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Nicholas Rogers''s new study of the old festival shows the connection halloween and costumes between such contemporary versions of the holiday and its antecedents. The Christian celebrations which are said to be precursors to our modern observance--All Hallows'' Eve, All Saints Day, Harvest Festival--are of comparatively little interest to Rogers, a historian at Canada''s York University. Rogers maintains prostetics that there is a unifying motif in related seasonal festivals as far back as the Celtic Samhain, an autumnal celebration originating in Ireland, which reflected rites for the protection of the harvest, apprehension at the onset of winter and a more halloween general awareness of the season''s shift toward increased darkness. That recurring motif is the celebration of transgressiveness. (While this is not a new term, a primary contemporary meaning is that of "exceeding a limit or boundary, especially of social acceptability." The related notion of liminality or liminal states--i.e., "consciousness or conduct related by proximity to the threshold of a physiological or psychological response"--is also significant here.)

Nicholas Rogers''s new study of the old festival shows the connection halloween and costumes between such contemporary versions of the holiday and its antecedents. The Christian celebrations which are said to be precursors to our modern observance--All Hallows'' Eve, All Saints Day, Harvest Festival--are of comparatively little interest to Rogers, a historian at Canada''s York University. Rogers maintains prostetics that there is a unifying motif in related seasonal festivals as far back as the Celtic Samhain, an autumnal celebration originating in Ireland, which reflected rites for the protection of the harvest, apprehension at the onset of winter and a more halloween general awareness of the season''s shift toward increased darkness. That recurring motif is the celebration of transgressiveness. (While this is not a new term, a primary contemporary meaning is that of "exceeding a limit or boundary, especially of social acceptability." The related notion of liminality or liminal states--i.e., "consciousness or conduct related by proximity to the threshold of a physiological or psychological response"--is also significant here.)

Rogers energetically traces this entertaining thesis through various times, cultures and places. His extensive costumes use of historic newspaper archives provides him with a vast array of anecdotes on how Halloween was celebrated in different places and periods. He describes early Druidic practices in autumn festivals; the rise of masques and mummery; disparate views on the revering of the dead; fortune-telling; fire rituals; and "souling" (the baking of "soul cakes" and their distribution prostetics to relatives or neighbors who halloween offered to pray for the souls of the deceased in purgatory).

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