The Many Faces of Halloween

A T MIDNIGHT ON OCT. 31, WHEN THE VEIL BETWEEN the worlds of living and lost stretches thinnest,

office manager and Neapolitan Rhiannon

Ravenhawk will slip into the other world or at least ask permission to “cross.”

Then, as Halloween parties are winding down and children have surrendered their trick-or-treat hoards for the land of dreams, Ms. Ravenhawk intends to visit with her great great grandmother, a Cherokee shawoman.

“This is our most important day, and we call it — not Halloween — Samhian (pronounced SOWwhen), which means end of summer,” says Ms.

—

. Ravenhawk, a pagan and third-degree high priestess.

The word pagan originally meant “country folk,” she points out. “It’s the beginning of the New Year for us, a time to get rid of the old energies and toss them into the fire. And it’s also a time to celebrate our ancestors. We believe in one thing: Harm none, Do as you will.”

GARRITY And brooms? Costumed children may use them to pretend. “For us, they’re used to clean a space,” she says.

Tradition

Others may not be so ambitious as to seek another world. Like a proverbial onion, the 3,000-yearold root of Halloween disappears into the mists of time, but the celebrations overlaying it bloom robustly when they’re peeled away across Southwest Florida — from the Wiccan (a variation on the pagan beliefs) to the pagan or neopagan, and from the Celtic to the Catholic to the cheerfully commercial.

“The ancient Celts celebrated Samhian — summer— in the latter half of the year at the beginning of the dark season, and also in May,” notes Father Robert Garrity, a Catholic priest who serves as the chaplain and an adjunct professor of theology at Ave Maria University.

“However — and this is where the intrigue with the darker half comes — in the eighth and ninth centuries, Popes Gregory III and Gregory IV moved the celebration from May 13 to Nov. 1, the beginning of the dark time, and celebrated Christian feasts on top of the pagan ones.”

The pagan ones didn’t disappear entirely, however. When they were finally ferried to America, they became light-hearted and socially important.

“This is the second-biggest American tradition we do, behind Christmas,” says Amanda Evans, an assistant professor of sociology and a human behavior expert at Florida Gulf Coast University. “For children, and even for teenagers and adults, it’s a chance to step out of your role. We like doing this in ways that are safe, but if we were to do it in normal life, we’d be ostracized. It’s a healthy thing.”

And now — ever since the Irish arrived en masse following

the potato famines of the

mid-19th century, bringing with them fiercely insistent traditions that predated Christianity in Ireland — Halloween has become synonymous with altered states of appearance. (The Scottish, the Welsh and the English also brought their own traditions, which were similar. And the Spanish-speaking world has more recently delivered the Day of the Dead to our cultural customs bank, from Mexico and the Americas.)

“Costuming has become common only since the Irish immigrated,” Professor Evans explains. “And for a century or so after, Mom would make a costume out of whatever was available.”

But American culture intruded to reshape the holiday, as it has on other occasions with other holidays. Christmas and Easter are also predated by pagan traditions, and have changed significantly in America. Beginning in the 1960s and ’70s, women began to work outside the home in significant numbers.

“With moms working full-time, an avenue opened for commercialization,” notes Professor Evans. “So many moms work today that they don’t make costumes anymore. The changes in this holiday tradition, as far as I’m concerned, are nothing more profound than that. We’ve industrialized so much, and most mothers work so much, that people buy their costumes now.”

And they buy them in a much wider range, which is very good for business, says Bethany Baier, the spokeswoman and sometime store manager for Masquerade and Balloons Galore, in both Naples and Fort Myers (her parents own the business).

Commercial holiday

Ms. Baier notes that Halloween kicks off the year for the family store, after which a series of events, many of them dating to pagan origins, boosts the business — especially Christmas, Mardi Gras and Easter.

“I think Halloween is a really great, unemotional holiday — there are no financial ties, you don’t have to exchange gifts. It’s just a good thing that brings people together and includes kids,” she explains.

“And it brings out the kid in the adults. We get 30-year-old men in here who take it as seriously as children, and we get 60-year-old women who do totally heavy costumes.”

They spend a lot of money. For Masquerade, as well as for Party World in the Coconut Point Mall and many other shops devoted to costuming — not to mention the huge efforts of grocery stores and pharmacies and gift stores to focus on Halloween — this is one of the biggest money-makers in the year.

For good reason, suggests Ms. Baier.

“I had a lady come in here, and she said, ‘I work in a hospital and I wear scrubs all day every day, and I want something pretty. I’m never pretty, and I just want to be pretty.’

“So I’m like, ‘You know what? We can do it. We can make you beeaauuutiful.’ And we did, and she was beautiful.”

Costuming for Halloween is a major undertaking for children faced with myriad choices — or for adults.

“You’ll always have the popular ones, the Cleopatras, the vampires and ghosts and goblins and witches, Dracula, Harry Potter is popular — and people try other things. They’ve done swine flu this year,” observes Ms. Baier. “They really get into it, and they don’t mind making it look right. They take it to the next step. They’re not just a witch with a witch hat, but they take it into character, they’re not just into costumes.”

Pagan and Christian

Which would describe Ms. Ravenhawk perfectly — getting into character, and not just into costumes. Except that she makes the character her life, renewing it at the beginning of her year, from about midnight on Oct. 31 to midnight the following night.

Much of that has to do with the people she loves and has lost, she says — which is what the night of Oct. 31 means to her, and to other pagans.

“We know they’re there. And we invite them into our space,” Ms. Ravenhawk explains. “Whether they come or not, there is still a table set for them. And we have two volunteers dressed in black with white faces, and two volunteers in costume — anything they choose. The two in black and white represent the ancestors we want to be invited in, and they’re usually the last ones invited to enter the circle.

“It’s still Halloween for the children, and if they’re teenagers, they get to dress in anything they want.”

Finally, around a bonfire and together, they bring out the joy.

“We have food and drink and merriment and drumming,” says Ms. Ravenhawk. “The drumming signifies the raising of energy. The more energy we raise, the more we send back across, for our ancestors who have passed.”

For the Catholic community, expeditions into the occult, as Father Garrity describes the pagan ceremonies, are off-limits. But other celebrations are not.

At Ave Maria University on All Hallow’s Eve (which is followed by All Saints Day Nov. 1, to celebrate the greatest defenders of the faith), variety, American style, will be the name of the game.

“There will be people praying and doing the blessed sacrament,” says Father Garrity. “There will be people dressing up in scary costumes — there’s not a whole lot of that, though. You’ll see people dressed as saints or popular figures. We’ll have an All Saints Parade for the little kids, and some people will just be studying or hanging out together. And others will be going to the basketball game.”

What you won’t see are expeditions into the dark places.

“We try to be prudent and avoid anything to do with the occult,” Father Garrity says. “We have a strong contingent here who want to avoid doing anything with the occult, so they don’t celebrate Halloween.”

But Father Garrity, who grew up in the Chicago area and spent his youth trick-or-treating on Halloween — often dressed, he says, “as a bum” — recalls the judgment of Father Don Gabriele Amorth, an exorcist in the diocese of Rome.

“Father Amorth said that as long as Halloween is celebrated as a game, there’s no harm in it,” Father Garrity explains.

Professor Evans, at FGCU, would probably agree with that.

“Halloween became a family thing (in America),” she says. “It became a way for little communities to get out, for people to talk to their neighbors and go door to door, then go back into their houses later.

“There’s powerful sociological impacts when people can do that.” 