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Samhain E3: Ancestral Spirits · Wild Kin: A Celtic Podcast

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Hi, friend.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Wild Kin.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Jess.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Pull up a chair by my fire as we cross into the Celtic spirit world,
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: a place where goddesses,
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: ghosts,
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: and nature spirits are all within reach.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: So let's step back in time to a night when the veil grows thin and the dead can walk among us.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: She was dreading this night.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_00: The communal bonfires had gone out hours ago.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: The village returned to their homes as smoke from their peat fires curled up into the night sky.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Shutters were closed tight with lamps alight in their windows.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: They were preparing, for they knew the dead were coming.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: But the young woman standing at the threshold of her door had no such luxury.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: As a seer, she had to go out into the darkness to meet these spirits.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: With trembling hands,
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: she gathered her satchel of goods and closed her eyes as her hand rested on the
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: latch of her home.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: This was her responsibility.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: She had to be brave.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: That winter,
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: her grandmother,
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: who was the village seer,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: died of a sickness that quickly spread through each family.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: She didn't have time to ask her how to perform these rites,
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: how to find the strength to help the dead.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: But now as her successor, the woman was tasked to walk the path between world.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Her grandmother had taught her how to channel the sight,
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: how to open the door,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: and tonight was the most important night of the year,
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: when their ancestors could step through it.
• 2:07
  Her breath exhaled as she stepped out into the misty night,
• 2:08
  and she could already feel them walking amongst her,
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: unseen,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: yet the air was buzzing with energy.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Holding her torch aloft, she followed the well-worn path to her place of vigil.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: Though she'd stepped inside the cairn many times before to perform funeral rites,
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: tonight the place felt ominous.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: They were waiting for her, impatient as the buzzing increased.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Without delay,
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: she began the ritual,
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: sprinkling water around her as she chanted the sacred phrases her grandmother had
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: taught her,
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: conjuring symbols to swirl around her for protection and communion.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: As she lit a bundle of herbs,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: whispers began to rise behind her,
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: falling into rhythm with her chants as she inhaled the scent,
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: smoke swirling around her, opening her mind to meet the dead.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then the young woman knelt down to press her palms into the earth and closed her
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: eyes,
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: her pulse connecting as she felt the power rise through her hands.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: The rhythm of breath and soil mingling until she no longer knew where she ended and
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: the other world began.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: A rush of wind rose up, pulling at her clothes and yanking her hair.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Heart hammering in panic, her breath caught as she opened her eyes.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The field was full of spirits.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: Beings not of this world, all mingling and celebrating on this most auspicious night.
• 3:55
  Some made their way toward the village,
• 3:56
  as loved ones were waiting for them with suppers hosted in their honor.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Others rode the winds into the forest to commune with the trees or cause mischief
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: for unsuspecting travelers.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: She recognized some of them.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Those who had passed last winter from the sickness,
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: warriors killed in battle,
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: stillborn children now happily gurgling in relatives' arms.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: All bones tucked away in the stones beyond.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yet now here in the flesh, as they were in life,
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: and before her stood her grandmother,
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: no longer sickly but radiant and ethereal as she smiled at her.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: She clasped her granddaughter's hands, placing a sprig of yarrow in her palm.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was a blessing for her new role, a gesture she didn't have time to do in life,
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: now commemorated in death.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_00: Tears sprang to her eyes as they touched foreheads.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: No words were needed.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Then others began to step forward,
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: ready to whisper their requests in her ear or give her signs and messages.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And the seer heard them all, for to listen and acknowledge was a sacred act.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Only when dawn broke did the spirits bodies begin to fade back behind the veil.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: But the woman stayed near the cairn for a long time,
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: until the bright morning sun was full in the autumn sky.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: She couldn't seem to pull herself away, for the scent of yarrow still lingered on her skin.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: What if the world was full of spirits and we just couldn't see them?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: Like many native traditions,
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: there's evidence of Celtic beliefs where our human existence was just one of a
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_00: many-layered reality.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Scholars have interpreted this other world not as some separate place like a heaven
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: or hell,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: but all around us.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: We know this from both archaeological evidence of ancient grave sites and the
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: writings of classical authors of the time.
• 6:21
  When a Celt died,
• 6:21
  people mourned deeply for their loss,
• 6:22
  but it didn't mean they weren't still invited to the party.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Remains at Iron Age grave sites have been interpreted as possible feasts for the dead.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: Animal bones,
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_00: drinking vessels,
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: and charred food have all been found at sites like the Hallstatt Graves in Austria
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: and the Danebury Hill Fort in England.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: This indicates that communities still ate together, even symbolically.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_00: It ensured a connection between the living and their departed generations.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Some sources,
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: notably Julius Caesar,
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: wrote that the Gaulish Druids taught that,
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: quote,
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: souls do not perish,
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: but pass from one body to another,
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_00: which implies that there is an immortality of the soul,
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_00: of reincarnation.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: To Caesar, this explained why these Celts were such fierce warriors,
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: as they fought without a fear of death.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: If they were killed in battle, they would simply pass into another state of being.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: Many Iron Age communities interred their dead near their villages too,
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: often with these same offerings of food,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: weapons,
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: or jewelry to sustain them on their next journey.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: Neolithic sites like Newgrange were reused for centuries as burial mounds,
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: treated as both resting places and to gather for important events.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: So really, the Celts didn't seem to fear death at all.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: They appeared to have viewed the departed as continuing participants in community
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: life,
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: just from the other side.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: But what does this term Otherworld really mean?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Within early Irish myth,
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: the Otherworld was portrayed as a parallel realm,
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: beautiful and interwoven with ours,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: rather than a wholly separate afterlife.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: It was a timeless place, a realm of eternal youth and plenty of feasting.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was also porous,
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: with stories highlighting how both mortals and the divine could travel between
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: realms.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: You simply had to find liminal places to cross over,
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: be it a lake,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: cave,
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_00: or perhaps a time of day like dawn or dusk.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: Threshold events like Samhain and Beltane were especially potent too.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: The other world was certainly a place of awe,
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: shimmering,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: strange,
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: and ever alluring,
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: but coming too close always came with a cost.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Mortals would lose hundreds of years of time when they were away,
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: vanishing to dust if they stepped ashore on their homeland.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Gods and goddesses would bestow prophecies, foretell deaths, or seduce you to stay for eternity.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Stories carried a thread of respect for the other world and the spirits within it,
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Over time, this intimacy with the unseen began to shift as the world became Christianized.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: The map of reality was revised from a liminal place to a hierarchical one.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_00: There was one heaven, one hell, and the mortal realm in between.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: And the ancient spirit world of the Celts didn't exactly fit neatly into their structure.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: Many of the old ways were seen as demonic.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_00: In later Christian retellings,
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: the fairy folk who once occupied these spaces were recast as dangerous or unholy.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And instead of keeping a relationship with your ancestors,
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: these souls were now seen as living in purgatory, in need of prayer instead of companionship.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Some remnants remained.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Folklore recorded in Ireland and Scotland described Samhain customs that endured,
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: lighting candles in windows to guide the dead,
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: leaving food on doorsteps,
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: and keeping vigil throughout the night.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: These traditions were seen as acts of faith from Christian souls,
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: yet carried pagan roots all the same.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: But after centuries of rigid belief systems associated with death,
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: the age of industrialization started to crack open the door to other ways of
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: thinking.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps unsurprisingly, as this was the time when death was ever present.
• 10:35
  First, there were high child mortality rates due to diseases like smallpox,
• 10:36
  measles,
• 10:37
  and tuberculosis, as antibiotics and vaccines to combat them hadn't been invented.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: Not to mention cholera outbreaks and war,
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: leaving millions grieving for loved ones who had left the world too soon.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And with so much grieving,
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_00: the spiritualist movement of the 19th century began to rise as an answer.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: It brought the possibility of connecting with these departed souls.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: The public's imagination caught fire as mediums appeared to be able to speak beyond the veil.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: This was the era of candlelit parlors,
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: tables trembling as voices whispered names from beyond,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: a time of ghost photography and seances in the dead of night.
• 11:21
  There were plenty of so-called mediums who were proven as frauds during this period,
• 11:23
  but there were also truths to the claims as well,
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: as there was a scientific push happening simultaneously.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: The Society for Psychical Research was founded in the late 1800s to attempt to
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: measure telepathy,
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: apparitions,
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: and life after death.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: They began to track these phenomena through claims of hauntings and psychics and
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: concluded the field merited further investigation.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_00: Parallel to these studies, occult societies emerged as well.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Though these belief systems varied wildly and had their flaws,
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: people were discussing concepts like reincarnation,
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: karma,
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: and the evolution of souls.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: Ideas shared across cultures, yet also central to Celtic spirituality, just found in a new form.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, the Victorians had rediscovered the Otherworld as they reached out to their loved
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: ones.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: And the dead were certainly talking again.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: By the 20th century,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: the craze of the spiritualist movement had been curbed with the push and pull of
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: religious doctrine.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: But the spirits certainly didn't go anywhere.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, they went more mainstream.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: Films, TV, and books had incorporated every kind of ghostly encounter.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Especially with popular movies like The Exorcist and Poltergeist,
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: these beings of the other world were firmly planted in the public's imagination.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: And real-life claims of ghost encounters only fanned the flames.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: The famous Amityville horror case and the Enfield Poltergeist took the world by storm.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yet interestingly, these stories often frame spirits within a moral framework.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: The encounters were always a battle of good versus evil.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: Spirits lingered because at best,
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_00: they couldn't move on,
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: or at worst,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: they were demonic with the goal of possessing those unlucky enough to cross their
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: paths.
• 13:20
  Seances in horror films inevitably went wrong,
• 13:21
  and mediums were often portrayed as deceived or doomed by the evil spirit's
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: motives.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But luckily, you could always ask the church exorcist for help.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_00: After more than a thousand years of Christian dominance,
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: it wasn't surprising that this moral framework lingered in the collective
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_00: imagination.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yet, beneath this fear remained a surreal fascination.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: People wanted proof of this feeling that they were brushing up against the veil.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: Surveys in recent decades show a notable rise in the belief of the spirit world.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: In 2023,
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: Pew Research found that 38% of Americans polled had a,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: quote,
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: strong feeling that someone who had passed away was communicating with them from
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: beyond this world.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: And scientific research is beginning to revisit questions that were once considered
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: metaphysical.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: Recent studies have explored mediumship under controlled conditions with intriguing
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: results on their accuracy.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: There are also significant studies at institutions like the University of Virginia,
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: where they are documenting accounts of children with past life memories,
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: challenging long-held beliefs in what happens after death.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in physics,
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: string theory suggests there could be up to 11 dimensions of reality,
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: conceptually echoing ancient ideas of these unseen worlds,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: something our ancient Celtic ancestors seem to have known all along.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whether or not you believe in spirits,
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: the cultural memory of these practices can bring a greater sense of depth and
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: meaning to life.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: The feeling of an invisible thread that connects us far more than we realize.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's the truest form of the other world.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_00: A belief in a place where our loved ones never really leave us.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: A place we can brush up against when the veil is thin.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: Where the dead aren't gone.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: Simply waiting.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to Wild Kin.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: If you'd like more Celtic-inspired stories and resources,
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: subscribe to the Artio Journal on Substack.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: Link is in the show notes.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for joining me by the fire, and we'll meet again soon.