A sudden chill swirls by; an inaudible whisper murmurs a forgotten warning and is gone. Beneath a blanket of bright leaves, decaying vegetation and harvested fields, Nature closes her eyes to the bright half of the year.
Samhain, the great fire festival today known as “Halloween,” begins at dusk on October 31. November 1 is the beginning of the Celtic winter as well as the New Year. At harvest’s end Samhain marks the conclusion of this season of life, the rightful time for reveling in the evaporation of boundaries, be they between neighbors, years or spiritual dimensions.
As old as the season that it turns, Samhain legitimatizes the passage from light to dark. This ancient festival ritualizes the act of Nature and the psyche turning inward toward liminal space and braces for that journey by celebrating the chaos that precedes it.
In the psyche, dissolution does not require disappearance, but rather, transformation. Samhain fuels the devouring aspect of nature and consciousness, and by so doing, prepares the individual and community for a coming time, facilitating endings that beget seeds which lie aground until spring, a time of action and growing.
Within its swirling cloak of confusion and change, Samhain harbors constancy. The Wheel of the Year follows a fixed law of change, thereby allowing each season the stability to produce effects that endure. In Samhain is the immutable promise of transformation for those who would face the dark ground of the Self.
Beyond the individual psyche, the arrival of year’s end thins the expanse between this world and the next. By Oidche Shamhna (the eve of Samhain), the contents of both worlds commingle in the twisting skyward smoke of the great festival’s bonfires, mixing the concerns of humanity with the divine firelight and blessings of those beyond time’s reach.
In the propitiation of the Feile na Marbh, the feast of the dead, deceased ancestors are cared for and remembered. In the disguises and divinations of the evening, the underworld power of the season and the coming of the winter hag Cailleach are recognized. The bonfire that burns on the hilltop above calls for an answer from the ground below.
The brilliantly burning river of underworld promise rises and roars past, consumptive, chaotic, fecund. Blacken your face, don a masque, engage the orgiastic dance of life, of death, of all that we have. Defy self-consciousness, throw your head back, let the fire of life course to your soul and honour that great underworld tide of light as it thunders in the darkness of the Samhain night. Blessed Be all who were, who are and will yet be. Happy New Year.