 Happy Halloween, and welcome to the Endless Knot. Tonight, we're casting a light on Jack-o-lantern, and trying not to wander too far off the path. Jack-o-lantern is just a shortening of Jack of the Lantern, a guy with a light. Originally, someone like a night watchman holding a lantern, it only later became a hollowed-out vegetable with a face carved into it used as a lamp, now almost associated with Halloween. There's an Irish folktale about the origin of the Jack-o-lantern, the wicked reputation of a rakish hero known as Stingy Jack or Drunk Jack catches the devil's attention. To stop the devil taking his soul, Jack convinces the devil to turn himself temporarily into a coin so that he can buy one last drink. Remember, Jack is both drunk and stingy. Cleverly, he then slips the coin into his own pocket beside a cross, trapping the devil. Jack lets him go in exchange for being left alone for ten years, and when the devil returns, Stingy Jack tricks him into climbing a tree to get one last apple, then traps him again by carving a cross into the tree. This time, Jack makes the devil promise never to take his soul to hell. Soon after, Jack dies and the gates of heaven are closed to him because he's a sinner. But the devil can't take him into hell, so he is trapped wandering the earth forever. The devil gives him a coal from hell to light his way, which he carries in a hollowed-out turnip as his only light. So that's one origin story, though it's probably more recent than the tradition it supposedly explains. But still, why is he called Jack? Jack is a pet name for John. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to come from the French Jacques, which actually comes from Jacob, but is a diminutive of John with the suffix kin, so Jack means little John. It became a generic name for an ordinary man in medieval Britain. Unsurprisingly then, the name is used for the hero of folktales in England and in some parts of North America, particularly the Appalachians. Unlike the fairy tales with their princes, Jack tales always feature a lower-class figure such as the Wiley and Cunning, but also sometimes bumbling, trickster figure. Think Jack the Giant Killer or Jack and Jill, and expressions like Jack of all trades or Lumberjack. Oh, and there's the Jack in the Deck of Cards, which was originally known as the Nave, but because K for King and KN for Nave was confusing, the Nave was changed to Jack. There was a tradition in French playing cards for the face cards to represent specific historical people. For instance, the Jack of Diamonds was Hector from the Iliad, and the Jack of Clubs was Sir Lancelot. In some card games such as Euker and Cribbage, the Jack, normally the lowest face card, is sometimes elevated to the highest, perhaps a reflection of the Jack hero whose cleverness beats his higher status opponents. So that explains the Jack element of Jack-o-lantern, but what about the lantern? Well, it comes from the Latin word lanterna through Greek from lampo, hence also the word lamp, ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root that means to burn or to shine. However, when lampter goes from Greek to Latin, it gets the erna stuck on the end because of the similar Latin word lukerna, which also means lamp. It comes from the word lux, meaning light, which gives us the name Lucifer, one of the names for the devil, which brings us back to the story of Stingy Jack. Now you'll remember that Stingy Jack carries his light in a hollowed-out turnip. The word turnip means literally a turned neep, as in the root vegetable called the neep, a Greek word meaning mustard which came to English through Latin, turned on a lathe, a machine used to carve things like table legs, referring to the turnip's round shape. So a jack-o-lantern made from a turnip is, I suppose, doubly carved. When the jack-o-lantern tradition moved to North America, brought over in part by Irish immigrants driven there by the failure of another root vegetable crop, the potato, where Halloween took on its modern form and where it's still most commonly celebrated, the pumpkin replaced the turnip as the carving vegetable of choice. Well, they were readily available and a lot easier to carve. Gourd, such as pumpkins, squashes, and melons, by the way, seem to have been one of the first domesticated plants, and along with many other culinary and household uses, such as containers or musical instruments, have sometimes been used for lanterns. It's been pointed out, for instance, that the Maori word for gourd also means lampshade. The word pumpkin itself comes from a Greek word for melon, pepon, from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning to cook or ripen, and comes through Latin and French into English as pompion. Then the diminutive suffix kin, remember that suffix from the name jack, was added, so a pumpkin means a little melon. Initially, the word was used for any edible gourd, but it now mostly refers to the orange North American squash. So, that's where the term jack-o-lantern comes from, but though the stingy jack story is filled with supernatural and creepy elements, what's the specific link to Halloween? Well, to start off with, the word Halloween means hallows eve, the evening before all hallows day. Hallow means saint, related to the word holy, coming from an Old English word, and ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root, which gives us words such as whole, hail, healthy, and holiday. The Christian All Hallowtide is the three-day festival to remember and pray for the dead, including all the saints without their own feast days, and all good Christian souls. The saints and martyrs honoured on All Saints Day were often asked to intercede for the souls of deceased loved ones in purgatory, earning their way into heaven. The beginning of All Saints Day was when Pope Boniface IV on May 13th, 609, reconsecrated the Pantheon at Rome, which had been a pagan temple as a Christian church to marry and the martyrs, and declared an annual festival in their honour. This is one of the first examples of what became a common procedure of the Christian church to absorb and repurpose pagan shrines and celebrations, turning them towards Christian worship. And the reason that Boniface chose that date, May 13th, may lie in a Roman festival of the dead, called Lemuria. For the ancient Romans, Lemuria, which culminated on May 13th, was a festival to exercise the restless and malevolent ghosts of the dead, and included a ritual of walking around the house in bare feet, throwing black beans over the shoulder. These ghosts were known as Lemurres. The great taxonomist Carl Linnaeus borrowed this Roman word for ghosts to name the primates Lemurs, because of their nocturnal habits, though their ghostly appearance and cries, and the legend of the Malagasy people of Madagascar that Lemurs were the souls of their ancestors, are a fitting coincidence. The Latin Lemurres were also known as Larvi, a word related to Larres, the Roman household gods, that could also refer to scary masks. Once again, Linnaeus picked up on the word larva in its mask sense to refer to the juvenile form of animals which mask their adult forms. But this scary mask sense fits well with our modern Halloween tradition of scary costumes. The Romans had another festival of the dead that contributes to the Halloween tradition, called Feralia, the final ceremony of the nine-day festival Parentalia starting February 13th, which honors the manes, which etymologically means good, the spirits of their ancestors, with offerings of food, drink, and flowers at their tombs outside the city's sacred boundaries. Now you'll remember that the annual celebration of the Saints and the Martyrs was first held on May 13th, not even close to modern Halloween. In the year 835, Pope Gregory III moved All Saints Day to November 1st, which happens to be the same date as the Irish Sauen, a pagan festival with its own supernatural aspects, eventually leading to the merging of similarly themed festivals in the British Isles. Though it's uncertain if this is another example of Christian repurposing of a pagan festival, the date actually seems to have changed in Germanic and English areas before Celtic ones. The outcome of the merging of these two traditions is our next stop in the journey toward modern Halloween. Sauen is the Celtic seasonal festival that marks the end of the harvest, when the herd was brought in from the summer pasture and excess animals were slaughtered before winter. The word Sauen either means summer's end or comes from a root that means together. Though it's been argued that Sauen was a kind of Celtic New Year and a festival of the dead, the evidence is thin. Nevertheless, in addition to the pastoral and harvest associations, it does seem to have had supernatural associations as a liminal or boundary time when spirits or fairies could cross over into the human world, and so may have developed rituals propitiating these spirits to protect people and livestock. A number of modern Halloween traditions may come at least in part from Sauen. Dressing up in scary disguises seems to have been a part of Sauen, either to blend in with the other spirits who are walking around or to scare them off. Also, offerings of food or sweets to propitiate the gods or spirits may lie behind Halloween candy. Since Sauen came at the end of the harvest season and involved slaughtering animals, the bones and other agricultural refuse were burned in a bonfire or bonfire, which may also have scared away evil spirits. Bonfires continue to be an autumn tradition and specifically a Halloween custom in many places. In fact, almost the only element of Sauen ritual that we have good evidence for is the use of fire, and that may also lie behind the jack-o'-lantern tradition, which may have started as lights or lanterns in the window to ward off evil spirits. Also, Sauen was a time of prophecy, especially concerning marriage. Several rituals involved apples, either seeds or peels, and this comes down to us as bobbing for apples, also known as duking or ducking in some parts of Britain, or as snap apple in Ireland as well as in Newfoundland, where it survived as a popular name for Halloween, snap apple night. And those apples are a link to another Roman influence on Halloween. It was the Romans who imported the domesticated apple tree to Britain, and along with it the celebration of the Roman goddess of fruit and orchards, Pomona, and her worship may be the origin of the apple rituals in Britain. But getting back to the development of modern Halloween, trick-or-treating may come in part from the disguises of Sauen, but it is also influenced by many other separate but related traditions. For instance, there's soling, going door-to-door in costumes during Halotide, carrying turnip lanterns representing the souls in Purgatory, and offering blessings or songs in return for soul cakes. There's the Scottish and Irish tradition of guising, going door-to-door in costumes asking for handouts, and by the 19th century, geysers also used turnip lanterns. In England, there's mumming, an old tradition of costume dances and little plays performed at various seasons of the year, sometimes in public places, sometimes going door-to-door. In northern counties of England, there's mischief night at the beginning of November when children played tricks and vandalized neighbours' houses. And then there's Guy Fox Night, November 5th, commemorating a failed plot to blow up the Parliament buildings, which is celebrated with bonfires and fireworks. Just before it, children would go door-to-door collecting pennies for the guy, that is money to pay for the making and burning of an effigy of Guy Fox. Since the gunpowder plot was a Catholic conspiracy, Guy Fox Night was particularly popular in Protestant England, where it took over some of the elements of the Halotide festivities which had been suppressed by the Puritan rejection of saints' days in Purgatory. While in Ireland and Scotland, the earlier holidays remained strong. Indeed, all over the British Isles, there are local events and celebrations around Halotide that feature some combination of these activities with elements of misrule, role reversal, and confusion of status, and all of them probably contributed to the development of the common modern practice of costumed, small children asking for candy with the phrase trick-or-treat, which became widespread in North America around the beginning of the 20th century. So, trying to pin down any one source in any particular aspect of Halloween, like the jack-o'-lantern or trick-or-treating, is like following a willow-the-wisp through the darkness and leaves us bogged down in confusing folk tales, scraps of evidence, and modern rationalizations and made-up origin stories. Which is fitting since another term for willow-the-wisp is, in fact, jack-o'-lantern. Actually, it turns out that a flickering light over a bog is an earlier meaning for jack-o'-lantern than its Halloween connection. There are, in fact, many names for this phenomenon, which is probably really produced by spontaneous ignition of methane coming from the decomposing vegetation of the bog, such as igneous-fatus, meaning foolish fire, or corpse candles. The most well-known modern term, willow-the-wisp, was used especially in East England. Wisp means a bundle of straw, hence torch. So, jack-o'-lantern and will-of-the-torch are essentially the same. One folk explanation for the lights is that they are the wandering spirits of people who are being punished for removing landmarks or boundary stones in life. The bog-light phenomenon is also associated with the mischievous spirit Puck or Puka, who leads travelers off the path to their death. Such mischievous spirits and tricksters, also known as fairies or hobgoblins, are of course perennial Halloween fixtures. Hobgoblin is itself an interesting word. The goblin part comes from a medieval Latin word that might go back to a Greek word, meaning rogue or nave, like the playing card, and or might be cognate with kobold, the Germanic spirit that was thought to live in rocks and mines, and gives us kobold for the mineral that is sometimes found mixed with silver ore, making it tricky and dangerous for miners to get out the valuable metal. This is parallel to the mineral name nickel short for kupfernickel, which means the devil's copper, since nickel mixed with copper ores made it hard to refine. Old Nic was a Germanic name for the devil, bringing us back to the story of Stingy Jack. And speaking of Jack, the hob part of hobgoblin is a short form of Robin or Robert, commonly used as a generic name for a lower-class guy, just like Jack. Hob also became a general name for a horse, and so also gives us hobby short for hobby horse, a character in those old mummers plays, as well as being associated with mischievous spirits like Robin Goodfellow, also known as Puck, and trickster figures, which may have influenced Robin Hood's name. And don't forget his right-hand man, Little John, or should that be Jack? So, Halloween is neither purely pagan or solely Christian. It's the interaction between various customs and beliefs that seem to have produced the modern traditions. A continuous process of creation, influence, combining, misremembering, reimagining, and reinterpreting. And since the theme of all the stories I've told was confusion, mischief, and breaking of boundaries, it's particularly appropriate that the history of Halloween and of the Jack-o'-lantern is itself full of confusion, false trails, and mixed up cultures. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel to help me make more videos. You can also sign up for email notifications of new videos in the description below. Leave a comment or question, or tweet at alliterative. You can also read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.