Samhain: The Last Feast of Summer
A brief historical summary of the Celtic festival of Samhain
Samhain (pronounced SOW-in as SOW rhyming with cow) is Irish Gaelic for the month of November. It comes from "sam" meaning summer and "fuin" for end.
The Irish English Dictionary published by the Irish Texts Society defines Samhain as: the feast of the dead in Pagan and Christian times, signalizing the close of harvest and the initiation of the winter season, lasting until May, during which troops (especially the Fiann) were quartered.
Origins of Samhain can be traced back to the earliest records of timekeeping in the ancient Celtic world. Four major "holidays" divided the year by seasons. The two most meaningful ones marked the passages between summer and winter - Beltane and Samhain. The oldest known calendar of Celtic times, the 2000 year old bronze tablet known as the Coligny Calendar, includes the festival of "Samonios" on its listing of dates significant to the Gauls. The earliest Irish literature, stories derived from even older oral traditions, records Samhain as a crucial and often dangerous time of transition, not only between the seasons of the year but between the living and the dead, the physical world and the Otherworld. At Samhain tribes gathered at Tara from all over Ireland for a Feis which included the ceremonial lighting of bonfires, collection of the annual tributes and debts, and divination of fortunes for the coming year.
Being a pastoral society, the onset of winter was a vital turning point. Livestock were herded in from distant pastures and made safe for the colder months. The last harvest of the year was gleaned and stored to last through the winter. The fields and herds were culled by sacrificing whatever would probably not survive. As weather turned cold, days shortened and darkened, and the people spent more time indoors.
Its no wonder this was the time to honor the dead. In the lengthening shadows of the oncoming winter, the Otherworld seemed very near. Ghosts of ancestors returned as tales were re-told by the fires and phantoms flickered just outside the circle of light. While the dead rose from the past, the living huddled around bonfires lit to ward off roving ghosts.
How did the ancient festival of Samhain become Halloween? As the Christian faith spread out from Rome to far and distant lands, the old religion was slowly absorbed into the new. In the year 601 Pope Gregory I instructed missionaries on the issue of converting indigenous traditions to Christian ones. They were to take the native symbols, names, customs and beliefs and simply re-name and re-consecrate them, letting the people continue to keep the outward vestiges of their folkways but with different underlying meanings. The age-old triplicity of the Celts easily embraced the Holy Trinity, for example. And the festival days of yore became Christian holidays.
Samhain was the hardest festival to convert to a Christian feast day and it is easy to see why. This ancestral celebration so deeply rooted in pagan contrasts between darkness and light that it was impossible to completely shroud its connotations under the trappings of Christianity. Universally, through ancient history into modern times, it has been observed that the gods of the old religion inevitably become the devils of the new, just as the old "heaven" - in this case, the Celtic Otherworld - becomes the new "hell".
In spite of annually revived efforts to abolish Halloween completely, the rituals stubbornly remain, even if somewhat faded. Tattered remnants of Samhain haunt us as little green-faced witches - descendants of ancient Celtic Goddesses, the Hag of Winter, the raven-roosting Morrigan, or the death-omen Banshee - as children roam from house to house on a quest for sweets (offerings to appease the restless spirits). Skeletons, reminders of human mortality, decorate porches and now the bonfires are safely contained inside pumpkin-lanterns to ward off the shadows.
Even in this twenty-first century, we still feel that ancestral urge to banish the oncoming winter darkness and act out our deepest primeval fears as the shadows of Samhain live again.
References:
Dictionary of Celtic Mythology by James MacKillop
The Celtic Book of Living and Dying by Juliette Wood
Ray White's Coligny Calendar Page http://www.technovate.org/web/coligny.htm
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