The Sunset of the Year

While researching the Macsen’s Treasure series, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for forms of rituals or ceremonies that Celtic British people of the 5th century might have used to celebrate their holidays. Unfortunately, though we have some notion of the existence a few holidays and their meanings, we have no clues to the actual rituals, if any, that might have been performed.

In the Welsh language, the name for one of these old holidays is Nos Galan Gaeaf . It literally means the eve of the first day of winter. The early pagan Irish called it by the more familiar name, Samhain (pronounced SAW-en). In ancient times, the festival was celebrated over a three day period beginning at sunset on the 31st of October. According to the old Celtic calendar, the holiday not only marked the end of the harvest season when people completed their preparations for winter, but it also denoted the end of the old year and the beginning of the next.

Like other ancient Celtic festivals, Nos Galan Gaeaf has continued into modern times under a newer name. In the 8th century the Christian church moved the feast day of All Hallows’ Day to the 1st of November and incorporated it into the older festival, which became known as All Hallows’ Eve, or what we now call Hallowe’en. Later, All Hallows’ Day was renamed All Saints’ Day. All that is left to us of the older festival are the remnants that evolved into modern trick-or-treating, jack-o’-lanterns, and costume parties, as well as the made-up rituals of modern neo-paganism.

As I developed the story line of the book A Land Beyond Ravens, I found that I needed to create a scene that takes place on Nos Galan Gaeaf. From earlier research I already knew that Celtic people believed that this was the time when the boundary between the conscious world and the Otherworld, called Annwn, dissolved and that some souls who had passed to Annwn through death might return and be seen to walk among the living. Superstitious folk feared these spirits and attempted to keep them at bay with bonfires. Over time, the use of costumes and masks began to be worn as well, to either imitate or placate the spirits.

Great. But this still didn’t give me a ritual. Once more I scoured reference books and the internet for more information, but I was left with the old adage, when in doubt, punt. So I got out the steel-capped boots (or should that be the steel-capped pen?) and had at it.

Most of my characters certainly believed in Annwn. In the scene in question I decided to have members of the clan of Dinas Beris gather around a standing stone with their druid. The druid speaks in a soothing tone about the time of year and its meaning. In this gathering, I’ve visualized that the people have brought personal mementos from either someone they’ve lost or an ancestor they admired, and use the memento to try to draw that person’s spirit to them. Claerwen, the Lady of Dinas Beris, has brought a lock of her dead step-son’s hair as well as a lock of hair from her husband, Marcus, because she believes the boy’s soul has been trying to warn her of something bad that will happen. She has placed both locks in an amulet she wears around her neck.

Claerwen never gets the chance to “see” the boy. She runs into Marcus while he’s on his way to a nearby stronghold. Her father was taken hostage and Marcus wants to try to get him released. Guess how? He’s painted his face in a spooky way that scares her until she realizes who it is she’s run into. His intention is to go scare the guards—as a Nos Galan Gaeaf ghost or spirit on the loose—into letting his father-in-law go. Of course Marcus gets sidetracked before the task is accomplished.

One thing that I absolutely did not want to do was give in to the gory horrors that became attached to the holiday in later times through superstitions, wild imaginations and modern special effects. I’ve read a number of books by modern Arthurian novelists that have a lot of weird, grotesque forms of paganistic rituals that are written simply for the shock value. When a story line and writing flow well, I don’t think authors should feel the need to succumb to such unnecessary, gratuitous tactics. So the result in my book is that I’ve portrayed the ritual itself in a rather mild manner. It’s the emotional value of the characters that carries the scene.

Interestingly, like the ancient Celtic calendar, even into the ninth century in the Christian era, days were still measured from sunset to sunset. In thinking about how the year was measured in early times, compare it to how we measure the time of day now. If the year ends at Nos Galan Gaeaf, the beginning of winter, this is the sunset of the year. In relation, Midwinter, the winter solstice, would mark the midnight of the year. The spring festival Beltaine, or May Day is the sunrise, and Midsummer, the summer solstice, is the noon of the year.

To me this makes more sense than the way calendars look now, with the so-called first day of winter on the 21st or 22nd of December. By then, hasn’t it already been cold for quite a while? And in many places snow has been on the ground for some time? Perhaps, if the popes and church of long ago had not messed with the calendar (and please tell me why they had the authority do this?), we might have retained a different sense of how our world courses from day to day and year to year.