A night-time walk through the sodium-orange murk of Dublin as the end of October draws near is becoming more evocative of Beirut c. 1983 or Sarajevo c. 1993 than of a capital bereft of white UN tanks. Every couple of seconds the approach of All Hallow's night is announced by a high-pitched screech or a mortar-like crump, sometimes distant, sometimes close by, the result of peoples' love of pyrotechnics and the entrepreneurial spirit of those young men hanging around Henry Street with a fun-size pack of lethal explosives imported on the sly from Eastern Europe or the Orient. Hail to the law of supply and demand.
Coming home last year as the Oiche Shamhna ritual of doorto-door tax collection, payable in the under-10's currency of sweets and apples, began, I saw something which coldly exemplified the changes that have come over Irish society. Here and there in the estate was the usual gaggle of five and sixyear-olds in ghoulish garb, entreating weary housewives to "help the Halloween Party ..." Only most groups had an adult guardian. Time was when that would have been unthinkable. Certainly, when I was six, my contemporaries and I would don bin-liners and cardboard witches' hats, then circumnavigate the estate, with never an adult in sight.
Different fears
An ancient pagan festival is a time to emphasise our fears. The reasons for these fears are different, just as the circumstances of ourselves and our long-vanished forebears are immeasurably different. But the sight of those children with their adult minders is telling. Once more our societal experience is tempered by trepidation, even fear. And a long historic epoch when society held certain securities and certain limitations is over.
November 1st is All Soul's Day, an early Christian endeavour to bury the neolithic rites of Druidic shamanism. For November was the strart of Samhain, the Celtic new year, the dark half of the year lasting until May 1st, when the light half (Beltaine) began. (Of lesser importance were Imbolc on February 1st and Lugnasad on August 1st).
Samhain represented the reconciliation between the male deity Dagda, the personification of tribal skills, and his female counterpart, the Morrigan, a goddess implicated in war and fertility. (Like the Indian goddess Parvati, she appears with alternatively benign and malevolent aspects.)
Samhain was a time when the veil 'twixt our world and the next became translucent, allowing interaction between the two: on this night, the sidhe or fairyfolk ventured forth from their mounds and ghostly descendants of the Tuatha De Danann were loosed upon the world.
Myths and legends
Numerous Celtic myths relate to Samhain, a central theme being the invasion by malign beings from the Otherworld. Dagda mating with the Morr igan is but one, although in Iron Age times, early November was a very practical time for a woman to conceive - hence the emphasis on fertility.
Samhain was also a time associated with the worship of the ancient god Crom Cruach (a.k.a. Crom Dubh) whose stone idol was located near Ballymagauran, Co Cavan, at Mag Slecht (the Plain of Prostrations). Crom was a corn and milk god to whom animal and human blood sacrifices were offered; on the eve of Samhain, worshippers at Mag Slecht killed their first-born as tribute. It is also said they rubbed their noses against his gold-embossed idol until their noses were worn down to the bone. The frenzy which accompanied this idolatry was probably of the brutal and primitive variety common to pre-Christian Europe; it is believed St Patrick destroyed Crom Cruach's influence at Mag Slecht.
Christianity may have diluted Samhain's influence, but the belief in fairy-folk and ghosts has persisted to this day. And the migrations of Celts and AngloSaxons to the New World, transplanting Hallowe'en into the mainstream of American pop-culture, has ensured that the tradition of Trick-or-Treat and the Jack-o-Lantern occupies pride of place in the culture which now rules the world.
In those distant Iron Age times, Samhain was the time when cattle which couldn't be overwintered were slaughtered: the bonfires of today were the "bone-fires" of yore, when the bones and inedible bits of carcase were burnt. As the shrunken sun dipped ever lower in the sky, the cattle may have been killed en masse. On those dark, distant nights the sense of moribund sorrow can only have been emphasised by the frantic lowing of doomed beasts.
Long after the coming of Christianity, the bonfire custom has endured; the wearing of masks may originally have represented animal cults, or even the ancestors. Eoin McNeill in his 1921 volume, Celtic Ireland, records verse heard during the festival:
Here comes I, old Beelzebub
And over my shoulder I carries a club,
And in my hand a dripping-pan
And I think myself a jolly old man.
McNeill also says that in rural areas, demons were said to roam the countryside accompanied by Oliver Cromwell.
Different demons
The demons today are quite different from those little ones dragging along Quinnsworth bags stuffed with monkey nuts, apples and fun-sized Crunchies. Cities of electric light keep the once omnipotent darkness at bay and the blow-torch of rationality has scorched away old superstitions. Nowadays, horror is bred by society's bonds melting, with alienation and increasing violence the results. The sight of Trick-or-Treating children cautiously guarded on their rounds serves to illustrate that though they have been born into a world wealthier and more advanced than at any time in history, it is a world riven with dangers and insecurities from within, not without.
What if one of the bogies from the other world crossed over into the city at this time? My guess is that either of two things would happen. One, he would not be noticed. Two, he would take fright and flee back whence he came.