Customer Reviews

Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The negative reviews I've read so far are trashing the book because it wasn't what they expected it to be: a nostalgic, easy read to be enjoyed while sipping hot cider. The book doesn't present itself as such and is clearly an academic and scholarly survey of the holiday.

I found the book to be a slim, well-written text that still manages to cover a wide range of topics and provide tons of interesting facts and figures. Rogers' main thesis is that Halloween, a holiday that continually reinvents itself, continues to provide "a space for transgression and parody," even as it is appropriated to fit the social and political needs of the culture. Rogers explores this thesis by examining the origins of Halloween, its history in Britain and North America, its similarities to Mexico's "Day of the Dead," urban legends and popular reactions to the holiday, its representation in Hollywood, and current trends in its celebration. He ends with a few guesses and questions about the holiday's future. A thorough analysis without getting bogged down in any one aspect.

Single-subject histories on the likes of salt, codfish and even the color red have become a fashionable lately, and this book is a fine specimen of the genre. It traces the history of the celebration of October 31 from Samhain, the year cycle rite observed by the pagan Celts in Britain, to the many ways it is marked in North America at the time of the new millennium. His central thesis, supported by myriad examples and illustrations, is that Halloween has always been a liminal time, a boundary between autumn and winter, this world and the other world, life and death. Drawing from the theory of anthropologist Victor Turner, he argues that liminal times are also periods of ritual inversion in which the obverse of cultural values, however they are construed, are temporarily allowed to emerge into public consciousness and celebrated before being relegated once again to the cultural closet. Whether these oppositional symbols are spiritual otherworlds, as they were for the ancient Celts, or consist instead of what is disavowed by the dominant cultural paradigm, Halloween provides a framework during which they can be publicly explored and performed. This central feature of Halloween, more than any individual rite or symbol, constitutes the core of the holiday that has endured for over a thousand years. From Celtic Samhain to globalized celebration of consumer culture, Halloween seems to attract to it the oppositional and the carnivalesque. No wonder, then, that is has become a popular target for the invectives of conservative Christian ministers and their congregations, who label it "Satanic" and call for its suppression. But the suppression of culturally contested symbols never successfully eliminates the ideas behind them. In fact, as Turner and French cultural historian Michel Foucault argue, these oppositional images are fertile ground for cultural renewal, and provide alternative ways of envisioning reality: they are cultural countersites where social mores and pretensions can be mocked, parodied, and lampooned with impunity, and an alternative universe can temporarily be imagined.
This excellent book will appeal to a wide range of readers. It reads fluidly and easily, is theoretically well-informed without being jargon-ridden or using theory as a bludgeon, and could easily be adopted for use in large undergraduate courses on cultural history, folkloristics and anthropology.

This book has an amazing amount of information in it about Halloween from the Celtic period to post 9/11 and anyone wanting to learn about the history of the holiday over this entire span should start with this book.

I can't fault the author in any way for what is written, my problem was with how it was written. It didn't seem as though the author enjoyed the holiday and that made the writing seem kind of gray to me, not enjoyable as it would be with someone who really loves the holiday.

Still a great reference book though.

First let me say that this book is like a history book on the history of halloween. If you are looking for a quick halloween story or costume and party information, then this book is not for you.This book deals with the actual history of this wonderful holiday,where it came from and how it adapted to what it is now.I found this book to be a great source of information on the history of my favorite holiday.I would recommend this book to anyone who wants an in depth read of the history of Halloween.

As other reviews suggest, this is not a ghost story or for those with short attention spans. Dr. Rogers is a professor of history, and he has produced a correspondingly scholarly book of history, including names, dates, argumentation, and references to his source materials. When I found the book, I was mainly interested in the early history of Halloween, and the first part of the book delivers it. And it's an important contribution, contrasting with pop-histories that paste later Christian traditions on to early Celtic celebrations, and basically dismiss a thousand years of Christian development as something like "And then they tried to Christianize it because those darned pagans wouldn't go away". Halloween evolved as the cultures celebrating it evolved, and you can't understand its celebration today through a single slice of time in history.

I was tempted to give it four stars instead of five because I thought the author put too much space into Halloween movies, and not enough into the early American development. But he was bringing us up through its modern celebration in the US and Canada, and movies are an important source and reflection of the culture, so I suppose that serves his intent.

You shouldn't try to learn any subject from a single book. Excellent companion books are "The Pagan Mysteries of Halloween" by Markale, for its early history, and "Halloween: An American Holiday, An American Tradition" by Bannatyne for its American development, if you ignore her pre-American history of it (for reasons which are explained comprehensively in Ronald Hutton's "Triumph of the Moon").

You need to love the history of HALLOWEEN in order to appreciate this book. It takes you back 3,000 years ago when HALLOWEEN began with the Celts and was called Samhain. It talks about how HALLOWEEN came to America. It talks about when people put poison in apples and gave them out as treats. (I transported that into a HALLOWEEN movie I made called 'Pumpkin Man.) It even talks about the HALLOWEEN film series, although I noticed a mistake when it came to that. If you love the holiday, you'll love HALLOWEEN: FROM PAGAN RITUAL TO PARTY NIGHT!!!

This book actually has a lot of detail on the history of Halloween. From its beginnings to its modern day traditions, this book seems to cover it all. You can tell that the author has done his research.

However, this book is a hard read. It reads like a college professor's thesis full of large, exaggerating words and sentences rather than a reader-friendly book.

The only other distracting thing about this book is it's continuous mention of homosexual Halloween traditions. This history gets its own introduction AND chapter, which is quite distracting when when you are trying to read the history and then reminded about the parades and flamboyant costumes of the gay community.

Aside from this criticisms, this is an informative book. If you want a brief history of Halloween, go somewhere else. But if you want a true (time comsuming!) commentary, then this is a good find.

I bought this for my husband. Listening to him talk about the book makes me want to read it when he finishes. The book was in good condition and was shipped in a timely fashion. Would recommend to other buyers.

When the time came to read this year's Halloween book, I chose Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers. I was looking for an interesting, scholarly treatment of the holiday. I didn't find it.

That's not to say that I didn't learn anything. According to Rogers, Halloween, as it is celebrated in the United States and Canada, was basically brought to the New World by Scottish and Irish immigrants. In those countries, Halloween apparently grew out of Pagan autumn festivals and the Christian holidays of All Saints and All Souls days. The Day of the Dead had a similar origin in Mexico. What began in the US and Canada as a celebration of Celtic pride evolved into a night of teen and adult rowdiness, which was in turn tamed into "trick-or-treating." In the last few decades, the commercial engines have behaved like a positive-feedback loop: Because Halloween is popular, there is money to be made, so it needs to be hyped and marketed to make it more popular, so more money can be made, and so on.

See? That didn't take 170 pages. The remaining space is occupied by the author supporting his conclusions with data and argumentation. The data generally amounts to lists of single sentence anecdotes gleaned from various Canadian and American newspaper editions published in late October and early November over a wide range of years. There are also a number of illustrations, including festive holiday snapshots taken by the author. The author's argumentation is based on induction from these published data points -- as well as stories from his colleagues and dentist -- to explain their significance as only an academic could. For example, this gem is put forth as part of the discussion of the relevance of the Halloween movies by John Carpenter to the actual holiday (p. 121):

"For it could be argued that Myer's murderous interventions are facilitated by the collapse of Halloween as an inclusive family holiday and its transformation into a set of generational consumer rites in which family mutualities are neglected."

What?! The plots of the six Halloween "films" are discussed and their commentary on the holiday is "explored." It is hard to take this kind of scholarship seriously when it takes slasher-flix so seriously.

Holly and Alexander, you two just stop it right now! And Michael, you stay out of it.