Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

by Nicholas Rogers

Book Overview

Boasting a rich, complex history rooted in Celtic and Christian ritual, Halloween has evolved from ethnic celebration to a blend of street festival, fright night, and vast commercial enterprise. In this colorful history, Nicholas Rogers takes a lively, entertaining look at the cultural origins and development of one of the most popular holidays of the year.
Drawing on a fascinating array of sources, from classical history to Hollywood films, Rogers traces Halloween as it emerged from the Celtic festival of Samhain (summer's end), picked up elements of the Christian Hallowtide (All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day), arrived in North America as an Irish and Scottish festival, and evolved into an unofficial but large-scale holiday by the early 20th century. He examines the 1970s and '80s phenomena of Halloween sadism (razor blades in apples) and inner-city violence (arson in Detroit), as well as the immense influence of the horror film genre on the reinvention of Halloween as a terror-fest. Throughout his vivid account, Rogers shows how Halloween remains, at its core, a night of inversion, when social norms are turned upside down, and a temporary freedom of expression reigns supreme. He examines how this very license has prompted censure by the religious Right, occasional outrage from law enforcement officials, and appropriation by Left-leaning political groups.
Engagingly written and based on extensive research, Halloween is the definitive history of the most bewitching day of the year, illuminating the intricate history and shifting cultural forces behind this enduring trick-or-treat holiday.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195146913
• ISBN13: 9780195146912
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.92 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 8.6" x 5.6"

Customer Reviews

For All the HALLOWEEN Lovers!!!

You need to love the history of HALLOWEEN in order to appreciate this book. It takes you back 3,000 years ago when HALLOWEEN began with the Celts and was called Samhain. It talks about how HALLOWEEN came to America. It talks about when people put poison in apples and gave them out as treats. (I transported that into a HALLOWEEN movie I made called 'Pumpkin Man.) It even talks about the HALLOWEEN film series, although I noticed a mistake when it came to that. If you love the holiday, you'll love HALLOWEEN: FROM PAGAN RITUAL TO PARTY NIGHT!!!

An excellent history of Halloween.

As other reviews suggest, this is not a ghost story or for those with short attention spans. Dr. Rogers is a professor of history, and he has produced a correspondingly scholarly book of history, including names, dates, argumentation, and references to his source materials. When I found the book, I was mainly interested in the early history of Halloween, and the first part of the book delivers it. And it's an important contribution, contrasting with pop-histories that paste later Christian traditions on to early Celtic celebrations, and basically dismiss a thousand years of Christian development as something like "And then they tried to Christianize it because those darned pagans wouldn't go away". Halloween evolved as the cultures celebrating it evolved, and you can't understand its celebration today through a single slice of time in history. I was tempted to give it four stars instead of five because I thought the author put too much space into Halloween movies, and not enough into the early American development. But he was bringing us up through its modern celebration in the US and Canada, and movies are an important source and reflection of the culture, so I suppose that serves his intent. You shouldn't try to learn any subject from a single book. Excellent companion books are "The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween" by Markale, for its early history, and "Halloween: An American Holiday, An American Tradition" by Bannatyne for its American development, if you ignore her pre-American history of it (for reasons which are explained comprehensively in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon").

Beating Up the Strawman (or Scarecrow?)

The negative reviews I've read so far are trashing the book because it wasn't what they expected it to be: a nostalgic, easy-reading book that tickled the toes and the spine while the reader sips hot cider. The book doesn't present itself as such and is clearly an academic and scholarly survey of the holiday, from its origins, through its break into popular North American culture, to contemporary practices. If you're not looking for that kind of treatment, don't read this book. But don't slam it because it didn't do what you wanted it to do. (If you don't get the connection between this paragraph and the title, look up "straw man argument.") I found the book to be a slim, well-written text that still manages to cover a wide range of topics and provide tons of interesting facts and figures. Rogers' main thesis is that Halloween, a holiday that continually reinvents itself, continues to provide "a space for transgression and parody," even as it is appropriated to fit the social and political needs of the culture. Rogers explores this thesis by examining the origins of Halloween, its history in Britain and North America, its similarities to Mexico's "Day of the Dead," urban legends and popular reactions to the holiday, its representation in Hollywood, and current trends in its celebration. He ends with a few guesses and questions about the holiday's future. A thorough analysis without getting bogged down in any one aspect.

Hey Now...

Alexander, you are indeed a jerk, this book is great! And all of us "normal" people would enjoy it if we decided to have an open mind and heart. It's about HISTORY, KNOWLEDGE is so important in this world and the more we obtain the better off we are, so although I also enjoy Charlie Brown, this is a REAL book. Look elsewhere, before you offend someone else, and by the way "okayness" is not a word, nice try...

A serious cultural history of Halloween

Single-subject histories on the likes of salt, codfish and even the color red have become a fashionable lately, and this book is a fine specimen of the genre. It traces the history of the celebration of October 31 from Samhain, the year cycle rite observed by the pagan Celts in Britain, to the many ways it is marked in North America at the time of the new millennium. His central thesis, supported by myriad examples and illustrations, is that Halloween has always been a liminal time, a boundary between autumn and winter, this world and the other world, life and death. Drawing from the theory of anthropologist Victor Turner, he argues that liminal times are also periods of ritual inversion in which the obverse of cultural values, however they are construed, are temporarily allowed to emerge into public consciousness and celebrated before being relegated once again to the cultural closet. Whether these oppositional symbols are spiritual otherworlds, as they were for the ancient Celts, or consist instead of what is disavowed by the dominant cultural paradigm, Halloween provides a framework during which they can be publicly explored and performed. This central feature of Halloween, more than any individual rite or symbol, constitutes the core of the holiday that has endured for over a thousand years. From Celtic Samhain to globalized celebration of consumer culture, Halloween seems to attract to it the oppositional and the carnivalesque. No wonder, then, that is has become a popular target for the invectives of conservative Christian ministers and their congregations, who label it "Satanic" and call for its suppression. But the suppression of culturally contested symbols never successfully eliminates the ideas behind them. In fact, as Turner and French cultural historian Michel Foucault argue, these oppositional images are fertile ground for cultural renewal, and provide alternative ways of envisioning reality: they are cultural countersites where social mores and pretensions can be mocked, parodied, and lampooned with impunity, and an alternative universe can temporarily be imagined. This excellent book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It reads fluidly and easily, is theoretically well-informed without being jargon-ridden or using theory as a bludgeon, and could easily be adopted for use in large undergraduate courses on cultural history, folkloristics and anthropology.