It's 10/31, Samhain . I'm not trying to harsh anyone's halloween, but try to keep in mind ...

[Rabblevox]

that for some of us (the "us" being Wiccans and most Pagans), it is truly a sacred day, when we honor our ancestors and departed loved ones. BTW, Samhain in Gaelic is pronounced "Shaw-veen", leading directly to "halloween" after the Christians stole it from us.
(thank you very much, Mr. Pope, I will NOT be honoring you tonight)

I hope everyone has a great halloween, and trust me, Wiccans and Pagans are not easily offended, I'm just asking that you keep in mind that for some of us, it is our High Holy Day.

If you are so inclined, here is a very simple Samhain ritual that won't offend people of other faiths or no faith.

http://www.zodiacbistro.com/rituals/samhain%20ritual.htm

This is a day of remembrance, our New Year and the last harvest festival. With so much going on with one holiday, this simple ritual expresses it all. As always, I leave the decorating up to your own good taste, but this is a meal celebration. So the recipe for your favorite dishes will be the key to your enjoyment. Pick recipes that includes the harvest essentials; pumpkin, apples, and if you are a meat eater include that as well. My own preference would be a hearty soup or stew, with plenty of fresh vegetables like potatoes, corn, onions, carrots, homemade bread and either fish or meat, depending on what I can find fresh at the market. Your own choices and life style should be reflected in the dishes you prepare.

Decorate the table for your ritual. You will be leaving a place at the table for those unseen friends who will join you. So set your table and cook your meal and welcome your friends when they arrive. If you are dining on your own, remember you are inviting those who have passed over so make a placesetting for them as well. Once dinner is ready, pour the drinks and open the ritual with a poem or make one up yourself. Doreen Valiente's poem "Samhain Chant" can be found here. There are lots of other seasonal and Samhain poems out on the Internet that can be used as well. Choose one that fits your style.

Once your ritual is open, invite your Gods and/or Goddess' to join you for your meal. At the empty chair, place some of the food on the plate and offer an opening toast to those unseen spirits who have joined your ritual.Time now for you to enjoy your own meal, and if you have a friend or two, enjoy the company of likeminded people. You should discuss the past year, plans for next year, good times and good company. This is a time to enjoy what the God and Goddess have given us, and we do so by celebrating. Laugh, have a great time, have second helpings of dessert if you so desire.

If you are doing this meal alone, I suggest you take a notebook and write down things that you want to remember in advance. Make a list of this year's events and next year's plans. As you sit and eat, discuss these with your unseen guests. Remember to have a good time on your own. There is nothing wrong with speaking with spirits, and sometimes you may even hear an answer or two, or a bit of laughter. Do not worry; they are there to enjoy the evening. You will have a good time.

Once the meal is done, it is time to drink a toast to those who have parted this world. Remember them by name, remember them by deed. Remember them with laughter, and remember them with a tear. Wiith a final toast, thank the Gods for a good year but save some drink in your cup. At this point take the plate of food, and the cup of drink, as well as a last portion of your own drink, and move outside to offer these to the spirits of those who have joined you, and to honor the Gods. Pour the drink into the earth, and leave the food for the spirit of whatever comes by.

Once back inside at the table, remember to thank the Gods again for the good year that has passed, and ask Their blessings on the year to come. This is a good way to end the ritual, but it should not end the evening. Continue to have a wonderful evening with good conversation with your friends, or if you are on your own, it's time to find those things that interest you and enjoy your evening as well. Good movie, good book, or go out someplace to find good company and good conversation. Again, this is your celebration. Enjoy it.

And here are 13 Samhain songs:
http://www.patheos.com/community/paganportal/2010/10/29/13-songs-for-samhain/

Seems strange that we began the 13 Songs series with Beltane and here it is already Samhain. What an important holiday, and an important milestone for us here on Pantheon. We’ve spent seven months together as of Samhain, the entire Goddess half of the year. I hope the God half proves as interesting and rewarding.

I thought I would do something a bit different this time. Instead of 13 random songs to fit the season, I attempted to put together a liturgical set of music. From Joan Jett to set the tone to Wendy Rule to point the way to the next holiday, I hope I have put together something that you can listen to as you bake for Samhain feast or even use for ritual if you are a solitary. If you would like to play all the videos automatically click here.

May the Hallow’s Tide bring you blessing and carry away your sorrow. Here’s to the Gods! Here’s to the ancestors! Here’s to our community!

13. Joan Jett – Season of the Witch

This song gets me in the Samhain mood. It’s dark, repetitive growling vibe tell my soul something different is about to happen.

#12-#1 follow at the above link, with vid clips for each:


Happy Samhain, and blessed be.

ps. even if you are a hard-core Atheist, try to take a sec today to think fondly of loved ones who are not in your life anymore. Trust me, it's good for the heart.

pps, I should clarify that I see this as metaphor and poetry, not theological fact. That does not reduce it's significance to me.

[Name removed]

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[Rabblevox]

2. And your point would be?

[Name removed]

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[NMMNG]

6. K&R

[GESICC]

7. LOL-looking for trouble eh?

And why would you post this if you didn't want a bevy of
tricks sans treats?  Folks went easy on you.  Happy All Saints
Day.

[bananas]

8. LOL - Trick or Treat!

Sometimes both!
Happy Halloween!

[madrchsod]

9. i thought "name removed" was banned several weeks ago....?

i guess i was wrong!

to bad the christians that get all bent out of shape don`t realize the early christians "stole" their holidays from other beliefs.

[FirstLight]

10. There's a powerful vibe inside of rememberance

I have been seeing a lot of 'ghosts' this past month, some in dreams and some in reality, of past people of significance in my life, and reliving the lessons from a new perspective, extending the gratitude for the blessings of their lessons, however painful, and giving myself the credit for growing to this place, here and now.

Thanks for sharing this, it would be a cool thing to do tonite with the kids for dinner... set and extra place and talk about remembrance of ancestors. It is common in all faiths, and that makes me think of it as something transcendant, beyond specific mythology. it is a human archetype to honor memory , and always coincides with the harvest as well. something to be said for the enter-twining of gratitude and honoring those who went before...

:hug: blessed be!

[roguevalley]

20. the more you remember the more they come around to love you.

I set a spare plate at all the important holidays. Happy holy day, all you out there.

[MedicalAdmin]

11. Thanks - interesting post.

I learned something today. Thanks.

What little I knew about your beliefs are based on reading Dies The Fire which could not even loosely be considered authoritative.

[ZombieHorde]

12. "it is truly a sacred day"

How does sacred work in your tradition? How does something become sacred?

[struggle4progress]

13. Your history seems questionable to me. The Hallowmas seems to have been set on 1 November in

Rome in the 8th century, under the Julian calendar

Ancient calendrical practices varied: a common approach was to reckon months by the moon with some regular correction to reconcile the lunar and solar years --

... The Gaulish Coligny calendar ... possibly the oldest Celtic solar/lunar ritual calendar ... is an attempt to reconcile both the cycles of the moon and sun ... The calendar uses .. a normal 12 month calendar in sync with the moon and keeps the whole system in sync by adding an intercalary month every 2.5 years ...
Continental Celtic Calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celtic_calendar

Since the lunar year is about 10 + 11/12 days shorter than the solar year, any Celtic fall festival, tied to a predictable "date" on such a calendar, would wander in the Julian calendar -- a festival falling on a certain Julian day, in one year, would occur about 11 days earlier in the second year; about 22 days earlier in the third year; then, in the fourth year, after the intercalation of an additional month, about a week after the Julian date from the first year, and so on

So if the pre-Christian Celts celebrated a fall festival (plausible, of course), the "date" of such a festival cannot meaningfully taken for any particular Julian date -- since under any credible modified lunar calendar, the "date" would vary considerably over the years, probably by as much as four weeks relative to our modern timekeeping

Celtic claims to any particular Julian date aside, there is (AFAIK) nothing to support a claim that "Halloween" is a corruption of "Samhain" or that the Christians stole this "holiday" from the Celts

First, It is not Halloween itself, but the next day (Hallowmas or Hallowtide) that is the ancient high holy day, and any pre-medieval history of Samhain seems largely lost to us:

... The earliest associations of 1 November with All Saints are .. found in 8th century sources ... while the earliest references to ... Samhain are found in sources ... compiled in the 10th century ...
Association with All Saints
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

... Hallowmas "All-saints" is first attested late 14c ...
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hallows

... The word Halloween is first attested in the 16th century and represents a Scottish variant of the fuller All-Hallows-Even ("evening") ...
Origin of name
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

Thus "Halloween" first appears in the English lexicon over a millennium after the Christianization of the Celtic region, and it seems to be a word modeled on the earlier-appearing "Hallowmas" and "Hallowtide," rather than some sneaky corruption of "Samhain"




... The word Halloween is first attested in the 16th century and represents a Scottish variant of the fuller All-Hallows-Even ("evening") ...

[flamingdem]

14. I fully agree

I don't view Halloween as being a high holy holiday for descendants of the Celts. It's nice that some of the history is remembered on this day but the real celebrations were related to certain new moons and the subsequent births nine months later.

Plus all the neo-Pagans take this stuff too seriously as so much is diluted and lost over centuries.

I have to wonder if it's about bloodline, can you really take on an ancient religion as a part of your soul if you are not from that line? My opinion is that you can do it as a guest but it's not the same.

[pokerfan]

15. War on Samhain?

It's also roughly halfway between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. There are four of these cross-quarter days, one for each season. We know three of them as Halloween, Groundhog Day and May Day. The fourth is Lammas Day.



I'm not a pagan but I find this stuff interesting insofar as it intersects with astronomy.

[humblebum]

16. I'm still trying to figure out how "the Christians stole it from us."

How do you steal a day off the calendar? How did they haul it off? Was it heavy? you should have locked it up. I am much more willing to bet they adapted it and adapted to it. Pretty common occurrence throughout history.

[struggle4progress]

19. I expect the claim is associated with general notions about syncretism: there's no question

that religious traditions can reflect local cultures

For example, in some Buddhism traditions, I think one can discern influences from Hinduism, or Taoism, or Yoga. Similarly, local Christian traditions sometimes reflect pre-existing cultural icons: this is perhaps true of Easter egg or Christmas tree traditions

The Celts, for all I know, had a fall festival, though it couldn't have been near the beginning of November at the time of the Roman invasion of the British Isles, since the Roman calendar was then months out of sync with the seasons, according to our current understanding of the seasons -- a fact that was remedied with the Julian calendrical reform, which involved inserting something like an extra 80 days into one year to restore the sync

In fact, if the ancient Celts did have a fall festival, discerning exactly when it was, would depend on knowing their calendrical system, which (unfortunately) we don't know with any certainty: there's some (limited) reason to think they had a lunar-solar calendar, which is awkward for comparison with the Julian calendar, because a solar year is not in a simple ratio to the (average) lunar month: one can reckon a that a solar year is about 12 + 1/2 (or, with increasing accuracy, 12 + 1/3 or 12 + 3/8 or 12 + 7/19 or ...) lunar months -- the bottom line is that 12 lunar months fall almost 11 days short of a solar year

The Julian reform among the Romans abolished the original Roman attempt maintain sync with intercalated months; but as far as we know the ancient Celts retained such a scheme, using the obvious 1/3 < 2/5 = (1 + 1)/(2 + 3) < 1/2 as a rational for intercalating an extra lunar month twice in every five years to maintain both lunar and solar sync of the calendar -- and even that, without regular observational modification of the intercalated month lengths, would produce a steady drift of dates by almost four months per century

But assuming the ancient Celts did their intercalations correctly, in order to maintain approximate sync with both the lunar and solar years, a lunar date for a fall festival would still have a solar date that varied by up to a month, over the years, when judged by our modern calendar: so the claim that 31 October or 1 November was an ancient Celtic holiday must be misleading

[tama]

21. In my country

When Christians crusaders came and conquered this land, oppressed and banned old pagan customs, destroyed places of worship, etc., and gave old feasts new christian meanings and interpretations, started "taxing" (ie. robbing) formerly free and independent people. That's what imperialist oppressors do, steal.

[WolverineDG]

22. Of course that's what happened

But it's easier to claim holidays & tradition were "stolen" so as to completely ignore the fact that such adaptations have been going on through out history as a result of any clash of cultures.

dg

[Silent3]

17. As for the pronunciation of Samhain...

...I've never heard the "Shaw-veen" pronunciation before. My wiccan friends say "sow-en".

Googling shows a variety of pronunciations, but the most important thing is knowing that "sam-hayn" (with "sam" as in short for "Samuel", followed by "hayn" with a long "a" like "day") IS RIGHT OUT, unless of course wincing and gnashing of teeth is your desired effect.

[Rabblevox]

18. You say tomAto, I say tomato. I've no problem with "sow-en, esp as there are so many different...

dialects in Gaelic. And you are correct, "sam-hAyn" indicates someone who has seen the word, but never heard it spoken.

[Odin2005]

23. This Atheist says K&R!