Q&A with Randall Styers

On Halloween, the traditions of trick-or-treating, dressing up in costume and telling ghost stories are rampant — but people might not know the roots of the holiday.

The Daily Tar Heel spoke with Randall Styers, a religious studies professor at UNC, about paganism and the origin of the spooky holiday.

DAILY TAR HEEL: Can you tell me about the origin of Halloween?

RANDALL STYERS: Halloween has a couple of different origins or different elements that contribute to the origin of the holiday.
On the one hand, I understand that there are some Celtic, pre-Christian or pagan roots to the holiday.

Some practices related to … the dead or spirits in various Celtic festivals, and at the same time then, Halloween happens in our calendar on the day before All Saints’ Day, which is a Christian holiday that recognizes Catholic saints who don’t have other special saint set day celebrations in the liturgical calendar.

And so various of those Celtic practices got incorporated into Christian practices of doing homage for the dead in connection with All Saints’ Day, and so I think that that’s where the origins of the holiday came from.

What I understand is that it looks like it was actually Irish and Scottish immigrants that brought the holiday to America in the form that we have it now — or not the form we have it now but in earlier forms — and it was through those Irish and Scottish influences that it came into America in the way that it does.

And of course it’s become a much, much bigger holiday in America, partly because of commercialism and partly for other factors, but it’s far more popular in America than it has been in other countries historically, although it might be spreading a bit in some ways.

DTH: How does (Halloween) connect back to paganism?

RS: Paganism is a broad category for pre-Christian religions of different kinds or non-Christian religions of different kinds that persisted in various parts of the world.

But many forms of paganism believe in spirits or fairies and believe in the possibility for connection between the living and the dead.

And so it’s presumably from various forms of Celtic paganism that especially the Irish and the Scottish became so enamored of practices like the kind of things that we associate with Halloween.

The practice of trick-or-treating actually has its origin in collecting different kinds of treats for the souls of the dead — going door to door to collect cakes as a way of praying for souls in purgatory and doing other good deeds to assist the dead on the eve of All Saint’s Day.

DTH: Do you think that many people connect Halloween with anything religious these days?

RS: Well, there are many evangelical Christian churches that actually don’t like a lot of the practices associated with Halloween, and so you can see even locally around North Carolina, a lot of churches actually try to resist Halloween.

(They have) various things like fall festivals or other kinds of children’s festivals on Halloween or around Halloween as a way to try to offer an evangelical alternative to dressing up like ghosts and goblins and engaging in other kinds of practices that they don’t like and trying to encourage what they think is a more wholesome kind of way to celebrate the day.

And that’s interesting because it shows that there’s some kind of discomfort with the association of Halloween — with ghosts and goblins and spirits and fairies — even though most people who are engaging in Halloween are doing it for the fun of it and not doing it with any kind of conscious or overt pagan or un-Christian kind of motives.

Most people are just playing with it in those kind of ways, not taking it serious as some alternative kind of religion.

Contact the desk editor at university@dailytarheel.com.