The shops call it Hallowe'en and the books call it Samhain. In the Book I copied it is November Eve, and I have come to think the plain name is the best of the three.
We kept it on Saturday, the thirty-first, which was the right night and a convenient one, and that does not happen as often as you would think. The clocks had gone back the week before. By half past five the valley was dark and by six there was fog in it, lying level as milk in a dish, with the top of the hill standing out black above. Nobody could have asked for better.
I had been answering the door since half past four. We live at the end of a lane and do not get many callers, but there is a family at the farm and another by the bridge, and this year there were three small skeletons and something that I think was a pumpkin. I gave them sweets and admired their faces and sent them home before the fog thickened. I have never seen any quarrel between their Hallowe'en and ours. Children dressed as the dead, going from house to house in the dark and being given food: if that is not a rite of the season, I do not know what is. Their great-great-grandmothers went souling down the same lane.
The name in the Book
When I copied my Book, nearly thirty years ago now, I was a little disappointed to find that it did not say Samhain. It said November Eve. Samhain was the name in all the paperbacks, and it had a wildness about it that November Eve, which sounds like a date in a parish diary, did not.
Hesper, whose Book I was copying, was unmoved. She said that Samhain was a fine word and I was welcome to it, but that the people who wrote the rite had been English, and had called the night what their neighbours would have called it if their neighbours had known. I have come round to her view. Samhain is a word I had to learn to pronounce. November Eve I knew already. It is the eve of November, the last evening of the light half, the night before the dark begins in earnest. It does not need translating, and I find that I like a holy day that can be said in the plainest words I have.
On the website we say Samhain, because that is what people look for. In the circle we say the other.
The book of names
The thing we do on this night that matters most to me takes about ten minutes. We have a book, an ordinary ledger with a cloth spine, that Hesper bought in a stationer's in the spring of 1981. In it are written the Craft names of the dead: first those who taught our teachers, as far back as Hesper could carry it, and then our own. It is read aloud, slowly, from the first name to the last, by whoever is the newest initiate. The rest of us answer each name.
The earliest names in it belong to people none of us ever met. I know nothing about them but the names, and that somebody who knew them wanted them remembered. There is a kind of faithfulness in saying a name aloud for no better reason than that you were asked to. I think it may be most of what a tradition is.
The last name is Wystan's. He has been last for more than ten years, and I am glad of it, because it means that in all that time we have added no one. It was read this year by a young woman who never knew him. She read it well. When she had finished there was the silence there always is, and then Hesper, who is eighty and was married to him in every sense but the legal one for forty-two years, said what she always says, which is, "Well, that is everybody. Shall we eat?"
The empty place
At supper we lay one place more than we need. It has a plate, a knife and fork, a glass, a chair pulled out. The first helping of everything goes on that plate and the first of the wine into that glass. Nobody makes a fuss about it. The talk goes on round it as it would round a guest who was a little quiet.
People sometimes ask whether we believe that the dead actually come. I can only say what I have observed. I have nursed a good many people at the end of their lives, and I have noticed that the dead are not gone in the way we speak of them as being gone. They are in how their children hold a cup. They are in a turn of phrase, a way of folding a towel. Wystan is in every apple tree on the north side of the orchard, and in the fact that Corwin, who learned it from him, cannot pass under an oak without looking up into it.
So when we lay the place, I do not think we are pretending. We are making room, deliberately and for one evening, for something that is true all year: that we are made of those who went before us, and that they have a claim on the first helping.
In the morning the food from the plate goes out under the oldest tree, and the birds have it by nine.
The year turns
When everyone had gone I stood at the back door for a while. The fog had come up as far as the orchard wall. Above it the sky was perfectly clear, and the stars were out over the hill. It was the first really cold night. You could feel that something had finished.
That is the other half of November Eve, and it is the half I should find it hard to explain to anyone who had not kept the year round. It is not only the feast of the dead. It is the night the year itself dies, and one is asked to let it. Whatever was not done this summer will not now be done. The fields are what they are. There is nothing to do but go in, shut the door and wait for Yule.
I find a great peace in that. I went in and shut the door.