Celebrating the Harvest By Lezlie Kinyon  Folklore is my avocation, so I thought I'd share some esoterica about that wonderful holiday at the start of November: Samhain, or Halloween. I grew up on farms and around ranches, and remember this as a time of plenty, and also one involving the confrontation of the realities of life and death in a rural economy. November begins with the ancient festival of Halloween. This day is commonly called Samhain or All-Hallows, by Pagans and Halloween by our children, friends and neighbors. Samhain is generally translated from Goidelic-Celt (Irish, Scots and Cornish Gaelic) as “Summer’s End”. It is a very ancient feast with roots as old as European civilization itself. In England, the holiday became All Hollows Eve, shortened by the changes in language over centuries to All Hallows e’en and then to Halloween. During the early Middle Ages, the Church made an attempt to assume the day into the calendar (as people insisted upon marking the holiday) as the night before All Saints’ or All Souls’ Day, a day to go to mass and pray. During Puritan times, the day became, like most holidays, “evil and Pagan” a sin and a crime to celebrate. They equated such things not with paganism, per se, but with what the English after Henry VIII called “the Old Religion”: Catholicism. They felt the same way about Christmas, Carnival and Lent; and Lady Day (The Feast of the Assumption), May Day and Easter. Their zeal is the root of the modern day fundamentalist assault upon Halloween. These people also reveal their true agenda when they bring up the Mexican celebration of Dia de los Muertes in the same breath. It may come as news that Samhain is truly the End of the Old Year, and although the Celts may have celebrated it as the New Year - as the Medieval Welsh tradition of “Calendais” suggests - during the Roman Empire, when the calendar was set for most of Europe by Empirical decree, Samhain fell during “Kalends” the end of harvest and beginning of the "unlucky time": the fallow of the year. The New Year was celebrated at the end of this fallow time, in late February or early March. Nobody did business, signed contracts, traveled without much due consideration, became engaged, accepted a commission in the military, was coronated as royalty, or married during the unlucky months of the fallow. It is possible that the custom of holding engagement parties and university entrance examinations in April and marrying and granting degrees in June began in the Roman Empire. It is an interesting aside to note that brides of those by-gone days would also have been horrified at the thought of a May wedding, as the Goddess Maia, or Britomartis as she was also called, hated the institution of marriage and would curse them with unhappiness and infertility. Ancient Roman brides wore saffron dyed tunicas and red veils, for prosperity and fertility. An end-of-harvest “Kalends” wedding certainly would have caused scandal. The Days of the Dead - Dia de los Muertes - are celebrated at the same time as our Samhain by Latino cultures and are a mixture - in a wonderful, creative, living folkloric sense - of native customs of Mexican, Meso- and South American Harvest festivals and  We wear costumes and masks during this season for a couple of reasons: One, it is the "memory" of Carnival, the great festival held in Europe mostly just before Lent, but in some places, as a Harvest Festival in the autumn. In Celtic countries (the Celts, as you may recall, went Everywhere, and took their bagpipes with them) gang abraid on Samhain night was a little dangerous, the fairies (like the dread Phuka, Wil'o'the Wisp, or Kelpies) and the dead might find you and haunt you. Especially your long-gone relations. Relations, for some reason, in Celtic lore, played nasty tricks on the living, and tended to drop body parts around. In order to stay "invisible" to such beings, one traveled in disguise. If you were unlucky enough to meet Feys or Sidhi abroad, an Irish traveler would offer a gift of acorns, hazelnuts and rowan berries. It was also an old custom, according to J. Campbell, that the harvest not brought in by All Hallows at the edges of the fields, was left for the "Tinkers, Gypsies, [-who are different -], gleaners, and fairies" - a sharing of the wealth. Of course, by November, the weather in the British Isles would have made harvesting fairly miserable in any event.  The Cowboy standard, “Ghost Riders in the Sky” is a folk song sung today based upon this very ancient folklore connected to the autumn and the “dying of the year”. Oral tradition has it that Stan Jones, as a young boy, rode to the top of a hill in Arizona to check on a windmill. A Storm was "a-brewin' up" and the blades had to be locked down to prevent damage. As he worked, lightening flashed and the wind blew, an old cow hand told him that if he weren't careful, "The devil's herd would be after them both ..." Sure enough, in the boiling clouds, Stan could make out the angry red eyes, the pounding hoofs of the herd, and the shouts of the devil's phantom cowpokes themselves. Feeling the hot breath of the herd behind him, the terrified boy leaped on his horse and rode home as fast as he could. Forty years later, Stan Jones sat on his from porch in death Valley and wrote the immortal country standard: THEIR BRANDS WERE STILL ON FIRE AND THEIR HOOVES WERE MADE OF STEEL, THEIR HORNS WERE BLACK AND SHINEY AND THEIR HOT BREATH HE COULD FEEL. A BOLT OF FEAR SHOT THROUGH HIM AS HE LOOKED UP IN THE SKY, FOR HE SAW THE RIDERS COMIN' AND HE HEARD THEIR MOURNFUL CRY. YIPPEE-YI-YA, YIPPEE-YI-YO, GHOST RIDERS IN THE SKY. (1948, Stan Jones)) Other articles by the author concerning ghostly events of the season: Le Vampyre, the Gothic Novel, and George Gordon, Lord Byron appears here: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/20031201/byron.shtml Ladies of the Darkness Trows, Rusalki, Vampires, and White Ladies of Literature and Folklore http://www.irosf.com/toc.qsml?ishid=10046Other resources: Loreena McKennit, All Souls Night: Video About Samhain, the Celtic New Year: http://www.allsaintsbrookline.org/celtic/samhain.html Mything Links: http://www.mythinglinks.org/Samhain.html Dia de los Muertes website: http://www.mexconnect.com/mex_/feature/daydeadindex.html Video form Albuquerque: http://www.abqtrib.com/videos/2007/nov/07/152/ The Roman Calendar: http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-roman.html Tribute site for Ghost Riders in the Sky: http://deenotes.homestead.com/ghost.html All rights reserved, Lezlie Kinyon, October 2008 Sona Samhain! |
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Harvest Festivals: Essay |