As I realised I know very little about Halloween I decided to spend some time surfing the Net looking for information about it in order to gather some ideas for the discussion we will have on Monday. I started from Wikipedia and then I visited other websites: some of them focused on the origins and the evolution of the famous festivity but the majority focused on business and their purpose was to sponsor expensive parties and sell gadgets. I have been reading a lot about Halloween and its religious connotation but in my opinion this celebration has lost all its spiritual meaning and it has become just a commercial holiday, another occasion to party and spend money on disguises. I just read that today Americans spend more or less $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday, can you believe it?
The situation in Italy is quite different: most of Italians do not know anything about it and consider it a sort of minor and weird carnival, in other words in our country the celebration hasn’t the resonance it has in the Anglo-Saxon world. However some kids play trick-or-treat and adults go out and party: personally I went out with my friends and we went to a club which was decorated with candles, pumpkins and skeletons. So we can say that the celebration has already been imported and a lot people organise parties like in the UK or in the United States but still a lot of people feel it doesn’t belong to our tradition. Actually I just found out that the Romans had two festivals which were very similar to this Celtic celebration and that they melt with it when the Roman conquered the Celtic territories: “Feralia”, a day in late October when then Roman people commemorated the passing of the dead and another day in which they honoured Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Anyway when Christianity started to spread all over Europe all pagan festivities and symbols were erased or their names were eventually changed by Popes in order to turn them into Church-sanctioned holydays. In this way the Celtic/Roman festival of the dead became a day to honour saints and martyrs. So if we look back we might discover that Halloween is not totally alien to our tradition! I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all these information about the Pagan world but I remember having read a lot about it in the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and that I was really astonished when I realised how the Catholic Church managed to destroy the Pagan traditions which however survived throughout the centuries.
Honestly Halloween really fascinates me: it is the night in which the boundaries between the world of the dead and that of the living people blurry and in my opinion there is nothing bad if we start disguising like spirits (in order not be recognized by ghosts who will mistake us for fellow spirits). Celebrating Halloween could be just another way to exorcise the death and everything that has something to do with it, anyway I can’t wait to discuss it with you all on Monday!
The situation in Italy is quite different: most of Italians do not know anything about it and consider it a sort of minor and weird carnival, in other words in our country the celebration hasn’t the resonance it has in the Anglo-Saxon world. However some kids play trick-or-treat and adults go out and party: personally I went out with my friends and we went to a club which was decorated with candles, pumpkins and skeletons. So we can say that the celebration has already been imported and a lot people organise parties like in the UK or in the United States but still a lot of people feel it doesn’t belong to our tradition. Actually I just found out that the Romans had two festivals which were very similar to this Celtic celebration and that they melt with it when the Roman conquered the Celtic territories: “Feralia”, a day in late October when then Roman people commemorated the passing of the dead and another day in which they honoured Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. Anyway when Christianity started to spread all over Europe all pagan festivities and symbols were erased or their names were eventually changed by Popes in order to turn them into Church-sanctioned holydays. In this way the Celtic/Roman festival of the dead became a day to honour saints and martyrs. So if we look back we might discover that Halloween is not totally alien to our tradition! I’m sorry if I’m bothering you with all these information about the Pagan world but I remember having read a lot about it in the Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and that I was really astonished when I realised how the Catholic Church managed to destroy the Pagan traditions which however survived throughout the centuries.
Honestly Halloween really fascinates me: it is the night in which the boundaries between the world of the dead and that of the living people blurry and in my opinion there is nothing bad if we start disguising like spirits (in order not be recognized by ghosts who will mistake us for fellow spirits). Celebrating Halloween could be just another way to exorcise the death and everything that has something to do with it, anyway I can’t wait to discuss it with you all on Monday!
1 commento:
Hi Giada,
I surfed the Net too and read the article in Wikipedia about Halloween and I realized that I didn't know anything about this festivity. I mean, except for Jack o'Lantern or "Trick or Treat", all the things about the pagan origins of this festivity and his following blending with the Christian tradition were a real surprise for me!
See you tomorrow in class!
Elena
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