Happy Hallow'een

Well this is Samhain;
Hallow'een for the general public, the eve of All Hallows or the christian feastday of the dead.

Samhain for some of us, the ancient festival marking the beginning of Winter and the need to prepare for the dark half of the year. At Tara and the Hill of Ward fires would have been lit and from these the chains of bonfires across the great central plains and out to the furthest reaches of the country, or so the poets tell us. The gathering at Tara at Samhain brought together clans for horse trading, games, arts, marriages; the ancestors were honoured and the gods, and the chieftains and the fosterings and alliances. Divinations were made, omens examined.

Over the centuries the christian associations (Feast of the saints, all souls) has beome conflated with the original ideals of Ancestor, and the sense of a liminal time. But underneath the games and the ghost stories, you have the ancient and enduring.

I love the ghostly and ghoulish and the mischief; I also love the older philosophies and tonight, I'll be reaching out to my ancestors, as they once did to theirs...