Samhain - pronounced sáwin - is the Pagan festival that takes place at some point around the end of October and beginning of November, and is often mixed up with Halloween. Although it is pretty certain Samhain spawned Halloween, the difference between the two is on one hand very different, and on the other hand strikingly similar. The Samhain tradition is a celebratory rite where we reflect on those who went before us, and where the curtain between the afterlife and this life is very thin, meaning there may be some overlapping of the two worlds. We also spend time contemplating our own lives. The deep autumn is an important time to understand who we are and where we are going; to remember why we are here and try to reach out to our ancestors for guidance. Understanding the past helps enormously in identifying our current paths. Halloween, as we shall read, is very far from this.
Paganism is, for want of a better metaphor, a very broad church. There are lots of weird Pagans as well as a lot of serious ones, which means we are often targets of derision by those from what we might call the established faiths. There are no real Pagan denominations as such, like in the Christian or Muslim traditions; they are more like independent franchises without the fiscal aspect, although everyone has the same goal: to see the divine in our surroundings, and to revere and protect it.
The divine is very easy to come across in our eyes: the similarly pentacular features of many flowers; the soughing of the trees in the wind; the tides of the sea; the passing of the moon overhead and the shadows it casts; the smallest insect and the largest mammal and everything in-between; the shooting stars and the spinning planets; the incredible detail on the wing of a butterfly; the majesty of bees going about their daily work. The list goes on.
Samhain is the time of year when we witness the dying of the summer flora and fauna, and the retreat of vernal fecundity to its winter sleep, ready for the spring awakening. How do Pagans celebrate Samhain? Any way they choose, but some things remain fixed: a meal to celebrate the harvest; a fire to summon the spirits; a walk in nature (clothes are optional, depending on the time of day/night and the location); an altar with some of the features of this time of year (e.g. the skull of a wild beast, pumpkins, brown leaves or nuts) and the remembrance of those who went before us.
Why are standing stones so important to us? Because they are the permanent legacy of our forebears. One thing we have in common with our pre-Christian ancestors is the marking of the seasons and celebration of the life-cycle of the Earth. Many standing stone circles are calendars, marking the time of year. In spring, the Earth is like a youthful girl, evident in the retreat of the snow and the arrival of hatchlings, calves, lambs, cubs, seedlings and all other forms of life. She blooms into full fertility by June, where the abundance of food and fecundity is all around us. By mid-August, the Lady gives us our harvest before her fertility ends. In autumn she recedes into her grand old age, and in winter she becomes the old crone before once again dying in midwinter, allowing a new life-cycle to begin.
We are reminded of our own mission on Earth: to live, die, and live again - we can never reappear, but we can make sure life continues to do so once we have long gone. This is why I have planted a great number of trees in my garden: they, or their saplings, will live on after me, but they will also allow the birds, insects and other flora to thrive.
Our mission to maximise our efforts to spread the positive effects of nature is misinterpreted by climate deniers or sceptics as needless do-goodery. In fact, what we are doing has absolutely no bearing on the climate change debate at all: we do it anyway, because it is the right thing to do. The recent extremification of weather phenomena is worrying for us all, especially with the recent UN report that gives us a little over a decade to sort it all out before it's too late.
What is disappointing, though, is the attitude of various politicians following an agenda either dictated by their voter base or their party's biggest sponsors. I find it abhorrent that, despite the overwhelming evidence, nay proof, there are people who choose to ignore the situation for their own financial or ideological gain.
If you want to know what is driving current politics, just follow the money. If you want to know our future, take a look at the past. And let us be honest here: it does not look very good. Samhain is a time to put our flora to sleep and help them survive the winter.
As I touched on at the beginning, Samhain often gets bundled together with Halloween. The former is a commemoration of the past, the latter is a commercialised corruption of it, which has, like all other Pagan festivals, been subsumed by Christianity and/or popular culture. Halloween is a shadow of Samhain. It has in fact become the total opposite. Samhain is about remembering those who went before us, lighting fires and sitting in quiet contemplation as befitting this time of year.
Halloween, conversely, is making loud noises, disturbing the peace, and dressing up in scary costumes. Although the spiritual aspect of Samhain spawned Halloween, it was far easier to turn it into a money-making racket as a prelude to Christmas. This is, of course, a total fabrication of the original. Many Pagan festivals have turned into corruptions of the originals, mainly by the Catholic Church - Easter, Christmas and Midsummer's (St John's) Day being just three. The Catholic Church always had an ulterior motive in wanting to do away with Paganism, so it came up with ways to distract the people.
In order to vilify Pagans, and bring people into their "flock", they used the same fake-news-style tactic that is used today - take their symbols and turn them into socially unacceptable things. For example, why does the devil have a red face? Why are horns and pitchforks associated with Satan? Could it be that people from the country, farmers who obviously used agricultural implements, were more likely to be Pagan and have ruddy-red faces from the cold wind, and place horned animal skulls outside their doors to ward off evil spirits? Why did St Patrick kill all the snakes in Ireland? Could it be that the snake, the symbol of Paganism in his day, was a way to use a euphemism to say that he killed all the Pagans?
Anyone, whether from a Christian denomination or not, who dares say we are satanic should do a little more reading, as equating us with evil is like saying apples must be alien because they're green. It says more about the naïvety of their flock to believe everything fed to them by their elders than it does about us.
Finally, I will not be celebrating Halloween this year, not because of any irrational fear of some so-called Satan fellow, but because it is not who we are.
