# Book of Halloween/Chapter 7

CHAPTER VII
HALLOWE'EN BELIEFS AND CUSTOMS IN IRELAND
Ireland has a literature of Hallowe'en, or "Samhain," as it used to be called. Most of it was written between the seventh and the twelfth centuries, but the events were thought to have happened while paganism still ruled in Ireland.
The evil powers that came out at Samhain lived the rest of the time in the cave of Cruachan in Connaught, the province which was given to the wicked Fomor after the battle of Moytura. This cave was called the "hell-gate of Ireland," and was unlocked on November Eve to let out spirits and copper-colored birds which killed the farm animals. They also stole babies, leaving in their place changelings, goblins who were old in wickedness while still in the cradle, possessing superhuman cunning and skill in music. One way of getting rid of these demon ​children was to ill-treat them so that their people would come for them, bringing the right ones back; or one might boil egg-shells in the sight of the changeling, who would declare his demon nature by saying that in his centuries of life he had never seen such a thing before.
Brides too were stolen.
"You shall go with me, newly married bride,
And gaze upon a merrier multitude;
White-armed Nuala and Ængus of the birds.
And Feacra of the hurtling foam, and him
Who is the ruler of the western host,
Finvarra, and the Land of Heart's Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood. But joy is wisdom, time an endless song."
Yeats: Land of Heart's Desire.
In the first century b. c. lived Ailill and his queen Medb. As they were celebrating their Samhain feast in the palace,
"Three days before Samhain at all times.
And three days after, by ancient custom
Did the hosts of high aspiration
Continue to feast for the whole week."
O'Ciarain: Loch Garman.
Gregory: Cuchulain of Muirthemne
The door was shut. Nera was married to a fairy woman, who betrayed her kindred by sending Nera to warn King Ailill of the intended attack upon his palace the next November Eve. Nera bore summer fruits with him to prove that he had been in the fairy sid. The next November Eve, when the doors were opened Ailill entered and discovered the crown, emblem of power, took it away, and plundered the treasury. Nera never returned again to the homes of men.
​Another story of about the same time was that of Angus, the son of a Tuatha god, to whom in a dream a beautiful maiden appeared. He wasted away with love for her, and searched the country for a girl who should look like her. At last he saw in a meadow among a hundred and fifty maidens, each with a chain of silver about her neck, one who was like the beauty of his dream. She wore a golden chain about her throat, and was the daughter of King Ethal Anbual. King Ethal's palace was stormed by Ailill, and he was forced to give up his daughter. He gave as a reason for withholding his consent so long, that on Samhain Princess Caer changed from a maiden to a swan, and back again the next year.
"Who is calling me?' said Caer.
Gregory: Cuchulain of Muirthemne.
She came, and he changed to a swan likewise, and they flew away to King Dagda's palace, where every one who heard their sweet singing was charmed into a sleep of three days and three nights.
Princess Etain, of the race of the Tuatha, and wife of Midir, was born again as the daughter of Queen Medb, the wife of Ailill. She remembers a little of the land from which she came, is never quite happy,
"But sometimes—sometimes—tell me: have you heard,
By dusk or moonset have you never heard
Sweet voices, delicate music? Never seen
The passage of the lordly beautiful ones Men call the Shee?"
Sharp: Immortal Hour.
even when she wins the love of King Eochaidh. When they have been married a year, ​there comes Midir from the Land of Youth. By winning a game of chess from the King, he gets anything he may ask, and prays to see the Queen. When he sees her he sings a song of longing to her, and Eochaidh is troubled because it is Samhain, and he knows the great power the hosts of the air "have then over those who wish for happiness."
"Etain, speak! What is the song the harper sings, what tongue Is this he speaks? for in no Gaelic lands Is speech like this upon the lips of men. No word of all these honey-dripping words Is known to me. Beware, beware the words Brewed in the moonshine under ancient oaks White with pale banners of the mistletoe Twined round them in their slow and stately death. It is the feast of Sáveen " (Samhain).
Sharp: Immortal Hour.
In vain Eochaidh pleads with her to stay with him. She has already forgotten all but Midir and the life so long ago in the Land of Youth.
"In the Land of Youth
There are pleasant places;
Green meadows, woods,
Swift grey-blue waters.
"There is no age there,
Nor any sorrow.
As the stars in heaven
Are the cattle in the valleys.
"Great rivers wander
Through flowery plains.
Streams of milk, of mead,
Streams of strong ale.
"There is no hunger
And no thirst
In the Hollow Land,
Sharp: Immortal Hour.
She and Midir fly away in the form of two swans, linked by a chain of gold. Cuchulain, hopelessly sick of a strange illness brought on by Fand and Liban, fairy sisters, was visited the day before Samhain by a messenger, who promised to cure him if he ​would go to the Otherworld. Cuchulain could not make up his mind to go, but sent Laeg, his charioteer. Such glorious reports did Laeg bring back from the Otherworld,
"If all Erin were mine, And the kingship of yellow Bregia, I would give it, no trilling deed, To dwell for aye in the place I reached."
Cuchulain's Sick-bed. (Meyer trans.)
that Cuchulain went thither, and championed the people there against their enemies. He stayed a month with the fairy Fand. Emer, his wife at home, was beset with jealousy, and plotted against Fand, who had followed her hero home. Fand in fear returned to her deserted husband, Emer was given a Druidic drink to drown her jealousy, and Cuchulain another to forget his infatuation, and they lived happily afterward.
Even after Christianity was made the vital religion in Ireland, it was believed that places not exorcised by prayers and by the sign of the cross, were still haunted by Druids. As ​late as the fifth century the Druids kept their skill in fortune-telling. King Dathi got a Druid to foretell what would happen to him from one Hallowe'en to the next, and the prophecy came true. Their religion was now declared evil, and all evil or at any rate suspicious beings were assigned to them or to the devil as followers.
"Maire Bruin: Are not they, likewise, the children of God ?
Father Hart:
Colleen, they are the children of the fiend.
And they have power until the end of Time,
When God shall light with them a great pitched battle
Yeats:Land of Heart's Desire.
Expedition of Nera. (Meyer trans.)
The old Druid idea of obsession, the besieging of a person by an evil spirit, was practised by them at that time.
Warren: Twig of Thorn.
If the fairies wished to seize a mortal—which power they had as the sun-god could take men to himself—they caused him to give ​them certain tokens by which he delivered himself into their hands. They might be milk and fire—
"Maire Bruin:
A little queer old woman cloaked in green,
Who came to beg a porringer of milk.
Bridget Bruin:
The good people go asking milk and fire
Upon May Eve—woe to the house that gives,
Yeats : Land of Heart's Desire.
or one might receive a fairy thorn such as Oonah brings home, which shrivels up at the touch of St. Bridget's image ;
Warren:Twig of Thorn.
or one might be lured by music as he stopped near the fort to watch the dancing, for the revels were held in secret, as those of the Druids had been, and no one could look on them unaffected.
​A story is told of Paddy More, a great stout uncivil churl, and Paddy Beg, a cheerful little hunchback. The latter, seeing lights and hearing music, paused by a mound, and was invited in. Urged to tell stories, he complied; he danced as spryly as he could for his deformity; he sang, and made himself so agreeable that the fairies decided to take the hump off his back, and send him home a straight manly fellow. The next Hallowe'en who should come by the same place but Paddy More, and he stopped likewise to spy at the merrymaking. He too was called in, but would not dance politely, added no stories nor songs. The fairies clapped Paddy Beg's hump on his back, and dismissed him under a double burden of discomfort.
A lad called Guleesh, listening outside a fort on Hallowe'en heard the spirits speaking of the fatal illness of his betrothed, the daughter of the King of France. They said that if Guleesh but knew it, he might boil an herb that grew by his door and give it to the princess and make her well. Joyfully ​Guleesh liastened home, prepared the herb, and cured the royal girl.
Sometimes people did not have the luck to return, but were led away to a realm of perpetual youth and music.
"Father Hart. What are you reading?
Maire Bruin. How a Princess Edane,
A daughter of a King of Ireland, heard
A voice singing on a May Eve like this,
And followed, half awake and half asleep,
Until she came into the land of faery,
Where nobody gets old and godly and grave,
Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise,
Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue;
And she is still there, busied with a dance,
Deep in the dewy shadow of a wood.
Yeats: Land of Heart's Desire.
If one returned, he found that the space which seemed to him but one night, had been many years, and with the touch of earthly sod the age he had postponed suddenly weighed him down. Ossian, released from fairyland after three hundred years dalliance there, rode back to his own country on horse​back. He saw men imprisoned under a block of marble and others trying to lift the stone. As he leaned over to aid them the girth broke. With the touch of earth "straightway the white horse fled away on his way home, and Ossian became aged, decrepit, and blind."
No place as much as Ireland has kept the belief in all sorts of supernatural spirits abroad among its people. From the time when on the hill of Ward, near Tara, in pre-Christian days, the sacrifices were burned and the Tuatha were thought to appear on Samhain, to as late as 1910, testimony to actual appearances of the "little people" is to be found.
Wentz: Fairy-faith in Celtic Countries.
The sight of apparitions on Hallowe'en is believed to be fatal to the beholder.
Pyle: Priest and the Piper.
One version of the Jack-o'-lantern story comes from Ireland. A stingy man named Jack was for his inhospitality barred from all hope of heaven, and because of practical jokes ​on the Devil was locked out of hell. Until the Judgment Day he is condemned to walk the earth with a lantern to light his way.
The place of the old lord of the dead, the Tuatha god Saman, to whom vigil was kept and prayers said on November Eve for the good of departed souls, was taken in Christian times by St. Colomba or Columb Kill, the founder of a monastery in Iona in the fifth century. In the seventeenth century the Irish peasants went about begging money and goodies for a feast, and demanding in the name of Columb Kill that fatted calves and black sheep be prepared. In place of the Druid fires, candles were collected and lighted on Hallowe'en, and prayers for the souls of the givers said before them. The name of Saman is kept in the title "Oidhche Shamhna," "vigil of Saman," by which the night of October 31st was until recently called in Ireland.
There are no Hallowe'en bonfires in Ireland now, but charms and tests are tried. Apples and nuts, the treasure of Pomona, figure ​largely in these. They are representative winter fruits, the commonest. They can be gathered late and kept all winter.
A popular drink at the Hallowe'en gathering in the eighteenth century was milk in which crushed roasted apples had been mixed. It was called lambs'- wool (perhaps from "La Mas Ubhal," "the day of the apple fruit"). At the Hallowe'en supper "callcannon," mashed potatoes, parsnips, and chopped onions, is indispensable. A ring is buried in it, and the one who finds it in his portion will be married in a year, or if he is already married, will be lucky.
Trant: Hallowe'en in Ireland.
A coin betokened to the finder wealth; the thimble, that he would never marry.
​A ring and a nut are baked in a cake. The ring of course means early marriage, the nut signifies that its finder will marry a widow or a widower. If the kernel is withered, no marriage at all is prophesied. In Roscommon, in central Ireland, a coin, a sloe, and a bit of wood were baked in a cake. The one getting the sloe would live longest, the one getting the wood was destined to die within the year.
A mould of flour turned out on the table held similar tokens. Each person cut off a slice with a knife, and drew out his prize with his teeth.
After supper the tests were tried. In the last century nut-shells were burned. The best-known nut test is made as follows: three nuts are named for a girl and two sweet-hearts. If one burns steadily with the girl's nut, that lover is faithful to her, but if either hers or one of the other nuts starts away, there will be no happy friendship between them.
Apples are snapped from the end of a stick ​hung parallel to the floor by a twisted cord which whirls the stick rapidly when it is let go. Care has to be taken not to bite the candle burning on the other end. Sometimes this test is made easier by dropping the apples into a tub of water and diving for them, or piercing them with a fork dropped straight down.
Green herbs called "livelong" were plucked by the children and hung up on Midsummer Eve. If a plant was found to be still green on Hallowe'en, the one who had hung it up would prosper for the year, but if it had turned yellow or had died, the child would also die.
Hemp-seed is sown across three furrows, the sower repeating: "Hemp-seed, I saw thee, hemp-seed, I saw thee; and her that is to be my true love, come after me and draw thee." On looking back over his shoulder he will see the apparition of his future wife in the act of gathering hemp.
Seven cabbage stalks were named for any seven of the company, then pulled up, and ​the guests asked to come out, and "see their sowls."
"One, two, three, and up to seven;
If all are white, all go to heaven;
If one is black as Murtagh's evil,
He'll soon be screechin' wi' the devil."
Sharp: Threefold Chronicle.
Twelve of the party may learn their future, if one gets a clod of earth from the ​churchyard, sets up twelve candles in it, lights and names them. The fortune of each will be like that of the candle-light named for him,—steady, wavering, or soon in darkness.
A ball of blue yarn was thrown out of the window by a girl who held fast to the end. She wound it over on her hand from left to right, saying the Creed backwards. When she had nearly finished, she expected the yarn would be held. She must ask "Who holds?" and the wind would sigh her sweetheart's name in at the window.
In some charms the devil was invoked directly. If one walked about a rick nine times with a rake, saying, "I rake this rick in the devil's name," a vision would come and take away the rake.
If one went out with nine grains of oats in his mouth, and walked about until he heard a girl's name called or mentioned, he would know the name of his future wife, for they would be the same.
Lead is melted, and poured through a key or a ring into cold water. The form each ​spoonful takes in cooling indicates the occupation of the future husband of the girl who poured it.
Sharp: Threefold Chronicle.
After the future had been searched, a piper played a jig, to which all danced merrily with a loud noise to scare away the evil spirits.
Just before midnight was the time to go out "alone and unperceived " to a south-running brook, dip a shirt-sleeve in it, bring it home and hang it by the fire to dry. One must go to bed, but watch till midnight for a sight of the destined mate who would come to turn the shirt to dry the other side.
Ashes were raked smooth on the hearth at bedtime on Hallowe'en, and the next ​morning examined for footprints. If one was turned from the door, guests or a marriage was prophesied; if toward the door, a death.
To have prophetic dreams a girl should search for a briar grown into a hoop, creep through thrice in the name of the devil, cut it in silence, and go to bed with it under her pillow. A boy should cut ten ivy leaves, throw away one and put the rest under his head before he slept.
If a girl leave beside her bed a glass of water with a sliver of wood in it, and say before she falls asleep:
she will dream of falling off a bridge into the water, and of being saved at the last minute by the spirit of her future husband. To receive a drink from his hand she must eat a cake of flour, soot, and salt before she goes to bed.
The Celtic spirit of yearning for the unknown, retained nowhere else as much as in ​Ireland, is expressed very beautifully by the poet Yeats in the introduction to his Celtic Twilight.
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare; Caolte tossing his burning hair,
Filling thy heart with a mortal dream; For breasts are heaving and eyes a-gleam:
And if any gaze on our rushing band, We come between him and the deed of his hand,
And where is there hope or deed as fair? Caolte tossing his burning hair.