The Night When the Veil Thins

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. It is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. Some of my friends in Ireland still do. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Photo by RM: Birch woman in the Samhain circle of Brigid's Gardens near Rosscahill, County Galway.

Story for Samhain: The dream god and the swan maiden

 

We find beauty or terror in our contacts with the Otherworld - or our flight from it - according to our courage and the colors of our imaginations. 

How people respond to the banshee is an excellent example. The banshee is well-known in Celtic folk memory as a death messenger, whose appearance and weird cries are feared as the sign that death is near. The banshee is often depicted as a hag, or a crow, or a crow-woman.  

 But the banshee is actually the bean sidhe, which means "she-faery". She can appear as a being of amazing beauty. She can come as a personal or family guardian in tight situations - as a family banshee appeared to members of the royal house of Munster on the eve of the battle of Clontarf.  

Above all, the banshee comes to invite us or escort us on the Otherworld journey: not only the journey that follows physical death, but on journeys beyond the physical world from which we may return to the body with magic and power.  

Banshees are much abroad at Samhain, or Halloween.  

The story of Aislinge Óenguso, The Dream of Aengus,  turns the traditional fear of the banshee on its head. Instead of being scared of being caught by a banshee, the hero of this story is out to catch one, because night after night, she has been visiting him as his dream lover. This wild love story haunted Yeats all of his life and inspired him to write some of his most haunting verse. We'll call the hero Aengus, as the poet did.  

 Aengus is a lover and a friend of lovers. He is a trickster, a shaman and a soul healer. He is described as "mac Oc", the Young Son, forever young. He lives in the Brugh na Boinne, a palace beneath a Mound of Wonder that recent travelers know as Newgrange. Women everywhere dream of Aengus; his butterfly kisses graze their lips and their secret places.  

 But Aengus is no longer master of his own dreams. His dreams have a mistress. She first appeared by his bedside in a glory of red-gold hair, her long white body dancing through the veils to music that played him like a harp and shook him like a tambourine. Carried by the music and his surge of passionate desire, Aengus flies with her, like a wild swan, into a different landscape.

In the morning, exhausted, he can barely fall out of bed. He is listless, lethargic, not even interested in sex, his speciality. This goes on night after night, day after day. His mother is troubled. She sends for a famous doctor, so skilled he can diagnose what is wrong in a house before he walks through the door, by reading shapes in the smoke from the fire.  

The doctor sees at once that Aengus is away: a part of his soul has left his body to live with his dream lover. The cure is to put body and soul together again. This involves finding the girl, and putting the lovers together in their physical as well as their astral bodies.

Will Aengus please describe his dream mistress as exactly as possible? He aches for her as he speaks of the red-gold hair, the pearly skin.  

Very well, Aengus' mother has resources. She is a queen and a goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan. She will send out searchers to look for a girl who fits Aengus's description.

This is not such an easy assignment, however, because the dream lover is of the Sidhe, and is hidden in the faery mists. A year passes, and she is not found.  

Now Aengus' father is called in. He is the Big Guy among the old gods, the Dagda, one end of whose outrageously huge eight-pronged club delivers instant death, while the other brings the dead back to life. But he can't or won't help with finding the dream lover, except to recommend the far-sighted Bodb the king of the Sidhe in Munster, as the faery for the job.  

 Bodb tracks the girl to yet another of the Mounds of Wonder. The girl is a bean sidhe, and she has the right kind of name for a banshee. Her name is Caer Ibormeith, which means Yew Berry. Of all trees in her landscape, the yew is most intimately associated with death.

It is agreed that Aengus must rally himself and go to Yew Berry's mound to spy on the banshee and make sure she is the one he has dreamed. She is. Her beauty shines beyond that of the "three times fifty" noble ladies about her, all wearing silver at their throats while Yew Berry wears gold.  

 At this point, in a different kind of story, we might expect the dream lovers to fall into each other's arms and elope. After all, they have been doing it every night for two years. But there are complications.

First off, Yew Berry's mound  is in the realm of the notorious Queen Maeve and her jealous husband Aillil, and they must not be scorned. They agree to help bring the lovers together, but Yew Berry's father won't hear of it. Even after the joined forces of the Dagda and King Aillil have stormed his faery fort, he clings to his daughter.  

 There are many tests and battles before the secret is learned. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes - in the deeper tellings - as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan. Then the cycle repeats.  

The day of shapechanging is Samhain. If Aengus would win her, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon's Mouth. At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon's Mouth. He finds "three times fifty" white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change into my form.

Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon's Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boinne - Newgrange - and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days.  

 It is an amazing story, a love god smitten by love, and seizing a moment of opportunity - at Samhain - to bring his lover from one realm into another.

In the best-known tellings of the Dream of Aengus, death is not mentioned. But the whole story is a dance with death, in several guises. It involves the death-in-life that we suffer when a part of our soul goes away, because of pain or abuse or heartbreak or - in this case - a longing for something beyond the familiar world. It involves the rescue of someone or something from the Land of the Dead. Yew Berry's name is a dead giveway. Her mound  is actually a piece of the Underworld, her father one of the princes of the dead.  

Terror or beauty, banshee or faery lover. On the Night When the Veil Thins, we are especially reminded that we can never claim the treasures of the Otherworld - and a love bigger than the familiar world - unless we can brave up. 

 

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss published by Destiny Books.

 Art: "Swan People" by Robert Moss

The Night When the Veil Thins

 Back in the day, I used to give a talk on the meaning of Halloween, on the night, at the New York Open Center, when it was still downtown in SoHo. We always had standing room only in the lecture room, which was partly filled by witches, ghouls and vampires dressed for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade that would unfold just down the street right after. 

I notice, looking through old journals, that on the night of October 30, 1998, prior to taking the train to Manhattan the next day, I asked for some Halloween dreams. This is what came as soon as I closed my eyes:

I watch a beautiful woman in a flowing, gauzy white dress like a wedding dress rise from a coffin and begin to float around a dark, undefined space (like an artists' background, defined by brushstrokes rather than finished shapes). The eyes are dead. All that is there is blind appetite. She is the living dead, a hungry ghost. I avoid her.

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. As my dream of the beauty from the coffin dramatized, it is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

The dream god and the faery lover at Halloween

 

We find beauty or terror in our contacts with the Otherworld - or our flight from it - according to our courage and the colors of our imaginations. 

How people respond to the banshee is an excellent example. The banshee is well-known in Celtic folk memory as a death messenger, whose appearance and weird cries are feared as the sign that death is near. The banshee is often depicted as a hag, or a crow, or a crow-woman.  

 But the banshee is actually the bean sidhe, which means "she-faery". She can appear as a being of amazing beauty. She can come as a personal or family guardian in tight situations - as a family banshee appeared to members of the royal house of Munster on the eve of the battle of Clontarf.  

Above all, the banshee comes to invite us or escort us on the Otherworld journey: not only the journey that follows physical death, but on journeys beyond the physical world from which we may return to the body with magic and power.  

Banshees are much abroad at Samhain, or Halloween.  

The story of Aislinge Óenguso, The Dream of Aengus,  turns the traditional fear of the banshee on its head. Instead of being scared of being caught by a banshee, the hero of this story is out to catch one, because night after night, she has been visiting him as his dream lover. This wild love story haunted Yeats all of his life and inspired him to write some of his most haunting verse. We'll call the hero Aengus, as the poet did.  

 Aengus is a lover and a friend of lovers. He is a trickster, a shaman and a soul healer. He is described as "mac Oc", the Young Son, forever young. He lives in the Brugh na Boinne, a palace beneath a Mound of Wonder that recent travelers know as Newgrange. Women everywhere dream of Aengus; his butterfly kisses graze their lips and their secret places.  

 But Aengus is no longer master of his own dreams. His dreams have a mistress. She first appeared by his bedside in a glory of red-gold hair, her long white body dancing through the veils to music that played him like a harp and shook him like a tambourine. Carried by the music and his surge of passionate desire, Aengus flies with her, like a wild swan, into a different landscape.

In the morning, exhausted, he can barely fall out of bed. He is listless, lethargic, not even interested in sex, his speciality. This goes on night after night, day after day. His mother is troubled. She sends for a famous doctor, so skilled he can diagnose what is wrong in a house before he walks through the door, by reading shapes in the smoke from the fire.  

The doctor sees at once that Aengus is away: a part of his soul has left his body to live with his dream lover. The cure is to put body and soul together again. This involves finding the girl, and putting the lovers together in their physical as well as their astral bodies.

Will Aengus please describe his dream mistress as exactly as possible? He aches for her as he speaks of the red-gold hair, the pearly skin.  

Very well, Aengus' mother has resources. She is a queen and a goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan. She will send out searchers to look for a girl who fits Angus's description.

This is not such an easy assignment, however, because the dream lover is of the Sidhe, and is hidden in the faery mists. A year passes, and she is not found.  

Now Aengus' father is called in. He is the Big Guy among the old gods, the Dagda, one end of whose outrageously huge eight-pronged club delivers instant death, while the other brings the dead back to life. But he can't or won't help with finding the dream lover, except to recommend the far-sighted Bodb the king of the Sidhe in Munster, as the faery for the job.  

 Bodb tracks the girl to yet another of the Mounds of Wonder. The girl is a bean sidhe, and she has the right kind of name for a banshee. Her name is Caer Ibormeith, which means Yew Berry. Of all trees in her landscape, the yew is most intimately associated with death.

It is agreed that Aengus must rally himself and go to Yew Berry's mound to spy on the banshee and make sure she is the one he has dreamed. She is. Her beauty shines beyond that of the "three times fifty" noble ladies about her, all wearing silver at their throats while Yew Berry wears gold.  

 At this point, in a different kind of story, we might expect the dream lovers to fall into each other's arms and elope. After all, they have been doing it every night for two years. But there are complications.

First off, Yew Berry's mound  is in the realm of the notorious Queen Maeve and her jealous husband Aillil, and they must not be scorned. They agree to help bring the lovers together, but Yew Berry's father won't hear of it. Even after the joined forces of the Dagda and King Aillil have stormed his faery fort, he clings to his daughter.  

 There are many tests and battles before the secret is learned. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes - in the deeper tellings - as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan. Then the cycle repeats.  

The day of shapechanging is Samhain. If Aengus would win her, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon's Mouth. At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon's Mouth. He finds "three times fifty" white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change into my form.

Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon's Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boinne - Newgrange - and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days.  

 It is an amazing story, a love god smitten by love, and seizing a moment of opportunity - at Halloween - to bring his lover from one realm into another.

In the best-known tellings of the Dream of Aengus, death is not mentioned. But the whole story is a dance with death, in several guises. It involves the death-in-life that we suffer when a part of our soul goes away, because of pain or abuse or heartbreak or - in this case - a longing for something beyond the familiar world. It involves the rescue of someone or something from the Land of the Dead. Yew Berry's name is a dead giveaway. Her mound  is actually a piece of the Underworld, her father one of the princes of the dead.  

Terror or beauty, banshee or faery lover. On the Night When the Veil Thins, we are especially reminded that we can never claim the treasures of the Otherworld - and a love bigger than the familiar world - unless we can brave up. 

 

Adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

Journal drawing by Robert Moss from a spontaneous night vision. A white swan took flight from my third eye and we went flying together lover a river in Europe.

 

 

the Night When the Veil Thins

Back in the day, I used to give a talk on the meaning of Halloween, on the night, at the New York Open Center, when it was still downtown in SoHo. We always had standing room only in the lecture room, which was partly filled by witches, ghouls and vampires dressed for the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade that would unfold just down the street right after. 

I notice, looking through old journals, that on the night of October 30, 1998, prior to taking the train to Manhattan the next day, I asked for some Halloween dreams. This is what came as soon as I closed my eyes:

I watch a beautiful woman in a flowing, gauzy white dress like a wedding dress rise from a coffin and begin to float around a dark, undefined space (like an artists' background, defined by brushstrokes rather than finished shapes). The eyes are dead. All that is there is blind appetite. She is the living dead, a hungry ghost. I avoid her.

As we approach All Hallows' Eve, a shiverish, magical, crazy night in a more than usually crazy year, I am thinking of its many meanings. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead. As my dream of the beauty from the coffin dramatized, it is a night when you want to be able to discern who is who and what is what. 

The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again. It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened. 

As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men." 

If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you. 

It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night, although there is likely to be much less of that in this time of pandemic. The Celts put on fright masks not to extort candy but to scare away restless spirits before they scared them. Out and about ,they carried torches to light the way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips. 

All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat. 

Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, sometimes with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead. 

Text partially adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Photo: Greenwich Village Halloween Parade masker by Wendy R. Williams 

The night when the veil between the worlds thins

The hair salon on the corner advertises, "Halloween Makeup Done Here." There are spooks and scarecrows at the doors of the houses on my block. As we approach Halloween, I am thinking of the many meanings of the festival, from trick-or-treat to the turning of the year.

      This is the most magical, crazy, shivery night of the year. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead.

     The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again.
     It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened.

     As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men."

     If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you.

     It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night. You might want to put on a fright mask to scare away restless spirits before they scare you. You might want to carry a torch to light your way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips.

     By tradition, Samhain is also a time for divination, since the departed can see across time and at this turning of the year we may share in their powers - and anyway, at New Year who doesn't think about what the year ahead may hold? 

     All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat.

    Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors. My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead.

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss. Published by Destiny Books.

I am offering a workshop on related themes in Berkeley over the weekend of November 23-24, "Ancestral Healing and Dream Archaeology"

The dream god and the fairy lover: an Irish story for Halloween

We find beauty or terror in our contacts with the Otherworld - or our flight from it - according to our courage and the colors of our imaginations.

    How people respond to the banshee is an excellent example. The banshee is well-known in Celtic folk memory as a death messenger, whose appearance and weird cries are feared as the sign that death is near. The banshee is often depicted as a hag, or a crow, or a crow-woman.

    But the banshee is actually the bean sidhe, which means "she-faery". She can appear as a being of amazing beauty. She can come as a personal or family guardian in tight situations - as a family banshee appeared to members of the royal house of Munster on the eve of the battle of Clontarf.

    Above all, the banshee comes to invite us or escort us on the Otherworld journey: not only the journey that follows physical death, but on journeys beyond the physical world from which we may return to the body with magic and power. Banshees are much abroad at Samhain, or Halloween.

    The story of The Dream of Aengus,  turns the traditional fear of the banshee on its head. Instead of being scared of being caught by a banshee, the hero of this story is out to catch one, because night after night, she has been visiting him as his dream lover. This wild love story haunted Yeats all of his life and inspired him to write some of his most haunting verse. We'll call the hero Aengus, as the poet did.

     Aengus is a lover and a friend of lovers. He is a trickster, a shaman and a soul healer. He is described as "mac Oc", the Young Son, forever young. He lives in the Brugh na Boinne, a palace beneath a Mound of Wonder that recent travelers know as Newgrange. Women everywhere dream of Aengus; his butterfly kisses graze their lips and their secret places.

    But Aengus is no longer master of his own dreams. His dreams have a mistress. She first appeared by his bedside in a glory of red-gold hair, her long white body dancing through the veils to music that played him like a harp and shook him like a tambourine. Carried by the music and his surge of passionate desire, Aengus flies with her, like a wild swan, into a different landscape.

    In the morning, exhausted, he can barely fall out of bed. He is listless, lethargic, not even interested in sex, his speciality. This goes on night after night, day after day. His mother is troubled. She sends for a famous doctor, so skilled he can diagnose what is wrong in a house before he walks through the door, by reading shapes in the smoke from the fire.

    The doctor sees at once that Aengus is away: a part of his soul has left his body to live with his dream lover. The cure is to put body and soul together again. This involves finding the girl, and putting the lovers together in their physical as well as their astral bodies.

    Will Aengus please describe his dream mistress as exactly as possible? He aches for her as he speaks of the red-gold hair, the pearly skin. Very well, Aengus' mother has resources. She is a queen and a goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan. She will send out searchers to look for a girl who fits Angus's description.

    This is not such an easy assignment, however, because the dream lover is of the Sidhe, and is hidden in the faery mists. A year passes, and she is not found.

    Now Aengus' father is called in. He is the Big Guy among the old gods, the Dagda, one end of whose outrageously huge eight-pronged club delivers instant death, while the other brings the dead back to life. But he can't or won't help with finding the dream lover, except to recommend the far-sighted Bodb the king of the Sidhe in Munster, as the faery for the job.

Bodb tracks the girl to yet another of the Mounds of Wonder.
    The girl is a bean sidhe, and she has the right kind of name for a banshee. Her name is Caer Ibormeith, which means Yew Berry. Of all trees in her landscape, the yew is most intimately associated with death.
    It is agreed that Aengus must rally himself and go to Yew Berry's mound to spy on the banshee and make sure she is the one he has dreamed. She is. Her beauty shines beyond that of the "three times fifty" noble ladies about her, all wearing silver at their throats while Yew Berry wears gold.

    At this point, in a different kind of story, we might expect the dream lovers to fall into each other's arms and elope. After all, they have been doing it every night for two years. But there are complications.

    First off, Yew Berry's mound  is in the realm of the notorious Queen Maeve and her jealous husband Aillil, and they must not be scorned. They agree to help bring the lovers together, but Yew Berry's father won't hear of it. Even after the joined forces of the Dagda and King Aillil have stormed his faery fort, he clings to his daughter.

    There are many tests and battles before the secret is learned. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes - in the deeper tellings - as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan. Then the cycle repeats.

    The day of shapechanging is Samhain. If Aengus would win her, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon's Mouth. At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon's Mouth. He finds "three times fifty" white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change into my form.
    Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon's Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boinne - Newgrange - and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days.

    It is an amazing story, a love god smitten by love, and seizing a moment of opportunity - at Halloween - to bring his lover from one realm into another.

    In the best-known tellings of the Dream of Aengus, death is not mentioned. But the whole story is a dance with death, in several guises. It involves the death-in-life that we suffer when a part of our soul goes away, because of pain or abuse or heartbreak or - in this case - a longing for something beyond the familiar world. It involves the rescue of someone or something from the Land of the Dead. Yew Berry's name is a dead giveway, since the yew is the favorite tree for planting in graveyards. Her mound  is actually a piece of the Underworld, her father one of the princes of the dead.

    Terror or beauty, banshee or faery lover. On the Night When the Veil Thins, we are especially reminded that we can never claim the treasures of the Otherworld - and a love bigger than the familiar world - unless we can brave up.

Adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books) (c) Robert Moss. All Rights reserved.

Art:"The Dream Maiden Visits Angus" by Ernest Charles Wallcousins (1883-1976).

Halloween, when the veil between the worlds thins

As we approach Halloween, I am thinking of the many meanings of the festival, from trick-or-treat to the turning of the year.

    This is the most magical, crazy, shivery night of the year. It is the topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down time, when the past lies ahead of you and the future walks behind you, breathing on your neck. It is a night when the doors between the worlds swing open, when the dead walk among the living and the living move among the dead.

    The last night of October is the start of Samhain (which is pronounced "sow-in"), the great Celtic festival when the dead walk among the living, the fires are extinguished and rekindled, the god and the goddess come together in sacred union, and as the year turns from light to dark, the seeded earth prepares to give birth again.
    It's a time, when the Celts knew what they were doing, to watch yourself and watch comings and goings from the barrows and mounds that are peopled by ghosts and faeries. It's a time to honor the friendly dead, and the lordly ones of the Sidhe, and to propitiate the restless dead and remember to send them off and to set or re-set very clear boundaries between the living and the hungry ghosts. It's a time to look into the future, if you dare, because linear time is stopped when the hollow hills are opened.

    As Celtic scholar Marie-Louise Sjoestedt wrote, "This night belongs neither to one year or the other and is, as it were, free from temporal restraint. It seems that the whole supernatural force is attracted by the seam thus left at the point where the two years join, and gathers to invade the world of men."

    If you have never learned to dream or see visions or to feel the presence of the spirits who are always about - if you have never traveled beyond the gates of death or looked into the many realms of the Otherworld - this is the time when you'll see beyond the veil all the same, because the Otherworld is going to break down the walls of the little box you call a world, and its residents are coming to call on you.

    It's a time for dressing up, especially if you are going out at night. You might want to put on a fright mask to scare away restless spirits before they scare you. You might want to carry a torch to light your way, and especially to guide the dead back to where they came from when the party is over. Before Europeans discovered pumpkins in America, they carried lit candles in hollowed-out niches in turnips.

    All of this was so important, and such wild, sexy, shiverish fun that the church had to do something about it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III decided to steal the old magic by making November 1 All Saints' Day, or All Hallows Day; so the night of Samhain became All Hallows' Eve, or Halloween for short. A century before, an earlier pope had borrowed the date of the old Roman festival to propitiate the dead - the Festival of the Lemures, or Lemuralia - and renamed that All Saints' Day. But since Roman paganism had been largely suppressed, the church fathers decided to grab the glamour of the Celts, among whom the old ways are forever smoldering, like fire under peat.

     Few people who celebrate or suffer Halloween today seem to know much about its history. For storekeepers and the greetings card business, it's a commercial opportunity. For TV programmers, it's a cue to schedule horror movie marathons. For kids, it's time to dress up as vampires or witches and extort candy from neighbors.
     My preferred way to spend Halloween is to rest quietly at home, with candles lit for my dead loved ones, and a basket of apples and hazelnuts beside them, tokens of the old festival that renews the world and cleanses the relations between the living and the dead.
    This year, however, I am in Dracula country as Halloween approaches, leading a workshop in Romania at a villa within sight of Bran castle, notorious for its associations with Vlad the Impaler. In my experience, the only vampires you are likely to encounter there are the hucksters selling tee-shirts. They are having a Halloween party at "Dracula's castle" over the weekend, in advance of the actual date, but I don't plan to be there. I'll have dinner with our dreamers at the villa. Our appetizer will be raw garlic, to be crushed or sliced over toast with olive oil and salt. You can never be too sure...

Text adapted from The Dreamer's Book of the Dead by Robert Moss (Destiny Books)

Divination at Halloween: By tradition, Samhain is also a time for divination, since the departed can see across time and at this turning of the year we may share in their powers - and anyway, at New Year who doesn't think about what the year ahead may hold? The 1904 postcard in the illustration above shows a young woman looking in a mirror 

in hopes of spotting her husband-to be, a survival of an ancient rite.

Photo: The view from my terrace in Dracula country as Halloween approaches. Bran castle, notorious for its associations with Vlad the Impaler, is hidden in the mist.

Loving the banshee: a story for Samhain

We find beauty or terror in our contacts with the Otherworld– or our flight from it – according to our courage and the colors of our imaginations.

    How people respond to the banshee is an excellent example. The banshee is well-known in Celtic folk memory as a death messenger, whose appearance and weird cries are feared as the sign that death is near. The banshee is often depicted as a hag, or a crow, or a crow-woman.

    But the banshee is actually the bean sidhe, which means“she-faery”. She can appear as a being of amazing beauty.She can come as a personal or family guardian in tight situations – as a family banshee appeared to members of the royal house of Munster on the eve of the battle of Clontarf. Above all, she comes to invite us or escort us on the Otherworld journey: not only the journey that follows physical death, but on journeys beyond the physical world from which we may return to the body with magic and power. 

     Banshees are much abroad at Samhain, or All Hallows' Eve. My favorite story about this turns the traditional fear of the banshee on its head. Instead of being scared of being caught by a banshee, the hero of this story is out to catch one, because night after night, she has been visiting him as his dream lover. This wild love story haunted Yeats all of his life and inspired him to write some of his most haunting verse. We’ll call the hero Aengus, as the poet did.

Aengus is a lover and a poet, with a trickster side. Some say he tricked his own queenly mother into letting him take over her palace, under a Mound of Wonder that recent travelers know as Newgrange. Women everywhere dream of Aengus;his butterfly kisses graze their lips and their secret places. Need I mention that he is a god?
    Whatever he is, in the story Aengus is no longer master of his own dreams. His dreams have a mistress. She first appeared by his bedside in a glory of red-gold hair, her long white body dancing through the veils to music that played him like a harp and shook him like a tambourine. Carried by the music and his surge of passionate desire, Aengus flies with her, like a wild swan, into a different landscape.

    In the morning, exhausted, he can barely fall out of bed. He is listless, lethargic, not even interested in sex, his speciality. This goes on night after night, day after day. His mother is troubled. She sends for a famous doctor, so skilled he can diagnose what is wrong in a house before he walks through the door, by readings shapes in the smoke from the fire.

     The doctor sees at once that Aengus is away: a part of his soul has left his body to live with his dream lover. The cure is to put body and soul together again. This involves finding the girl, and putting the lovers together in their physical as well as their astral bodies.

    Will Aengus please describe his dream mistress as exactly as possible? He aches for her as he speaks of the red-gold hair, the pearly skin, the tilt of her breasts. Very well, Aengus’ mother has resources. She is a queen and a goddess of the Tuatha de Danaan. She will send out searchers to look for a girl who fits Angus’s description.  This is not such an easy assignment, however, because the dream lover is of the Sidhe, and is hidden in the faery mists. A year passes, and she is not found.      
     Now Aengus’ father is called in. He is the Big Guy among the old gods, the Dagda, one end of whose outrageously huge eight-pronged club delivers instant death, while the other brings the dead back to life. But he can’t or won’t help with finding the dream lover, except to recommend the far-sighted Bodb (pronounced “Bove”), the king of the Sidhe in Munster, as the faery for the job.

      Bodb tracks the girl to yet another of the Mounds of Wonder that make the whole of Ireland – for those whose senses are still alive – a many-breasted goddess. The girl is a bean sidhe, and she has the right kind of name for a banshee. Her name is Caer Ybormeith, which means Yew Berry Castle. Of all trees in her landscape, the yew is most intimately associated with death.

      It is agreed that Aengus must rally himself and go to Yew Berry’s mound to spy on the banshee and make sure she is the one he has dreamed. She is. Her beauty shines beyond that of the “three times fifty” noble ladies about her, all wearing silver at their throats while Yew Berry wears gold.

      At this point, in a different kind of story, we might expect the dream lovers to fall into each other’s arms and elope. After all, they have been doing it every night for two years.But there are complications. First off, Yew Berry’s Mound of Wonders is in the realm of the notorious Queen Maeve and her jealous husband Aillil, and they must not be scorned. They agree to help bring the

lovers together, but Yew Berry’s father won’t hear of it. Even after the joined forces of the Dagda and King Aillil have stormed his faery fort, he clings to his daughter.

      There are many tests and battles before the secret is learned. Yew Berry is under an enchantment, sometimes represented as a curse, sometimes – in the deeper tellings –as a gift. She does not stay in one form. She is a beautiful woman for one year. Then for the next year she is a white swan.Then the cycle repeats. 

      The day of shapechanging is Samhain. If Aengus would win her, he must find her on the liminal day, on a lake whose name is The Dragon’s Mouth.

      At Samhain, Aengus goes to the Dragon’s Mouth. He finds “three times fifty” white swans with silver chains around their necks, and one swan with a gold chain. He recognizes his love in the shape of the beautiful white bird, and calls to Yew Berry to fly to him. No, she tells him. You must change

into my form.

       Aengus changes, becoming the long-necked bird. They mate, in beating splendor, above the deeps of the Dragon’s Mouth. They fly together back to the palace of Brugh na Boine – Newgrange – and the love music they make in flight is so lovely and lulling that all the land is at peace and people drift into pleasant dreams and stay there for three days. Since then, some say that Caer Ibormeith has become a goddess of sleep and dreams.

What is the message of this story for us? Myth, like poetry, cannot be shrink-wrapped. In the best-known tellings of the Dream of Aengus, death is not mentioned; Lady Gregory’s version even manages (amazingly) to omit Samhain. But the whole story is a dance with death, in several guises.

    It involves the death-in-life that we suffer when a part of our soul goes away, because of pain or abuse or heartbreak or – in this case – a longing for something beyond the familiar world.

     It involves the rescue of someone or something from the Land of the Dead. As noted, Caer Ibormeith’s name is a dead giveway. Her Mound of Wonder is actually a piece of the Underworld, her father one of the princes of the dead.
      I have not seen much about this in prose commentaries, but Yeats brought this out, with his poetic insight, in his late poem “The Old Age of Queen Maeve”. In this marvelous re-visioning, “Aengus borrows the vocal chords of Maeve’s sleeping husband to request her help in releasing his lover from her father’s dark kingdom. When Maeve agrees to break open the faery mound, the diggers are panicked by the guardians of the Underworld who fly at them through the air - “great cats with silver claws, bodies of shadow and blind eyes like pearls”and “red-eared hounds with long white bodies”.

Terror or beauty, banshee or dream lover. False opposites,perhaps. On the Night When the Veil Thins, we are especially reminded that we can never claim the treasures of the Otherworld – and a love bigger than the familiar world - unless we can brave up.

Notes

My retelling of the Dream of Angus is based on Jeffrey Gantz’s translation of a 1782 manuscript whose content is clearly from a much earlier time; see “The Dream of Óengus” in Early Irish Myths and Sagas. (New York: Dorset Press, 1985) 107-112. I have preferred to use Yeats' spelling

of Angus’s name. Though beautifully written, Lady Gregory’s well-known version of the same story omits the vital detail that the Day of Shapechanging – the one day of the year when Angus can claim his love – is of course Samhain. Her account is in Cuchulain of Muirthemne, reprinted in Lady

Gregory, Complete Irish Mythology (London: Slaney Press,1994) 420-22.

Text adapted from Robert Moss, The Dreamer's Book of the Dead published by Destiny Books.