![]() ![]() ![]() There’s no visual record of the wildest Samhain excesses, but we’ve got some absolutely cursed images, so grab your fattest cabbage stalks, nuts and hempseed (coincidentally, what my mum’s hippy friends offered horrified trick-or-treaters in the 1980s), and let’s get started. This homespun horror vibe crossed the Atlantic to the rural US with mass Irish emigration in the 19th century, and, finally, people started taking pictures of it. “Young people sometimes dressed up in strange garments the boys going as girls, the girls as old men or women with masks … perhaps a bit of flour bag or calico with slits for eyes, nose and mouth, the beard and brows drawn with boot polish” – as Rogers quotes a witness telling the Irish Folklore Commission in the 1940s. It’s not a big step from there to disguising yourself to confuse the wandering souls of the dead and if you don’t have animal skins, you make do. This tulle tutu is great as is, or embellish it with a. Samhain was a season of livestock slaughter, so wearing skins around the ritual fire may have been part of it (although actual evidence is thin to nonexistent). Halloween Party Shirts Funny Costume Ideas Mom Halloween Outfit Womens Shirt. What have we retained of that good stuff? Well, the Celtic custom of souling involved going door to door asking for food, and soulers carried hollowed-out turnips lit with a candle representing a soul in purgatory. Before it was defanged by the only force stronger than religion – capitalism – “Heathenrie, Devilrie and Drunknennesse” (as Philip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses put it in 1583) abounded and anything could happen. Withered crops and creepy birds scream “party time” and that’s what Halloween became, if by “party” you mean “throwing a cabbage stalk at your neighbour’s door, then trying to knock them over with a cabbage”, “running round corn to summon the devil” or “ burning nuts with your significant other to see which of you will die first”. One early account in Nicholas Rogers’s history of Halloween describes it, highly specifically, as the season when “malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops”. It was variously a time of communion with the dead, divination, misrule, excess and fire (the word “bonfire” derives from “bone fire” – so wholesome). The Celtic Samhain end-of-harvest traditions from which it evolved proved impossible to sanitise entirely into the tidier Christian celebration of All Saints’ and All Souls’. With that kind of worldview, it’s no surprise old-time Halloween was creepier than the current version. It’s not like there was much else to fill the lengthening winter nights back then, except getting killed by Vikings, starvation or plague. Babies in Barbenheimer costumes “yummy mummy” mini Colin the Caterpillars pumpkin-flavoured, glow-in-the-dark lube and an email from your accountant laboriously joking about spooktacular self-assessment: Halloween these days feels tediously, tackily modern, when actually we’ve probably been scaring ourselves silly at this time of year since pre-history. ![]()
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