Halloween originated in Pagan Europe, in the days before Christianity replaced native religions. Samhain was the Celtic harvest festival, practiced in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Alfablot was the change-of-year festival practiced by the Norse and Germanic peoples when they made sacrifices to the elves for protection through the winter. These holidays were practiced at the exact same time of year.
There isn’t a whole lot that is known about Alfablot, it is rarely mentioned in the surviving Sagas and Eddas. We know what Samhain is, because it survived. Christianity absorbed it as All Saints Day, with many Celtic traditions such as wearing masks surviving. How closely related were these two holidays? Samhain practice included offering food to the spirits, and Alfablot offered “food” to the elves. Both Holidays were a marker of the end of the “light” half of the year and the entrance into the “dark” half. But this brought up a much more intriguing question.
Did all Indo-European religions spring from the same well? Yes, they did. The well of chaos, and its tunnel goes much deeper than expected. It begins with chaos, and it all ends with chaos. There is one mythological archetype that is drawn throughout every European, Near East, and even some religions that had little to know contact with the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Not the flood, but the sea serpent, the leviathan, bane of gods.
Chaoskampf, or struggle against chaos, is present throughout these religions. It is the story of a hero’s battle against a great sea serpent, leviathan, or dragon. The heroes always bring order with the slaying of this monstrosity, with the serpent often being an elder god, or a member of the hero’s family. In this mythologue the masculine often represents order, throwing down the chaotic matriarchy, with the first known example of this legend being the goddess that was responsible for birthing the world: Tiamat.
In Sumerian religion, Tiamat was goddess of the sea, giving birth to the younger gods with her husband Abzu. Abzu assumes that their children will usurp him, so he attacks them and is killed. Tiamat gave birth to the monsters of Sumerian myth, including dragons, turning herself into a sea serpent to take revenge on her husband’s killers. She is in turn murdered by the storm god Marduk. Marduk then used one half of her body to create the heavens, and the other half was used for the earth. Interestingly, Marduk created mankind and was the sixth generation from Tiamat, which parallels Yahweh’s creation of man on the sixth day. Yahweh also slays a sea serpent.
Isiah 27:1, “In that day, the Lord will punish with his sword—his fierce, great and powerful sword—Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.” It is seen again in Psalms 74:14, “It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert. It was you who opened up springs and streams; you dried up the ever-flowing rivers. The day is yours, and yours also the night; you established the sun and moon.” This is similar to the creation of the earth after the destruction of the Tiamat.
In the religion of the Canaanites, Ba’al was the son of Dagon (one and the same with the fish-god, for you Lovecraft fans). He is crowned king of the gods, but Mot resents this and sends the many-headed serpent Lotan against him. Ba’al the storm god defeats this serpent. It is possible that the Hebrews drew upon the detail of the many-headed serpent for God’s battle against his own leviathan.
Tarhunz or Tarhunt was the Hittite god of storms. The Hittites apparently liked tension more than the other cultures mentioned, because in Tarhunt’s first battle with Illuyanka the serpent, he loses. He goes to a goddess for help, and they team up to defeat the serpentine enemy. There is a second version that is much longer but ends with the same result.
Lets step outside Mesopotamia for a moment, to a myth that may or may not be related. Yu the Great was a legendary Chinese sage king and the first emperor of China. Yu was not a storm god, but his providence was water, as he was tasked with stopping the flooding that caused so much turmoil, or chaos, in China’s heartland. Xiangliu was a servant of the great serpent and god of waters, Gonggong. Gongong wished to punish man, and sent Xiangliu, the many-headed serpent, out to create floods. Yu killed Xiangliu, and spent many years repairing China’s waterways to stop the flooding.
Let’s step even farther away, and leave the iron age behind. In the Aztec mythos, Cipactli was a primordial deity, lacking the many-heads archetype, but being part crocodile, part fish, part frog, and every part of its body was covered with mouths. Quetzalcoatl the storm god and his brother the war god realized that everything that they created was consumed by Cipactli, so they decided he must be killed. They baited him out of the water, and after a long fight, killed him. They cut his body into fourths and threw each piece out towards one of the cardinal directions, creating the universe. The Aztecs absorbed the religious traditions of those that came before, like the Olmecs, a civilization that began around 1600 BCE.
The list goes on and on. Thor the storm god and the sea-serpent Jormungandr fight at the end of all things, in Ragnarök, where Thor kills the beast but is felled himself. The world is reborn from water. Gaia, angry that the Greek Gods usurped the Titans, sends forth Typhon to assault Mount Olympus in a battle between primordial chaos and godly order. Typhon is a giant with many serpent heads that spew fire. He defeats Zeus in the beginning but with the help of Hermes, Zeus returns and is victorious over the monster. He-no is an Iroquois god of thunder who slays the water serpent, the serpent’s broken body then created the three great lakes.
At the end of the last ice age, as the massive glaciers and ice sheets were melting, there was a cataclysmic flood. If our ancestors were to view a flooding waterway from say, the safety of a mountaintop, it could have possibly looked like a many-headed snake. What is unclear is why the storm god is consistently the one to defeat the serpent of waters. That seems counterintuitive. What is also murky is whether they drew inspiration from the cessation of the floods or the creation of irrigation, like in the myth of Yu the Great. Then again, it could just represent the victory of civilization over primal fear. What is perhaps the most interesting is that it is older than Marduk, Ba’al and Yahweh. The myth was carried across the Bering Strait with what became the Native Americans. Just like this myth, which changed a little with time and cultural assimilation, Samhain and Alfablot were likely the same holiday at some point.
So, uh, I don’t know. Happy Halloween, or whatever.
