Samhain Dartmoor: Part 3 – Samhain vestiges in All Hallow’s Eve

In this third blog (of a series of four ) I am going to build on the myth and practice of the pre-Christian Samhain explored in blog 2, to see what happened to the festival after Christianization? There is such an abundance of Halloween practice recorded over recent centuries that there is enough to fill volumes of books. It is therefore not the intention of this blog to give full coverage of Halloween customs, but rather to illustrate a few aspects of Halloween folklore that most closely map to pre-Christian Samhain. My purpose is also to focus on elements that provide a local and a landscape dimension to Samhain so that in blog four, I can use these to hypothesize about the festival on Dartmoor.

As a re-cap, to split this examination of ‘Dartmoor Samhain’ into digestible chunks, I have been posting in 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 the second part I explored 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. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 2 -Samhain Myths & Practices]
• In this part three, I am looking at Halloween folklore, to examine how it built on Samhain practice, but in a Christian guise.
• 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 culturally at this festival. [Samhain Dartmoor: Part 4 – Tors on Fire?]

Think of Halloween and one of the first images we conjure is the Jack-o’-lantern, be this the American pumpkin, or our British traditional, the swede or turnip. Whether these lanterns were a representation of the spirits that swirled on Hallowmas or whether to protect against them, the Jack-o’-lantern embodies the relationship of All Hallow’s Eve to the dead and to the otherworldly. Samhain marks the fracture between summer and winter; a boundary time, that dissolved the barrier between our world and the other world. The carving of Jack-o’-lanterns is therefore part of this continuum; of acknowledging and protecting ourselves from this otherworld.

Today, witches and ghosts are the creatures from the dark side that we typically celebrate at Halloween, but in the past, the fairy folk, the sídh, were more commonly the otherworldly inhabitants that people expected to encounter.  For example, Armao (2006, p192) explains that, in the manuscripts of the Irish Folklore Commission (which began recording folklore in the 1930’s) there are stories such as that of the young girls living near Cnoc Aine (Knockainey), placing gifts on the hill at both Bealtaine and Samhain. These gifts were left under a ledge on the western side of the hill. This hill is associated with fairies and is so named because of its reputation for being the dwelling of the fairy queen Áine, who interestingly is the goddess of summer, wealth and sovereignty. It is not recorded what the nature of the gifts were, nor their purpose. However, the timing of the gifts, at Bealtaine and Samhain, and the links of the location to fairies is suggestive that these were protective offerings to the Sídh. The character of the goddess Áine also seems of particular relevance due to her association to the summer, Bealtaine and Samhain marking the beginning and end of this productive season.

It is not just in Ireland that there are stories of offerings to the Sídh, and their disgorging from the brown belly of the earth at Halloween. Folklore from Wales and Scotland also records fairy-folk and bogies inhabiting this night and doing mischief (Frazer, 1919, p270). Wherever fairies are thought to inhabit, there seems to be a need to gift-give, to prevent their harm-doing. It is because of fairies, no doubt, that trick-or-treating is likely to have developed; tricks relating to fairy mischief-making and their tricksy behaviour, and treats a vestige of offerings to the fairies to  mollify the ethereal naughty sprites.

Strongly featured in Halloween folklore are various acts of divination, hints of which appear in Samhain mythology and druidic ‘seeing’ on this night. In the 18^th Century, for example, Halloween was known to some as Nutcracker Night. On this eve it was common to eat hazelnuts, burnt in the fire, but some traditions recall these being used to divine a future partner or ascertain their fidelity (Frazer, 1919; Johnson, 1968; Groom, 2018). This might involve placing two nuts together by the grate and prognosticating, from their response to the heat of the fire, the actions of the lover. Hazelnuts as a foodstuff have a long history of association with fire and large winter feasts. They are known from archaeological evidence, to have been roasted in fire pits from as early as the Mesolithic (Ray and Thomas, 2018, p60; López-Dóriga, 2019). Hazelnuts therefore seem to have an entangled connection with the end-of-summer fire festival, when autumnal nuts, recently harvested, were widely available for feasting upon.

Fire, in the form of a candle was also used to divine (Frazer, 1919, p273 Johnson, 1968). This could be achieved by looking into the candle’s flame at Halloween, preferably in church, to see who will die in the coming year. This practice is not dissimilar to the stories of druids sitting out on Samhain at cairn locations, places also with spiritual and burial meanings, to see into the future and who was about to perish.

It wasn’t just around the home-hearth or church that people would prophesize the future. Frazer (1919, p273) repeats folklore gathered from Wales of people on Halloween going to a dark crossroads, scene of many an encounter with spirits or the devil, and listening to the wind. Tales tell of the Halloween wind ‘blowing over the feet of corpses’ on ‘three spirits night’ and in so doing, bearing a message of who would die within the next twelve months. This is echoed in Scotland where it was said that you could take a three-legged stool to a three-way crossroad to divine, at midnight, who in the parish would die (ibid).

In blog 2, on the myths and practices of Samhain, we encountered a legend of warriors at Sliab Leccach in Ireland, leaving stones by the Samhain fire and picking them up on return, as a way of keeping track of which warriors survived from battle. At Halloween, there are reverberations of this custom. A tradition from Ochetyre in Scotland, is recalled by John Ramsay in the eighteenth century, remembering the practices of his youth (Frazer, 1919, p274). This involved stones, one for each person, being placed around the Samhain fire, lit ‘on an eminence’. On a shout, a burning torch of ferns or sticks would be grabbed by each from the fire and the Halloween revellers would run around the fire ‘exulting’. The fire would be allowed to burn out and the people would return home to feast. But in the morning, the ashy remnants would be returned to, and the stones inspected. Whichever were displaced, then the person who had set that stone there, would die within a year. A similar tale of stones and death prophesy at Halloween is told from Callendar in Perthshire (also in Frazer). 

Bringing disquieting tales of Halloween back south, and to Devon, the 19^th century Tavistock writer, Mrs Anna Eliza Bray tells us, of the last day of October that:

“on that day every person was compelled to extinguish all fire in his house, and come to the priest in order to obtain from him a consecrated brand, taken from the altar to renew it. But if any begged this, without having previously paid what ever might be due to the priest, it was denied to him, and the terrific sentence of excommunication pronounced. This sentence consigned the miserable defaulter to a lingering death from cold and hunger. His cattle were seized; he had no fire to cheer his home, or to dress food for his subsistence, or to warm him in the depth of winter, whilst surrounded by frosts and snows. No friend, kindred or neighbour, was allowed to supply him with fire, under pain of incurring the like cruel sentence.”

Mrs Anna Eliza Bray (1838, p335)

Bray is opinionated in her reaction to this ‘cruel’ extortion by an ‘idolatrous priesthood’. She concludes by saying that she has read somewhere that this was formerly a custom in the western parts of England, as well as in Wales but ‘now, I believe, wholly extinct’.

What I find fascinating in this account is how it mimics earlier Celtic practice in which great tithes were extracted from the people in obligatorily attendance at the Samhain fire, from which they must re-light their own fires for the coming new year  (see Blog 2) and illustrated in this quote, written in 1634 by the early Irish historian Geoffrey Keating:

“Accordingly he [Tuathal – a high king of Ireland] built Tlachtgha in the portion of Munster which goes with Meath; and it was there the Fire of Tlachtgha was instituted, at which it was their custom to assemble and bring together the druids of Ireland on the eve of Samhain to offer sacrifice to all the gods. It was at that fire they used to burn their victims; and it was of obligation under penalty of fine to quench the fires of Ireland on that night, and the men of Ireland were forbidden to kindle fires except from that fire; and for each fire that was kindled from it in Ireland the king of Munster received a tax of a screaball, or three-pence, since the land on which Tlachtgha is belongs to the part of Munster given to Meath.”

Keating c. 1634, Translated by Comyn and Dinneen 2009, p166

Bray’s account seems to capture this tradition of fires being required to be renewed, not through a ruling king or druid, but through the authority of the church, via the priest. This association is highly suggestive of Celtic Samhain practices in Christianized form, persisting in south-west England until the early modern period. This being the case, this hints that in the west-county, we too had a form of Samhain, and that new year started at this time, similar to traditions described in the last blog for other parts of Celtic Britain.  

Finally, in recounting Halloween folk tales that evoke Samhain, and a link to my narrative of this festival pulsing to the pastoral rhythm of the year – of summering and wintering with cattle in a cow-economy – I want to end with some reference to cattle. Armao (2016), who has studied in depth the Celtic fire festivals, notes that both Bealtaine (that marks the start of summer) and Samhain (that marks the end) are times of year where there are many records of post-Christian customs associated with protecting cattle. Whilst Moore (1891, p124) shares part of a Manx rhyme that, in its Gaelic (and to a non-Gaelic speaker), has a romantic veneer, but whose meaning is decidedly unsentimental:

Oie Houna; Shibber ny gauin(a); Cre gauin marr mayd?; yn gauin veg vreac

Hollantide Eve [Halloween]; Supper of the heifer;  Which heifer shall we kill?; The little spotted heifer.  

Interpreting this rhyme Moore tells us that Oie Houna, is a an alternative Manx expression for the older word Hoganna, the Manx word for new year; a word linguistically related to the Scots Hogmanay. He also interprets this song as a reminiscence of cattle sacrifice and feasting, an analysis that, through the research I have done for this blog, I have sympathy with.

So there we have it. Not a comprehensive guide to Halloween and its predecessor, Samhain, but one that I hope, shares some lesser known myths, practices and continuities. There is plenty I haven’t covered, like the long tradition of guising, or games such as apple bobbing, but my emphasis here has been focused on elements I want to develop in my final blog – what was Samhain like on Dartmoor?

In the fourth and final blog I am going to get imaginative, drawing on these oral histories and whispers from mythology, to stage Samhain in the theatre of the moor. What Samhain acts may have been observed over the millennia and where were they performed? What were the sights and the sounds and the smells, and who were their players? These ephemeral events recorded in myth and oral history leave only ghosts of things past, yet I think it is going to be both fun and useful, populating the Dartmoor landscape with this part of its cultural history, even if this can only be achieved partially and conjecturally.

References

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

Armao, F., 2016. The ‘Time of Ireland’: an Interpretation of the Four Irish Festivals. Time and Culture, pp325-338.

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.

Nick Groom (2018) Hallowe’en and Valentine: The Culture of Saints’ Days in the English-Speaking World, Folklore, 129:4, 331-352

Johnson, H.S., 1968. November Eve Beliefs and Customs in Irish Life and Literature. The Journal of American Folklore, 81(320), pp.133-142.

Keating, G., [Irish name – Seathrún Céitinn], 1634. The History of Ireland [Foras Feasa ar Éireann]. Translated into English by Edward Comyn and Patrick S. Dinneen, With a memoir of Geoffrey Keating by
Michael Doheny. Ex-classics Project, 2009. https://www.exclassics.com/ceitinn/forintro.htm

López-Dóriga, I., 2019.  How did ancient Europeans roast hazelnuts? Wessex Archaeology. 8^th May, 2019.

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

Ray, K. and Thomas, J., 2018. Neolithic Britain: the transformation of social worlds. Oxford University Press.