Celebrating Samhain
Here is the text of my first draft for Time For Magic which was radically changed for publication:
SAMHAIN – Here’s your chance to get off the Wheel. This is the end of the line. The Game’s up. What a relief to be free of this endless cycling round and round: from growth to decline and decay back again to darkness and seeding and endless new days and more things to do. Samhain is the time when Time stops. If you’re a druid you’ll have three days to get off the wheel and pretend that time doesn’t exist, usually between 31st October and 2nd November, and then the whole game will start up again. Unless you’ve got off for good that is.
Samhain is perhaps the most powerful of all the festivals because it offers this quantum leap, and preparation for it began a long while ago. You could kid yourself that it wasn’t coming until Lughnasadh, but then they started singing John Barleycorn in the pub, the fields were turning golden, and the combine harvesters looked menacing as they did their business. By the equinox you couldn’t deny it. The fields were bare, it was getting colder and what was left of the fruit was falling from the trees. And now it’s the time of the third harvest – the Blood Harvest – when livestock were slaughtered and when we too go down if it’s our time.
The old grey hag of Winter rattles at the windows, we huddle round our fires and try to peer into the future using whatever oracle we can find or love, and we remember our dead. They’ve stayed where they belong all year, but now Time’s wall has been demolished and there’s no forgetting them, no ignoring them. They’re here all around us and we may as well invite them in and raise a cup and a cake to them. In Druidry we offer them a fourfold feast and ask for their blessings on our lives. We send them our love. We might offer them our rage or our forgiveness. Or perhaps both, if they had been unthinking fools who had repeated the age-old curse that hurt people hurt people. We too might like to continue in that vein and offer nothing but our hatred, but still we try to lift a glass to break that chain. And we remember too the old idea that we are raised with two lines: the bloodline of our genetic ancestors, and the milk-line of those who loved and cared for us, nurturing us as children or feeding us with inspiration and guidance as adults. Our milk-line can include those who have influenced our spiritual and intellectual development as well as foster-parents, guardians and kind friends who have played important roles in our lives. We invite them into our Samhain circle, spend time allowing them to mingle with us. And we toast each other and know that one day it will be us who are invited to this party from the other side of the wall: us who try to reach for the food and drink held up to us as our names are spoken in the Roll-Call of the Departed.
At Beltane two fires are lit and we walk through these fires of desire into the world of adolescence, making love, eager for life, wanting more, wanting everything. And the Wheel turns and we face another two fires at Samhain but this time we are invited to walk, not towards the glowing centre of life here on Earth with all its sparks and heat, but continuing, still walking the same way but the path takes us outwards, out of the wheel into the darkness of Space. Away from this world.
Samhain is probably the oldest of the festivals, rooted in tradition thousands of years old. In Scotland and Ireland two fires were lit at both Beltane and Samhain and everyone would walk through these fires – the cattle too. In England the tradition was lost at some time but then reborn, conflated with Guy Fawkes Night, shifted by a few days to November 5th, two bonfires turned into one. Samhain was celebrated as a time in an ordered world when disorder and mayhem could rule for a while. Men could dress as women, women as men, raucous mayhem that we see watered-down and commercialised today in the trick-or-treat shenanigans of Hallowe’en. At a serious time it is vital that seriousness does not prevail. That trickster energy is at large. Think Mexico’s Day of the Dead with its costumes and parades. Think of the sometimes startling humour that can bubble up at the best of wakes.
If the Year is seen as our lives in microcosm, our birth into this life starts with conception at the Winter Solstice dawn, we are born at Imbolc, achieve young adulthood and find love at Beltane, reach the fullness of our lives at the summer solstice, and then mature into old age through the three harvests, until at this last harvest time of Samhain we walk through the fires and let go of our body.
So what then of the time from the beginning of November until the Winter Solstice? What does this segment of the Wheel represent? Perhaps it is the time between incarnations. We slough off our bodies at Samhain and then this next phase of the turning of the Wheel is the journey in-between lives, in the Afterlife, until at the Winter Solstice that one tiny light of our soul incarnates again, conception occurs, and around the Wheel we go.
These processes can seem pretty full-on – life and death things – but the cycles of growth and decay, of taking on things and of letting go, are happening all the time in all sorts of ways. The process of shedding that started at Lughnasadh and reaches its peak at Samhain is also a process that we can explore in our own lives, not as a route to dissolution and decay, but to rebirth in a lighter way of living. The old Druid Chief, George Watson MacGregor-Reid, applied this idea to the way we could lead our lives. He called it ‘simplicitarianism’: streamlining your life by shedding the inessential, making it simpler. It’s what the planet needs us to do.
Philip Carr-Gomm