Samhain Revisited — The Pagan Journey — Part 1
Hi and Welcome to Magic Self and Spirit, we’re delighted to take this opportunity to share video and audio excerpts from our podcasts with you. How to Celebrate Samhain with Ceridwen Bringer of Death was a fascinating journey for us and the folks we shared it with. This is the first excerpt that paints a mental picture of the philosophy and nature of Samhain. The written part of this blog is more or less the transcript and reads as it’s spoken.
Welcome to the journey with the year, welcome to the journey with the pagan year. We are now at a point with the pagan year that at the end of this month at Samhain, as it used to be called before it became a Halloween, that was the end of pagan year . The B ringer of Death, the Lady of Death came and took the souls of those who were dying to the other world.
And those who also wished to walk on those paths, those Pagan paths, that used to move with, and still do, move with the seasons, move with nature, move with the year, would walk with the Lady of Death, Regeneration, Healing and Rebirth, through into the underworld to see their loved ones, to feel their connections again, to feel that real power of the regeneration of the new year.
And so we’re going to look at Samhain . I know it’s spelled Samhain, but it’s pronounced Samhain, depending on where you’re from. This whole journey with Samhain, this whole journey with the immanence of the spirituality of paganism, the whole idea that the Divine Being or the Divine Beings were the seasons, were nature, were the grand spirits themselves of the earth, is a very very powerful journey to work with. I trained as pagan pagan priest for a number of years, for three years, in Glastonbury, England, and walked that path for quite some time. Samhain, for me, was always the most amazing of all the the eight Sun festivals.
It was the most powerful for me. The veils were the thinnest between the worlds and if you saw the year as a circle, six months across that circle, the absolute mirror, was Beltane the time of love and sexuality. That relationship between love and sexuality, and death and regeneration is very, very potent in our mythology. Looking in the mirror to the other side, looking in the mirror to that kind of power, that kind of way of working is an incredible journey.
We’ve done a number of podcasts now, however, this is something we’re relatively new into and we’re building and sharing out a cross the internet, and out across the blogger space if you like, the podcast space sphere , I don’t know exact words for that. Working in those kind of amazing ways via podcast can give us opportunities, particularly to talk about things like Samhain. Parts of spirituality that in some areas are very well-known but in other areas are very, very new. Spirituality, in this context, in a pagan context, is about the relationship with the seasons, the relationship with the land, the relationship with how the planets move and how they move everything for us.
So, let us look to this podcast how to celebrate with Samhain with Ceridwen, and Ceridwen was one of the goddesses that is associated with Samhain in Avalon. Paganism, particularly the paganism of the UK, Ireland and northern France those kind of areas where it started and obviously translated later on over into the United States, would work with different deity depending on the tradition. In the tradition I was training in Ceridwen was probably the most important of the goddesses for this time of year. So the title of this podcast is How to Celebrate Samhain with Ceridwen Bringer of Death.
As the sun is about a week into its sojourn in the constellation of Scorpio, we arrive at the festival of Samhain . At this Sabbat we encounter the goddess Ceridwen bringer of death, stirrer of the great cauldron of regeneration. Let’s look at the tradition and modern ways we celebrate Samhain one of the most powerful pagan sun festivals, well they’re all powerful, but this one always feels to be the most powerful to me . Samhain, is a late Fall festival Although it was originally known as the end of the summer, in the pagan wheel of the year, this is the Sabbat cycle.
Sabbats are the sun festivals, the eight of them in the year, they come up about once every six weeks and they reflect the movement of the seasons and the energies and the movement of the seasons. are seen as like the life of divinity, and this Sabbat is about the end of life, death, regeneration, rebirth, healing, those kind of things. It is a celebration of death, transformation and rebirth. It marks the end of the growing season and a time when the veils between this world and the next are thin.
This is a perfect time to develop mediumship, to connect to those, we have lost this year and build our connection to the spirit world, and lost a we’ve lot this year. It’s been a huge year of change and Samhain will come about this Saturday. So Samhain eve will be Friday night. And we can cross the veils then when they’re the thinnest but we can cross them now the very thin right at the moment. And the souls of the people that we’ve lost, our loved ones will be waiting for us. It’s very very powerful time of healing.
The days of darkening, the nights are longer, decay and death are on the ascendancy. Ceridwen is the crone, the dark goddess, the hag, the ancient reaper. She prepares us for our journey to the underworld to meet the beloved souls of our dead and also our shadow selves.
The light of the days is 6 weeks from its lowest ebb. Nature is dying all around us, animals gorge on fruit and store nuts and other food preparing for hibernation. The air is cold and as we wrap him warm clothes to protect our bodies temperature, we notice the carpet of fallen leaves from the trees and the bushes begin to rot on the land we’re walking. Oranges, reds and browns carpet the road and the countryside. They slowly blacken as they return like all once living things eventually do to the Earth as nutrients..
