Wishing You All A Fantastic Samhain!

[Xious]

I wish all of you a pleasant and enjoyable Samhain festival, and whatever activities you plan to enjoy tonight!

[petik1]

A Sam-what?

[Parodius Duh]

Same to you Xious! I will attempt to raise the dead tonight!  
Post Merge: October 31, 2011, 01:20:39 pm

A Sam-what?

Samhain, The spirit of Halloween. Make sure to let all Jack 'O Lantern candles to fully burn out! Do not blow any out or Samhain will come for you!  Hand out plenty of candy too! 


......Samhain was originally a Nordic? end of Harvest festival. Over the years Samhain has been turned into "The Spirit of Halloween"  via stories, films, tv, etc....

[P]

Not Nordic it's Celtic I think. It's similar to All Saints Day or Halloween.

Spirit of Halloween? Shouldn't that be Jack-o-Lantern himself? A guy who was doomed to walk the earth because he couldn't enter neither Heaven nor Hell.

[Xious]

Samhain is the original Celtic tradition: The 'Holy Roman Empire', who wished to remove all pagan practices tried to substitute their 'All Hallows Day' in it place,to which the Celts and their neighbours replied by commemorating 'All Hallows Eve' the night prior, essentially transferring the Samhain traditions under a new moniker.

As I recall, the middle-English name being Halwen'en and dutch naming this Hallowe'en, or 'Eve of Hallowes', eventually transmogrified in the middle-20th century to simply 'Halloween', dropping the 'en, which still to this day means 'evening of' in Dutch and similar dialects, or so I understand.

Jack O'Lantern was a spirit condemned to walk the Earth forever, carrying an eerie lantern--often depicted as a human skull,and mimicked by people who carved root vegetables into this shape--like a Will O'Wisp in the urban countryside, often in or near in the marshlands. The idea of these lights of the dead may is ancient, but is probably related to certain spontaneous types of flash-illumination that can be caused by marsh gas; unless you prefer the faerie-lore version of the tale. Either way... 

[P]

That was a common method used by missionaries. By taking holidays and mythological figures and turning them into to christian ones it became much easier for people to accept the new religion. Even the all important christian holiday Christmas was once a pagan holiday celebrating the winter solstice.

Will O'Wisp, just like Jack O'Lantern, lures people into marshes but it can also be the mark of a hidden treassure. It is a phenomenon that also appears at graveyards, as why it is said to be souls of the dead all over the world. The blue eerie flames that appears so often in Japanese pop-culture is an example of this I think.