Welcome to Hyperfixation Investigations, a podcast where two neuro-spicy best friends take time each Saturday to info-dump their research deep dive of the week.
Lovingly produced by Wolf and Stagg Productions.
Today's fun fact is that pumpkins and other squashes are actually fruits, not vegetables, since they come from the flowers of their plants.
Good evening, I'm Cara, and I will be captaining this week's episode, Samhain and its influences on Halloween, ghosts, and all.This is part one of our Examples of Pagan Repurposing miniseries.
Good morning, I'm Josh, and today I'm just along for the ride. For those of you joining us for the first time, which I'm assuming it is because this is our first ever episode, unless, of course, you were a beta listener, in which case, welcome back.
Or, of course, you could be listening from the future and have happened to listen to a different episode first.Gosh.Yeah, yeah, yeah.Either way, welcome.
And how things are generally going to work around here is Cara will be leading us through a mini lecture on the topic in the first half so we can discuss today's topic in depth in the second half.
expect tangents throughout.We switch off duties each week, so next week expect Josh to helm the episode.
Now to our regularly scheduled program.Kara, what have you been hyperfixating on this week?
Well, Josh, I have been hyper fixating on the holiday of Samhain, which many people think of as Halloween in this day and age, but is in fact a separate holiday, though also the foundation of the separate holiday of Halloween.
One of those things where like the original still exists and so does the quote unquote knockoff.
That's a way to put it.Fair.
So first I'm just going to briefly go over what is known as the Wheel of the Year or the Sabbaths, which are the eight major pagan, when you think of like Wicca or Druidism or things like that, the eight major holidays because that one is one of them.
So you have four main festivals known as solar festivals and those happen at the equinoxes and the solstices.
So that's Yule at the winter solstice at the end of December, Ostara at the spring equinox in March, Litha the summer solstice in June, and Mabon the autumnal equinox in late September.
Halfway between each of those four are what are called the earth festivals.
that's Imbolc on early February, Beltane at the crossover from April to May, Lamas, or if you are practicing within a Celtic tradition, Lunasa in early August, and then Samhain at the end of October into early November.
So one of the really important things about Samhain is it is celebrated by and large on the 31st of October.
However, that date was come to after Ireland and the Celtic areas transitioned to the Gregorian calendar because of the conversion to Christianity.
So there is actually about almost 10 days of potential play of when Samhain would have been celebrated in traditional pagan times.So anywhere from like 26th to 27th of October to the 8th of November.
Okay.Just because of the calendars they were using at the time?
Right.So you go from a lunar calendar, the 28 days, to the Gregorian calendar where we have 30 and 31 day months instead.
So it gives you about a 10 day play. One of the other big things, and this will help us transition into talking more in detail about Samhain itself, is Samhain is celebrated from sunset on October 31st to sunset on November 1st.
So it's not the 24 hours of October 31st, it's the 24 hours of transition between October 31st and November 1st.
Sure, so it's not like midnight to midnight or noon to noon, it's a night and a day.
Right. The holiday itself is big on transition, celebrating and marking transitionary times.
So it kind of makes sense to see this holiday celebrated on the transitional time of the day, you know, over a day instead of the stamp in the calendar, so to speak.
And it is also sometimes known as November Eve, given the fact that it leads into November.
To this day, some practicing Wicca and other pagan groups may practice Samhain into that early November period.They may have a calendar within their own order that says, hey, this year we're celebrating Samhain on November 4th.
So some people do celebrate it still, but it's a much smaller group.The majority celebrates still on October 31st.
Okay, so there's still some people who have gone back to the lunar calendar as a way of reaching back to the original version of it a little bit more?
Yeah, exactly.Okay, that's pretty cool.Yeah.
So getting into the specifics of Samhain, I have a quote from one of the major sources of research that I did that I just think is really beautiful and encapsulates what we're going to be talking about in the rest of this episode really well.
That quote is, Samhain isn't frozen in time, isn't just what it was a millennia ago, nor just what it is today.Rather, it is the culmination of all the history, each story, and every celebration that has come before and happens now.
It is a living belief and practice, born in Ireland and spreading outwards like the branches of a tree.And that quote is by Morgan Daimler, who wrote the preface of the book Samhain, the Root of Halloween by Luke Eastwood.
So within this, right, Samhain is a holiday to mark and celebrate and honor time of transition.One of the biggest times of transition in the entire year, which is the tradition from summer to winter.
So, in the pagan tradition, and in Irish tradition specifically, Samhain is actually the New Year.
And it's the time when you would have been harvesting your crops, you would have been picking all of your apples, you would have maybe been slaughtering your animals to prepare the meats to last you through the winter.
And it's when the time of grasses and leaves beginning to die and the wind starting to chill would have been coming about.
And so the beginning of the year was marked by this transition, this time of death in some cases, and the beginning of the darker days.And that was the mark of your new year.
And then it would end kind of the flip holidays in bulk in February when the days start to get a little bit longer again.
Sure.So then starting the year kind of in death and in preparation for the coming night, so to speak.Interesting.
So there is a very strong connection of Samhain with death.And there is a misconception within that that was spread by the Christian church, unsurprisingly, that this holiday is a pagan celebration of the god of death.
And then it was kind of twisted into this idea of devil worship.
That sounds pretty classic.
Right. So let's all just clear that up right now.Samhain is a celebration about death, and we're going to get into that.But it is not about a specific god of the dead or really specific gods at all.
While there are gods in the pagan mythology of Ireland and the Celtic lands and whatever, and they are important, they're not referenced so specifically during these big holidays.
These big holidays are really about the land and nature and this idea of what's going on in the human world, so to speak.There is the other world, we'll talk about that too.
But yeah, specific gods are not necessarily tied to each of these holidays or celebrated in the way you might think of Greek or Roman polytheistic religions.
Okay, that's fair.But it is easy if you can tie an idea to a holiday that you're trying to discredit or kind of diminish when you take over a land.Yeah, that's an easy in to go, well, actually, it's devil worship, you see?
No, that makes sense.That's pretty standard.
Yeah.So with this idea of death at Samhain, the belief is that, and this is going to be kind of the modern parlance for it, right, is that the veil is thinner. between the human realm and what is called the other world in pagan tradition.
And again, when I say pagan in this episode, I'm specifically talking about Irish, maybe Scottish and Welsh, the Gaelic land kind of pagan, because any religion that's not a current monotheistic religion is pagan to some extent.It's pagan.
That's a pretty big umbrella.Right.So yeah, we're looking at like one slice of the pie, so to speak.
Right, one geographic area of paganism. But anyway, so it's this veil between the other world and the human world is either very thin or altogether missing at this time of year.And that comes with this transition of things starting to die.
But it also, more importantly in some ways, comes to this idea that this was a day and night when your ancestors would be coming back. to visit you, to put blessings upon your home, to protect you, to commune, those kinds of things.Sure.
People would leave places at their dining tables, sometimes food as well.They would leave candles in their windows to guide their ancestors home, leave their doors and windows open so they could get into the home.
All these kinds of things about really celebrating and honoring the ancestors.So that's part of where this idea of death, and we'll talk about in our later section of this episode, ghosts, right?Ghosts and Halloween go hand in hand.
Where did this idea of ghosts come from?Well, Where'd the idea of zombies come from?If your spirits are able to rise from the dead at this time of year, you know, it's not so far of a stretch to go.Bodies can rise from the dead.
CB That's fair.Well, and if everything else is dying, it makes sense to if the veil is thinner because so much is dying, so many things are dying that other things could take the opportunity to cross back over as well.That makes sense.
And there are parts, some interpretations, both scholarly and spiritually, that the dead actually only cross over at Samhain.
So anybody who's died in the past year, their spirits have not been able to move on to the other world until Samhain as well.
So some will come back, but some will just be moving on for the first time.So that is... He's laughing.It's very distracting.Sorry.
So if you die immediately after Samhain, you're stuck here for almost a full year just sitting around like, well, I gotta watch my cousins take care of the
All right.Well, how much longer till Samhain?Another 327.Oh, no.
Well, you might have some company, though, because what else exists from the other world and hangs out in weird planes of existence but the sheep, which are the Irish Fae?
Ah, yes, of course.Yes.OK, so you're not alone.
You just have to deal with the Fae after death.
But you're dead, so it's fine.
Sure. I assume that's... Is that fine?
For the most part.That's so comforting.If you were a really bad person, it's probably fine.
Yeah, and at Samhain, again, there's the idea that it's not just the dead that are hanging out in the human world.The fae are around too.Okay.And that can range from just mischievous creatures to more
Well, you don't really want to call them malicious, but darker entities.
Yeah.And we also have legends of the wild hunt happening at Samhain, which in some connotations, the wild hunt are fae who go and collect the souls of wrongdoers.
In other traditions and in other legends, they simply collect the souls of the dead that have been waiting to go to the other world through the past year. that aren't able to find it without the help of the hunt.
That makes sense.That's actually quite a nice post-death taxi service for your soul.
They might look a little freaky, but you know.
Well, yeah, I mean, you know, they're called the wild hunt.They come out only when the veil is thin.That's Yeah, they're bound to look a little spooky.
For the vibes.Totally for the vibes.
So you can see where death, right, is one of the hallmarks of this holiday and why things like ghosts, zombies, the thinning of the veil, hanging out in graveyards and haunted places have become traditional things within the holiday of Halloween.
I have another quote here from Samhain, the Root of Halloween, that touches on both the spiritual and the physical act of transition at Samhain, which is, quote, Samhain marked the time of the return to darkness, the forces of life being absorbed into the earth and into the other world, and a state of death or hibernation occurring until spring returned at Imbolc, unquote.
And again, that's Luke Eastwood from Samhain, the Root of Halloween.
I think that wraps up this little section on the origins and main themes of Samhain really well.There are a few smaller subcategories that I just want to touch because they also have little things that show up in Halloween.
One of those areas is that Samhain was also viewed as a holiday for protection, for getting blessings of protection, warding yourself against the winter, so to speak.
Some of the big things that what we would consider casual things, but that had protective connotations to them, would be sometimes people would also leave out food for the she, for the fae, so that maybe at least they would not cause their mischief at your house.
But that food shouldn't have salt in it, because salt keeps the fae away.So if you want to feed them that and not poison them, you give them food without salt.
Probably good not to upset the Fae.
Right.Some of the tradition of iron being used to repel the Fae and ghosts comes from this time as well.People would wear iron pins around Samhain to protect themselves from more nefarious Fae.We also have the sacrificing of live chickens.
Which is still seen even in current times, especially among more elderly populations in Ireland and different Celtic lands, though it has been repurposed and moved to November 11th as part of St.Martin's Day.
Why does Martin get the chickens?
Who knows?It's close enough to sound to count.
But I mean, that makes sense for leaving out food for the Sheed and for ancestors to pop by and visit.It makes sense that animal ritual sacrifice would be tied in with that somehow.
Right.You know, there are legends and whispers of far, far in the past of human sacrifice as well.
And that that transitioned, the sacrificing of either people or live animals became the transition into leaving out food.
Because to leave out any kind of food right before you go into winter is a sacrifice that was a lot more attainable and a little less gory for the average person.
Yeah. Yeah, reducing the amount of food that you have to potentially get through winter when there are no convenience stores, there are no long haul shipping or trucking or any kind of like that.
It's you just have the food that your community has available.Yeah, that that's a big sacrifice.
Right. One of the other little subsections of Samhain is this idea of divination.Samhain is considered a great time for that.With the veil being thinner, you have more access to the quote-unquote magic through the other side of the other world.
It's said that a 5th century high king
once asked his chief druid on Samhain to predict the future from this Samhain to the next, and that that druid spent the evening upon the Hill of Tlatka, which is a very important druid religious site in Ireland.
And in the morning, he revealed his predictions, and all of them came true over the year.And that's part of why divination is considered to be stronger or potentially more accurate at this time of year.
Some of the little fun ones that came into play were things like, again, apples were coming into harvest at this time of year, were probably one of your final crops to be harvested.
And there would be games for children and adults alike of bobbing for apples or stringing up an apple from a beam in a barn and attempting to bite it with your teeth without using your hands.
And it was said that these were tests of your ability to divine the future because you were divining where these apples were.
There's another one of Bram Brach, which is an Irish cake, would be eaten and there would be a ring, sometimes like a real ring or a metal ring.Nowadays, they're usually metal or plastic because this is a tradition that carries on.
A ring would be baked inside of it and it said that whoever found the ring while eating would be married by the next Samhain or receive extremely good luck.
Nice.That feels like a great, use it to propose, like the classic ring in the champagne.Sure.You see nowadays in classic rom-coms.
I could see that also being used as, oh, well, they got proposed to by the person that they didn't want to get proposed to by.You'll have good luck this year.
That's right.Yes.Yes.Just good luck.Definitely.
If you were already married.
You know, like, so your grandpa gets the ring, what does he get?
That's fair.That's very fun.
One of the interesting modern connections and non-Irish connections that I think of when I was researching this part of the traditions was the king cake at Mardi Gras. with the hard bean or the baby inside of the cake.
And whoever got that would receive good luck throughout the year.And did we come across that from some common ancestor in ancient culture?Did the voodoo creole tradition come about separately from the Irish tradition?
It just begs the question, right, how such similar traditions can show up into very different cultures.
Yeah, that's very interesting.
Because it is fun to see how many different cultures have similar traditions like that.
Not necessarily this one in particular, but there are so many other traditions that pop up that happen to be very similar across cultures, that it's always fun to see any of those connections.That'd be really interesting to research and find out.
Do a little addendum research someday.
This is one of the hardest parts of these episodes, guys, is we come across more things we want to learn about, but to keep these episodes at a reasonable length, we can't dive into it yet.
And to not stay up all night for like four nights in a row researching, because it's so easy to dive down that rabbit hole.
You're very guilty of it.
Well, just a little bit.Maybe a lot of it. No, but that's very interesting.And, oh, the fact that we've also kept, for the most part, the bobbing for apples tradition as a kind of like a carnival game almost for kids, that's very interesting.
But that was a divination.
Yeah.Test your skills, so to speak, or your luck even.So one of the other main key kind of icons and symbols during this time is fire, right?I think a lot of us have had associations of bonfires at Halloween.
I know for myself in the neighborhood I grew up in, a lot of people will have fires on their driveways and their little, you know, portable fire things and give out candy from there as kids come to trick or treat or they'll have little chili fests or cider fests with their neighbors.
It's a very communal, great kind of neighborly time. And it's because there's these great warm fires outside and it's usually cold here because we're outside of Chicago.
Right.So, yeah, the air is crisp.Stay cozy around a fire.Exactly.Hang out in the neighborhood.Yeah.It's the right time of year for it.
It totally is. But fire actually has a really significant place in the Samoan traditions.
One of the ways, which I briefly mentioned earlier, is people would light candles and put them in their windows in order to help guide their ancestors back to the family homestead. Oh, okay.
Sometimes, if they were poor and didn't have lard candles or fat candles or oil lamps, they would carve out turnips and light the inside of the turnips on fire.You might see where we're going with that.
Jack-o'-lanterns for those who might not have caught it.Turnips are not a thing in North America, really.So when Irish and Celtic immigrants came to the States, what they found instead was pumpkins and squash.
And so they would carve those and actually found them easier to carve than the turnips in a lot of ways.
I mean, yeah, you use the fruits that are available.That makes sense. Also, I can imagine it definitely sounds easier.I mean, I've never carved a turnip, but it sounds easier to carve a pumpkin than a turnip.
Maybe not like a butternut squash, but a pumpkin.
No.Well, I mean, butternut squash, if you get them at just the right time.
So one of the other main things with fire, and bonfires in particular, is the sacred bonfire that was lit at Tara.Now the Hill of Tara in ancient Irish culture was the seat of the High King.
Now at some other point down the road I'm going to be having an episode talking about the idea of the High King and the four or five provincial kings of Ireland.
But what you need to know is there are four or five provincial kings, and then there was a high king, and the high king's seat was in County Meath at the Hill of Tara.
Not far away from the Hill of Tara was the Hill of Tlockta, which was the Druidic religious center.So at Samhain, it said that all fires would be put out across Ireland. at sunset when the holiday begins.
And then the Druids at Klokta would light a sacred fire and then process it to the hill of Tara where the high king and the provincial kings were presiding over the major festivities of the noble courts and things like that.
That fire would then be lit and it would be a large bonfire at the top of the hill. And as the hills in the other area, you know, the surrounding area would see that fire lit, they would begin lighting their own fires.
And so there would be a ripple effect across the country of people reigniting their fires, either big bonfires in the community or even just your small hearth fires inside your own home.
And that that was representative of keeping warm and staying protected through the dark season.
And again, now we still see fire through these jack-o'-lanterns and also fire just as a communal thing that happens around this time of year and sometimes on Halloween specifically.
CB That's very nice.That also very much requires a lot of trust that, yeah, put out your fires and know that your community, your neighbors, even those miles away
will light their fires again in a minute, or soon, as soon as they receive signal from the next fire.That's, yeah, that's gotta be requiring a lot of trust from your local community.
And also kind of evokes the Gondor signal beacons from Lord of the Rings.Yes.
It's not 20 to 30 miles between signal fires for all of Ireland, but probably more like, what, five, six miles at most.
At most.I mean, it's an island.Things are pretty close to each other.Yeah, that's fair.One of the really interesting things is kind of a little bit of a sidebar, is the Hill of Tara today is a big tourist center.A lot of people go to visit it.
It is a pilgrimage site for pagan spirituality. Plochta, however, was largely unexplored and unexcavated until 2014.And Tara is also known as the Hill of Ward, so you don't have to try to spell Plochta if you want to look it up.
Right, W-A-R-D. and they've found that Tlakta is a series of concentric rings.Now we know throughout many, many, many cultures and many, many thousands of years circles are almost always indicative of some kind of spiritual center.
and that's true of Tara or Takta.But what's interesting about this site in particular is that archaeologists, and these are earthwork rings too, right?Like they're not built of metals or of woods at least that we can see to this day.
It's more like they've been built up of the local soils and things.
Okay.So not even like transported rocks in rings or anything, just... Right.
Not like a stonehenge or anything like that.
But they were created over three distinct phases over almost a thousand years.That first phase was built in the Bronze Age, which was 1200 to 800 BC.
The last set of rings was done in AD 400 to 520, which was right around when the country was transitioning into Christianity and converting to Christianity. That middle section is giving archaeologists a whole bunch of trouble.
What's funny about that is that is probably the time period which it was used the most, is that middle section.And they're just having a really hard time pinning it down.
When it was built, how long it was fully in use for, and all of that kind of information.
Sure, and is that do you think just because it was used so much in that time period or just because it's been long enough that the inner ring is easier to tell because some of it is so much older and the newer ring being so much newer is easier to tell?
There's some of that for sure.Yeah.There's also some theories that Cromwell used it as a base during the invasion of Ireland.
And when you have a lot of soldiers trampling over stuff,
That, yeah, that'll leave a mark.
So they're not entirely sure why it's hard.They're not entirely sure what's going on with it.But when you have any kind of invasion force anywhere, it's going to mess some stuff up.
Yeah, that's fair.Add on to the fact that it is just old.
Yeah.In a country that rains all the time.
Sure, sure.So you're really relying at that point on, I assume, like artifacts or anything that you find in that spot.
Yep.And they have. pottery and ceramics and things like that.They've even found some burials.There are questions about whether or not the site was a burial site before it became the Druidic center.
Which is also common in ancient sites that they kind of serve multiple purposes.But if you guys want to see any pictures of both the Hill of Tara or the Hill of Talakta, we're going to have photos of that on this episode's blog on our website.
So go check that out. So now that we've kind of finished our background information and foundational information on Samhain, let's get into Halloween, shall we?
So I don't think this is going to surprise anybody when I say that Halloween is Halloween because of the Catholic Church and Christian missionaries in Ireland.
One of the key things, before we kind of get into all the Halloween stuff, is there is a misconception, don't know how common it is, but I do know that it exists, that Ireland turned Catholic overnight.
Christian or Catholic, whichever version you want to think of.Overnight, like St.Patrick came and it was done.
So there were Christian missionaries in Ireland before St.Patrick, like hundreds of years before then, not long after the Romans.And then there was a Norse invasion.
And you can imagine how they felt about Christian missionaries and the Christian faith.
Only positivity, I'm sure.Right.
So, all in all, it probably took a minimum of 300 years for Ireland to actually convert to Christianity fully, right?
When a religion takes that long to take over the majority of a country, of a people, of a culture, you kind of have to start absorbing and repurposing from the religion and the culture that stood before.
In this case, on November 1st, the Catholic Church created All Saints Day.It didn't really do what it was supposed to do.Oh?About 150 years later, they made All Souls Day on November 2nd.
Because All Saints Day was more about martyrs, saints, leaders, essentially important quote-unquote people.
All Souls' Day was meant to then be more about ancestors, family ties, things like that, to tie into the Samhain tradition of the ancestors coming home.
Sure.Closer to the earlier meaning and importance behind the holiday.Yes. Yeah, that's fair.
Right.So then you have All Hallows' Eve, because All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day are hallowed days in the church, holy, sanctified, whatever.And so All Hallows' Eve came to be October 31st, and now we call it Halloween.
So as you can imagine, as Christianity and the Catholic Church absorbed a lot of what came from Samhain,
It might be good to note that the Irish people are well considered stubborn, and that even when people had converted, a lot of old practices were still practiced.
You also see this in cultures like the Mexican culture and how Dios de los Muertos is Catholic, but
Right.Most of what they, a lot of what is done comes from a much older religion than that.So same deal in Ireland.
A lot of these little rituals, the things like apple bobbing and leaving a candle in the window, things like that continued even once the country and everybody was Catholic and baptized and all that fun stuff.This is kind of the point in time when
things transitioned from being Samhain as a pagan holiday to Halloween as a Christian holiday.And then we'll kind of get into how that Christian holiday became what I call a pop culture holiday.
I think when we all think of Halloween, we think of trick-or-treating.
So let's talk about where that comes from, right?There are such things called the mummer's play.
Which was a reenactment of old pagan beliefs and events and legends with Mummers, essentially actors, going door to door.It was often a mix of adult and children.
Children would participate with singing and dancing, and the Mummers would ask for things in exchange for blessings, essentially.Often what they were given were sweets, small cakes, things like that.
And it was said that if you did not give a treat when asked by a mummer, you would have bad luck for the rest of the year.
One of the other aspects of tricks is the long-held tradition of children and adolescents causing mischief during Samhain.Joining the she on their mischievous little adventures, so to speak.
Though, you know, after the Catholic Church took over, that's not what you would be calling it.So they would do things in older times, like letting cows loose.
And they'd be doing this at nighttime when it was dark, potentially when everybody was asleep.
I mean, letting the cows loose feels fairly serious.
I think better the cows than the sheep though.
Okay, that's fair.That's fair.
You know, they're not going to maybe not go as far because they're cows.I don't know.If you have cows, tell me if I'm wrong.
I still feel like that's letting any ranch animal loose feels a step higher than like, oh no, you got bad luck because you were mean to a performer.
But you can just blame it on the fairies.
They do other things, though, like removing shed doors, moving shovels and other objects to weird places.In today's day and age, people will steal traffic cones or flip road signs upside down.
I mean, that's mostly hard work.
Right.All right.So there you get a lot of the mischief, a lot of the quote unquote tricks that would be going on.So then let's get into this idea of creatures.
Yes, goblins and ghouls and whatnot.
As we've touched on before, we've got this idea of the rising dead, zombies, ghosts.We've touched on fairies, various kinds.You've got your super mischievous ones, you've got your more nefarious and dark ones.
You have the Tuatha Dé Danann who are high fey in our modern parlance.
There is a lot of lore and legend about that, so that's a whole other conversation.Just know that the fae in Irish legend and lore are extensive.So there you go, ghosts and fairies and zombies, right?
So let's talk about Banshees, which in Gaeilge, which is how you pronounce Gaelic in Irish as a modern language, the word is not Banshee as in one word, it is Banshee, two words, and it often means like fey woman or something of the sort.
Banshees, if you don't know, are portents of death. And they would appear to a living family member of someone who had died, like at the time of the death of the person.
And they would either appear very physically and very... Like they would manifest almost like tangibly.Yeah, that's a good way of saying it.So they'd appear very tangibly.To steal Josh's helpful words right now.
or they would wail, which is where you get a lot of these legends of wailing women.
Okay.Wait, so it's not necessarily always wailing.It's sometimes just a visual appearance, a visual apparition of, that's interesting.Because usually I only ever hear Banshee referred to as some creature screaming shrilly in the night.Right.
That usually is.In a lot of modern interpretations, it feels like a signal of your own impending death.
Right, which is a twist.Let's kindly we'll call it a twist.That's fair.One of the really interesting things about Banshees is that it said that some family lines, some bloodlines would have the same Banshee. through their whole family line.
There are records of people going, oh, this is exactly how the Banshee looks and this Banshee has come back over generations and generations.That's one of the other creatures we see a lot at Halloween time.
Obviously, we see which is warlocks, which was essentially anybody who wasn't the accepted form of Christian or Catholic in Ireland.
If you stayed pagan, what some people might call Wicca today, which is a more neo-pagan, but it's close enough that a lot of people would recognize it.If you were still a druid, if you were a faith healer or a fairy doctor, a wise man, wise woman,
Anybody who was kinda outside the norm, right?
Sure, anyone who could be painted as a practitioner of some kind of magical art.
Right, and this is understandably the time when ideas of magic and witchcraft became twisted into something bad, to the ideas of devil worship, so on and so forth.
So one of the big creatures we also see at Halloween and scary movies and all of that are werewolves.Now, interestingly, Ireland and Scotland have a very long history of werewolf lore.Yes.Yes.
Specifically, they have stories consisting of people or families turning into wolves, fully wolves, not wolf-like, wolf-half-man, half-wolf creatures.
Sure, so less Teen Wolf and more American Werewolf in London, a little closer to that.
Yeah, more shapeshifting, less Harry Potter.
And we said that this didn't coincide with the moon, right?It wasn't always at the full moon.Sometimes they had a choice over it, sometimes they didn't, but it wasn't always just tied to the full moon.
There are then, later on, the werewolf legends of the half-man, half-wolf kind of werewolf.Those came from the Norse.
The Norse believed that witches with darker magic created werewolves, and that's why they were this deformed version of both man and wolf.
This interpretation of werewolf was the werewolf that was kind of at the fore when the Catholic Church took over and at the time of the witch trials in Ireland and Scotland and Wales.
So at the same time as many innocent women were being killed for being women, i.e.
the witch trials, thousands of men were being killed for being quote-unquote werewolves because maybe they were trying to protect a witch or trying to stand up to an evil mayor or practicing some of the old ways as a wise man themselves.
And so very flimsy evidence just like the witch trials and they would be killed in the thousands during this time. One of the interesting things to note too is that clans in Ireland and Scotland often had totem animals, so they were totemic.
So there's also this idea of perhaps clans themselves could turn into the animals that they had chosen as their totems that represented them.
So it might not have just been wolves, it might have just been that wolves have been the part of the history that have largely remained.
Sure.They've stuck out enough in the zeitgeist and for some reason they used to the test of time more than like where bears and where rats or where owls.
Well, there aren't snakes in Ireland.That is not accurate lore from the Catholic Church in St.Patrick, but that's also another conversation. One of the last creatures I kind of want to touch on are vampires.
Now, when it comes to Samhain, most of these creatures that we've touched on really don't play a part.
You know, you can say, oh, witches and warlocks are related to druids, ghosts and fairies are related to the other world veil, all that kind of stuff.
Sure, there are connections to be made.Right.
Vampires, really not at all.But one of the most iconic pieces of vampiric literature came from an Irishman, so we're going to talk about it. Of course, because they're all over the place at Halloween.So Bram Stoker was an Irishman who wrote Dracula.
And around the time he wrote Dracula, a few other Irish and British authors were writing things like, I don't know, Frankenstein and Carmilla, which is also a vampiric story.
Yeah, Carmilla doesn't get as much play.
No, I wonder why.So there was a lot of this inspiration for that aesthetic and that idea going around at this time when Bram Stoker wrote Dracula.
Now we know that a big amount of his inspiration came from Vlad III, the Impaler of Wallachia, and a lot of people assume that the name Dracula comes from the kind of family name, so to speak, of Vlad the Impaler, which was Dracul, meaning dragon.
You can see where it comes from.
However, there may be a parallel, I guess you could say, inspiration for the name.Dracul very much was probably part of it.
But it's interesting to note that if you've studied any kind of medieval history or talked about any kind of old medicine, there's this idea of bad blood.And this is not just inherent to Ireland or Scotland, this is throughout many, many cultures.
Sure, the classic balancing of the humors between blood and black bile and yellow bile.
And I think there was a fourth humor, but I can't remember it off the top of my head.
But yeah, so this idea of bad blood and that bad blood could make you sick or bad blood could make you evil, all that. In Gaeilge, in Irish, bad blood translates with proper, mostly, pronunciation to drac ula.
Well, that's really right there.
Right.So there are some that believe those were kind of one of those giddy writer moments where you get to go, oh, two things combined to make the thing.And maybe nobody else will ever know.And maybe everybody will.
But this idea that Dracul as dragon and Dracula as bad blood came together to form the name Dracula.
That's very cool. That's very cool.Yeah, because of course Dracula being, and vampires in general, being bloodsuckers.Right.That makes sense to tie that in with older bad blood ideas.
And I would say also makes probably a little more sense, at least linguistically, than Dracul would immediately.
But Dracul being tied to Vlad the Impaler, I see why a lot of people go down that road.
And I mean, I've generally- Plus it's just more common knowledge.
Right.I mean, Gilga is almost a lost language.
So I am attempting to learn it.So my pronunciations in this are maybe slightly better than the average person.But please don't quote me on any of it.
You're better than I would.But that's I mean, I'm a low bar.So
So one of the other really important things I think to note about Halloween is that the Halloween we think of today, the one we celebrate here in America, has a lot of influences that are not just sound.
Traditions from voodoo and Santeria and Dios de los Muertos and all of that, and again, excuse my mispronunciations of things, all have pieces that we can see and connect to. in modern day Halloween.
That being said, it's pretty well established and accepted by historians and anthropologists and the like that Samhain is the root of Halloween as a holiday.Sure.It's the primary influence. So we touched on this idea of fire earlier, right?
And jack-o'-lanterns and the sacred bonfires.There's one final aspect of fire that we see a lot in modern Halloween and modern media.And that is this idea of a folktale called Stingy Jack.
And there's a poem from about 1851 that goes into details about this, but, and it's called Stingy Jack, but there are other recountants of the story as well.
And it essentially says that Stingy Jack, while he was alive, managed to catch the devil once or twice and in various ways. The first time, he had him turn into a coin so he could buy himself a drink.
So he uses the devil, essentially, while he has him trapped.At the final time of capturing the devil, he makes a deal with the devil that if he lets the devil go, the devil won't accept his soul into hell.
Now, it wouldn't be extreme to think that maybe this idea of Stinchy Jack existed before the idea of the devil in Irish society.
Or if somebody trapping a creature, you see things like this with leprechauns.
Sure, maybe with some other kind of fae.
Right?Yeah.When you make deals with the fae, don't do it, first of all.
Second of all.Yeah, it's always going to backfire.There's always going to be consequences you weren't expecting.So he makes the deal with the devil.The devil says, fine, I won't accept your soul into hell when you die.So then Stingy Jack dies.
Well, you might have been able to tell from trapping the devil and using him to buy his drinks and whatever that maybe Stingy Jack was not the best person.And so he wasn't accepted into heaven. And the devil had swore not to take him into hell.
So then what is a soul to do?And that's the question that Stingy Jack asked the devil at the gates of hell.What am I to do if I am not in heaven or hell?
And it's said that the devil carved a lantern into a turnip and gave it to Stingy Jack, and Stingy Jack carries it with him as he roams the land to this day.
Now, does that remind you of any?
reminds me of the Headless Horseman.
Right, Ichabod Crane.We gotta love this whole turnips turning into pumpkins thing.I love it.
Well, you know, it's... Hey, they're equivalent.
Right.And the other thing that we see in media, very similar, Jack Skeleton, right?
So there's another one of our examples of how this whole thing of fire and candles lighting the way has manifested itself in Halloween.
Yes. It is kind of a weird journey to go from what was potentially stories about tricking and trapping the Fae to Jack Skellington.
But I do love that idea of, because you mentioned the carved turnips used in place of candles sometimes in people's homes to guide their ancestors or loved ones back.
I do kind of love the idea of this guy who kind of sucked, wandering around aimlessly for all time.
in between worlds, but unfortunately also, I would imagine, dragging some people away from their home, and as possibly an explanation as to why sometimes people don't necessarily make it back on sound to their own families, because they saw the wrong light.
And then you just hope the wild hunt collects everybody before the day's out.
So I think you can see Samhain into Halloween.Samhain, Christianity, Halloween.Boom, boom, boom.
But this idea of Halloween that you and I have celebrated our whole lives. didn't really make it to Ireland or Scotland or Europe, continental Europe until like the 1950s with the invention of radio and television.
Because a lot of what we celebrate today, again, had those influences of other cultures and other immigrants on the North American continent in Canada, Mexico, what have you, Australia and New Zealand as well.
So Halloween then being kind of an amalgam of all of these influences with a strong Samhain core to it.
It would make sense that that's not necessarily happening also the same way without those same influences.Yeah, that tracks.
And it's, you know, a conversation for another day as well.Halloween becoming this amalgamation and having all of these outside influences upon it.Minority influences, at least in North America.
There's now the conversation of like evangelical Christians don't celebrate Halloween.
But All Hallows' Eve exists in the Christian literature because of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day.
And so there's that whole interesting discussion of what is and what is not still practiced in various forms of the Christian faith.
Right.That's always interesting.Something that exists as consequence of the church than not being practiced by members of the church because it's not what the church would want.Right. It's always amusing at the very least.
Yeah.So yeah, so this idea of what I think, you know, post 1950s, what I would call the pop culture holiday of Halloween, made its way back to the British Isles and Ireland and continental Europe in the 1950s.
And so it's, again, just this fascinating timeline, I think, of ancient religion and tradition to new religion.Because I'm sorry, Christianity is still a new religion. with a bunch of sprinkles of that pagan religion still in it.
media and modern cultural sensation and back in some ways, because there has also been a very significant revitalization of neo-pagan spirituality, especially in North America, parts of Europe, and it's making its way around the world again, this idea of
Wicca, Druidism, whatever you want to call your pagan belief system depending on what cultural heritage what clicks with you, I don't judge.Yeah, so it's now like we've got this pop culture holiday that's celebrated.
from the Saturday before to the actual 31st, depending on when it falls.
I mean, whatever's most convenient to celebrate.
Because it's not actually necessarily tied to anything spiritual or particular religious.It's just, yeah, we celebrate, go out, get the candies and the costumes.Yeah.Great.
And then you have people who are still celebrating a holiday on October 31st.People who, you know, my cousin calls me.Oh, because if you haven't figured out yet, I'm not Christian.
Not sure I would call myself pagan either, but I'm some fun spiritual... Hey, you're something.
I'm something.You're something else.
But I would lean more towards calling myself pagan than I would anything else.And I get calls now from a couple of my cousins on Samhain going, Happy New Year.Because for us it is.
So yeah, it's just such an interesting timeline.
And it's interesting to see the holiday kind of fold in on itself.
We've gotten to the point that the resurgence of the old is bumping into the old recyclings into the new.That's very fun.
Yeah. So that's it for our first section.We went a little bit longer on this lecture section today because there's a lot to cover.
There's like a couple thousand years of history and influences in here, but we're going to run into intermission now and then we'll be back for our final discussion section.
All right, that's the first half of the episode.Now we're entering our little mid-roll break, where we will eventually, hopefully, have maybe some ads or whatnot.
But for the time being, just our little self-promo, because we are truly the definition of independent.
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Would be phenomenal.That's already huge.
Right, exactly.We're just the kind of people that manifest, so we've made all of the tiers.
Yes, yes.And any way in which you choose to help us, just keep on yapping.
Rate and review the podcast on Apple Music and Spotify, the only two places that we're posting right now.
Other than our website, of course, where you can access it for free.
Yes. Our website, of course, and I'll mention this again at the outro, is hyperfixation-investigations.com.
Anything else we need to get out of the way here?
I don't think so.Great.Cool.All right.Awesome.
Then let's get back to the episode, shall we?Yes.Huzzah.
So there's just a couple of things that I want to say before we kind of get into any more discussion.And that is, and I'm sure you all know this already, but it bears repeating.
It's important, especially in today's day and age, to take every representation of a culture or a religion or whatever with a grain of salt and look at who wrote that narrative, right?
Because there is a lot of misconceptions about paganism throughout the world, about Irish Druidism, in particular Wicca, Samhain as a holiday, and a lot of that comes from the fact that the Catholic Church is the one who wrote the narrative on it.
And that narrative that the Catholic Church wrote is the one that the media perpetuates in a lot of ways today, and not entirely and not always ill-meaning, but it's still there, right?
So you always have to take representations and stories about religions and cultures with the understanding that that religion or culture may not have written their own story.The other thing
is fact-check yourself, and that includes when Josh and I present stuff.There is a lens through which every person, be them an academic, a historian, a scientist, whatever, or a quote-unquote layperson everybody has a lens, right?
Their own lived experiences, their own culture and heritage that might affect how they present information or why they're presenting information or where they looked to receive the information that's informed them.And that's even true of us, right?
Like with this episode today, I am Irish and I am closely related to or practicing a form of paganism, right?
And I grew up in a family that often talked about, despite the fact that they were Catholic, the harm the Catholic Church did to Ireland and the Irish people. All of my research I have added.
As always, we will have all of my resources linked and cited on our website on the blog episode for this, which is also where you might even already be listening and looking at it, which is great.
But take it with a grain of salt as well, because I myself have a lens, right?
We are still just two people who are researching what we love and things that we feel connected to in whatever form, be it a logical brain connection, or in this case, a cultural and spiritual connection.Always take it with a grain of salt, folks.
Right.We'll do our best and try to not be too subjective on everything.
But always question where you're getting your information from, who's saying it, why they're saying it, how they're saying it.
We want to be entertaining for you guys.We want to be a resource for those who want to learn more about the topics we're talking about.
But we also don't ever want you to think that we are the end-all be-all knowledgeable or 100% accurate, because that's just not possible with how long we have to do our research and all of that.
Right.We'll do our best, but our best is not perfection, as perfection does not exist.
Right. So those are just our little disclaimers.I promise we won't make them every episode.
But since this is the first episode and it is one that has a bit more subjectivity inherently involved in it, we really wanted to make sure that we are forthright with you guys about all that.
It's important to at least say it at some point.
So we know going into this what to expect.
Exactly.All right.So, Josh, did you have any other questions or things you want to talk about with this?I.
did, or at least I wanted to bring up some things that I found amusing that I didn't get a chance to say earlier.Specifically, a secondary French connection that I thought of with the Mummers.Because I know Mardi Gras also has Mummer shows often.
And there's also Mummer shows, I know, I don't remember what time of year, but I know there are Mummer shows often in some areas in the American Northeast. So I'm just amused by that little connection.
Well, I mean, you even look at winter carolers.Where did that tradition come from?This idea of going door to door with song and story and what have you.
I do think it's a really interesting... During my research, we touched on... We didn't touch on it in this episode, but the research that I was doing also touched on Brittany.Brittany, the geographic location.
B-R-I-T-T-A-N-Y, the place.And there is, to this day, a pretty significant pagan influence.
And they themselves were essentially colonized by the French and held on to a lot of their pagan traditions for a long time and their mummers and all this different kind of stuff.
So if that's something you guys want to look into or you want a separate episode on Brittany and it's, you know, fun story, let us know either on Instagram or Facebook or if you join our Discord through Patreon, that too.
We're always happy to do research and talk about things.But yeah, it's really interesting, I think, this idea of community that is inherently underlying so many traditions that have spread to so many places and to the point where you really can't
can't fully track anymore which immigrant population brought it places.
Or how the combination... Or at least you have to do some serious digging.Some serious digging.Or how the combination of immigrant cultures came together to form this stuff.It's really cool.
But I was also very interested specifically by a the word choice for like the Irish specific Fae term for Sheed.
Because I think the only other place that I've heard fairies of any kind called Sheed, at least that I'm aware of off the top of my head, is the BBC TV show Merlin.What a classic.
We love that show, folks.
Which I think pretty much all the fairies that they encounter, they refer to in some fashion as Sheed.
Yeah, and I think they brought up the Huathajidinon too, which are, again, like the higher fae.
They might have.I don't remember that specifically.I feel like they did.
But regardless, I mean, you have to think about it.It's a BBC show.It's Britain.Oh, yeah.Despite what Britain likes to think, it had a very similar pagan cultural upbringing as did Ireland and Scotland and Wales.
Right.No, it's just amusing to go, oh, hey, okay, yeah, that tracks.But also to see that term still being used, even in modern pop culture, that we don't see it very often.In a lot of pop culture, it's fun to see it anywhere.
It is also often mispronounced when it does show up.Because there are multiple ways to spell it.One of the more common ones, and if you read fantasy romance novels, you've probably seen it, is S-I, with what's called a fada accent, D-I,
H-E, and it's pronounced she.
Sometimes you'll just see S with the I with the fada accent.Sometimes it won't have the E at the end.So there's multiple kind of spellings of it.
That you might see, but it's one of the many fun Irish words that, at least this one sounds somewhat like it's spelled.
Yeah, I mean, sure, it's not too crazy spelling-wise.
Right, but when you get into the drach ula, the second word, ula, starts with an F-H.
F-H is always silent in Irish.
Oh, that's horribly confusing.It's not drach fula.
I will also be including a pronunciation guide, because I still butchered some of the pronunciations even with having some training in this language, on the mini blog for this episode.
Before you get into our resources and images, I'm going to have a little pronunciation guide there for all of the Gaelic words that we used today, and then how the dictionary would spell it out for your pronunciations and stuff.
Yeah, because it's hard to keep track of otherwise.
I mean, I'm sure.Yeah.Because it's all, it does not match our current anglophonic bias.Right, at all.In terms of how it's spelled?No.No.No.So I could see how it's a little confusing.
Yeah, that's very fair. But I just enjoy seeing Fae and fairies anywhere.
And seeing that same name being used is a fun connection because usually it's just Fae, fairies.Sometimes there's other terms thrown about here or there.
But I don't often hear she.
So yeah, I think that's pretty much our episode.We've talked about Samhain as a pagan holiday.
We've talked about Halloween as a Christian holiday briefly, talked about modern Halloween and how you can see these influences even today and how Samhain is coming back around for some folks.
Folding back in on itself.
Yeah.And just how intertwined all of this can be, which is just, again, I just think it's so cool that Such a pop culture, again, quote unquote pop culture holiday can have such deep roots and can be as deep or as light as you want it to be.
Because so much of it today is just kind of getting a cool costume to represent some character that you enjoy from some piece of media, hanging out with friends, family, getting some treats.
Yes, and how this whole time of year has become Halloween movies and spending time with friends and dressing up with them and hanging out around the bonfires.
I feel like that community aspect of Samhain can still really be seen today, which I think is is just really heartwarming in a lot of ways.
Yeah.And do we always love the media representation of some of the strongest influences from Samhain?No, but we can say that about a lot of things.
Right?And at the end of the day, I choose to view Halloween separately from Samhain, but still as something really fun, cultural community thing that I celebrate with my friends. usually on Saturdays, right?
And then on October 31st, I commune with my family and I'm a bit more spiritual about it.And going into these darker days with a sense of this isn't the end of the year, this is the beginning.
Which I think is beautiful.
Yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode.As always, you can find the resources and images, like I said before, on our website.
If you're not already listening there, if you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, our website is www.hyperfixation-investigations.com.Josh will give you that again a little bit later.
And we hope that you have an absolutely fantastic Halloween weekend, or Samhain, should you celebrate.And have a great rest of your week, guys.We'll see you next Saturday.
Happy Halloween and good night. That's a wrap on episode one, Samhain.If you'd like to delve further into this topic, our research sources and related images are posted on our website, hyperfixation-investigations.com.
Again, that is hyperfixation-investigations.com.Thanks so much for listening.
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