Samhain and the Gift of Descent

In a small west cork village, magic exists.

For weeks the villagers gathered. One brought old boxes, another brought fresh, pliable willow. One gathered clam shells, another brought washed up fishing nets. As evenings began to dim, the making commenced. Schull’s Puca Festival theme this year was ‘The Raising of the Lady Charlotte’, a fishing boat which sank off the West Coast of Cork in 1839. Nine sailors lost their lives and as the sails of the 2024 Lady Charlotte were hoisted over main street, it was as if the ghosts of their story are still haunting the shore.

The Samhain parade was a resurrection in many forms —of the Lady Charlotte story, but also of tradition, keeping up the playful mythic marking of the threshold into the dark cycle of the year, a time of liminality, which access to the otherworld is cracked open and souls are said to pass through. The underworld in the Celtic imagination is always just below the surface; veiled thin and pressing, and particularly so at Samhain. Masked or veiled, cloaked or covered, who is from the living realm and who is from the dead are questions which still invite mystery and mischief; questions which the Puca parade carried so well.

I had been away for a few weeks, so sadly my creative contributions to the event were limited to cutting out a few boat shapes and making circles from the willow, which would go on to be fashioned into fish. But every hand that helped made the street come alive in myth. A class of school children were transformed into a school of fish. There was a shoal of techno jellyfish (made from umbrellas!), a compass, a telescope, a ship of drunken sailors, a silver angelfish made from an old tent, huge skeletons rising and me, in the parade mix, holding a giant blue octopus tentacle, primely positioned for tiggling under the chins of onlookers, or even better, scaring young children, not to fright but to wonder and delight.

Samhain. The ritual is reviving, at least here in West Cork, where the following night, the next village over were having their own celebrations. And later in the week, a few villages further. Like a string of rituals, hung up to air out the old, and welcome the new. I think the place is the better for it.

Like any decent tradition, it goes deeper though too. Samhain, the initiation festival of the Celtic Calendar, the start of the Celtic year, positioned not at a time of rise, but at descent. Here in the Northern Hemisphere we are moving into the dark season, a time of release and decline, heading towards a wintering of being, the great fallow, and the slow - if we can let it. For ever season holds its gifts, and its invitations. The gift of Samhain goes beyond the playful parade or the night of trick or treat, and into the gift of the dark descent itself, which is also its invitation. What if, it asks, we allowed the darkness to take hold, if we allow ourselves the initiatory rite into its dark passage of slow time and the unknown? What might we find there? And how might we return?

The role, symbolism and questions of decent are not unique of course to the Celtic lineage. Scan any of the great mythologies and we find parallel underworld trajectories. Inanna, the Sumerian Goodness descended through the seven gates of the underworld only to be stripped bare, slain, then resurrected once the domineering masculine was rejected. She returned, like all devoted descenders, transformed. Persephone too descended, not from her own volition but from force. It was a brokered deal from Zeus which split her time between the dark and the light, the summer and winter, the masculine and feminine- in other words, she ascended to mirror the dual nature of existence, learning to straddle polarities and dichotomies, and learning to live between. In Maori tradition, we meet Hine-nui-te-po (The Great woman of the night), the Goddess of the dark, who is tasked with receiving the spirit of the dead into the underworld. It is here that out of force and will, she kills her father/ husband who, without consent, had tried to enter her, serpentine, through her vulva. She subsequently killed him with a set of piecing obsidian teeth in her vagina. If ever there was warning, let this be it. In Inuit mythology, we meet Sedna, Goddess of sea and marine creatures  who, with parallels to the selkie stories of the Celtic lands, is flung to the ocean by a controlling father, sinks, grows a tail fin, has her hands frozen off, and her fingers turn into multiple sea creatures. The depths may be violent, but they are fecund too.

As the great myths continue to teach us, the underworld and the feminine are deeply, and often, deadly, intwined. What must die in order for the true power to rise? What must be slain? What transformation awaits those that dare descend?

While there is death, so too is there retrieval- of limbs, perhaps, but mostly of power or the force which ultimately emerges to restore balance and order; to allow the cycle of time and nature to continue. As the news cycles spins yet another dark spin, I can’t help but think that within these old stories is a pattern which offers their own gift of questions for these dark times we trying to navigate. In this larger cycle of time, what might we be invited to retrieve? What maps might the underworld- the world of our ancestors and mythologies, of old rituals and traditions offer us now.

As I walked along the village street, among the willow fish, the techno jelly fish, beside the haunting ghost ship and the giant squid, as crowds gathered and were filled with awe, a moment of ‘collective effervesce’ as the philosopher Emile Durkheim would call it- a feeling of social cohesion in a moment of shared purpose, knitting social structures together, I couldn’t help but think: much. It can offer so much. Like questions: what if we are only just be realising the true power of the myth or story as a map, as path, as psychological reframe? What if these stories and their honouring of the old cycles, is a way of restoring and rebalancing what holds us apart, within ourselves, and within the natural cycles of time and death and rebirth? What if the ritual is a threshold, a bridge to our transformed return; equipped with true power and the wisdom from the depths. The descent, the threshold, the liminal, the giant octopus, the community. We step across. We shapeshift.