If you want to take advantage of Madrid's autumn, we recommend some routes that will help you get to know the capital in depth you can consult here. And if you want to see more about the history of Halloween don't stop reading!
But at this time we also expect a celebration related to autumn and that in recent times has been gaining a lot of strength. It is the night of October 31, Halloween night, for others it is still the night of All Saints. For many, one more Americana that fills the city streets with witches, vampires and pumpkins; but if we delve a little deeper into the tradition, we will realize thatHalloween is not as American as we think.
We will start by commenting that Halloween is a word that derives from the English phrase "All hallow eve", which means the eve of all souls. Now it sounds a little more familiar to us, right?
Halloween and all saints are the same celebration
A celebration whose Celtic origin is related to the afterlife and contact with the dead. The night of October 31 is the night in which a door of contact with the afterlife opens according to the Celtic peoples. Various offerings were made to the dead with seasonal flowers and fruits. The typical fruits of autumn are chestnuts and pumpkins.
Knowing that Halloween and all saints are the same expression and that pumpkins come from Celtic celebrations dedicated to the dead, why does this celebration come to us from the United States? The answer is simpler than it might seem. What do you think but unknown: Halloween, being a Celtic celebration, when Christianity arrived it was lost in the origin of time, but there always remained a part of the population that continued with pagan rites to the dead.
Being a holiday originating from the Celtic peoples, logically we find Halloween in Ireland and England. It is here that the British colonists played a fundamental role in the transfer of the festival to the United States. The British colonists carried among their traditions, theCeltic tradition of "All hallow eve".
The United States, a country where capitalism is taken to its maximum exponent, has made Halloween a most commercial and colorful holiday. Houses full of pumpkins, vampires, spider webs, witches, etc. Children asking for trick or treating and an entire society celebrating a pagan festival of Celtic origin (many of them without knowing its origin).
In Madrid, with the arrival of Halloween, great interest arises in the mysteries and legends that are hidden behind the streets and squares of the city. Enchanted palaces, ghosts that wander through the city, bewitched kings, or souls in pain that cry out for justice.
Do you want to know more? Read: 5 plans for Halloween in Madrid
We are going to take advantage of these lines to write about one of the typical sweets of this celebration, All Saints' Day or Halloween, that is, the saint's bones. The saint's bones are related to the obsession of King Charles II for collecting relics of saints.
According to legend, this king had been bewitched and, as a victim of this spell, he could not have children. Charles II, "the enchanted one", decided to go to a series of witches and sorcerers who advised him to collect saint's bones to protect him from the spells and spells that could affect his reign and the birth of the future heir.
Carlos II's obsession was such that he came to collect 6,000 relics, of which forensic experts have been able to reconstruct 35 corpses. Bones of supposed saints, since as a curiosity he came to collect 8 hands of Saint Teresa (if we do the count at least we have 4 left over, anatomically the count does not add up).
This obsession reached such a point that the people of Madrid came to think that the king ate the bones he collected, since his desire to collect had no end. Relics and bones from all over the world end up at the court of Charles II.
Charles II will die without descendants on the night of October 31, 1700. As a mockery of the late king's necrophilia, the court bakers had the brilliant idea of creating a sweet related to this king. As the death of Charles II had coincided with All Saints' Day and given that this king compulsively collected bones, they decided to create a sweet special, which they called bones of a saintso that the people would remember Charles II every October 31 and his strange relationship with the relics and bones of a saint while they enjoyed an exquisite sweet made of marzipan and egg yolk .
So Halloween is not as far from our culture as it seems and now we know where the name of the saint's bones comes from and the relationship that these sweets have with Charles II and the relics of saints.
And you, do you have a story to share? Tell us!
