An All Hallows Eve Special...

[endlessrarities]

It's Hallowe'en tonight, and there's been quite a build-up on Live Journal.  Pagans everywhere are celebrating Samhain (I know there's a few of you out there - have a great time, whatever you're doing!).  Though I like to think I'm a pagan by inclination, I'm not a big fan of equinoxes - putting such a great emphasis on those owes too much to those new-fangled Iron Age ideas for my liking, thank you, very much. 

The day I find much more meaningful ( and which I always think of as 'The Day of the Dead)' is Midwinter, the shortest day, which appears to have been the focus for rituals involving the ancestral dead during the Early Bronze Age.  It's easy to see why: it's when the battle between the light and the darkness reaches its most crucial point.  The sun dies, but every year without fail, it is reborn. 

It must have been a day of incredible significance to our prehistoric ancestors, who meticulously observed the movements of the celestial bodies, but had no way of understanding the forces that guided them.  Their preoccupation with this day is seen in a number of important sites, and it's always associated with the dead, and often the ancestral dead.  The midwinter sun reveals itself in the 'lightbox' that overlooks the entrance of Newgrange, the entrance of Maes Howe is aligned on the midwinter sunrise, too, and recent research suggests that Stonehenge is also oriented around the midwinter sunrise.  That's not to say that the midsummer sunrise wasn't important: perhaps midsummer was a time devoted to celebrating the hopes of the living, while midwinter was the time to remember the achievements of the ancestral dead. 

It's on Midwinter day that I raise a glass of red wine to my Ancestral Departed and to the Ancestors in general - this year, I should probably celebrate it with a post devoted to Stonehenge. I've been promising you that for months, I know...

In the meantime, I'll join in the Hallowe'en celebrations with some lovely gravestones.  There's a preoccupation with horror and ghoulishness at this time of year: I find this a bit unfair, because I've not yet met a dead person I didn't like.  They're not really very good at conversation (I'd be alarmed if they were!), but one thing's for sure: they're very easy to get on with!  They never argue, they never talk out of turn, and they never complain about their circumstances!

Spooky reminiscence of the day?  A few years back, I was checking out a consignment of late 19th century skellies who'd been unceremoniously chucked out of their graveyard.  I was on my own in one of our stores so I switched on the radio to keep me company while I decanted my poor dead (and rather smelly!) friends into their trays.  What should be playing but Mozart's Requiem.  i thought that was quite appropriate, considering...

Anyway, without further ado, here's some pretty gravestones.  They're all late 18th or early 19th century in date, and they can be found in the kirkyard of the parish church of Saint Quivox, in South Ayrshire. 

Saint Quivox is a tiny little village which I've often wondered about but never visited during trips down the A77 to Ayr - this year, I finally made the effort to seek it out, and it wasn't disappointing.  Its major attraction is the church, which has its origins in the 12th century.  The earliest gravestones are much later, dating to the 16th century, but they'll have to wait for another day.

Here's a rather fetching skull on one of the late 18th/early 19th century gravestones:-

 

And a rather more complicated set of motifs on another:-

 

A third shows rather a naive figure of a man - this kind of rough-and-ready carving is so typical of the Ayrshire gravestones, and is rather charming.  The accompanying tools suggest he may have been a gardener:-
 

 

And lastly, I give to you the jewel of the Saint Quivox kirkyard, a lovely carving of Adam and Eve:-

 

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!  And remember - it's not the dead you should be afraid of tonight, it's the living! 

I sometimes wish the dead would come out of their graves and remonstrate with all those thoughtless oiks who kick over gravestones, break into mausolea and chuck the bones around, etc;. I've heard of so many cases of it through the years - it makes me very angry on their behalf!!!

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I think it is very interesting that scholars seem to have come quite recently to the idea that the Stonehenge alignment was about the shortest day rather than the longest one, considering the clues at Maes Howe and Newgrange.

In these northern latitudes, the fear that the dark might engulf us one day seems much more real than the joy of midsummer. Humans are probably more motivated by fear than happiness.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. And I suppose I still perpetuate the idea of the midwinter sacrifice to this day. We always have a real Christmas tree - the tree must die, so the sun will be reborn...

It used to be a handy excuse to keep eating turkey when I'd turned 99% veggie. I didn't eat turkey one year, and the sun still came back, so the turkeys were spared from then on!

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

Lovely old gravestones! Thank you for sharing them.

Your thoughts about the solstice are intriguing, and make sense. I am rather fond of Halloween/Samhain though, partly because here in the US it is a big holiday for everyone, so we get to play with the muggles. ;)

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I presume the association with the equinoxes must come from Julius Caesar's observations of the Iron Age druids? I haven't read his stuff, so I'm in complete ignorance. My knowledge of IA religions is confined to dismembered dogs, horses and people dumped in rubbish pits, the cult of the head, and offering votive deposits to the gods and the ancestors by throwing nice pretty things into water (I like that bit!)!

I'm sure modern paganism is much more friendly and fluffy and pleasant in comparison! So please don't try and re-create the old ways in gory detail! I don't think the muggles would take to it too kindly...

Anyway, surely the Dead deserve two days of celebration in a year! We wouldn't be where we are today without them...

[lizziebelle.livejournal.com]

We only sacrifice in effigy, I assure you! That, and food.

I recently tossed a ring into water that had associations I wished to rid myself of. Ancestral memory, perhaps? ;)

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Offering metal objects into water seems to be a very ancient tradition, from coins in wells to Excalibur. Nice to continue it.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It certainly goes way back to the Bronze Age. It might even have its roots in the Neolithic. I've certainly come across Early Bronze Age axes from rivers, and some gorgeous jadeite axes come from wetlands....

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I love the way that tradition just goes on and on. Most folk don't even know why they're doing it!

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

When we first moved here in the late 70s I was fascinated by our local standing stones and read up a lot about archeoastronomy. The details have all gone fuzzy now, but I seem to recall that by noting the angle of the sunrise and sunset at Samhain (around 6th November) and Beltane (around 5-6th May), it tied in with moonrises and enabled one to calculate possible total eclipses.

PS The equinox is something totally different, by the way. That's when the day and nights are of equal length and occur in March and September. I'm sure you know that and I'm only mentioning it because your post seemed to imply that Halloween/Samhain was an equinox, which it isn't.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

You are right, it is well away from the Equinox, I'm hoping somebody knows why Samhain is when it is. It's older than All Souls Day.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

It's years since I read Stonehenge Decoded by Gerald S. Hawkins and the details are now very fuzzy, but if the midwinter full moon rises at the same angle as the sunset on Samhain, then a solar eclipse is likely the following summer. Or something like that.

It's all to do with the wobble in the moon's orbit and the fact that the sunset at Samhain is on the same angle as the sunrise at Beltane because they form a kind of diagonal.

I ought to read the book again, but it's quite complicated and right now I don't have time.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Sorry! My archaeoastronomy is a bit rusty. I'd always thought that the equinoxes were fairly close to Samhain/Beltane. I think my knowledge of these things is still rooted in the Neolithic...

But... Your comment about the moonrises is probably crucial to establishing why these particular dates have become enshrined in the calendar. Everyone's keen to emphasise the importance of the sun at places like Stonehenge, etc. But recent works are putting more emphasis on the role of the moon - the passage of the moon plays an integral role in the recumbant stone circles of north-east Scotland. If you're interested, check out Richard Bradley's book 'The Moon and the Bonfire'...

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

But recent works are putting more emphasis on the role of the moon

Well, I don't know about recent, Gerald S. Hawkins wrote Stonehenge Decoded in 1965 which explains about the moonrise alignments at Stonehenge. But perhaps what at first seemed like a crackpot theory is now mainstream? (Like plate tectonics in geology, which was initially dismissed as a ridiculous idea. Initially it was thought to be just a coincidence that you could fit all the continents together like a jigsaw.)

I'll look out for the Bradley book though because I have an old novel idea that's been lying dormant for years that's based on what I've read of astroarchaeology, plus my own observations of the way the constellations move through the sky and then combining both Welsh myth and folklore.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I'm no good with archaeastronomy - we were weaned off it at Uni. There was a sense of hostility towards the whole archaeoastronomy movement - it was too 'old school', something the young turks wanted to rebunk at all costs.

I think it's one of these things that goes through cycles. The archaeoastronomy folks made Great Things of the Megalithic Yard, and the skeptics replied with 'wait a minute - how can these people do advanced maths & physics? They can't even read or write!' It's generally accepted that quite complex observations can be made by passing down information held in the oral tradition through generations, but it's like the whole ley-line thing - if you keep drawing more and more lines and taking more and more measurements, you can interpret something anyway you want!

I think the consensus is that by reading too much into these monuments, you're doing the people that built them even more of a disservice. By interpreting them on even the most basic level, their achievements are still impressive - the stone (or timber!) circles probably reinforce observations made generations earlier when the sun or moon was known to rise above a certain point in the landscape at a certain time of year, and that was when the crops were to be planted/harvested, or whatever.

[gipsy-dreamer.livejournal.com]

Those gravestones are beautiful! Also, you'll need to remind me when Midwinter's Day is so that I an raise a glass too :)

I really really want your job! What does it take to become any kind of historian these days? x

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

No, you don't want my job.

It takes at least four years studying, an ability to work long hours in sometimes hellish conditions for below average wages, and that's if you're lucky! I got my first permanent full-time job when I was thirty-eight. Before then, it was a succession of temporary contracts with long spells of 'resting' in between. A bit like acting, really...

[annietopia.livejournal.com]

Oh do I love when you share gravestone pictures! As we have discussed before, you never get to see markers like these in the states. Or at least in any graveyard I have ever seen. The details...the story told in the carvings...very very neat to see. Thank you for sharing more!

[red-trillium.livejournal.com]

I love your gravestone posts!

I grew up in the US with a lot of Halloween celebrations. There's also the Mexican Dia De Los Muertos on 1 Nov, different from Halloween but similar in recognising our ancestors and those who have passed on ahead of us.

Halloween is slowly making it's way to NZ, still not a lot of trick or treaters and you are generally looked at oddly when you dress up.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised it's taken so long!

[cobaltika.livejournal.com]

i love love love those stones! we have nothing like that here! thank you for sharing them. cemeteries have such fascinating sculptures.