A Guide to Celebrating Samhain through Mythology and the Five Elements

Late Autumn gathers darkness, and the boundaries between worlds grow thin. Here the ancient rites of Samhain have come to call the ‘Otherworld” to the surface. More than an agricultural cycle, Samhain is a threshold energy that moves us into the womb of the year that promises rebirth as much as it acknowledges death. Here, as the axe falls at seasons turn, we meet the Dark Feminine of Winter, where the Water element strengthens, not just in the natural world, thickening and darkening, but within the white of our bones themselves. How do we approach this threshold where the veil is thinnest, and the old ways overshadow the new?

At Samhain, the sun crosses the halfway point of Taurus/Scorpio (depending on your hemisphere), merging halfway between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice. Here the solar energies accelerate downwards to rest in the incoming Winter and the liquid field of the element of Water. Here we shift into the quiet after the exhaustive dismemberment of Autumn, the natural void after the giving away. We are newly naked and feeling the space between the natural world of the fairy realms and the supernatural world* (as in ‘above nature’) that we have inherited. At the heart of modern celebrations like Samhain lies a deep longing to return to the reciprocity of the natural, and the ways lived in alignment with those whose names we have long forgotten.

These post-covid days of crumbling dissolution and sharp awakenings are in themselves each their own Samhain. An Autumn came to disrupt the old patterns and awaken us from the modern myth that gathering as much stuff as possible before death is the one true goal. The real story is that life’s goals are lived through the felt experiences of love, loss, transformation, and regrowth.

aka Nature

Anything else is a theft.

There is a wild, wide calm at Samhain that heralds the Wild Hunt of seasons return, that has for aeons, cut like a scythe through the frigid and old in us. Figures of mythology and legend; Arawn Lord of the Dead, Odin, the headless rider of Dullahan, and the Celtic Cernunnos rode out, swords glinting, come to slay the old stories, the tired beliefs and the patterns that slowed us down and held us low. Each one a guide showing us how we might confront and release the shadow in preparation for death…and rebirth.

What in you is ready to be laid at the foot of the Lord of the Dead?

In our bones, we long for the depth we denied ourselves as we colonized the lie of eternal summers and the superficiality of material existence. We intellectualized, hypothesised, anesthetised, and pushed away the medicine of grief and the songs of lamentation that Autumn tried so hard to teach us.

But we plugged in the leaf blower and sent the leaves right on down the road. We conveniently forgot that to compost and be reclaimed by the Earth is our destiny as well.

Autumn cried for you to carve off and call forward your melancholy. While Winter insists you sit by its Waters and weep yourself into transformation. Winter as a season is a voice without solution, a place where we sing in emptiness with the sisters of tears, relief and eventually joy.

The Fairy Court jostles at winter’s verge, assembling for the procession into the depths. Here all those who crave stories that are old and deep listen into the otherworld where transformation is possible, where it is safe to demolish the old, and right to trust the new. Through sacrifice and ritual, our ancestors would travel here with the fairies to download the insights that evolved civilizations - fire, the wheel, paper, the compass, steam power, electricity, and even the internet…..

What might happen to big pharma, big ag, governments or organised religion we crossed the liminal threshold to the place on the other side of dismemberment, where death and the solution exist as one.

What old stories within you are ready to be rewritten?

If we think we are separate from the cycles of the forest or the sea that demolish in order to renew then we will never find what we long for most - to know the source of the ocean, to feel the churning of the heart, to become wholly naked and to know the void. This is why the burial mounds must open at winter’s verge. There are lessons here on how to navigate towards freedom from delusion, and how to recognise the pathway of return when we see it.

Persephone and Orpheus showed us how to traverse this underworld as a means of renewal and rebirth. Here the soul’s dark night, instead of being a psychiatric offence becomes a crucible for spiritual enlightenment where the dark Feminine holds the lock, and you hold the key.

Samhain’s sacred pause is a time for us to step into the dissolve of the great unknown, trusting in the transformative power of darkness and depth to renew us. It is to surrender and then weep in the nakedness for all that has been given away until we are found again, it is to action Sacred grief, and it is the pure Gold of the Autumn cycle. Only then can we let the dead and dying parts of ourselves lead, through the lens of grief, forward into the dark until our eyes adjust to the light.

“Since our open attempt on the mountain-pass our plight has become more desperate, I fear. I see now little hope, if we do not vanish from sight for a while, and cover our trail. Therefore I advise that we should go neither over the mountains, nor round them, but under them. That is a road at any rate that the Enemy will least expect us to take.”

- Gandalf | Lord of the Rings

At midnight on Samhain, we are on the edge of a profound transition, not just in the annual cycling of seasons, but in how we engage with the larger spiritual journey through these times, choosing if we come as participant or victim.

* Iam completely aware that this is a flipped narrative however to my reckoning the synthetic world of modernity is the ‘supernatural’ while the natural world remains as it always has - a land of moss and forests, fairy folk and magic.