As autumn deepens and the sun sinks earlier into the west, something ancient stirs in the chill of late October. The air carries the scent of woodsmoke and fallen leaves, and somewhere beneath our modern merriment - beneath the carved pumpkins and flickering lights - echoes the heartbeat of an older world.
Here we discover the origins of Samhain, Halloween, and All Saints’ Night - three names for one great turning, the eternal moment when the living glance across the threshold into the realm of the dead.
The Fire at the Edge of the Year
Long before Christianity spread across Europe, before cathedrals rose and saints’ names were written in gold, the Celtic peoples marked time by the pulse of the seasons. They divided their year into light and dark, life and rest, and the border between them fell at Samhain - summer’s end.
It was the Celtic New Year, when the harvest was gathered and the livestock brought down from the hills. But more than a season’s change, it was a crossing - a time when the veil between worlds grew thin as mist, and spirits of the departed could walk once more among their kin.
On that night, great bonfires blazed upon the hills, their flames licking the cold stars. Villagers circled the fire for protection and renewal. Offerings of food and drink were left for wandering souls, and lanterns were lit to guide ancestors home.
It was also a night of disguise - of masks and animal skins - for those who ventured out wished to hide from the restless dead or perhaps to join them unnoticed. Divinations were cast in apples and nuts, to glimpse what the coming year might bring: love, fortune, or death.
Samhain belonged to neither one world nor the other. It was the in-between, the stillness where time itself seemed to pause, and the old gods drew near.
This was considered a sacred time when we would remember and honour our ancestors.
The Coming of the Saints
When the Church came to these Celtic lands, it found Samhain deeply rooted in the people’s souls. But rather than destroy it, the Church did what it often did best - it transformed.
In the 7th century, All Saints’ Day was set on the first of November - All Hallows’ Day - a festival to honour the holy dead. The night before became All Hallows’ Eve, which the tongue, over time, softened into Hallowe’en. And by the 10th century, the Church added another day, All Souls’ Day, on the 2nd of November - a solemn time to pray for those still journeying through purgatory.
The old and the new twined together like ivy over stone. Candles for saints replaced the bonfires of the hilltops, and prayers for lost souls took the place of offerings to ancestral spirits. Yet the heart of Samhain remained - the reverence for the dead, the awe of the unseen, and the fear that something might still linger just beyond the candle’s edge.
The Night of the Wandering Dead
Throughout the Middle Ages, people still spoke of spirits roaming the night at the turning of the year. The living lit candles in hollowed turnips to ward off unwelcome guests - a practice that, when carried to America centuries later, would bloom into the glowing jack-o’-lantern.
The legend of Stingy Jack, doomed to wander with only an ember of hellfire in his carved gourd, captured that uneasy mingling of sin, trickery, and redemption that clings to Halloween even now.
Children went souling, carrying lanterns door to door, singing prayers in exchange for soul cakes to free the dead. Over time, this morphed into the playful “trick or treat,” the sacred act turned to merriment - yet still a reflection of ancient exchange between the living and the beyond.
Across the Sea and Into the Modern World
When Irish and Scottish families crossed the ocean in the 19th century, they took with them their tales, their songs, and their customs of All Hallows’ Eve. In the vast and restless New World, Halloween transformed again. The sacred and the superstitious gave way to celebration - bonfires became lantern-lit parties, masks became costumes, and prayers for souls became games and laughter.
Yet the spirit of the old ways lingers. Each year, when the leaves turn and the nights grow long, we still sense that same ancient hush - that feeling that the world is thinner somehow, that something unseen draws close.
The Thread That Binds
From Samhain’s mystic fires to All Saints’ holy vigils, from soul cakes to pumpkin lanterns, these traditions share one golden thread: the human need to acknowledge the mystery of death and celebrate the cycle of return.
Halloween is not, at its heart, about fear - it is about remembrance, respect, and the spark of light we carry through the dark half of the year. It is the whisper of ancestors, the glint of a candle in the window, the laughter of children who do not yet fear the night.
And so, as the shadows lengthen and the stars grow cold, we remember. We remember the fires on the hill, the saints in their glory, and the souls that walk between.
For on this night, as it was thousands of years ago, the veil grows thin, and every flicker of flame is both a ward and a welcome - a promise that life, like the seasons, always turns again.
