SAMHAIN – going into the dark at the Celtic New Year
(with a bit of a poem & a samhain squash soup recipe)
THE WHEEL OF THE YEAR
Hello my friends – this is one of my ‘occasional posts’, and I intend to write one at each of the eight turning points of the Celtic year. This one is an early example of the 8 posts, but once they become paying posts there will be more content, including suggestions for your own way of celebrating these moments on the wheel of the year.
Mostly, I love transitions. I especially love these transitions that occur in a year: they are ‘thin times’, times when the veil between worlds – this world and the Otherworld – are penetrable. (There are of course thin times as well as thin places.)
Samhain, Samhuinn, tonight and into tomorrow, is a Celtic festival sitting between the autumn equinox (my birthday), and the shortest day of the winter solstice.
It’s the time, too, of the late harvest: here at our new home in Brittany we’re bringing in the gratifying harvest from our first year of growing: sweetcorn, sweet potatoes, far too many squashes. The freezer already hosted many bags of our summer beans; now it’s almost overflowing. (Then there is the harvest towards which we’ve done nothing; simply the generous abundance of the earth offering herself: huge chestnuts, a healthy walnut crop, a few wild mushrooms, masses of Bramley apples. I spend the first couple of hours, most mornings, with our first pot of tea, listening to the jays, robins, sparrows while I peel chestnuts, chop apples, make chutney and pickles. And the dog food. Of which more anon.)
Samhain is one of the fire festivals of the pagan/Celtic world. This time is a ‘doorway’ into other planes and subtler realms, where the veil between our world and the Otherworld is briefly drawn aside. This is a time when spirit and matter may approach each other more closely, as they are after all not separate.
This is, too, a time for fires and human warmth, storytelling, and a reflective and inward time of memory and recollection.
It’s also the Celtic New Year, and the festivities in the ancient Celtic world would last for three days (the traditional length of time for initiation/transformation into higher levels of being, to our ancestors: viz Christ in the tomb, Odin on his tree, Osiris in his underworld journey) from the evening of October 30th until the evening of November 1st.
It’s a time to enter the dark, to ‘earth’ oneself, to enter the cave of the heart, slough off all that is not needed for the journey, and go deep before we emerge again into the light. It’s a time to welcome in the dark incubatory months alongside the crone/cailleach/elder aspect of the divine feminine. At this time, I often symbolically burn all that is past, all that no longer serves me; give myself time to grieve all that has broken or is lost, and let it all run into the rich dark earth, as compost-of-ashes.
In the Druidic year a branch of yew would be brought into the house, and offerings (as thanksgivings for the harvest of summer) of bread, salt, wine and honey made to the fire and then tasted by those present.
It’s a time to remember the ancestors, and those who have passed from your life (I include animals to whom I’ve had a close connection), and invite something of their spirit into our lives as well as bless their passing. I make a practice of lighting candles in every window to shine out into the dark on the night of 31st. The west is the direction of the dead, the Otherworld, the dreaming time, the dying year, the setting sun, so in Celtic areas in the past sometimes a shrine was made to the west of the house in honour of the ancestors. A fire or bonfire, indoors or outdoors, seems essential – a reminder of the light as we turn to the dark of the year, and ‘summer's end’, the meaning of ‘samhain’ or ‘samhuinn’.
As I see it, the solar gods, aspects of the masculine principle, are handing over to the goddesses, the feminine principle, of moon and earth, during this early part of the descent into the dark.
A POEM (this one’s a triolet, if you’re a poetry nerd) & A PART-POEM
Walker Between the Worlds
I am the god who fills the head with fire.
My blood is ancient as the blood of stone.
I walk the threshold between day and night.
I am the god who fills the head with fire.
My tongue’s the language given by the nine.
I speak the wild waters, the song of bone.
I am the god. Who fills the head with fire?
My blood is ancient; is the blood of stone.
© Roselle Angwin, in All the Missing Names of Love
The nine in the poem refers to the nine goddesses, or the triple aspects of the Triple Goddess (Maiden, Mother, Crone) of Celtic pagan tradition. It is at this time that already, down in the darkness, new life is being conceived, ready for birth between the midwinter solstice and Imbolc, the cross-quarter festival at the beginning of February.
Outside the Wild Hunt passes, mythically speaking, with the Gabriel Hounds or Herne the Hunter (the horned god, consort to the goddess, now in her third phase of ‘crone’, whose time is from Samhain till Imbolc, 1st February). In parts of Eire this was the time of the White Mare, symbol of the Great Goddess.
So to sum up, this can be seen as a time of timelessness, briefly, when eternity is closer to us, when subtle doors and windows are open.
*
October morning
The redwings are back, crooning over berries or skirring in flocks over the water meadows.
By the wall, dead montbretia heads stream like prayer flags
We see ourselves more clearly
when we’re not looking
Calling somewhere home
October dusk
These nights of the quick and the dead. The earth turns away from the sun. Something of ancient fire flickers within us still; we flower like candles in grinning pumpkin faces in someone else’s window
Aurora at Samhain
Now, tonight, under this shifting coloured sky all this falls away. You are walking, walking, staff of quickbeam, oiled boots - the long view, the green note that calls you away over these hills, where you will be
another indigo handprint on the hem
of night.
This is a fragment of a longer poem that appears in Looking for Icarus, Roselle Angwin, bluechrome 2005/Indigo Dreams 2015
© Roselle Angwin
AND THAT SOUP RECIPE?
Here you are (it’s a large quantity as I sometimes make it if I’m leading a weekend residential workshop; you can freeze it). For the sake of transparency, the squash soup in the photo below includes beetroot and carrot as I can’t find the photo of my squash soup in the recipe below:
Roselle’s Autumn Squash Soup
for 6–8 as starter, 4+ as main
1–2 red onions
2 large red peppers
1 whole squash, halved
3 cloves garlic
2 cans tomatoes
3 handfuls red lentils
1 can coconut milk
1 heaped teaspoon (or more to taste) each gr cumin, cinnamon, turmeric, smoked paprika, chilli if liked
2 bay leaves
3 tbsps coconut oil (you can use olive but coconut’s the best)
stock to more than cover, or water with yeast extract/soy sauce
juice of 1 – 2 lemons
grated root ginger (a piece the length of your thumb)
seasoning
Bake the squash, pierced with a knife, lightly basted in oil and with a little water in the base of the baking tray, for about 30 minutes at 175º fan. Put the peppers on a separate tray and bake too until just beginning to char.
Chop the other veg except the garlic and sauté in a large pot in the coconut oil for 10 minutes. Scoop out or chop the squash (depending on the squash variety you can usually include the peel), remove the seeds, and add. Peel the peppers and remove their seeds; slice them in.
Add the chopped garlic, grated ginger, bay leaves, and spices.
Stir and add the tomatoes, the lentils, and enough stock to cover the lentils with a couple of cms to spare above the liquid. Stir frequently. You may need to add more water if the lentils soak up most of it and threaten to stick. Add the coconut milk and season to taste, then squeeze in the lemon juice.
Simmer for 40 – 50 minutes. I blend half of it, and serve with a dollop of plant yogurt (coconut if you can get it). I also sometimes whizz up a raw kale and walnut pesto – very quick, with olive oil, salt and pepper, a little lemon juice, and garlic – to dollop.
This recipe will be in my vegan cookbook.
I wish you a good Samhain turning; and blessings from the fires of immortality.
What a fascinating and beautiful description of ancient traditions, alive today :)
😂 Here’s a photo the roasted veg soup I made yesterday - I was going to say you could use the recipe! No need obvs. Oh, can’t insert photo so see Messenger for that. x