October 31 marks the annual celebration of Halloween.
However, the origins of some traditions associated with this date have been lost over time. There are customs once practiced on the last day of this month which have now vanished completely, and while a number are still practiced today, it has sometimes been forgotten why they were used in the first place. In fact, many customary Halloween traditions have their roots in a belief that they were thought to predict future events, such as when someone might marry, and what their future spouse might be like.
Here is a look at some of the rituals once performed on Halloween to try and tell the future.
BOBBING FOR APPLES
Halloween has its roots in the ancient Gaelic festival of Samhain, which was traditionally a way to mark the divide between the two halves of the year, and was viewed as a time to communicate with the deceased as the curtain lifted between these time periods. The sense of divisions melting between realms led to a belief that the gap between present and future could likewise be dissolved, and that impressions could therefore be discerned of events yet to come. And so Halloween became a time to try and predict what events those might be.
One of the things which were used on Halloween to try and predict the future were apples, from where the continuing practice of apple bobbing originates. Also known as ducking for apples, it involves filling a tub with water and adding the fruit to it, with people then leaning into the water to try and remove one using only their mouth and teeth. But it was not just a party game; it was once used as a way to predict a future marriage: one of the variations of the ritual revolved around the idea that the first person to successfully lift an apple from the tub would also be the first of the group to wed.
MIRRORS AT MIDNIGHT
The practice of apple bobbing is also connected to other folk customs which intertwine apples with romantic love. This has been traced to the observation that an apple, when cut open, resembles a five-pointed star, a symbol traditionally connected with female fertility.
As folklore history shows, it is not just apple bobbing which was used to try and discern what the future held: eating an apple in front of a mirror at midnight on Halloween was also a ritual used to foresee what might happen romantically in the future: it was said that a woman who did so would glimpse a vision of her future husband in the glass in front of her.
CABBAGE STALKS
In some areas, customs specific to that place also evolved from the idea of Halloween as a time for divining the future. In the Orkney Islands off the north coast of Scotland, one ritual performed on this occasion was for three young women to walk backwards into a cabbage patch and for each of them to pull one cabbage up, with the condition of the stalk being the indicator of the woman’s marital future. How smooth or not the stalk happened to be was related to how old the woman’s husband would be when they married: a smooth stalk meant a youthful man, while a knotted stalk meant an older one.
While some of these traditions have long since faded, the practice of apple bobbing continues today, and will likely take place at many Halloween celebrations this year. And even though it is no longer used to predict someone’s marriage prospects, and many will be unaware that it was ever used for this purpose, the fact that a custom like this has survived in some form shows how some rituals can endure beyond the beliefs which originally inspired them.