Samhain, Yule, and a Child’s Heart

Finding the Scriptures

I know the difference between the holy scriptures and all the books written merely by human beings, and I suspect you do as well. There is an infinite depth shining in the scriptures’ simplest things.

Once when I was a child, I had a beautiful dream: I was walking in the neighborhood where I grew up, in suburban Washington, DC, on a street I had known all my life. Suddenly there was a new street I had never seen before; and as I turned in curiosity to walk up it, I found myself no longer in the suburbs but on a rocky road in a wild moorland with bracken, heather, gray skies, and the distant sense of the presence of the sea. It was a place for which I had always longed, without having seen it or known it. My heart was filled with joy.

(Dear reader, perhaps you know this joy, a child’s joy from before the weight of life has been laid on it: the joy of a gift received, the joy in which we taste life as perpetual fulfilment rather than perpetual longing alone. Of course, there is a godly longing in the midst of fulfilment, what St Gregory of Nyssa would call epektasis, the soul’s reaching out for the “endlessness of royal riches” which the lady of the Tuatha Dé Danann tells Bran is to be found in the Land of Emain, as the bards relate in his Voyage. You can listen to a modern bard tell this story if you don’t already know it, which is the best way for it to come to your heart.)

The Scriptures are like this: we know them well enough, by heart sometimes, but then one day we look again at the familiar and discover that it is strange, marvellously strange, that there is a truth hidden we had always before passed by, heedless. And that truth proves to be lembas, as I am always moved to say, lembas for the journey of this life. Often that truth is full of a grace that we need so desperately in the moment we find it. Indeed, finally, this is the real definition of scripture, this is the identifying mark of divine inspiration in a text: perhaps this will affront those who live with the need of tight and precise definitions, but I will say that any text through which this grace comes that elevates the habitual working of your mind and heart, that shows you not just a new pathway for your soul, but a pathway truly full of life, the life for which you thirst in a land barren and untrodden and unwatered — this text is holy scripture. There is the normative canon, but there is also the canon to which your heart witnesses that it is awakening you. And as John Moriarty says, the most imperative waking is to wake from our habitual, quotidian “wakefulness.”

“Become As Little Children”

The text I want to open here is St Mark 10:13-16:

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up in his arms, put his hands upon them, and blessed them.

This text came to my heart as I felt Samhain approaching. I am presently working with a Druidic curriculum which, rather than presenting esoteric doctrines and mythology, begins by directing attention to the numinous as it is revealed in our concrete experience of nature and human life rooted in nature. I think this is a very congenial approach for Christians, since it is wholly complementary to orthodox faith and practice — after all, St Anthony the Great said, “My book is the nature of created things, and whenever I wish, I may open it and read the words of God.” This attention to nature is perhaps a way towards a recovery of the indigenous folk Christianity that was largely destroyed by the Industrial Revolution.

In one reckoning which I am “trying on,” the lunar months — from moon’s dark to full and back again — are defined by solar calendar events that fall in them. The current moon cycle is thus the cycle of Samhain, the cross-quarter day that in ancient Celtic reckoning marked the beginning of the year and the beginning of its dark half. I will be marking Samhain especially then on the full moon night of this cycle, November 5, rather than on Halloween itself, the modern remnant of the ancient festival.

But how dearly I love Halloween! Far from rejecting this “secular” festival, I feel it as my child’s heart felt it. It was the night itself that entranced me: I mean the night as a phenomenological reality, not as a “time” on a clock. It was late autumn; it was dark and cold; the leaves were falling; the streets were littered with acorns; woodsmoke was in the air; these were the days before mercury vapor, when the streetlights were incandescent. The common talk among Pagans is that at this time “the veil between the worlds is thin.” Some scholars claim that this is a modern conceit, that ancient pagans did not think of the festival this way; but as a child, I felt it so keenly — revealed even in the simplest reversal that we all wandered late in the dark, cloaked in the “otherness” of our enchanted costuming, adopting the mischievous or heroic aspects of our beloved exemplars.

To honor and evoke those magical Halloween nights of my child’s heart, I will christen the full moon of Samhain the “Lantern Moon.” In the text from St Mark’s Gospel, I feel the Lord’s blessing on this childhood magic. (Of course I don’t mean the dark corruptions of terror that increasingly accompany it. There is an appropriate and truly delightful “fear” associated with these liminal experiences, but the cultural egregore that wants to plant destructive, gnawing worms of fear in our souls is doing something altogether different and altogether perverse.)

Exiles and Treasures

As I sense my way more deeply into that scripture, I reflect on the life of my child’s soul that still lives in me — jaded as I may be, contorted by life as I may be. I think of the Hymn of the Pearl, that ancient Gnostic Christian story of the soul’s descent into this world from its homeland:

When, a quite little child, I was dwelling
In the House of my Father’s Kingdom,
And in the wealth and the glories
Of my Up-bringers I was delighting,
From the East, our Home, my Parents
Forth-sent me with journey-provision.
Indeed from the wealth of our Treasure,
They bound up for me a load.
Large was it, yet was it so light
That all alone I could bear it.

Gold from the Land of Beth-Ellaya,
Silver from Gazak the Great,
Chalcedonies of India,
Iris-hued opals from Kashan.
They girt me with Adamant [also]
That hath power to cut even iron.
My Glorious Robe they took off me
Which in their love they had wrought me,
And my Purple Mantle [also]
Which was woven to match with my stature.

And with me They [then] made a compact;
In my heart wrote it, not to forget it:
“If thou goest down into Egypt,
And thence thou bring’st the one Pearl –
[The Pearl] that lies in the Sea,
Hard by the loud-breathing Serpent –
[Then] shalt Thou put on thy Robe
And thy Mantle that goeth upon it,
And with thy Brother, Our Second,
Shalt thou be Heir in our Kingdom.”

We have to read this text in a way that is true for us. We have to appropriate it by identifying not something that we think but something that we feel, something that we know with immediate certainty, not something that we merely “believe” on pious hearsay or thoughtless repetition.

For me, “my Father’s Kingdom” is the Emain of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the Silver Branch land. That is my soul’s homeland. The gold and silver are the tales of the bards as they live (and yes, they still live) in the tradition of my people and in me. The precious stones are the inspired strains of music — geantraí, goltraí and suantraí. The adamantine sword, that can cut even iron — and our life in this Age of Iron has so many chains — is the Awen of God which “has flooded our hearts through the Holy Spirit he has given us.” Never doubt that this sword can cut iron.

Samhain, Yule, Magic, and the Commandments of Men

As much as I would like to say about Samhain, the Samhain of my heart, I would say more about Yule (which on the lunisolar reckoning described above, will fall on January 3, 2026 — comfortably midway between the New and Old Calendar dates for the Nativity) — but I have already said a lot. I am embarrassed to admit that I have already quietly begun listening to my favorite Yuletide music — and we are not even in the Nativity Fast yet!

But this is the magic my child’s soul received when I came here from the Silver Branch Land. As I reflect on the world of feeling that encompasses Samhain and Yule for me, I see simply that there is no difference between the pagan and the Christian. They are all of a piece. The same voice is speaking through them. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.

To the child, it is all gift, it is all magic, it is all lore, it is all remembrance. It all comes from the same place; it all grows from the same hidden roots. My celebration of the Nativity would not, could not be what it is without the entire world of Yule that mantles it in snowbound beauty and fills it with light from within.

The soft-heart balm-vision of the child in the manger would not taste like anything without the lantern- and gift-bearing Father Christmas leading his donkey laden with gifts through the snow — the Holly King come to offer his gifts with the Wise Men of the East.

Indeed it is only through this deeper root that I can even understand what the Christian mystery is. Without this deeper root I go astray; my mind can hear and play with the doctrines, but my heart and soul are far from them: This people pays me lip-service, but their heart is far from me; they worship me in vain, for they teach as doctrines the commandments of men.

I wonder if you can understand me, and let the marvellous other meanings of that scripture into your heart. It is not talking about submitting ourselves to outward words, to delineated doctrines and texts acclaimed as “revealed.” No, the precise opposite: it is talking about how we lay waste to our souls by seeking, constructing, worshipping the idols of such doctrines and texts when we cut the taproots of our souls that are sunk deep in the magic, deep in the Awen, deep in the Spirit. We make idols of texts when we close ourselves to their actual inspiration. The way to tend the roots is to tend to those deep oceans, deep woodlands, nights of magic and joy, that the Lord blesses in children — the children we once were, the children we still are in our greatest sincerity.

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