Beyond The Walls

Nowadays, browsing the aisles of candy corn and plastic bats, it’s hard to imagine that Halloween was ever an article of controversy. But the history of Halloween in America was surprisingly contentious. It took a long time to become established as a mainstream holiday and was resisted, perhaps not so surprisingly, by religious authorities. Halloween has its origins in the Celtic holiday of Samhain. It was a druidic festival held between the evening of October 31 and sunset of the following day. The ancient Druids believed that during this night, the separation between the worlds of the living and the dead softened. Ghosts, they believed, roamed the countryside, damaging crops and meddling in human affairs. And it was also a time when divination was thought to be more powerful. After the Celts were conquered by the Romans, Samhain underwent a series of revisions. Over the course of the four-hundred-year Roman governorship, Samhain blended with two similar Roman holidays – Feralia, a day to honor the dead, and