October 20, 2012
It’s been less than two weeks since the world started to fall apart.
During the third week of October, I received an e-mail with the subject line “Samhain query.” Of course, I get a lot of e-mailed questions this time of year: Requests for interviews, reporters searching for illustrations for Halloween articles, someone trying to identify and appraise an odd Halloween collectible. This year I had a new Halloween history book out, so I was trying to set up book signings. I’d even been invited to sign at a store in Salem, home of America’s own homegrown witch-hunting tragedy, although they couldn’t find me a place to stay; hotels there book up a year in advance for the October festivities.
But, two things stood out about this e-mail: The first was that it asked not about Halloween, but about the holiday’s ancient Celtic forebear. The second was that the sender’s address ended in “ucla.edu.”
I clicked on the message and read:
Dear Ms. Morton –
I’m a linguistics professor at UCLA specializing in Latin, and I’m currently working with a team from Ireland to translate a manuscript discovered in a recent archaeological dig. The manuscript was written mostly in Latin, but was believed to belong to an Irish Druid circa 350 C.E. It includes numerous references to Samhain, many of which I’m frankly having difficulty making sense of. I found your book The Halloween Encyclopedia in the campus library, and you seem to have extensive knowledge of Samhain. Your bio says you’re in the Southern California area, so would you be open to a meeting? Thank you. My contact information is below.
Sincerely,
Dr. Wilson Armitage[1]
I checked the e-mail headers to make sure this really had come from UCLA, because otherwise I would have smiled and dismissed it as an early Halloween prank. The Celts’ Druids—essentially their priest caste—were notorious for passing all of their lore verbally; they didn’t believe in writing anything down. To have a Druid “manuscript,” then, was virtually impossible. And in Latin? There had been cases of Celts who had integrated into Roman society and become quite adept in Latin, but they were from the Gaul tribes of continental Europe, not Ireland.
But, if this was real…
Scholars frankly know little about the Irish Celts, and less about Samhain. What we have are the tantalizing bits passed down in legends transcribed by early Catholic missionaries. Stories about heroes who fought malicious sidh, or fairies, on Samhain Eve[2]. Horror tales involving hanged corpses that returned to vengeful life on that night and asked for drinks, which they spit into the faces of those who were foolish enough to supply them, causing immediate death to their benefactors[3]. Romances about princesses who turned into swans on October 31st and who flew off with their true love[4]. There were suggestions that the Celts had celebrated “summer’s end” (the literal translation of “Samhain”) with a three-day long party of drinking, feasting and horse racing. One debate raging among those who study Halloween questions how much our modern holiday owes to the Celts. Some believe that the festival has a completely Christian history, and that its grimmer aspects derive from the November 2nd Catholic celebration of All Souls. Myself, I fall largely on the side of “summer’s end”—I think Halloween unquestionably inherited some of its lore from Samhain, like belief in supernatural forces being prevalent on the evening of October 31st, or the notion (held mainly by the old Scots) that fortune-telling was likelier to be successful if performed on All Hallows Eve.
There’s another camp, however, which holds that Halloween is little more than a pagan festival renamed; fundamentalist Christians go so far as to condemn the holiday as a celebration of “Samhain, Lord of the Dead.”[5] What the fire-and-brimstone preachers don’t know is that their “facts” stem from the fanciful work of one Charles Vallancey, an eighteenth-century British engineer who was dispatched by the government to survey Ireland. He fell in love with the Irish/Celtic language and culture, and spent most of the rest of his life collecting information, which he transcribed into a massive opus (pretentiously) called Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis. Except…Vallancey was frankly an arrogant fool. He was obsessed with the notion that the Celtic tongue could be traced back to Indo-European roots, and in his quest to find connections he frequently disposed of the facts. He somehow decided that all of the other scholars (and there had already been many even by 1786, when his Collectanea was published) were wrong, and that Samhain had not been a new year’s celebration and in-bringing of the harvest, but was rather a day of judgment when the Celts offered sacrifices to their dark god “Bal-Sab.” Vallancey’s books found their way onto library shelves around the world, next to volumes that both reiterated and decried them, and so Vallancey inadvertently created a strange alternate history of Halloween. By the 1990s, some American church groups were calling October 31st “The Devil’s Birthday” and they consequently banned trick or treat. I wondered if they were simply miserable people who didn’t want their kids to have any fun, either.
So now I had been presented with what could potentially, possibly, change our understanding of Samhain and perhaps finally lay the ghost of Vallancey to rest. My schedule was pretty booked, but I had a rare free night tomorrow, and my significant other, Ricky, was working on a movie that was shooting down in South Carolina (he’s an actor, and is most well known for his performance as “Henry the Red” in Army of Darkness). I answered Dr. Armitage and told him I’d be happy to meet tomorrow to discuss his project. He responded within minutes, suggesting a time and providing his UCLA office address.
At least Armitage was legit, and he wasn’t likely to be the kind of man who could be fooled by a scam. What would I find out? Was Samhain mainly an administrative function when the Celts extinguished all their home hearths and relit them with an ember from a fire kindled by Druid priests (for which services they were duly taxed)? Was it really a three-day kegger? Was it possible that human sacrifice had been performed?
I was twenty-four hours away from finding out.