⛤How To Celebrate Samhain⛤
Samhain, Celtic New Year, is the passage, threshold, conclusion and beginning.
It is the darkness from which everything begins, the silence from which the first vibration will arise, that initial void that must be in order for birth to take place.
Precious and necessary time. Time of rest and silent listening.
Threshold of this passage, of the limit between life, death and life, Samhain is an open door between the dimensions of time and existence.
The guardian of this threshold is Hecate, an ancient goddess who holds the keys of this Celebration.
Fairies and spirits are especially active on this night.
It is equally one of the many times to honor and host dead ancestors.
Prayers and food are left on the door steps and altar doors are left open and additional chairs are set outside.
Hearths are clean and home hearths are rekindled by a sacred common bonfire that is lit by rubbing.
The patron God and Goddess of this festival are the Dagda and the Morrigan.
On this day, spirits and fairy creatures invite mortals to spend a year together on the Hill of Delights with them; the druids act in the opposite direction, writing messages for the dead and entrusting them to the fire.
With the food and drinks of the afterlife, wine, beer and mead, they feast for the duration of the festival, which takes place from a minimum of 3 days to a maximum of 6 weeks, including meetings, battles, prophecies, spells and ritual sacrifices, in honor of the god of fertility Dagda and his wife Morrighan.
In the Celtic tale "The Wasting Sickness of Cuchulainn", the feast of Samhain is celebrated for a total of 7 days, of which 3 before and 3 after the party night.
To worthily celebrate the full circle of existence we must recognize the reality of death and physical decline as natural events, not as something to be ignored or hidden.
To these energies we must now pay homage but at the same time we must remember the new life that will come.
The Holly King teaches us that death is an end but also a beginning.
Let us keep in mind the lesson of the ancient Celts and do not indulge in sadness!
⛤Little things to do for Samhain:
Collect acorns, giving an acorn to friends and family as a wish for good luck.
Toast the local orchard with ale and cider in thanks for a copious harvest. Part of the harvest was left on the trees to ask for a good harvest in the coming years.
Apples were also buried to provide food for the spirits waiting to be reborn.
Before pumpkins were introduced, turnips were carved outside and lit with small candles. They could then be placed on the windows or carried in procession around the neighborhood to ward off diabolical intentions.
Scary stories were told throughout the night until the crowing of the cock drove all the fairies and spirits back into their world.
Stones marked with the owners' names were thrown into the fire and recovered the next morning. The state of the stone indicated the person's luck for the coming year.
Invite your friends to dinner, dress up as witches and ghosts, decorate your homes with Halloween pumpkins and celebrate traditional games by trying to grab the sacred apples hanging from a string or floating in a basin with our mouths of water!
You can have fun carving and digging pumpkins and turnips, inserting candles in them to expose them to the windows or balconies of your homes.
Finally, it is a moment in which in order to favor our regeneration, we can ritually abandon all the things of the past that we must or want to leave, abandon (let die) the things that we do not like in our life.
We can then write these things on slips of paper to burn them in our Samhain fire, which can also be a black or otherwise dark colored candle.
You can say a phrase three times like: "The so-and-so thing has come into being, the so-and-so thing has its season, and the so-and-so is going away!" Then, the slip of paper is burned in the flame.
We can then, more simply, give away or burn those objects that we no longer like.
It's time to give up bad habits, to change your life! In fact, before the new growth can begin, the soil must be fertilized with the remains of the previous year's crops and with the waste (if there were no death and decomposition there would be no Life).
An undoubtedly more complex ritual, but one that is worth performing, can be performed in our homes.
At sunset, the eve of Samhain, all the lights in the house go out and you stand in front of a black or dark candle. We hear the old year that is about to die, we remember all the good or bad things that you have experienced, we remember the people dear to you who are no longer there, and when we feel ready we light the candle saying: "I welcome them with this light. spirits of those who left before me. Welcome! ".
Let's take a cup or a glass full of wine and drink some, after having said: "To the dead!", Leaving a few drops.
We can then light a special candle for each of your dead friends or relatives: it can also be white or colored candles.
To light them we use the dark candle, and with the same candle we also light the Halloween pumpkin lanterns, if we have made any.
After doing this we take a plate or a tray where we will have put some bread or sweets (you can use the "sweets of the dead" if there are typical recipes in your area) and we invite invisible friends to share the food with us.
Always leave a few portions.
Then, taking the dark candle, we go to all the rooms and turn on all the lights, maybe just for a few minutes.
Let's go out the front door and throw a coin: it should be silver but a common coin will do anyway.
We say: "Money on the floor, money under the door" and leave the coin on the floor for a month, perhaps sliding it under the doormat. It will bring good luck to our home.
Let us meditate on the meaning of this holiday and leave the door of the house open to let our invisible friends in!
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