November

November, the ninth month of the old Roman year, entered the Christian centuries as a quiet stretch of the calendar, and the two commemorations that now define its opening were assembled piece by piece. All Saints began as a spring feast: the Pantheon in Rome was consecrated as a church of Mary and all the martyrs in the early seventh century and its anniversary kept on the thirteenth of May. In the eighth century Gregory III dedicated a chapel of All Saints in St Peter's on the first of November, and in 837 Gregory IV extended the November date to the whole Western church. All Souls followed from the abbey of Cluny: around 998 Abbot Odilo ordered a commemoration of all the faithful dead on the second of November in every Cluniac house, and the custom spread from the monasteries to the universal calendar.

The result was a two day sequence, the saints then the souls, standing exactly where the Gaelic year had kept Samhain and its returning dead, and the older and newer observances have shaded into each other ever since, in soul cakes and grave candles, in the Polish Zaduszki, and in the Mexican Day of the Dead.

The Roman November had held its own banquet of the dead in a different key: the Isia, the imperial era festival of Isis mourning and finding Osiris, ran from late October into the first days of November, and the plebeian games filled the month's middle with the last great banquet of Jupiter in the civic year.

Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A HistoryMary Beard, John North and Simon Price

The first two days of November are the West's great season of the dead. All Saints on the first honours the whole company of the holy, known and unknown, and All Souls on the second prays for all the faithful departed; in Catholic countries the days are kept with candles and chrysanthemums on the graves, and in Poland the cemeteries on Zaduszki glow after dark with fields of small flames. Mexico's Dia de los Muertos spreads across the same two days, welcoming the dead home to ofrendas laid with marigolds, sugar skulls, photographs and the foods the dead loved, a celebration whose exuberance descends from pre Hispanic festivals of the dead that the colonial church's calendar absorbed rather than erased.

Slavic tradition keeps the same season as Dziady, the forefathers' eve, when food and drink were set out for the ancestors and fires lit to warm them, an observance the Belarusian and Polish lands kept in autumn around the turn of November and that Adam Mickiewicz's drama of the same name fixed in Polish literature. Rodnovery, the modern Slavic native faith revival, has taken the autumn Dziady back into practice.

Later in the month the lunar calendar usually brings the birthday of Guru Nanak, founder of Sikhism, celebrated at the full moon of Kartik with processions and continuous readings of the Guru Granth Sahib, and the Western church year ends as November closes: the feast of Christ the King falls on its last Sunday, and Advent begins at its edge.

Sources The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) with Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and BeyondStanley Brandes, The Encyclopaedia of SikhismHarbans Singh (editor-in-chief)