Halloween, the Feast of All Hallows Eve, is supposed to be the night when spirits are closest to our world, thus the pageantry, haunting costumes and parties. Halloween is a great excuse for all the fun, kids love the candy and “trick or treating” and adults tend to let down their hair that day, but Halloween
got all this attention thanks to over zealous Christians centuries ago when they wanted to stamp out the old religious ideas. Naturally, folks decided that if the Church was against it, then it had to be fun and the holiday was born.  If you are hoping to see a ghost on Halloween however, you may be looking on the wrong day!

My personal candidate for the most ghostly night would however be the lesser known holiday of Harvest Home, a Celtic tradition that found its way to the New World and is still celebrated to this day. Depending on who you ask, the holiday should be celebrated either on the evening of September 24th until the sunset of the next day, or on the Autumnal Equinox, a movable feast that falls near that date.  It is the day when the balance of daylight and night swings to the dark, the day traditionally remembered for the Celt’s Wicker Man ceremony and the night when the forces of darkness gain control of the earth and begin to turn it cold. The agrarian harvest is done, growing has stopped and the old ways tell celebrants to enjoy the coming of fall, before the air turns frigid and all living things wither.

Being as pure blooded a Celt as reasonably possible and having grown up on the tales of John Barleycorn, the Wicker Man and all sorts of ghosties, this day in particular holds a unique attraction for me. Of course the tales of Harvest Home have been tainted over time, most recently by a book and movie of the same name by Thomas Tryon who gives the holiday a more sinister tone, and of course by the modern tales of the Wicker Man most recently depicted in a movie of the same name, a remake of an older film; only the location is changed, the story line is exactly the same.

The sacrificial offering of the Wicker Man, celebrated today in the form of a “corn dollie” is ancient.  Julius Caesar, in his Commentaries, first described the Wicker Man ceremony, although a close study of his text doesn't’ claim to have actually witnessed it personally.  In his version, the Wicker Man ritual involves a human sacrifice, thus the modern day story line, but Caesar was known to twist a tale to his
own ends, so he may have just been trying to tell the folks at home that he was battling a particularly blood thirsty lot when facing the Celts.  In fact, oral tradition among the Celts has never included a human sacrifice involved with the Wicker Man, who most historians will tell you was celebrated by the burning of the last sheath of corn, neatly wrapped and disguised in human clothes, carried throughout the village to be revered by the populace, before being ritually offered up to the spirits in hopes of a bountiful harvest the next season.

Truth be told, the Celts were a very fair minded lot, they believed in sexual equality and gave equal time to both a male and female deity. In the old religion, Celts believed that what was really taking place was the eternal struggle between light and darkness, which was later translated by the early Christians as the battle between good and evil, or God and Satan. The Celts however had no real grasp of the good and evil concept; they simply lived from harvest to harvest, dictated by the forces of sunshine and night and the ebb and flow of the seasons.  They were more concerned with carrying on the line and fertility, both human and agrarian and saw the change of season as a physical confrontation of a much higher order. On the day when the scales tip from longer days of sunshine to longer nights of cold, the Celts believed that their God of Light was vulnerable to his twin, the God of Darkness; the one time when darkness can triumph over light.

The Celtic priests were adept at reading the stars, what we today call astrology. To them, Light stands on the scales of Libra, one foot on the cauldron of Cancer and the Summer Solstice, the other on the goat’s head of Capricorn and the Winter Solstice.  On this one night, the God of Darkness is the victor, ritually slaying the God of Light and according to legend, prepares himself to be crowned king of the
world; that ceremony is suppose to take place six weeks later, on Halloween, the now traditional day when the Celts bid farewell to the God of Light, knowing that his offspring and heir was sure to return in the Spring.  Thus is the basis for the tradition of Fall festival.

Of course, much later when the concepts of Christianity and science entered the lives of the Celtic tribes, the acceptance of the old ways began to change, but being agrarian, they were not willing to turn their backs completely on them and continued their traditions each fall in what we know as Harvest Home.  Time has changed the celebration considerably over the centuries, there are not too many giant Wicker Men to be seen in fields anymore, but the old scarecrow is still in abundance, although we might not really remember his significance and while we no longer parade him through the streets at the end of September, we do find traces of the old ways in quaint shops that still sell corn dollies and harvest wreaths for our doors. The rhythm of Fall has changed, we no longer make a big deal of the end of the
growing season, when winter is still some time off in the future and daylight savings time has already adjusted our biological clocks, little thought is given to the slipping of the scales from light to dark.

All that taken as a given however, we return to my original thesis, that if you really want to go seeking an earthbound spirit, you are more likely to succeed on September 25th than on October 31st. If in fact the old ways are true, this is the optimum time of the year to seek out ghosts and others that go bump in
the night, the night when the dark overtakes the light. Harvest Home is the oldest of holidays and if the generations that preceded us were correct, a time when their spirits are closest to our own, a time when the goat headed deity of old comes briefly to power as we mere mortals celebrate the triumph of having enough grain to exist through the long, cold winter to come. Such is the celebration of Harvest Home.