30/10/2025
SAMHAIN - START OF WINTER
Samhain is the start of winter. The hours of daylight continue to dwindle; the powers of growth are winding down, while the powers of darkness and cold gain ascendancy. Plant growth has stopped. The vegetation harvest has long been gathered in, and root crops, nuts, berries and apples have been stored against hungry winter. Animals have been brought down from their summer pastures to more sheltered winter quarters, to be fed on stored hay. We turn to the hearth and the warmth of the crackling fire and the cheer of the singing kettle on the hob.
We enter the season of the Crone, the Hag of Winter. She is no gentle old lady but wild, fierce and primal, just like winter itself. With her holly staff in her hand and a carrion crow perched on her shoulder, she strides across the land, beating down the vegetation, and hardening the earth with ice. But when the earth is bare and the trees skeletal, when everything showy is stripped away, we feel the underlying bones of creation and we see more clearly into its deepest secrets; we approach its elemental power.
The myths of the Crone tell us something fundamental about winter; there is a deep connection between fertility and winter death. While the Maiden begins it, the Mother bears it, and the Harvest Queen reaps it, the fertility of the next year’s harvest is fundamentally the Crone’s gift – the sleeping seeds in the underworld are in her care.
Winter is a powerful time of radical change. We should not mourn the passing of spring and summer, but celebrate life returned to the cauldron of creation where it is held, where the compost of old forms feeds the roots and seeds of the new.
Though the modern world tells us that we should be the same all year round, our bodies tell us that this is not so. Winter affects us on a physical, emotional and spiritual level, and we need to acknowledge that we too are cyclical beings. Mother Earth teaches us that periods of withdrawal from busyness, slowing down, resting and recuperating are necessary.
All growth takes place in darkness from idea in the mind to seed in the ground. We withdraw our energies into our roots and nurture the seeds sleeping in the darkness. We undertake deep inner work and dreaming magic. Samhain is a chance to enter the Crone’s cauldron of transformation, to shed our old forms and use them as fuel for new ones.
Samhain is time to acknowledge the role of death, seasonally and personally. We all return to Mother Earth, and death is the price we pay for life. Our lives are ephemeral, existing they do in a time that passes. Time will destroy all, and all things dissolve in the blackness of the Crone’s cauldron. But the Goddess promises us that the tomb is the womb from which we shall be reborn.
Death is an absolute transition from one state to another with no possibility of return. We experience many small deaths in our lives as various stages and experiences end to make way for new phases and experiences, up until to the ultimate transformation of physical death and rebirth. Death initiates change. We take this time to acknowledge death in all its forms, and to mourn what we need to mourn. We think of all the lives that have touched ours, and the ancestors that have brought us to this place.
© Anna Franklin, The Hearth Witch’s Path, Llewellyn, 2025
