Remember the Burning Times. Samhain isThe Witches New Year
NEOPAGAN unknown author, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
These days Halloween has become another day in the year in which to sell lots of scary rubber and plastic paraphernalia, fake blood, creaky coffin lid opening soundtracks, the Monster Mash, etc etc. another commercial holiday. Children dressed in costumes go door to door with their pillowcases {environmentally friendly} asking Trick or Treat! The kiddies are given way too much sugar, and carefully pre-packaged non interfered with goods. Adults these days get into the Halloween theme by dressing up- straight guys love to be able to go out in drag on Halloween and generally party, funkily “spook-up” their environments and drink a lot. Lots of scary movies get shown.
But let’s not forget the origins of Halloween. It is Hallowed Evening. A Holy Evening, the Ancient Pagan/Wiccan New Year during the month when the Sun is in Scorpio, sign of Birth Death and Transformation. It is close to the mid-point between Autumn and Winter Solstice. Death is Rebirth. Wiccans honour this eve as the night when the veil between the two worlds is thinnest and much scrying, gazing into crystal balls and connecting with the spirits of the dead goes on as this night offers the easiest access.
The Wheel of the Year Turns and this is a Sabbat or Sabbath Night, covens gather to do Ceremony. This is a Sacred not a Scared Night.
Read about the history of Samhain https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/samhain
I wish in the midst of your pumpkin carving and revelry that you take time out to honour this day as it was originally intended. Remember in the midst of all the superficial trappings of Halloween, the hundreds of thousands, some say up to 9,000,000 mainly women, children and men who were accused of being witches by the Catholic Church who were tortured and burned at the stake. Old women, crones, medicine women, herbalists, midwives, pagans,their families, the poor, all innocent people who lived in harmony with Nature, who Loved their Mother the Earth, who knew the Wise Women’s Ways, the ancient ways to heal, to tend the sick, the dying, the mothers giving birth. It was a misogynist Nazi Christian tyranny that went on for over 300 years in Europe and to the New World where the last woman was burned at the stake at Salem. Remember this Holocaust because it wasn’t so long ago. You didn’t have to be Jewish or Muslim you mainly just had to be a woman and therefore evil in the sainted eyes of the Holy Christian Church.
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I remember my own burning, the Inquisitors {one of whom turned out to be in this present life, my first husband, and a couple of Real Estate Agents, one Jewish, one Black} I relived this memory of my past life during a Holotropic Breathwork session. Many other women also relived the same experiences. It was horrible, my own two children were forced to stand and watch as their mother was tied to the stake and the fire lit. Of course I wasn’t meek or mild, I screamed and cursed them all for their inhumanity and ignorance, for their sadism and cruelty.
Those 100,000-200,000 to 9 million innocent souls who were terribly tortured and burned are back now on this earth.
Deep in the cells of your being in your cellular consciousness be you male or female at this time, you remember the Burning Times when you lived in total fear, when you hid you pagan religion, your ability to help, to heal, when tyranny was all around and anyone could accuse you of being a witch thereby ensuring your almost certain death. Watch The Burning Times a Canada Film Board movie which chronicles in detail this stain upon humanity.
Light a candle for those hundreds of thousands of souls who were innocent and remember what it was like. Given 6 degrees of separation you or someone you love, your children or your dog or cat, a friend or even your landlord was surely enough one of those people.
It’s time to acknowledge the deep pain in the shadows of our unconscious. The only way to heal it is to acknowledge that shadow, let the tears flow, the grief, the agony. This brings it out of unconsciousness otherwise shadow control our actions unconsciously and allows us to keep inflicting pain on others and ourselves, believing that we are not worthy, not lovable, deceitful, sinners, powerless. There is a collective shadow of women being afraid to hold their power and beauty.
As this is a New Year in the Ancient Count of Days Light a Candle of Illumination and Enlightenment and go beyond the rage, the anger into Love and Forgiveness. For the only way out is to forgive the accusers for their ignorance. This takes great strength and courage, for as you Forgive them you also forgive yourself and allow yourself to be free of the past.
They will have gotten their karmic comeuppance.
HALLOWEEN is SAMHAIN is the Pagan New year!
We are totally out of synch with solar/lunar natural cycle Westerners who denigrate the earth, the Feminine, the Goddess, and ourselves celebrate New Year’s on a totally artificial Gregorian calendar date 2 months later. Why not get in synch now?
The commercialized version of Halloween which has been handed down to us, does partake of some of the original mystery of this night filled with ghosts and spirits walking amongst the living.
October 31 is the night when the veil which divides the worlds of the living and the dead is the thinnest. Covens of pagans, who are ancient nature worshippers, labelled witches and persecuted by the Catholic Church for centuries, would gather to celebrate this sacred Night, the direction of the North West on the great round of the wheel of Life.
Plates of cakes and wine with candles lit are offered to your beloved ancestors, without whom your consciousness and body would not be here. Recalling your departed relatives with reverence is part of the sacredness of this day.
An altar is decorated with autumn leaves, the oranges and golds, the pumpkin, a fall vegetable, one of the last of the season, symbolizes the full round, ripe with abundant seeds of Life. The harvest has been gathered, the fields are fallow. The King of the Waning Year has sailed over the sunless sea of the womb of the Mother, and alights on the Shining Isle, the luminous wolrd egg, becoming the seed of his own rebirth. The gates of life and death are opened! the new Sun child is conceived, the dead arise and walk, and to the living is revealed the Mystery, that there is no death, that life is everlasting, all endings are but new beginnings. We meet in time out of time, everywhere and nowhere, here and there, at once, to greet the Lord of Death, who is Lord of Life and the Triple Goddess who is the circle of Rebirth. – referenced to Starhawk.
It is the best night to scry gazing into crystals or water.
The popular children’s Halloween game of bobbing for apples comes down to us from the original ancient ceremonial use of the apple at the Halloween Sabbat ceremony. An apple is Goddesse’s sacred fruit of Life- remember the Garden of Eden? It is cut by a ritual sword or athame splitting it open to reveal it as the fruit of death as well. The 2 in One. All apples are Goddess symbols, the shape of the fruits’ seeds is the 5 sided pentagram , the five fold star of rebirth, as Venus actually cycles in the pentagram shape over time. Upright pentagrams are symbols of Venus herself. The downturned ones are inverted used for black magic and negative.
Apples and eaten wine is drunk. Celebrations of rebirth, renewal, everlasting life is what Halloween is all about. At Midnight Nov 1st becomes the day of the Dead celebrated throughout Mexico, it is coincidentally also part of that ancient Halloween celebration. The spirits of the dead are able to intermingle with the living. Meals are shared with the departed ancestors and friends. In Mexico great family picnics occur in cemeteries. The dead are considered to be helpers and protectors of the living from the beyond always with us but closer this night.
Happy Samhain
remember this is the best night for scrying and psychic work and contacting spirits. Time to go within in the Northern Hemisphere.
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Tara Greene,Tarot Reader, Astrology Psychic 