Samhain

The harvest is in. The fields are bare. The nights are suddenly long. Samhain is the moment the year tips over into the dark, and for more than a thousand years people in Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man have marked that turning with fire, food, and stories about the dead.

For modern witches, Samhain is the most important sabbat of all. Many call it the witches' New Year, a time to honor ancestors, to say goodbye to what the old year took, and to sit quietly on the threshold before the new one begins.

It is also one of the most misunderstood festivals on the calendar. So here is the story as we know it, with the evidence and the guesswork kept apart.

What the name means

In Old Irish the word was samain, and Irish still uses Samhain as the name for the month of November. You'll often read that it means "summer's end." That is the popular explanation, but many modern linguists connect the word to an old Celtic root, *samoni-, meaning "assembly" or "gathering." Both fit. Samhain was when summer ended, and it was also when people came together.

The oldest clue: a bronze calendar from Gaul

In 1897, farmers near Coligny in eastern France found the broken pieces of a large bronze calendar from the second century AD, written in the Gaulish language. One month is called SAMON, and one of its days carries the note TRINOX SAMONI, "the three nights of Samon."

It's a tantalizing link to the Irish festival, but scholars still argue over whether SAMON fell in autumn or at midsummer. It's best read as a clue, not a proof.

Samhain in the old Irish stories

Our richest picture of Samhain comes from medieval Irish literature. These tales were written down by Christian monks, mostly between the eighth and twelfth centuries, from older oral tradition. Again and again they set their strangest and most important events on Samhain night:

• The four feasts. Tochmarc Emire (The Wooing of Emer) names Samhain first among the four great seasonal festivals, alongside Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh.
• A week of feasting. Serglige Con Culainn (The Sickbed of Cú Chulainn) describes the men of Ulster gathering for a whole week: three days before Samhain, the day itself, and three days after. Much of it was spent on games, contests and boasting.
• The Adventure of Nera. In Echtra Nerai, a tenth-century tale, King Ailill of Connacht dares his warriors to go out on Samhain night and tie a band around the ankle of a hanged man. Only Nera is brave enough. The corpse speaks and begs for a drink. Nera carries it on his back from house to house, and before the night is over he has followed a fairy host into the cave-mound of Crúachan and into the Otherworld itself. The story treats Samhain as a night when the dead have power and the doors of the síd, the fairy mounds, stand open.
• The burning of Tara. In the tales of Fionn mac Cumhaill, a being called Aillen came out of the Otherworld every Samhain. He played music so sweet that everyone at Tara fell asleep, then burned the royal hall with his fiery breath. Young Fionn stayed awake by pressing a spear-point to his own forehead and ended the burning for good.
• The gods themselves. In Cath Maige Tuired, the Dagda, the "good god" of plenty, meets the Morrígan, the great queen of battle and prophecy, at a river on Samhain before the gods' war against the Fomorians.

Much later, the 17th-century historian Geoffrey Keating described a great Feast of Tara held at Samhain, where Ireland's kings, nobles and learned poets gathered to make laws.

Keep in mind that these are stories, and good ones. They tell us how medieval Irish writers imagined Samhain: a night of gatherings, danger, fairy mounds and restless dead. They don't record exactly what pagan Irish people did on that night, because no one wrote those rites down.

Fire on the hills: Tlachtga

About twelve miles from Tara, near Athboy in County Meath, stands the Hill of Ward, known in Irish tradition as Tlachtga. Later tradition says that on Samhain the druids lit a great fire here, and that every hearth in the land was relit from it.

Beginning in 2014, archaeologists from University College Dublin led by Dr. Stephen Davis excavated the hill. They found a ritual site used in phases from the Bronze Age (around 1200–800 BC) through the late Iron Age (around AD 400–520). There were massive enclosures, a lot of burning, and many animal bones that suggest feasting, but no sign that anyone ever lived there. It was a place people came to for gatherings and ceremonies.

Was it a Samhain fire? Davis himself put it well: the link is "tempting, but difficult to conclusively prove." What we can say is that people gathered on this hill, burned great fires and feasted there for well over a thousand years. Since 2019, County Meath's Púca festival has lit a Samhain fire again at the foot of the hill: on Halloween night the Lighting of the Samhain Fire takes place on the Fair Green in Athboy, in the shadow of Tlachtga.

A tomb that greets the November sun?

On the Hill of Tara itself is the Mound of the Hostages, a passage tomb about five thousand years old. Local observers report that the rising sun shines into its passage in early November and early February. That's a beautiful possibility, though it hasn't been studied as carefully as famous alignments like Newgrange's midwinter sunrise.

Was Samhain really the "Celtic New Year"?

Many modern books call Samhain the Celtic New Year and a festival of the dead. The history behind those phrases is worth knowing:

• The "Celtic New Year" idea was first put forward by the Welsh scholar Sir John Rhŷs in 1901. He based it largely on folklore he collected on the Isle of Man, where some people still called Samhain night New Year's Eve.
• The "festival of the dead" idea was popularized by Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough in the early 1900s.
• Historians such as Ronald Hutton point out that no medieval source says the year began on November 1st. The ghostly atmosphere of the old stories may be as much a literary setting as a record of belief.

None of this makes the witches' New Year any less real. Modern traditions are allowed to be modern. It simply means that when we call Samhain the witches' New Year, we're speaking the language of a living practice, not quoting an ancient calendar.

The Church, All Saints, and All Souls

You'll often hear that the Church "moved" All Saints' Day to November 1st to stamp out Samhain. The real story is more tangled:

• In 609 or 610, Pope Boniface IV dedicated the Pantheon in Rome to Mary and all martyrs, with a feast on May 13th.
• By about 800, churches in Ireland and in Northumbria in northern England were celebrating all saints on November 1st.
• In 835, the Frankish Empire adopted November 1st, and it spread from there.
• All Souls' Day on November 2nd, for praying for the ordinary dead, was added in the eleventh century.

Whether Irish custom shaped that date is still debated, and there's no clear evidence of a deliberate takeover. Either way, the result was the same: the first days of November became, all over Christian Europe, a time to remember the dead. The eve of All Hallows became Hallowe'en.

How the people kept it

Whatever the Church called it, people in the countryside went on keeping the night in their own way. Folklorists from the 16th to the 20th centuries recorded a wealth of customs:

Scotland. Hilltop bonfires called samhnagan were believed to protect and cleanse. Young people went guising: masked and disguised, they went door to door reciting verses for food. The custom was recorded as early as the 1500s. Nuts and apples were used to foretell love and fortune.

Ireland. Hollowed turnips and mangels were carved with grotesque faces and lit from inside, the ancestors of the jack-o'-lantern. In parts of the south, the Láir Bhán (white mare) went round the houses: a procession led by a figure under a white sheet carrying a horse's skull. Families baked barmbrack, a fruit bread with a ring, coin or rag hidden inside to tell each person's fortune for the year.

The Isle of Man. On October 31st, Manx children still celebrate Hop-tu-Naa, carving turnips and going door to door singing the old Hop-tu-Naa song. It's one of the oldest unbroken customs of the season anywhere.

Wales. Samhain's Welsh cousin, Nos Galan Gaeaf ("the night of the winter calends"), was also called Ysbrydnos, "spirit night." Villages lit bonfires, and when the fire died everyone raced home as fast as they could. Behind them came the Hwch Ddu Gwta, the tailless black sow, and the Ladi Wen, the headless white lady, waiting for the last one home. In Powys, men disguised as gwrachod (hags) went about in pairs or in gangs wearing sheepskins and masks.

When Irish and Scottish families emigrated to America in the 1800s, they brought these customs with them. Turnips became pumpkins, guising became trick-or-treating, and Halloween as we know it was born.

The burning times

Between the 15th and 18th centuries, witch trials swept across Europe and Britain, and tens of thousands of people were executed. Historians find little evidence that the accused belonged to any surviving pagan religion. Most were ordinary people, many of them poor women, caught up in fear and local feuds. Still, the image of the night-flying witch became tied to Halloween forever. Many modern witches keep Samhain partly as an act of remembrance for them.

The revival: how Samhain became the witches' New Year

• 1921: Margaret Murray argued that the accused witches had secretly belonged to an ancient pagan religion. Historians have since rejected her theory, but it caught the public imagination.
• 1951: Britain repealed the last of its Witchcraft Acts.
• 1954: Gerald Gardner published Witchcraft Today, and modern Wicca stepped into the open. Working with Doreen Valiente and others, Gardner's tradition celebrated the four old Gaelic festivals: Samhain, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasadh.
• Late 1950s: The solstices and equinoxes were added, forming the eight-spoke Wheel of the Year that most witches and many other pagans follow today. Samhain took its place as the greatest sabbat and the start of the witches' year.
• 1979: In San Francisco, the first Spiral Dance ritual was held to celebrate the publication of Starhawk's book The Spiral Dance. It became the Reclaiming community's large public Samhain ritual, and it is still held each year. Other groups and solitary practitioners worked out their own ways to keep the day.

Today Samhain is kept by Wiccans, eclectic witches, Druids, and Celtic Reconstructionists. Reconstructionists work closely from the historical sources, and some of them time the festival by the first frost rather than the calendar. The traditions differ, but almost all of them share the same heart: remembering the dead, marking an ending, and welcoming the dark.