After reading through some of the remarks on the "Is Halloween Rubbish?" thread, I felt the spookiest of urges to start this one for the benefit of those who complain about this ancient "occult" festival which condones, supposedly, "greed and vandalism".

It's interesting to note that most northern cultures around the world held ceremony to honor their dead and "assist" them on their journey to the "spirit world" at this time of year - between the Autumn Equinox and the first snows of winter.

In my locality - a triangular-shaped region dubbed "Huronia" just north of Toronto, between Lakes Ontario, Simcoe and Huron - eyewitness accounts of the Feast of the Dead as celebrated by the original inhabitants (the Wyandot, or Hurons) have been passed down from the C17 Jesuit martyr Brebeuf and his associates - the first Europeans to visit this area.

According to this article, the Feast of the Dead was usually celebrated on or around Oct 29. Make sure you've already eaten and that you're sitting comfortably before you check out these traditional Wyandot practices ...

The Jesuits had long been familiar with the ordinary rites of sepulture among the Hurons: the corpse placed in a crouching posture in the midst of the circle of friends and relatives; the long, measured wail of the mourners; the speeches in praise of the dead, and consolation to the living; the funeral feast; the gifts at the place of burial; the funeral games, where the young men of the village contended for prizes; and the long period of mourning to those next of kin.

The body was usually laid on a scaffold, or, more rarely, in the earth. This, however, was not its final resting-place. At intervals of ten or twelve years, each of the four nations which composed the Huron Confederacy gathered together its dead, and conveyed them all to a common place of sepulture. Here was celebrated the great "Feast of the Dead,"-in the eyes of the Hurons, their most solemn and important ceremonial ...

The corpses were lowered from their scaffolds, and lifted from their graves. Their coverings were removed by certain functionaries appointed for the office, and the hideous relics arranged in a row, surrounded by the weeping, shrieking, howling concourse. The spectacle was frightful. Here were all the village dead of the last twelve years ...

Each family reclaimed its own, and immediately addressed itself to removing what remained of flesh from the bones. These, after being tenderly caressed, with tears and lamentations, were wrapped in skins and adorned with pendent robes of fur. In the belief of the mourners, they were sentient and conscious ...

At length the officiating chiefs gave the word to prepare for the ceremony. The relics were taken down, opened for the last time, and the bones caressed and fondled by the women amid paroxysms of lamentation. Then all the processions were formed anew, and, each bearing its dead, moved towards the area prepared for the last solemn rites ...

... the priests soon reached the spot, and saw what seemed, in their eyes, an image of Hell. All around blazed countless fires, and the air resounded with discordant outcries. The naked multitude, on, under, and around the scaffold, were flinging the remains of their dead, discharged from their envelopments of skins, pell-mell into the pit, where Brebeuf discerned men who, as the ghastly shower fell around them, arranged the bones in their places with long poles.

All was soon over; earth, logs, and stones were cast upon the grave, and the clamor subsided into a funereal chant, - so dreary and lugubrious, that it seemed to the Jesuits the wail of despairing souls from the abyss of perdition.9 Such was the origin of one of those strange sepulchres which are the wonder and perplexity of the rnodern settler in the abandoned forests of the Hurons.


Creepy enough for you? :-) Now is it still so easy to find fault with the relatively tame European/Christian Halloween traditions we know today?

Rest easy tonight everyone,

daylia


PS Read the final paragraphs of the article at the link if you'd like to relish an account of how the Huron Bear Tribes "honoured" the Iroquois warriors they captured. First they tortured them to display their bravery, and then cooked and ate them.

I bet this was a bit disconcerting, even for a Wyandot Trick-or-Treater! ;-)