Irish Teacher: Modern Halloween is a ghost of its former self

Have we lost our connection to nature and the old traditions of Samhain? 

IT’S ALMOST Halloween: the pooka is busy preparing; the Cailleach is fine-tuning her cackle; the sprites are setting up for their few hours of release. Samhain. A night when the veil is lifted between the living and the dead, when the border between two worlds thins, melts and fizzes.

It’s my favourite time of year and the message of Samhain is one I invite into my classroom. How? By talking about death in an open and accepting way, just as our ancestors did.

Our ancestors were experts in how to live in the world and how to leave it. On this night, all those moons ago, they’d exterminate their fires and let the dead in. This show of respect and hospitality ushered in a peaceful winter. The dead would thank them for their night of freedom by protecting the living through each dark winter into spring.

Celtic lives were imbued with the cyclical reality of the world. As the seasons passed, as the landscape gained or lost its colour, they marked it. Imbolc celebrated the coming of the light and Samhain the arrival of darkness; human life was viewed in its fearless totality.

The Irish Celts counted their days by sunsets. Darkness was not necessarily an ending — only through death and decay could next spring’s seeds find fertile soil in which to grow and flourish.

Of course, ours was not the only culture to treat death this way. El Dia de los Muertos was and still is celebrated at the same time across Mesoamerican and Spanish cultures. Diwali, a festival of lights, marks the Hindu New Year in the same way that Samhain marks the Celtic one.

But arguably, over the years, the Western world more than anywhere else lost its connection to these ancient rituals. We lost our connection with nature in the name of progress, and we did our best to disassociate ourselves from the inevitability of death by viewing it with horror.

Halloween is now thought of in commercial terms, a ghost of its former self. Thankfully, I find myself on a strange little outcrop, teaching English literature, one place where death remains front and centre.

When I summarise what I’ve taught my sixth years over the last 18 months, the common thread is death. To say Othello ends in tragedy is an understatement. Never Let Me Go is pretty much a book-long coming to terms with death. Philadelphia Here I Come is a text haunted by a dead mother, a forgotten past.

The poetry syllabus is no different. Elizabeth Bishop processes the loss of her parents, her addiction, and her depression. Emily Dickinson writes about nature and death in a way that’s comparable to the Celts, and Yeats sadly characterises himself in old age as a “paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick…” And yet students react to all of it. Why? 

Because these writers are telling them the truth. I should of course mention that I’m not suggesting we read Othello to five-year-olds, but we might talk to them about how everything dies, starting with leaves and insects or animals — gradually helping them grasp that human life is also finite. And that on the heels of death comes renewal.

This Halloween, this ancient celebration of Samhain is a wonderful opportunity for us all to reflect on the beauty of life and its passing. We might look at the skeletons hanging from our trees in another way, recall how our ancestors dressed up as ghouls to avoid being snatched into the underworld by them. We might appreciate how our lives will end and give way to new life — that it is all a cycle. We might reconnect with what makes us human — the fact that we must live every day of our lives knowing that it ends.

In Irish classrooms, we teach Midterm Break to our first years for a reason. Every Irish person knows and lives with that final line: ‘a four-foot box, a foot for every year.’ It’s not because we’re morose as some might claim. It’s because we’re honest and we still, perhaps unknowingly, respect the knowledge of our Celtic ancestors. Samhain, along with the sugar overload and the fun of trick or treating, re-connects us with an ancient wisdom.

This Halloween, we can bring in the last of our autumn leaves, trace their colours and explain to our children why they fell. Because the skeletons are there, not just for our entertainment, but to remind us that death isn’t to be feared, that the dead deserve to be talked about, invited in, and respected.