Instituto Politcnico Nacional

CECyT 2: Miguel Bernard

Halloween

Name: Guadalupe Alonso Contreras.

GROUP: 1IV09
 Halloween
Halloween of Druids:
It is generally agreed by historians that Halloween came to take the place of
a special day celebrated by the ancient Druids. The Druids were the
educated or priestly class of the Celtic religion.
Samhain is the pagan origin of Halloween and its terrifying rituals include
human sacrifices and pumpkins filled with burning human fat.
Halloween is regarded as the Witches' Sabbat, the equivalent of their New
Year's Eve.
Halloween is regarded as the Witchess Sabbat, the equivalent of their New
Years Eve. The Druids had many ways of sacrificing humans, one of which
was packing them in a giant burning effigy of a man.
The Druids celebrated two special nights of the year: Beltane and Samhain.
Beltane took place on May 1 and marked the birth of summer. Samhain
occurred on November 1 and signified the death of summer. Samhain, a
night celebrating death and hell, was the Druids most important ritual. It was
a terrifying night of human sacrifices. And it was the original Halloween.
The Druids believed, during Samhain, the mystic veil separating the dead
from the living opened. The Druids taught these roaming spirits loosed on
Samhain went searching for a body to possess. The frightened Celts would
masquerade as demons, evil spirits and ghosts, hoping to convince the
roaming evil spirits, they were another evil spirit, and leave them alone. The
Celts also prepared meals as "treats" to appease the evil spirits from "tricks"
or malicious acts; hence our custom of "trick or treat." The Druids performed
horrifying human sacrifices and other vile rituals during Samhain. Let there
be no doubtSamhain night was a terrifying "covenant with death, and with
hell." And let there be no doubt Samhain was the original Halloween night.
The rituals of the Druids reek from the deepest hell. Their most repulsive
activities involve their human sacrifices of children on the night of Samhain
or Halloween. The Druids would drink their victims blood and eat their flesh.
The Druids "counted it an honourable thing" to eat their fathers flesh and
perform incest with their mothers and sisters.
May I remind you, this is what occurred on the original Halloween
night! Today, Halloween lives and breathes with the foul stench of the
diabolical Druids.
Halloween of Celts:
To find the origin of Halloween, you have to look to the festival of Samhain
in Ireland's Celtic past.
Samhain had three distinct elements. Firstly, it was an important fire festival,
celebrated over the evening of 31 October and throughout the following day.
The Celts celebrated four major festivals each year. None of them was
connected in anyway to the sun's cycle. The origin of Halloween lies in the
Celt's Autumn festival which was held on the first day of the 11th month, the
month known as November in English but as Samhain in Irish.
The festivals are known by other names in other Celtic countries but there is
usually some similarity, if only in the translation.
The festival of Samhain was the most sacred of all Celtic festivals. Its rituals
helped link people with their ancestors and the past. The Celts believed that
the dead rose on the eve of Samhain and that ancestral ghosts and demons
were set free to roam the earth.

Since spirits were believed to know the secrets of the afterlife and the future,
the priests of the Celts, the Druids, held that on the eve of Samhain
predictions had more power and omens could be read with more
clarity. They divined the health of the tribe, the wisdom of a proposed move,
the right time to make magic or the key to curing a sickness.
The festival occurred at the time of year when nights, in Northern Europe,
were getting long:
Samhain marked the start of the season that rightly belonged to spirits - a
time when nights were long and dark fell early. It was a frightening time for
a people who were entirely subject to the forces of nature, and who were
superstitious about the unknown, with only a primitive sympathetic magic
system to rely on for comfort. Shamhain was a night of mystical glory.
The Festival of Samhain marked the end of the Celtic year and the
beginning of the new one and as such can be seen to the equivalent of New
Year's Eve. We have seen how the Celts believed that night preceded day
and so the festivities took place on the Eve of Samhain. There is no doubt
that that this festival was the most important of the four Celtic Festivals.
Samhain was a crucial time of year, loaded with symbolic significance for
the pre-Christian Irish. The celebrations at Tlachtga may have had their
origins in a fertility rite on the hill but it gathered to itself a corpus of other
beliefs which crystallised at the great Fire Festival.