Samhain 2011

Samhain 2011 - a reading (on YouTube)

Light, darkness, birth, death, each year begins with hope and ends in resignation.

The sun seeps through the clouds like a reopened wound, its watery light staining the landscape as if a thrice-washed bandage. At the edge of a shadowed wood, yellow daisies glow in the gloaming of the evening sun like a string of jack-o'-lanterns marking out the territorial margin between the land of the living and the land of the dead.

The wind whispers the names of the missing through the evergreens. Wind chimes toll a death knell for the departed. We cover their eyes for the ferryman so they can't see their destination. Into light or darkness we are unconcerned as long as they're at peace. Their cairns form the portals to the Otherworld. The moon holds a mirror to their souls.

Tonight, the glass is broken. Tonight, the dead and darkness become as one. We didn't used to fear the dead, we feared their disappointment. Like faded family portraits, ghosts were pale memories of once vibrant friends and familiars. Kobolds, goblins and Swedish tomte were once our kith and kin. In our desperate longing to reclaim them, we seek out witches, priests and necromancers to throw us winter's bone.

They cannot.

Life is a sacred gift, death a sacred mystery beyond the veil of which our mortal eyes were never meant to see.

© 2011 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2010

Samhain 2010 - a reading (on YouTube)

Samhain is upon us, the season of leaf mold and decay.

Spun white threads of fungus creep across the forest floor like spider silk in hiding. The grove that glowed at midsummer has sickened, its heartwood is corrupt. In its final act of dying, the sacred tree laid a scent trail upon the wind. Now, rival colonies move in to fight over its remains. Under foot, its acorns crack and crumble, their soft interiors rot and blacken to reflect the misty night.

Beyond the hidden border, beyond the wall of thorns, the churchyard stands empty. A headless witch lurks near the crossroads, a black shadow snuffling beside her. She cradles a basket of steaming sweetbread to entice the unwary she plans to bake into her pies.

Deep in her woodland lair, tailors unravel the bewitching threads of her bloodstained kirtle. They whipstitch her victims' lips and eyelids shut. As her spellbound minions ply their delicate, golden needles, she stuffs unspun wool deep within their ears. Too late for them; they've already believed her lies.

Her shadow slides steel against naked steel in preparation to carve up thought and memory, like the dark familiars of an elder god already crackling within the fire. The smoke inside smells sickly sweet, like a horde of apples left to overwinter one year too many.

By moonlight, she ransacks the burial chambers of misty, musty cairns. She grinds their nitered bones beneath a pestle, then soaks them in rancid blood. She kneads the mixture smooth with ancient, arthritic hands. At midnight, she wagers with the shadow for butchered souls to leaven her sweet, dark, gobshite loaves. She stores their broken knucklebones in a bag beside her bed.

Behind her decrepit cottage, a midden rises where a single acorn soon takes root. A seedling feeds on discarded blood and bone until it grows strong enough to weave a spell around the somnolent, sated witch. Its golden branches then entwine through her rafters, its roots collapse her cellar walls, casting down her evil reign, crushing her quietly beneath.

And from the foundation of that tangled knotwork, the sacred grove will rise again.

© 2010 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2009

Samhain 2009 - a reading (on YouTube)

Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. The night is not evil, only mysterious and unknown, unilluminated.

Unblinking eyes embrace the darkness tonight, glowing in the shadows, some friendly, some not, some merely mischievous. They look out from behind the masks of archetypes, the stories we tell each other gathered around the harvest fire to remind ourselves that danger is ever present and all around.

We tell tales of the horned god who is the hart bounding through the forest, darting into shadows to keep the wolves at bay. Like him, we fear the onset of twilight, the hunting hour for wolves and panthers. We sense them stalking us from a time when a flash of eyes provided our only warning before a scream heralded that one of us had gone missing, disappearing behind a trail of blood. The stag serves as the guardian of the forest deer, a reminder that if we are quick and willing to confront the circling pack in our fastness, our children will survive and prosper. But to him, we are just another set of eyes in the night, another predator darkly desirous of his flesh.

We speak of the great mother, the black soil beneath our feet from which life springs, as dark and mysterious as a cave. Sometimes cruel, sometimes gentle, she nurtures her better children and grinds the rest to nourish the next generation already stirring in her womb. She is the dark earth goddess we appease with blood, bone and flesh to keep the land fertile and the harvest towers full. After the sickle falls, she embraces our dead, still her children, whose eyes make our spines tingle in the night when she sends them out to play.

We whisper of the old crone, our ancestral grandmother, toothless and bent yet bold and unintimidated, reminding us with her cane when she thinks we've gone astray. She is the good witch whose identical twin lives deep among the trees luring children into her lair with sweet promises before devouring their innocence, baking them into men and women in her oven before offering them as sweetmeats to her pets, some of which have learned to walk on their hind legs among us. Their hungry eyes follow us while she hums through her preparations, devising a cunning plan to separate us from the shepherds and woodcutters so they can dine on lamb come spring.

Finally, we utter stories of the goblins, the thieves that live among us, miscreants of mischance that pilfer our good fortune. Hardship and misadventure waiting to steal our cache of luck, they are the mischievous spirits lurking near our shame. Once, they were simple village numina, kobolds and tomte easily appeased. Outcast from our homes like demons, now they gather in clans and tribes, packing up like wild dogs to hunt, setting camps deep inside the forest to brigand the unwary and unsuspecting. Their eyes shine beyond the windows tonight, casting back red or green reflections as they call for treats in small, high voices.

Half the year we spend in darkness struggling to find the light. Tonight beyond the harvest fire, eyes embrace the darkness, tracking us through the night. We must be careful not to hold their gaze or we will be spellbound by our own reflection.

© 2009 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2008

Samhain. Nos Calan Graeaf. Summer's end. The first of winter's eve. The sun descends and the shadows move. Aflame, a chariot disappears beyond the horizon. A pale reflection of her departed brother, the huntress rules the night. Will we pack or prey?

Each day, we play different roles, sometimes changing by the hour. Magician, lover, warrior, king. Ingénue, vixen, amazon, priestess. Father, husband, son. Mother, maiden, crone. Each of us longs to be someone else at times, covets another's life. We wish to pack our cars and move away, to start again, only younger and wiser. Instead, we continue drinking at the masquerade, the music and clinking of glasses covering the agony stalking beyond the safety of our walls.

Tonight, we throw open the gates and pry away the mask. Stringers of adhesive cling to the emptiness we call our face. Peering behind it, we find our subconscious has become an ossuary filled with bones sorted and stacked by function. Deep within the catacombs, we are confronted by a wall of skulls. Dead end. No one gets out of here alive.

We build a bonfire and scribe our names to stones that we cast within to see who will come up missing in the morning. We pacify the tailor lest his silver needle weave a spell within our clothes. We ward ourselves with roses and crushed ivy. Prophetic dreams visit us in the silence of the night.

The deadliest gifts come in small and tidy packages, wrapped prettily with silver bows. Inside the most innocent of children, the bete noire lurks, eager to possess them. Each year, they run the streets in gangs, trapping us within our homes. We bribe them with foolish consistency lest they hobgoblin our distracted minds.

We scare ourselves because we want to be scared. Like a movie whose ending we can predict, or a game that children play, it teaches us and reminds us. Don't look behind every door. Don't wander through the maze alone. Fear the branches scratching at the window. Fear the shadows scurrying across the floor.

Tomorrow, we light the candles in remembrance our hallowed dead. Tonight, we fear the mischief of lesser souls until we know they are safely tucked away.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III

Samhain 2007

Tonight, the summer ends and the dark half of the year begins. It is a time to reap the final harvest, a time to cull the herd. A time to stock our larders and cellars against the snowy moons ahead.

Long ago we would all light our hearths from the bonfire that blazed on the village green to strengthen our ties to one another. From that point forward, we were all one in warmth and light for the remainder of the year. We would all see each other through the lean months of winter, sharing what we had to offer in ritual feasts meant to hold back the night. Today we hide these rituals behind closed doors and tightly shuttered windows. Tonight, hidden from the prying eyes of judgment, we purify ourselves in fire and prepare to receive our dead.

We feast our dead to honor them, to celebrate them, to comfort them. We want them to know that we remember them and that we still care. We want them to be happy when they visit, not restless or annoyed, not bound to a life they have transitioned beyond. Though we rarely admit it, we still talk to them in quiet or desperate moments. We look to them for guidance as we hope others might look to us even after we fade from the light of this world into the light of another. Our dead are our anchors to the past, stabilizing us in this life.

Centuries ago, invaders from the far side of the dyke christened our spirits into saints with angled names and converted our dead into demons beneath their saxsam knives. They coveted our holy days, coveted our three-faced gods, cleaving them from us, cleaving them to their own. Substituting their beliefs for ours by dominion and sleight of hand as though such a trade was an equitable exchange in the agora of ideas.

Today, even the hallowed substitute they provided has become a parody, a harlequin comedy, a farce played out by a wandering troop of motley fools and children. The communal bonfire has dwindled to a votive tended by crones in black just as maternal aunts tend the markers of our family. In the fading light, the dead become no more feared than children playing dress-up, no more respected than their parents playing make-believe. But do we always know the face behind the mask we bribe with sweets? Perhaps a few of our dead, reduced to beggary and thieving, return tonight to reclaim their portion for the year.

We abandoned the old ways face down in the bog, garroted like criminals before a feast day. The skulls of tradition are piled upon the roots of ancient oaks which have grown heavy and thick from blood yet remain hungry. But the lords of the forest are also patient. Silently lifting their limbs to their arboreal gods, they pray we might return before they too are hewn to feed the furnaces that warm our homes and distance our lives from theirs. Or feed the pyres that reduce our dead to the ashes we sow like seeds on the wind rather than tend among the spirits of their kindred.

Today, too many of us fear belief more than the restless spirits of our ancestors. Unanchored, we allow the living to pull us headlong in whatever direction they desire, thinking that is our future, while our path wanders aimlessly because our dead are dead to us.


© 2007 Edward P. Morgan III