Spring Break
Celebrating the dead
Mauricio Garcia
Issue date: 10/29/09 Section: Features
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As winter approached, the ancient Celts of Ireland would hold a grand feast consisting of the perishable foods they would be unable to preserve for the winter, said Jennifer Rycenga, professor of humanities at SJSU.
"Even though the exact date has changed, there is evidence that in ancient Celtic cultures there was a celebration that occurred around this time," Rycenga said.
She said the winter half of the year began on Samhain - the end of the grazing season. It was a time of tribe gathering for celebrations of death and renewal.
"Pre-Christian Europeans knew when the days became equal, the sun was losing the war between the light and the dark," said Lucia Farnham-Hudson, a children's librarian at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library. "They believed the spirits were closest to this world, and they would do things to help ward the spirits."
In contrast, contemporary neo-pagans use Samhain as a celebration to remember their lost loved ones, said Leigh Ann Hildebrand, a junior religious studies major and volunteer for the Spiral Dance.
The Spiral Dance, which takes place Oct. 31 in San Francisco, is an event where people commemorate the recently deceased by dancing and chanting in a guided trance for hundreds of people, she said.
"Samhain is a pagan holiday where the dead become close to us, and we reflect on the cycle of life and death - the death part of the cycle," she said.
The line between life and death is one of the mysteries of existence, she said. There is a lot of potential energy in that twilight line, and neo-pagans want to give attention to that.
"At this time, the dead are closer to us - this plane, this world - than at any other," she said.
Rycenga said to appreciate birth and creativity often associated with the coming spring, neo-pagans feel they must also acknowledge decay and the end of life - this time is Samhain, what Americans know as Halloween.
Jack-o'-lanterns may be intended to ward away unwanted spirits, but the jack-o'-lanterns themselves may have originated on the battlefields of Celtic Europe.
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Ted Rudow III,MA
posted 10/29/09 @ 12:23 PM PST
The true name of Halloween is "Samhain." This was the Celtic Lord of the Dead! For 3 days from Oct 29-31, the Celtic people, along with their priestly class called Druids, would hold an ancient rite which would mark the beginning and the end of the year. (Continued…)
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