I recently received a newsletter from one of my suppliers with an excellent article on honoring our ancestors by creating an ancestor altar that I want to share with you. Thank you Jacki Smith at Coventry Creations for this wonderful article.
This month my project is to go through the picture boxes and gather some pictures for my Samhain altar. Continue reading
I have been studying Celtic Shamanism for quite a while and am about half way through my Bardic training. Eventually I will complete the Druidry course, but it is a ways out.
Bards are storytellers, poets and musicians. Since Celtic society was an oral tradition, they were also the keepers of tradition, of the memory of the tribe.
One of the areas I struggle with is poetry. It has become a standing joke within my circle that when we come to poetry, I go blank. So, maybe I’m beginning to “get it” because as I was going to sleep last night, I was creating a Samhain poem. Continue reading
Samhain (sah-win or sow-een) is the fourth and final fire festival (or cross-quarter holiday) in the Celtic Wheel of the Year. The veil between the worlds grows thin, as the portal opens into the Celtic New Year, and we begin our decent into the dreamtime. It is a time of releasing the old, planting seeds for the coming year, deep visioning, receiving transmissions of wisdom, and communing with ancestors, faeries, and the spirit world. We are reminded of the importance of the season of bone that follows the harvest and precludes the spring – a time of silence, of resting, of the death of all that is completed, and the incubation of that which is to come.
This is also a time for remembering all our ancestors and loved ones who have passed into the world beyond. Many traditions honor their ancestors at this time. For the Celts, the celebration is Samhian, in the Hispanic traditions it is known as Dia de los Muertos or “Day of the Dead”. The Christian Church incorporated these festivals into a festival known as “All Souls Day”. Continue reading