From jack-o'-lanterns and cats to witches and vampires, Halloween has become synonymous with a set of spooky symbols, and Nicole Kilburn, an instructor of anthropology at Vancouver Island's Camosun College, is working to demystify them.
鈥淎s somebody that has been on the planet for 49 years experiencing Halloween, it's really fascinating for me to apply that anthropology lens to something that I'm very familiar with," said Kilburn, who has taught students about Halloween for years.
Many of the symbols associated with Halloween relate to the origins of the Oct. 31 bash, which stems from a Celtic pagan festival called Samhain, celebrated thousands of years ago to mark the beginning of winter.
According to the instructor, on Samhain, celebrants believed the barrier between reality and the spirit world became porous, allowing humans and souls to interact. Many Celts, however, didn鈥檛 want to mingle with these spooky characters. Their solution: disguises.
"They would use costumes to disguise themselves from the spirits, and the best way to do that was to make yourself look like a spirit," said Kilburn, adding that this tradition informed today's practice of wearing eerie outfits on Halloween night.
Hundreds of years later, early Christians began to reshape Samhain traditions.
"After the arrival of Christianity in Celtic landscapes, one of the easiest ways to assimilate people was to take something familiar like Samhain and give it another name," said Kilburn.
Samhain soon became All Souls Day, also known as All Hallows Day, which took place on Nov. 1. The event the night before was coined All Hallow's Eve.
In the 1800s, Halloween continued to change when Irish immigrants journeyed across the Atlantic, bringing their centuries-old Samhain traditions with them.
"It takes on its own brand here in North America, and so you're going to see the continuation of costumes, but they kind of change in meaning," said Kilburn. "We have a shift towards Halloween being more for children."
Of the symbols that now pepper the Halloween season, none are more prominent than jack-o'-lanterns 鈥� the remnants of a centuries-old Irish myth.
Legend has it, that a malevolent character named Jack encountered the devil while out for walk. Being a trickster, the Irishman encouraged the horned creature to climb a tree, then pinned him there by carving a cross in the trunk.
"And so, the devil had to negotiate with Jack," said Kilburn, adding that in exchange for helping him down, the devil agreed not to drag Jack to hell after his death.
However, when Jack died, God didn't allow him into heaven, so he was forced to wander in purgatory's eternal darkness. The devil eventually took pity on Jack and decided to help him.
"The devil said, 'I will give you an ember from Hell to light your way,' and the vessel that held that burning ember was a carved turnip," said Kilburn, adding that this myth informed the Irish practice carving root vegetables before Halloween.
People in Ireland would set up these carved vegetables on Halloween to scare away Jack's wandering soul.
"When Irish immigrants arrived here in North America and were introduced to pumpkins and other squashes, which are New World domesticates, it was a no-brainer ... to switch to that vessel from a root vegetable," said Kilburn.
Like carved pumpkins, witches hold special a place in Halloween lore.
"[Witches] were feared because they had knowledge," said Kilburn. "That can disrupt another way of seeing the world, one ... where explanations come from a Christian God, as opposed to a way of knowing that is more connected to nature, that was pegged as being pagan."
In accordance with Samhain traditions, where Celts would dress up as characters they feared, people began to dress as witches, which ingrained the characters in contemporary Halloween traditions.
Tied to these long-demonized figures, cats are also a prominent Halloween symbol because many believed witches could shape-shift into cats.
"There are instances of cats being ... burnt in these big fires because of this idea that they could have been the shape-shifting witches," said Kilburn.
Even having a cat was problematic for some.
鈥淎t a certain point in time during the Witch Trials, it was pretty dangerous to be a woman and have a cat as a pet or even a cat that hung around because it was cited as evidence of your potential identity as a witch, which rarely ended well," added the instructor.
Vampires are yet another spooky symbol, which originated as a concept when the Black Plague was killing millions across Europe.
"[Vampires] became the explanation for a state of sudden death and illness in a community," said Kilburn. "You would explain it as ... the work of malicious spirits that are restless and are reanimating recently deceased individuals."
People dressed like vampires for the same reasons they did witches 鈥� to look like characters who scared them.
"It is really interesting today that you continue to have Halloween costumes like witches and cats without any of that back story, and that history really has to do with gender and gender politics and some pretty dark moments in our social history," said Kilburn, who hopes her classes give her students an inside look at traditions that have lost meaning with time.
