Sabbats Almanac: Samhain to Mabon - Kristoffer Hughes 2018
The Old Ways: A Bard’s Halloween by Linda Raedisch
Samhain
WE’VE ALL HEARD OF “Double, double, toil and trouble,” but as “Hallowmass” approached, Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have been just as likely to suffer from the earworm, “Mingle, mingle, in the pingle,/Join the cantrip with the jingle.” You, dear reader, may already be aware that a cantrip is a witch’s incantation. (A pingle, in case you are wondering, is a little lidded pot used for cooking a child’s porridge.) The above is a line from the Galloway Song, one of a number of Jacobean greatest hits having to do with witches.
If any of the action in Macbeth is meant to take place on All Hallows’ Eve, Shakespeare does not mention it. October 31 was regarded as a night of prophecy, so it would have been entirely appropriate for Macbeth to have his first run-in with the Three Witches on that date. History tells us that King Duncan was killed in August (in battle, not in his bed), but when has Shakespeare ever allowed history to get in the way of creativity? (History also tells us that Macbeth enjoyed a long and more-or-less successful reign before he met his doom at Lumphanan.) The fact that Shakespeare did not invoke the occasion of Halloween to lend eeriness to the scene tells us that, in his day, Halloween was a fairly low-profile holiday.
We know that Shakespeare was acquainted with the feast at the end of October, but his single reference to it, “to speak puling, like a beggar at Hallowmass,” in Two Gentlemen of Verona has no spooky ring to it at all. In both Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Halloween was indeed an understated affair. “Souling” was technically no longer allowed under the newfangled Church of England, but children roamed the streets nevertheless in hopes of receiving “soul cakes,” in gratitude for which they were supposed to pray for the souls trapped in Purgatory. In the countryside, Catholic holdouts quietly fed bonfires in memory of the dead, but in Shakespeare’s imagination, ghosts were more likely to walk abroad on Christmas Eve.
In Scotland, it was a different story. There, Halloween bonfires remained de rigeur, ostensibly to “burn the witches,” as the accompanying chants made clear. In Macbeth’s own Moray, blazing fir candles were thrown into the flames to keep fairies away too. The smoke imparted blessings while the soot could be used to blacken the face, a convenient disguise for the youths who ran amuck, pinching cabbages out of the neighbors’ gardens and flinging them at the cottage doors. Hence Scotland’s other name for Halloween, Cabbage Night.
The flames of the bonfire were fed with bracken, peat bricks, barrels of pine tar, old furniture, and even bits of houses, which may explain why there is now nothing left of the two witches’ houses that Sir James Sinclair clearly marked on his map of Dunsinane in 1772. Sinclair’s map also included a “Witches’ Stone”, but I believe any witch in Dunsinane would have been lucky to survive so long. The last witch to be tried and executed in Scotland, indeed in the British Isles, was Janet Horne in 1727. Had witches still been living at Dunsinane fifty years later, I’m sure they didn’t appreciate Sir James drawing a path to their doorsteps.
The houses, as Sinclair has rendered them, are quite ordinary-looking. With peaked roofs and doors in their gable ends, they radiate all the spookiness of Monopoly hotels. Back in the 1600s, playwright Ben Jonson displayed a little more imagination. His witch, Maudlin, in The Sad Shepherd, dwells “within a gloomie dimble ... Down in a pitt, ore-growne with brakes and briars,” a “dimble” being a narrow valley and a “brake” a thicket. And earlier, in The Faerie Queen, Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser described the typical witch’s abode as “a little cottage built of sticks and reedes/In homely wise, and wald with sods around.” Like Jonson, he situates the cottage in “a gloomy hollow.”
But what were the witches who lived in these quaint little cottages supposed to be up to at Halloween? Surely, they were not whining for soul cakes with the children in the streets? Fortunately for us, but very unfortunately for the accused men and women, we have several accounts of supposed witchy doings in the Scotland of the time. On “Allhollow Even” 1590, accused witch Agnes Sampson partied with two hundred other witches in a churchyard in North Berwick in the Lothians, the party guests arriving at the venue in sieves. There they drank wine and danced to the music of a “Jew’s trump,” led by the devil’s secretary, John Fian. In Craigleuch, near Aberdeen, we hear of a coven of witches dancing round a stone on Halloween 1597. Dances, especially ring dances, often come up in accounts of the so-called Witches’ Sabbath. The witches were said to dance withershins, counterclockwise, thereby reversing the fertility of the land.
Did these sixteenth-century gatherings of witches ever really take place? Probably not, but the defendants, in their desperation, told their torturers what they thought they wanted to hear. When Macbeth’s Three Witches “Round about the cauldron go” in Act 4 Scene I , they’re enacting a Jacobean stereotype, one which has persisted into the twenty-first century, thanks to the play’s popularity.
The magical cooking vessel of Celtic mythology survives on the one hand as the Holy Grail and on the other as the witch’s cauldron. In both cases, it is a source of life and a sign of covenant. By the 1500s, the ingredients of the witch’s brew had become the subject of wild fantasy and disgusted fascination. But whether it contained “eye of newt and toe of frog” as in Macbeth or “May dew and fumart’s tears” as in the Galloway Song, the most important aspect of the witch’s brew was the idea that it should be cooked and consumed together with other witches in the presence of their leader, each witch dipping in with a little horn spoon which she kept on her belt just for that purpose. In this way, the witches affirmed their identity as a coven and sustained their individual magic powers until the next gathering.
All in all, the Christian observance of All Souls’ and All Saints’ Day was not all that different from the Samhain-tide gathering of the ancient druids, when all members of the community, living and dead, came together to reaffirm their bond. The Witches’ Sabbath, as it existed in the Elizabethan and Jacobean imagination, was basically the same ritual turned on its head.
It is amusing to note that the practice of trolling the streets for soul cakes was once as frowned upon by the Church of England as its robust offspring, trick-or-treating, is in many American communities today. So whether you are all decked out in Druids’ robes and headed for the sacred groves or are simply dressed as a Jacobean witch at Hallowmass, rest assured that it’s all part of the same life-affirming ritual.
Resources
Aitchison, Nick. Macbeth: Man and Myth. Gloucestershire, England: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2000.
Briggs, K. M. Pale Hecate’s Team: An Examination of the Beliefs on Witchcraft and Magic among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and His Immediate Successors. New York: The Humanities Press, 1962.
Hutton, Ronald. The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
McNeill, F. Marian. Scottish Folklore and Folk-belief. The Silver Bough, Volume One. Glasgow: William Maclellan, 1957.