#22 Samhain in the southern hemisphere

Hello friends,

I was pleased to learn some years ago that the origins of Halloween belong to my Irish ancestors. In the ancient Celtic calendar, 31 October is Samhain (sah-win), a harvest festival that marks the beginning of the darkening of winter. It is also the last day of the Celtic year. Rituals celebrated the final harvest, and involved animal sacrifices, and slaughter to prepare meat for the winter, as well as the lighting of the fires. Samhain is also considered the time where the veil between the waking world and the afterlife is the thinnest, and so is a time of honouring, celebrating, and communicating with the ancestors.

Last year around this time, I was in Ireland, visiting my brother in Dublin. As you might guess from my name, Ireland is an ancestral home for us. I have lived in Dublin and have visited often. It is a place I really treasure, and where I have always felt that luck is on my side. Auspicious timing aligns, wonderful friends find me, and I always seem to happen upon beautiful objects. I really know that Ireland loves me.

Last year, a new such friend (easily found and much treasured) took my brother and me to her home town for the Púca Festival, a Samhain fire festival that takes place in the historic towns of Trim and Athboy. We visited the Hill of Tlachtga (pronounced clock’d-gah, named for a powerful druidess of great magical skill, who was said to have died on the hill after giving birth to triplet sons), or the Hill of Ward, a sacred site that was a centre of spiritual worship and ritual for thousands of years. It was here that the druids would light the bonfires of Samhain.

There is something about finding a place where you have business. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes there’s some obvious reason - a place of significance to your family, a site of such global consequence that it is impossible not to feel affected, or maybe just the old street of a past lover. I have understood as much about this phenomenon from going to places where I do not have business as I have from going to places where I do. For example, a few years ago I arrived in Lisbon for a few days vacation, and immediately felt the complete lack of karmic relevance that place holds for me. It is lovely there, but it gave me a feeling the whole time like, “What am I doing here?” Barcelona, on the other hand, though I have no Spanish family lineage, no logical reason for having business there, sucked me in like a magnet and never let me go. Before I’d even set foot off the train, I felt like I was home.

Needless to say, I have business in Ireland, and I had business on that hill. It really is a magic place. It charged and restored some energy in me that I cannot quite explain, but the days that followed were filled with an enduring sense of that kind of synchronicity Jung tells us means we are aligned with our rightful path. I knew I was in the right place, and knew - though briefly - what was to come. It really changed me.

This year, I wanted to pay special attention at Samhain, partly because I am more steeped in magic practice than I have been in the past, and partly to connect again to these ancestral energies I had found so powerful last year. I was planning to use parts of a dinner ritual from Dr Kate Tomas, then I happened upon a beautiful piece from Jennifer Murphy, a Dublin-based Celtic mythologist, who shared a ritual by which a chair is left by the hearth, or the fire, for the ancestors.

We do not have a fire, here in my apartment in the Australian urban landscape. Instead, we created an alter, with lit candles and food and ancestral objects. It was beautiful.

Still, all of that is to say that what I really want to share about is this grief I felt, a familiar one that I am bowled over by every now and then. It is the grief of trying to reach across the world to a familiar spiritual lineage from a place where everything is upside down. Winter is summer, the flowers and grasses and birds and animals are all different, so the books I read and teachers I find sharing knowledge on the rituals and practices of my own magic lineage require massive adaptation. There are ancient stories and rituals here too, but ancient people of this land where I live were massacred by the people who brought my relatives here. In white Australia, I feel caught in an enduring convict energy - can’t go ‘home’, but something prevents me from fully placing my feet on this earth like I can in a place like the Hill of Ward, because I cannot feel like I really belong here.

But we light the candles anyway, and hunt around little stores to find some Irish potato chips to leave as an offering (iykyk), and I hope that the ancestors can still find me, hearth-less and upside down, at the root chakra of the world.

Happy Samhain - may your ancestors find you and bless you, wherever you find yourself.

Kate

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