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    Halloween: A Festival of Lost Meanings
    Halloween: A Festival of Lost Meanings
    Halloween: A Festival of Lost Meanings
    Ebook64 pages1 hour

    Halloween: A Festival of Lost Meanings

    By Alvin Boyd Kuhn

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    About this ebook

    Alvin Boyd Kuhn, the author of the popular New Lectures on the Ancient Wisdom series, offers up an essay on the origins of Halloween and its traditions, including the candle in the pumpkin, broomstick riding witches, apple in a tub of water and the wearing of masks. Kuhn searches to find a meaning behind Halloween that goes beyond the sheer fun and deviltry of it, as it has been practised in the past and present.

    A fascinating read!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBorodino Books
    Release dateDec 2, 2018
    ISBN9781789127744
    Halloween: A Festival of Lost Meanings

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      Book preview

      Halloween - Alvin Boyd Kuhn

      This edition is published by BORODINO BOOKS – www.pp-publishing.com

      To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – borodinobooks@gmail.com

      Or on Facebook

      Text originally published in 1922 under the same title.

      © Borodino Books 2018, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      HALLOWE’EN: A FESTIVAL OF LOST MEANINGS

      BY

      ALVIN BOYD KUHN, PH.D.

      They became fools, and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.—Romans I:22-23.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

      AUTUMN’S MYSTERIOUS REVEL 4

      MAN A QUATERNARY BEING 6

      THE HEYDAY OF THE ANIMAL 8

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 32

      AUTUMN’S MYSTERIOUS REVEL

      The large Merriam Webster’s dictionary gives the definition of Hallowe’en (spelled Halloween) as the evening preceding All Saints’ Day; the eve of October 31. In many countries Halloween is traditionally devoted to merrymaking, with playful ceremonies and charms to discover future husbands and wives. Nothing more.

      It is not unwarrantable to predict that the time is not far distant when a world of more enlightened intelligence will be able to look back upon the present age, particularly in the Western area of civilization, and label it as the epoch in which the people celebrated a series of religious festivals around the cycle of the year in nearly total ignorance of their true significance. Certainly, whether or not this be the future’s judgment on our present state of semantic nescience, it is to be presumed that if the departed souls of the Sages of antiquity are in any wise in position to gaze down the corridors of history from their day to ours, they must register uncomprehending dismay at the sight of our ghastly misconception and utterly travestied motives in our commemoration of the great annual festivals their dramatic genius instituted round the year. They must stand agape at the sight of our mechanical parade of holidays and the completely distorted spirit and élan with which we go through the perfunctory observance of one after the other in total miscomprehension of the original inspiration and signification of each in turn. It must afflict them with consternation to see how in the case of every one of the cardinal festivals a true sense of the meaning to be dramatized by the occasion has been overlaid by some outer, some material or superficial reference that retains or conveys not the remotest relevance to the primal message.

      While the divagation from the basic meaning is egregious in every instance, it has perhaps swung most outrageously far from prime character in the case of our Hallowe’en observance, falling annually on the night of October 31. So profoundly is this true that one risks little in possible misstatement in venturing the assertion that none of the millions of revelers on that riotous night has the faintest real idea of the significance of his carousal, or any idea that approaches within a country mile of the original intent of the occasion. It is quite doubtful if one in ten thousand even ventures a random guess as to why he goes out in the street of town or village in grotesque disguise. He does it from the sheer force of custom. He hardly bothers even to wonder why, because he knows nobody is going to ask him about it. The meaning does not concern him, because society for ages has ordained it that way, and it comes with the force and sanction of something established under the unchallengeable authority of immemorial custom. If there is perhaps a mite of idle curiosity about it, his wonder is fully satisfied by the reflection that somewhere away back in past history it had its origin in some meaningful situation, and now it is enough to know that it goes on by the automatism of habit and tradition. Under the sweep of conventional mores it comes each year to give him, if he is still in the fling of youthful urges, an evening of semi-wild license, embroidered with the possibility of interesting adventure. It is at any rate one evening when at least a partial escape can be made from the restraints of rigid canons of moral conduct and a suppressed original elemental tendency can be freely indulged. And this vaguely felt native urge to wildness, if he but realized it, is the one link, though mostly all unconscious, still remaining between

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