At Samhain, the circle of the year has come to its final spoke in the Wheel. At this time, the harvest has finished, the dying god interred, and the goddess has descended to the underworld to be with her beloved. Above, her people prepare for the veil between the worlds to thin; dead ancestors will be visiting, and with the harvest tools put away, there’s a new year to think about, resources to manage, goodbyes to say, and plans to make. Meanwhile, the now barren land gives way to the rulership of the Crone.
In some climates, October is a sad and beautiful time. Autumn leaves cover the ground like bright bleeding, leaving the trees bare. The grass fades from green to brown and in mornings carries the white hoar of frost. The temperatures grow colder, forcing more and more time indoors, and with what we have gathered, we have just a bit more time to remember the loved ones we no longer have. Many Pagans believe a membranelike veil separates the world of spirit from the physical world and that it thins the most in late autumn. Things pass through that membrane. Those things might be spirits, faeries, or even the departed ones we wish so much to see again. This veil also makes Samhain season ideal for magick and divination.
Halloween coincides with Samhain. Consequently, many Pagans see Halloween as half of the whole celebration. This time of costumes, revelry, and social inversion grew from the same traditional roots. Samhain is serious and loving—Grandma might visit—while Halloween releases our restrained wildness. Many Pagans revere both agricultural cycles and the processes of nature; this dichotomy manifests in this sometimes two-sided celebration. Both the reverent and the silly have their place on October 31.
Samhain is Gaelic and usually pronounced SOW-win. Most Gaelic speakers translate it to mean “summer’s end.” In the early twentieth century, some scholars argued that the name for the holiday came from the word samhtheine, meaning “fire of peace” (MacLean). Modern Celtic and Druidic Pagans may have several other names for this day as well, depending on the flavor of their Celtic roots. The Welsh may call it Calan Gaeaf (or Nos Calan Gaeaf), and the Manx Oie Houney or Hop-tu-naa. The Welsh, Scottish, and Irish customs were often about ensuring home and hearth had protection through the winter. The Manx saw (and still see) Oie Houney as a new year celebration. These are not all the same holidays as Samhain exactly—but perhaps around this time of year with the veil so thin, the division of meaning and practice between different cultures thins as well. For modern populist Pagans, all these old and still living festivals inform the meaning of their own celebrations.
The Fire Festival
To the ancient Celts, Samhain marked the most important of four Celtic fire festivals. Located halfway between an equinox and a solstice, it is one of four cross-quarter festivals. Every year on the first frost after the full moon in October, families allowed their hearth fires to burn out. At this time, they brought back herd animals from grazing and completed gathering the harvest.
After the fires died, they gathered with the rest of their tribe to observe the Druid priests relighting the community sacred fire using friction. The priests induced friction with a wheel and spindle: the wheel, representing the sun, turned from east to west and lit sparks. At this time, they made prayers and offerings or sacrifices related to their needs. The Crom-cruach came out: this was an emblem of the sun, and scholars are uncertain whether it represented a Pagan god or symbolized an aspect of nature embodied in a stone pillar.
The villagers left offerings of food at the edge of their village for wandering spirits and faerie folk. There was also a sacrifice of a black sheep, a black sow, or cattle. At the end, every person returned home with a brand lit from the sacred fire, which they used to relight their own hearth and then to light bonfires or to set torches at the edge of their fields. These ancients considered it a sin to relight the hearth fire any other way.
To the ancient Celts, Samhain marked the completion of the harvest and called them to put their energy into preparing for the coming winter. It also betokened a day when their ancestors would come to visit, followed across the veil by all sorts of creatures both good and bad that moved freely in the mortal world on Samhain night. Since faeries were often unfriendly, the Celts dressed themselves as animals or as other fearsome creatures as a way to prevent kidnapping by faeries and later by witches.
The Christian Influence
When Christianity spread throughout Europe, the church officials went about converting the area heathens by converting their holidays. Sometimes church officials did this by scheduling an observance for a different time of year. Other times, they simply renamed the old Pagan holiday for a saint’s day. In the fifth century, Pope Boniface attempted to repurpose the ritual of honoring otherworldly spirits and the dead, identifying it as a day to honor saints and martyrs, and moving the holiday to May 13.
When the late October/November fire festivals continued anyway, in the ninth-century Pope Gregory decided to move the saints and martyrs day back to the same day as the secular festival of the dead. In the case of Samhain, rather than negate the festival of the dead, the church resorted to declaring November 1 All Saints’ Day, alternatively called All Souls’ Day. Later the church added All Souls’ Day on November 2, possibly because All Saints’ Day failed to displace the Pagan rituals.
Eventually both All Saints’ and All Souls’ became distinct holidays unto themselves, with All Saints’ an observance for souls believed already ascended to heaven, and All Souls’ as a day to honor souls possibly still working out some issues in purgatory. In Ireland, these days marked a time for family reunions after cow-milking season finished. Over time the night before November 1, called among many names Hallowe’en, Allhallows eve, or Hallowmas, became the repository for most of the original Pagan practices.
The Export of Hallowe’en
When the Ulster Protestants (Ireland) settled in the United States in the nineteenth century, they brought their own Samhain/Halloween traditions along. They had parties, games, and masquerade parades, and their non-Irish neighbors joined the revelry. Most of what the other colonists adopted was the tradition of parties and games for children. Older children and young adults could attend these parties as part of local courtship practices.
In the 1930s, the tradition of Halloween pranking became a significant and expensive problem in many American communities. By 1950, most cities had some type of trick-or-treating event as a way of distracting the troublemakers.
Halloween caught on in the United States as a commercial event around 1970, when it stopped serving only as a holiday to entertain children and became a secular holiday for everyone. The LGBT community in New York adopted the holiday as a day to celebrate their true selves, college students began having costume parties and trick-a-shot events, and companies began producing paper-wrapped candy and house decorations.
As Halloween became prevalent in the United States, it also became more controversial. Some Christians aware of its Pagan origins objected strenuously to expanded observation of the holiday in the United States. People in rural areas especially referred to Halloween by the derogatory “Beggar’s Night” as they saw it as door-to-door panhandling and sometimes extortion. The tradition of pranking as currently practiced is generally just base destruction, uncreative on the part of the vandals and expensive on the part of its victims.
The Reassertion of Samhain
In truth, Samhain changed costumes more than it disappeared. By 1980, as the Pagan movement in North America and the Wiccan and Traditional Witch movement in the United Kingdom grew, more people began practicing serious and solemn celebrations on October 31 or on the full moon closest to it. Many in the United Kingdom never really stopped practicing the old Samhain traditions, embedded as they were in the folk culture of their communities. Pagans who now observe the holiday often practice modernized versions, complete with horror movies, trick-or-treating, and pumpkin carving. Others prefer a solemn observation. Many specific traditions of Paganism may have their own prescribed practices for the day, as well.
The veil bleeds thin at Samhain, and that very small, soft line between secular and spirit especially shows in the meaning behind medieval and more modern Samhain practices. In the end, many of the traditions of this holiday that appear Pagan are actually embedded in Christian lore, such as trick-or-treating, whereas the seemingly Christian practices, such as honoring the dead, have a deeper connection to the old Pagan lore. Many of these deep-rooted ancient practices also make appearances, sometimes in new forms, in modern Pagan tradition.
Night Lights
The Celtic fire festival took on new expressions in the Middle Ages, some of which are still practiced well into the modern day. For instance, in Wales and the Scottish Highlands, servants and boys from around age eight into their teens would go to a bonfire built at the main street of the village, light torches, and run to field and farm, planting the torches at the boundaries of their properties. Families and communities might then build bonfires on hills close to their farms. These bonfires, called samghnagans, kicked off the land rituals of those nights. The intention, according to the Welsh, was to scare off faeries. In later years, they said it protected their farms and homes from witchcraft.
For those who went out into the night, they carried carved turnips on strings with a glowing piece of coal inside. These lanterns, called jack-o’-lanterns, came to refer to a Christian legend about a blacksmith named Old Jack—a man so evil that both heaven and hell refused him. With nowhere to go but purgatory, he had to roam the roads on Hallowe’en night with nothing but a turnip lamp to light his way. When Hallowe’en observances came to the New World, pumpkins were more common than turnips, so the Irish settlers used those for their lanterns instead.
Often the men of Wales might stay out at the bonfires also lit on hilltops on Halloween night, throwing firebrands at each other, engaging in somewhat violent games, and lighting off fireworks. When the fires burned out, they ran down the hills shouting. In the northern parts of Great Britain, sometimes they also carried noisemakers, such as bells and horns, that they played as they ran.
Over time, the rituals for protection from faeries changed to protection from “witchcraft.” In Victorian times, villagers would throw an effigy of an old woman into the flames and call that “burning the witch.”
Welsh communities also enacted a Halloween ritual called a Tinley. After the fires in town centers or on farms burned down, every member of that community placed a stone in the ashes, forming a circle. If a person found his or her stone moved the next morning, the community considered this person claimed by the fey, and expected him or her to die within the coming year. For all the seeming superstition, these rituals also had a practical benefit—the fire and ash protected fields from invasive plants the following year.
The Irish, on the other hand, put out their hearth fires on Samhain and used candles in the evening instead. Women of the house would make candles for each of her neighbors. She would give them to her neighbors to pray over, and pray for her neighbors over the candles given to her.
Lighting the Way for the Ancestors
The torches of the Welsh and the jack-o’-lanterns left at the edge of walks “kept witches away,” but they also lit a path for ancestors wandering across the veil. Candles might be placed in windows—usually in the west, to represent the land of the dead—or lights placed along walkways and paths so that the beloved dead visiting from across the veil could find the way to the door of their loved ones’ homes.
The Celts considered it unlucky to let a hearth fire go out on Samhain night. It meant darker evens awaited them in the coming year.
Feeding the Dead
This night also called for a “dumb supper” or similar acts of feeding dead ancestors that might cross from the veil—or purgatory—for a visit. During these events, people set out food for their family and for their departed ancestors. Participants consumed these meals either in silence or in muted tones, except at the beginning of the ceremony, when they invited ancestors, and at the end when they bid the ancestors to leave.
In Ireland, families left the doors and windows unlocked, and set out cakes saved for the visiting dead. Any mortal who ate it was guilty of sacrilege and was condemned to afterlife as a hungry ghost. After the meal, the dead apparently expected entertainment, so children played games related to the rituals of Samhain while the adults discussed the events of the previous year for the ancestors to hear.
This tradition also came to Colonial and post-Colonial United States, where it became an overt superstitious magickal practice. The version reported by one group of Kentucky folklorists stated that the supper was prepared in silence, but that those making it also walked backward the entire time, and when possible prepared the food with their hands positioned behind their backs (Lindsey). No one would eat until a sign, ostensibly supernatural, appeared, such as two men carrying a corpse or a large white dog.
The Fearsome Things
While the early Celtic Christians invented Old Jack, the British Isles had other monsters to fear tracing back to their Pagan days. Yet others reflected the evolving political history of the Isles. Early on, people carried lanterns on Samhain night and went out in groups lest they run into any of a host of wicked characters. They might run afoul of a Pucah (or Pookah) a shapeshifting faery prone to both seduction and outright kidnapping. This was far from the only lurking shadow.
The Lady Gwyn (or Wen) was a woman who appeared dressed in white, sometimes headless and evil, sometimes playing the role of a benign lost soul. Similar to many spirits associated with Allhallows, she chased travelers she caught wandering in the night. A popular folk song describes this lady:
A tail-less Black Sow and a White Lady without a head
May the tail-less black sow snatch the hindmost.
A tail-less black sow on winter’s eve,
Thieves coming along knitting stockings. (Howard)
This seemingly nonsensical verse may combine forgotten goddess images with water spirit images. Different folktales about white ladies and about the White Lady appear throughout the British Isles. In one story, a man, seeing her in distress, asks her if he can help, and she asks him to hold on to her hands until she tells him to stop and her troubles would leave her. A barking dog distracted the man so he let go her hands—she disappeared, crying that she was bound for yet another seven years. In a gentler legend, a farmer saw a woman in white scattering rose petals in a sheep’s meadow. When she left, he gathered the flowers. The next day, the flowers disappeared, but he found three gold coins in their place (Hope).
In addition to these tales of enchantment, more frightening/less benign White Lady stories appear in different locales throughout Great Britain. In many of these tales, her character is a tragic figure—victim of murder or suicide—or is a guardian of treasure. In other stories, she appears as a spirit that dances in memoriam on the site of mass deaths, and in yet others she is herself a banshee and a death omen. While often the stories speak of a white lady, in Wales the stories become specific: the Lady Wyn is a specific Lady in White associated with Samhain. A white lady, on the other hand, can refer to a specific class of spirits mainly notable for appearing wearing white, usually in traditional funeral shrouds (Beck, 292–306).
Scholar J. C. Beck posits that White Lady/Lady Wyn lore is an example of the entity’s gradual downgrade as Paganism waned and Christianity rose in Great Britain. The Lady Wyn may have begun as a goddess, then downgraded to a water/well spirit, and at last downgraded to a ghost story. A black sow, often associated with Lady Wyn, at one time symbolized the goddess Cerridwen in her crone aspect. This suggests that the Lady Wyn is actually the goddess Cerridwen, appearing to the inhabitants of the land in a new way (Cuhulain). As Christianity demonized Paganism in Europe, stories about her began to represent her as more wholly evil.
Along with the Black Pig, folk might encounter the Dullahan, or sometimes ghosts, not always of the friendly departed. The Black Pig, often associated with the White Lady, served as a diabolic image. Irish families often considered this pig an incarnation of the devil. In one Welsh ritual, when the bonfires went out, those tending it ran away shouting, “The cropped black sow seize the hindmost!” This tradition suggested running away from evil.
The Dullahan, sometimes described as a malicious imp, more often referred to a headless horseman that appeared on deserted roads at night. This personage appears as a death omen, carrying his own head at his side, and calling out the name of a person destined to die that night.
Another piece of lore involving horsemen as hunters, the Faery Host, bore a strong resemblance to Northern Europe’s Wild Hunt. According to the Celtic lore, on Samhain night, the faery mounds opened and the Wild Host/Hunt (or Faery Host) came forth. Often this involved a hunting party, usually royal, accompanied by baying dogs, usually black, that ran ahead of and alongside the hunters. Some travelers might report seeing mortal adults kidnapped by this hunt—those who witnessed this often reported seeing their neighbors running with or from the Wild Hunt. The only way to avoid the hunt if caught outdoors was for the traveler to throw him or herself on the nearest soil, or better yet, into the nearest fallow field.
The identity of the hunters and their quarry changed according to the folklore of a given region. Sometimes the hunters came from other tales, such as King Arthur or King Herod; on other occasions locals identified the hunter as a man sinful or sacrilegious in life. Those hunted might also be recently departed community sinners, sometimes a lady in white, and sometimes woodland spirits. The Scottish added to this legend’s atmosphere with tales of unbaptized infants wandering the woods at night, moaning.
In Northern Europe, people attributed the hunts to the gods of weather as well as the gods of death (in the case of Woden, these were one and the same.) Also called the Furious Host, locals believed that Odin himself led these hunts, sometimes accompanied by the goddesses Bertha and Holda. In addition to Odin’s hunt, stories of the Goddess Bertha collecting troops of unbaptized children and flying them across the winter sky colored tales of the ghostly storm.
In attempts to explain what prompted the legends of the Wild Hunt, scholars looked to natural phenomena for explanations. As storm gods, Odin/Woden represented natural phenomena and storms, especially storms common just before winter. Some scholars thought that early Pagans interpreted thunder and howling storms as the Wild Hunt breaking into this world and giving chase to its prey. Another theory is that geese migrating across Great Britain and Europe in late October sounded like baying hounds at night. Yet another theory is that the wind in the trees prompted earlier people to think a hunt was afoot.
In yet another incarnation of this legend, sometimes it was just one hunter—the Specter Huntsman. Often this was a single hunter on horseback accompanied by dogs. The ghostly hunter often resembled either the Wild Hunt or the Dullahan.
The dogs/hounds that ran on these hunts also had their own flavor of lore. Nicknamed “Gabble Ratchets” or formally called Gabriel Ratchets, they were named after the Archangel Gabriel, who was believed to make announcements/deliver messages at the command of God. The sound or sight of these dogs, considered portentous, usually signaled death for any lone traveler exposed to them. Some legends identified the dogs themselves as the souls of unbaptized children or as will-o’-the-wisps (lights that hovered between heaven and earth) that acted as spirits attempting to lure night travelers to their deaths. These stories caused some people to avoid the outdoors at Halloween, believing that seeing any apparition could induce death.
Not all the fearsome things stayed outdoors, however. People took great care to prevent faeries from absconding with human children or livestock on Samhain night. Cradles and animals received a sprinkling with holy water or parents might hang a parshell, a special type of cross, above the child’s bed. Parents placed a dead ember from the fire or iron in an infant’s cradle. Older children might have oatmeal or salt placed on their heads. In addition, some families put food outside for the faeries, in hopes of deterring them from helping themselves to other living creatures around the property. The Irish had a remedy for confrontation by faeries or malevolent spirits on Halloween night: should one confront you on a darkened road, throw some dust from under your feet at it. Then, run.
Trick-or-Treating
Trick-or-treating is a modern incarnation of old Irish, Manx, and Scottish practices that sometimes occurred over multiple nights leading to Samhain. In Ireland, the poor went door-to-door “mumming” or “souling.” They offered songs and prayers for the dead. As payment, the owners of the homes visited gave them soul cakes, cookies with a cross drawn on top, representing each soul detained in purgatory. Some saw the soulers, who often carried turnip lamps as they went about their rounds, as enacting the role of the dead souls seeking their food offerings. The regions that called this practice “mumming” were also referring to a type of folk theater called “Mummer’s Theater.” These often involved loose, strange plots involving stock characters. Saint George and the Doctor was a common play used at Samhain.
In Somerset, children went door-to-door on October 30, called “Punkie Night.” The colloquial name “punkie” referred to their turnip (or beet) lanterns. On this holiday, children begged their neighbors for money to pay for fireworks used on the next night, called Mischief Night. The locals considered it unlucky to refuse—the children carrying the punkies represented the souls of dead children.
Some regions came to call this door-to-door collections practice Halloween rhyming. Often children sang a song to the people who answered their doors and soul cakes or soul meat was part of an expected exchange. Mumming in Ireland gave way to going door-to-door, saying, “Help the Halloween party! Any apples or nuts?”
In France, the tradition differed slightly. Rather than demanding food, children collected flowers from their neighbors, so that they might decorate graves of family members the following morning.
Pranks
As strange as it may sound, the Halloween tradition of pranks —even the obnoxious ones—has a foundation in Pagan tradition: blaming the faeries. While nothing on record speaks specifically to the logic or ritual of it, it seems that part of the holiday involved acting out a series of pranks either as a way of fooling the faeries or just because people might just blame the faeries, allowing the culprits to avoid consequences for the things they wanted to do. Many of the more popular pranks were “threshold” pranks, such as taking doors off hinges, soaping windows, and de-picketing fences.
Since the season marked a time of passage between the physical world and the spiritual, it’s possible these pranks represented the breaking of the veil barriers. While any ritual intent has long since disappeared from record, spoken word records mention that often the recipients of these pranks were unpopular members of the community.
In Scotland, people call October 30 “Cabbage Night,” and those in Nova Scotia call the same tradition “Cabbage Stump Night.” To celebrate, spiteful people throw cabbage stumps at the doors of people they dislike. Perhaps this practice releases some anger in a manner that does less property damage than other expressions might cause.
In Scotland, when a father had daughters of marriageable age that he refused to let court, frustrated young men might wrap themselves in straw and break into the house of their would-be sweethearts, stuffing the girls’ father up the chimney or stealing food and demanding a dance from the daughter.
In northern England, “Mischief Night” was a nickname for Halloween or for October 30. Typically a night of mayhem, young men threw fireworks in mailboxes, whitewashed windows, filled locks with glue, and stole gates. In Oxfordshire, people rolled tar barrels down the streets. In the North of England, teams pushed the tar barrels up and down streets in races. Many of the pranks played imitated the tricks attributed to faeries and goblins.
The pranks themselves often had traditional names and practices. For instance, in some areas of the United Kingdom and Canada, on October 31 it’s common to rub chalk on someone’s back, yell “Halloween!”, and take off running. This practice, called chalking, may have originated from an obscure old holiday called Chalk-Back Day.
The Scottish prank called “Burning the Reekie Mehr” required a kale stalk filled with tallow. The prankster lit one end, put it against the keyhole of a victim’s house, and blew on the other end until the house filled with smoke. Sometimes, when young women went to pull kale stalks, young men might leave a punkie out in the middle of the kale field to spook them.
While it’s not known what spiritual role such mischief played on Allhallows (except, perhaps, to convince the goblins their services weren’t needed) not only have the pranks continued and evolved, they are the main reason almost every city in the United States now allows trick-or-treating.
Costumes
What began with the Druids and ancient Celtic villagers dressing as animals or as frightening creatures such as ghosts and wandering the edge of their settlements in groups evolved into the moving ritual theater known as mumming. Along with singing traditional songs, sometimes those who performed also took on traditional costumes.
In South Wales, men and boys would dress as women while singing of a White Lady who sat in a tree accompanied by pigs and apples. Locals referred to these costumed characters as gwarchod, which translates to “hags.” They often costumed themselves in sheepskin and wore ragged clothing and masks. In some areas, a man dressed as a horse accompanied mummers on their rounds. This character carried a horse skull painted black and decorated with ribbons, which he kept hidden under a white cloth. This traditionally had a jaw that snapped. This skull had several nicknames, such as “Old Hob” and “Wild Horse.”
When the Irish came to the new world, they brought their costume traditions along. In colonial America, they had masquerade parades that over time caught on among their neighbors. The Victorian aesthetic popular in the United Kingdom and in the United States made Halloween a night much more tame than the folklore in its roots. Examples of this are apparent in vintage Halloween cards, showing young women participating in witchlike pursuits that refer to divination and other archaic practices in a way that suggests such games were trendy.
The costumes veered away from that of goblins, ghosts, and faeries in the 1930s when commercial costume companies appeared. The earliest costumes included characters relevant to that time—Little Orphan Annie, Mickey Mouse, and the ever-popular witch.
Parties and Games
Over the years, Halloween night became an evening to entertain children while adults reflected on the year prior and made plans for the year to come. These parties served as small family reunions, but also played a role in matchmaking, giving the eligible men and women of the community a chance to socialize. Apples, nuts, and kale all figured significantly into
Halloween/Samhain tradition, with the apples and nuts often given as gifts to children. This happened in part because kale came to maturity latest in the fall, and the winter stores of apples and nuts opened up around Samhain. A common nickname for Halloween was Nutcrack Night, in part because on that night people began eating the nuts collected earlier in the season.
Attendees played several games throughout the evening. The more popularly remembered games and superstitions involved apples. The United States and the United Kingdom had apple bobbing (also called apple ducking) as a common Hallowe’en game, where children attempted to remove apples from a tub of water with only their teeth. In the United Kingdom, a hostess might toss a silver coin to the bottom of the tub. The first to catch it hands-free kept the prize and was thought to be the first to marry. In colonial America, the first young woman to snag an apple won the title of the first to marry.
Another game played throughout the United Kingdom called Snap Apple dated back to the original Druids. In its initial form, the host tied an apple to one end of a rope, threw it across a barn rafter, and then tied a lit candle to the other end. Players had to catch the apple in his or her teeth without getting burned by the candle. This game gave way to a less dangerous form, still called Snap Apple (or in the United States sometimes “tethered apple”) where the players tied apples to strings, suspended them from the ceiling (usually by tying the string around a rafter), and then swung them at one another tether-ball style while attempting to catch an apple with only the teeth. Those who won, according to divination, would have successful marriages within the year.
In addition to these games, apple peels and seeds had their own divination traditions. A person seeking information on a future spouse would peel an apple in a continuous spiral and throw it over his or her shoulder. The peel formed the first letter of the true love’s first name. In one variation, the peel staying whole meant that the querent faced marriage by the end of the year, while the peel breaking meant the querent faced another year unwed. Women could take two seeds from the apple and place them on the cheek or eyelids after naming each after two opposite states of fortune—for example, wealth or poverty, travel or home, or marriage or spinsterhood. The first to fall off was the answer to the question. Cutting an apple in half, crossways, so that the center formed a star, might also serve as a divination tool. If two seeds appeared, the apple predicted an early marriage; three meant wealth or inheritance; four meant travel; five meant good health or a sea voyage; six meant wisdom or fame; and seven meant fame or a wish granted. Three guests might also hang apples on a string and stand in front of the fire; the first to have their apple fall would marry first, the last might never marry.
The abundance of nuts also led to their frequent use in Samhain and Autumn Equinox divinations. A favorite method determined the compatibility of a couple. If two nuts, named after a pair of lovers and thrown in a fire burned bright together, it foretold a happy marriage. Two nuts jumping apart warned of arguments. A nut failing to ignite meant the pair faced unhappiness.
Cabbage and kale also configured into popular divination and Halloween magickal practices. The most practiced of these involved young men and women old enough to marry sneaking into a kale patch at midnight and pulling up a stalk without looking at it. The youngest person hung the kale above the bedroom door overnight and then examined it the next day. The character of the kale purportedly revealed the character of the kale thief’s future spouse. For instance, a plant with lots of soil meant marrying rich. One with a black core meant the future spouse had a temper. Longer plants meant a tall sweetheart.
One party game called for naming seven kale stalks after seven people present. The partygoers pulled the stalk, and then each person witnessed an examination of their own character through kale. If the person that pulled the kale hung it over a door on Halloween night, the first person to walk beneath it the next day could take it, place it beneath his or her pillow, and have an excellent dream about the future. Children in want of a new brother or sister would pile kale outside their parents’ door in hopes that it might result in a sibling.
Many of the Samhain divination traditions revolved around the identity of the future spouse, especially as November was the month that the most weddings occurred. In the alphabet game, a diviner cut every letter of the alphabet from a newspaper and then floated the letters in a bowl of water. The letters that floated to the top could reveal the name of a future spouse. In a similar game, young men were encouraged to write the names of female friends on slips of paper and then wrap the papers in dough. The young men then cast the dough onto the water: the woman revealed when the dough melted away was the young man’s true love. If perhaps he had trouble making decisions, someone wrote three names in the dust of a fireplace mantle and the one the young man’s finger landed on revealed his true love.
In another scenario, a young woman might, on Halloween day, go and thresh wheat, believing she would have a vision of her future mate by the time she finished her work. In a less strenuous version, a curious person might climb to some point that no four-footed animal could (usually a house roof) and close his or her eyes. The first animal spotted upon opening the eyes indicated characteristics of the future spouse. In an equally accident-prone variation, a person shut his or her eyes and walked backward to the end of his or her house. Upon opening the eyes, the first thing seen indicates the nature of fortune in the coming year. Among the things that were lucky to see were men, especially men on horses. In this superstition, seeing a woman foretold ill luck, especially spying an old woman; seeing anyone digging or a bird with its head under its wing were also bad.
The fire and its ashes also held answers for Halloween truth seekers. Betrothed people were encouraged to blow on the ashes of a fire. If the ashes flew into the face, it warned of an unhappy marriage. The ashes around the hearth the morning after Halloween foretold the future—a footprint toward the front door meant a death within the year and one away from it meant marriage. In colonial North America, a blindfolded person would walk across a ring of fireplace ashes or flour. A footprint toward the door didn’t mean death of a loved one: it just meant bad luck, and a footprint away from the door meant good luck or marriage within the year.
Several marriage divinations involved performing proscribed actions for calling that person’s “fetch” or astral self from the body to the diviner’s local for the sake of identification. For example, in one popular spell, a young woman sowed a row of hemp seed at midnight on Allhallows. As she sat and watched, the apparition of her husband to be would appear to furrow the seed. In another version, a young woman would hang her nightgown in front of the fire and then watch the room through the keyhole of the closed door, waiting to see the ghost of her future husband come and turn the garment. She might instead choose, on Hallowe’en, to sit in front of a mirror at midnight, eating an apple and combing her hair—the man destined for her would appear to her over her left shoulder.
In a sort of inversion of the dumb supper, a young woman might also seek to see her lover’s form with “dumb cake” by mixing dough with any liquid except spring water. She would do this using her left thumb only, performing the kneading in total silence, and at midnight pricked her initials on them with a new pin before putting them into an oven to bake. She then sat on the opposite side of the room, waiting in silence for her the form of her future lover to appear and check on the cake’s progress.
A young man might pull flowers from the horse-knot plant and cut the tops off the stamens, then hide the flower from view. If, on All Saint’s morning, he found the stamens shot back to their original height, he knew his sweetheart returned his love.
In yet another variation, a woman would throw a blue ball of yarn out a window and chant the Lord’s Prayer in reverse while rewrapping the yarn and gazing out the window looking for the ghostly figure of her future partner. The yarn ball divination sometimes took place with presumed faery participation. In one version, someone threw an entire string of unraveled blue yarn into a limekiln. This person then rewound it until he or she felt resistance from inside the kiln. If nothing tugged, the diviner might die unmarried.
In another version, an unwed miller might perform this divination with the help of brownies called Killmovlis that specialized in mills. While often these creatures appeared to live to annoy the miller, they also seemed protective of the mill itself and sometimes did help with the work. At midnight on Halloween, the miller, seeking the name of his future wife, threw the ball of yarn in a kiln and again rewrapped until he felt resistance. The miller assumed the tension came from a Killmovli taking hold of the other end of the yarn inside the kiln. The miller would call “what holds?” and the brownie would, from his hiding space, snort the name of the future spouse.
While most Samhain divination games revolved around marriage questions, people also brought their concerns about health, career, weather, and wealth to the party. Farmers watched their bull to see what way it lay down on Hallowe’en—the direction indicated the direction of most wind through the winter. If Samhain fell on a Wednesday, farmers expected a rough winter. People threw shoes over houses to determine where they might be in the coming year: whatever direction they pointed indicated the direction that thrower might travel. There were multiple “three plates” divinations, where each plate contained something symbolizing a future possibility. Often mothers entertained children by piercing an egg, dropping the egg white into the glass of water, and foretelling future based on the visions created by the swirling white.
Despite the best efforts of the ninth century Christian Church, Samhain did not so much return as it remained. That, alongside Halloween, speaks to humanity’s enduring need to acknowledge fear, death, uncertainty, and loss. Samhain offers a chance for renewal and a chance to connect lovingly with the dead again. Halloween offers a release from the norm—often exactly what people need after enduring powerful grief. Pagans celebrate life, and with Samhain they do so by revering the dead, celebrating the chain of lives that brought us all together.