Samhain

History, Folklore and the Beginning of Winter

31 October to 1 November

Samhain is one of the four traditional Gaelic seasonal festivals, alongside Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh, and marks the beginning of winter in the old Gaelic calendar. Celebrated around the beginning of November, it falls at a time when the harvest has largely ended, livestock were traditionally brought back from summer pasture and preparations for the winter months became increasingly important.

Today, Samhain is also one of the eight festivals of the modern Wheel of the Year and is commonly associated with remembrance, ancestors, divination and the darker half of the year. Some of these associations have deep historical roots, while others belong to later folklore or modern Pagan practice. Much of what we know about early Samhain comes from medieval Irish literature rather than contemporary accounts of pre-Christian ceremonies, so it is worth distinguishing between the historical evidence and traditions that developed around the festival in later centuries.

What is Samhain?

The name comes from the Irish Samhain, which remains the Irish name for November. The festival belongs principally to the Gaelic traditions of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man, rather than representing a single festival celebrated in exactly the same way throughout ancient Britain. This is an important distinction, particularly as Samhain is now frequently described as a universal ancient Celtic festival.

Its position in the seasonal calendar is perhaps easier to understand. Samhain stood opposite Beltane, which marked the beginning of summer around the first of May. The year was therefore divided into a summer half and a winter half, reflecting a pastoral calendar in which the movement and management of livestock were closely connected with the seasons.

By the beginning of November, animals that had spent the warmer months on summer grazing needed to be brought closer to home, crops had been gathered and decisions had to be made about food, fodder and livestock for the winter ahead. The beginning of winter was therefore a significant practical point in the year, as well as one that accumulated stories, customs and supernatural associations over many generations.

When is Samhain?

Samhain is now usually observed from the evening of 31 October into 1 November. Its traditional association is with the beginning of November and the beginning of winter, although attempting to assign a precise modern date to very early seasonal observances can give a misleading impression of how such festivals would originally have been experienced.

The idea that Samhain was traditionally celebrated on the nearest astronomical cross-quarter day is sometimes encountered today, but this belongs largely to modern attempts to fit seasonal festivals to astronomical calculations. The traditional Gaelic festival is associated with the beginning of November.

The beginning of winter at this point may seem early to us because we generally think of December, January and February as the winter months. In the older Gaelic seasonal division, however, summer began with Beltane in May and winter with Samhain in November.

There is still something recognisable about that division in the countryside. During May the hedgerows fill with blossom and fresh growth, insects become abundant and the evenings lengthen rapidly. By the beginning of November, deciduous trees are losing their leaves, insects have largely disappeared, growth has slowed and darkness occupies far more of the day.

Samhain and the agricultural year

The agricultural background to Samhain is important because seasonal festivals developed within communities whose lives were much more closely governed by the natural year than ours are today. The success of the harvest and the condition of livestock could determine how comfortably a household survived the winter.

The movement of cattle between summer and winter grazing was an important feature of the traditional pastoral calendar. Around Samhain, livestock returned from their summer pastures and preparations were made for keeping animals through winter. This was also a time when difficult decisions could be made about which animals could realistically be fed during the colder months.

Food preservation, fuel and winter stores all assumed greater importance as daylight diminished and productive growth came to an end. The festival therefore belonged to a very practical seasonal transition between the abundance of the growing year and the restrictions of winter.

Samhain and the Otherworld

Samhain occupies an important place in medieval Irish literature, where it frequently provides the setting for supernatural encounters and extraordinary events. Tales associated with this time of year contain otherworldly beings, dangerous journeys, feasts, transformations and disruptions of the ordinary order of things.

These stories are part of the reason Samhain later became so strongly associated with the supernatural. The familiar modern idea that the boundary or 'veil' between this world and the Otherworld becomes especially thin at Samhain is a useful poetic description of this theme, although it should not be mistaken for a documented phrase or universal belief from ancient Celtic religion.

What the surviving literature does show is that Samhain was repeatedly imagined as a significant and sometimes dangerous threshold in the year, a time particularly suited to stories in which the ordinary and supernatural worlds came into contact.

Samhain, the dead and remembrance

Remembrance of the dead has become one of the most important elements of modern Samhain observance. Many people now use the festival to remember relatives and friends who have died, visit graves, display photographs or prepare food associated with family members.

The historical development of these practices is complicated. Autumn traditions surrounding death and the supernatural became intertwined over many centuries with the Christian observances of Allhallowtide. All Saints' Day falls on 1 November and All Souls' Day on 2 November, creating a sequence of days concerned with saints, souls and remembrance at precisely the same point in the seasonal calendar.

Older seasonal customs, medieval Christianity, local folk traditions and later Halloween practices influenced one another over a long period. This makes it difficult, and often unnecessary, to assign every surviving custom exclusively to either a Pagan or Christian origin.

The association between the end of October, the dead and remembrance nevertheless became extraordinarily persistent and remains one of the defining characteristics of this part of the year.

Is Samhain the origin of Halloween?

Samhain is an important part of the history surrounding Halloween, particularly in Ireland and Scotland, although the often repeated claim that Halloween is simply Samhain renamed is too straightforward.

The word Halloween comes from All Hallows' Eve, the evening before All Saints' Day. Halloween customs developed from several strands of tradition, including Christian observances surrounding Allhallowtide, seasonal folk customs, beliefs concerning spirits and the dead, divination practices and traditions carried from Britain and Ireland to North America.

Some familiar Halloween customs have particularly strong connections with Irish and Scottish traditions, while others developed considerably later. The modern celebration, with carved pumpkins, trick-or-treating, costumes and its enormous commercial culture, is the result of centuries of change rather than the survival of a single ancient festival in its original form.

Turnips and other root vegetables were carved into lanterns in Britain and Ireland before pumpkins became the familiar Halloween lantern in North America. Apples and nuts also featured heavily in older Halloween games and divination, reflecting foods that were naturally abundant at this point in the agricultural year.

Divination and Halloween folklore

Divination was once a much greater part of Halloween than it generally is today. Many recorded customs involved attempts to discover something about the coming year, particularly marriage, romance, luck and death.

Apples and nuts were frequently used because both were readily available at the end of the harvest season. Nuts might be placed near a fire and watched to see how they burned, while apple peel could be thrown over the shoulder in the hope that its shape would resemble the initial of a future husband or wife. Mirrors, candles and bowls of water also appear in later Halloween divination customs.

Apple bobbing, now usually regarded as a children's party game, belongs to this much wider history of autumn apple customs. The precise origins of individual games can be difficult to establish, but apples had a remarkably persistent place in British and Irish celebrations around the end of October.

Allantide in Cornwall

Cornwall has its own distinctive tradition at this time of year. Allantide, or Kalan Gwav in Cornish, was historically associated with the feast of St Allan around the end of October and beginning of November, particularly in west Cornwall.

Apples were an important part of Allantide. Large, polished apples known as Allan apples were traditionally given as gifts, and accounts of the festival include apple games and forms of divination. These customs belonged to a wider autumn tradition in which apples were associated with courtship, fortune telling and the end of the harvest.

Allantide and Samhain should not simply be treated as different names for the same festival. Their histories are distinct, although they occupy a similar point in the seasonal calendar and share themes that appear in many autumn traditions.

For anyone following the Wheel of the Year in Cornwall, Allantide provides an opportunity to look beyond the better-known modern descriptions of Samhain and explore customs that developed much closer to home.

The natural world at Samhain

By the end of October the change in the British countryside is unmistakable. Oak, beech, hazel and field maple are shedding their leaves, woodland paths are disappearing beneath them and the structure of the trees becomes visible again. Ash may already be almost bare, sometimes having dropped its leaves while they were still relatively green.

The abundance of the September hedgerow has also begun to diminish. Blackberries have largely finished, but haws, rosehips and sloes can remain well into the colder months. Ivy is particularly important at this point in the year. Its late flowers provide nectar and pollen for insects when relatively few other plants remain in bloom, while its berries ripen later and provide winter food for birds.

Late October can still be an excellent time for fungi, particularly after mild, wet weather. Woodland floors and fallen timber may hold species that appear only briefly, making repeated visits to the same place especially rewarding.

Birdlife is also changing. Redwings and fieldfares arrive from northern Europe to spend the colder months in Britain, often gathering wherever berries and fallen fruit are plentiful. Their arrival is one of the characteristic signs of the approaching winter.

Garden orb-web spiders can still be conspicuous, particularly on damp mornings when their webs are outlined with dew. As temperatures fall, insect activity diminishes rapidly and many of the small creatures that filled the summer landscape disappear from view.

Perhaps the most obvious change is the light. Only a few weeks have passed since the autumn equinox, yet by the end of October sunset comes noticeably earlier and the low angle of the sun alters the appearance of familiar woods, fields and lanes.

Plants of the Samhain season

Several native and long-established plants are particularly conspicuous around Samhain, not because they have been assigned to the festival by a modern list of correspondences, but because they are genuinely part of the British landscape at this time of year.

Blackthorn carries the blue-black sloes that ripen during autumn. Traditionally used for sloe gin and preserves, they are strongly astringent when raw. Although frost is often said to sweeten sloes, freezing picked fruit can achieve much the same effect by breaking down their structure.

Hawthorn has moved a long way from the white blossom of May. Its red fruits, or haws, can persist along hedgerows into late autumn and provide food for thrushes and other birds.

Dog rose produces the bright red and orange hips that become particularly conspicuous as surrounding leaves disappear. Rosehips have a long history of culinary use and are exceptionally rich in vitamin C.

Ivy is one of the most valuable plants of the late season. Its flowers support bees, hoverflies and other insects during autumn, while the berries provide food later in winter.

Oak is shedding both leaves and acorns. A mature oak supports an enormous community of other organisms, and fallen acorns provide an autumn food source for animals including jays, squirrels and small mammals.

Recording these plants through the year is an interesting way to follow the seasonal cycle. The blackthorn covered with sloes at Samhain is the same plant that will produce one of the earliest great displays of white blossom the following spring.

Samhain in the modern Wheel of the Year

Samhain is now one of eight festivals within the modern Pagan Wheel of the Year. The four traditional Gaelic festivals, Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasadh and Samhain, alternate with the spring and autumn equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices.

The eightfold Wheel in its familiar modern form developed during the twentieth century, drawing together seasonal observances with much older histories. This distinction is useful because it allows the historical festivals to be explored on their own terms while still recognising the value that the Wheel has for people today.

Modern Samhain observances vary considerably. Remembrance of the dead and ancestors is common, as are candles and fires, seasonal food, divination, visits to graves and time spent reflecting on the year that has passed. For others, the date is primarily a point at which to notice the arrival of winter and the changes taking place in the landscape.

Marking Samhain through the natural year

There are many ways to mark Samhain that draw directly from the season. Returning to a familiar walk taken earlier in autumn makes the speed of the change particularly apparent. Trees that were only beginning to colour at the equinox may now be bare, fungi may have appeared and vanished, and hedgerows once heavy with fruit may have been almost completely stripped by birds.

An autumn meal made with apples, squash, nuts or preserved fruits reflects foods traditionally available at this point in the year. A candle can be lit in remembrance of someone who has died, or an evening can be spent reading local folklore and stories connected with the supernatural.

In Cornwall, learning about Allantide or trying one of the old apple customs gives the season a particularly local connection. A walk after dark can also be surprisingly revealing, especially in a familiar place where the absence of summer sounds and the different quality of the night are immediately noticeable.

A nature journal is particularly useful at this point in the year. Recording the first frost, the arrival of winter thrushes, the last insects, remaining berries and the progress of leaf fall creates a picture of how winter arrives in your own landscape.

Samhain nature journal

If you keep a nature journal, try making a Samhain entry that can be repeated at approximately the same time each year.

Record which trees still carry their leaves and which are already bare, which berries remain in the hedgerows and whether redwings or fieldfares have arrived. Note any fungi still appearing, the date of the first frost if it has already occurred, the time of sunset and any plants that remain in flower.

It can also be useful to record absences. Swallows and house martins that filled the sky earlier in autumn have departed, many insects have disappeared and familiar summer plants have died back. These changes are just as much a part of the natural calendar as first flowers and spring arrivals.

Repeated over several years, a simple entry of this kind becomes a record of local phenology. The timing of leaf fall, migration, flowering, fruiting and frost varies from year to year, and a journal allows those differences to become visible.

From Samhain towards Midwinter

Samhain begins the winter half of the traditional Gaelic year, but the darkest point is still several weeks away. Through November and into December the days continue to shorten until the winter solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere reaches its longest night.

During those weeks, the last autumn leaves fall, winter thrushes become familiar visitors and holly, ivy and other evergreens become increasingly conspicuous against bare woodland. The year is moving towards midwinter and the next of the great seasonal markers.

Continue around the Wheel of the Year

Autumn Equinox
Harvest, the changing hedgerows and the beginning of the darker half of the year.

Wheel of the Year
Explore the history and meaning of all eight seasonal festivals.

Winter Solstice and Yule
Midwinter, the shortest day and the gradual return of the light.