Halloween History from HuffPo

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The History Of Halloween Plus 5 Things You Didn't Know About The Holiday!

Huffington Post | Katla McGlynn
First Posted: 10-30-09 11:01 AM | Updated: 10-30-09 11:42 AM

Americans love Halloween. We as a country spend over $5 billion a year celebrating it. But where did the holiday come from? And how did traditions like asking strangers for food and dressing up as ghosts develop?

Halloween has its roots in Samhain (pronounced sow-in), an ancient harvest festival held at the end of the Celtic year. The festival marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark wintertime. It was believed the spirits of the dead returned on this eve to damage crops and play tricks on the living. It was also believed that the Celtic priests, or Druids, were able to make predictions about the future, which they did during large bonfire celebrations where they wore animal skins and sacrificed crops and animals to the spirits.

In early A.D., Romans came to the Celtic territories of modern day England, Scotland and Northern France, and were the first people to influence the celebration of Samhain. They brought their own holidays: Feralia, the Roman day to honor the dead in late October, as well as another holiday to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. It is possible that this Roman influence is the reason apples are given out and bobbed for on Halloween.

By 800 A.D., Christianity spread to the Celtic Territories and brought with it another holiday, "All Saints Day." Pope Boniface IV, the designator of All Saints Day, was likely trying to replace Samhain with a similar but holier holiday meant to honor saints and martyrs. Later on, All Saints Day was renamed "All Hallows" and thus the day of Samhain (Oct. 31st) began to be called "All Hallows Eve," and eventually shortened to "Hallowe'en."

All of the holidays that were melded together to create our modern version of Halloween involved dressing up in one way or another. The celebrators of Samhain wore animal skins at their bonfire celebrations and those that observed "All Saints Day" often dressed as saints or angels. Later on men in Scotland would impersonate the dead on the day, explaining the ghoulish tradition we still observe.

During the mid 1800's, Irish and English immigrants flooded the United States and brought Halloween with them. From these immigrants we received the Halloween traditions we recognize today, however skewed they are now. For instance, the first trick-or-treaters were far from today's smiling children with commercialized costumes. They lived in Medieval England, and practiced "souling," in which poor people would beg for sweet breads, in return for praying for the families' souls. Later, the immigrants who brought Halloween to America would develop their own version of trick-or-treating, but it didn't become popular here until the 1930s.

Read the full story (including the five things) at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/30/the-history-of-halloween_n_321021.html

Inauguration Classical Quartet Was Not Live

NYT
January 23, 2009
Frigid Fingers Were Live but the Music Wasn’t
By DANIEL J. WAKIN

It was not precisely lip-synching, but pretty close.

The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.

The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation minutes before the president’s swearing in (which had problems of its own).

“Truly, weather just made it impossible,” Carole Florman, a spokeswoman for the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies, said on Thursday. “No one’s trying to fool anybody. This isn’t a matter of Milli Vanilli,” Ms. Florman added, referring to the pop band that was stripped of a 1989 Grammy because of its lip-synching, making it synonymous with the practice.

Ms. Florman said that the use of a recording was not disclosed beforehand but that the NBC producers handling the television pool were told of its likelihood the day before.

The network said it sent a note to pool members saying that the use of recordings in the musical numbers was possible. Inaugural musical performances are routinely recorded ahead of time for just such an eventuality, Ms. Florman said. The Marine Band and choruses, which performed throughout the ceremony, did not use a recording, she said.

“It’s not something we would announce, but it’s not something we would try to hide,” Ms. Florman said. “Frankly, it would never have occurred to me to announce it. The fact they were forced to perform to tape because of the weather did not seem relevant, nor would we want to draw attention away from what we believed the news is, that we were having a peaceful transition of power from one administration to the next.”

Anthony McGill, a principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera, and the pianist Gabriela Montero joined Mr. Ma and Mr. Perlman in “Air and Simple Gifts,” a piece written for the occasion by John Williams. While not all music critics agreed about the quality of the piece, some took note of the frigid circumstances for the performers. And the classical music world was heartened by the prominent place given to its field.

Mr. Perlman said the recording, which was made Sunday at the Marine Barracks in Washington, was used as a last resort.

“It would have been a disaster if we had done it any other way,” he said Thursday in a telephone interview. “This occasion’s got to be perfect. You can’t have any slip-ups.”

The musicians wore earpieces to hear the playback.

Performing along to recordings of oneself is a venerable practice, and it is usually accompanied by a whiff of critical disapproval. Famous practitioners since the Milli Vanilli affair include Ashlee Simpson, caught doing it on “Saturday Night Live,” and Luciano Pavarotti, discovered lip-synching during a concert in Modena, Italy. More recently, Chinese organizers superimposed the voice of a sweeter-singing little girl on that of a 9-year-old performer featured at the opening ceremony of last summer’s Olympic Games.

In the case of the inauguration, the musicians argued that the magnitude of the occasion and the harsh weather made the dubbing necessary and that there was no shame in it.

“I really wanted to do something that was absolutely physically and emotionally and, timing-wise, genuine,” Mr. Ma said. “We also knew we couldn’t have any technical or instrumental malfunction on that occasion. A broken string was not an option. It was wicked cold.”

Along with admiration for the musicians’ yeoman work in the cold, questions had swirled in the classical music world about whether Mr. Ma and Mr. Perlman would use their valuable cello and violin in the subfreezing weather. Both used modern instruments. Mr. Ma said he had considered using a hardy carbon-fiber cello, but rejected the idea to avoid distracting viewers with its unorthodox appearance.

“What we were there for,” he said, “was to really serve the moment.”

Stonehenge as Neolithic Trance Music Site

Discovery/NBC
Stonehenge: One totally awesome rave location
Stone circle’s acoustics are ideal for listening to repetitive trance rhythms
By Rossella Lorenzi
Discovery Channel
updated 8:40 a.m. PT, Wed., Jan. 7, 2009

Stonehenge was built as a dance arena for prehistoric "samba-style" raves, according to a study of the acoustics of the 5,000-year-old stone circle.

Using cutting-edge technology, Rupert Till, an expert in acoustics and music technology at Huddersfield University in northern England, discovered that Stonehenge's megaliths reflect sound perfectly, making the stone circle an ideal setting for listening to repetitive trance rhythms.

Till and colleague Bruno Fazenda first carried out mathematical analysis of the archaeological site to make predictions of its acoustic effects. Their aim was to look at Stonehenge as it was thousands of years ago, rather than limit their work to the remaining acoustic properties of the semi-collapsed site.

"We visited a full-size concrete replica of Stonehenge at Maryhill in Washington state. The model was built as a war memorial and has all original stones intact, so it was possible to carry out some acoustic tests," Till told Discovery News.

Using specialized acoustics software, the researchers compared results from their own calculations, computer simulations, and tests conducted at the concrete Stonehenge replica.

"Finally, we were able to create examples of what the space sounded like." Till said. "Echoes in the space indicate that there might have been rhythmic music played."

Till speculated that most likely Stonehenge's music consisted of a simple rhythm played in time to the echoes in the space, at the same tempo as the echo, or at a multiple of it.

"This would be at a tempo of about 160 beats per minute, a fast tempo. It is interesting that this is the tempo of fast trance music, of samba...It is at the top of the range of musical tempos. It is also at the top end of the range of the human heartbeat, the same as the heart might beat if you were doing really vigorous exercise, or dancing really energetically," Till said.

Located in the county of Wiltshire, at the center of England's densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments, Stonehenge consists of the remnants of a mysterious circle of large standing stones built between 3000 B.C. and 1600 B.C.

The prehistoric monument has long baffled archaeologists, who still argue over its original purpose, with two main theories taking shape in recent years.

"One is that it was a healing space, the other that it was a place of the dead. Both theories imply ritual activity. And rituals almost always involve music as a key element," Till said.

According to Till, who has also reproduced the sound of someone speaking or clapping in Stonehenge 5,000 years ago, particular spots at the site produce unusual acoustic effects, suggesting that perhaps a priest or a shaman may have stood there, leading the ritual.

Till's research ties in with previous studies carried out by Aaron Watson, an artist and archaeologist who specializes in the study of Neolithic monuments.

Watson's research strongly suggested that the monument's builders knew how to direct the movement of sound. Indeed, the stones at Stonehenge amplify higher-frequency sounds, such as the human voice, while lower-frequency sounds such as drums pass around the stones and can be heard for some distance.

The effect would have been a "dynamic multisensory experiences," according to Watson.

"An audience outside the monument could not have clearly seen or heard events within, perhaps creating a sense of mystery. In contrast, an audience occupying the confined interior of Stonehenge would have heard amplified sounds," Watson wrote on his Web site.
© 2009 Discovery Channel

Bolivian fighting ritual draws crowds

photos AP - Juan Karita

By DAN KEANE, Associated Press Writer - Thu May 17, 3:13 AM ET

The locals come down from the mountains drunk, dancing and ready to fight. The police come to make sure no one dies. And the tourists, reporters, and documentary filmmakers come for the blood.

The outside world has discovered Tinku, an ancient ritual in which indigenous Quechua communities gather each year in a remote corner of the Bolivian Andes to dance, sing and settle old scores in staggering and bloody street fights.

The largest Tinku takes place early each May in Macha, about 210 miles southeast of La Paz, where this year's festival provided a stunning and sometimes uneasy combination of culture, spectacle and violence.

Relatively unknown outside the Andes for centuries, Tinku remains on the fringe of Bolivia's growing tourism industry. But its heavily asterisked listing in the guidebooks (Lonely Planet calls it "a violent and often grisly spectacle") is beginning to draw both backpackers and media curious to witness the peculiar event firsthand.

The attention has not gone unnoticed by the locals in Macha, a bitterly poor village of adobe houses and narrow dirt streets tucked between cold, dusty hills some 13,100 feet above sea level.

Tinku fighters generally resent the foreigners' gaze and now ask for money to have their picture taken. When drunk enough, a fighter may take an occasional swing at anyone in the street carrying a camera.

Tinku ("encounter" in Quechua) is a pre-Colombian tradition meant to solve conflicts and release tensions within the local community while honoring the Andean earth goddess Pachamama. Participants believe the spilled blood brings fertility to the rocky soil, and the death of a fighter forecasts an especially abundant harvest the following year.

The challenge for Macha city officials is to promote Tinku's authentic heritage while preventing the spotlight from turning its sacred rituals into meaningless blood sport.

"Before, Tinku before was something shared," said Abelardo Colque, who was selling press passes in Macha's one-room city hall. "They didn't just fight; they fought and ended up shaking hands. But now it's turning into just fighting without any point."

The festival includes several days of ceremonies blurred together by sleepless and spirited binges on grain alcohol and chicha, a tart homemade corn beer. There are prayers to a Christian crucifix, llama sacrifices at dawn, and an endless stomping, shuffling dance to the eerie strains of cane flutes and rhythmic, two-chord songs beat out on mandolin-like charangos.

On its climactic day, May 4 this year, fighters marched down the hill into town — still dancing, still singing — with their eyes peeled for particular rivals, intent on resolving everything from love triangles to land disputes.

While most fights are short-lived, death is not uncommon; one person was killed at a smaller Tinku in Macha in February. But with more foreigners turning up each year, local officials have brought in extra police to reduce the violence, and even broadcast radio announcements asking revelers not to attack street vendors.

The police immediately took control of this year's festival, forming an improvised ring in the town square and refereeing the fights. A sergeant selected combatants of equal size and age — women, too — and set a few ground rules ("No kicking!"). Fellow fighters cheered each pair on, while journalists and tourists crowded in, holding their cameras high to catch the bare-knuckle action.

The police ended each clash after only a minute or two, after drunken punches had bloodied one or both of the fighters' faces.

By late afternoon, the increasingly intoxicated crowd repeatedly overran the ring, hoping to revert to Tinku's traditional free-for-all. But the police drove them back each time, occasionally popping a tear gas grenade to clear the square.

Foreigners seemed both relieved and mildly disappointed to learn that Tinku had been toned down.

"Are they making it less violent so that people have a different image?" asked Portuguese backpacker Pedro Pimentel, 28. "It shouldn't have to be changed just by our presence."

Just what the world wants to make of Tinku — cultural celebration or a drunken brawl — remains to be seen, but increased exposure seems inevitable. "It's something that belongs to the world," Pimentel said.

In one Macha boarding house, a poster on the wall advertised an academic conference dedicated "to the rescue of the original Tinku of our collective memories" as a grainy video showed wince-inducing highlights of a previous year's street fight.

Out in the street, a tourist snapped the picture of a defeated fighter stumbling through the crowd, his face streaming with blood.

"Gimme a peso, you (expletive), if you want to take my photo!" the fighter bellowed.

Stiffening with fright, the backpacker quickly dug into his jeans for a coin.

Reviewing the picture later on his digital camera, the tourist was disappointed: The Tinku fighter held his head down to let his blood drip in the street, and his face was covered in shadow.

"I'm going back to take another picture," the backpacker told his buddy. "And this time I'm not going to ask."

Ritualized fighting in Bolivia's highlands

A young man took a swing at a man from a rival village, left, during the Tinku celebration in Sacaca, Bolivia, last week. The last remaining Tinku festivals are held in the Potosí region. Sacaca holds one in February, and Macha has a larger one in May.


Evan Abramson for The New York Times

Before the drinking and fighting began, villagers paraded through the main plaza carrying flags and playing traditional instruments.

New York Times
February 12, 2007
Sacaca Journal
Ritual Fades Into Blur of Drinking and Fighting
By SIMON ROMERO

SACACA, Bolivia — For hundreds of years, the Indians of Bolivia’s high plains have trekked to this town in early February. They dance, drink chicha, the fermented beverage made here from rye, and then fight one another until blood stains the dirt alleyways.

The ritual, called Tinku, a word that means “encounter” in both Aymara and Quechua, was once widespread throughout the Andean world, predating the arrival of the conquistadors. Anthropologists say it now tenuously exists just in this isolated pocket of Bolivia, seven hours southeast of La Paz by bus on a washboard dirt road.

To the chagrin of Roman Catholic priests who would like to see Tinku fade into the past, political officials here want it to survive.

“Tinku is a sublime, beautiful act,” said Wilson Araoz, the mayor of Sacaca and a leading official in the Popular Indigenous Movement, a party that is part of the coalition supporting Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

Emboldened by Mr. Morales’s efforts to strengthen Bolivia’s indigenous cultures, Mr. Araoz’s party is one of several political organizations pushing to preserve endangered traditions like Tinku.

“There’s a predisposition in all of us to do Tinku,” Mr. Araoz said in an interview. “I believe that denying that impulse is harmful.”

No one disputes that Tinku can be harmful, at least physically. The fighting, though ritualized through music and dance, is far from organized, less like boxing and more like street brawling.

Not everyone takes part. Men of roughly equal size and age square off against each other on the streets surrounding the plaza, though sometimes women also enter the fray. Some of the men wear leather helmets and gloves and carry woven coca-wallets. But the fighting can also be bare knuckle.

In one fight at a dirt intersection, two men in their 50s punched and kicked each other for about 10 minutes, their faces bloodied as a crowd cheered them on. By the time exhaustion overwhelmed them, both were still conscious, though in a trancelike state.

Bystanders sometimes step in to break up contests that become too lopsided. In addition to bruised faces and limbs, deaths sometimes occur.

No one died at this year’s Tinku here, but blood certainly flowed. Some of the fighting evolved into generalized rock-throwing brawls with screams of aggression in Quechua and Aymara.

Some of the Tinku fighters could be found passed out on the ground, though it was not clear whether concussions or chicha were to blame.

“It was a good year, but slower than before,” said José Acuña Gabriel, 22, a Quechua-speaking Indian who wore a colorful ceremonial vest over a secondhand Operation Desert Storm T-shirt.

Expressing concern with Tinku’s violence, priests in this region, North Potosí, have been trying to eliminate the ritual fighting. Some priests have told indigenous leaders that church aid and community religious services could be withheld if residents took part in Tinku.

“There are profound things within these people that I still don’t understand,” said Carlos Ortigosa, a Spanish priest who has lived in Sacaca for the last 10 years. “But basically Tinku is an event in which people kick each other when they’re down and die with some frequency. It’s not agreeable to see people treating each other so badly.”

Anthropologists say Tinku represents much more than fighting. But the fighting, often between members of different communities, can be a way to confirm or defend collective landholdings, or to bring good fortune at harvest time.

It is also a chance for young men to show off in front of women from other communities. Couples often meet at Tinkus and marriages are known to result.

Tristan Platt, director of the Center for Amerindian Studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said Tinku’s origins were hard to pin down though indigenous communities might have practiced something similar as far back as 1100. The periodic channeling of communal violence may serve to reduce conflict during the rest of the year, he said.

Rare acts of cannibalism have occurred, Mr. Platt said, and are thought by participants to be legitimized by the Catholic eucharist, letting them believe they are eating the flesh of a divinized human being.

Ramiro Molina, an anthropologist and director of the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore in La Paz, said blood was required for Tinku’s participants to feel they had consummated a harvest fertility rite.

“The West isn’t used to seeing such violence out in the open, ritualized and organized in such a way,” Mr. Molina said. “So of course this seems shocking at first glance.”

Most of the several hundred people who attended were subsistence farmers who walked to Sacaca and bartered in the town plaza for corn, blankets, shoes, chicha and coca leaf before the dancing began. Those who took part said the fighting was as natural as farming potatoes.

“I do it because it’s fun,” said Esteban Lisidro Aguilario, 20, between turns playing the Tinku dance’s haunting rhythm on his pinquillo, a flute made for the occasion.

Sacaca, even with its isolation, feels the tug of the outside world in ways that are diluting the appeal of rituals like Tinku. Entel, the national phone company, opened a booth here five months ago with three Internet-connected computers. Many of the town’s children and teenagers seemed more entranced by the instant messaging and games on those machines than with the centuries-old ritual unfolding around them.

This year’s Tinku drew only about half the number that had come three years ago.

Bolivia’s largest Tinku is not in Sacaca but in Macha, another town in North Potosí, where thousands gather to fight each May. The police there sometimes disperse brawls with tear gas. Officials in Macha have started charging admission to foreign tourists.

Sacaca’s leaders hope their ritual may become an attraction as well, though for now outsiders are still oddities. The only lodging here is a room in a shopkeeper’s house on the plaza for $3 a night.

“Tinku is like a psychologist that helps us overcome our traumas,” said Osvaldo Echeverría, a Sacaca cultural official. “We have a lot to learn about the world, but the world also has a lot learn from us.”