Monday, October 26, 2009

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Samhain, the origin of Halloween urban legends current

Samhain is the festival's most important Celtic pagan period that dominated Europe until his conversion to Christianity, which was celebrated the end of the harvest season in the Celtic culture and was considered the "Celtic New Year, which began with the dark season. It is both a celebration of transition (the transition from year to year) and opening into another world. Its etymology is Gaelic (Gaelic: samhain, 'late summer')?.

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has been practiced for more than three thousand years by the Celtic peoples that have lived all over Europe (Iberia in places like Galicia, northern Portugal, parts of Asturias, Cantabria, País Basque, Navarra, and in much of León). Today
Samhain continues to be celebrated by the followers of neo-pagan movement (religion) as Wicca and Druidism.
On the one hand we find that the pagan origin of the celebration could be attributed to Celtic celebration called "Samhain" and was aimed at the reverence of ancestors. The invasion of the Romans (46 BC) to the British Isles resulted in a mixture of Celtic culture, which over time eventually disappeared. His religion called Druidism, with evangelization eventually disappeared in most communities in the late Celtic II.

Relationship Druidism


On the religion of the Druids, they do not know much did not write about it, everything is passed from generation to generation. We know that the festivities of Samhain is most likely held between November 5 and November 7 (half of the autumn equinox and winter solstice) with a series of week-long festivities, ending with the feast of "spirits" and thereby initiating the Celtic New Year. This feast of the spirits was one of their main festivals as celebrated what for Christians would be "heaven and earth" (concepts that came only with Christianity). For them the place of spirits was a place of perfect happiness in which there was no hunger or pain. The Celts celebrate this festival with rites in which, the Druid priests, serving as a "medium", communicated with their ancestors waiting to be guided in this life to the immortal. It is said that the spirits of the ancestors came on that date to visit their former homes.

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To the Celts, who only distinguish between two seasons (summer and winter), Samhain (meaning 'late summer') marks the beginning of winter. It is just the harvest time and from then on would be shorter and the nights longer. Therefore, the Celts celebrated important festivals to welcome the Year Again. On the evening of October 31st (and 1st November for the Celts, as the new day started with the setting sun), the custom was to leave food and sweets out of their houses and light candles to help the souls of the dead to find the way to the light and the rest by the Sun God in the Land of Summer. On the night of Samhain the living and the dead could communicate. The barriers that separated them in that magical moment disappeared. The good thing was that the spirits of ancestors living could advise on the future, but the bad news was also summoned evil spirits. Therefore, the Druids ordered bonfires to scare away the last.


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In modern Halloween has maintained the old tradition of leaving food for the dead, now represented by children dressed up, going from house to house asking for candy, with the phrase "trick or treat ' (treatment or trick). It seems that the Celtic Druids food collected by the house to make offerings to the deity (one also speaks of possible human sacrifice) and carried a large turnip coals hollow inside, representing the spirit which gave them power. In the late nineteenth century, the Irish introduced this festival in America and named the pumpkin as "Jack who lives in the light" or now known as "Jack O'Lantern."

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Today Halloween is an international party that lacks any sense of religion and whose origin is ignored by the majority. And has nothing to do with the rituals of the Druids or the Celts who dominated most of western and central Europe during the first millennium BC It's just another excuse for the business, consumption and the film industry .
However, Ireland remains the reference of Samhain: not only is the Irish Gaelic name in November, but still during the night of Samhain is large items fires in the neighborhood gives the junk that accumulates in their homes. That is the modern form in which the Irish are the Celtic New Year.


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