and adds All Souls on the 2nd.
• 1500s Souling is on record in England and guising in Scotland. The Reformation strips out the prayers for the dead.
• 1800s Irish and Scottish emigrants carry the night to the United States and Canada, where the carved pumpkin, already a harvest decoration, becomes attached to it.
• 1911 A newspaper in Kingston, Ontario reports children out "guising".
• 1917 The earliest known version of the phrase in print: a newspaper in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario reports children calling "tricks or treats".
• 1930s to 1950s Trick or treating spreads across North America, pauses for wartime sugar rationing, and comes back stronger.
• 1980s on "Trick or treat" reaches Britain and Ireland, to a mixed reception, and the pumpkin pushes out the turnip.

Pumpkins are native to North America, and carving them is recorded there by the 1830s as a harvest custom. Emigrants used to wrestling with turnips found something bigger, softer and mostly hollow already. The turnip never stood a chance.

So people who complain that trick or treat is an American import are half right. The phrase is, and the sweets. The children in disguise going round the doors on 31 October left from Glasgow and Cork, and have come home with a different accent.

Samhain as a modern sabbat

Modern pagan witchcraft took shape in England in the middle of the twentieth century. Gerald Gardner's early writings call this festival November Eve, or simply Hallowe'en. By the end of the 1950s the four old quarter days had been joined with the solstices and equinoxes to make an eightfold year, and the Gaelic names became standard in the decades after.

For most pagans and witches today it's the most important night of the eight. It's their festival of the dead and the ancestors and their turn of the year, as well as the best night for divination. Some keep it with a full group ritual. A great many more keep it at the kitchen table.

You can see how it was put together. The name and the open door come from the Irish tales. The remembrance of the dead comes largely from Allhallowtide, the new year from Victorian scholars, and the veil, most likely, from the spiritualists.

A tradition assembled with care from old materials is still a tradition.

For seventy years this one has done a useful job. It gives us a night set aside for the people we've lost.

Samhain, Halloween and the Day of the Dead

These three get lumped together because they fall in the same week.

The Day of the Dead shares its dates with All Saints and All Souls because Spanish Catholicism took those feasts to Mexico, where they met Indigenous ways of honouring the dead. It is a living tradition, recognised by UNESCO in 2008, and it is not Mexican Halloween. Admire it, and leave the sugar skull face paint to the people whose festival it is.

Myths worth dropping

"Samhain was the Celtic god of the dead." There is no such god. The claim goes back to Charles Vallancey, a military engineer and surveyor with eccentric theories about the Irish language, who wrote in the 1780s of a deity called Saman who judged the souls of the dead. Nothing in medieval Irish literature supports him, but the line was copied from book to book and still turns up every October. The same goes for druids going door to door demanding offerings, which has no source at all.

"Apple bobbing comes from the Roman festival of Pomona." Pomona was a real goddess of fruit trees, but Roman writers record no festival of hers at the start of November. Apples are at Halloween because it's the end of October and the apples are ripe.

"It has been celebrated the same way for thousands of years." The Mound of the Hostages at Tara, a passage tomb about five thousand years old, is aligned with sunrise around the start of November. It was also built millennia before anyone in Ireland spoke a Celtic language. The date matches. That tells us nothing about what the builders believed.

Symbols and what they mean

Correspondence lists for Samhain are mostly twentieth century work, but the better ones rest on symbols with real history behind them.

• Fire and candlelight. The hilltop bonfire, brought indoors. Black candles are the modern choice for protection and banishing, white for remembrance. Small black spell candles burn down in about an hour and a half, which is what you want here, and there are more in Spell and Ritual Candles.
• Apples. The fruit of every Halloween game, and in Irish and Welsh legend the fruit of the Otherworld.
• Smoke. Fire and smoke protected the house and the herd through the winter. Today that's incense or a herb bundle carried round the rooms. Our pumpkin incense cone burner manages to be lantern and smoke at once, and doesn't smell of turnip.
• Dark stones. Jet, obsidian, smoky quartz and black tourmaline, traditionally associated with protection and grounding. Whitby jet was the Victorians' mourning stone. If you're new to crystals, see our guide to choosing a first crystal by intention.
• Photographs and keepsakes. The most important things on any Samhain altar. Everything else is set dressing.

Then there's our Samhain spell jar. It's a small layered jar in autumn colours, with a dripped wax seal and a little pumpkin charm, made to sit on an altar or a shelf. It's a bit of Samhain that'll fit anywhere. You'll find it with the rest of the spell jars and kits.

How people mark it now

You don't need a coven or an especially tidy house. Most people who keep Samhain do something small and do it every year. Doing it again is most of the point.

• A candle for the dead. One candle, lit at dusk on the 31st, beside a photograph. Say their name. For a lot of people this is the whole of it.
• A place at the table. An extra plate set for those who are gone, sometimes with the meal eaten in silence. It's more comforting than it sounds.
• Something written down. What the year gave you, and what you're finished with. A journal or book of shadows kept from one Samhain to the next is worth having, mostly for the reading back. The Book of Shadows and Light journal covers the moon and the Wheel of the Year if you'd like some structure.
• A seasonal shelf. A cloth, a candle, an apple, a photograph. The pieces are in Spellwork Essentials, with cloths in Altar Cloths and Bells.

A proper step by step evening for the 31st deserves a guide of its own. The list above is enough to be going on with.

• Spell and Ritual Candles Small candles that burn down in one sitting. Have a browse
• Spell Jars and Kits The Samhain jar and its relatives, for an altar or a shelf. Have a browse
• Incense, Smudge and Cleansing Smoke for the house at the start of winter. Have a browse
• Journals and Grimoires One page a year, read back the next. Have a browse

Common questions

The ones people type into a search box late on an October night.

That's Samhain as honestly as we can tell it. Where we've said "most likely" or "it may be", we meant it.