High Day: Samhain (DP Entry)

The prime directive of this blog is to document our ADF Dedicant Program work.  Obviously, it has grown into more than that, but still.  Since we started, Michael completed, submitted and had approved his DP documentation and I have procrastinated at great length about getting mine written at all.

My commitment for November is to focus on getting a good chunk of this done, so there should be a lot of posts coming, and some of them won't be particularly seasonal as it includes a requirement for essays about of the eight High Days, so bear with me on that.

The actual submission requirements include a pretty rigorous word count limitation, and while 'extremely brief' makes absolutely good sense as a submission policy (both to avoid having the reviewer go insane from reading it all, and because if you can't explain what you know in a reasonably short bit of verbiage, extra padding is not likely to help), it's not really my voice to spit out thought in just a few words - so I'm just going to say it here the way I do and then do some ruthless editing to submit.

Here then, is my draft essay for Samhain.  The requirement is:  Short essays on each of the eight ADF High Days including a discussion of the meaning of each feast. (125-375 words each)

High Day: Samhain

Samhain (generally pronounced SOW-en) is an Irish word for an ancient Gaelic period of feasting which is also found in the Irish word for "November" - it did not denote simply a day but a longer time of year as Winter approached.  Traditionally, this was the time when livestock were brought in from their summer pastures and herds were culled.  It was a matter of economic and actual survival that those animals that were fed and cared for over Winter were only those few most likely to grow next year's herd, while the majority of the herd was put to use as food for the coming months.  This then, was the meat harvest, the last of the three periods of harvest before the long, lean period of the dark season of the year, and it was a period of feasting and plenty. 

Additionally, Samhain occurs at the liminal period of the year when Summer gives way to Winter and is regarded as a time when the veil between the worlds is thin. Spirits of the dead and the fae could easily cross  the veil and wander the earth, and for this reason, many Samhain customs involve protection magic and staying close to home and others involve honoring and welcoming the spirits. Many of these customs are alive and well in modern Halloween celebrations, from disguises and jack-o-lanterns to welcoming strange visitors and offering a treat to avoid a trick.  Because communicating with the dead is easier when the veil is thin, this also is a time that is regarded as favorable for divination.

There are many holidays in other cultures around this time of year that are also related to similar themes. 

For example, the ancient Greek celebration of the Thesmophoria occurs sometime around October to November (depending on the lunar calendar) and was a women's ritual that centered around a re-enactment of the story of Persephone and Demeter.  When Persephone was abducted into the Underworld, her mother's response in her grief and anger hurled the world into a season of cold and death where nothing would grow.

Other examples include the Norse celebration of Winternights, focused on honoring the Ancestors, and celebrating abundance before the coming of the cold months, and the Mexican custom of Day of the Dead, which combines elements of Catholic Spanish customs and Native American ancestor worship by feasting with their family ancestors in cemeteries and depicting them as happy skeletons continuing to lead normal lives.

Pope Gregory IV, in 835, moved All Saints Day (All Hallows Day) from May 12 to Nov. 1, quite likely to line it up with popular pre-Christian customs already in place.  However, since so much of our lore was written in the Christian era, it is difficult to pinpoint which customs were practiced in spite of Christian influence, and which because of them.

http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/grecoromanmyth1/a/aa102400a.htm
https://www.adf.org/rituals/celtic/samhain/background.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain

SGSD: Zombie Tarot & Tarot Activities

Today, I'm showing off the Zombie Tarot, created by the same fine people that make the Housewives Tarot (one of my favorite decks).  Both decks come in lovely recipe box style boxes and have a wonderful humorous sensibility. Like the  Housewives Tarot, the Zombie Tarot is set in the fantasy version of the 1950s created by Hollywood.  But if Housewives depicts the world of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, the Zombie Tarot harks to every B-movie directly and indirectly about Cold War fears and anxiety about The Bomb.

A quick look through the Major Arcana shows a story old horror movie fans will find familiar - opening scene, The Fool - a man walks to a graveyard with flowers for a loved ones grave - not noticing the disturbed remains and the walking dead following behind him. Uh oh!  The Magician shows the scientist creating the disease that starts all this.... the Hierophant is a TV showing emergency broadcast instructions, and on we go until Judgment is finally delivered with a dropped nuke, and the World depicts a happy 50s family living 'normal life' - in an underground bunker on the Moon, while the Earth explodes in the distance.

The Minor Arcana of the Zombie Tarot most uses the usual names - Cups (pictured as neatly sliced skulls cradling tasty, tasty brains),  Wands (bones and limbs which tend to get yanked off in Zombie World), Swords (shown as knives and other weapons for fighting the brain-munching horde), and Hazards (Pentacles - depicted as a 'hazard' symbol, and showing some interesting attempts to use the Zombies rather than being eaten by them.  The practicality of living in a world overrun with animated corpses).

Zombie stories are, I think, about how things fall apart - they hook into our fear that unseen things are happening that are going to shred the facade of normalcy and civilization we take for granted.  There are two horrors in the zombie genre - the first is that Death itself has stopped working (how is that for turning a fear of death on its head?) but not in the sense of eternal life.  Rather, zombies are animated meat with a chronic hunger for flesh - our dead loved ones don't rest in peace. Instead, what's physically left of them shambles around, dropping rotting flesh all along the way, and try to mindlessly eat us.

The other horror is the ruin of civilization itself - you might get eaten, sure - but you might also just as easily wind up killed by a living person because all the social structure has disappeared and everyone's creating their own rules as they go.

This theme of 'Things Fall Apart' makes the Tower the obvious choice of card to share, as that is what the Tower is all about in Tarot - the understanding that sometimes, that carefully constructed reality you think protects you just crumbles, and you're left with nothing but rubble.

Little wonder the Tower is one of those cards in Tarot that makes people nervous!  In the Zombie Tarot, the lightning has struck.... Tower moments are always sudden mayhem. There you minding your own business and ZAP, it all falls apart.  In this depiction of the Tower, the walls hold, but these folks, securely thinking they are sheltered away from the Zombie Apocalypse, suddenly find their fortress breached - the zombies are here, they're hungry, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Things fall apart, and your security measure are useless against the forces of chaos.  Scarrrry, eh?  I don't think it's a coincidence that zombie tales are popular right  now - they feed into current fears that things are, indeed, falling apart and our old fortresses are more fragile than they seem.

The book I'm sharing today is The Tarot Activity Book, by Andy Matzner who is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist as well as tarot reader.  This book uses Tarot in concert with various journaling ideas, 'conversation starters' and ideas for therapeutic art projects.  The result is a treasure house of ways to use Tarot in a different way than divination for self exploration, growth and healing.  Fair warning - while this book does not require any previous knowledge of Tarot, neither will it directly teach a beginner anything specifically about Tarot. Most exercises involve going through a deck and choosing a card or cards as a part of the activity, by using visual cues rather than 'standard' meanings.  I honestly think that's a pretty great way to learn Tarot - but don't look for key words or even any explanation about what a particular card 'means'.

The activity I chose to try with the Zombie Tarot was Poetry Time.  Very simply, pull a card at random, and use it as inspiration for a poem.  An alternative suggestion is to use the title of a Major Arcana card, spelled out vertically, so that the letters become the first line of the poem about the card.

I'm no poet, so excuse the raw (brainns!!!!!) effort here.   The card I pulled is No. 6: The Lovers.

Zombie Love

Til Death, we vowed,
Hardly believing such limits truly exist
Even as the world faltered around us.

Look at us now.
Our love perfumed with roses and rot,
Visions of the one I once adored
Even as you decay in my arms.
Relish the taste of my beating heart,
Sweet gift I gave you long ago.

~ Lynda H

~~~

Don't forget to head over to Pagan Culture, and look down the sidebar for many wonderful creative entries for the So Good, So Dark Blog Party. Don't forget to explore the giveaways!

And take a moment to hop over to the Samhain's Sirens entry today - a delicious recipe for baked squash, a tutorial on creating a spider web, and a unique bracelet up for giveaway.

So Good, So Dark: Halloween Tarot

For the next eight days, Magaly Guerrero of Pagan Culture is hosting an All Hallows Grim Blog Party with the theme of So Good, So Dark, with the aim "to use our artistic power, intellect and heart to create posts that show the delicious goodness that blooms in the dark."  Participants will be sharing all sorts of creative spins on the darkness - artwork, stories, etc, along with a few giveaways.  Check back to Magaly's website - she'll be offering giveaways throughout the week, and you can find participants' entries in the sidebar.

For me, I'm going to share some of my Tarot treasures - a few of my darker decks (or at least seasonally themed) and books that lend themselves especially to creative exploration or working with darkness and shadow.  What I have is absolutely not the limit of what is available (I find I am not a particularly dark-oriented person these days!), but perhaps it will inspire an interest in working with a new deck or two, or to use Tarot in a different way than simple divination.  For each deck, I'm going to share the Death, Devil or Tower card (the ones most likely to be considered dark and scary) and the back.  And I will also share an exercise from each book I am highlighting using the chosen deck.

The Halloween Tarot
Karin Lee & Kipling West
US Games Systems, Inc.

Our first experience with October darkness tends to not be too frightening - most of us, at least those of us in the U.S. have memories of Halloween, and the (mostly) safe thrill of costumed figures in the darkness of our own streets, our neighborhoods transformed into spooky haunted houses where we are lured in with the promise of sweets, and almost, if not quite, sure that the cackling crone and Frankenstein handing out the goodies are really our best friend's mom and dad.

The first deck I want to share takes us back to those intriguing days of sweet spookiness - The Halloween Tarot. 

This deck is an utterly charming Rider-Waite Smith clone.  The four suits are Pumpkins (Pentacles), Ghosts (Cups), Bats (Swords), and Imps (Wands).  I have found this deck not only to be great fun to read, but also a wonderful introduction to Tarot for children, and those who are a little afraid of Tarot - that little thrill of Halloween fright is there, but in a familiar and non-threatening package.  As a person gets comfortable with these images, they can then compare them to the standard RWS deck, and will find they have developed a good grounding in the symbolism of the system.

But besides all that - it is simply a fun, slightly spooky deck to play with at this time of year.

Death in Tarot usually does not indicate physical death (although it can).  Instead it has to do with transformation - specifically the transformation that rises out of things that have ended.  It's not a comfortable card but it needn't be seen as a 'bad' one, either.

The Death card in the Halloween Tarot is rich with symbol - in the night sky, we can see Saturn (Cronus in Greek - a deity related to Time and a reminder that everything has a timespan).  The vulture and the rat are each scavengers, feeding off the remains of that which has died - and a good thing they do, too, if you think about it.  In the bottom left of the card is a Death's Head Moth and tacked onto the fence is an ankh, an Egyptian symbol thought to mean Eternal Life.  In Death, matter is transformed, not lost.  Death itself - here a skeleton - is shown here as a gardener.  As anyone who has ever grown anything, what dies becomes compost and fertilizer - dirt, which becomes the soil in which new life can grow.  Without death, there could be no life.   The pumpkins and flowers in this garden seem to be quite happy to be there, even if they know it cannot be forever in this form.  Finally, for those familiar with the RWS Death card, the watering can has the five-petaled rose so familiar on Death's banner.

Oh and the black cat?  He's on every single card - try this deck with children.  Even very young kids will enjoy looking for the cat on each image.

Tarot Games
Cait Johnson & Maura Shaw

Tarot Games: 45 Playful Ways to Explore Tarot Cards Together is a delightful book by Cait Johnson & Maura Shaw.   Rather than the 'usual' look at each card, this is, truly, a book of games that can be played with Tarot.  Some alone, some in a group setting, and some specifically designed to be played with children.  Most of these do not require any previous experience with Tarot, but can also be used as a way to shake things up for those who have long experience with reading.  I highly recommend it!

Today, I decided to try a simple game from the children's section, called Autumn Leaves:

"The player mixes the cards, then stands on a chair and drops ten cards, one by one, from this height. Only the cards that land face up are read.  These may indicate attitudes or beliefs that the player is beginning to outgrow or needs to let go.  Let the child tell you what he or she sees in the "autumn leaves."

 

Out of 10 cards, I had 8 show up upright.  These could be read separately, considered as various things that it might be time to put away as the season turns toward Winter.  Or they could be arranged as a narrative.

My inclination was to pay a little extra attention to the 10 of Pumpkins overlaying the 9 of Pumpkins - it is burying the qualities of the 9.   

The 10 shows a party where a pumpkin is being used as a pinata - the tree is full of jack o'lanterns and there is a crowd of people in costume waiting their turn to take a whack.  It's a social setting and looks fun.... but on the other hand, little is as it seems.  Who are these people under their masks?  What do the jack o'lanterns waiting to be hit represent?  It's a lot of activity, but it could be pretty stressful and noisy.  This 10 generally has to do with family legacies, and it makes me worry about things being broken open 'for fun', and not so nice games being labeled as good times and social obligations where no one is really open at all.

It's burying the 9 of Pumpkins, which shows very nearly the opposite scene - a pleasant, well dressed woman stands alone in her thriving pumpkin patch, keeping company with an owl, a symbol of wisdom.  Her pumpkins are still growing, not cut into jack-o-lanterns, and she wears no mask.  She's found a place of serenity and quiet - a haven from the noise and gameplaying.  With the 10 hiding this, I see here a suggestion that it what may be needing to be put away is social experiences and family dynamics  that disrupt peace.  It can be a wonderful thing to enjoy the company of others, but make sure it's the people you want to spent time with.

~~~

A couple of giveaways to point you to, today:

Samhain's Sirens has a tutorial for making seasonal masks and is giving away two of them, one for Fall and one for Spring.

Meanwhile, Pagan Culture has a gorgeous chest by Eliora called "Reach Through the Darkness to Those You Love", full of things to help honor our Ancestors.  Lovely!

See you tomorrow!

~ Lynda H.