Like with older age as gaps appear in the memory of those recalling times past, so it is with history. Not only do we rely on an unbiased interpretation of events by those who could take ink and quill and scribe on parchment, or who could etch into stone cuneiform, all the while hoping that conquerors would persevere tradition as opposed to rid themselves of guilt and shame amidst a good ol’ book burning or monument defacing. Yet, much of history has been lost to the sands of time, skewed by a form of Chinese whispers, intentionally exaggerated by colonisers, syncretically manipulated by the Church or left to absorb into the soil of the killing fields. Indeed there are many cultures that did not take to writing, preferring the transmission of their lore and customs via the aural and oral traditions, revering the ‘holy-people’ and bards, musicians and story tellers to persevere their past.
It is believed that as far back as the 3rd century BCE the Babylonians, a people who were amongst the first recorded to take to ‘writing’, considered the deceased to be active participants in any family or community, albeit from ‘beyond’, as rituals and rites were performed at the places of entombment. There was no separation between those with whom physical interaction was possible from those who had crossed through the Veil, as death was not understood as being ‘final’ but merely a shift in ‘home’, the ‘soul’ being the person and therefore immutable, even if their physical body withered.
Aside from acknowledging the specific day in a solar year that someone phase shifted, festivals held in their honour tended to be held three days before the New Moon, which later became systemised to being the end of a ‘moonth’, and later again at the end of a season.
The Celts who settled in Ireland, extended the notion of the three days before a New Moon, now called the Balsamic Moon, into the solar year and set about formally acknowledging the thinning of the threshold between this world and the ‘spirit’ world, where the ancestors now inhabited, as being 45 days prior to the darkest day of the year – the Cardinal Earth Ingress when the Sun reached zero degrees of Capricorn. This day is a time when the Sun stands motionless on the horizon for four days before slightly rising above the horizon on the 25th of December, heralding the ‘rebirth’ of the Light. Known as Samhain (pronounced sow-an, with the “ow” like in “cow), it is one of four festivals unique to the Celtic calendar when the Sun is equidistant between a Solstice and an Equinox. Located in the midpoint of a Fixed Sign of the Zodiac – Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius – these ‘power’ zones where our Star is at its maximum strength and undiluted in its focus, are celebrated with the lighting of fires, the offering of gifts and the ritual of invocation.
Samhain, being that date heralding the Sun’s final descent to its death and rebirth at the Capricorn Solstice, has not only been considered the start of the Celtic New year, as it marked the end of the harvest season and the start of the dark ‘half’ of the year and the onset of the cold season, as recorded in early Irish texts, annals and legal documents.
But what has captured modernity’s imagination is the liminal and spiritual importance of this date, depicted in the misappropriation and exaggeration of the rites and rituals, as Samhain is THE time when the ‘dead’ walked amongst us. Morphing into seeking ‘treats’, food and drink were left out to honour those returning from their voyage, just as fires were lit as beacons to show the way home through the mist that separated here from the beyond, as opposed to frightening off those maligned spirits. Remember that there was very little darkness about the Celtic/ Irish otherworld, unlike the stories from Greece, Rome and Scandinavia. Therefore those returning were not ‘demonic’ or ‘evil’, terms that were added to Otherworldly Presences by the Romans and then the Church. For example, All Saints Day is celebrated the day after Samhain, to cleanse the people from the presence of those wrong doers, and from those without the ‘Light’.
As I draw to conclusion with this brief overview of Samhain, let me ask you whether you know much about your great-grandparents – their lives, their vicissitudes, their hopes, their dreams, their pain and their joy? I didn’t think so. Why do you think that is? Because if we cut ourselves off from our history, our land, our ancestors, we cut off our connection to the Earth, our past and those whose scripts and patterns lie within our DNA, inclining us towards certain ways of being. Is it intentional or just a function of a society that honours the invisible future more than the reality of our past, especially given the heinous acts that have been committed to Christianise and ‘civilise barbaric’ peoples.
So as the Veil thins on the true Samhain – this year in the early hours of the 7th of November (not the arbitrarily chosen 31st of October) – and in keeping with these vastly liminal times we have been moving through, I’d ask you to hold a space for those who have come before you, whose lives have made possible yours; whose labour and toil, paved the way for the world you live in; and whose hopes and dreams live inside you and often inclining you towards certain activities and practises. The Irish, along with many indigenous cultures, honoured their deceased with gifts and celebrations, toasting, and revelling in, their lives, as opposed to generating copious galleons of cortisol with slasher tales of deranged psychopaths and ghoulish demons who, like the Sandman, are here to sever the silver chord that tethers you here, as they whisk you off to a life devoid of Light amidst a burning inferno.
