We are now approaching the end of the Celtic year, and the start of a new one. The harvest has been gathered, the wheat has been threshed and the grain stored or milled. The fields lie fallow, the ploughed soil now shades of Ochre, Umber and Sienna, catching the glints of cobwebs in the low early morning sun. For a land-based society the time for the end of one cycle and the start of another, and the liminal space between the two years is a time when the dead can be contacted, a time when the veil between the worlds is thin, and a propitious time for divinations, a time for the superstitions, myths and supernatural tales to be told around the fire. Samhain is a festival of the dead, and as such forms part of a common practice amongst cultures right around the globe to honour the dead.
Is it reasonable to suggest that as a culture as we have increasingly lost touch with the earth, with the soil from which our lives depend, we have also lost touch with our relationship with life and death as passages of transformation? How can we prepare ourselves for such events, and how can we integrate these events into our lives when our culture no longer accords such value and import to life, and is so fearful of death? Even Mindfulness training as it’s taught in the West from Buddhist teachings has deviated and omitted the meditations in the Charnel ground, watching the corpses burn as a reminder of our impermanence. In fact, all of our major life transitions are either medicalized or celebrated with large amounts of alcohol – a Central Nervous System Depressant.
By life I mean the very essence of all that is us and is around us from an animistic perspective, to feel it in our bodies as the seasons turn, to know that we also have our cycles; that as surely as the Earth spins, she has her rhythms, and we too are held within these circadian, diurnal and cosmic revolutions, as opposed to the fake, sterile, linear uber-immortality of our Western techno-lives. We too will die at some point. It is through our corporeal bodies that we fully realise our sensorial self, our wild and savage self, and by being attuned to our bodies we also fully recognize their ephemerality, their transience, and their fleeting existences here. By being fully alive we embrace death as part of life.
I have had my own share of contact with death, the loss of family members, my own recent close brush with death on a mountain, and friends who have lost loved ones recently. What always struck me about death was its’ finality. One minute you’re there, the next you’re not. You are somewhere else – maybe? I am not afraid of death or dying, and I live each day as fully as I can in case it may be the last. I fully rejoice in all those simple miracles that make up life: to share life with others, to breathe in the air, to see another sky, to taste, to feel the warmth of the sun, the soft liquid juice of the raindrops, the smell of the moss, lichens and fungi on the forest floor and the glory of the trees. Sometimes that’s enough – more than enough, to give thanks and to be connected in the consciousness that witnesses and experiences all these sensory and bodily-felt sensations, the eroticism of organic life, of which death is a part.
Living within an animistic world-view feeling everything glowing, spinning, vibrating with life, imbued with that consciousness that is everything, we can never feel alone. We are the progeny of the Sun, rocks, trees, and rivers. In Nature everything is in exchange, in relationship, and death is an inherent aspect of this vitality of life and movement. Death is never the end, just a transition from one state to another, the energy is never lost in this system – 1st law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
I’m passionate about being a vibrant member of this living community of Earth, to contribute something, not just consume, I do not resist death, as to do so would deny life, deny Nature, and deny that eternal cycle of conception, gestation, birth, growth, death, decay/decomposition, rebirth. I want to be able to say as Mary Oliver does in her poem
‘When Death comes’:
…When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
Samhain (Hallowe’en, All Hallow’s eve) still has a charm and an endearing quality in our lives, like many of these ancient rites that have largely lost their meaning and significance since becoming ‘christianised’, then commercialised, then ultimately Disneyfied.
If we can gently come back to the cyclical wisdom of Nature and insert ourselves into that equation, then we maybe can celebrate life and death, acknowledge our loss, and on the day of the dead, go and visit those relatives who have passed, open up their tombs and burial caves like the Ancient Greeks, let their spirits have a stretch, make a big feast to share with them, bring the kids along too and play and laugh and sing.
We are an expression of Nature, not separate and our rejection of death leads to a constriction of self towards life, but by embracing death we can expand, ‘we become more vibrant beings, and in doing so we become part of the ongoing cycle of birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth that has perpetuated life over aeons’.
Apart from the spiders I see outside my window with their pearly webs, I am conscious of 2 presences in my wanders at this time, the ever present and industrious Woodlouse who’s main task in life is to break down dead and decaying matter and make it palatable for the next set of organisms, and of course at this time of year – no coincidence, the fruiting bodies of fungi popping up everywhere to relish the damp, warm weather and maybe to join in the festive celebrations of the dead, after all, it’s their harvest too.
Neil Jordan In morte sumus Therapy Today 2017
1. Emminent historian Ronald Hutton disputes the origins of this festival and feels that there is insubstantial evidence for a Celtic New Year celebration of the dead. See Hutton, R. (2024). The Celtic New Year and Feast of the Dead. Folklore, 135(1), 69–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/0015587X.2023.2282282.
