Let’s take a look at Halloween or Samhain as it was originally known with an academic lens. Where does it come from what did it mean in the past and what does it mean to modern pagan practitioners. Coming out of Celtic mythology and practice and adapting to Christianity as Halloween today’s practitioners have revived it and made it part of their celebration of the seasons. It is also a time where the borders between us and the other world become tenuous and we may encounter otherworldly folk and creatures that may or may not have our welfare at heart.
Summary
“Samhain was a time when the gates between this world and the next were open. It was a time of communion with the spirits of the dead, who, like the wild autumnal winds, were free to roam the earth.” (Hutton, 2001, p. 1055)
Let’s dive deeper into the Pagan festival of Death and Rebirth… which, to my own surprise, was also called PUCA!
Hello everyone, I’m Angela and welcome back to my channel! I’m a University Lecturer and a Researcher and this is your online resource for the Academic Study of Magic and Magic-practising Religions and Traditions!
This video will be focused on Halloween… well, not really. On its Celtic predecessor.
Samhain (Sauin), as pronounced in modern Irish, likely derives from Old Irish and means Summer’s End. In Celtic cosmology, Samhain was seen as the Feast of the Dead and is thought to have marked the start of winter. It is still disputed among scholars whether this festival marked the New Year for the Celtic People and whether it marked the New Year across Celtic regions (Butler, 2008, pp. 68–69).
Let’s now summarise the reconstruction that Historian Ronald Hutton offers in his ‘The Stations of The Sun.’ Samhain, as already mentioned, marked the start of winter in early medieval Ireland and was seen as a time of change and transformation, a liminal place on the edge of the darkest days of the year when Druids and Soothsayers would forecast the events of the coming year. Long feasts were also held by the High Kings of Ireland to celebrate the end of summer before the colder months took over. This was also a time of communion with the realm of Spirits. The establishment of Christianity led the Pagan Gods to fall under the rule of the Saints, as suggested by the new Christian festival of All Hallows Day – later known as All Saints Day. Christianity saw the Old Gods as evil spirits or demons and interpreted the ‘uncanniness’ of Samhain as a threat to the Christian soul. However, Hutton continues, the old Pagan traditions lived on in the guise of Halloween, the eve of All Hallows Day. We find evidence of this perception of Samhain as marking the end of Summer and its related feasts in an old Irish tale Tochmarc Emire and in the twelfth-century version of another (which I will be spelling out on the screen as I have no idea how to pronounce them) The Serglige Con Culaind.
Jeffrey Gantz, the translator of Irish literature related to Samhain, deemed this festival as a time of unusual supernatural power, due to the sheer amount of stories and tales where human beings were either approached or attacked by spirits, monsters, fairies and deities. Proinsias MacCana endorsed the same idea and referred to Samhain as – as quoted in Hutton – ‘a partial return to primordial chaos… the appropriate setting for myths which symbolise the dissolution of established order as a prelude to its recreation in a new period of time”(Hutton, 2001, p. 1060).
At the end of the nineteenth century, two academics from Oxford and Cambridge contributed significantly to the conception of Samhain that we have nowadays. The first is Sir John Rhys who portrayed Samhain as the ‘Celtic’ New Year. This assumption, however, was not based on historical records but on contemporary folklore linking Halloween celebrations in Wales and Ireland to the concept of new beginnings. However, as Hutton argues, ‘The divination and purification rituals occurring on the 31 of October could be explained either by a connection to the Christian feasts of All Saints or by the fact that they occurred during the darkest and scariest of all the seasons. Especially considering that similar rituals were also being performed on New Year’s Eve. As Jennifer Uzzell mentioned in a previous video, the contemporary Pagan Samhain may have borrowed elements from the Christian festivity just as the latter may have re-branded an old Celtic tradition to make it it’s own.
What we do know is that the Celtic Festival has been reclaimed by Neo-pagans, who call it ‘Samhain’ instead of ‘Halloween’, to highlight the link to a celebration which pre-dates the Christian Halloween.
The reclamation and popularisation of Samhain as a Pagan festival took place thanks to Wicca and its religious conceptualisation in relation to the natural seasons. Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, portrayed it as an earth-based religion whose deities are embedded in the seasonality we see in nature. The Goddess of Fertility and the God of Hunt were not only to be venerated but also to be found in the changing seasons we experience as human beings (Berger, 2005, p. 32). As Helen Berger explains, the Goddess is eternal but changes from maid to mother to crone. The God is born of the Goddess at Yule, or Winter Solstice grows to manhood to become the Goddess’ consort at Beltane and dies to ensure the fertility of the crops at Samhain to be then reborn at Yule (Berger, 2005, p. 32).
For contemporary Pagans connection is of the essence and getting in tune with the season means experiencing the manifestations of the Gods within, for the seasons outside mirror the seasons we live inside just as the multiple aspects of the Gods mirror our own.
Allow me to quote this beautiful passage by Drury;
Samhain is a celebration to honour the dead. As the dying sun passes into the netherworld, Samhain is said to be the time of the year when the thin veil between the everyday world and the afterlife is most transparent, which allows Wiccans and Neo-pagans (or just Pagans we may say) to communicate more easily with the spirits. In mythic terms, Samhain is the season during which the dying God sleeps in the underworld awaiting to be reborn. At the same time, the seed of new life gestates within the womb of the Great Mother, who in this stage of the cycle is regarded as the Queen of Darkness.
The Farrars – as cited in Drury – write that Samhain ‘was, on the one hand, a time for propitiation, divination, and communion with the dead, and on the other, an uninhibited feast of eating, drinking and the defiant affirmation of life and fertility in the very face of the closing dark’ (Drury, 2009, p. 65).
So this is it for today’s video and before wrapping up, I’d like to wish the wildest feasts and a heartfelt ancestry communion to all of you celebrating.
Also, please allow me to introduce to the Inner Symposium, my new Patrons… Thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon and I also thank those who stay pledged and are part of my Inner Symposium. Next week we will have a very special celebration for the 10,000 subscribers and I will involve, in a Livestream event, my Patrons, the members of the Channel who joined Memberships and a few academics. We will have a lovely Livestream round-table and a 10K party talking, discussing, and asking questions about the afterlife and near-death experiences. Are you looking forward to it? If you want to be part of that Livestream I suggest either joining my Patreon community, my Inner Symposium or joining Memberships here on the Channel. It would be lovely to see you enter the community and participate more actively in all the academic fun.
So, if you liked this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, please share the video so that we can grow more and more, let me know what you think in the comments section down below since I always reply to each and every comment and as always, stay tuned for all the Academic fun.
Bye for now.
REFERENCES
Berger, H. A. (ed.) (2005) Witchcraft and Magic: Contemporary North America, Philadelphia, Pa, University of Pennsylvania Press.
Butler, J. (2008) ‘Neo-Pagan Celebrations of Samhain’, in O’Donnell, H. and Foley, M. (eds), Treat or Trick? Halloween in a Globalising World, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Drury, N. (2009) ‘The Modern Magical Revival’, in Harvey, G (ed), Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, Brill, pp. 13–81.
Hutton, R. (2001) The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain [ebook], The Stations of the Sun, Oxford University Press.
First uploaded 1 Nov 2020