After a year away, I’m back with material I hope you’ll continue to find of value. Thank-yous to you who’ve supported this blog, returning to read from over a decade of posts, commenting, encouraging, and recommending articles at A Druid Way to others.
Here we are at another time of festival and holiday, which it pays to remember is ‘holy day’, one set apart from mundane time. The English words holy, Old Englishhalig, and hallow, Old English halga, ‘holy one, saint’ also form a verb halgian, to hallow or make sacred. Hallow evening or Hallowe’en, or All Hallows’ Eve, OE Ealra Halgena Æfen, is in many traditions the first of three days, continuing with All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1 and concluding on All Souls’ Day on Nov. 2. Together the days of the period make up Allhallowtide, a holy time.
It’s a great word we could easily bring back to wider use in contemporary life. What are your hallowtides? If you’re observing Samhain or Halloween alone or with a small group, it’s a great theme for meditation, or a ritual question to ask and answer aloud or silently.
On Friday I drove with a friend to one of Mystic River Grove’s celebrations of Samhain. The crisp air, the almost windless evening, let us feast outdoors before ritual, and the sacred fire warmed us as temps dropped to freezing. “All you who have gone before, please listen now, we are listening too” we sang as we processed into the circle. Third of the ancient Celtic harvest festivals, Samhain is truly ‘summer’s end’, as we turn inward to winter. And as with all things, balance persists, whether we discern it or not: the Southern Hemisphere is cherishing Beltane and its celebration of growing heat and light. This is one of the great challenges of our time, especially as Druids: to find the balance, the hinge point or still center around which events and passions swirl.
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With this cycle of the voyage comes a site upgrade, so you can now read without ads.
Many years ago now, I participated in an online discussion group that included members of multiple faiths. It wasn’t always a comfortable space, nor did it need to be. We were there for engagement, but not necessarily ease. I recall a sharp criticism of Pagan perspectives on cycles and circles: that a circle is ultimately a cage, a trap, with no escape, and that only a faith that provided an out could offer anything like freedom.
It’s a distinctive view of salvation, or liberation, particularly as a faith rather than a practice. The discussion at the time was also particularly focused on one version of the Goddess as a kind of stand-in for all Pagan belief — a limited perspective the critic brought with him. That is, the (or a) Goddess as immanent, a part of the world, suffering along with mortals, influenced by human actions and wounded by human deeds stemming from ignorance. How, asked the critic, could such a figure ever meet our human hunger for transcendence?
It’s an interesting idea to unpack and explore, rather than simply reacting to. Most traditions have a round of observances, festivals, holidays, and don’t seem to feel bound or constrained by them. I haven’t found Druid practices any different. It’s the combination of the familiar and the new that keeps ritual observances fresh. For that reason, though the circle is a powerful symbol, and a kind of default shape for in-person Druid and other Pagan ritual, the underlying sense I perceive, and another widespread Pagan image, is the spiral. The circle is its two-dimensional version. Energetic movement or potential for movement curls in the spiral, a coil or spring or serpent power. It’s the source of rebirth, regeneration, that ritual glimpses and evokes and embodies. “True voyage is return” indeed, as long as we realize that “everything She touches changes”.
As a meditation object, a “Samhain mandala”, the spiral is potent. Drawing it, tracing or painting it on the body, can work as well for Beltane, for the energies spiraling into summer that are manifesting in whorls and curls of plant tendrils, of the burgeoning natural world, of seashells and spiral galaxies, of the long spiral of death and rebirth. Enter the underworld at Samhain and re-emerge at Beltane every year, practicing the pattern we live, of dying and being reborn. The festivals mirror and echo off each other across the calendar, across the hemispheres. What have I been born from? asks my Beltane self. What am I building right now as I near Samhain that will emerge in the early summer?
Samhain for me is a well. Maybe a well that opens onto the Otherworld, if I choose to dive in. Or sometimes a sea, endless, restless, caressing or lashing our mortal shores. I attempt to sound it, to measure its depth or outlines, to communicate by way of the thin line of attention or ritual or meditation, a line disappearing into the depths toward that which needs to speak with me. I don’t need to worry about missing it: what I do not heed consciously will work its way to the surface regardless.
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If there’s one thing I know about the ancestors, it’s that they will be heard. Death has not so enfeebled them that they can only speak one time each year, or only with my attention and respect. Rather, my attention and respect are gifts I can offer, so that ancestral patterns, goals, wisdom can emerge within my circle of intention: I can meet in a circle with my ancestors, as with a spiritual council, and know what is afoot, and whether it aligns with what I am doing now. Not all their long-term projects deserve my assent or participation.
And I also bring assets to the council: present understandings, a body and set of experiences derived from being alive now, with links to the future and my own capacities as ancestor-in-training. For this reason, a mirror is one of my Samhain sacred tools: the face of my ancestors is also mine. I reflect a part of what they accomplished, what survives in this world, what may rest in the earth as a potential for them to manifest, should they return to bodies within this particular ancestral line.
Our ranch house is small enough to heat easily, but it does sometimes leave us tight for space. Ever since we moved here I’ve made my office in our front entryway, a 7-foot by 6-foot space, with small windows facing north, west and south. It’s cold in winter, but bright enough: even on the most overcast days I can write and read without a lamp. As I started to write this morning, I heard a rustling of birds in the nest above the south-facing door. It’s sheltered by the house to the east, and my entryway-office to the north, and almost every year I hear the peeping of the year’s crop of nestlings. In another hour the sun will hit the nest directly. Some birds still sun themselves there, even now in late October.
Samhain is the start of another kind of nesting season. Beltane is of course a nesting time in more literal ways: birds raising families, and soon enough kicking them out of the nest to get them flying. We nest at Samhain and turn earthy, drowsing, seeking warmth, comfort, richer foods to keep the cold at bay. At Beltane we celebrate the fire in us, and we can do the same at Samhain, especially if we seek more inwardly for the flame. Samhain and Beltane fires differ — you know this in your skin if you’ve observed both holidays in some way more than in your head.
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The other path I follow celebrates its new year this weekend, and enters a year of creativity, one in a twelve-year cycle of named years. A year tuned to creativity: we need it, to work through the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.
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I like Susan’s recent comment: “does our breath with intent to our ancestors give breath to them … hmmm I would like to think so.” I try it out — breathing as a way to connect with those who breathed before me, those whose bodies enabled this body, who made it so it could breathe. One communal shared breathing, the same air: beloved ancestors and I, one large set of lungs among us. We keep the breath going, the ancestral lines, the lines of inspiration, taking in what’s handed down to us, and breathing it into new life and possibility. I breathe with intention as I light my tea light, as our local sunset arrives, and send off this post.
I find myself in a rhyming mode today, and over time I’ve learned to work with it when it comes, because it can often give me light touches and entries and approaches to things that can otherwise be heavy or obscure, or present no handles, no entrance or doorway at all.
On this first Day of Samhain, I’ve lit a small fire in our woodstove. This Saturday’s sunny, but that autumnal nip in the air is real, and the dampness of early morning fog crept into the house. My wife and I were outdoors early and suddenly we were noticing cardinals. Maybe because many of the leaves are already off the trees, we speculated. Maybe it’s easier to spot them. The bright birds match some of the leaves as they darted in and around the trees. Depending on the weather, sometimes they’ll winter over here.
Beltane moon, Samhain moon …
As with dream work, so with blogging: first I have to get words down, a tentative, preliminary, approximate account. If I’ve left off dream study for a while, the direct links between dream and waking consciousness can take some work to revive. (Indirect links never leave us — they filter into reverie, whim, daydream, flashes of intuition and inspiration.) For me, the music of a line or two of verse can help. Other times, reading past dream entries can spark a new dream. I take these into sleep and recall improves, coming sometimes over several days, and slowly, or all at once.
I titled this post “cardinals,” but that’s really a placeholder. The birds aren’t thinking in human words, and “cardinal” evokes the color, which is often more useful than the word itself for many of my purposes. Let me bathe in cardinal red. Words as stepping stones out of our hyper-verbal culture — words simply as light touches, into something other.
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Tonight at dusk I’ll set a match to a tea-light and daydream with it. Scrying with flame? Sure. Drawing a tarot card? Possibly. Maybe literally trying my hand at drawing a tarot-like image. Just being alive is itself a kind of divination. Samhain flame links me to a thousand generations. I take air into my lungs, I let it go. O mortal thing, whispers everything else around me, mortal thing, are you listening?
Both fire festivals, so fire can feature prominently in both, if you choose.
Nine Days of Beltane? What’s that? Well, go ahead — create it, if only for yourself! Noon for Beltane, dusk for Samhain. Or some other time that fits you and your season.
Often I try to model these things here on this blog, because so much of Druidry is in the doing. I’ll be starting my own Nine Days tomorrow, Saturday — 23-24-25-26-27-28-29-30-31 — ending on the Holy Evening itself, which is after all what Hallowe’en means. I’m posting today, a day before, in case you want to try it out yourself. Or you could start on the 27th, with Samhain/Beltane as the middle day, and continue for four days after for your count of nine. Or try seven days, or five. The point is to make a shape, and then fill it with a practice, with intention, with doing and experiencing and trying on the shape for size and fit, partly to see how well it actually works.
Much has been written recently about how to deal with toxic ancestors (here’s one example). Do a blog search if you need support in that regard. I’m focusing on a few ancestors I specifically choose to remember. As for inviting their presence, if they’re direct blood ancestors, I carry them in me already, in all their messy humanness. And I can make any invitation to a ritual quite specific: to those who wish me well, whom I respect and love, whose legacy deserves acknowledging, whose imprint helps shape me in ways I benefit from. If I need a further reminder, I can look in a mirror. That I’m here at all, I owe to those who came before me, and built this physical form from their own bodies. If it feels right, include a small mirror for the ritual.
Fire works so well at these times because of the major seasonal shifts occurring — whether into early winter, or early summer. In both cases, fire fits. It signals to the unconscious that something profound is happening, that something elemental is one appropriate response. If I do nothing more each day than light a fire — a candle, a lamp, a blaze in the woodstove or fireplace — and sit in silence for a time with that light, that flame, I am opening a portal for memory and inspiration and deep reflection. As the wisest recipes advise, season to taste.
You might find a star meditation a simple addition. If you’ve investigated ceremonial magic, you’ve likely heard of the rituals of the pentagram, of summoning and banishing forms. Here at these elemental times a full panoply of the Four Elements and Spirit is good to recall, to embody, to honor and enact. With nothing else needed but fire and my own body (“earth my body, water my blood, air my breath and fire my spirit”), I have all I need. Anything I opt to add is a gift, an offering. If I choose, as one part of my simple ritual, I can shape a star in the ethers, the akasha, the astral, drawing it with a forefinger, good as any wand. If I need or choose, I can declare my finger a wand for the purpose of ritual. Or search the day before I start my Days of Samhain for a found object as wand or magical tool. Spirit honors creativity, because we’re doing what It does all the time. We’re awen-izing.
Or I may spend that fire interval of each day’s ritual just journaling. I can mark each entry with a star, or do any other rituals that surround my writing. “Here begins the first day of my fire writing …” and I’m on my way for that day’s entry.
When you start thinking and imagining these things, the ritual also starts taking shape.
You can feel it, can’t you? The approach of the next of the Great Eight festivals, the holy tide of Samhain. Or across the hemispheres, the advent of Brighid’s day of Imbolc. Fire festivals, both of them. Opportunities for a “deep dive” inward, if you so choose.
Or maybe your inner senses just aren’t tuned to such things. Not a problem. Imagine what it feels like, the energies swirling and eddying around this time. Or if you have a photo of a beloved ancestor, or an object which that ancestor once held, you’ve got a different kind of connection.
Suggestions for where I can purchase an altar? posted a new Druid on a Druid forum. The responses tended toward the repurposed and well-loved piece of furniture. Discarded, scratched and refurbished, that tabletop, desk, nightstand, shelf. One commenter noted, “Half my house is now an altar” with niches and corners lovingly adorned with figures, stones, feathers, driftwood, sacred objects. The cast-off, hand-me-down, yard sale. And out of doors, the sawn-flat stump in the woods, or the stone the septic company excavated while locating your tank, or the natural crook or niche where a tree-trunk meets the ground.
Those blessed with outdoor space in a yard may have room for a permanent circle, or simply an open patch of grass, or a small corner walled on two sides by fencing, where a small figure peeps through the foliage.
The full moon last night and tonight can be a potent altar, as can the human heart, open and listening. Each ritual we do erects an altar in spirit, leaving an imprint in consciousness we can strengthen and reaffirm each time we bring it to mind, or repeat the ritual, each time we gather again in a beloved circle of Others, whether they have their skins on or not.
Se téoða mónð, October, Winterfylleð, swá hine cíg[a]ð íġbuende, Engle and Seaxe — Menologium. “The tenth month, October, Winterfylleð, as the island-dwellers call it, Angles and Saxons”, notes the medieval Old English Menologium.
No, not “filth” as in dirt or foulness, but “fullness” — the moon of October that signals the start of winter.
Tolkien, master scholar of Old English, uses many of the OE month-names in his Shire Calendar.
TWO — Samhain
What is there to say about Samhain that hasn’t been said already? Well, it’s always new, each time it rolls around. Part of the newness lies in the perceptions we bring to it. This year, the OBOD celebration of Samhain puts members of New England’s Mystic River Grove front and center as celebrants for the online event on Saturday, 6 November at 3:00 pm EST. You can find more info on the OBOD Facebook page and website.
THREE — Free While Living
Jivan mukti, as it’s called in Hinduism, “liberation while still alive”, is a curious mix of qualities and characteristics that many Druids might well aspire to, as well as perceptions or goals many might shun. Such a person, as the Wiki article describes it, is “humble, high spirited, of clear and steady mind, straightforward, compassionate, patient, indifferent, courageous, speaks firmly and with sweet words”. The jivan mukta, or liberated one, does no harm to living beings, is indifferent to praise or blame, and is as comfortable alone as in the company of others. Insofar as we think of the “ideal Druid”, many of these qualities fit.
How well does my practice illuminate some or any of these qualities, or others? How can I assess whether I even find these qualities desirable?
FOUR — “Into the Woods”
No, it’s not Sondheim, and it’s not so recent (2013), but it deserves wider viewing. Three-quarters of an hour worth spending with the words and images here — a Druid group active in the Chiltern Hills in England, with a Samhain celebration in the final third or so.
FIVE — Stretching the Seams
Pick up Thoreau’s Walden, and scarcely do you begin when in the second paragraph he lobs a request, a “burn”, a dedication and a metaphor at us:
I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives; such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
It’s both bracing and disorienting to read writers like this, who disdain ingratiating themselves with readers, and instead set off on their course expecting readers to have sense enough to follow.
The request and “burn” I mentioned go together — a sincere account of our lives, and the rarity of such a thing. Then a dedication: to poor students — and we can number many thousands in that category, though they may never read Walden or ponder its wisdom, or its author.
Whom does the “coat” of the book “fit”? If we work not to stretch the seams, Thoreau appears to be saying, then it will fit. The readers need to engage; the author will not hand everything over. Perhaps the more valuable the contents, the less they can be made to order. In a certain sense, the world is indeed a kind of “one size fits all” dwelling. We all find ourselves here, somewhere on the planet, whether the place where we find ourselves feels very hospitable or not.
“Those who would learn must want to learn in the manner they will be taught”. No customer model of learning, where we cater to student whim and prejudice and ignorance. What is the ‘poverty’ of the ‘poor students’ which Thoreau wishes to address, especially in Walden’s first and substantial chapter, titled “Economy”? Economy, oeconomia, oikos + nomos + –ia — “laws of the household”. Does a well-run, smoothly operating world-house or cosmos follow principles, laws, patterns? Many Druids think so, and to varying degrees we attempt to match and harmonize with those rhythms, patterns, and principles.
Why “deepest refreshment” (apart from its appearance in C. Matthews’ Celtic Devotional)? Before you read further, spend some time reflecting on why and how Samhain might provide such a thing for you. What can you do to help it manifest, at whatever scale matches this last day of October 2020?
Your reasons, hunches, nudges, inklings and flashes of insight can become part of your Samhain experience. Trust them. I’m blogging about Druidry today because Slowly, Idiosyncratically, Reflectively, Imaginatively, and somewhat Skeptically — SIRIS — that’s the track I followed. (I use acronyms a lot.) So I’m commending that as one possible option for you, too. Y gwir yn erbyn a byd “The truth against the world” really is a Druidic ideal for many, and now at Samhain is as good a time as any to try it out. In many ways, while visitors are welcome (after covid) at our circles and most events, Druidry isn’t particularly a spectator sport. Get your truth on!
front yard by moonlight at 3:30 am this morningThe Breakfast Six celebrating the last day of the season at our favorite spot. Sharing is the most human, communal and Samhain-y thing we do. Chef Michael is standing, masked. I’m in lavender hat on far left.
So here we are today, approaching Holy Evening, which is what Hallowe’en means, after all. Or alternatively, Hallows (all ultimately from Old English halga “saint, holy”) are the Saints that make it Holy. The Church certainly thought so, and overlaid its festivals of All Hallows Eve (Oct. 31), All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1), and All Souls’ Day, or Day of the Dead (Nov. 2) on the older Celtic observance.
I’ll be spending a quiet Great Hallows tonight with two other Vermont Druids via Zoom. Together we’ll do a meditative reading of OBOD’s Solitary Rite, because it’s more flexible than the group rite for accommodating any latecomers on our mailing-list who didn’t reply or let us know they’re joining us. (Easier to change pronouns — and actions — from one to several!) And if it’s not snowing or too windy, I’ll light a backyard fire in our fire circle and enjoy a blaze under the full moon. I’ll also be meditating on and listening to a specific ancestor who came into my attention in contemplation yesterday morning. Last and next, if I’m still up at midnight, or I wake later while it’s dark, I’ll be making notes for this year’s Nanowrimo — National Novel Writing Month.
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The last words of the main OBOD rite come from the Ancient: “… a new time begins … may it bring us whatever things are needful, support our bodies, nourish our souls and give radiance to our spirits. May it show to each one their true path, by the light of the Oak, the Yew and the Silver Birch”.
The blessings of Great Hallows to you all.
Without Samhain-sight.With Samhain-sight. (Actually, with night-vision camera setting.) From kitchen facing East.
The late author and teacher Raven Grimassi published a 2009 book* with the same title as today’s post, and among several techniques he discusses for connecting with the ancestors, lucid dreaming has particular advantages:
If you have trouble with visualizations, or with pathworking in general, there is another method of ancestor contact at your disposal. This is accomplished through the Dream Gate, which is a portal to a particular area of dream consciousness.
There are essentially two states of consciousness in the dream state. The first level is the one in which the dream dictates a series of events or a storyline. At this level we are subject to the dream and we react to whatever is taking place. In effect we are a drafted actor without a script. In the common dream state our subconscious mind is operational but our conscious mind is a passive spectator.
The second dream level is one where we take conscious control and shape the dream as we wish. This is often referred to as lucid dreaming. The advantage of lucid dreaming (in an occult sense) is that we can come into contact with inner plane realities with both halves of our consciousness fully operational. This allows us to function in the magical setting of the subconscious mind (where anything is possible) while at the same time having the benefits of the conscious mind (where everything has connection and direction) (Cauldron of Memory, pgs. 140-141).
Now your reaction may be “But I don’t remember my dreams, so that’s not gonna help”. This is where the dream chalice technique from an earlier post in this series can prove useful. For many people, the light trance that sitting around a night-time fire brings can also help provide another alternative practice. Through such access-points we can stand at the doorway, and decide if we wish to go any further. Another of the many functions of ritual itself can be a similar light trance that we induce through repeated words, chants, gesture and dance.
berries through the snow
Simple candle-gazing also works well for solitaries. You may wish to establish a quiet period, perhaps with few other lights, so that the semi-darkness helps with focusing on your candle-flame. As with any ritual, what we bring to it makes all the difference. How we feel about it, how we set it up, what props we include, what significance we assign to them, what we do with our experiences, whether we choose to record them, and where they fits in with everything else that we are — these things build our spiritual lives piece by piece. And as we learn to choose where we place our attention, rather than letting it be grabbed by whatever is shouting most loudly, we reclaim a priceless spiritual tool.
The metaphor of a cauldron is a potent one. Some of us may experience memory as a thread, or the roots of a tree. Exploring our metaphors can reveal new practices. If memory is a cauldron, bringing to ritual, to our bedside, to our imaginal lives, an object to represent memory can be most useful. Magic shops market small cauldrons for such purposes, and you can make your own from clay. Those with foundry skills may find making a cauldron a remarkable project. Found objects, gifts and other things may serve as cauldrons. A bowl, piece of driftwood, a sea-shell — my own cupped hands — can all be cauldrons in dream and in ritual.
Alternatively, if memory is a tree, then images of trees and their roots, working with a favorite “tree of memory”, drawing or photographing trees, and meditating on the linkages between “roots and recall”, between the solidity and stability of a tree, and the persistence of memory, even memories we have stored deeply, can turn the experience of remembering into a magical and imaginal exploration.
This same cauldron or tree of memory includes “memory of the future” — visions and dreams, hunches and nudges, all part of our largely untapped ability to gaze up and down the time-track. Most of us get glimpses, while some may get more. We live in a particular time and place in the physical realm, because such focus is powerful and has its special lessons to teach us, but we can also learn to look and attend elsewhere, and remember/(re/dis)cover what is needful, whatever things in our long lives we have set aside, and take them up again and use them today, leaving other things in turn for our tomorrows.
What do I wish to leave in safekeeping for my future self, and for my descendants of blood and spirit? What is the spiritual heritage I am building day by day? Making a practice out of consciously leaving things for the future helps shape the futures we both desire and earn.
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*Grimassi, Raven. The Cauldron of Memory: Retrieving Ancestral Knowledge and Wisdom. Woodbury, Minnesota: Llewellyn Publications, 2009.
At the start of this third triad of three in this series, I want to address briefly my conscious sidestepping of most current events. Plenty of Pagan and Druid forums are grappling with current events and the often polarizing conversations that have developed around them, and you can engage them there, where there are people much better informed than I am about up-to-the-minute developments, about the unfolding of events, about history and context. My practice of Druidry points me toward tools and strategies for insight, discovery, exploration and survival, so that’s what I’m choosing to focus on and share with you here.
That doesn’t mean Druidry is somehow values-neutral, that it equips you with a wand of power, then stands back as you wave and cast however you want. A wide range of political expressions may follow on Druid experiences and perceptions, but they won’t slot neatly into one or another political party. Extremes within either U.S. party, for instance, while they generate much of the current outrage and controversy, polarize opinions and attitudes, and grab headlines, aren’t especially productive places to find keys to human happiness and growth. It’s at points of balance and equilibrium between poles where creative tension often flourishes most successfully. Druidry reminds us that liminal spaces draw our attention for very good reasons, because that’s where worlds meet. And Samhain is a prime instance of the liminal or boundary experience.
Do the Gates allow me to look through in both directions?
“Gates of Welcome” is an excellent subject for exploration and meditation. A guide to practice: where do I feel welcomed? And where in turn can I make the things and people and experiences I want in my life feel welcome?
And what practices? Journal entry, prayer, wordless communion outdoors, an artistic response to “gates of welcome” in painting, music, sculpture, etc. Each of these can acknowledge the gates right for us, gates where we feel welcome, gates we may indeed already be passing through.
(What is my True Name? What is my Quest? Because this IS a spiritual quest.)
Snow in the forecast for tomorrow/Friday here in Vermont, with a low of 13 F / -10 C. We’ve had a fire in the stove for the past several days, mostly against the damp. The most daily things, preparing and eating a meal, building and maintaining a fire, washing and hanging up clothes (which we do outdoors in warm weather, indoors on racks by the fire in cooler weather) can become chances for epiphany — moments of spiritual transparency where we see that lived life is holy, that incarnation is a gift, that life is sacrament.
What are your triads today? What are the Three Gates of Welcome? What music do you find yourself singing?
When I realize it’s not “about me”, my sense of “me” can often enlarge, and — paradoxes teasing us and breaking up our rigidity as they do, gift of the gods to ease us open — I may know myself a part of all that is. Most humans, if we judge by interviews, polls, sociological surveys, etc., have experienced such moments. Consciousness expands, barriers drop away, and we re-connect. The ecstasy that can accompany such moments underlies a surprising amount of experimentation with altered states of consciousness — through drugs and alcohol, ritual, chant, jogging, yoga, dance, and so on.
Caitlin Matthews’ Celtic Devotional offers a “Threshold Invocation for the Festival of Samhain (to be said at the front door of the house on the eve of Samhain, 31st October, in the evening)” that begins:
Grandmother Wisdom, open the door, Grandfather Counsel, come you in …
This sense of living ancestors, of cultural guides and totems, of others with us who simply join in “without their skins on”, still flourishes among many traditional peoples. It’s one of the things much of Druidry has also striven to reclaim and re-animate in our lives.
Part of our experience of these things lies in any welcome we give or withhold. Last night I joined a Zoom discussion on inner guidance. We talked about trusting what we receive, about learning to recognize its signs, those nudges that aren’t merely fear or ego or desire, about staying alert for the confirmation that often comes in outer circumstances that we’re on the right track.
For Christians, Jesus says “I stand at the door and knock”. As far as we can tell, there’s a lot of knocking going on in our lives. Yes, sometimes the message is urgent enough we may receive a visit uninvited. But in either case, what we do or don’t do in response often forms a core part of the significance of the visit. My listening, my acceptance, my questioning or doubt — in sum, my engagement in some way — is a good half of most experiences of contact and connection. In the language of his day, Winston Churchill remarked, “Men [i.e., humans] occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened”. In Heather Hughes Cullero’s The Sedona Trilogy, one character says, “This is the gift of Spirit to you. What you do with it is your gift to Spirit”.
East Coast Gathering, 2017. Spirit may take any form to reach us.
If you’re fortunate to know the names of your ancestors, particularly beyond your four grandparents, you may more readily gain an intimate sense of the curious timelessness of forming part of an immense ancestral line. Though my wife and I don’t have children of our own, we stand in the middle of just such a Long Line, like everyone does. As I mentioned in a previous post, live to 70 or 80 and that puts us squarely in the lives of five to seven generations within our living memory and connection. I recall my late grandmother who died at 81 in 1977, and I know her living descendants down to her youngest great-great-granddaughter Ashley — five generations already.
Try out the implications of reincarnation, and you could easily be one of your own ancestors. Take stock, look at family patterns, and it can often help clarify things: who I was then is part of who I am now. Step outside this world and its particular laws, and others come into play. Lifetimes like beads on the string of spirit, linking this brief span of decades to others, backwards and forwards. (Do I want to know the future? I’m building it day by day.)
Rather than being that flaky guest at parties who insists he was Julius Caesar or Rasputin or Charlemagne — that she was Cleopatra, or Madame Curie or Queen Elizabeth I — why not explore the major themes at work in life today, and link them up to nudges and hints about “who we were before”, to help map out a larger spiritual purpose and vision? (It sure beats the hell out of watching and worrying over current headlines — though that has its place, too, if we choose — if it doesn’t choose us.) Even as a purely imaginative exercise, it can open up perception and awareness — which seems to be one of the purposes of reincarnation anyway. (Is everything a metaphor?!)
Grandmother Wisdom, open the door, Grandfather Counsel, come you in …
Yes, you can purchase Matthews’ book — it’s a good one. You could also use this as a prompt for your invocations. Grandmother Wisdom, what message do you have for your descendants? Grandfather Counsel, how can I best move through the next year? Among other things, Samhain is about tapping into the larger Selves we all are. The rest is often “just” holiday bling, Halloween decorations. But like the family heirloom or old metal toy or yellowing photo, such seemingly small things can loom large, and offer a link between generations.
We hear about ancestors of blood and also ancestors of spirit. If I have a difficult family, or one divided for any reason, my ancestors of spirit, and the current family I make out of friends and loved ones — families of choice — matters just as much. Mentors, supporters, our own cheering section, school classmates, colleagues, “chance” acquaintances who become beloved, spiritual ancestors whose art or music or books matter deeply to us — all of us gather such ancestors in addition to the people in blood relationship to us. These too are our ancestors at Samhain, and can form part of remembrances and prayers and invocations.
Bard initiates with Kristoffer Hughes (left, back row) at East Coast Gathering. What is the awen saying?
Samhain is not, or not primarily, “darkness and death”, but the realities deeper than these, which may wear them as masks. (The masks themselves can be fun, depending.) One measure of our lives is how and when spirit works to get our attention, whether it can keep it this time around — and what we choose do next.
The Morrigan personifies the challenges that prove and test us all. Photo courtesy Wanda Flaherty.
Some of you may know author Leigh Bardugo and her recent (2019) novel Ninth House. Set in New Haven, Connecticut, it takes place mostly on the Yale University campus, where it re-imagines the school’s actual secret, elite “landed” societies or Houses like Skull and Bones, Book and Snake, Scroll and Key, Berzelius, Wolf’s Head, etc. as occult organizations, each with its magical specialties. Certainly those names are wonderfully evocative all by themselves!
Berzelius House or “tomb” at Yale University / Wikipedia.
Spoiler alert: one of the novel’s characters, familiar with portal magic, encounters what he thinks is just another magical portal, until he realizes — too late — that it’s a mouth instead.
A little Samhain shiver, of the kind that horror movies offer their fans.
The mouth of what? you ask. So do Bardugo’s readers, who await the sequel. But the metaphor is an apt one, outside the novel and at large in what we are pleased to call the “real world”. We resist change for this among other reasons — that the opportunity, doorway, portal will swallow us whole. Nothing left. Gone. Yanked out of our old life, which for all its problems and burdens is at least familiar. Sucked, tossed, flung into some new and terrifying realm where none of the old rules apply, and at the very best we have to start all over again. And at worst? Well, it just doesn’t bear thinking about.
Fear is a favorite emotion these days. It sells! And it rouses us from lethargy, it pulls in donations and ramps up political action. Right and Left both doing their level best to drum up every imaginable terror at the thought of the evil Others taking control at the next election. In the U.S., November 4 looms for far too many like a shape of fear brighter and darker than any Samhain hysteria.
At best these are distractions from something far more important.
In a 2015 post, “Reclaiming the Wild Self“, I quote Clarissa Pinkola Estés (author of Women Who Run with the Wolves), who writes:
The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a saner life, that is a door.
In part, the doors Estés refers to are a matter of human time. Live long enough and you’ll very likely acquire such scars, carry such stories, cherish such loves. One way to find common ground with others is to focus on these doors. And one of the best ways to access them is by careful listening to ourselves and to each other. (Yes, it’s a “slow fix” which, in case we haven’t noticed, is the only effective kind.)
Often enough, we may fear such a world and such a self as much as we yearn for it. A doorway means change. Even if it just opens onto another room, it’s not the room we were in a moment ago. Fears can outline such a door, too — including fear of a door itself. If you’re anything like me, you know or have been someone who at one time or another has walked into a cage and exulted as it clanged shut behind you, reassured that at least you wouldn’t have to walk through yet another damned door.
How many horror movies give us spider webs across the face as a sign we’ve passed a portal? Can we do it without fear for once?!
How to recapture the sense of the preciousness of these doors, as Estes calls it? For in the end our own longing compels us to find them and walk through. Ritual is one way, though by no means the only. By defining boundaries in ritual we can make a door easier to see and peek through. If the past is difficult country for me, I can approach it with safeguards in place. Ritual can help with its prescribed beginnings and endings, its containers of energy and wisdom we can safely draw on at need for balance and perspective and protection. A holiday like the upcoming Samhain, like Halloween, a holy evening for remembering who and what has passed from our lives, offers a safe space to honor and to say farewell to what is gone. Sometimes all that is needed is for us to agree that we can finally let go.
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Samhain can be good “portal practice”. Every year we already walk through many doors, whether we choose to or not, so why not practice doing it consciously? (Or if we choose not to walk through a door we face, that too is valuable.) By ritualizing our experience, we get to explore it, viewing it from several perspectives, and if we’re part of a community, a ritual circle, a group of friends, we get to do this together.
One of the advantages of Samhain (a fruitful subject for meditation all its own) is of a holy day “outside of time”. During Samhain we can gaze up and down the time track, the pathways of our lives and those of our ancestors.
The ritual words of the OBOD Samhain ceremony address the uncertainties and doubts that we may face:
“Is it then possible, during the celebration of Samhain, to pass without risk or fear from one world to another: the living to the realm of the dead, the dead to the span of the living?”
(Those with recall of past lives whisper to themselves “It sure ought to be — after all, how many times have I already done this before?!”)
One good answer: if we do it with love, the answer is yes. Many of us have made the journey already in meditation and dream, meeting loved ones where the boundaries are less daunting, unless we close ourselves off to such experiences. No rush, no need to force these things: we will know when the time is right.
No surprise, midway through this series and this post has been a tough one. I drafted a few paragraphs this morning, then had to step away for a while and return later.
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Whenever I lack a sense of how to proceed, the guidance of the living green world rarely steers me wrong.
But snow?!
Well, snow in the forecast, a picture of a snowy owl, and a winter memory quietly guide me. For this theme of the Fourth Day of Samhain, then, I found myself turning toward the midwinter thaw that often arrives in Vermont sometime in January or February. Not Samhain-y at all, you might think. Temperatures rise, the air warms sometimes to short-sleeve heights, and everything seems to pause on the hinge of change.
Will some oak wisdom sink into my head?
But while it’s a reprieve of sorts from the coldest months, it’s an echo, no more. The dedicated waking comes not around Groundhog’s Day or Imbolc, at least for New England, but later, after the Spring Equinox. Then there’s a greater chance that warmth might stay, or at least wake the beginnings of Spring. A kindling. Or is it a second kindling after all, after that first one from the winter thaw?
And what waking at Samhain? For I don’t need to wait till Equinox, or Samhain itself, for that matter. Things wake up, or can, all the time. A dedicated waking is fuller, the kind that comes not in the middle of the night, though I may stir and turn on the light and read for a little. The dedicated waking comes later, when I actually get out of bed. I’ve committed myself. Morning coffee calls, and the day beckons. We live by such choices, thinking nothing of them. But let a spiritual opportunity like Samhain arrive, with ancestors knocking, and it pays to listen harder. Will I?
trees and green along the Pinnacle Trail
If this is the season that marks the start of hibernation, why should I care about waking up? I’ve got sleeping to do. Well, for one thing, because the other hemisphere is awakening into spring. Beltane and Samhain, yin-yanging it across the planet, nestling in each other. Anyone celebrating Beltane is also probably hearing from the ancestors, if they give them half a chance.
One reason the Old Ways still call to us is that they’re replete with earth-wisdom and heart-truth. For dogma, read experience. For doctrine, read rule-of-thumb. Our favorite childhood stories, our fairy-stories, legends, myths and tall-tales all seem to take place in such a cosmos, where the smallest actions spin out their consequences, where magic flourishes, and where hopes and dreams come true. Samhain wisdom.
It’s a revealing expression, come true. This world of change and manifestation is constantly arriving, shaped as much by our misunderstandings and mistakes as by our grasp on truth, all tangled up in the physics of a cosmos that’s often far weirder than we imagine. Samhain cosmos.
Often we’ve jettisoned belief in a single truth-with-a-capital-T, but in the process we’ve also often forgotten that cause and effect still play out in our lives, and not all of our personal truths are equally viable. (That’s how and why we keep learning and growing, after all. We test our understandings against our lives. I don’t know about you, but I’d not want to jump back to 14-year-old me and my beliefs, doubts and fears of that time.) Samhain truths.
In place of our traditional and healthily provisional/experimental perception of what spirit is and how it works, we’ve turned to all manner of beliefs and disbeliefs, forgetting that spring keeps coming every year, that the power that underlies and sustains things still pulses through them regardless of our human awareness or obliviousness. Rather than bothering so much with belief, it might help us to find out where and when and how things are true, under what circumstances they can be true, and so on. Less church, more laboratory. Samhain practice.
Even words like wisdom and truth and evil have fallen out of fashion, because we think we don’t believe in them any more, until they bite us where it hurts. (Well, wisdom still manages to stick around in a few places — especially if it comes from somewhere exotic, and can be bottled and marketed as hidden or never-before-revealed or traditional.) Sometimes we even notice that most of the “new and improved spirituality” on offer is our traditional wisdom with a hip contemporary makeover. Samhain fashion.
But catch the spirit of Samhain and I get plugged back into a cosmos alive under my skin and in my blood and flaming in the autumn leaves. Get out in the cooling air and I smell the old earth-year. I watch the moon swell to fullness this time coinciding with the last day of October. Samhain reminds us we are alive in time and space, here and now, but also that the world turns, whether we will or no. The chorus of the old goddess chant deserves meditation: “Hoof and horn, hoof and horn/Those who die shall be reborn./Corn and grain, corn and grain/Those who fall shall rise again”. Where and when and how is this true, under what circumstances can it be true …? Samhain questions.
And what of Samhain music? It’s in our blood, a human heritage. Wisdom makes a song we all know by heart. We hear echoes all the time — a fragment of a melody that arrests us in the middle of whatever we’re doing when we hear it. A phrase in a speech or book or conversation that makes us sit up straighter, or slip into reverie. All the things we tend to discount in our humanness, things we rarely talk about. Samhain stuff.
Earth of Samhain, bone and boulder. Air of Samhain, breath and breeze. Fire of Samhain, ______ . Water of Samhain, ______ . What draws us to fill in those blanks we might call the gravity of Samhain, the tug of the time on us. Things have a particular shape, fit into a certain space and no other. Aptness. Identity. Fire of Samhain, heart and hearth. Water of Samhain, blood and brook.
Turn those phrases toward however they work best for you. Then do it. (For counsel on what your particular it is, consult the season of Samhain, your left ventricle, your right hemisphere, you animal guides, and the blessed time you spend outdoors under trees, listening.)
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The Beltane Fire Society will hold a digital Samhuinn this year, with live events posted to Facebook and Youtube.
What offerings do I bring to the shrine of sleep these days?
In some ways we resist the dark on a national level. In most of North America and much of Europe, the season of time changes is upon us, where we turn back our clocks one hour to bring more daylight to our mornings. But much of the rest of the world doesn’t do this, and some regions even within the time-changing nations don’t change either.
Mystic River Grove ritual
Samhain, like Beltane, is a time when “the veil thins” — when the distinctions and barriers between levels of reality are less sharply defined, and it’s often easier to move back and forth between realities. Many of us have had dream experiences that open us to such possibilities. (Whether and how we choose to respond to these opened doors and gates and windows is another matter.)
Twice a year, potential experiences of a larger cosmos unroll into our awareness, unasked. (The rest of the time we may need to make more effort.) The mingled fear and curiosity we often hold for such enlargements tell us much about the social controls at work in our lives. While some explore lucid dreaming, yoga nidra and similar practices, for many of us the twice-yearly opportunities of vivid and insightful dreams, if we invite them, offer plenty to work with. Anyone who has kept a dream journal, and worked with recurring dreams, dream sequences, symbols, guides and ancestors, knows the value of dreamwork. As with so many practices, what you reap mirrors what you sow.
Animal companions can often walk with us to help us with comfort and reassurance, if we’re exploring other worlds. A familiar object — a photograph, seashell, feather or stone, handled before sleep over several nights, can travel with us into the dream, appearing within our dreams to remind us of our intent and our desire, and help shape the dream experience. Some people find that gazing at their hands, as a reminder of our capacity to effect change, to accomplish tasks, to shape our lives, can be another dream tool.
Personalized affirmations, repeated verbally, written in a journal, kept in the attention during the daylight hours, can also help incubate a dream. Here are a couple of examples:
At the shrine of sleep I dedicate my intent to ___, this object/animal companion to ___, my hands to ___ . Change whatever needs changing for your personal circumstances.
As this candle comes alight, so I seek a dream tonight, a holy gift of deep insight. Meditate with the candle, then extinguish it, knowing you carry the light of your intent into sleep for blessing during this time of Samhain.
Likewise, many have found the dream chalice practice an effective one:
Dedicate a goblet, glass or other cup as your dream chalice, placing it on your nightstand or otherwise near your bed before you sleep. Each morning when you awake, drink from the chalice, knowing you are drinking in the wisdom of your dreams. Keep a record of your impression, thoughts, feelings, memories, and images that occur to you over the next three (or seven) days.
A Druid Way 
