Samhain Unveiled: Tracing its Origins and Time-Honored Rituals
Samhain is a time-honored tradition followed by witches, Wiccans, ancient druids, and countless other modern pagans across the world, and celebrated as October turns to November. Samhain is a festival of the dead, meaning “Summer’s End,” and though you’re probably tempted to pronounce it “sam-hane,” it’s actually pronounced saah-win or saah-ween.
What is a Samhain Celebration?
Samhain is a sacred and ancient Celtic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It holds deep spiritual significance as it honors our ancestors, acknowledges the time of year when the veil between the physical and spiritual worlds is thinnest, and embraces the mysteries of life and death. Samhain typically takes place from October 31st to November 1st and involves various rituals and traditions, such as ancestor veneration, divination, bonfires, costume dressing, feasting, and releasing and renewing rituals. It’s also celebrated as the beginning of the spiritual new year for Wicca practitioners, which is also why it’s nicknamed “The Witches’ New Year.” Samhain serves as a time of reflection, transformation, and connection with the natural and supernatural realms, reminding us of the cyclical nature of existence and the eternal bond with our ancestral heritage. If this celebration sounds oddly familiar, it’s because our modern Halloween, although different, originates from this Gaelic tradition. Historically, most American Halloween traditions were brought over by Irish and Scottish immigrants.
How to Celebrate Samhain
Samhain is typically celebrated by preparing a dinner to celebrate the harvest. The holiday is meant to be shared with those who have passed on as well as those still with us. Set a place at the table for those in the spiritual plane, providing an offering for them upon every serving throughout the meal. In addition to those who have passed, invite friends and family to enjoy the feast with you. Typical beverages include mulled wine, cider, and mead, and are to be shared with the dead throughout the meal.
Halloween Similarities & Differences
Despite occurring at similar times and containing similar themes, Samhain and Halloween are not the same holiday. Halloween, short for All Hallow’s Eve, is celebrated on and around Oct. 31 and tends to be more family-focused. On the other hand, Samhain is more religious in focus and spiritually observed by practitioners.
There are some more light-hearted observances in honor of the dead through Samhain, but the underlying tone of Samhain is one of a serious religious practice rather than a light-hearted make-believe re-enactment. Today’s Pagan Samhain rites are benevolent, and although they are somber and centered on death, they do not involve human or animal sacrifices, as some rumors may claim. Another difference between Samhain and Halloween is that most Samhain rituals are held in private rather than in public.
When to Start the Celebrations
If you want to start honoring this pagan tradition, you might wonder when to start. The timing of contemporary Samhain celebrations varies according to spiritual tradition and geography. Practitioners state to celebrate Samhain over several days and nights, and these extended observances usually include a series of solo rites as well as ceremonies, feasts, and gatherings with family, friends, and the spiritual community.
In the northern hemisphere, many Pagans celebrate Samhain from sundown on October 31 through November 1. Others hold Samhain celebrations on the nearest weekend or on the Full or New Moon closest to this time. Some Pagans observe Samhain a bit later, or near November 6, to coincide more closely with the astronomical midpoint between the Autumn Equinox and Winter Solstice. Most Pagans in the southern hemisphere time their Samhain observances to coincide with the middle of their Autumn in late April and early May rather than at the traditional European time of the holiday. In the end, it’s really up to you!
Honoring Life, Death, & Nature
Samhain isn’t necessarily a creepy, morbid holiday obsessed with death, as some may conclude. Instead, it reaches for themes deeper than that, tying in with nature’s rhythms. In many places, Samhain coincides with the end of the growing season. Vegetation dies back by killing frosts, and therefore, literally, death is in the air.
This contributes to the ancient notion that at Samhain, the veil is thin between the world of the living and the realm of the dead, facilitating contact and communication with the dead. For those who have lost loved ones in the past year, Samhain rituals can be an opportunity to bring closure to grieving and to further adjust to their being in the Otherworld by spiritually communing with them. However, it’s also a way to appreciate life when you get right down to it.
There are many rituals you can partake in to celebrate Samhain. Here are just a few ideas (and none of them involve life sacrifice):
13 Samhain Rituals & Traditions
1. Samhain Nature Walk
Take a meditative walk in a natural area near your home. Observe and contemplate the colors, aromas, sounds, and other sensations of the season. Experience yourself as part of the Circle of Life and reflect on death and rebirth as being an important part of nature. If the location you visit permits, gather some natural objects and, upon your return, use them to adorn your home.
2. Set Up A Samhain Altar
If you’re new to the pagan tradition and don’t have a permanent altar in place, you can easily set up a table to leave in place for the three days before Samhain. Decorate the altar with symbols of late fall, such as:
• Skulls, skeletons, grave rubbings, ghosts
• Harvest food such as pumpkins, squash, turnips, root vegetables
• Nuts and berries, dark breads
• Dried leaves and acorns
• A cornucopia filled with an abundance of fruit and veggies
• Mulled cider, wine, or mead
3. Dumb Supper Ceremony
A Dumb Supper is a silent meal traditionally held on the night of Samhain. During this ritual, participants set a place at the table for deceased loved ones, leaving an empty chair and serving their favorite foods. The supper is conducted mostly in silence as a way to invite and commune with the spirits of the departed, allowing them to partake in the meal and share their presence during this spiritually significant time.
Start by preparing a meal for the family, deceased loved one(s), and your pagan deity, focusing on fruits, vegetables, and wild game meat if available. Include a loaf of dark bread like rye or pumpernickel and a cup of apple cider or wine. Set the dinner table with candles and a fall centerpiece, and put all the food on the table at once. Don’t forget to reserve a spot for the deceased and pagan deity, so consider the dinner table a sacred space.
Before eating and drinking, gather everyone around the table and say this, “Tonight is the first of three nights on which we celebrate Samhain. It is the end of the harvest, the last days of summer, and the cold nights wait on the other side for us. The bounty of our labor, the abundance of the harvest, and the success of the hunt all lie before us. We thank the earth for all it has given us this season, and yet we look forward to winter, a time of sacred darkness.”
Take the cup of cider or wine and lead everyone outside. Make this a ceremonial and formal occasion. Head to your garden (if you don’t have one, find a grassy place in your yard). Each person takes the cup in turn and sprinkles a little bit of cider onto the earth, saying, “Summer is gone, winter is coming. We have planted and we have watched the garden grow, we have weeded, and we have gathered the harvest. Now it is at its end.”
Collect any yard trimmings or dead plants and use them to make a straw man or woman. If you follow a more masculine path, he may be your King of Winter and rule your home until spring returns. If you follow the Goddess in her many forms, make a female figure to represent the Goddess as a witchy hag or crone in winter. Once that is done, go back inside and bring your deity into your home. Place it on your table and prop it up with a plate of its own, and when you sit down to eat, serve it first.
Begin your silent meal with the breaking of the dark bread, and make sure you toss a few crumbs outside for the birds afterward. Keep the King or Goddess of Winter in a place of honor all season long — you can put it back outside in your garden on a pole to watch over next spring’s seedlings and eventually burn it at your Beltane celebration. When you are finished with your meal, put the leftovers out in the garden as another offering for the dead.
4. Make an Ancestors Altar
Honor your deceased family members with this ceremony. Gather photographs, heirlooms, and other mementos of deceased family, friends, or even pets. Arrange them on a table, dresser, or other surfaces, along with several votive candles. Light the candles in their memory; while you do so, speak their names out loud, express well wishes, and thank them for being part of your life or lineage. Sit quietly and pay attention to what you experience. Note any messages you receive in your journal. This Ancestors Altar can be created just for Samhain or kept year-round.
5. Guide the Spirits
Place a white seven-day candle in the window to guide the dead to the Spirit World. Light the candle and speak these words, “O little flame that burns so bright, be a beacon on this night. Light the path for all the dead, that they may see now what’s ahead. And lead them to the Summerland and shine until Pan takes their hands. And with Your light, please bring them peace, that they may rest and sleep with ease.”
6. Visit a Cemetery
Another way to honor the passing of family and friends is to visit and tend their gravesite at a cemetery. Call to mind memories and consider ways the loved one continues to live on within you. Place an offering there, such as fresh flowers, dried herbs (rosemary is one great choice), or freshwater.
7. Hit ‘Pause’
As we mentioned, Samhain is also a time to celebrate life in contrast to death, which makes it a great moment to stop and introspect. Reflect on you and your life over the past year. Review journals, planners, photographs, blogs, and other notations you have created during the past year. Consider how you have grown, accomplishments, challenges, adventures, travels, and learnings. Meditate. Journal about your year in review, your meditation, and your reflections.
8. Hold a Séance
Also as we mentioned, Samhain is thought to be a time of little distance between the living and the dead. If there’s anyone on the other side you’d like to communicate with, now is an excellent time, according to the pagan tradition.
9. Bonfire Magick
Kindle a bonfire outdoors when possible or kindle flames in a fireplace or a small cauldron. Write down an outmoded habit that you wish to end and cast it into the Samhain flames as you imagine release. Imagine yourself adopting a new, healthier way of being as you move around the fire clockwise.
10. Divinatory Guidance
Using tarot, runes, scrying, or some other method of divination, seek and reflect on guidance for the year to come. Write a summary of your process and messages. Select something appropriate to act upon and do it.
11. Divine Invocations
Honor and call upon the divine in one or more sacred forms associated with Samhain, such as the Crone Goddess and Horned God of Nature. Invite them to aid you in your remembrance of the dead and your understanding of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth. If you have lost loved ones in the past year, ask these deities to comfort and support you.
12. Herbs and Spices
Many plants that tie in closely with Samhain, to name a few: allspice berries, broom, catnip, mountain ash berries, mugwort, mullein, oak leaves, acorns, rosemary, sage, pine cones, and straw. Find creative (and safe; research each before consuming) ways to use them in your cooking and around your house as decorations.
13. Community Connections
Connect with others. Join in a group ritual in your area. Organize a Samhain potluck in your home. Research old and contemporary Samhain customs in books, periodicals, online, and through communications with others. Exchange ideas, information, and celebration experiences. Regardless of whether you practice solo or with others, as part of your festivities, reflect for a time on being part of the vast network of those celebrating Samhain all over.
Interested in more? Check out our Halloween Collection!
About the Author
Shamanic Soul Retrieval: How to Recover Parts of Our Soul?
“Every book…has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.” ~ Carlos Ruis Zafon
It has been said, “The best things in life are free.” We can all agree it’s nice to be surprised with a gift; but not just any gift. The gift that arrives in your life precisely when you are ready to receive it. The gift is clearly a message to you and for you.
In this case, the gift is Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self by Sandra Ingerman.
With graceful delivery of rarely discussed phenomena, Soul Retrieval: Mending the Fragmented Self combines shamanism and psychology to explain the effects of trauma that cause parts of the soul to leave the body and the process by which the part(s) can be retrieved.
Follow along as renowned psychotherapist, shamanic teacher, and author Sandra Ingerman delves into soul loss and retrieval.
What is Soul Loss?
Sandra Ingerman’s Abstract on Shamanism states that “there are many common symptoms of soul loss. Some of the more common ones would be dissociation, where a person does not feel fully in his or her body and alive and fully engaged in life. Other symptoms include chronic depression, suicidal tendencies, post-traumatic stress syndrome, immune deficiency problems, and grief that just does not heal. Addictions are also a sign of soul loss.”
For those who have lost parts of themselves, knowingly or unknowingly, “tremendous amounts of psychic energy” are unconsciously spent looking for the lost parts.
What Causes Soul Loss?
According to Ingerman, “The basic premise is whenever we experience trauma, a part of our vital essence separates from us in order to survive the experience by escaping the full impact of the pain.”
This quiet occurrence, known as soul loss, takes the form of a perpetual feeling and experience of incompleteness and disconnection.
Ingerman says, “Anytime someone says, ‘I have never been the same’ since a certain traumatic event, and they don’t mean this in a good way, soul loss has probably occurred.”
Sandra Ingerman on Lost Soul Parts
Sandra Ingerman holds a master’s degree in counseling psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist, professional mental health counselor, the author of more than ten books, and a board-certified expert on traumatic stress who was awarded the 2007 Peace Award from the Global Foundation for Integrative Medicine.
As a leading authority on soul loss and retrieval, Ingerman’s highly regarded career spans 35 years of conducting workshops and soul retrievals around the world.
For Ingerman, the leading practitioner of soul retrieval whose own spiritual journey to recapture her soul led her on various spiritual paths. The answer she found was in the ancient tradition of shamanism, which views soul loss as an important cause of illness and death.
The word shaman, originating from the Tungus Tribe of Siberia, means “one who sees in the dark.”
Soul Loss in Society
According to Ingerman, “A reflection of how much soul loss people are dealing with” is evident when “so many governments and businesses are valuing money over life.”
However, Western medicine has no framework for this kind of diagnosis because it only deals with imbalance when it appears on a physical and mental level.
Western medicine “treats chronic pain with pain medication, insomnia with sleeping pills, weight issues with diet and exercise, and most damagingly, may label soul loss as mental illness, and cover up the symptoms with psychiatric medications that may make things worse by slapping a Band-Aid on a wound that’s not healing underneath the bandage.”
This “covering up” can lead to the deep unhappiness that many have come to consider as “simply ordinary.” Eventually, this prolonged dissociation produces a nameless void that shows itself through “a loss of meaning, direction, vitality, mission, purpose, identity, and genuine connection.”
This spiritual void, which is always present and always trying to get your attention, operates as the incessant yearning of your soul wanting to incorporate all of its highest qualities, all of God’s essence, all of you.
Simply put, the soul is always trying to reconnect with that from which it came.
Ingerman imparts, “If you are truly in your body (your whole soul present), you cannot place money over life. Planetary soul loss causes so much of the behavior we are currently seeing, behavior that no longer honors the beauty and importance of life.”
Signs of Soul Loss
The following checklist can help identify symptoms of soul loss:
- You have a difficult time staying “present” in your body
- You feel numb, apathetic, or deadened
- You suffer from chronic depression
- You have problems with your immune system and have trouble resisting illness
- You were chronically ill as a child
- Memory gaps of your life after age five where you sense that you may have blacked out significant traumatic experiences
- Struggle with addictions, for example, to alcohol, drugs, food, sex or gambling
- Find yourself looking to external things to fill up an internal void or emptiness
- Have difficulty moving on with your life after a divorce or the death of a loved one
- You suffer from multiple personality syndrome
Having read this book with no prior knowledge of soul loss or retrieval, I found the concepts quite sobering.
Within situations of physical and emotional abuse, negation, and trauma, many experiences in life can be too difficult to bear. Soul loss is an understandable response to spiritual woundedness and deep fragmentation of one’s soul essence that would lead to an internal dissociation from natural balance.
What is Soul Retrieval?
During the soul retrieval process, the shaman moves into an altered state of consciousness to travel to realities outside of normal perception (non-ordinary reality), also known as hidden spirit worlds, to retrieve the lost part of the soul.
In some cases, there is reluctance of the soul to return, or the soul may not even know a separation has occurred. While in most cases, the soul does want to return. It is, however, important to note when the “soul returns, it comes back with all the pain it experienced when leaving.”
Once the lost soul is located, the shaman will “acknowledge the former pain and gently negotiate the soul’s return to the body.” The shaman then brings the soul back to normal reality and (literally) blows the missing soul part back into the body through the head or heart.
If a person is trained in shamanic journeying, they can ask their spirit guides to perform a soul retrieval on their behalf. Or anyone can ask for a healing dream where one sets the intention to request a soul retrieval to be performed during the dream state.
If these two processes do not create change or healing, then working with a trained shamanic practitioner is recommended.
Although Ingerman is very clear that you should not try to practice soul retrieval based solely on the reading of this book, in an exclusive interview, Ingerman and I discuss what can be done when someone suspects soul loss has occurred.
Shamanic Healing Practice Interview
BJB: What can someone do if they suspect soul loss has occurred but do not have immediate access for soul retrieval with a Shaman?
SI: If a person has soul loss, they can work with a shamanic practitioner long distance. Most shamanic practitioners perform long-distance healings these days.
I have been training Soul Retrieval practitioners since the late 1980’s. I have a website where I have an international list of shamanic practitioners who have sent me case studies. Of course, no shamanic practitioner can ever promise a cure, but I know their work, and I trust them.
BJB: Is there a healing exercise the person can do to begin to address and/or heal the root cause of the soul loss?
SI: Nature is our greatest healer. A person who feels they have lost their soul can walk or lie down on the ground and reflect on what is the root cause of their soul loss.
You can also do automatic writing. This includes listening to spiritual music while writing the following question on a piece of paper: “What is the root cause of my soul loss?”
You then close your eyes and allow your hand to write. This is a powerful way to let your soul and intuition give you the truth of the cause of your soul loss and other information that is important for you to know.
BJB: What has been the most surprising or unexpected part of your work as a Shaman?
SI: All of my Shamanic work is a surprise.
The helping spirits never give expected responses to the questions I ask them. This is true also when I perform the healing journey for a client. I am always given information I did not expect or would rationally think of on my own.
Also, in my 35 years of working with clients, I continue to be surprised by the miraculous effects of the work.
The Most Important Factor in Personal Healing
Soul retrieval is not a quick fix. Sandra Ingerman states, “If the person has done a lot of personal work, the soul retrieval might be the end of the work. If not, the soul retrieval would be the beginning of the work.”
No matter where you may find yourself, at the beginning or near the end of working through an issue, the most important factor in all healing work is you.
You have to be willing to do the work that is necessary to participate in your own healing. You will have to be willing to look at yourself with new eyes, from a new shamanic perspective, and as an embodiment of completion and wholeness while knowing that willingness is the impetus for great change, which always begins with the heart.
For more information on Sandra Ingerman’s work, log onto SandraIngerman.com.
You can also learn more by watching this interview on Gaia.com with Jill Kuykendall on soul retrieval.
