Samhain (Learning to Hold Ancestors Close)
This piece was originally written and shared in October 2021 at my brick-and-morter congregation, Theodore Parker UU Church.
In the almost seven months since my beloved mother’s death, I have needed to learn the world all over again. Every seasonal shift, every holiday and tradition lands differently now; every detail of the world exists only in relationship with my grief.
When Halloween decorations started cropping up around my neighborhood this month, I realized that I was seeing the fake skeletons, ghosts, and gravestones — all of these casual references to death — entirely differently. It’s not exactly that I’ve minded that images of death on display around me, but more that I felt their irony in a new way. Halloween might be the closest this culture comes to having a holiday where death is on the surface, honored in some way, but even saying that is a stretch — this is a season of surface-level nods to death, with little space for holding its reality.
I don’t fault Halloween itself for this, nor do I begrudge my neighbors and the plastic gravestones on their lawn. The denial of death and grief in this culture is so much bigger than any one holiday. Modern Western culture, particularly white, mainstream Christian culture, sees life as an onwards and upward trajectory, and grief as a hard but brief, quiet, private time to get through. Even in this time of pandemic, in the mass death event we are all living through, dominant culture urges us to move ever forward, ever more quickly back to ‘normal’ — with little to no mention of our need to mourn the beloved people and things we have lost.
I’ve been feeling the irony of how we (sort of) (a little bit) reference death around Halloween particularly strongly, because the roots of this holiday offer something very different. Our modern Halloween has its roots in the cultural tradition of many of my ancestors: the ancient pre-Christian Irish/Celtic festival of Samhain (pronouced Sow-en), and its Christian equivalent of All Hallow’s Eve.
I’ve been interested in the culture and spiritual traditions of my ancestors for a long time; I see it as part of my responsibility as a white person to try to understand who my people were before we were considered white, and how the processes of colonization and assimilation brought us here. And now, as I try to process my grief, my interest in ancestral practice feels more like a longing, a need to be connected to a deeper sense of time, lineage, and culture.
So I’ve been exploring what is known about the spiritual traditions of my ancestors, including this ancient festival of Samhain, and trying to see what in those traditions might serve as antidotes for all that modern white culture lacks, particularly in relation to holding death and grief.
Samhain is known as one of the cross-quarter days in the Celtic wheel of the year, the approximate mid-point between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. It was a feast day, a festival to mark the end of the harvest season and welcome in winter’s darkness. The always-fluid boundary between the worlds — meaning the world of the living and the otherworld, where ancestors and other spirits dwell — was thought to be particularly porous around Samhain and the other seasonal festivals, like spring’s Beltaine; all times of great transition and liminality.
In contemporary pagan practice, Samhain is often referenced as a holiday about ancestors, a day to honor our beloved dead and perhaps feel closer to them than at other times. But much of my research suggests that seeing this as the one day to connect with beloved dead is more of a modern way of understanding the festival. Within the Celtic culture and worldview, ancestors were always present in daily life, and most major festivals honored and celebrated them in some way. Samhain has come to have a particular association with the dead simply because it marked the entry point into the winter, into the dark part of the year — and that whole season brought with it both a closeness to death, and more regular, ritual honoring of beloved ancestors.
I want to step back for a moment, and sit with that a bit more. Particularly if you are someone who knows and carries with you any kind of close loss — can you imagine how different it might feel to live within a culture were your beloved dead were held closely by your whole community at every holiday, and even particularly for a whole season of the year? A culture in which it was normal to speak their names, leave offerings for them, hold feasts in their honor, regardless of how long it was from their year of death?
Ancient Irish culture is, of course, far from the only culture to have practices of ancestor veneration, and to have holidays that honor the dead. I’m sure, actually, that in every one of our lineages, as close as in this generation or thousands of years back, we could all find traditions with deeply similar themes — because, of course, death is universal, and the need to honor it and tend to our grief is perhaps the most basic human need.
This is something I keep coming back to: these ancient cultural traditions of ancestor connection and honoring all come from the same universal human need to keep our loved ones close, especially when we are separated from them by death. Those traditions are now largely absent from our dominant culture — but the need for them has not gone away. Death is just as much of a reality in our lives now, it is simply less acknowledged; grief is just as present, it just less collectively held.
What would it look like for us now, in this tradition we are co-creating, to hold and honor our beloved dead together? Not just on this holiday, or even just this season, but all of the time? Informed by ancient practices or by simple human need, how can we begin, in whatever small way, to un-learn the death-denying norms of modern culture and embrace our ancestors once again?
- Love at the Center: Exploring the New UU Values - January 10, 2024
- Turn the Year Around (A Winter Solstice Story) - December 20, 2023
- Samhain (Learning to Hold Ancestors Close) - October 1, 2023
