Samhain
by planetparker
SAMHAIN
Samhain was the beginning of the Celtic year. It was when the year turned and so was propitious for divining the future. Long after Christianity had apparently triumphed this aspect was retained in popular memory when cooks placed talismans in food whose discovery might reveal what lay ahead for those discovering them.
In prehistoric Cavan Samhain was a time of terror, when the prescribed sacrifices of the first-born were made to the idol of Crom cruach in west Cavan. At a season when the skies were visibly darkening the land around Darragh Fort near Ballymagovern often ran red with blood.
Samhain marked another turning-point; from those seasons when man mastered nature through husbandry of the soil and care of plants towards the dead season of winter. With the lengthening of night Man became an important slave of nature and its forces, which were mysterious and frightening.
The enveloping darkness was luridly illuminated by people’s imagination. The boundaries between the living and the dead became blurred: the dead shook off their shrouds and emerged from their tombs to pay often unwanted visits to their friends and relations who had been able to cheat the grim reaper. The connection with the dead was so strong that the early Church, which had struggled for so long against this pagan survival was forced to embrace Samhain, transforming it into the Feast of All Saints or All Hallows.
