30/10/2025
🍁🍂🔥Samhain🔥🍂🍁
🍁Alholowmesse🍁
🍂Allhallowmas🍂
🔥Halloween🔥
Halloween and it's traditions date back.....way, way, WAY.....over 2000 years ago to the Celtic celebration of Samhain...... (pronounced in Scots Gaeilc, Sah-Vin, and Irish Gaeilc, Sow-Wen).
Ancient Celts marked the 31st of October as the most significant of the four quarterly fire festivals, taking place at the midpoint between the fall equinox and the winter solstice.
since the Celtic day began and ended at sunset.....Samhain is traditionally celebrated from sunset to sunset.....so in the Uk on October the 31st at 16.39pm to sunset on November the 1st at 16.37pm.
The festival celebrated the end of summer and the harvest and the coming dark, cold winter, and a time of year that was often associated with death as part of lifes natural cycles.
The Celts believed that on this night, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred...the thinning of the veil between worlds.
Many of the ways we celebrate Halloween today have their origins in not just the Celt festival of Samhain but also the amalgamation of future rulers and religious observances.
The Roman festival Feralia commemerating the passing of the dead, The Catholic feast of All Martyrs Day.
The most recent merging was in the 9th century and the Christian church sanctioned holiday of
"Alholowmesse" All-Hallowmas to honour the dead.
The timing of Samhain has an important connection to the Pleiades which has been recorded as being of great importance to the Druids.
The Pleiades cluster (7 sisters) is one of the most recognisable star patterns in the night sky and in the waning of the year (after the fall equinox)....it gradually rises higher and higher until it reaches its highest point in the sky, late in November.
On these nights, the cluster shines from nightfall until dawn then gradually begins to recede until disappearing from the skies altogether around the time of Beltane on the 1st of May.
Samhain has been recorded as coinciding with the midnight peak of the Pleiades cluster and with its importance to the Druids, this cluster would have been observed as the peak timing of their sacred rituals.
With the origins of Halloween originating from old Druid rites that coincided with the midnight peak of the Pleiades cluster....it was then.....and only then that they believed that the veil dividing the living from the dead would be ready.
HOWEVER?!?!?!........
Just a little extra something to ponderate on how and why and when?!?!
Several thousand years ago the Pleiades peak WOULD have occurred closer to the end of October, beginning of November BUT....... due to precession it now falls much later in the month of November. This year the culmination occurs on the night of November 17th.
Now....this may be irrelevant if you like celebrating Samhain or Halloween on the traditional October 31st date, but for those who might like to separate Samhain away from the commercialised and Christianised Halloween.....AND whoever this person they call
"??Sam ?? Hane ??" is..... that appears to like candy and scary s**t......
This.... extra knowledge represents a wonderful opportunity to regain our sacred ways and return to the ancient traditions of assigning sacred days according to astronomical alignments......just as the Druids and other wisdom keepers of old worldwide that followed the stars....not a man made calender of convenience and consumerism.
The Druids believed that this movement of the Pleiades marked the triumph of night over day......the beginning of the time of year that was ruled by the moon.....a time of introspection and recommital of service to community, a time to reunite with family and friends and strengthen bonds with those you cared about.....
Samhain and the period of time of Negetal (reed) in the Ogham calender is between
October 28 - November 23.
It is the reed moon and the eerie haunting sound as the wind whistles through its reeds like the souls of the dead being called to the Underworld.
The beautiful gentle sound to welcome, honour and bring to remembrance the ancestors at this time of year.
A time for divination, scrying & magical works.
A time of honouring & celebrating the cycle of life, death and rebirth.....welcoming the thinning of the veil and Samhain
Whenever and however you decide to honour this time....make it a sacred recommital of service not to self and consumerism but to community.
🍂🌿🍁Antheia 🍁🌿🍂
