Samhain and the Thinning of the Veil: Honouring the Ancestors at the Turn of the Year

On Samhain night at Cruachan, the royal seat of Connacht, King Ailill offered a prize to any man who would go out into the dark and tie a withe around the ankle of a hanged man on the gallows. Only Nera dared. The corpse spoke to him, asked for a drink, and Nera carried it on his back to three houses before one would serve them. When he returned to the hall he saw it burning and the heads of his people carried off by the fairy host, and he followed the host into the Cave of the Cats, into the mound. He lived there a year, took a wife, learned that the vision of burning was a warning of the next Samhain, and came back to tell the king, carrying wild garlic, primroses and golden fern as proof that it had been summer where he was. The tale is called the Echtra Nerai, the Adventure of Nera, and it tells you almost everything the tradition knew about this night.

What Samhain Is

The name means “summer’s end.” In the pastoral year of early Ireland, the cattle came down from the summer pastures at the start of November, the surplus animals were slaughtered for the winter, the last of the harvest was in, and the tribe gathered at the royal site for the great assembly. It was the hinge of the year, the end and the beginning, and like all hinges it was a gap. The Celtic day began at dusk and the Celtic year began with its dark half; Samhain was the dusk of the year, and in that in-between time, the sources agree, the doors of the sídhe stood open.

Two things came through. The dead came home. Every house set food by the fire and left the door unbarred, and the living went to bed early to leave the hearth to those who had sat at it before. And the Otherworld came out: the fairy host rode, the púca claimed what was left in the fields, the Dagda met the Morrígan astride the river and took her counsel for the battle. It was a night to stay in, or to go out disguised so that the host would take you for one of their own. The turnip lantern, the guising, the apple games and the nuts on the hearth all come from this: the Halloween that went to America with the Irish and came back as a costume party is Samhain in thin disguise.

The Fire on the Hill

The great Samhain fire, tradition says, was lit on Tlachtga, the Hill of Ward, a few miles from Tara, by the druids of all Ireland. Every hearth in the land was extinguished and relit from it. Tlachtga herself was a druidess, daughter of the arch-druid Mug Ruith, who died giving birth to triplets on the hill. The site is a great ringed earthwork, little visited, and in recent years the fire has been lit there again on Samhain night. Whether or not the medieval account is strictly historical, it carries the meaning of the festival: in the dark of the year the light is renewed from a single source, and everyone carries a coal of it home.

The Thinning of the Veil

The phrase is modern but the idea is old. In the tradition the Otherworld is always near; at Samhain and Beltane it is nearer, and the ordinary rules of distance and time break down. Nera lives a year in the mound in what is, for Cruachan, a single night. The reverse is also true: Oisín’s three years in Tír na nÓg are three centuries here. The shamanic practitioner will recognise this as the time of nonordinary reality, where the journey of twenty minutes contains a lifetime. The Celtic tradition simply says that twice a year the whole world goes there.

For the practitioner this makes Samhain the great night for two kinds of work. The first is ancestral: journeying to meet the beloved and the forgotten dead, to ask their blessing, to hear what they need and to tell them they are remembered. The second is psychopomp: helping those who have died in the year to find their way to Tech Duinn, the house of Donn, where the Irish dead gather on an island off the western coast before their journey on. Both should be done in company, with a clear intention, and with the courtesy the tradition insists on.

A Samhain Ceremony

This is the shape our circle uses. It can be done alone or with many, in an evening.

1. Clean the hearth. Or the table, or the altar. Sweep it, wash it, lay it bare. The old year is done.
2. Set the dumb supper. Lay a place at the table for the dead: a plate, a cup, a chair. Serve them first. Eat the meal in silence, or with only the names of the dead spoken.
3. Speak the names. Each person names those they have lost, this year and in all years, and those of the land whose names are forgotten. Light a candle for each, or one for all.
4. Extinguish the light. Put out every flame. Sit in the dark of the year for as long as you can bear. This is the gap.
5. Journey. To the drum or in silence, go to the mound of the ancestors or to Tech Duinn. Meet who comes. Ask what they need. Carry a message if one is given. Return.
6. Kindle the new fire. One flame from a natural source if you can: a flint, a coal kept from the last fire, the sun through a glass that afternoon. From it, light the candles again. The year has begun.
7. Divine. The old games: the apple peeled in one strip and thrown over the shoulder, two hazelnuts on the hearth, the cup of water, the ring in the barmbrack. Or a journey with a question for the year.
8. Leave the door. Leave the food for the dead out overnight, and the hearth to them. Go to bed early. In the morning give the food to the birds or the earth.

Nera came back with summer flowers in his arms in the dead of November. That is what the ancestors give at Samhain, if you go out to meet them: proof that the Otherworld is in bloom even now, and a warning, perhaps, about the year to come. Take both.