Samhain

The Wheel / October 31

Of the eight sabbats, Samhain is the one that has never entirely gone underground. The ancient Celtic fire festival marking the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the dark half of the year survived, incompletely and changed, as Halloween. The bonfires were preserved. The dead were remembered. The sense that something opens at this turning remained, even in a culture that had lost the vocabulary for what exactly was opening.

Samhain (pronounced SAH-win in Scottish Gaelic, SOW-in in Irish) falls on the last day of October, opposite Beltane on the wheel. It marks the final harvest, the slaughter of livestock that would not survive the winter, and the beginning of the season when the boundary between the living and the dead was understood to thin. The dead could visit; the living could reach across to them. What was dangerous about this permeability, what was also valuable about it, formed the central tension of the festival.

In the Irish tradition, Samhain was one of the four great seasonal festivals (ceithre prímfhéile), a time when the sídhe, the supernatural mounds, stood open and the inhabitants of the otherworld could be encountered. The fire festival at Tlachtga, where the great Samhain fire was lit each year, preceded the lighting of all other hearth fires in Ireland, a demonstration of the primacy of the communal fire at the year's turning. Cattle were driven between two fires for purification before the winter.

The Roman festival of Lemuria, the ancestor-honoring festivals of the ancient Mediterranean, and similar observances across northern Europe at the end of the harvest season suggest that this moment in the agricultural calendar consistently prompted attention to the dead, across cultures and without obvious borrowing. There may be something in the structure of the season itself, the dying of the visible world, the shortening light, the smell of the turning earth, that makes ancestor work feel appropriate here in a way it doesn't feel other times of year.

Correspondences

Traditional Workings

The dumb supper is one of the oldest Samhain traditions still practiced: a meal eaten in silence with a place set at the table for the dead. Food appropriate to the deceased (their favorite dishes, or traditional spirit-feeding foods such as apples and pomegranates) is placed at the empty setting. The silence is the invitation; the meal is the welcome. The tradition appears in Scottish and Irish folk records and has analogs in similar ancestor-feeding practices worldwide.

Ancestor altar work: At Samhain, an ancestor altar is traditionally assembled or refreshed. Photographs, objects belonging to the dead, meaningful stones, candles in their preferred colors. Water is offered, as is food. The altar is a place to speak to the dead, to acknowledge them, to ask for their guidance. This is one of the most accessible Samhain practices and one of the most powerful.

Divination is traditional at Samhain because the thinned veil was understood to make the future more legible. Scrying by candlelight or in dark water, reading signs in apple peels or nuts thrown into the fire, and tarot or rune readings done at the Samhain threshold are all in keeping with the traditional function of the date. The fiber divination proper to the night is The Blue Clew, which Burns wrote down in 1785: a ball of blue yarn thrown into the dark and wound back until something holds it. If you read, read at midnight.

Shadow work: Samhain's shadow work tradition asks you to look at what you've avoided looking at during the brighter half of the year. What has gone unexamined? What do you keep in the dark? The dark half of the year begins here; you might as well begin it with intention.

Notes for the Dye Pot

The Samhain palette is the darkest on the wheel. True blacks, made by layering multiple dye baths or by using iron-heavy mordants; deep blood reds that are almost brown; the dark orange of dying leaves; silver and bone for the underworld tones. The Arachne colorways that belong most naturally to this season are Depths, Hex, and Blood Petal. See the Color Correspondences for how these colors work in relation to Saturn and Pluto.

Closing

After Samhain, the wheel turns into the dark. The growing months are behind. What comes next is not absence of season but a different kind of season: interior, gestation, quiet. Samhain is the threshold between them, and thresholds, by nature, cannot be held. The turning continues.

Sources

• The Schools’ Collection — first-hand accounts of Samhain customs gathered from Irish schoolchildren in the 1930s, digitised by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin.
• Tochmarc Emire — the early Irish text that names the four quarter days, at the CELT corpus, University College Cork.
• Frazer, The Golden Bough — the 19th-century comparative account of the Hallowe’en fires and the feeding of the dead — dated in its conclusions, still the fullest gathering of the records.
• The Hill of Tara — Heritage Ireland on the royal site whose assembly calendar the festival sat inside.

Continue reading: Yule · Ancestor Work · Divination · Color Correspondences