A blessed time

A blessed Samhain to you all.

I co-hosted a Samhain ritual last Saturday with a dear friend and it was one of the most moving and powerful public rituals I’ve ever participated in, let alone had the pleasure of creating space for. We followed that with an early evening feast and it was honestly absolutely sensational, the food, the company (both the living and the dead) was nothing short of spectacular.

What I’ve fast realised about marking Samhain in the Southern Hemisphere is how different it is for everyone. For me, it’s become a longer stretch of about 10 days of marking time, from Anzac Day through to early May, which if we follow the astrological timings for these things, works out to sit around May 4^th/5^th most years. It’s a run of days which coincides which the shift of the seasons. Thankfully here in Sydney, the weather has finally turned and it’s cooler, one might say even bordering on an approximation of ‘cold’.

As someone with a chequered family history, discovering my own ancestry in the last handful of years has sincerely enriched my witchcraft practice to the point that I now feel like I can actually have a relationship with my ancestors, but it took becoming a parent and the realisation that I’m an ancestor-in-training too, to make that connection. Creating life, and birthing, to acknowledge that I’ll perish too. Birthing itself was dangerous. I mean, we’re all going to die, right? Some of us psychic ones will even know when 😉

Tonight will be a quiet commemorative affair. I don’t believe the veil is thin only at Samhain or Beltaine. In my own path (influenced by Scottish folk traditions) it is believed that the otherworld is always just a few steps away. The veil is thin all the time, because, well it’s a veil. But it’s not always as penetrable as we might find. As witches, we know how to pierce it when we have need, and tonight, I’ll honour my dead once again. I will pierce that veil and will contact a few of them to ask some questions.

What will you be doing tonight or over the next few days? Do you contact your dead? Do you think the veil is thin only at Samhain? Why?