Samhain is with us again. I love this time of year. Golden leaves underfoot and suddenly it’s cold, nights are drawing in and I am so grateful for the warm glow from the log burner.
I work some nights and head out in the dark to run evening ghost walks which are now very atmospheric – but also a challenge when I can’t always see the faces of the group in the dark while telling the stories. It feels weird performing to the dark huddle.
Samhain and moonlight
But there is always an extra crackle in the air at this time of year as we descend into the dark months and out under the stars, full moon rising over the Bay, there is a sense of something else present. I think of little entities that turn up for fires and frosty nights, moonlight and stars in the black velvet overhead. Magic is afoot.
According to the Witch’s Maleficum of the 1600’s, a multitude of elemental beings show up at Halloween. Many of those mentioned, it would seem, have populated these landscapes at some time or other. They straddle the fence between myth and reality. For example, a good detailed OS map of North Yorkshire will reveal a hoard of place names attributed to Hobs. Hob Moor at York, Hob of Howl Moor, Hob of Glaisdale, the Farndale Hob, Hob Holes at Westerdale, the Hob Cave at Runswick Bay, Hob Cross at Lastingham, to name a few. These are the Hobbits of the North.
Rose Rylands is a Storyteller and walking guide based where she grew up on the East Coast at Whitby. Her mission is to connect people to the earth as a place of magic, mystery and meaning, to arrest ongoing harm to both ourselves and the natural world.
“My passion is to connect people with the earth as a place of mystery, meaning and magic through story. I suppose I am a sort of cultural custodian of my own small space and beloved bit of earth.”
Rose writes a monthly blog for us on the Wheel of the Year theme. Her next video blog from Rose will be coming out very soon.
Pleides rising
The Celts were great astronomers and could see the Pleides constellation. It rises in Spring at Beltane and again at Samhain – Halloween. Pleides lights the night skies with its bright cluster. The celts believed the seven bright stars of Pleides were celestial beings, and that they come to earth at these times of the year. Alchemists for centuries worked in the presence of celestial energies during their alchemical processes. Some are again today working in such ways.
Samhain – time of gateways
It was known as a mercurial time of transformation, when gateways between the worlds open up. Each bringing us the opportunity for renewal, enlightenment, and metamorphosis. Nowadays we have long forgotten the inner worlds and other realities teeming with other beings. The shaman, seer, hedgewitch, magician, magus, alchemist, all were silenced, for the most part. There has been a great censorship for centuries, a subjugation of esoteric knowledge and learnings of antiquity. From the times of the High Priestess and the Temples of Isis, where it is said Christ was initiated, there was a brutal and sometimes otherwise subtle destruction and suppression of a profound, divine, magical (in its truest sense) path that had been followed for millenia. Worship of nature and sacred rituals around the elemental, symbolic and archetypal realms had always been practised.
Magic and mystery
The supression lasted centuries and even we know thousands suffered terribly in the banishment of Pagan worship. The witch hunts, a general suppression and abuse of women, a great wounding of men.
Today such ideas are still looked upon with skepticism. Children are taught that magic isnt real and that we cannot return to the great mystery schools. People really learned how to live with the mysteries of life. They worked within the divine enchantment of a living natural world. People were trained in communicating with plants and other fellow non human beings. Others who worked solely in the invisible worlds.
But magic never left, the world is still a place of marvel, and earth craves our return to a more multidimensional consciousness where we might find the oneness of everything. Perhaps in time to come we will turn more and more to what we yet know of the timeless old ways in order to seek real relationship with life away from our flashing screens. Perhaps in time gateways will open and long lost wisdoms will permeate consciousness once again. Who knows. So Halloween is nearly upon us and I gaze at the stars I feel small and give thanks that I am here on this incredible garden spinning in the great black bejewelled emptiness of space. I try to look to the heavens as our ancestors did for guidance, assurance, and illumination.
I will be running ghost walks this week and as always, people come for different reasons, but with a curiosity to delve into something otherworldly. It’s in our DNA.
What is TA Earth?
TA Earth series explores our connections with our home planet and the world around us. We are inspired by Hayley Marshall and Giles Barrow’s pioneering work, Eco TA. Moving ‘toward an ecological understanding of the individual embedded in relationship with others and the wider natural world’.