3. Bonfires and Lanterns
Bribery was not the only way to ensure safety from the spirits. Fire also played its part: to purify and protect. As soon as night fell on Samhain Eve, the clan would light the flames. This fire took a slightly different form depending on local customs. In some areas, brushwood torches were formed and used as to light a vast communal bonfire. Elsewhere, each family had their own, smaller affair. What was common was, the fires were a central rallying point for the family or clan, a place to gather in safety – and to use to drive away harm.
In parts of Scotland, once the clan lit the fire, a great shout would go up. Then, a youth would light a torch from it and run about the fields, to ward off the darkness- and by default whatever hid within it. In England, from the seventeenth century, the practice of Halloween bonfires began to die out, as religious reformers frowned upon old traditions and the blazes shifted to November 5, Guy Fawkes night. But the practice of purifying with a fire remained.
In Lancashire, it took various forms. The tradition known as ‘Laying the Witch’ became common in the hills around Pendle. Participants would walk the hills at around midnight, each holding a lighted candle to ward off witches. Elsewhere in the same county, farmers circled their fields, holding a wad of burning straw on the end of a pitchfork, to protect winter crops from any malicious elements. The smoke from the bonfires was also used for purification of people as they bathed in the smoke.
Fire has survived as part of the Halloween celebrations- right up until the present day in another form: the lantern. The Jack O’ Lantern as it was commonly known in the east of England became popular in the seventeenth century. Originally made from turnips or mangle worzels (and later, in America, from pumpkins) these vegetable lanterns were carved with goblin faces to represent the spirits abroad on Winter’s Eve. Such lamps lit people’s way through the darkness of the night- and were used to scare away any danger.