Trick or treat?
October 2009
Have you heard of the fun children’s festival of Halloween, where kids dress up as witches, wizards and demons?
Did you know that it is one of the most important days for real witches around the world? Halloween, called Samhain (pronounced sow-en) among the Wiccan community, is a Wiccan sabbath. This cross-quarter day (roughly midway between the autumn equinox and winter solstice) is the most important day in the Wiccan calendar, even celebrated by some as ‘the witch’s new year’.
Samhain is a day of mystery and real magick. On this day, the veil between the two realms — seen and unseen — is the thinnest, and every magickal (–k is added to differentiate the occult form from stage magic) ritual and energy work has even greater power. The Wiccans follow both a solar as well as lunar calendar but celebrate solar events as the ‘Turning of the wheel of the year’. The solar calendar divides the year into two parts, the light half and the dark half, and October 31 marks the beginning of the dark half of the year.
If you witness a Wiccan get-together on Halloween, you’ll see that none will raise an eyebrow when the Dance of the Dead is begun, nor will anyone flinch when asked to invite their dear departed ancestors into the gathering. These are normal parts of the ritual in which the dead are honoured, thanked and even celebrated for the life that they have given us.
Since the air is so full of magic and the veil between realms is thin, everyone gets down to psychic work. “My favourite bit of Samhain folklore is finding your lover’s name on an apple peel: Peel the apple all the way without breaking the peel, and let the peel fall on to the floor. The letter that the peel forms is the initial of your true love,” says Sangeeta Krishnan, a practising Wiccan from Mumbai, who is adept at other forms of divination too such as tarot, runestones and scrying.
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