Monthly Archives: January 2015

Samhain: Romance in the Dark

17 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by in Samhain, Seasons, Spring, Winter

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I can already feel it. I drive home from work at exactly the time when the sun is in the process of setting during winter. A month ago, it was sinking beneath the horizon before I turned on Highway 30 for the seven mile drive to High Ridge; today it’s still up for about ten minutes after I’m home. It’s a little warm today, though I’m aware it’s just a teasing January thaw. There’s still a lot of cold weather to go in February and March, but it will be well-lighted cold weather, and I can feel spring’s approach.

I have been reading much about the Celtic festival year, particularly Samhain. The impression I have been getting is of a poorly understood, even a purposely misrepresented tradition. First let me say that I am in touch with quite a few neopagans who mostly seem to spend much time working to understand the lore and traditions of ancient beliefs. They are a valuable source of information and interpretation for me. But there is also, quite frankly, a lot hooey out there.

For instance, there are yearly ‘Druidic’ rites conducted in and around Stonehenge, when it is clear to anyone who spends more than ten minutes studying the subject that Stonehenge is not in any way a Celtic monument–and hence not a Druidic site. The Druids certainly had nothing to do with the building of Stonehenge, and most likely never conducted any kind of ceremonies there.

But I am also bothered by the proliferation of traditions that see Samhain as a dark, foreboding time full of ghosts and malevolent spirits, Druids skulking in dark robes. It’s true that the Celts began their year at Samhain, a dark time which would grow darker before building to spring. They also saw the day as beginning at dusk, much as the ancient Hebrews did. It’s also true that Samhain was regarded as a liminal time when boundaries between this world and the next grew fuzzy. But there is much in Celtic lore that sees the beauty, hope, and even the romance in the encroaching darkness.

In The Wooing of Emer, one of the great tales about the hero CuChulainn, our hero asks his beloved how he can achieve the ‘beautiful plain’–a coded reference to her breasts. ‘No one comes to this plain,’ said she, ‘who does not meet Benn Suain, the son of Roscmelc, from summer’s end to the beginning of spring, from the beginning of spring to May-day, from May-day to the beginning of winter.’ Summer’s end is of course another name for Samhain, and she is describing a love that can persevere through winter to spring and back again.

Perhaps the greatest love story in Celtic lore is The Song of Aengus. Aengus is one of the Tuatha de Danaan, a race of gods, or godlike heroes, usually portrayed as a god of love and youth. Aengus falls hard for a maiden he sees in a dream, but whenever he reaches out to touch her she disappears. He wastes away with unfulfilled love while his divine mother and father seek the dream girl. She is finally found imprisoned among 150 girls whose sad fate it is to turn into swans at Samhain and back into human form the next year. Aengus is told that if he can select his beloved from among the swans, he will win her. He visits the lake after the transformation and successfully picks out Caer, his one true love. He also becomes a swan and together they fly off, singing such beautiful music that people who hear it are lulled to sleep for three days.

This tale was the basis for William Butler Yeats’ great love poem The Song of Wandering Aengus. One of the most poignantly lovely poems in the English language, it does not speak of the swans, but it does have its hero endlessly seeking his love ‘through hollow lands and hilly lands.’ If he finds her they will spend eternity plucking ‘the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun.’ So I choose to see the romance, the optimism of Samhain. Yes, there is the mystical and the other-worldly, maidens turned to swans and all that. But within that there is romance.

The Celtic year is not divided by the solstices and equinoxes, as in the Classical World. There isn’t the great lamentation about the death of the sun and the fervid ceremonies pleading with the gods to return their favor to us. It is more about observation of the natural world–when things ripen, when the warmth returns, when the ewes are calving. Things go on, and we go on as well. Samhain may be a dark time, but the harvest is in and we have food and leisure for a while: life goes on, and love endures. I can already feel it. Spring is coming.

What Do You Know?

13 Tuesday Jan 2015

Posted by in Beekeeping, History, Prehistory, Seasons, Technology

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It has been very cold here in the Great American Midwest, limiting the tasks I can take care of outdoors, but I had a few things I really meant to get done today. One of those jobs was to check on my beehive. Because it has been so cold I wanted to make sure the bees are doing well. I found them all dead, every last one of them. The combs are holding neither honey nor brood, but thousands of huddled dead bees.

I had told my wife that I would burn the pruned blackberry canes. We have a lot of blackberries, and she has been working to prune the dead wood out over the past few weeks. My job is to gather them all up and burn them, not an easy task because they are so wickedly thorny. Nor did I have an easy time getting the fire going.

A few years ago, when my seasonal research had taken me deep into the study of our primitive ancestors, I began to wonder something, a very basic question that I asked of many friends and colleagues. Some had no answer for me, some did, and I found most people’s answers either unsatisfactory or clearly the result of not truly understanding the question.

If you were to awake and find yourself among a band of primitive humans, perhaps 20,000 years ago, how could you help them advance their culture? I’d ask people this and they’d say well, we have modern medicine, or we know all about computers or electricity or transportation. Yeah, sure, we know all about those things. But what do you actually know how to do?

I mean, I understand that making metal drove a lot of the development of civilizations, so much so that we name different periods in human history the Bronze Age, the Iron Age. But I haven’t got a clue about how to find ore or turn it into metal. It goes without saying that I’m not going to be starting my primitive friends down the path of using electrical appliances any time soon. Examples like this abound. Even if someone is an accomplished engineer, the ability to get something meaningful done depends largely on having useful materials at hand. In the end, I think any modern human would be terribly dependent on those nature savvy experienced hunter-gatherers to stay alive, and the things we could show them would be limited indeed.

The blackberry canes wouldn’t light. I started with a pile of leaves and dried grass, put some newspaper under it and lit it with a match. It took several matches to get a fire started, which burned out before much of the pile of canes caught on fire. I started it again using more leaves and grass, even adding several logs from the wood pile to increase the heat. I was at this a long time, until I had used my last match. That’s okay, there were lots of embers, and limitless dried grass and leaves. As I worked furiously to ignite a flame, I thought how easily almost any member of a primitive tribe, given glowing embers and so much dry tinder, could have gotten a fire going. It would likely be a job for toddlers. I kept looking back towards the house, wondering if I should just march down there and get another book of matches.

When I finally got a good fire going the blackberry canes burned down in about fifteen minutes. But I still find it humiliating that even something as simple as starting a fire can give me such fits. When I came inside I found it had taken me an hour longer than I thought to do this simple job.

There are plenty of books and endless Websites detailing the steps to take in keeping a healthy beehive. I have read a lot of those, and I thought I was taking most of the steps they advise. Clearly I missed something, and my colony paid the price. It’s hard to say, in the depressing depths of winter, whether this crushes my spirit or inspires me to keep working. But for now, this is my goal: to be good enough at something–anything!–that I might be more than just a drain on resources to my tribe.