Also called Halloween spell, Samhain, Oíche Shamhna, Calan Gaeaf, All Hallows' Eve, souling
The old Gaelic start of winter on 31 October to 1 November, kept with bonfires, turnip lanterns, guising, souling for cakes, and divination games. Modern Pagan Samhain rituals for honouring the dead build on these folk customs but are largely a 20th-century reconstruction.
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Take care: Keep any fire in a proper hearth, fire pit or fireproof dish, with water or an extinguisher at hand; never leave flames unattended and check local burn bans. Never leave a candle inside a lantern unattended; a battery light is safer near children and costumes.
Going from house to house in disguise, reciting verses for food, is recorded in Scotland from the 16th century. In the 19th century turnips and mangel wurzels were hollowed into lanterns carved with grim faces. Irish and Scottish emigrants brought the custom to North America, where the pumpkin took over.
Uses: Turnip, Candle, Disguise
Children and the poor went to houses on All Souls' Eve singing for apples, ale and soul cakes, which were given in return for prayers for the dead. In East Yorkshire one cake was kept in the home all year for luck. Ormerod printed a Cheshire souling song in 1819.
Uses: Spiced soul cakes, Apples, Ale
Wiccans and other Pagans keep Samhain as the most important sabbat, the witches' new year, with rituals to honour ancestors and the thinning veil. Hutton points out that the medieval Irish sources describe feasts, assemblies and bonfires but no pagan religious rite, and that the idea of Samhain as an ancient festival of the dead owes much to 19th and 20th-century writers.
Samhain marked the end of the grazing season, when cattle came down from summer pastures and stock was slaughtered for winter. Medieval Irish tales place great assemblies at Tara and describe it as a liminal time when the Otherworld opened and the aos sí walked abroad. The name may match SAMON on the Gaulish Coligny calendar of the 2nd century, though that reading is debated. Detailed descriptions of how ordinary people kept it only begin in the early modern period.
Ronald Hutton notes in The Stations of the Sun that no early source actually describes a pagan religious ceremony at Samhain. What folklorists did record, from the 1700s on, is a rich night of bonfires, guising, pranks, apple and nut games, and fortune telling, much of it shared with the Christian Allhallowtide of 1 and 2 November. Modern Pagans revived Samhain as a sacred festival in the later 20th century, which is a new religious practice built on old folk customs.
Peel an apple in one unbroken strip, throw it over your shoulder, and read the letter it makes on the floor as the initial of a future partner.
Naming two nuts for a couple and setting them side by side on the fire on Hallowe'en. If they burn quietly together the match is good; if they jump apart, it is not.
A meal prepared and eaten in total silence, often backwards, at midnight. In Appalachia and the Ozarks young women set it to see the spirit of their future husband walk in; modern Pagans keep it at Samhain as a quiet supper for the dead.
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