North Carolina will become North "Scarolina" when Halloween is celebrated tonight. While students will take part in many common Halloween-related activities, there is more to the holiday than most people normally think.
The origins of Halloween look very different than the current traditions associated with Halloween. According to Garry Crites, a graduate student in religion, the forbear to Halloween was a Celtic festival called Samhain, which took place on the night before the start of the new calendar year, or Nov. 1. On this night the Celts believed that the souls of the dead would return to the earth.
"It was one of the two most important days in the Celtic year," Crites explained. "It is a time when the separation from the other world is the smallest."
The Halloween costume evolved from the Celtic people's fear that spirits would return during the night. They wore costumes to disguise themselves in order to avoid the spirits.
This pagan festival continued for many years, until the 800s when the Catholic church took on the traditional Samhain festival as part of the celebration of All Saint's Day on Nov. 1, also known as All-Hallows. The festival became known as All-Hallows Eve, and was subsequently renamed Halloween.
Carl Clark, a Divinity student and faith and arts intern at the Chapel, said the Christian celebration of All Hallows Eve is dedicated to "highlighting the people who have died in service of the church."
While the history of Halloween connects pagan rituals and Christian tradition, modern Halloween practices reveal aspects of current American culture.
Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology Diane Nelson--who spent Thursday morning shopping for her costume--said the festivities of Halloween give Americans a chance to explore aspects of life that fall outside of cultural norms.
"To me it is my favorite holiday of the year because it pushes you into places that we don't usually go," she said. "It is the place where you are supposed to touch on the dark things, skeletons, death, witchraft--just think about the costumes for children, they are out of these fantasy places."
Nelson linked the dark qualities of Halloween to the subject of death--something she said Americans often struggle with and attempt not to think about.
"It is totally cracking open the regular life, where you work, go to school, produce and marry and not think about death and worms crawling through your bones," she said. "Here is this day when you are supposed to cross that line, to meddle with it and play with it."
Lanprad Professor of History William Reddy also sees Halloween providing the opportunity for people to exhibit a variety of emotions, based on the theory that people across cultures reveal emotions in order to better manage them.
"Halloween fits into the picture--in its current form, as an opportunity that allows people to practice a variety of emotions, not just fear, but also aggression, anger and feelings of being deviant or hot," Reddy said. "I think that the evidence is that this is the kind of thing that people do in order to have a better sense of who they are and to be able to anticipate real situations and know how they might feel in them."
While Halloween is the most known holiday this weekend, Mexico's Dia de Muertos, or Day of the Dead, will be celebrated Nov. 1 and 2. The holiday is an amalgam of Aztec and Catholic heritage, which centers around remembering dead loved ones.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.