Celtic Festival of Samhain

Celebrated at the beginning of November, the Celtic Festival of Samhain marks the upcoming of the wintertime months, with their fainting light and intensifying darkness. The root word of the word “Samhain” derives from “samhradh”, meaning “summer” in Irish Gaelic.

Samhain was, accordingly, a festival of deepening darkness and budding light. It comprised a merging place between two opposites – the wintertime and the summertime, the dark and the light, dying and living. As such, the festival comprised both aspects of being – although the darkness, expanding at this time, was more exuberant and substantial.

In its ‘dark’ aspect, Samhain marked a period of wipeout and pandemonium. Perhaps the most spectacular example of this was the sacrificial killing of the Irish kings of Tara. According to Dalton’s manifest and interpretation, the kings that had conducted inappropriately or impiously in authority would be killed on the day of Samhain. sacrificial killing was also established against animals: Samhain was the time of year when the cattle that wouldn't be kept going through with the wintertime were butchered.

On Samhain, the powers of dark or chaos came back to rule. Concording to Irish mythology, first of November labeled the day that the satanic Comorian race crushed the citizens of Nemed. According to a different fable, the sacred Aillen the Burner puts everybody to rest at Samhain and fires the castle of the Irish kings at Tara. On the festival, lots of adult male, adult female and kids appareled in masks and costumes embodied the havoc-causing deities and imposed their own terror and bedlam on the locality. As Dalton remarks, the tyrannical Irish king Conn Cetcathach was killed by fifty warriors appareled as women. The habit of cross-dressing was popular in various parts of the Celtic world as expressions of the breakdown of rules on Samhain.

Samhain was a terrible time when laws were broken and evil roamed the earth, it followed till a time when light was born-again. Samhain, as Frazer has noted, was not a festival of the sun: the sun is in getting back in autumn. Alternatively, Samhain marked off the birth of a mystic light – a light that may arise in the early ray of sun at break of day or the early lunar ray after the new moon. In Ireland, a bonfire started on the imperial hill of Tara accompanying, maybe, the enthronement of a newfound king after the wiping out of the previous one. The tradition of lighting fires on Samhain was also general in Scotland and Wales.

This combining of darkness and light, dread and hope, order and pandemonium gave Samhain its special coloring of a joyous time of misconduct. It was a fete where regulations were concisely got rid of  – whether common, sociable, governmental or even psychological – forced out a time once new order was gave birth – Figures of major power were got rid of and others substituted them; rules were broken and recreated.