Despite its distinctly modern imagery — kids in cute vampire costumes, pugs in cute vampire costumes, pumpkins carved to look like pugs — Halloween and many of the traditions surrounding it can be traced back at least two millennia, to the Celtic festival of Samhain.
Clearly, much has changed since then; across ancient Britain and Ireland, Oct. 31 was more than an excuse for fun and frivolity. “To examine the history of Halloween,” writes the historian Nicholas Rogers, “is to recognize that it is not a holiday that has been celebrated the same way over the centuries, nor one whose meaning is fixed.” For the Celts it was a shift of season that marked the border between summer and winter, between life and death, and between our earthly realm and the underworld.
