Let's face it: modern Yule has undergone a thorough Christmasization.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, just a fact. Still, when we scrape away the encrusted barnacles from the ship of Yule—when we look, for instance, at the extended Winter Solstice celebrations of the Kalasha of what is now northwestern Pakistan, the last Indo-European-speaking people to have practiced their traditional religion continuously since ancient times—what emerges is revealed as something both strange and familiar beyond telling.

The same may be said for Samhain, now thoroughly reshaped by its proximity to Halloween, and by the Christian festivals of All Saints' and All Souls' Days.

When, however, we look at Samhain as it used to be—Samhain as recorded in the old lore—a new-old landscape emerges before us, a land both familiar and strange.

That is what makes the following little poem so remarkable. On the face of it—until you get to the last stanza, anyway—there's little that seems to be about Samhain at all. (Oh, but look deeper, my friend!)

Even more remarkable is the fact that this enumeration of the essentials of Samhain-ness is not, in fact, ancient, but a modern poem: an excerpt from a longer poem, “Fionn's Migrations,” in Martin Shaw and Tony Hoagland's 2020 Cinderbiter: Celtic Poems.

Listen, now.

Samhain Is the Name of the Season

Did Halloween—as Variety section writers would invariably have it—really originally mean 'Holy (or Hallowed) Evening'?

Short answer: no.

'Halloween' is an eroded form of 'All Hallow's Even'. ('Even' here = 'evening, eve.') 'Hallow' is a dialectal form of the Old English word that also became Modern English 'holy.' Anglo-Saxon hælig (pronounced, roughly, HAL-ee) was a fine old pagan word denoting something in a state of radical wholeness: a holy thing or person.

It's the latter usage that gave rise to 'Halloween.' After the Conversion, the word came to denote a 'saint,' a (Christian) holy person. So All Hallows' Eve originally meant 'All Saints' Eve,' the eve of the ecclesiastical feast of All Saints.

('Saint,' of course, was originally a French word from the Latin sanctus, both of which—like hallow in English—mean both 'holy' and 'saint.')

Pssst . . . wanna know a secret? 

...There is no “veil” between the worlds. We are always in multiple dimensions, and the veils, when there are any, are all in our heads! What is sacred today on Samhain is our communal decision to come together and venture beyond our imagined fail-safe points. Take your mother’s, sister’s, daughter’s, lover’s hand and walk bravely up to Death. Introduce yourself. Say hello.
     What a wonderful and holy time to practice leaping over the edge of Surrender into the dark juiciness of all Unknown. Death is just a doorway between particle and wave, and every particle of our being dissolves into wave every nanosecond of our existence—and then collapses back into the same old, same old who we think we are. NOT if we pay attention! Not if we think who we are is pure consciousness and out of that mystery decide to shapeshift ourselves into beings with great wings, beings shining with internal light, beings who dance an open spiral around the limits of death and life.
Miriam Dyak © Mother Tongue Ink 2015

Miriam Dyak (Seattle, WA) All my life is poetry. Close to 60 years of writing poems, journals, books and not about to stop. I am a Social Artist, Voice Dialogue facilitator and teacher, dream weaver, gardener of souls. miriam (at) miriamdyak.com
Paula Franco (Buenos Aires, Argentina) shaman woman, visual and visionary artist, teacher in sacred art, writer & poetess, astrologer, tarotist, creator of goddess card and mandalas book. 

They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see.

So wrote an anonymous Hebrew poet, probably in the 7^th c. BCE, speaking of what he would have called 'elilim, “idols.”

Of course he misses the point.

As anyone who actually lives with idols (for want of a better word) can tell you, they actually do speak and they do see; their interaction with their—um, worshipers—is subtle but undeniable. But perhaps that's a little too conceptually non-literal for your average dyspeptic 7th century Yahwist.

Likewise beyond his comprehension was the fact that the idol's obvious limitations are precisely part of the shining truth that it embodies.

Did you know that there's a specific name for a statue of the Horned God?

Neither did I, until I read Dorothy Edward's 1981 children's novel, The Witches and the Grinnygog.

Back during the Troubles, goes the story (the Witch Troubles, not the Irish ones), the three appointed Keepers of the most sacred image of the Master just barely manage to escape (on brooms) with their lives and the Lord. They hide Him away in a safe place, and go into a deep, deep sleep until such a time as they shall be needed again.

That time is our day. Where's the best place to hide a Grinnygog? Well, of course, precisely where no one would ever think to look for Him: among the carvings of the local church.

But now the historic church is being dismantled stone by stone, preparatory to being moved to a new location, and the Lord is once more in danger. (Or is He?) His guardians awake, and their magic along with them.

From the spiritual technology of the ancestors, let us consider the hallows—in Latin, the sacra—those holy objects of presence, in which a god is. If the work of religion is the making-present of the gods, this work the hallows accomplish, for the hallows are points of communication, articulating radical immanence. The genius of the paganisms has always been to understand that we best touch the universal through the specific.

To say “idol” implies a statue, but hallows take many forms.

One thing to remember about hallows is that in them, by them, through them, we look upon a god.