Hello everyone, and welcome to LukeLore. A quick deep dive into a folklore topic, where I share
some of the stories from around the world that have piqued my interest.
It's my favourite time of the year again, it's Spooky Season!
Samhain is here. Summer's end, the final harvest, the rising darkness. Another year of sharing fun facts for Halloween. Let's dive on in...
SECTION BREAK – Rituals in Lancashire
I was born and raised in West Lancashire, which is something that has come up before, but having dug deeper into some regional rites for the season I think I may have missed out due to being on the outskirts. It turns out that if you're a bit deeper into the North-West of England, there are some stranger things to see and do around this time of year.
That Pendle has a unique Halloween tradition is probably no surprise, with its history of witch trails, and should you be about Pendle Hill this time of the year you can join in with Lighting the Witches. If you're bold enough, anyway. This ritual can sometimes be pronounced as Lating or Leeting the witches, but a lit candle is integral to the process so the alternatives may just be a bit of Lanky Twang dialect at play with “Lighting” seeming to be correct.
Lighting the Witches was supposed to be a ward against evil influences. You would need to be out and about on Samhain night, taking with you a candle. You should light the candle at Eleven O'Clock, then through until midnight wander about the fells and hills of the area. If you managed to keep the candle alight that whole time? You will bring about a year of protection from witches for your home. If the candle should go out, however? Well... It's kind of the opposite. The candle becoming extinguished marks out an omen of evil.
As an added bit of Hard Mode, forces beyond the weather or a terribly timed sneeze are at play in the area. The ruined and desolate farmhouse the Pendle Witches were supposed to have been active using, known as The Malkin Tower, is a patch of ground where unseen forces will attack a ritual candle. I suppose in theory avoid the Malkin Tower, but the roaming about is a key component of Lighting the Witches. You can't just hide somewhere sheltered for an hour if you want to win the protection you seek.
Anyone else should be careful around the home of anyone out Leeting. To cross their threshold any time from the beginning of the walk up until they returned home was a quick way to get unlucky, and the whole place should be avoided for a year if the candle went out! Success protects a home, failure was markedly worse than nothing, should the poor sod's candle be extinguished before the hour is up. Just doing nothing may have been wiser, at this point the dinner bell has been rung on the All You Can Hex buffet. Anyone Lating it wrong needs to get good fast at every other way to ward off malevolent intent. Still, it's nice that there's a one hour ritual for a year's protection, provided it doesn't go wrong. Maybe don't try this one if it's raining, though.
It's interesting that I have spotted some speculation Lighting the Witches may predate the Pendle Witch Trials. If I had no choice but to wager? I would lean towards the witch trials coming first and the candle rites being something that followed. But I WANT it to be older, for Pendle to just plain have a long storied investment in witches... Although that may just be because I've been enjoying Agatha All Along in the run up to Halloween.
Pendle doesn't get all the Halloween fun, there is also Teanlay Night in the Borough of Fylde. Fylde is right near Blackpool, you could in fact cross over into it walking south down the coast as after a certain point it switches from Blackpool beach over to The Fylde: the coastal plain the Borough is named after. This region has a longstanding tradition of Teanlay, or Teanley, night as their particular version of Samhain.
A bonfire ritual on the midpoint between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, the final day of October as the modern calendar reads now – it broadly aligns with what's expected of Celtic and Gaelic celebrations. Stoking the fires high, and feasting around the final harvest in Britain for the year. The Teanlay Night observance comes with some added benefits. There's the general stuff of ensuring healthy herds in the year ahead, and blessing the wheat fields so they are free of weeds in the harvests to come. Good luck was also on offer, or at the very least not receiving bad luck (which is pretty useful in and of itself). A small number of families, two or three, were to gather at a local cairn to carry out the bonfire celebration. This was likely no small gathering, given how a single extended family can sprawl. As the bonfire was built in advance, in addition to the needed firewood for managing a good blaze well into the night, not to mention the bones that made for a true traditional “bone fire”, white stones specifically are needed to circle the flames. The bonfire would be tended until it had burned down to just ashes, which would then be gathered up and have the white stones added to them to be left overnight. Come the morning everyone would need to retrieve the correct stones for each family, the accidental mixing up of which could lead to bad luck, some stones were then to be thrown down into an opening on the hill cairn as an offering. These were to be dedicated to a saint associated with the cairn, or else to a local god, and this would have two benefits. The family taking care to do this would be blessed, and so too would the nearby water well associated with the site, infusing that water with healing properties.
These white stones consecrated in the Teanlay Night fires were also an important part of a ritual when someone was seriously sick. The ill person would be helped to pass through the entrance a traditional cairn in Fylde had, then would either be sprinkled in the water of the cairn's associated well or else full on dipped into it. Then an offering would need to be made assortedly of a shell, a pin, a rusty nail, and/or a rag – the exact offering would vary – plus three white stones which had gone through the bonfire ritual.
Sadly, a lot of these cairns have been lost. Destroyed because they were inconvenient, or in anti-pagan zeal. Across the Borough there are still plentiful fascinating archaeological finds to be had uncovering this rich legacy, as well as sometimes these places being gone yet not forgotten. At the heart of the town of Poulton is the Teanlowe shopping centre, named after the nearby field where a Teanlay Night bonfire was observed across times past.
SECTION BREAK – Unlocking the Mounds
Back at the How to Have A Happy (But Not Headless) Samhain episode we talked about how important the bonfire rituals were in Ireland, especially the large celebration at Tlachtga (Clackda). Samhain long before it became Halloween in Britain certainly enjoyed a good bonfire, with some variation in its meaning these fiery rituals have long spread all up and down the isles. Tlachtga (Clackda) wasn't the only site of major significance back in the Celtic days of Ireland, however. There's another hill in Boyne valley, called the Hill of Tara, and it holds its own significance for this time of year.
There is a 'passage tomb' on Tara, these are one or more linked covered burial chambers with an open passage to access them. Tying us back again into Tealay Night, a passage tomb or grave covered in stone is the form of cairn likely to be seen in Fylde. Where Tara stands out for Samhain, is down to how it was built. On Tara Hill is The Mound of the Hostages, this particular passage tomb was built so that on sunrise of Samhain, the rising sun lights up its entrance. It makes for beautiful pictures you can find online of this ancient heritage site! The Mound of the Hostages is between 4,500 and 5,000 years old. While it's most common to talk about Celtic Ireland, the Celts didn't colonise Ireland until around 500 BCE, which could well mean that Samhain in some form has been observed for thousands of years before Ireland even became Celtic. Let alone Christian. It's an awe inspiring weight of history, and extraordinary that there may be some sort of continuity around this time of year stretching from the Neolithic times all the way through to Halloween trick-or-treating today.
Tlachtga (Clackda) had the hearth relighting ceremony, making it more important than Tara through the Celtic times, but Tara has an older claim to Samhain. A legend that has great ties to the night of the year the dead can easiest cross the worlds to visit the living.
Old Irish folklore is concerned with the different waves of civilisation that inhabited the lands in the past. First were the monstrous Fomorians, then came the Tuatha de Dennan, the children of the goddess Dennan. Any remnants of these peoples are now Aos Sidhe, Of The Otherworld, and may be possible to meet around Samhain (although ideally you would want to avoid that). What came next was the Milesians. The Milesians will need much, much more unpacking on some future episode but they were a new wave of invaders to colonise Ireland. They may be a third and youngest wave of Aos Sidhe, the fae folk who are no longer a part of this world. They may be historical ancestors of modern day Irish folk. They may be both! They may also be an entirely fictitious invention of Christian scholars, but folklore is convoluted to say the least, so lets just get on with it. The very first Milesians to land at the Boyne would go on to have a special significance between being the first of their people to set foot upon the Emerald Isle and what happened to them.
After landing the Milesians made their way up to Tara, and were met with the Tautha De Dennan. This was the beginning of the conflict which would lead to these older gods and elves retreating to the underworld, but they get their licks in first. The Milesians are commanded to leave these lands, and appear to agree: They agree to leave beyond the ninth waves, a point of magical power in the ocean, and then come back. They'll be seeing you all soon, after entering a technically true agreement. With some proper fae oath warfare having been the first shots fired, the Milesians set sail to meet the required letters of the command, which annoyed the gathered Kings who represented the current gods of Ireland at that time. The druids of the assembled god-Kings conjured terrible weather to destroy the fleet as it turned about to return, then concealed the shoreline in mists hoping to disorient the Milesian invaders. Unfortunately for the invaded, but pretty handily for the invaders, Milesian druids dispelled the conjured weathers, and it was the beginning of the end an age.
What happened when the storm hit is what I want to talk about, though. As the fleet was scattered, before their own druids rallied the remaining ships, there was the matter of the lost ones. A Milesian ship and 25 from aboard were the first Milesian losses in this battle for Ireland. The very first Commander to die was a man named Donn, who drowned when his ship was broken to pieces.
As the very first Milesian to die in Ireland, he was elevated to this new era's God of Death.
He was buried on the Skellig Islands off of the coast of Kerry, and that place would become Tech Donn, the House of Donn, getting it pretty authoritatively associated with the otherworld. Donn is a pretty laid back god, not so much lazy as he his emblematic of the inevitability of death. Uninterested in the other gods or their affairs, he prefers to stay isolated in the austere rocky outcrops of the Skellig Islands which could easily be seen as a piercing outcrop of the underworld jutting out of the sea. Although puffins do seem to like the Skelligs, so they can't be all that bad. Donn, the god of shadows and death, doesn't need to venture forth. He just needs to wait. So a quote attributed to him goes...
“To me, to my house, you shall come after your death.”
There are plenty of stories of the dead gathering at the Skellig Islands, and perhaps more worrying their leaving them to return at times. Fisherfolk in the area have shared tales across time of strange boats heading to Tech Donn in the night, with the names of the dead being greeted being called out. Christians would go on to decide this was where the damned went to wait before going to hell, and apparently some iconography of the devil and hell were appropriated from depictions of Donn, but I would chalk them up to being a somewhat biased source when it comes to the native folklore of Ireland.
The Milesian invasion itself, and Donn's ascent to godhood, were said to have happened at Beltane, which is Samhain's opposite time of the year where the light half is begun. But Samhain being the Feast of the Dead puts this time of year firmly into Donn's domain. What do you want to bet this is the time of the year strange ships ferrying the dead back to Ireland from Tech Donn can be seen? The Samhain bonfires are a celebration of the sun, but they're as the sun god Mog Ruith must go down into the Lord of the Dead's realm for 6 months. Donn himself was said to ride out across Ireland at Samhain, and with this comes tales of the unwary being snatched up by him. Definitely do not mess with the God of the Dead on October 31st, it's the metaphysical equivalent of shoving a fork into a live socket to see what happens. There's a more than fair chance scraps of the Cult of Donn's observances survive into today's Halloween, such as leaving out a seat at the dinner table for the dead. These fragments of older rituals may themselves even be a continuation of something older.
4500 years. Maybe 5000. The prehistoric bronze age. That's when The Mound of Hostages was made on the Hill of Tara, it's opening facing the Samhain sun. All of which is just what remains THAT WE KNOW OF, it very likely wasn't the starting point of this season's observances. You can go and visit Tara to see this for yourself. Never let anyone tell you Halloween is just a modern made up holiday to sell sweets and spooky plastic rubbish. In fact, go enjoy Halloween even harder, buying more spooky nonsense and fun treats the more anyone tries to tell you that!
SECTION BREAK – Seasonal Divination
The "anything goes" nature of Samhain comes down to its timing. Twice a year, the light and dark halves of the year are in perfect balance, and while this also applies to Beltane with Samhain we are moving from the precipice into the long nights. Away from light, warmth, and the sun. This gives the better known impacts and risks of this night: The dead, the divine, and the otherworldly can all visit on Samhain. This knife's edge moment between the natural and the supernatural can, however, be made use of by the brave...and/or the foolish. Same difference.
Each of these rituals come with their risks. Being abroad at night at all, let alone in certain places, is a bad idea at Samhain. Less so if properly guised, but you're still up to mischief when forces better than you at it are having the same idea. With that being said, let's tell you exactly how to get into trouble this way as some Halloween fun!
An obvious place you absolutely should not be on Halloween night, or at the very least should only venture with your features safely hidden, is anywhere the dead are buried. As such, there are two different ways to attempt to divine the future in and around graveyards this time of year.
One is to stand in the porch of a church and look out across the graves. The church porch part is for your own safety. From there, spend time looking out among the graves, and watch. Wait for long enough, and you run the chance of seeing spectres of people yet to die in the year ahead. Not so much ghosts yet, but this is a time of the year you can look forwards, if you watch close, stay still, stay silent, and stay SAFE. But even if you do everything right, you can still get unlucky. Out there, among the shadows of the graves and the dead fed trees, one of the shapes you may see could well be yourself. At which point, it wasn't so clever to go and attempt to divine who will be dead before next Samhain.
For this next one, any burial site will do, but bigger will be better and if you choose a churchyard you have a convenient sanctuary to run screaming to the porch of. On Samhain night, you can walk three times around the outer edge of the graves to attempt to catch a glimpse of the future. The drawbacks to this are myriad. First of all, you're playing silly buggers at night on the 31st of October. All assorted ghosts, bogies, monsters, and forgotten gods get a pass to go out; and you've gone to where the dead get gathered up in what is also something of a nature preserve for 364 and a half days of the year. It's not without risk, is what I'm saying, before you go skipping off in an attempt to sneak some spoilers out from under the noses of the Fates. On top of the regular potential blunderings, from twisting your ankle in the dark to getting pantsed by a goblin, you may also bump into the devil on your third go around the graves. If you really feel the need to do this, going clockwise is common in Celtic rituals. Going widdershins, or anticlockwise, is common in witchcraft. Your mileage may vary. Pick well, and feel free to pick not doing it at all.
There's another way to accidentally bump into the devil Halloween night. Any given mirror ritual involving candlelight or else full on darkness to try and sneak a peak at your future marriage partner may result in a game of peek-a-boo with Beelzebub. This one seems to be more of a traditional hazard for teenage girls, and it's the boys who would be out cracking their heads open on gravestones, but demons are equal opportunity underworld ambushers. So, good news is these mirror rituals are most likely to work on Samhain. The bad news is who, or what, they happen to be working better for. It's much safer to use an apple peel ritual at Samhain for an attempt to peek into your future romances, and its still more likely to work given the holiday associations with apples and the final harvest.
If things do go hellaciously wrong, what's interesting is you may be seeing the God of Death Donn, and it's just recent Christian interpretation insisting Lucifer is on the prowl. This is a little bit of a moot point if whichever you bump into is hungry for a soul, but a last ditch attempt to be correctly respectful may get you out of trouble here.
There is one more small Samhain tradition to mention that ties into all this... Samhain is the day in which a well laid plan is most likely to succeed. It's a day the magic of which CAN be used responsibly, so maybe don't dance with the devil, but definitely do use the special nature of this time to put plans into motion.
SECTION BREAK – Scottish Samhainn
I'm really going to struggle with the pronunciations here...
Okay! The British Isles are outstandingly diverse, and it can be hard to wrap your head around that from the outside given that there are boundaries all up and down this collection of countries you can cross by accident just going for a short walk. Each sub faction will fervently assert their uniqueness, and dislike of their similar seeming neighbours. I currently live and work out of Liverpool, in Merseyside, which very much sees itself apart in its own way and it would be hard to argue against that meeting Scousers while out and about in the city. Lancashire and Yorkshire on their divide in the Pennines may seem the same at a glance, but don't mix up which side of a hill you are on if you're trying to make new friends in a pub! All of this is to say that Irish Celts and the Gaelic Scottish may share superficial similarities, and a lot of their folklore can be fit into similar categories for the sake of convenience, but they are not identical.
While sharing the name what is Sow-win in Ireland is better pronounced Sow-ween in Scotland, and will usually be written with a second “n” on the end in English to distinguish it. Well, parts of Scotland. If you think Scotland is homogenous, the Scottish will happily debunk that one for you. United by hating the English is not quite the same thing as everyone getting along together up there.
I'm derailing myself with quite a deep rabbithole to go down here, let's leave it as the British Isles are surprisingly diverse in its weight of history and traditions. Instead let's look at some Scottish Samhainn.
Guising is ever present, and calling it “guising” may actually be the Gaelic tradition. Anyone wanting to pass the wandering spirits abroad this time of the year should best be hiding their identity, and the flipside of that is anyone in a disguise you bump into may not be human. It's especially important for children as they are more likely to draw unwanted attention from fae creatures, and anyone engaging in rituals this high risk/high reward day of the year is better not being identified to hunt down later. The traditional turnip jack-o-lantern is very much a root vegetable close to Scotland's heart, don't be surprised to be heard it called a “Neep Lantern” and for the scooped out part to be turning up in a delicious hot meal soon after it is carved.
As alluded to at the start of the section, each part of Scotland can be pleasantly unique with its own traditions, and that wasn't just me rambling. I have a Samhainn example to share! The town of Kilmarnock in East Ayrshire celebrated Halloween six days early this year, and it's a date that will usually change each go around the sun. This is because “Killieween” is always celebrated on the last Friday of October. Now, some tales do go, this is an ancient tradition of how witches would be burned on the last Friday before Halloween... But this just seems to be a spooky story for the time of year, and it instead seems to be a recent tradition that ties into Kilmarnock's history as an industrialised town. Samhainn was celebrated there across the 20th century, although not quite as commercially as the modern revitalisation of Halloween, and from the industrial revolution through to the end of the 20th Century workers in Kilmarnock got paid on the last Friday of the month. This being when it was best possible to celebrate settled Killieween on that day even as times changed once more. Kids would make their tumshie lanterns (the local dialect for turnips) and to get a treat would need a song or poem first.
Divination is popular this time of year in Scotland as it is elsewhere. As are traditional bonfires, and the two can come together with nut burning. Couples could do a small rite asking how their relationship will go, either long term or for the year ahead. Each person would place a nut in the Samhainn bonfire, then watch what would happen. If the nuts hissed, it would warn there are hard times ahead. If they burned quietly and evenly, the ritual points towards calm times for well matched partners.
The Scottish Poet Robert Burns included a different way to sneak a peek at a future romantic partner in his poem simply title 'Hallowe'en'. Anyone who should wish to know the height and shape of the paramour they are yet to meet should wait until dark on Halloween night, then pull up a kale stalk from the ground with their eyes closed. Raise the root to head height, open your eyes, and then the shape will be revealed to you. Don't worry if it's hard to see that shape because too much soil came up with it, that's a good thing as it's a sign the future partner will be wealthy.
I did find a final bit of food based divination from Scotland, and this one I found extra interesting because it's very similar to a pudding around Christmas or Yule which would wrap a small variety of objects up to predict the future. I'm wondering if this is in an old episode, or if I need to revisit it here on LukeLore as it was from my guest appearance on the Spooks, Creeps, and Assorted Devilry podcast talking about food in folklore... Anyway, this is Fuarag na Samhna. Toasted oats and whipped cream would be beaten together with a froh stick, that being a traditional Scottish milk whisk, including several tokens to predict something in the year ahead which would be then served as a communal pudding. People would take it in turns eating a spoonful at a time, nabbing a tasty treat but also potentially one of the fateful tokens. Like in a lot of similar practices a coin predicts you would find money, and is 100% correct by merit of being a coin itself (although was supposed to indicate more would follow in the year to come). A ring would forecast an engagement to come, a button would show someone is about to lose money after pranking them with the initial shape of a coin. The saddest one would be finding a thimble, as that indicates a year without finding love, better luck next Samhainn with another go at the Fuarag na Samhna.
SECTION BREAK
That's all your folklore treats for this spooky season! I hope I had some fun new facts for you all. If you feel a burning need to join in with the rituals I've shared this year, stay safe out there. That's not just a call to guise right so you don't get pranked by something otherworldly, slipping on a cobblestone graveyard path is no fun either.
This time of the year is first and foremost a celebration! It's supposed to be fun, affirming how we're all going to get through the dark times together with as much joy as we can muster, along with Yule to come so we can yell that merry defiance out again. Feel free to share your seasonal hijinks online, we'll all revel together. I've already been to a haunt, I was lucky enough to attend Farmageddon in my home town of Ormskirk this year, and had a brilliant time. If you chase me up on social media I have some pictures to post from there which should be up before this episode airs. Sadly not of the haunts themselves, they ask not to record in those, but it's a huge venue with loads to see and do. It's weird it took me so long to go, and I definitely want to go again now.
Blessed Samhain and a Happy Halloween!
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