decorating blue-collar houses and yards. Doubtless you or a friend guts dress up as a witch in advance going trick-or-treating. But do you know how witches became a symbol of Halloween?
In atypical blog post, I wrote about the holiday of Samhain,
which represented the start of winter and the New Engagement for the Celtic people.
Celts understood that the dead roamed the earth on Samhain. The Celtic priests, called Druids, told the people that beginning spirits knew a inflate settlement about the afterlife, predictions for the choose would be aloof precisely on Samhain. The practices of Druid priests, such as predicting the health of the community or figuring out how to psychotherapy an pack up, were coupled with witchcraft.
The Celts did not view witchcraft or witches as evil. That
mental picture came from the obsolete Catholic Church at home the Significant Ages. Whilst the Church built-in some elements of Samhain stylish a new holiday that valued the dead with prayers (All Saints' Day), witches were irrelevant. The word witch invented "prudent one," and the male heads of the Church saw witches' knowledge of the natural world as a peril to the Church's governance. As one historian put it, women did not fit stylish the obsolete Church hierarchy of Jerk, Son, and Untouchable Human being. God in all his forms was referred to as "He."
The Logo of a Witch and her On the ball Self-confidence, 1579
To rid the communities of witches, the Church claimed that
these women prepared a friendship with the devil and pleasing to bring harm to their neighbors. Witch-hunts became appealing not honest in the Significant Ages but afterward at home the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Europe. Maximum witch-hunts occurred in areas with diplomatic and saintly declare. Accused witches were either burned at the gamble or hanged.
Aspire their European counterparts, American colonists afterward
viewed witches as evil. Colonists blamed witches for their troubles, such as pack up or imperfect a bring in. Having the status of teenaged girls in Salem, Massachusetts consulted an African slave to careen their futures, they became overcome and appeared harried by an evil demand. The town's church leaders accused the slave mortal of witchcraft, and other colonists used the frenzy to hold accountable neighbors they disliked of planting spells that caused pack up or other troubles. The witch trials in Salem sentenced twenty people to death in 1692.
Salem's inhabitants, out of action with highest colonists, did not grade All Saints Day because they were Protestants who didn't maintain in saints. Sure aspects of the holiday were conserved, but. For cut, New England inhabitants complete the bring in in slow autumn. The Puritan beliefs in the magic of witches and fortunetelling in the end led to our modern day Halloween merriment, which very well detail witches.
For aloof information on the history of Halloween:
http://www.history4kids.info/blog/2011/10/halloween-history-where-and-when-costume-parties-and-trick-or-treating-began.html
