Before there was Halloween, there was Samhain (pronounced “sow-in”), a Celtic holiday celebrating the new year. Samhain is the second oldest unbroken holiday in the European World, approximately 6,000 years old.
This ancient holiday marked the changing of the seasons and was a time to honor the ancestors and to communicate with their spirits. This holiday, celebrated when the Sun is at 15° of Scorpio, is when the veils between the world of the living and the world of the spirits are at their thinnest.
Which makes Samhain a great time for divination, for crossing the barriers of time and space with the help of those spirits. In fact, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol really should have been A Samhain Song with all those spirits showing up to help old Scrooge change his ways.
Communicating and honoring the spirits is a tradition that crosses many cultures, like Mexico’s Feast of the Dead, where gifts of food are brought to the grave site of ancestors. And, it’s when Death strolls the streets of every town and city in the guise of skeleton or monster and the citizens don’t run screaming.
This is also the mythical time of the year when Persephone once again makes her descent into the Underworld.
But what does this have to do with our creativity and creative work? This connection to the spirits on Samhain, or All Hallow’s Eve, is a great time to:
- Let something die in order for something new to be born creatively. This is a time of year to look at what needs to be finished and let go of. Having you been holding onto a project thinking if you just do this, and this, and this…it will be perfect? Or have you been holding onto a project because it is something really different for you and it might change the way people look at you? Or because you are afraid if you let it go, there won’t be something to replace it? Holding on keeps you from moving forward with your work. No matter how scary, let go.
- Feel the creative fear and enter the dark anyway. For some reason, Samhain and Halloween seems to be the one time of the year, when we eagerly and playfully let ourselves get spooked, creeped out, scared to death. So use this time to enter into those shadowed places of your creativity that you normally avoid. Places like the dark emotions of fear, failure, loss, grief, and anger. Instead of shutting them away, ask how you can use them to empower your work, to give your work depth and authenticity. If you have to put on a costume or a mask to go into that space, do it.
- Commune with the spirits. With those veils between the worlds so thin right now, take advantage of this time to talk to the spirits and your Muse. Set aside time to light a candle, get centered and then focus on a question or concern about: the future direction of your work; advice and guidance on your creative path; a request for that magical, inspired idea for a new project (the one you have room for now that you let the other one go). Use the tarot or other card systems, or runes, or astrology, or the I Ching, or your pendulum or whatever other divinatory tool strikes your fancy.
And if you have an ancestor whose creative genes were passed on to you, you might want to honor them by putting a picture or some token of them on your table for the day. Light a candle in their honor, raise a glass of wine in toast to their gifts, and tell a story about them (and if you don’t know one, make one up!)
As a grateful guest, who knows what marvelous insight they might whisper to you through the flicker of the flame?
Blessed Samhain. Happy Halloween.