Today marks Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows, All Saints or Winters Eve,The Festival of the Dead. There are several explanations for its origin, one being the Roman festival of the dead 'Parentalia', but another origin, not necessarily exclusive from the Roman one, is from the ancient Celtic old day of Samhein (sa-wain). and most of the traditions that we celebrate on Halloween have its origins in Celtic/Gaelic Culture.
Samhein, which means November in Irish, was the end of summer and the harvest season in the Celtic calender. It was the last great feast held outdoors before the cold months to come. The last night of October also marked the ancient Celts New Years Eve. Marking the end of the summer and the beginning of Winter.
The Celts believed that on Samhein, the veil between the living and the dead was dropped for one day, and the spirits of the living could intermingle with the spirits of the dead.The ancient Celts divided their year into two seasons: the light and the dark, at Beltane on 1st May and Samhain on November 1. Many believe that Samhain was the more important festival, marking the beginning of a new cycle / new year,and the most magical time of this festival was November Eve, the night of 31st October, better known today as Halloween..
Samhain, means November in the Celtic Culture, the literal translation being‘summer’s end.’ It is the Gateway to winter, a time when the veils between the realms of the living and the afterlife were said to be especially thin, marking a time for reflection to honor the worlds of the seen and unseen. In the country year, Samhain marked the first day of winter, when the herders led the cattle and sheep down from their summer pastures to the shelter of the stables, .in order to determine how many animals could be adequately fed through the winter. Those not able to be cared for were butchered, which would help to feed the family during the dark days ahead. It is partially due to this practice that Samhain is sometimes referred to as the ‘blood harvest.’
With the rise of Christianity, Samhain was changed to Hallowmas, or All Saints’ Day, to celebrate the saints in heaven, and so the night before became popularly known as Halloween. The 2nd November became All Souls Day, when prayers were to be offered to the souls of the departed. Throughout the centuries, pagan and Christian beliefs and celebrations have intertwined
Over the years we have ended up with the modern commercialised, corporate version that is now known as halloween far from its original roots when children dress up in Ghoulish costumes and go out trick and treating in what was developed in America in the late 19th and early 20th century replacing what in reality is such a sacred day The old ways are still with us despite the grip of large corporations, the real reason and respect for this occasion has never been lost.Samhein and its energy has never fully died out and still burns bright. Samhain fires have continued to light up the countryside down the ages., In some areas, ashes from these bonfires were sprinkled on surrounding fields. The day is also about remembrance and contemplation. Our ancestors, the blessed dead, are more accessible, more approachable during the time of the dying of the land. A day to commune with the dead and a celebration of the eternal cycle of reincarnation to honor our ancestors and remember our deceased loved ones.
Some in revelry and fun today will be dressing up as witches in pointy hats, perhaps forgetting this days roots. and all those who have been tortured or killed as suspected witches during the centuries of the Burning Times in Europe, in Salem, and elsewhere across the globe.Witches have a long history of being associated with this time of year, primarily because of ritual gatherings at Samhain, the cauldron used as a symbol of the witchs' control over life and death.
It is worth noting that the word witchcraft has good and bad meanings in different cultures around the world. A general definition of witchcraft is the changing of everyday events using supernatural or magical forces. Witches, in folklore, and throughout history can be seen as considered outsiders of the human collective. Found in hidden enclaves (covens), or in isolation from society, they straddle the gap between the civil and the wild, the human and the element, and it is they who provoke, attack, agitate, heal and enliven the social order.They have existed in all inhabited continents of the world and across the majority of human societies.
Originating in the Mesopotamian myths of Inanna, in the Hindu stories of Kali, and in the Greek tales of Hecate, the legacy of the witch stretches back thousands of years. These goddesses had the ability to give life and to take it away, and they were worshipped for it. There once was a time when wise women were honored. They were often the keepers of knowledge about folk healing, and they were often spiritual leaders. Paganism – living in sync with nature and observing rituals associated with the seasons – was the prevailing tradition.
The witch however has long been a symbol of fear not because she can harness forces that transcend this mortal coil, but because she embodies a powerful femininity free from male influence or ownership. Indeed throughout history the figure of the witch has both challenged and reflected patriarchal narratives about female power.
Then in Medieval Times, when monotheistic religions gained greater prominence, thereby consolidating belief around an omnipotent male deity, women were cast more frequently as “other,” and as villains. They were women who raised suspicion by amassing too much land, wealth, or influence. They were mothers, sisters, and daughters who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And they were punished for it.Women who had gained some form of social power was subjected to patriarchal tests to see whether her heart was pure. For her to be proven to be pure, she had to lose her will to live. Should she fail the test, by maintaining her struggle to survive, she was shown to be of impure heart. This meant that she was condemned to die for her sins.One particular test was the dunking of witches. If they floated they were guilty of witchcraft, if they sank they were innocent but would have usually drowned anyway.
During the “witch craze,” women’s power became associated with darkness and death, and folk healers were misconstrued and condemned as worshippers of Satan. Well-organized campaigns of tortures like burning, dunking, and the application of thumb screws enforced the suppression of what was by then called heresy. For three centuries of early modern European history, diverse societies were consumed by a panic over alleged witches in their midst between the 14th and 17th centuries, especially in Central Europe. This was a time when many believed in the supernatural and misfortune was thought to be the work of the Devil or his servants. here was a widespread belief in Europe that a strong nation was one that had a uniform religious faith. By consorting with the Devil, "witches" were committing treason and were punishable by courts enforcing anti-witchcraft statutes.
The witches, of course, were nothing like the stereotype of the carbuncled hags shrieking incantations around a cauldron full of devilish potions. They were ordinary people who were often the convenient scapegoats for anything from a death in the village to the failure of crops. Individuals would often have been branded a witch simply after falling out with a neighbour.
Protestant evangelists targeted all magic, claiming that witches were deluded by the devil. The Catholic Church responded in kind. Each side blamed the other for colluding with Satan. This quickly escalated, leading to a number of the most brutal witch hunts in history ,(known as The Burning Times) resulted in false accusations of heresy and trials and led to massive torture and burnings at the stake, and executions of tens of thousands of victims, about three-quarters of whom were women. Many question whether the widespread violence against women and the neglect of our environment today can be traced back to those times.
Some have claimed that as many as nine million people were killed in the name of “witch hunts.” However, there’s a lot of discussion about the accuracy of that number, and some scholars have estimated it to be significantly lower, possibly as few as 200,000. Still a significantly huge number nevertheless. Hundreds of thousands of women, men and children died due to mass fear, propaganda, politics, and institutions run amok. The Burning Times may actually be viewed as mass hysteria. Plagues, droughts and other natural disasters during these times were often attributed to witchcraft which further fuelled the fear of witches. Witchcraft came to be viewed upon as an unpardonable offence which resulted in capital punishment. Many an innocent woman were condemned due to it. In the past, its often been pointed out that the European witch hunts targeted women — after all, these poor country girls were simply the victims of the misogynistic societies of their times. However, what is often overlooked is that although overall about 80% of the accused were female, in some areas, more men than women were persecuted as witches.
England's most famous case were the Pendle Witches from Lancashire who were convicted of murdering 17 people in 1612. Their prosecutors argued they had sold their souls to the Devil in return for being able to lame or kill anyone they pleased. The trial was meticulously documented and appeared the following year in book form. Enormous crowds flocked to Lancaster Gaol to watch 10 "witches" - eight women and two men - die on the gallows.
In Scotland, where nearly 4,000 people died during a frenetic period of witch trials between 1590 and 1662, one of the popular types of evidence used against suspects was the Devil's Mark. When his followers made their pact with him, the Devil supposedly left his mark, usually an insensitive spot, upon him or her.
Witch hunting was old by the time Great Britain erupted into the Civil Wars of 1639-1651, but this existential clash between royalists and parliamentarians amid a swirling miasma of sectarianism and suspicion, resulted in a fresh flowering of superstitious barbarity. Behind the frontlines of the conflict in the puritan stronghold of East Anglia, Matthew Hopkins, the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General, and his colleague John Stearne dispatched an estimated 300 people to the gallows between 1644 and 1647 for their alleged covenant with the devil.It was the largest outbreak of witch hunting in English history, a unique product of fear, war, and the breakdown of civil society.
In 1692, -1693 there were the cataclysmic events of Salem, Massaschusets the belief in witches was so commonplace that anything out of the ordinary, from odd weather to a cow’s milk going sour, was explained away as “witchcraft.” In the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, fear of witches was rampant. In 1692, a group of young girls accused three women of working with the devil. The accusations soon multiplied, as those who stood accused would only be saved from hanging if they admitted guilt and provided the names of others who conjured the devil alongside them.Soon paranoia gripped, as people suddenly perceived something so incredibly innocent to be the "devils work." After the girls were accused of being witches, fingers began to be pointed at everyone in the town, everyone was ready to accuse their neighbour or friend, in order to take the focus away from themselves. By the time this event was over 141 suspects, both men and women, were tried as witches. Nineteen were executed by hanging. One was pressed to death by heavy stones. The town had become so afraid of something that was not to blame, that innocent lives were taken, creating a spread of blame, along with a chaotic panic.
After these tumultuous events European belief in witches seemed to spontaneously disappear. The Age of Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and logic, was beginning in Europe and natural causes began to replace the Devil as the reason behind much of society's ills. By 1736, the Witchcraft Acts in England and Scotland had both been repealed. The same happened on the continent
But what never died out completely, however, was the demonization of those considered "other," and it is a grim grim paradox of 21st-century life that persecution against people accused of sorcery is very much still with us. It resurfaced, along with witch hunting, in postcolonial Africa, as a response to the process of modernization after independence.
The last witch trial in Britain took place in 1944, when Helen Duban was jailed for claiming to have conjured up the spirit of a dead sailor from the HMS Barham – the sinking of the ship by the Germans was classified information, and the authorities were worried that she might also reveal details of the D-Day landing plans. She was released after nine months, and lived to see the repeal of the Witchcraft Act in 1951.
Even today, we see witch hunts breaking out in different parts of the world among cultures most fearful of change. In recent years, there has been a spate of attacks against people accused of witchcraft in Africa, the Pacific and Latin America, and even among immigrant communities in the United States and Western Europe. Researchers with United Nations refugee and human rights agencies have estimated the murders of supposed witches as numbering in the thousands each year, while beatings and banishments could run into the millions.https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NEWSEVENTS/Pages/Witches21stCentury.aspx
For all the surface rationality and modernity of lives everywhere, fear of witches is still widespread, a reminder that ancient superstitions are durable and widespread. Much like xenophobia (fear of foreigners), Wiccaphobia ( fear of witches or fear of witchcraft) is triggerred especially by the fear of the unknown. What the mind cannot perceive or what it deems as unusual, it fears. The root cause of fear of witches may also be prejudice and stereotypes. In short: witches represent everything that is threatening. Many popular childhood stories have often reinforced beliefs that witches are bad. Today, there are many Churches that continue to teach its members that witches are evil.
Today’s accused “witches” are almost all women, many of them the more outspoken, independent and prosperous women in their communities. Whether victims of simple sexist domination or scapegoats for the old ways in a modernizing society plagued with economic injustice, often they stand for a former way of life, a life more in harmony with nature. Their murder is thus a crime against women and nature, as well as a horrific violation of human rights and religious freedom generally.
Witch hunts lie at the dark heart of Western culture, so much so that they've become synonymous with any kind of vicious, dogged and irrational persecution, takeMcCarthyism in the 1940's for example when a similar paranoia and hysteria emerged, with federal employees being dragged before loyalty boards on murky charges, their names often cleared only to be charged again and again. Eventually 8,000 employees were forced to resign. At least seven committed suicide. Then the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigating communist activity in Hollywood in what critics considered an outrageous infringement of First Amendment rights, labeling the hearings a “witch hunt.” hounding politicians, academics, celebrities, and other public figures while chasing vague rumors of Communist sympathizers. As in Salem, these persecutions moved some to accuse others as evidence of their innocence.
Later we would see the ritual child abuse panics of the 1980s. No wonder the history of the original European witch hunts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries has become politicized.
The inauguration of the US president, Donald Trump, provoked women’s protest marches around the world, with some banners reading: “Hex the Patriarchy”, “Witches for Black Lives”, and “We are the daughters of the witches you didn’t burn, and we are pissed off.”And recently an event even took place in October in Brooklyn, New York, to hex supreme court justice, Brett Kavanaugh. The meeting was sold out and the protest made headlines across the world. It is no surprise that, at a time when women’s rights are under increasing pressure in some areas of Western society, that the witch should be used as a feminist symbol of power, both in language and in the claimed reality of witchcraft.
Then the the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements led Woody Allen to invoke the spectre of Salem, but with men as accused witches, saying: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch-hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself.” In these cases, men are positioning themselves and their peers in the role of witches, but in this scenario the witch is an innocent, a victim.
Donald Trump feels persecuted. The most powerful man in the world is always complaining that he’s being treated unfairly. He has whined that no politician in history had ever received worse treatment, and tweeted that there was a witch hunt out to get him.In 2018 alone, Trump has tweeted the term witch hunt 112 times. Now, Trump is pretty bad at being president, but he’s an even worse historian. There are plenty of witch hunts in history that are much bigger than anything Trump has yet encountered. A witch hunt involves persecution as well as prosecution, and Trump is not being persecuted.We should remind him that the Muslim ban is a witch hunt. The perrecution and demonisation of refugees is a witch hunt. And so is calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
Intrerestingly today it is male politicians like Donald Trump – and countless others – who still use 'witch' or generally cry 'witch hunt' as a term of vilification against women, just as their predecessors so often led them. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, Hillary Clinton was repeatedly defined as a witch by Trump supporters: Clinton was “the wicked witch of the Left”, pictured with green skin, pointy hat, and riding a broomstick; her opponents claimed she smelt of sulphur. Aligning her with such stereotypical representations of witchcraft evidenced the power plays at the root of such blatant and public misogyny.
Men are still walking around afraid of women and their power. Hate crimes, sex crimes, domestic violence, glass ceilings, all are testimony to this legacy of fear. The real witches who live among us are still angry at having to live under patriarchal control, and the measures taken against her are no less real than the past, and raw patriarchal society still seeks to destroy her.
So today on Samhein, as the more consumerist tradition of Halloween takes place, along with the stereotypical images, remember the deeper messages of the day, remember the dead , our loved ones gone before us, honour our sisters, the witches, and all of the other lives who were lost in "the Burning Times " and celebrate their courage, and be mindful for those who still face persecution for their beliefs.
Men are still walking around afraid of women and their power. Hate crimes, sex crimes, domestic violence, all are testimony to this legacy of fear. The real witches who live among us are still angry at having to live under patriarchal control, and the measures taken against her are no less real than the past, and raw patriarchal society still seeks to destroy her. Our deepest power is to learn and grow and talk about our fears out loud, so that we do not repeat the tragedies of the past, make a conscious effort not to repeat the evil of history, not to repeat the evil of fear.
The air is full of the whispers of our ancestors, loved ones passed, and we remember them holding them close to our hearts. What is remembered lives. Good Samhain to you and yours.
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