Five Historical Halloween Celebrations That Make Your Little House Party Seem Extra Lame
Halloween, as we currently celebrate it, is a mishmash, especially country to country, of traditional harvest and fall equinox celebrations. It’s a big deal as is, but it still can’t hold a jack-o’-lantern candle to some of the festivals that came before it.
To that end, here are five autumn parties of the past that put Halloween to shame…
Haustblot
Haustblot was the fall iteration of a Norse celebration known as a blot. Now, all you really need to know to be sure that something was a pretty good party is that the Norse started it. Horns of mead might be a cliche, but it’s one that comes from a group that did genuinely know how to tie one on.
The blot involved drinks aplenty, but it was all centered around a single main event: sacrifice. Animals, often horses, would be sacrificed in order to curry favor with the gods. Haustblot aimed to please Freyr, the god of the harvest, in particular. The blood from these sacrifices would be gathered and splattered around, even onto the participants themselves.
Once a couple animal lives had been fired up to Freyr, Haustblot would transition into more classic Viking fare, including numerous toasts to Odin, to bravery, to the fallen, and so on until everyone woke up in a bush.
Thesmophoria
The Greeks also looked to honor their god of the harvest, Demeter. According to legend, Demeter herself was the one who taught humans how to farm, meaning even outside of the yield, every harvest was thanks to her. It was deeply interwoven with fertility, which might explain why Thesmophoria was a unique ritual celebrated only by women. A welcome switch-up, since they weren't allowed to partake in most other festivals.
Even details of Thesmophoria are much hazier than historians would like, thanks to the fact that men weren't allowed to partake. They do have a couple details that they accept to be likely, though: That the women set out for three days and two nights to celebrate, that they did a lot of cursing and that they threw piglets into a pit of snakes.
Yeah, that last one does hit a little different, doesn’t it? Piglets were tossed into a snake-filled underground chamber called a megaron, and then their remains were brought up after the ceremony, where they were used as the word’s most metal form of fertilizer.
Homowo
Let’s get a little less European and look over to Africa. Specifically, Ghana, where every autumn they still celebrate with a festival known as Homowo. The word Homowo means “hoot at hunger” in the Ga language. It’s rooted in tragedy, an ancient famine that was finally relieved with the Ga people's first harvest of corn in what is now Ghana. The festival itself, though, is anything but somber. Starting on Homowo Day, there's parades, dancing and massive feasts. The revelry and the leftovers last for multiple days.
It’s a little early on the calendar compared to the others, usually taking place in August, but it’s a harvest festival nonetheless, and even has one particularly Halloween-y detail: The night before, Homowo Eve, people are encouraged to stay home because it’s thought the spirits of the dead are walking the streets.
Kukulkan’ s Descent
Visiting Chichen Itza by itself is already something for the bucket list. It’s one of the Seven Modern Wonders of the World, a massive pyramid built by the Maya that also doubles as an incredibly efficient place to get your steps in.
The architecture of Chichen Itza isn’t just meant to be impressive, however, but also is painstakingly designed to correspond with the movement of the sun. It’s during the spring or fall equinox that everything comes together and you truly see the peak of the Maya architects’ intent. Kukulkan, the great feathered serpent, was one of the Maya's most important gods. On the equinox, as seen above, the shadows created by the corners of Chichen Itza extend and form the body of a snake along the massive stairways, meeting the carved snake heads at the base.
This was said to be Kukulkan, either descending into the underworld or returning to the sky. Beats the hell out of a fog machine, if you ask me.
Samhain
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Of course, we can’t close out without a nod to Samhain, often considered to be the most direct relative of modern Halloween. The spookiness originated from the idea that it was when the veil between the human and spirit worlds was at its very thinnest. It involved costumes, an ancestor of trick-or-treating called “mumming,” which landed you cakes in exchange for songs to the dead, and turnip jack-o-lanterns.
Samhain's drinking, though, puts even a booked-out Halloweekend to shame, lasting six full days.