SAMHAIN

Samhain is one of the four greater festivals in the Pagan year, diametrically opposite from Beltane and serving as the gateway between one year and the next. The festival was historically a celebration of the last of the harvest and was the time when the herds would be culled; rather than let sick or injured animals die in the winter and be wasted, they were killed and the meat stored to see the humans through to the spring.

Modern Paganism also recognizes Samhain as the primary festival of the Dead. The rite I will be attending is to feature Donn as the patron; Donn features in Irish myth as one of the Sons of Mil, who, as the Milesians attempted to land on Ireland, was knocked dead from the mast of their ship by the magic of the Tuatha Dé Danann. The bard Amergin declared that the spot where Donn fell would be the place that the Sons of Mil would go after death, and Donn became the ancestral Lord of the Dead in the Irish mythos, the keeper of the House of Donn under the waves where the Ancestors lived. On Samhain we particularly 0remember and honor our beloved dead; thanks to the liminality of the Gate of the Year, it is often said that the Ancestors and the Otherworlds are closest to our world at that time.

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