Author: A Solitary Pagan

This night also called for a “dumb supper” or similar acts of feeding dead ancestors that might cross from the veil—or purgatory—for a visit. During these events, people set out food for their family and for their departed ancestors. Participants consumed these meals either in silence or in muted tones, except at the beginning of the ceremony, when they invited ancestors, and at the end when they ...

The torches of the Welsh and the jack-o’-lanterns left at the edge of walks “kept witches away,” but they also lit a path for ancestors wandering across the veil. Candles might be placed in windows—usually in the west, to represent the land of the dead—or lights placed along walkways and paths so that the beloved dead visiting from across the veil could find the way to the door of their loved ones...

Over time, the rituals for protection from faeries changed to protection from “witchcraft.” In Victorian times, villagers would throw an effigy of an old woman into the flames and call that “burning the witch.” Welsh communities also enacted a Halloween ritual called a Tinley. After the fires in town centres or on farms burned down, every member of that community placed a stone in the ashes, formi...

The Celtic fire festival took on new expressions in the Middle Ages, some of which are still practised well into the modern-day. For instance, in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, servants and boys from around age eight into their teens would go to a bonfire built at the main street of the village, light torches, and run to field and farm, planting the torches at the boundaries of their properties...

When the Ulster Protestants (Ireland) settled in the United States in the nineteenth century, they brought their own Samhain/Halloween traditions along. They had parties, games, and masquerade parades, and their non-Irish neighbours joined the revelry. Most of what the other colonists adopted was the tradition of parties and games for children. Older children and young adults could attend these pa...

In truth, Samhain changed costumes more than it disappeared. By 1980, as the Pagan movement in North America and the Wiccan and Traditional Witch movement in the United Kingdom grew, more people began practising serious and solemn celebrations on October 31 or on the full moon closest to it. Many in the United Kingdom never really stopped practising the old Samhain traditions, embedded as they wer...

When Christianity spread throughout Europe, the church officials went about converting the area heathens by converting their holidays. Sometimes church officials did this by scheduling an observance for a different time of year. Other times, they simply renamed the old Pagan holiday for a saint’s day. In the fifth century, Pope Boniface attempted to repurpose the ritual of honouring otherworldly s...

Halloween coincides with Samhain. Consequently, many Pagans see Halloween as half of the whole celebration. This time of costumes, revelry, and social inversion grew from the same traditional roots. Samhain is serious and loving—Grandma might visit—while Halloween releases our restrained wildness. Many Pagans revere both agricultural cycles and the processes of nature; this dichotomy manifests in ...

AT SAMHAIN, THE circle of the year has come to its final spoke in the Wheel. At this time, the harvest has finished, the dying god interred, and the goddess has descended to the underworld to be with her beloved. Above, her people prepare for the veil between the worlds to thin; dead ancestors will be visiting, and with the harvest tools put away, there’s a new year to think about, resources to ma...

Several marriage divinations involved performing proscribed actions for calling that person’s “fetch” or astral self from the body to the diviner’s local for the sake of identification. For example, in one popular spell, a young woman sowed a row of hemp seed at midnight on Allhallows. As she sat and watched, the apparition of her husband to be would appear to furrow the seed. In another version, ...

Many of the Samhain divination traditions revolved around the identity of the future spouse, especially as November was the month that the most weddings occurred. In the alphabet game, a diviner cut every letter of the alphabet from a newspaper and then floated the letters in a bowl of water. The letters that floated to the top could reveal the name of a future spouse. In a similar game, young men...

The abundance of nuts also led to their frequent use in Samhain and Autumn Equinox divinations. A favorite method determined the compatibility of a couple. If two nuts, named after a pair of lovers and thrown in a fire burned bright together, it foretold a happy marriage. Two nuts jumping apart warned of arguments. A nut failing to ignite meant the pair faced unhappiness. Cabbage and kale also con...