Samhain (Halloween) an Early Thanksgiving

Halloween, was once known as Samhain, and was celebrated on October 31st by the ancient (shamanic) Celts. On the 31st the Celts burned animal bones, carved gourds like skulls, and hung skeletons upon their windows… young men even dressed as though dead and painted their faces black.

The Celts did all this because Samhain was the day when the world of the living overlapped with the world of the dead. And through these symbols and rituals the dead were free to move among the living. It was actually a generous day, a day where we welcomed the dead back into this beautiful and growing world.

So between trick-or-treaters this year, consider all those dead people (your/our ancestors) who have brought you forward. Give thanks! And hold for a moment in your mind the wondrous fact that is this world (which is a closed circuit) you are breathing the same air that was in your ancestor's lungs, you are drinking the water that passed through them too (not as gross as it sounds), and your body is made of molecules that have changed hands billions upon billions of times, on this planet and before that reaching out into the primordial recesses of space!

The first, long vanished, ancient stars are our earliest known ancestors, and countless eons down the line, the amoeba, the lunged fish, the tool wielding apes, our father's father's father, our mother's mother's mother... all standing behind us today. Happy Halloween!

Yin Yang Halloween

or "Yin Yang, Jack-o-'lantern, Celtic Cross - bad tattoo suggestions"

“What is a bad man but a good man’s job? What is a good man but a bad man’s teacher?” So says Lau-Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. In Taoism there is a belief that “opposites” are actually polar aspects of one, same thing, energy, event, or concept. In this way light and dark are thought of as mutually arising, which is to say: one did not create the other, they in fact exist only simultaneously; like-wise, one can never dominate or destroy the other, for they depend upon one another, and in fact are the same.

They are falsely named light and dark, and should rather be seen as lightdark, or perhaps by some other name [might I suggest ldiagrhkt?]… this is the same as our understanding that a magnet is what sits between the pulling and pushing poles, a central point that essentially cannot be located, and certainly cannot be extracted. When does the negative pole become positive, or visa versa? They must both be present to create a magnet. So it can be said of life and death, and good and bad, or, if you prefer, good and evil.

Halloween is less about “evil” than it used to be. Based on ancient Celtic traditions All Hollows’ Eve (formerly Samhain), observed every year on October 31st, is when the pole that is the living world collides with the pole that is the world of the dead; and so this planet is like the magnet “between” the poles.

Halloween sometimes brought darkness upon the villages and homes of the shamanic Irish. Evil might visit in the form of illness, bad crops, or disease among the livestock. October 31st was indeed a dangerous day. So how was death, darkness, and evil to be placated? How were the Celts to act? As Taoists it seems, for they did not close down their towns and hide at the end of October, nor did they fearfully fight for the other pole.

They did not fill their homes with idols and reminders of the living world, instead they burned animal bones, carved gourds like skulls, and hung skeletons upon their windows… young men even dressed as though dead and painted their faces black. Through these symbols and rituals the dead were free to move among the living. There was no fight.

The ancient Celts walked in the darkness as they walked in the light, knowing (it seems to me) that they are one… knowing that darkness, pain, sickness, fear, madness, sorrow, cruelty, and death are the troughs of waves with peaks called light, pleasure, well-being, wonder, clarity, love, kindness, and life. For the peak to exist at all there must be the trough, and so to fight for light to conquer dark is to fight also against light.

May this Halloween be totally Celtic, very dark and very scary, and so it follows... may the next day be bright and hopeful… forever and ever, Amen.

photo notes: taken by Fletcher Tucker in 2008 near Stockholm