by Robert Moss
The hair salon on the corner advertises, “Halloween Makeup Done
Here.” There are spooks and scarecrows at the doors of the houses on my
block. As we approach Halloween, I am thinking of the many meanings of
the festival, from trick-or-treat to the turning of the year.
This is the most magical, crazy, shivery night of the year. It is the
topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of
you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a
night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk
among the living and the living move among the dead.
The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is
pronounced “sow-in”), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among
the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the
goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light
to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It’s a time,
when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch
comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by
ghosts and faeries. It’s a time to honor the friendly dead, and the
lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and
remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries
between the living and the hungry ghosts. It’s a time to look into the
future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow
hills are opened.
As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, “This night belongs
neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal
restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by
the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to
invade the world of men.”
If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the
presence of the spirits who are always about – if you have never
traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the
Otherworld – this is the time when you’ll see beyond the veil all the
same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the
little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on
you.
It’s a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at
night. You might want to put on a fright mask to scare away restless
spirits before they scare you. You might want to carry a torch to light
your way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from
when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America,
they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips.
All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that
the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope
Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All
Saints’ Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All
Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope
had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead –
the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia – and renamed that All
Saints’ Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the
church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the
old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat.
Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much
about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business,
it’s a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it’s a cue to
schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it’s time to dress up as
vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to
spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, with candles lit for my
dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them,
tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the
relations between the living and the dead.
Text adapted from The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)
Divination at Halloween: By tradition, Samhain is also a
time for divination, since the departed can see across time and at this
turning of the year we may share in their powers – and anyway, at New
Year who doesn’t think about what the year ahead may hold? The 1904
postcard in the illustration above shows a young woman looking in a
mirror in hopes of spotting her husband-to be, a survival of an ancient
rite.
about the author:
Robert Moss describes himself as a dream teacher, on a path for which there has been no career track in our culture. He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three ""Only"" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole.
Robert Moss describes himself as a dream teacher, on a path for which there has been no career track in our culture. He is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. Born in Australia, he survived three near-death experiences in childhood. He leads popular seminars all over the world, including a three-year training for teachers of Active Dreaming. A former lecturer in ancient history at the Australian National University, he is a best-selling novelist, journalist and independent scholar. His nine books on dreaming, shamanism and imagination include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamways of the Iroquois, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead, The Three ""Only"" Things, The Secret History of Dreaming, Dreamgates, Active Dreaming and Dreaming the Soul Back Home: Shamanic Dreaming for Healing and Becoming Whole.
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