텝스 독해특강_할로윈 배경지식

[evas]

내용이 길긴 하지만 상당히 글이 재미있고 텝스에도 도움이 되리라 생각됩니다.

나름대로 알아두면 좋겠다고 생각한 부분은 체크를 했습니다.

Night of the wandering souls: many of the customs associated with Halloween can be traced to the ancient Celtic festival of the dead. (Samhain) Jack Santino.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT American Museum of Natural History 1983

On October 31, a Rubik's cube crosses Times Square and a lion leans against a lamppost, while an Extra-strength Tylenol box, E.T., Superman, and a pair of ears mingle with the crowds. Pan plays his hornpipe. Off to the side, a witch is being interviewed on "Eyewitness News.' Tonight, Manhattan is a Mardi Gras. In more political Washington, D.C., an "unindicted co-conspirator' joins a grim ghost, a swashbuckling cavalier, and a wrathful witch. They carry glittering jack-o'-lanterns they have just carved at a party. Out in the Virginia countryside, a pumpkin-headed strawman rests against a haystack, while squash and sheaves of corn adorn mailboxes and porches as if part of some ancient fertility rite. In Pittsburgh, people mark their homes with Halloween dummies dressed in macabre black and hung from roofs and trees--creepy figures that combine both the scarecrow and the harvest figure but more sinister than either. In the midst of all this, young trick or treaters roam the streets, seeking thrills and scares--although not the kind their mothers warn about: razor blades in apples or LSD-laced jelly beans. Long a children's holiday in the United States, Halloween now seems to be regaining some of its original status as an adult holiday.

While it has undergone many permutations during the last two millennia, Halloween has always been associated with death--and more than a little scary. The holiday had its beginnings in a pre-Christian festival of the dead celebrated by the Celtic peoples of England, Ireland, and Scotland. The ancient Celts divided the year by four major holidays. According to their calendar, the year began on November 1, a date that marked the beginning of winter. Since they were a pastoral people, it was a time when cattle and sheep had to be moved to closer pastures and all livestock had to be secured for the winter. Crops were harvested and stored. The date was both an ending and a beginning of an eternal cycle.

The festival observed at this time, called Samhain (pronounced Sah-ween), was the biggest and most significant holiday of the Celtic year. At this crease in time, this midway point between the old year and the new, might not the spirits of generations departed find it appropriate to mingle with the living? The ancient Celts believed that they did, especially since Samhain was the time when the souls of those who had died during the year traveled into the otherworld. People gathered to sacrifice animals, make offerings of fruits and vegetables, and light bonfires to honor the dead, aid them on their journey, and keep them away from the living. During Samhain, all manner of beings were abroad--ghosts, fairies, and demons, all part of the dark and the dread.

The lighting of bonfires is traditionally associated with Samhain, so much so that it is called a fire festival. People would extinguish the hearths burning in their homes and take an ember to a hilltop, there to contribute it to a community bonfire. Later, the peat fires of the homes would be rekindled from these bonfires. The ritual took on symbolic overtones: the renewal of the sustenance of home and hearth by means of a journey to a place of power and holiness, and a renewal of family life through a gathering of the community. The custom was made all the more meaningful by being set in the beginning of winter, when the darkness and its demons are threatening and fire is immediately and obviously necessary.

When Christian missionaries tried to change the religious practices of the Celtic people, Samhain became the Halloween we are familiar with. In the early centuries of the first millennium A.D., before missionaries such as Saint Patrick and Saint Columcille converted them to Christianity, the Celts practiced an elaborate religion through their priestly caste, the Druids. Perhaps because so little is known of them, the Druids continue to capture the imagination. There are many misconceptions about them. There is no evidence, for instance, that they ever practiced human sacrifice at Stonehenge, as is often purported. They were priests, poets, scientists, and scholars; religious and ritual specialists who were the bearers of learning and knowledge, not unlike the very missionaries and monks who would later Christianize the Celts and brand the Druids as Devil worshipers.

As part of their efforts to wipe out "pagan' holidays such as Samhain, the Christians brought about major transformations. In A.D. 601, Pope Gregory the First, known as Gregory the Great, issued an edict to his missionaries concerning the native beliefs and customs of the peoples he hoped to convert. Instead of trying to obliterate peoples' customs and beliefs, the pope's instructions were, use them. If a group of people worship a tree, rather than cut it down, consecrate it to Christ and allow them to continue their worship. In terms of spreading Christianity, this was a brilliant concept and it became a basic principle in Catholic missionary work. Catholic holy days were purposely set at the time of native holy days. Christmas, for instance, was assigned the arbitrary date of December 25 because it corresponded to the midwinter celebration of many peoples. For the same reason, Saint John's Day was set at the summer solstice.

Samhain, with its emphasis on the supernatural, was very pagan. While missionaries identified Christian holy days with native holy days, they branded the earlier supernatural deities as evil and associated them with the Devil. As representatives of the rival religion, Druids were considered evil; their gods and spirits, devilish and demonic. The Celtic underworld inevitably became associated with the Christian Hell.

The effects of this policy were to diminish but not totally dispel beliefs in the traditional gods. According to priests, fairies were fallen angels, thus identifying them with devils in Catholic theology. The spirits of the dead still traveled, fairies still roamed, but the church tried to define these creatures as not only dangerous but also malicious. Followers of the old religion went into hiding and were branded as witches. The Christian feast of All Saints was assigned to November 1. This feast day honoring every Christian saint, especially those who did not otherwise have a special day devoted to them, was meant to substitute for Samhain, to draw off the devotion of the Celtic peoples, and finally, to replace it forever. This did not happen. To this day, the hills and hollows of the British Isles are inhabited by the traditional Celtic gods, which, diminished in status, have become fairies, leprechauns, or pookas.

The old beliefs never really died out. The powerful symbolism of the traveling dead was too strong, and perhaps too basic to the human psyche, to be satisfied by this new, more abstract Catholic feast day. Recognizing that something closer to the original spirit of Samhain was necessary, the church in the ninth century tried again to supplant Samhain, this time by establishing November 2 as All Souls' Day. On this day, the living prayed for the souls of the dead. But once again, the practice of retaining traditional customs, while attempting to redefine them, had a sustaining effect. All Saints Day, otherwise known as All Hallows (hallow was another word for a saint; we still see it used in the word hallowed, meaning sanctified, or holy), continued the Celtic tradition. The evening prior to the day was the time of the most intense activity, both human and supernatural. People continued to celebrate All Hallows' Eve as a time of the wandering dead, but the supernatural beings were now associated with evil. The folk continued to propitiate those spirits (and their masked impersonators) by setting out gifts of food. Consequently, All Hallows' Eve--alias Hallow Even, alias Hallowe'en--is a Celtic New Year's Day in modern dress.

Virtually all of our Halloween customs today can be tracted to the ancient Celtic day of the dead. Each of Halloween's many mysterious customs has a history, or at least a story, behind it. The wearing of costumes, for instance, and the roaming from door to door demanding treats can be traced to the Celtic period and the first few centuries of Christianity, when it was thought that the souls of the dead were out and around, along with fairies, witches, and demons. Food and drink were left out to placate them. As the centuries wore on, people began dressing as these dreadful creatures and performing antics in exchange for offerings of food and drink. This practice, called mumming, evolved into our present trick or treating. To this day, witches, ghosts, and skeleton figures of the dead are among the favorite disguises.

Another hallmark of Halloween is the jack-o'-lantern. In America, Jack is always a carved pumpkin, but in Great Britain and Ireland, where the custom originated, turnips originally served as the favored vegetable. Apparently, a blacksmith named Jack made an agreement with the Devil: he would give up his soul in return for seven years of absolute mastery of his trade. Outside his shop, he hung a sign in which he boldly proclaimed, "Here lies the Master of all Masters.'

One day, Saint Peter and Christ himself paid a visit, disturbed by the obvious boasting of the sign. To instill some humility in Master Jack, Christ worked a few miracles, but to no avail. Saint Peter then offered to grant him three wishes. Jack's wishes were rather strange: first, he wished that whenever he told someone to climb a nearby pear tree that person would have to stay in the tree until Jack allowed him to come down. He made the same wishes regarding his armchair and his purse: one must stay in them until Jack allowed him to go.

"You have wished very foolishly,' said Saint Peter. "You should have wished for everlasting peace in Heaven.'

Nevertheless, Jack used these three wishes to trick the Devil when he came to take his soul. Each time the Devil came, Jack tricked him into climbing the tree, sitting in his chair, and finally, shrinking himself and entering his purse. Each time, the Devil gave Jack seven years in return for his freedom, and finally he simply fled in terror.

But Jack's time finally came. Jack went first to the Pearly Gates, where Saint Peter reminded him that he had once had an opportunity to gain everlasting happiness but spurned it. Now it was too late--he could not be allowed into heaven.

To Hell he went, only to find that the Devil wanted nothing to do with him. "I've had enough of this one already. You'll not torment me here.'

Then the Devil ordered all nine locks of Hell bolted. Before he was shut out entirely, Jack scooped up a burning coal from the fires of Hell in the turnip he was eating, and to this day he uses this "lantern' to light his way as he wanders the earth until Judgment Day.

Witches have always been a part of Halloween. We tend to think of witches as amusing cartoon characters that fly on brooms and stir bubbling caldrons. Once, however, people did not take witches so lightly. They were genuinely afraid, and indeed, had reason to be, for some people did practice witchcraft and boasted of magical powers. Of course, cultures all over the world believe that individuals can affect each other and their environment by magical means. However, our Western idea of witchcraft is specifically Christian; the idea is that witches are granted their magical powers by the Devil. In the Bible it says (in some translations), "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' (Exodus 22:18), and this formed the basis and justification of the antiwitchcraft laws of church and state between the eighth and twelfth centuries A.D.

The first recorded instance of the belief that witches fly about on sticks or brooms was in the tenth century, and the origin of "witch's brew' lies in the belief that witches were cannibals who feasted on baby's flesh and made potions of obscene and blasphemous materials.

The great witch crazes, with their torture, forced testimony, and mass executions, swept Europe after the Middle Ages, as modern societies began to evolve. Social stresses found release in the witch accusations and executions, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as many as a half million people, most of them undoubtedly innocent victims, may have been put to death in Europe and Great Britain.

The New England witch trials took place in 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts, which is today the town of Danvers, not Salem. In all, twenty people were hanged, not burned as is sometimes supposed; eight others were put to death in other parts of New England (two died in jail). Although they later repented, the officials at the Salem trials acted with purpose, conviction, and little compassion, upon hearsay evidence, gossip, and the wild accusations of three young girls who apparently had been influenced by stories their slave from Barbados had told them of the black arts.

Witches became connected with Halloween in the United States because of their association with evil, the Devil, and the underworld. When nineteenth-century Irish immigrants brought their Halloween observances to this country, they found a fully developed and elaborate witch-belief system waiting for them.

In seventeenth-and eighteenth-century America, Halloween was mentioned in almanacs as a day against which to mark one's progress in he agricultural round. The notion of a harvest holiday was melded with that of a day for the spirits of the dead. Most of the customs we associate with the holiday today, such as carving jack-o'-lanterns, were brought to this country in the nineteenth century by the great numbers of Irish immigrants. The Irish were among the first to emigrate to the American colonies, but their numbers swelled dramatically after Ireland's potato famine in 1846. From this period we begin to find mention of games such as snap-apple (an apple is suspended from the ceiling or from a threshold by a string and the player attempts to catch it in the mouth, using no hands) and the burning of nuts (nuts are tossed into an open hearth; according to the way they burn, the initials of one's future spouse can be read in the ashes). Beliefs concerning marriage partners abound at Halloween: if you peel an apple and throw the peels over your shoulder, they will assume the initials of your future spouse. Or, at midnight, October 31, throw a ball of yarn into a barn, old house, or cellar, and wind it back up, repeating these words:

I wind, I wind, my true love to find

The color of his hair, the clothes he will wear

The day he is married to me.

Your true love will soon appear in one form or another. Another custom that persists today, especially among Irish-Americans, is the baking of special breads with several small objects baked inside. Getting a piece with a coin means you will be wealthy, a ring means you will get married, a tiny doll stands for children, and a thimble predicts spinsterhood.

While children's trick or treating has long been one of the main American Halloween activities, in recent years adults have increasingly been reclaiming and redefining the holiday, which is taking on the airs of a Mardi Gras and a masquerade. Where once the spirits of the dead traveled on the crease of the new year and people hoped to appease them with gifts of food and drink; where once people dressed in costumes and went mumming as representatives of those wandering souls and were rewarded with soul-cakes, today adults in traditional costumes and disguises drawn from the latest headlines take to the streets of big cities and parade in great numbers past flickering, grinning, carved jack-o'-lanterns. They are creating anew a custom with a pedigreed ancestry. They are challenging, mocking, teasing, and appeasing the dread forces of the night, of the otherworld that becomes our world on this night of reversible possibilities and transcendent turnarounds. They are reaffirming death and its place as a part of life in an exhilarating celebration of a holy and magical night.