Death and Darkness: The True Story of Halloween?
Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Why do civilizations separated by eons in time have similar legends and holy days on the calendar? Halloween and the Day of the Dead are holidays connected in many unusual ways.
In the eighth century, the Catholic Church attempted to replace the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain with All Saints Day. This holiday was known as “All-hallowsmas” to the people. The day before All-hallowsmas became known as All Hallows Eve, and eventually Halloween. Halloween resembles Samhain in many ways, which for the Celtics was the beginning of the dark time, the opposite of the light time, which begins in spring.
When the Catholic Europeans encountered the Aztecs they once again attempted to morph the pagan celebrations into a Christian holiday. The celebrations honoring the Lady of the Dead became the Day of the Dead holiday.
Although the Celtics and the Aztecs where separated by 4000 miles, an Ocean, and 20,000 years, they both acknowledged a time of death and darkness at the same point on the calendar.
The question is: was there a time of horror that could have sparked world wide human cultures to pass down the story of destruction as a warning for future generations?
Plato talked about the destruction of Atlantis, an advanced civilization that ended in disaster around 10,000 BC. Coincidentally in North America the: Dire Wolf, Smilodon, Giant Beaver, Ground Sloth, Mammoth, Jeffersonian Mammoth, Columbian Mammoth, Woolly Mammoth, Mastadon, Giant Short-Faced Bear, American Cheetah, Scimitar Cats, American Camels, American Horses, and American Lion all become extinct. The most advanced culture in North America, the Clovis People also disappeared at this time. This period also marks an abrupt drop and then rise in global temperatures accompanied by massive glacial flooding and a rise in sea levels. Myths of a The Great Flood in cultures around the world could certainly have been describing these events.
The cause of the mass extinction has long been a mystery. Disease and over-hunting have been prime contenders, but unsatisfactorily explain the magnitude of the extinction over so vast an area in such a short period of time.
Recently new evidence has surfaced that may prove to shed light on this period of devastation. A scientific team has visited more than a dozen archaeological sites in North America, where they found high concentrations of iridium, an element that is rare on Earth and is almost exclusively associated with extraterrestrial objects such as comets and meteorites.
The findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago. According to the scientific team, the comet before fragmentation must have been about 2.5 miles across, and either exploded in the atmosphere or had fragments hit the Laurentide ice sheet. The Laurentide ice sheet was an up to 2 mile thick glacier that covered hundreds of thousands of square miles, including most of Canada and a large portion of the northern United States. The team concluded that the comet likely destabilized a large portion of the Laurentide ice sheet, causing a high volume of freshwater to flow into the north Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. That massive influx of fresh water could have disrupted global temperatures with devastating results for our ancestors.
Worldwide, early humans would have experienced strange fiery lights plunging into the atmosphere. It’s easy to imagine that these burning harbingers were thought to be evil spirits coming to deliver hardship and death. Is it possible that burning bonfires and wearing scary masks were early attempts to stop the evil spirits from returning? It’s possible that Halloween isn’t about superstition, myth, and magic. Halloween could be an observance of events passed down through the ages to us as a warning. Halloween may be the time our ancestors experienced hardships unlike anything in our written history. Halloween could be a celebration of human survival on the most violent day in modern man’s consciousness.
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