Samhain

From sunset on October 31 to sunset November 2, the time of the wise ancestors, looking both backwards to the past and into the future.

This includes the period of no time, the time of the yew tree, on October 31-November 1 when the gateway between the dimensions are opened.

Animal: raven

Tree: Apple

Herbs and Incense of Samhain: cypress, dittany, ferns, nutmeg, sage, and pine.

Candle colour: orange

Crystals: deep blue, purple, brown and black, sodalite, dark amethysts, smoky quartz deep brown jasper, jet and obsidian (apache tear).

Symbols: Use as a focus apples, that are a symbol of health and feature in Halloween love divination, a custom dating from Druidic times, pumpkins, nuts and autumn leaves, mingled with evergreens as a promise that life continues.

Samhain rituals are potent for protection, overcoming fears, for laying old ghosts in our minds, psychological as well as psychic, for welcoming the positive influence of the family past and present and for marking the natural transition between one stage of life and the next.

Agricultural significance:

The time when the herds came down from the hills and family members returned to the homestead for the winter. The animals that were to be kept during the winter were driven though fires so that they might be cleansed of disease and parasites and others were slaughtered with reverence and preserved for food.

Folk Lore/magical significance:

It was likewise reasoned that the family dead would come shivering from the fields and

should be welcomed at the family hearth, a practice that has continued on the Christianised day of the Dead in European countries with a strong Catholic influence and in Mexico where flowers are scattered from the churchyards to the homes.

The fires of Ireland were at one time extinguished at sunset on Samhain (which simply means summer’s end). A fire was kindled by the ArchDruid/ess, on the hill of Tlachtga in Ireland and every great family carried home torches to rekindle their hearth fires which thereafter were kept burning.

In parts of Scotland youths would take fire from the cleansing Nyd or Balefire (after Beli, the Fire and Sun God and earlier maybe the Goddess Belili) and run around field boundaries to protect creatures and homes from malevolent fairies and spirits who might also be abroad.

Ritual significance:

Working with the open dimensions both for divination and for receiving the wisdom of the ancestors

Deity forms:

The Cailleach, the Old Hage of winter whose role was largely protective.

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Personal activities

• Light huge orange candles and place them in a safe place facing a window to protect your home and light the way home spiritually for those you love who may be far away. Burn from dusk until midnight on Halloween.

• Place a clove of garlic on a west-facing window, saying: ‘May only good enter here’. Leave the favourite foods, flowers and photographs of deceased family members at the family hearth or a focal place in the home. Cook great-grandmother’s favourite recipes and retell the family legends, especially to younger members of the family.

• Create eight holes instead of a face around a pumpkin and place a candle inside. Peer through each hole to see into other dimensions and receive wisdom.

• Gaze into a fire or candle and allow images of past worlds and maybe past lives to emerge spontaneously.