Halloween Reflections:

It’s Halloween time again and, as every year, I feel a certain ambivalence about the celebration. While I am enthusiastically all in on witchy/pagan rituals, the fact of living in the Southern Hemisphere complicates matters on numerous levels. Halloween has been connected to Samhain – the Celtic festival marking the end of harvest and the turning to the dark portion of the year but they aren’t actually the same. Samhain was not overly concerned with ghouls, ghosts and mischievous pranks, although there was the belief that the veil between the realms of the living and the dead could be thin at this moment. Exactly how deeply the magical beliefs ran is impossible to know as there are no written or pictorial records from this period. Everything is relatively modern, messy interpretation.

More importantly however, is the fact that our seasons operate in direct opposition to those in Europe, so logically we should be celebrating Beltaine – the festival of Belenos, god of sun, fire and healing. But because of the association across Halloween/Samhaim of honouring the ancestors, I question whether I should be falling in line with the rhythms of my Celtic ancestry, rather than my current geographical status.

It’s a tricky question for which I have never satisfactorily found an answer. I do believe that any natural witchcraft practice is intrinsically linked to the environment that you inhabit, to the physical elements that surround you. Does this matter more than repeating long held, distantly created traditions? Another of my deeply held beliefs is that witchcraft is an intensely personal practice that by its very nature rejects regulation and rule making. To me that’s the entire point- personal resonance and responsibility.

So how seriously should this contemplation go? Is it acceptable to purely enjoy Halloween as the modern festival it has become and derive my own sense of meaning around that? At this point that is my best response. Tomorrow evening I will be dining with family and I shall be wearing the beautiful skull-lace (yes that’s a thing) skirt that my cleverly creative friend has made for me. And after dinner I will be lighting candles in memory of my ancestors and pulling tarot cards for the season ahead. Ultimately any ritual or festival that gives us encouragement to pause for a moment of reflection is worthwhile, in whatever form that takes. However you may celebrate it- Oidhche Shamhna shona dhut!