Samhain 2019

Today is Samhain! The modern celebration of Halloween gets most of its traditions from the old Celtic New Year celebration of Samhain (pronounced SAH-win), including costumes, Jack O'Lanterns, trick or treating, and the like. The original holiday was all about honoring those passed on, celebrating the ancestors. There were other celebrations with the theme of honoring the dead (the Roman Feralia being one of them) at this time of year throughout Europe, so in the seventh century Pope Boniface IV declared a two-day festival honoring the dead to replace the pre-Christian celebrations - All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day on the 2nd. In England All Saints was known as All Hallows, and the celebrations starting on the night before became known as All Hallows Eve, which through the years became Halloween. The pre-Christian traditions survived the transition and we still follow them today. 

Some of those traditions include wandering the streets to beg for soul cakes, special little cakes baked for this holiday; this tradition was called souling and eventually became the modern day trick or treating. Our ancestors would also carve out turnips and place a candle within, making "turnip lanterns" to light the way for those souls coming to visit at this time when the veil between this life and the afterlife was believed to be at its thinnest; when pumpkins were discovered here in the Americas they were deemed to make much better lanterns than turnips! And of course those who wandered the streets a-souling wore costumes, supposedly to scare away the evil spirits who would also take advantage of the thinner veil between the worlds, although I suspect the costumes may go even further back into time and were originally meant to represent the spirit totems of this time of year - Raven, the Horned God Cerunnos, Owl, and other spirits of the dark half of the year. Nowadays those costumes are more likely to be humorous and light-hearted rather than serious.

Anyone who has been following this blog for a time will know that I always include music in my Samhain posts. There's quite a bit of music over the years that I've used to represent this time of year, both for Samhain and the modern Halloween, and last year I put together a playlist on YouTube to collect my favorites in one place, which you can visit here - these include the 1980s PBS animation of Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, Loreena McKennitt's All Souls Night, one of my favorite versions of the A-Souling song by New Zealand ensemble Lothlorien, some old British folksongs dealing with some of the more unpleasant characters who might be wandering about, and some assorted modern tunes associated with Halloween these days. Definitely give it a visit.

This year I'm also posting a slideshow here that I put together of my best gravestone photos, set to a breathtakingly beautiful musical setting by Natalie Merchant of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Spring and Fall: to a young child, written for a young girl facing mortality for the first time. This piece, more than anything else I've posted here, exemplifies the spirit of Samhain - honoring the departed, and placing death in its necessary place in the cycle of life. Have a blessed Samhain!

© 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger