The days of Lughnasadh merge into Samhain as the colours in the trees and hedgerows go wild!
Autumn arrives at Bealtaine Cottage with a more magnificent palette year on year!
As the Celtic New Year arrived on the first day of Samhain, it’s time to visualise yourself in the year ahead…spend five minutes each day quietly meditating on your goals for the year ahead. Visualisation is the key to changing your life for the better!
The Ancient Festival of Samhain marked the last day of the Celtic year, with the rising of the sun on the following morning illuminating the New Year and the turning of the wheel. Samhain Eve marked the Celtic New Year’s Eve.
The Celts believed that night preceded day, thus all four annual festivals began at sunset on the evening before.
There is no doubt that that this festival was the most important of the four Celtic Festivals.
Samhain was a crucial time of year, loaded with symbolic significance for the pre-Christian Irish.
As they watched the the sun descend into the western skies, the symbolic inference was that of a descent into the Otherworld. This marked the thinning of the veil, as those within the Otherworld were free to roam the Earth.
The Sidhe, (fairies as we know them, for we know so little of them) have the power of shapeshifting are deemed able to walk among us, unknown and unrecognisable to mortals. Alongside them travel our ancestors and other spirits we fail to recognise. It is a night filled with magic!
The Christian fear of the Pagan outlook has damaged the whole consciousness of man.
~D. H. Lawrence
The incredible astrological event of the Winter Solstice is a momentous, epoch changing event. We are literally living through the end of the age of Pisces and entering the Age of Aquarius. These are literally historical times. I have written about this many times, over the past decade and a half, on my website and spoken of it often on my YouTube channel. I will be preparing and sharing as we approach Midwinter in the ancient Celtic Calendar, the beginning of Yule, Winter Solstice, the 21st of December 2021.
Many claim a respect for Nature, but as a Pagan Woman, the Earth’s patterns and rhythms are the bedrock of my belief…that Mother Earth is a living, sentient being at the centre of all I venerate and respect. This is the very principle upon which Bealtaine Cottage was founded.
The Pagan Celts of the ancient world were animists to the extent that they believed that all aspects of the natural world contained spirits, divine entities with which humans could establish a rapport. According to classical sources, the Celts worshipped the forces of nature and did not envisage deities in anthropomorphic terms.
“Follow me down, follow me down, follow me down
To the place beside the garden and the wall
Follow me down, follow me down
To the space before the twilight and the dawn” – Van Morrison
The great Winter bird Feast is ripening! The calorie-rich berries of Ivy are a useful winter food source for blackbirds and other garden visitors.
As Orion strides across the evening sky, we draw closer to the winter solstice and the darkest, stillest, night of the year.