Samhain Dartmoor: Part 2 -Samhain Myths & Practices

This is the second of four blog posts about Samhaim, Halloween and Dartmoor that I have been festively writing. What has Halloween, and its Celtic predecessor Samhain, got to do with Dartmoor? That is what I wanted to find out. My intention has been to try and put the local (local to me that is) and ‘place’ into this unearthly and uncanny time of year. Aware that the key Celtic festivals had a linkage to the pastoral wheel of the year, I have also been keen to tell this story because of my interest in Dartmoor as a landscape of transhumance – moving with cattle between summer and winter grazing; putting a ceremonial and spiritual dimension into the story of Dartmoor transhumance and dairying [see Landscape and Mammary].

What I found out was too much for one blog post so I am posting a series of four parts:

• In the first part I provided a broad outline of what Samhain is, what is known about when it falls, and how it relates to the other key Celtic festivals. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 1 – What is Samhain?]
• In this second part I am going to explore the myths that surround Celtic Samhain and what they tell us about the mindset and practices of the people who celebrated this pre-Christian festival.
• Part three will look at Halloween folklore, to examine Samhain practice, but in the guise of its more recent and Christianised form. Here I will be particularly focusing on linkages of Halloween folk practice to earlier Samhain roots. .[Samhain Dartmoor: Part 3 – Samhain vestiges in All Hallow’s Eve]
• In the fourth and final part I will turn all this research into a sketch of Samhain Dartmoor; to imagine what parts of landscape were important and how they were being used. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 4 – Tors on Fire?]

Samhain Myths

It is from Ireland that the largest and best-preserved collections of Celtic mythology exist, to shed light on beliefs, including those attached to Samhain. Whilst these are specifically Irish, glimpses from mythologies across Europe suggest there are parallels in this Gaelic corpus to the wider Celtic world. Although some of the characters and details may differ, these stories provide clues to the practices and ontology of our Celtic predecessors.

From this mythology we learn, for example that, on the feast of Samhain, the people of Nemed^[1] had to ‘deliver to their masters, the Fomorians^[2], two-thirds of their corn, their milk and their children’ (Sjoestedt, 2000, p6). Another legend tells of Dagda, a mythical father-figure, god of druids, copulating with the river goddess Morrígan at Samhain. He then enters the camp of the enemy Fomorions and, in this legend, Sjoestedt describes that:

“They made him a porridge ‘for he was a great eater of porridge’. They filled the king’s cauldron, which held twenty measures of milk and as many more of flour and fat. And into it they put goats and sheep, halves of pork and quarters of lard; and the whole mixture was boiled. Then it was poured into a hole dug in the ground (as is still done today on the day of Samhain with the food offered to the spirits), and Indech, leader of the Fomorians, ordered the Dagda to eat it all under pain of death. The Dagda took his ladle, which was so big that a man and a woman could have lain together in it; and not content with eating the whole meal, he scraped the hole with his finger and ate even the gravel at the bottom … after the feast the Dagda has intercourse with his enemy’s daughter, not without difficulty, for his stomach was greatly distended, and she promises in return to serve him against her father with her magic powers.”  

Sjoestedt, 2000, p40-41

Sjoestedt highlights the ‘grotesque obscenity’ of this Samhain story, and its ritual demonstration of the powers of voracity and sexual rigour, attributes necessary for a chieftan. The Nemed story also shows us that Samhain is linked with subjugated homage and great sacrifice. Both speak of terror and excess.

Unlike the other key Celtic festivals, which as Sjoestedt points out, are linked to one god, Samhain seems to have no such attachment, and instead is linked to ‘a whole world of spirits, whose intrusion upon the world of men takes on a threatening and warlike air’ (ibid, p53). It is specifically from the underworld that most of these supernatural entities flow, rising from places like cairns or fairy mounds. In Ireland these beings were called the sídh– immortal supernatural underground dwellers of fairy guise. In fact, so inseparable are fairies and mounds in Ireland that the word sídh can be applied to define both. And so at Samhain, the sídh were expected to cross over, or rather out of the earth, particularly from burial mounds of the ancestors.

We can take from this, as is true of the later incarnation of Halloween, that this festival is interwoven with death, spirits and fairies – creatures of the otherworld. In our time, we tend to think in terms of the natural as separate from the supernatural; with many of us regarding the supernatural with scepticism or disbelief.  But for the Celts, this otherworld was real. They envisioned being in an interrelationship in time and space with the otherword; in constant dialogue, able to both penetrate and be penetrated by this other place. Samhain was particularly important because the planes between our world and the otherworld became one, and the night belonged ‘neither to one year or the other’ and is therefore ‘free from temporal restraint’ (ibid, p52).

With some idea of the rich and weird Irish Gaelic mythology behind Samhain, let us now look at what is known, or at least suggested, about Celtic Samhain practices.

Samhain Practices

As the seasons pivoted, and the nights pressed in, the full moon after the mid point between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice signalled the time of Samhain assembly. But what happened at these great gatherings?

The idea has been mooted above that Samhain, paired with Beltaine, were the two most significant of the Celtic fire festivals, and that their celebration is in some way deeply rooted in prehistoric time, to the rhythms of the pastoral year; to transhumance, and the summering and wintering of cattle. This being the case, cattle would be expected to feature in Samhain ritual and legend.

In some of the earliest written records about the British Isles, various Roman authors note the centrality of cattle, their meat and milk to the subsistence and economy Britons. They also comment on their sacrificial festivals and feasting (Sherwood, 2009, p12). In her paper, Sherwood expands on the cultural role of cattle in Ireland and Britain more widely, and how their significance cannot be overstated (Sherwood, 2009, p31). So integral were cattle in Britain, they were used as the currency – even people’s worth, life and honour was measured in cattle. Because they were so important, Sherwood says:

“The Iron Age Irish attributed all natural forces to supernatural forces, i.e. the gods, including the health and welfare of the cattle herds. These gods could be both beneficent and malevolent, and seem to have had very human-like needs and desires that needed to be satiated by the populous. They are not only the primordial source of cattle, but they desire their own animals as well. The most obvious method one can imagine in which to symbolically give anything to a deity is to sacrifice that object.”

Sherwood, 2009, p32

In this quote then we can begin to see how the very rationale for a festival like Samhain marries belief in magic and gods, with a cattle and herding economy.

Sherwood goes on to explain that, in terms of Irish kingship, the rulers were ‘symbolically and literally responsible for the fertility of the land’. If cattle were sick, or in danger from other tribes, then this was the king’s responsibility, placing great pressure on him to demonstrate, through ‘power and prestige’ that he was doing all that he could to secure good health and fortune for his people. This was demonstrated through the hosting of feasts, characterised by conspicuous consumption of cattle and ritual sacrifice, to appease deities. Samhain, being the end of pastoral summering and the start of the new year, was one of the most consequential feasts, where sacrifice and appeasement were most extravagant. This gluttony and blood shedding was no doubt aided by the ability to slaughter surplus stock ahead of winter.

In imagining a full-blooded Samhain, an evocative portrait of sacrificial feast is given by Atran (2002), quoted by Sherwood, saying:

“Religious sacrifices are not only designed to be materially costly, they also aim to be emotionally arousing. Blood, especially human blood, is optimal for sacrifice on both accounts … Such costly offering of a significant part of a particular human life was made to the gods to obtain an even fuller and more enduring life for the congregation as a whole. Blood offered at the alter was usually conceived to be drunk by the deity … In many of the world’s religions, blood sacrifice has persisted in one form or another. Usually it survives as animal sacrifice, with animal blood replacing human blood … Often the animal is consumed by the congregation, at least in part. This serves to redistribute meat and affection among members of the community … In religious offerings, there is always a non-recuperable cost involved both in the selection of the item offered and in the ceremony itself … In many cases, the first or best products of one’s livelihood must be given to the gods …”

Atran 2002, p115- 116, quoted in Sherwood, 2009, p12

Some of the paraphernalia of these frightful and excessive feasts is recorded in the Senchus Mór, a collection early Irish laws, where mention is made of the existence of a “great cauldron … which is used for the preparation of feast every quarter of a year” (Armao, 2006, p333).

This subjugation of the populous at Samhain is present in the early Irish myths, where goods, and even children must be gifted. We saw above, with the legend linked to the people of the Nemed. Another example comes from the Dindshenchas – a set of early Irish texts on the origins of place-names and traditions of the events and characters associated with these places. This tells of the ‘firstlings of every issue and the chief scions of every clan’ being offered to the Chief of the Mound at Samhain up until the coming of St Patrick (Sjoestedt, 2000, p53). In a different myth the men and women of Ireland are described as prostrating themselves before their king ‘so that the tops of their foreheads and the gristle of their noses and the caps of their knees and the ends of their elbows broke, and three-quarters of the men of Ireland perished at those prostrations’ (ibid). As Sjoestedt pithily notes, these tales may sound fantastical, but they seem to ‘evoke the memory of a bloody rite based on terror’.

In order to host such great consumption, rulers would have needed their subjects to gather together and give of their offerings – be these cattle, crops or offspring. The ‘resources’ brought to the Samhain fire are therefore often described in terms of tithes. Sjoestedt expresses this:

“Samhain is the time when the tithes levied upon the harvest of the fruitful season are offered, in this barren season, to the spirits. These sacrifices take on the character not of offerings to guardian powers but of a heavy tribute imposed on man by the powers of destruction.”

(Sjoestedt, 2000, p53)

Here Sjoestedt gets us to think about the burden of offerings, not just in spiritual terms, but in terms of tax. Perhaps we might even want to think about taxation being the raison d’être for Samhain, sustaining power through tax and fear. Myth and magic are the cultural, yet ultimately contrived justification for Samhain, but in their all-pervading hold over belief, they were none-the-less, very real.

So, where did these Samhain feats take place? Hill-tops feature heavily in Samhain folklore. This is nicely exemplified in both the mythology and archaeology at a four-ringed enclosure, once known as Thlactga^[3] and now known as The Hill of Ward (Archaeology Ireland, 2013). This ‘monument of ‘exceptionally high status’ was well-known as a place of assembly, linked to Irish kings. It was said that they summoned ‘the priests, the augurs and druids of Ireland’ at Samhain eve to ‘consume the sacrifices that were offered to their pagan gods’. Here, stories of fires being extinguished and re-lit from the Thalchtga fire are fabled (ibid). Magnetic surveys confirm stones on the hill-top to be thermally altered by exposure to fire. The Hill of Tara (to which attached the myth of the Feast of Tara) also has Samhain associations, as does the hill top of Slieve Donard in Northern Ireland (Moore, 2012).

Of note in this mythology at The Hill of Ward, we see introduced the idea that at Samhain, fires were extinguished and then re-lit. Tales from Celtic mythology and folklore tell of people across the land having to extinguish fires and only to have them re-lit from the flames of their ritual Samhain fire (Lyle, 2003, p195). This practice is laden with great symbolic meaning, as Samhain marks the new year. We will see in Part 3, in the folklore of Halloween, that extinguishing fires and re-lighting them, echos down the centuries to as late as the 18^th century, suggestive that relighting fires had a depth of importance.  

In this Samhain story we have seen that this festival is characterised by a maximum commitment to feasting, tithes, offerings and sacrifice. To this list of main features we need to add the act of divination. Priestly seers (the druids), and lordly poet seers (the Filid) (digitalmedievalist, 2018) were important actors in Samhain (e.g. Armao, 2006). According to Frazer, in his collation of folklore (1919, p272) Dathi, a king of Ireland in the fifth century, was at the Druids’ Hill in the county of Sligo one Hallowe’en (Cnoc-nan-druidneach – a cairn site), and ordered his druid to forecast for him the future from that day till the next Hallowe’en should come round. The druid passed the night on the top of the hill, and next morning made a prediction. Such ‘sitting out’ at a place of burial to prophecies is something I encountered before, when writing about the Lich Way acrss Dartmoor (The Lich Way: Part 2 – Lydford Tor to Coffin Wood).  Again, divination comes up again and again as part of Halloween practice into the Christian era.

Finally, I want to finish this second blog with a myth noted by Sjoestedt (2000, p54-55) and Hicks and Elder (2003). In their examination of stories in the dindshenchas they find the Samhain feast is associated with cattle raids, warfare and the death of warriors. They recall, for example, the infamous Cú Chulainn (named after the Cuckoo – a symbolic bird of strength and virility – see Nance 2022). This warrior king takes vengeance for the stealing of cows and the for the humiliation of having his head smeared with cow dung at a place called Sliab Leccach. Here it is reputed that each warrior left a stone by the fire so that on return, they could pick up their own, allowing a count of the dead. We will see in Part 3, which focuses on the Halloween, how stories like this ripple into the Christian era and more recent Halloween practice.

What might these tales tell us of Samhain on Dartmoor? I hope that this fleeting flight through the Samhain festival has given some ideas as to how our forebears may have used and moved through the landscape at this time of year. It also begins to tell of the relationship between landscape, resources, the rhythm of their year, and how this was expressed in belief and ceremonial practice.

I am going to refrain from elaborating more at this point, on what this might mean for Dartmoor. This is going to be the focus of the final blog, where I offer some informed speculations and encourage you to use the knowledge you have on your landscapes, to think about how Samhain might have manifested in the places that you know well.

[1] The Nemed were supposedly an early people who settled in Ireland; other Celtic tribes in Europe share the same etymological root such as the Nemetes (Germanic), Namnetes, Nemaloni and Nemetrurii (Gallic). The word Nemeton is thought to mean sacred grove, and place names connected to this word appear across Europe, including in Devon (where there are various Nymptons and Nymets).

[2] The Fomorions were the earliest settlers of Ireland – portrayed in various accounts as tribe of supernatural men, gods or underground demons.

[3] The name Thlachtga is translated as ‘Earth Spear’ (Archaeology Ireland, 2013). In Irish, ‘ga’ means spear. ‘tlacht’ means surface, skin or covering but is very similar in spelling and phonetically to ‘lacht’ which means milk.

References

Archaeology Ireland, 2013. Heritage Guide No. 63: The Hill of Ward: A Samhain site in County Meath (December 2013)

Armao, F., 2006. O Samhain Go Bealtaine: Folklores, mythes et origines de la fête de mai en Irlande (Doctoral dissertation, Université de Lille).

Digitalmedievalist. 2018. What are Druids, Fili and Bards? Celtic Studies Resources. https://www.digitalmedievalist.com/opinionated-celtic-faqs/druids/. (2018, April 30).

Frazer, J.G. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Volume X of XII. Part VII: Balder the Beautiful. The Fire Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the Eternal Soul. MacMillan & Co: New York and London.

Hicks, R. and Elder, L.W., 2003. Festivals, deaths, and the sacred landscape of Ancient Ireland. Journal of Indo-European Studies, 31(3/4), pp.307-336.

Lyle, E., 2003, January. The Celtic Seasonal Festivals in the Light of Recent Approaches to the Indo-European Ritual Year. In Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium (pp. 184-199). Dept. of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University.

Moore, S., 2012. The Archaeology of Slieve Donard, Co. Down: A Cultural Biography of Ulster’s Highest Mountain. Down County Museum.

Nance, D.A., 2022. Sacred kings of the Picts: the last cuckoos. Scottish Geographical Journal, pp.1-20.

Sherwood, Amy (2009) “An Bó Bheannaithe: Cattle Symbolism in Traditional Irish Folklore, Myth, and Archaeology,” PSU McNair Scholars Online Journal: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 21.

Sjoestedt, M.L., 2000. Celtic Gods and Heroes. Courier Corporation.