Thammasat University students of comparative religion, sociology, history, and related subjects may take a special interest in Halloween, which is celebrated on October 31.

The TU Library owns a scholarly book on the holiday, Halloween: from pagan ritual to party night by Nicholas Rogers. 

The author Nicholas Rogers is Professor Emeritus of History at York University, a public research institution in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. York University is Canada’s third-largest university.

Professor Rogers also wrote and cowrote Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords  and Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain. Students may borrow these books through the the TU Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

The term Halloween basically means the evening before the celebration of the saints. The  verb hallow means to honor something as holy.

In his famous Gettysburg Address spoken at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in November 1863, US President Abraham Lincoln said:

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

Lincoln meant that it was not up to speakers to decide whether land of a battlefield was holy or hallowed. The soldiers fighting and losing their lives were the ones who made it hallowed.

Although the word Halloween was first used in the 1700s, the festival probably dates back many hundreds of years before that. Professor Rogers associates it with Samhain, a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the darker half of the year. The Gaels are an ethnolinguistic group indigenous to Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man in northwestern Europe.

Few partygoers in the West today think of the ancient religious origins of the festival. An article by Professor Jay L Zagorsky, senior lecturer at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, posted on the website of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation suggests that this may be a problem: 

Americans spend twice as much on Halloween as on their national parks. It is consumerism gone mad.Halloween spending is out of control. Americans are expected to spend $US8.8 billion ($12.8 billion) on lollies, costumes and decorations this year — or $86 for every person who plans to celebrate. That includes half a billion dollars on costumes that Americans are buying for their pets, which is double the amount they spent a decade ago. Pumpkins and hot dogs are the favourites. How did a holiday that began as a way to honour the dead morph into just another ritual of over-the-top American consumption? As a relatively frugal person who has reused the same Halloween costumes for years, I found the $86 figure shocking. But I’m hardly the first economist to moan about out-of-control consumerism. Day of the decadent Halloween started as a Celtic holiday honouring the dead. It was then adopted by the Catholic Church as a time to remember saints. One research paper described Halloween as an “evolving American consumption ritual”, but a better description might be an over-the-top spending ritual. To put the $US8.8 billion being spent on Halloween in context, the budget for the entire National Park Service is only $4 billion. The US spends less than $2 billion on flu vaccines. The $86 average may not give us an accurate look at per-person spending. Only about two-thirds of respondents to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey of Halloween spending said they were celebrating the holiday. And while some spend nothing, others go overboard.

How Asia celebrates Halloween

Part of Professor Rogers’ research is how Halloween has spread to Asia and other places where there are more serious festivals to honor the souls of ancestors. In China, non-religious celebrations are organized expatriate Americans or Canadians. Chinese young adults in large cities enjoy costume parties. Hong Kong Disneyland  has an annual Halloween show.

Mainland China too has started to show an interest in Halloween, especially children studying at private or international schools where they are taught by instructors from North America.

In Japan, in less than then years, Halloween has become popular among young people who enjoy dressing up in costumes. In Singapore and the Philippines as well, Halloween has grown in popularity. 

Halloween and literature

For students who wish to observe Halloween by reading something scary for the occasion, the TU Library owns a number of novels by Stephen King.  Among them is the novel It which inspired the film It Chapter Two, a 2019 American supernatural horror film based on Stephen King’s 1986 novel of the same name. It is the sequel to 2017’s It and the second film in the It film series.

Since many TU students have been scared by the clown Pennywise in It Chapter Two, they may be interested to sample the book where he originated.

The clown Pennywise is so evil that the character has promoted what has popularly been called coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns. Coulrophobia is not an official medical term developed by psychologists. Yet it does describe a feeling that some people have when they see clowns. The word is derived from Greek terms meaning to be afraid of someone who walks on stilts.

The noun stilts refers to poles with places to put the feet so it is possible to walk at some distance above the ground. In circus acts, clowns are often seen walking on stilts.

Stephen King claimed that he invented the character of the clown Pennywise because children are more scared of clowns than of anything else.

The TU Library also recently acquired Best new horror. Vol. 29 edited and with an introduction by Stephen Jones.

The editor Stephen Jones, like the author Stephen King, clearly enjoys frightening readers.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)