After the Romans conquered ancient Celtic realms, pagan traditions were adopted into a holiday honoring Catholic saints.
Halloween may be a secular affair today, dominated by candy, costumes and trick-or-treating, but the holiday is rooted in an annual Celtic pagan festival called Samhain (pronounced “SAH- wane”) that was then appropriated by the early Catholic Church some 1,200 years ago.
The ancient Celts were an assortment of tribes and small kingdoms once scattered across western and Central Europe with distinctive languages and culture, explains Frederick Suppe, a historian specializing in Celtic and medieval history at Ball State University in Indiana.
Even after the Romans conquered their realm, Celts continued to survive and thrive in places such as Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Scotland, and Wales.
Halloween Inspired by Samhain
Samhain, the Celtic festival that is the ancestor of Halloween, was related to the Celts’ way of looking at the world. “All the Celtic peoples conceived of a fundamental dichotomy between light and dark, with the former representing positive, lucky, fruitful values and the latter representing negative, threatening, destructive values,” Suppe explains.
The Celtic year began at sundown at the end of the autumn harvest, continued through the… Click here to read the rest of this article about How the Early Catholic Church Christianized Halloween
Witches Of The Craft® 