"Tis the season to be spooky. It's Halloween time and I just love this holiday and the fall season. It's a playful holiday where people, no matter what their age, act like kids. The normally beautiful landscaping of houses in the neighborhood are filled with skeletons, ghosts, tombstones and all kinds of fun decorations. The majority of people wouldn't dream of keeping pink flamingos or giant blow-up characters on their lawn normally, but on Halloween people get creative and fill their yards with graveyard scenes.
Halloween brings communities together through decorations and handing out candy to the kids who are trick-or-treating. Grown-ups as well as kids dress in costumes and act the part. It's like a giant block party each year. How many normally serious adults have no problem acting like the undead for the night? Halloween is a real American tradition that we all grew up with.
Beyond the way we are all used to celebrating Halloween, there is at least 2,000 years of history with this holiday. Beyond the fun and playfulness, Halloween explores the shadow side of our lives. Halloween traditions express cultural views of death, the afterlife and our connection to both.
Halloween is based upon a Celtic holiday called Samhain (pronounced sow-in). The word "Samhain" is an Irish and Gaelic word meaning November. Samhain was celebrated on November 1st which marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter or the "darker half" of the year. So just like the world lay in greater darkness, the winter season also corresponded with beliefs and rituals dealing with the "darker" side of life, conditions that are out of our control like death, chaos, drought and blight.
Samhain was seen as a time when the boundary between this world and the spiritual world was weak. Spirits of the dead could enter our physical dimension and roam freely on Samhain. The souls of the dead were thought to revisit their homes seeking hospitality. Places were set at the dinner table and by the fire to welcome them. The belief that the souls of the dead return home on one night of the year and must be appeased seems to have ancient origins and is found in many cultures throughout the world.
In order to treat these spirits respectfully, people dressed in costumes so the difference between the living and dead wouldn't be noticed. Impersonating these spirits or souls was also believed to protect oneself from them.
A tradition called mumming or guising was practiced where people would go from house to house in costume reciting songs or verses in exchange for food. This came from a tradition where people impersonated the souls of the dead, and received offerings on their behalf in exchange for good fortune.
Divination rituals that foretold the future were practiced on Samhain. Fire played a large part in these rituals. Large bonfires burned that symbolically cleansed people of bad influences. People would bring the flames from these sacred bonfires back to their homes to light their hearth fires . These hearth fires were considered to protect people and joined the community together as the season of darkness began.
Finally turnips were hollowed out and given grotesque faces while a candle was placed within them. These turnips represented the dead and also protected people from spirits. They were put on windowsills to protect the house from spirits. This is where our jack-o-lanterns originated from.
When large populations of people with Celtic roots like the Irish and Scottish came to America, they brought all of these traditions with them. Our modern American tradition of Halloween is born from this.
As a medium, I work with spirits everyday. There is nothing spooky or scary about that. I work with and explore the shadow side of life and death. The more I explore and learn, the more I see a beautiful order to the universe. Each day brings a little more understanding to me about the vast realm of the unknown. My job as a medium is to prove the continuity of life beyond what is known as death. Mediums do this by bringing through evidential information during the reading, information about the person in spirit that can be verified.
My experience shows me that a spirit is simply a disembodied human being, a person who no longer has a physical body. We are all spiritual beings. During our lifetime here, we are spiritual beings with a physical body. When the time comes to transition from the physical world to the spiritual world, you will be the same person you are now. You just won't have a body anymore. There is a continuation of consciousness beyond physical life.
Exploring our spirituality is our modern way of dealing with death and the unknown. We live in a time where we are free to do so. Death is still something in our culture that needs to be talked about and brought out into the open on all levels from death cafes where people meet and end of life needs are discussed to experiencing communication with those who have passed.
