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SG101335

October 31st, Eve of All Souls, Samhain, Halloween, Celtic New Year.

We feast on the flesh of third harvest, mourn the collected souls, honour ancestors, commune with our beloved dead.

The veil thinned, Dumb Suppers wait invitingly, totemic Jack O’ Lanterns provide a beacon for those to be let in but also guard against those to be kept out.

The God, after his plunging descent through the earth, sits crowned upon his underworld throne as Dread Lord of Shadows. He is the Grim Reaper, the leader of The Wild Hunt. He is the prank playing, Lord of Mischief. Trick or Treat?

The Goddess, transformed to crone, the Old One. She is Queen of the Underworld, the Dark Earth Mother of Winter, the Wise Old Woman with her dual aspects of midwife and layer-out. As Holda of The Wild Hunt it is she who collects the souls of children, safely ushering them to the otherworld.

A night for recalling the past and divining the future.

We would like to share this poem with you, within its layers, lies an abundance of seasonal treasure.

Hallowe’en in a Suburb
H. P. Lovecraft. 1st pub: 1926

The steeples are white in the wild moonlight,
And the trees have a silver glare;
Past the chimneys high see the vampires fly,
And the harpies of upper air,
That flutter and laugh and stare.

For the village dead to the moon outspread
Never shone in the sunset’s gleam,
But grew out of the deep that the dead years keep
Where the rivers of madness stream
Down the gulfs to a pit of dream.

A chill wind blows through the rows of sheaves
In the meadows that shimmer pale,
And comes to twine where the headstones shine
And the ghouls of the churchyard wail
For harvests that fly and fail.

Not a breath of the strange grey gods of change
That tore from the past its own
Can quicken this hour, when a spectral power
Spreads sleep o’er the cosmic throne,
And looses the vast unknown.

So here again stretch the vale and plain
That moons long-forgotten saw,
And the dead leap gay in the pallid ray,
Sprung out of the tomb’s black maw
To shake all the world with awe.

And all that the morn shall greet forlorn,
The ugliness and the pest
Of rows where thick rise the stones and brick,
Shall some day be with the rest,
And brood with the shades unblest.

Then wild in the dark let the lemurs bark,
And the leprous spires ascend;
For new and old alike in the fold
Of horror and death are penned,
For the hounds of Time to rend.

Wishing you a meaningful Samhain
Blessed Be SRTB