Every year, as October slides toward its close, the light grows thin and the world seems to hover — not quite alive, not yet asleep. The air sharpens. Trees hold their breath. And in that strange hush, something ancient stirs. We light candles, carve faces into fruit, and put on masks we claim are for fun. But somewhere beneath the glitter and sugar lies an older instinct: to mark the time when the veil grows thin.

Halloween began long before pumpkins and plastic masks. Its origins lie in Samhain, the great fire festival of the ancient Celts, celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, and parts of Britain more than two thousand years ago. Samhain marked the end of harvest and the beginning of winter — the “dark half” of the year. It was a hinge in time, a threshold moment when boundaries blurred: between seasons, between worlds, between the living and the dead. Early Irish texts such as the Tochmarc Emire and the Senchas Már describe Samhain as a liminal night when the sídhe — the spirits of the Otherworld — could cross freely into the mortal realm. Fires were lit on hilltops to ward off danger and guide the returning souls. People disguised themselves in animal skins and masks, both to honour and to protect. It was a ritual of order in the face of darkness.

The Celtic world moved by cycles, not straight lines, and Samhain sat at the centre of that circular rhythm. Folklorist Ronald Hutton, in Stations of the Sun, calls it “the most magical time of the year, when the veil between the two worlds is at its thinnest.” In agrarian societies, death was not metaphor but reality — the harvest’s end meant the land’s temporary death. To remember the ancestors was to remember survival. The festival’s rituals — bonfires, offerings, disguises — were ways to make peace with that uncertainty.

When Christianity arrived in the British Isles, it did not erase Samhain so much as absorb it. The early medieval church, facing deeply rooted local traditions, learned the art of syncretism. Pope Gregory I’s letter to Mellitus in 601 AD advised missionaries not to destroy pagan shrines but to repurpose them, transforming sacred sites into churches and festivals into feasts of saints. By the eighth century, Pope Gregory III had established All Saints’ Day on November 1 — and by the tenth, Cluniac monks had added All Souls’ Day on November 2, dedicated to the faithful departed. Samhain’s night — October 31 — became All Hallows’ Eve.

The theological shift was subtle but profound. The old fear of wandering spirits became the doctrine of souls in purgatory — neither damned nor saved, but awaiting prayer. Historian Jacques Le Goff, in The Birth of Purgatory, argues that this medieval invention of an “in-between” afterlife mirrored the liminality that Samhain had always represented. The living still cared for the dead, but now through prayer rather than offerings. The church replaced bonfires with candles, sacrifice with intercession — but the emotional core remained.

And this blending was not unique to Europe. Across the world, societies have found ways to speak with their dead when the year wanes and the air turns cold. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — shares the same logic of return. Its pre-Columbian roots lie in the Aztec festival of Mictecacihuatl, the goddess who ruled over the underworld. When Spanish colonisers brought Catholicism, the celebration fused with All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. Families built ofrendas — home altars filled with marigolds, candles, and food — to welcome ancestral spirits back. The dead were not feared but feasted.

In Japan, Obon performs a similar act of remembrance. Each summer, ancestral spirits are believed to return home, guided by lanterns and welcomed with dances and offerings. Families visit graves, clean them, and share meals in the presence of their ancestors. In China, Qingming marks a springtime renewal of the same instinct: to sweep tombs, burn incense, and offer food. In India, Pitru Paksha is a fortnight of feeding the ancestors, performed through ritual offerings known as pinda.

These festivals — spread across geography and faith — speak the same emotional language: a cyclical moment when the living pause to make room for the dead. Anthropologists like Arnold van Gennep and Robert Hertz saw these rituals as rites of passage, not just for the deceased but for those left behind — structures that turn grief into continuity. Whether in candlelight, dance, or silence, they enact what the medieval theologians tried to systematise and what ancient farmers instinctively understood: that life and death are not opposites, but neighbours.

As Christianity spread through northern Europe, older folk customs persisted under new names. In the British Isles, people went souling — visiting homes to pray for the dead in exchange for “soul cakes.” Children and the poor disguised themselves, reciting rhymes and collecting food, much like modern trick-or-treating. In Scotland and Ireland, guising and mumming turned remembrance into performance. Folkloric traditions also spoke of a figure named Jack, doomed to wander with a lantern carved from a turnip — the ancestor of the modern pumpkin jack-o’-lantern. When Irish and Scottish immigrants carried these customs to America in the nineteenth century, they adapted to new materials and urban life. Pumpkins replaced turnips; sweets replaced cakes.

By the twentieth century, Halloween had become a global phenomenon — less a ritual of the dead than a carnival of the living. Yet even in its most commercial form, it retains an echo of its past. The costumes, the lights, the gatherings — they are all fragments of a much older story about how humans confront fear through play. Nicholas Rogers, in Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, notes that even in the age of mass consumerism, “Halloween continues to traffic in the sacred and the profane, in rituals of inversion that reveal what cultures repress.” The fake blood and glitter masks are modern disguises for the same old dance with death.

But perhaps what is most striking about Halloween — and about every “thin-veil” tradition — is how persistently it survives in an age that claims not to believe. Even in secular societies, ritual has a way of returning. We may not pray for souls, but we light candles. We may not fear ghosts, but we still dress as them. These gestures endure because they answer something psychology and philosophy still struggle to name: the need for structure in the face of mortality. Ritual, anthropologist Victor Turner wrote, is “social drama” — a way for communities to rehearse transformation. To participate in Halloween, or Día de los Muertos, or All Souls, is to engage in an ancient act of choreography: to step to the edge of loss and come back.

What changes is the costume, not the impulse. Pagans covered their faces with masks to hide from spirits; we wear ours to become them, or to become something else entirely. The act still carries protection — against chaos, anonymity, irrelevance. Even the secular Halloween party, with its curated playlists and flickering candles, recreates the same circle of light our ancestors drew around their fires. We tell ghost stories not because we believe in ghosts, but because they give shape to the inchoate. They let us name the dark.

Ritual persists because we still crave connection — not only to our dead but to one another. Día de los Muertos altars, Japanese lanterns, Catholic vigils, or carved pumpkins on a doorstep all enact the same desire: to keep the conversation going across time. The anthropologist Mary Douglas once argued that purity rituals are never about cleanliness but about boundary — defining what belongs where. Halloween, then, is a yearly rehearsal of boundary-breaking: a moment when we admit that the borders between life and death, fear and joy, sacred and profane, are never quite fixed.

And perhaps that’s why Halloween endures — not as a pagan relic or a commercial event, but as a reminder that ritual itself is a kind of memory. Even in its modern form — with its Instagram filters and sugar rushes — it performs an old work: confronting loss, celebrating survival, and finding meaning in repetition. The bonfires of Samhain, the candles of All Souls, the lanterns of Obon — all are ways of holding darkness at bay with a small, defiant flame.

The historian Peter Brown, writing about late antiquity, described the cult of the saints as “a vast negotiation between the living and the dead.” That negotiation never stopped. It simply moved from the hilltop fires of Iron Age Ireland to the candlelit windows of twenty-first-century cities. We keep lighting our way through uncertainty — through fear, through winter, through time itself.

So when we carve pumpkins or don masks, we are not just playing at fright. We are reenacting an ancient conversation — one that began in fields and shrines and hearths long before we called it Halloween. Every candle, every costume, every small ritual of remembrance is a way of saying: the veil is thin, but we are still here. And somewhere, in the flicker between worlds, the past answers back.