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From the liner notes of my 2005 spoken word album, Radio Paganistan: Folktales of the Urban Witches.
Really, one has to wonder just who the speaker is.
Good Samhain, all!
I'll Be Home for Sam Hane
I'll be home for Sam Hane,
you can count on me.
Pumpkins glow on dancing bones
beneath the naked trees.
Hallows Eve will find me
where the hearth-fire's red:
Irish Revival writer James Stephen's dazzling little 1924 novel In the Land of Youth, though largely forgotten today, is nothing short of a modern pagan classic. In it, Stephens takes up an ancient Irish literary genre, back-stories to the Táin Bo Cuailinge, and recounts, in shining, lapidary prose, his tales (and tales-within-tales, and tales-within-tales-within-tales) of human and sidhe, of This World and the Other, and of the intercourse between the two.
The Song of Death is drawn from the novel's second section, “The Feast of Lugnasa,” but in this Season of the Ancestors it is the novel's first half, “The Feast of Samhain,” which I commend to the reader and which, in my opinion, richly deserves to become to the modern Samhain what Dickens' Christmas Carol has become to its eponymous holiday.
In the royal hall at Cruachan, on the Eve of Samhain—when gates between worlds swing wide—Ailill the King proposes to his assembled heroes a pastime while waiting for the feast to be made ready: that on this night of terrors, one of them should go out alone to tie a withy around the ankle of one of the dead men hanging from a nearby tree.
Two men go out, two men fearfully return, deed undone. Then Nera the Hero goes out into the night's darkness, withy in hand.
But things are not as they seem, for Ethal Anbual, King of the Sidhe of Connacht, is that very night proposing to raid and burn the royal hall at Cruachan....
The Song of Death
(James Stephens)
Wishing you all a Happy Samhain in the Northern Hemisphere; and Happy Beltane in the Southern Hemisphere!
Samhain article at my new blog, which I would post here except that it isn't Canadian per se: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/betweentheshadows/2014/10/samhain-song-for-the-dead/.
Blessed be!
For all its liturgical and cultural importance, Samhain has yet to inspire much popular music.
So when we end our big public Samhain ritual by joining hands and announcing, “Let's finish with the Samhain song that everybody knows,” you'll see eyebrows go up all around the circle.
When you first start in, you'll get a nice laugh, and then folks will belt it out like they mean it. After all, what's Samhain for, if not for Old Long Ago?
