For Halloween to have meaning, you have to believe in All Hallows. You have to believe in the Saints. You have to believe that there is a breed of human that is better, higher, more blessed, more holy than another. And I don’t. I believe that there are people who do more good in the world, than they do harm – and I believe that the reverse is also true. But Saints and Sinners, Angels and Devils? Those are concepts I struggle with. I think the concepts of “good” and “evil” are more complicated than that, and so are people.
I believe that good people do bad things, and bad people do good ones, and that none of us can ever know what it is like to be in another person’s body, another person’s mind, another person’s life. None of us has the capability to judge. That is why religions survive. They enable us to put the judgement outside of ourselves. They enable us to cut and measure according to some lain down rule. They don’t allow for the complexity of what it is to be human in a world that has become so complicated and disconnected.
A friend of mind talks about letting things unravel when what he really means is to let them unfold. But there are times when I think his malapropism is closer to the truth, that everything is unravelling, and that maybe that is what we need. Let the cloth disintegrate back into threads, the knitting back into yarn, and maybe we can start over, differently. Better. Not more holy, not more saintly, just more humanly, with a greater care for each other and for our planet.
I don’t like Halloween.
I like it even less now that it has become commercialised and trivialised. Trick or treat is a horrible importation – encouraging children to beg, children who have no reason to, children who will beg better (in the sense of more successfully) the less they need to, if they are richer and can afford the best costumes, costumes that mock things that – if we believed they existed – we would be afraid of. We have trashed what was meant to be a sacred time and made it a thing “for the children”.
Just like we’ve done with Christmas. I am not a Christian but I can respect those who (truly) are and who hold the day sacred to their faith – but how many times do we hear that it is “for the children”. Another holy day that has simply become a holiday. We make days of meaning into meaningless commercial opportunities. We make holy days into holidays for the children because we do not trust our children with truth. Nor do we trust them with mystery. We sanitise the world for them.
And then we wonder why they grow up the way they do.
We actively disconnect our young from their history, their heritage, their culture and therefore ultimately from their planet home.
We do not trace our culture back to its mystical beginnings. We do not dare. Because to do so means to recognise that there are no saints, no gods, no religions. There is no good or evil, there is only help or harm. And even a small child can tell the difference. There is only the planet in all its wildness and goodness and danger.
Samhain may have been a religious festival in the sense that I am, I guess, rejecting. I am no expert in Celtic ways of life. To me, though, the Celtic quarter days and cross-quarter days, touch more deeply, because I do not need to believe what they believed. We don’t know whether they tied them to gods at all. Certainly, the honouring of the seasonal shifts goes back further than any records of god and hero stories. It goes back beyond our knowing, back into the times when the stars and the moon and the sun were the only compass and calendar.
Samhain was then the new year. The crops were gathered in, and it was time to plan and plant for the year to come. A time to hope and dream. A time to rest.
The people of those times recognised that everything begins in the darkness. Their days started at sunset. Their years started at the closing time of the year, the harvested time, the clearing and cleansing and resting time. The beginning of the dark time. Samhain marks the beginning of the darkness. The beginning of rest.
Rest from work enables pleasure to be prioritised. It enables self-care to become a focus. It enables all the things that we have ‘no time’ (allegedly) for when we are all busy-busy trying to cram every ounce of achievement into daylight hours, squeezing every drop of joy from sunshine. Because somewhere along the line, someone span us a fable that the darkness is not a time for such things. That this is such a depressing time of year.
And they lied.
Autumn is a beautiful time of year. Whether you hold to Halloween or Samhain this is the time of year when fires are lit and fireworks crackle, and the boundary between what is and what was is thinned.
It is so, because we want it so. We yearn for a time when we can reach out and touch beyond the here and now, backwards through time, back to the memories of those who raised and taught us (not necessarily parents, for those who were not as lucky in theirs as I was in mine) but all of the ancestors, the wider human family, the mystics and humanists, the links that we forget to honour in our everyday business. We need a moment in the year when we look back and say: yes, I remember you and your works, and I am grateful to still have you in my life.
We want also to reach forwards into the mystery of tomorrow, so that we can prepare for it.
I love the Autumn weeks. I love the leaves and the mists and the long-shadow days. Days that feel deeper because of their shortening. Days richer in colour and scents and taste. Days that cram all their wonder into fewer daylight hours and resonate in bass tones. If Summer is all sparkling wine and flutes, then Autumn is vintage cider, clear and fruitful, and saxophones, and geese calling across the sky.
Autumn is the most romantic of all the seasons. It is mist and mystery. It is street lamps reflected on rain-washed pavements. Windows hiding unseen lives behind warm-lit curtains. It is foggy mornings that give way to unexpected golden sunlit days. It is bright blue mornings that crash into downpours.
I love the quietening of this time, as winter weather creeps in and streets empty of summer visitors, but the Christmas frenzy has not yet begun. Autumn is the time when places come back to themselves. It is a breathing space, where towns and villages are able to look about and see who they really are, themselves only, the community, the ones who stay, without the flitter-ins-&-outs.
It is a time when we all might think about where we belong, and where we are the flitter-byes, because certainly we are both.
Autumn is a damp air time, where sounds carry further. The bark of a dog, or a seal, the low moan of a cow, or pier-end horn to warn the shipping of the rocks unseen under rising tides.
I sense the melancholy, but that is only the settling of another year to rest, its growth spurts over, its ambitions passed.
For myself I find it a time to retreat and rest and reflect. I cannot help but lament the days that have gone and will not come again – but then, equally, I reflect on those I would not wish back again. And I breathe in the glory of the year, the harvest of it, the abundance. I look to the good memories and the seeds of future growth. I scent the richness of earth and of life.
There are those who look to see another Spring. I will always wish to scent another Autumn.
For me Samhain is about that settling. I was born close to this fire festival so the turning of my personal year falls in this season. Then, because I mark the true turning of the year at the Winter Solstice when we turn back to the light, I have this ‘Samhain season’ – it matters not whether it falls on the new moon or the dark moon – that concept jars anyway with concepts of equinoxes and solstices which are sol rather than lunar calendars – the day, date, moon, are merely markers to a “round about now” notion of Samhain.
So I think of Samhain not as a day, or indeed a night, but as a seaon. I have these few weeks of reflecting, settling into rest, welcoming the deepening earthiness of Autumn slowly giving way to the brittle enforcing of Winter. Welcoming the dark.
Halloween has been contorted into a festivity, a travesty, a frivolity. That sits not easily with me. Samhain is about the dowsing of the hearthfire, and the re-lighting it from the communal bonfire. It is about our connection with the earth, but also our connection with each other. It is about sharing the fruits of our common work, and marks a time when we then retreat for a while, to care for ourselves. To rest.
There will be no pumpkin outside my door welcoming trick-or-treaters. There will be gifted candles newly lit as symbolic new hearth fire.
