My grandmother and other ancestor spirits aren't here. Tonight is not the first night of Samhain. Plenty of spirits are here though. Also, many gather at the "gates" and or near the veil, or at the elevators, etc. (I was going to start making offerings tonight, anyhow, because I was going to do the full moon tonight, as the eclipse will need to be celebrated tomorrow night.)
My arguments about Samhain is not that people shouldn't celebrate when they feel is right. If your spirits are there and it is the night you can do it, go for it. They will always appreciate offerings, memories, And you can always talk to the dead.
(They can hear you, but there are a lot of prohibitions about what they can say to you. A lot of people cannot or do not want to hear the dead or have the dead invade or take up too much space in this world. For many folks, the spirits of the dead are like zombies, consuming resources, if not brains, and creating emotions- like fear of death, sadness about death, regret. Better to limit them to a few times a year- Samhain, birthday, death day, anniversaries.)
I never would have begun the path to find the origins of Samhain if I hadn't felt the spirits as a child. Seen them shifting in the dark out in the street, when my grandmother propped open the storm door to go get more firewood on the porch.
Felt that knowledge rise up from my 7 or 8 year old subconscious: "The real Halloween happens a week later." But that also scared me a little as a child and a teenager. And I had no one to talk to about all of these things. When I embraced the spiritual life and my abilities, and began pursuing the Craft and the various deities and entities outside of the Christian pantheon, I found that very very few people that celebrated Samhain could say what it was, how it had begun, or how they knew that Halloween was the proper date, etc. That includes modern day Druids and heavily pedigreed magickal folk.
And it still bothers me that people will insist that "there are many ways of calculating Samhain" or tell me something they heard from other modern day pagans, or insist that a re-enactment of traditions from post-Christian Celtic countries was the origins.
It's like Francis Ford Coppola calling his version of Dracula "Bram Stoker's Dracula." I love that movie. So much! Gary Oldman's Dracula made me swoon. I loved even Keanu's bad accent.
But that was NOT Bram Stoker's Dracula. That was Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. (Dracula pursued Lucy and Mina- and Renfield!- to mess with his tormentors. To get back at Jonathon and Van Helsing. While they were out hunting Dracula, the vampire was sneaking into their own bedchambers. Dracula himself was a dead cold corpse. He was scary and disgusting and evil. That's Bram Stoker's Dracula.)
The studio used this title to distinguish the film from all the other Draculas. To make it seem more authentic.
That is how I feel about calling Halloween Samhain. Calling your Samhain ritual on Halloween a Samhain celebration, etc, that is fine, but insisting that it is Samhain is another thing altogether.
Samhain is a genuine Mystery. Maybe one of the few remaining. And people know that. They feel it. That is why they keep invoking its name.
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