Between Worlds: Samhain, Halloween, and the Shadow of the Sun.
- apeach5
- 4 days ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening, where we dig deep into the rich earth of history to uncover new understandings of the present. Today we stand at the gate of the long dark to come. I am moved to write about the spirit of the season.
I. Before the Name Samhain
Long before the word Samhain (pronounced Sow-en) was spoken, the people of Atlantic Europe were already watching the sun sink into winter. The builders of chambered tombs, circles, and cursus monuments measured the year not exclusively in numbers, but in the tonalities of the light — the slow drift of sunrise and sunset along the horizon, the moment a beam touched the heart of a crafted passage or vanished behind a sacred hill. These were not mere calendars: they were architectures of return, mapping the dying and rebirth of the sun across centuries.
At Avebury in Wiltshire, the great Beckhampton Avenue reaches toward the sinking sun of late October. It is not exact to solstice — it gestures toward the cross-quarter day, halfway between equinox and the year’s turning. To stand there at dusk is to see the same geometry the Neolithic surveyors marked: a liminal sun dropping through mist, as if slipping between worlds.
The West Kennet Long Barrow at Avebury
On the ridge south of the great henge-circle at Avebury stands the long earthen mound and stone gallery of West Kennet Long Barrow. Professor Terence Meaden argues that this monument was designed not simply as a tomb but as a chamber of ritual renewal: the east-facing entrance catches the light of the February sunrise, while within the barrow are carefully carved megalithic images — among them an animal head, possibly a ewe, and a sculpted “sheep-stone” simulacrum.
I have written in more depth about this [here].
According to Meaden, the alignment and imagery correspond with the pastoral calendar at Imbolc (see below): at this time the ewes' first milk begins to flow, the dawn of the new herd-year, and the returning light of spring converging in stone. The carved ewe's head, he suggests, may represent that moment of transition when the life giving milk flows and the season turns. There are also alignments with sunrise at the twin equinoxes (Meaden T, 2024, register with Academia to download the paper here).
February stands at the opposite end of the year to Samhain, but it demonstrates some evidence for a ritual year based on a farming calendar.
Newgrange
More evidence for this is demonstrated at Newgrange in the Boyne Valley, Ireland a shaft of light enters the vast tomb only at the winter solstice — but the season of darkness begins weeks earlier. By early November, the sun has strayed too far south for its rays to find the passage. Morning light that once reached the tomb’s heart now falters on the threshold, and the chamber sinks into dreaming shadow until the solstice wakens it again. From around Samhain, the beam withdraws; the chamber sleeps. The builders, then, did not celebrate a single morning but a long descent, a many-day passage from the balance of equinox to the stillness of midwinter. Light became a presence that could die and be reborn.
Ireland’s Samhain Circle: Grange, Co. Limerick
At Grange, near Lough Gur in County Limerick, the largest stone circle in Ireland is not merely a ring of stones but a walled theatre of the sun. Recent research by Ken Williams and others has shown that its entrance passage frames the setting sun on the November cross-quarter — the old Samhain horizon. As dusk falls, a shaft of light strikes through the portal and glances off the inner stones, while the long, triangular shadow of the axial monolith stretches towards the threshold before dissolving into twilight.
For over a century, antiquarians had puzzled over a “V-notch” alignment proposed by Bertram Windle in 1912, but new observations reveal a subtler and more persuasive geometry. The builders seem to have fixed their gaze not through the notch, but toward a squat triangular stone — numbered 69 — that catches the last beam of the Samhain sun. In that moment, the circle becomes a clock of shadow: the stones’ silhouettes sweep across the bank like the hands of time, measuring the sun’s surrender.
It is hard not to imagine the Late Neolithic congregation gathered here, watching the light withdraw through the entrance as the year itself seemed to pass into the underworld. Grange, like Avebury and Newgrange, shows that this “season of descent” was mapped not only in myth but in stone: a dialogue between architecture and astronomy, light and its loss.
II. The Celtic Inheritance
Many modern works speak of an ancient Celtic year divided by four fire-festivals, yet the archaeological and textual evidence is more fragmentary than that tidy scheme suggests. What we do find are ritual alignments and folkloric celebrations clustered around these turning-points; whether they ever formed a fully articulated “calendar” across all regions and periods is less certain.
That said, if we allow that the Iron Age peoples of Europe may have shaped their own ritual cycles, there is some evidence that the year turned upon four great thresholds — the so-called quarter days:
Samhain (October 31–November 1),
Imbolc (February 1),
Beltane (May 1), and
Lughnasadh (August 1).
Each marked a pivot between solstice and equinox — the agricultural and cosmic crossroads inherited, perhaps unconsciously, from Neolithic observation. Of these, Samhain was the most charged — being at the liminal point between the year’s end and beginning. (Though some might grant that crown to the winter solstice).
At this time Cattle were brought down from high pastures; the last fruits stored; debts paid. The hearth was extinguished in every home, then rekindled from a central communal fire, binding the tribe anew.
In Irish tales, the sídhe — the mounds that dotted the landscape — opened on this night. The Tuatha Dé Danann, the old gods of the land, rode out from the barrows, their fires glimmering across the plains. To the living, these were the dead returned.
Families left food and drink for the wandering souls; travellers carried torches against their touch. The custom of mumming and guising, dressing as spirits to confuse or placate them, has its roots here — a ritualised exchange between human and otherworld, survival and remembrance.
III. The Living Night: Traditions, Superstitions, and Reformation Shadows
In the Gaelic-speaking lands — Ireland, Scotland, and the Isle of Man — Samhain is not a mere date but a threshold inhabited by the living and the dead. The festival begins at sunset on 31 October and lasted until the following dusk, opening the dark half of the year. The year itself was imagined as a circle divided by fire.
Ireland: The Night of the Dead
In Ireland, Samhain was the Feast of the Dead. Doors were left unlatched, candles burned in windows, and a place was set at the table for returning ancestors.
The hill of Tlachtga (Hill of Ward) in County Meath was the ritual heart of the island: medieval annals describe a great fire kindled there from which all others were lit, echoing the older practice of drawing new light from the sun’s dying. The air was alive with augury — apples bobbed in water to divine lovers’ names, nuts cast into the hearth to test fidelity. Such games were not idle fancy but small survivals of divination rites, where the boundary between play and prayer blurred.
Another tradition that I remember from my Manx/Irish lineage concerns turnips that were hollowed and carved into faces, lit from within to ward off malign spirits or guide ancestral souls home. The grimacing glow of the jack-o’-lantern was both offering and warning, its lineage reaching back through centuries of folk magic.
Scotland: Masks, Mischief, and the Cailleach
In Scotland, Oidhche Shamhna was the night of masks and fire. In the Highlands and Isles, “Hallowe’en bleezes” blazed across the hills, while young men carried burning torches, circling houses and fields sunwise to bless the land and drive away witches. The guisers, disguised in rags and skins, went from door to door reciting verses or performing antics for food — a practice that married reverence with irreverence, echoing ancient processions of masked spirits.
Here, too, the season belonged to the Cailleach, the old woman of winter. With her hammer she froze rivers, raised storms, and shaped mountains. When the Samhain fires burned low, it was said she began her reign. Children were warned not to venture out after dark, lest they meet her or her host, yet she was revered as the architect of the land itself — creation through dormancy.
The Isle of Man: Hop-tu-Naa
On the Isle of Man, the festival endures under its old name, Hop-tu-Naa — likely from Shoh ta’n Oie, “this is the night.” It remains one of the purest survivals of Samhain in Europe. Manx children, as my grandmother remembered, carved the aforementioned turnip lanterns and sang Hop-tu-Naa songs in the island’s own Gaelic tongue, receiving apples or sweets in return. Adults kindled fires for good luck and performed weather charms for the fishing season. The sea, too, was part of the rite: fishermen feared to sail that night, believing that the Otherworld stirred beneath the waves.
Contrasts in England: From All Hallows to Harvest Home
In England, the ancient festival was reframed early under Christian influence.
Yet the elemental power of fire remained.
Across the Midlands and North, bone-fires blazed in churchyards and fields, echoing both the slaughter season and ancient rites of purification. The name bonfire itself comes from these “bone fires,” where animal remains were burned as offerings for the dead.
Puritan Shadows
With the Reformation and the rise of Puritan Protestantism, these rhythms of remembrance came under assault. Reformers condemned All Souls’ observances as Papist superstition; the Puritans of the seventeenth century went further, abolishing saints’ days, church feasts, even Christmas. Fire festivals and guising were branded heathen; divination and masquerade were denounced as witchcraft.
In their place arose the state-sanctioned spectacle of Guy Fawkes Night (5 November) — a loyalist inversion of Samhain’s fire. Effigies of the Pope or his supporters replaced ancestors; treason replaced transience. The same flame that once honoured the dead now burned in mockery of them. The ritual survived, but its meaning was turned inside out — Samhain became satire, the sacred rendered civic.
Still, beneath the sermons and statutes, folk practices endured. In the western shires, in upland farms and coastal villages, lanterns still glimmered and apples still bobbed. The old year would not die so easily.
IV. The Christian Cloak
When Christianity spread through the Celtic world, it did not erase Samhain but translated it. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III fixed All Saints’ Day on 1 November, followed by All Souls’ Day on the 2nd. The eve became All Hallows’ Eve — Hallowe’en. The fires of Samhain burned on, now consecrated to Christian remembrance: vigils for the dead, prayers for souls in purgatory.
Medieval folk left soul-cakes on their thresholds; the poor, especially children, would “go souling”, singing and praying for the departed in return for food — a clear ancestor of modern trick-or-treating. When the custom crossed the Atlantic, the turnip lantern was - like Cinderella's coach - transformed into a pumpkin by the rich soils of the New World.
Even the witch’s imagery — black cat, cauldron, broom — fuses pre-Christian and Christian layers: the Cailleach, winter’s hag-goddess, merges with the medieval image of the witch, her cauldron of death and rebirth echoing the Otherworld’s cauldron of the Dagda. Thus Halloween is less a corruption of Samhain than its palimpsest — a festival continually rewritten upon the same primal fear and hope: that death is not the end.
V. Bones of Light: Monuments and the Liminal Sun
Archaeoastronomy shows that many British monuments align not to solstices alone but to these cross-quarter days — the eighths of the year when threshold and transformation were most keenly felt.
These monuments, like Newgrange, speak in the language of light withdrawing and returning — a choreography of shadow that turned cosmology into ceremony.
Clava Cairns, near Inverness, are built to catch the setting sun from Samhain to solstice.
The cairns glow in the low light, stones warming briefly before night reclaims them.
At Callanish, the western arm of the avenue points toward the hills where, at Samhain, the sun dies behind the Cailleach’s sleeping body — a mythic landscape alignment still visible today (see here).
On Anglesey, the passage of Bryn Celli Ddu looks to the rising midsummer sun and another alignment to the Midwinter sunrise, yet folklore insists that its mound opens at the year’s other hinge, when the dead walk and the ancestors return. The duality is deliberate: life and death as two gates of the same sun gilded line.
Even Stonehenge, though primarily solar at solstice, forms part of a wider choreography that would have made late-October sunsets a herald of the coming rebirth of light.
Through these alignments, prehistory and myth coalesce. The stones were not built for abstract astronomy but for seasonal revelation — a communal witnessing of the cosmos turning.
VI. The Modern Mask
When Halloween crossed the Atlantic with Irish and Scottish migrants in the nineteenth century, it shed much of its religious solemnity but retained the grammar of inversion: night instead of day, masks instead of faces, sweets instead of offerings. The festival became a mirror of modernity’s uneasy truce with mortality — a night to flirt with fear in the safety of the seductive electric glow of conspicuous consumption.
Yet beneath the costumes and the parties, the plastic and confectionery, older rhythms survive. The flicker of the candle in a pumpkin’s hollow still echoes the hearth-fire rekindled at Tara; the masquerade still enacts the ancient traffic between the living and the dead. Even the timing — as clocks go back and fields fall silent — carries a whisper of prehistoric exactness. Our bodies know this turn; we are creatures of the same tilt and orbit that once guided the builders of stone and flame.
VII. The Circle Closes
To walk among the stones at dusk in late October is to feel the season itself as ceremony. The air thickens, the light slants low, and time seems porous. Whether one calls it Samhain or Halloween, the essence is unchanged: a negotiation with darkness, an affirmation that the cycle endures.
From the quartz-rimmed tombs of the Boyne to the jack-o’-lanterns in suburban windows, the human gesture is the same — to light a small flame against the encroaching night and believe it matters.
Epilogue: The Wheel Turns
Thus, the glowing embers of autumn sink into shadow, and from their ash the haunted season exhales its frosty breath into newly kindled fires still dreaming of summer’s warmth within winter’s withered hearth.
In the cradle of frost-kissed boughs, where whispers of yesteryear’s blaze linger like wraiths at the feast, the year turns its solemn page. Yet behold — beneath the Holly King’s cloak, a spark defies the dark, unyielding as the heart’s quiet rebellion.
From winter’s forge, spring shall be hammered anew, tempered in the anvil of night, until dawn’s first thief steals back the sun.
And so the wheel spins on: eternal, indifferent — inviting us to dance in its waning glow, to revel in its turning trance, and to carry forward its sacred tune.
Have a happy Halloween!
Suggested Reading
Hutton, Ronald (1996) The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford University Press.
MacCulloch, J. A. (1911) The Religion of the Ancient Celts. Edinburgh University Press.
Brennan, Martin (1983) The Stars and the Stones: Ancient Art and Astronomy in Ireland. Thames & Hudson.
Darvill, Timothy (2016) Megalithic Tombs and Long Barrows in Britain. Shire.
Green, Miranda (1997) The Celtic World. Routledge.
Meaden, T. (2024) Expression: Cult Images Carved on Stones at the West Kennet Long Barrow and at Avebury, England, The International Journal of Conceptual Anthropology. https://www.academia.edu/128121358/Cult_Images_Carved_on_Stones_at_the_West_Kennet_Long_Barrow_and_at_Avebury_England?auto=download
Acessed 29/10/2025
