Samhain Sensibilities

Natural Resources - An Ancient View

Natural resources weren’t always commodities to be bought and sold. Take Halloween for example: a natural resource of time and space. Although our 2012 Halloween festivities have come and gone, the staff of Lucky Six Farms knows this unofficial holiday’s raison d’etre has only just begun. Halloween marks an important seasonal shift, and its roots extend deep into a Celtic past, when a large portion of Western Europeans gleaned their livelihood from an intimate understanding of and concomitant cooperation with Mother Earth. In fact, the familiar October 31 date of our Halloween - an abbreviation of All Hallows Eve - marks the approximate period in our planet’s solar cycle when Samhain was celebrated. As conspicuous midpoint between autumnal equinox and winter solstice, Samhain drew young and old together to ceremonially close the harvest season and prepare for the cold, dark half of the year. Group and individual purification inevitably followed to insure that psychic natural resources were appropriately attuned to accord with the prevailing temporal ones.

Noumena As Natural Resources

But why were rites of purification considered so very important during Samhain that they were practically obligatory? As with all uniquely liminal times, significant transitions of this kind heralded natural phase shifts in consciousness. Peculiarly charged emotions long closed off would spring open and vice versa. Thus, Samhain was considered, above all, as not simply a mindless tick-off of a cold, calendric division but rather a portal opening quite literally and directly to the Otherworld. Spirits of the departed, elves, fairies, elementals, and angelic beings both celestial and fallen suddenly secured access to the affairs of mundane life. Like a life-giving shower of rain or a devouring yet proteinaceous cloud of locusts, this avalanche of noumena required insightful management if the social fabric was to remain intact. To deal effectively with natural resources of this kind required an especially clear head coupled with unwavering physical resolve, an energized intellect supported by calm nerves. Given these facts, ceremonial purification became the order of the day.

Our White Sage Products - Uniquely Purifying Natural Resources

Gaelic peoples often pursued psychic purification by passing between two specially constructed bonfires. In fact, the close association of fire and aromatic fumigation with psychic cleansing extends well back into the prehistory of virtually every continent and indigenous society. Native Americans utilized smudging with White Sage for exactly the same end. Our certified organic products - essential oil, hydrosol, smudge bundles, cones, and whole leaves - continue this venerable tradition. We know they will prove remarkably efficacious, as they always have, throughout the winter ahead.


By Alan Beck