“Sow-win” – Samhain is an ancient holy day that dedicates time to honouring ancestors, the dead, and welcomes the dark part of the year where the land goes to sleep in winter or “dies” for a period.
These days my experience of sabbats or holy days has shifted gear. I’ve been practicing Alexandrian Witchcraft for about twenty years, since being trained and Initiated in my early 20s.
When I first started practising, I observed every Ritual detail perfectly. Gathered the correct supplies and offerings sometimes weeks in advance and planned elaborate experiences to convey my gratitude to the land and the elemental expressions of our realms. But something has changed over the last five years. Either my experience of sabbats changed, or I noticed things differently that were always there, I can’t totally say for sure.
My recent experience of Samhain (in Australia), was an example of how I seem to have started living out the mythology and themes of the sabbats in my daily life, actually experiencing the story of the sabbat directly, instead of just honouring it in Ritual.
Around the sabbats, I sometimes now experience upheaval or big changes in the weeks leading up to the event. This time around, I was consumed by practical details of life, needing to move house and relocate my animals due to the recent New South Wales floods. I hadn’t given much thought to Samhain this year.
A few weeks ago I heard a whisper in my mind to start researching some new approaches to creating offerings on my altar. I had a sudden interest in exploring different offering techniques using spirits – alcohol as a way of honouring and feeding those that have passed, and, surprise surprise, my ancestors.
I experience the sabbats and the path of Witchcraft now as a living interaction with life. No longer simply a set of rules and obligations to keep the wheel turning and the balance honoured. Although I have always felt lucky and blessed to know enough to simply create appropriate Ritual and offerings at the correct times, and keep alive a tradition that is extremely important to me, and I believe is also important for the world and all it’s realms.
As the Samhain sabbat came and went this year, I once again found I had somehow randomly tuned in to deepening my relationship to my ancestors as the weeks approached Samhain. The path has begun to live through me, rather than me having a practise that I have to work hard and diligently to maintain, as I have done for the last 20 or so years. Maybe this is the gift of all that dedication and hard work? A living embodiment of experience that runs through my veins. I’m not sure. I am again, laughing a little bit at how I have gone from a stickler for tradition, to not making any real plans for Ritual and then somehow metaphorically playing out the story in real life. This has been a welcome embodiment and deepening of my practice on the path of Witchcraft. And perhaps a natural maturing of energies, a deeper blending of my own soul with life itself.
One of my most treasured pleasures in my practice is that I can feel and experience a deeper, more profound and heightened awareness of life force energy through practicing Witchcraft. This is what drew me to it in the first place, like a magnetic force that pulled me in. A force that still gives my life a feeling of expansion and meaning.
It has been beautiful to deepen my practice and keep learning.
Happy Samhain. Enjoy your Ritual however you practise, and I hope you can clearly hear the voices of your ancestors and the ancestors of the earth and stars, at this beautiful holy day of connections between the realms.
Browse my sensitively curated and soulfully cooked offerings at www.seahorseoracle.com
Photo and words copyright Cacey Blackburn 2022