Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m never too sure about what to believe about the spirit world, a non-logical, unscientific and unmeasurable sphere of comprehension, but this week we’re being bombarded with material about stuff that goes bump in the night, most of it thankfully in a light-hearted and humorous vein.

This week, as the festival of Samhain is being celebrated, it brings us back thousands of years to the ancient Celts who marked the seasonal tradition from light into darkness with all kinds of rituals from burning crops to sacrificing animals.

The whole strategy behind the ceremonies and sacrifices was to keep at bay those forces ‘from the other side’ — not always benign — who would come back to visit the living at this strange time of year. A kind of meeting of the living and the dead to sort out a few things for the year ahead.

All very much by way of pagan customs but one thing about the Church (Catholic) in the early decades after the coming of Christ was their ability to zone in on the older traditions and adapt them to their own agendas.

By the early 700s AD, Pope Gregory III had realised the significance of Samhain to peoples across Europe and beyond, so he decreed that each year November 1 would be All-Saints Day and the day after All-Souls Day. Now the month of November is the main month on the Christian calendar for remembering the dead and celebrating their connection to those of us that are still in the land of the living.

The whole Halloween setting has along the way provided one of the great backdrops for horror films such as ‘Scream’ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ and many more, with darkness, the changing of the clocks and ghostly tales all tying in seamlessly with that agenda.

Even to this day, after many decades of my life have sprinted by, it is a time of year that brings back spooky memories of very kindly aunties visiting my house and recalling tale after tale of ghoulish events as we played away as kids at the kitchen table not pretending to be listening . . . but all the while not missing one word of the stories.