Samhain: The Night of the Open Gate

Samhain is the end of summer, and the Irish named it so: Samain, from sam, summer, and fuin, end, as Cormac's Glossary explains it in the 10th century, and the bronze calendar of Coligny, cast in Gaul in the 2nd century, names the month Samonios and marks within it the trinox Samoni, the 3 nights of Samonios, the oldest written record of the feast. The harvest is in, the last sheaf is bound, the herds are brought down from the summer pasture, and the year turns toward the dark.

The Celts counted the day from sunset and the year from this night, as Caesar noted of the Gauls, who “reckon periods of time not by days but by nights” and claim descent from Dis Pater, the Father Below (Gallic War 6.18). Samhain is therefore an end that is a beginning, the dark from which the year is born, and the Zevist keeps it as the last of the 4 Mystery holidays, the cross-quarter feast that stands opposite Beltane on the wheel.

Astronomically, the Sun stands at 15° Scorpio, the heart of the fixed water sign, the sign of death, of what is hidden in the water, and of what lives after death; its second image, the ancients said, is the eagle. Beltane stood at 15° Taurus, the fixed earth, the door of the living; Samhain stands at the opposite degree, the door of the dead. At both the veil between the worlds is thin, and the direction differs: at Beltane the Gods come close to life, at Samhain the dead come close to the living.

The Temple keeps the festival by the calendar night, 31 October, as the Celts kept the eve of 1 November, for everyone on the planet at once, because the Sun's place in the zodiac is universal, whatever the weather outside the door.

The inner meaning of Samhain is communion with the dead and the confrontation with mortality. This is the most powerful night of the year for honouring the ancestors, for communication with the departed, for divination, and for every working that touches the boundary between the worlds. The veil is thin, the dead are near, and the Zevist doesn't fear this: he approaches it with reverence, with knowledge, and with the understanding that death is a passage and not an end.

The Temple's Necromantic Rites give the method; the festival gives the night. And Samhain is also a night of creativity, of costumes, of the imagery of death and transformation, of the carved light in the window and the games with the apple and the nut, and it's kept with both solemnity and joy, because the dead were once the living and like a feast.

The Festival of Hidden Appearances

Samhain is, above all the other 7, the festival of hidden appearances. Everything on this night hides its face. The dead have no appearance and come without one; the living put on masks to meet them halfway; the Sun hides in the water sign; the year hides its beginning in its end; the God hides in the mask of the priest, and the priest who wore the jackal's head in Egypt was Anubis for the length of the rite.

The Greek word for mask is prosopon, which is also the word for face, and the Latin is persona, which became the word for a person: the ancients understood that the appearance is already a mask, and that to hide it's to show something truer. The Mystery of Samhain is this, and the page returns to it below.

The Night and the Slander

The Temple says plainly what Father Zeus has let his clergy know. Zeus isn't a Halloween monster. Zeus isn't a vampire, a spook or a ghoul. Zeus doesn't have red horns and a tail. Zeus isn't about graveyards, grim reapers, skeletons or horror. The Church manufactured the red devil with the pitchfork to blaspheme, denigrate and ridicule the God of Gods and the Gods beside him, and pinned it onto his night, because it couldn't erase the night and so defaced it.

Samhain is a great night for costumes, monsters and ghouls, for images of death, for creativity and indulgence; it's one of the major holidays of the Zevist calendar; and the negative images that denigrate the Father have to go. The Zevist who loves the masks and the horror films keeps them, and takes off the one mask that was made to insult his God. Costumes, yes; mockery of the Gods, no. The distinction is the whole of the matter, and it isn't hard.

Samhain hides every face: the dead have none, the living put one on, the year hides its beginning in its end, and the God is in the mask.

Persephone, the Queen Below

At the Autumn Equinox the Temple honoured the Maiden going down; at Samhain it honours the Queen enthroned. Persephone (Περσεφόνη) has 2 names and 2 thrones, and on this night she's addressed by the name of the throne below: “dread Persephone,” as Homer calls her, beside whom the dead are judged and from whom Odysseus feared the Gorgon's head would be sent up (Odyssey 10.491, 11.634).

The Thesmophoria, the women's festival of the Two Goddesses, fell in this same month at Athens, on the 11th to the 13th of Pyanepsion, and at its centre the women brought up what they had thrown into the chasms at the summer's end, the piglets rotted in the earth, and laid them on the altars and mixed them with the seed corn (scholion on Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 2.1).

The Temple's Ritual addresses her as Ereshkigal, Persephone, Libera, Queen of the Great Below, She Who Returns, Queen of Two Thrones, Keeper of the Sacred Cycle, Mother of Zagreus, Melinoe and Makaria; and its Sumerian lines call her by the oldest name of all, the Great Lady of the Great Place, before whom Inanna hung on the hook (Inanna's Descent 164 to 172). The soul of the initiate, says the gold leaf of Thurii, comes before her pure and is answered: hail, hail, hail, go to the right (OF 488 to 490 Bernabé).

She's the first of the 3 Gods of the night, and the first hour of the thin veil is hers.

Pluton, the King Beneath

Hades (Ἅιδης), the Unseen, is the brother of Zeus and of Poseidon, son of Kronos and Rhea, who drew the third lot when the 3 sons of Kronos divided the world: the broad sky to Zeus, the grey sea to Poseidon, the murky dark to him, and the earth and high Olympos in common (Iliad 15.187 to 193; Hesiod, Theogony 455 to 458).

Plato in the Cratylus gives his name 2 roots and keeps both: the Unseen, from not seeing, and the Knowing, from eidenai, since the dead know everything and the Lord of the dead knows most, and it's he, Socrates says, who holds the souls below not by chains but by the desire of the knowledge he gives (403a to 404b).

His other name, Plouton (Πλούτων), the Wealthy, the Greeks explained plainly: all wealth comes from under the ground, the metals, the gems and the seed, and the Romans translated it as Dis Pater, the Rich Father, whose altar lay 20 feet under the Campus Martius and was dug up once a century for the Secular Games (Cicero, De natura deorum 2.66; Zosimus 2.1 to 7).

His epithets are Polydegmon, Receiver of Many; Klymenos, the Renowned; Eubouleus, of Good Counsel; Chthonios, of the Earth; and Hesiod tells the farmer to pray to Zeus Chthonios and Demeter when he puts his hand to the plough (Works and Days 465 to 468). The Temple's Hades Power Ritual invokes him across 5 civilisations, in 5 ancient tongues: Hades Plouton Aidoneus, Osiris Khenty-Imentiu, Yama Dharmaraja, Nergal Meslamtaea, Dis Pater; the Unseen King, the Eternal One, the First Path-Finder, the Lord of the Great Below, the Wealthy Father.

The second hour of the night is his, and in it the Zevist opens the gate.

Anubis, Opener of the Ways

Anubis (Egyptian Inpu, Greek Ἄνουβις) is the jackal-headed God of embalming, of the dead, and of the passage between the worlds. The Pyramid Texts call him He Who Is Upon His Mountain, watching the necropolis from the desert edge; Lord of the Sacred Land; Foremost of the Divine Booth; He Who Is in the Place of Embalming (Utterances 213 to 222).

He was the first to care for a dead body and make it live: when Set killed Osiris and cut him in 14 pieces and Isis had gathered them, it was Anubis who wrapped and bound and spoke over the body, and the first mummy was made by a God (Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 14 to 18). In the Hall of the 2 Truths he steadies the balance on which the heart is weighed against the feather of Ma'at, while Thoth writes and the Devourer waits (Book of the Dead 125).

The Greeks of Egypt saw Hermes in him and called him Hermanubis, the Guide of Souls with the jackal's head, and his priests walked in the Isiac processions wearing his face (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.11). The grimoires, which preserved the Gods by mangling them, list him as Ipos, the 22nd spirit, a count with the head of a lion or, in the older manuscripts, of a jackal, who knows things past and future; the Temple's Ritual restores the true name under the false one.

He's the third God of the night, and the third hour, the hour of the weighing, is his.

3 Gods, 3 hours, 3 gates: the Queen who receives, the King who holds, the Opener who weighs and leads. The Zevist on Samhain passes through all 3, in order, and comes back by the same road at dawn.

The Queen receives, the King holds, the Opener weighs and leads: 3 Gods, 3 hours, 1 night, and the Zevist comes back by the same road at dawn.

Every ancient people kept a feast of the dead, and most kept it in the dark half of the year. The Samhain of the Celts is the one whose name the night still carries; the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Norse, the Indians and the Mexicans kept their own, and the Temple sets them side by side, because the rite of the Zevist is built from all of them and the restoration begins, as every restoration does, with the outer form that the sources preserve.

The Celtic Samhain

The Irish sagas, written down by monks from the 8th century onward out of older tradition, place the great events of the year at Samhain. The Ulstermen held their assembly at Samhain for 3 days before and 3 days after, with games and fairs and feasting (Serglige Con Culainn 1 to 2). The Dagda met the Morrígan at the river Unius at Samhain before the second battle of Mag Tuired, and the land was the better for it (Cath Maige Tuired 84).

Nera went out from Cruachan on Samhain night, when the hills of the sídhe stood open and the dead sat up, and came back changed (Echtra Nerai). The kings held the feast of Tara, the Feis Temro, which wedded the high king to the land, at Samhain.

Keating, writing in the 17th century from older sources, says that at Samhain the druids of Ireland assembled on the hill of Tlachtga, in Meath, to kindle the fire of the year, that every fire in Ireland was put out, and that each house relit its hearth from the fire of Tlachtga on pain of a fine (Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, c. 1634, Dinneen's edition, vol. 2, 246 to 249). Excavation of the Hill of Ward, which is Tlachtga, has found the traces of great fires.

The eve of 1 November was the eve of the Celtic new year; the Church placed All Saints on 1 November in 835 under Gregory IV, and Odilo of Cluny added All Souls on 2 November in 998, and the night before them was called All Hallows' Eve, and then Hallowe'en, and the name was changed and the night wasn't.

What the people did survived in the folk record of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Man into the 20th century, and the folklorists collected it: every fire in the house put out and relit; the table set for the dead with the door unbarred and the fire kept in; the dumb supper, eaten in silence with a chair left empty; the bonfires on the hills; the guising, young people going from house to house in masks and borrowed clothes, with the lantern carved from a turnip; the soul-cakes given at the door; the apple on the string, the apple in the water, the apple peeled in 1 strip and thrown over the shoulder to spell the name.

The folklorists also found the 2 nuts set on the fire to see whether they burned together or leapt apart; the kale stalk pulled blind; the mirror looked into at midnight (Danaher, The Year in Ireland, 1972, 200 to 227; Hutton, The Stations of the Sun, 1996, 360 to 385). Robert Burns set the whole of the Scottish night into verse in Halloween (1785), with notes on each divination, and it's a source.

There was never a Celtic God of the dead named Samhain; the sources that name one are Christian, and the scholars who went looking for him agree that he isn't there.

The Greek Feasts of the Dead

The Greeks kept no single Samhain, and kept its parts on several days. The Thesmophoria, in the same month, stands described above. The Genesia, on the 5th of Boedromion, was the public day of the dead at Athens, on which each house went to its tombs with offerings, and Herodotus names it as a festival all the Greeks kept (4.26; Philochorus, FGrH 328 F 168).

At the Chytroi, the last day of the Anthesteria, the householders cooked the pot of all seeds for Hermes Chthonios on behalf of the dead, tarred the doors against the wandering spirits, and when the day ended cried the oldest closing formula in the world: out, Keres, the Anthesteria are over (Photius and Suda s.v. θύραζε Κᾶρες; scholia on Aristophanes, Acharnians 1076, Frogs 218). The Athenians left Hekate's suppers at the crossroads at the dark of the moon, and the poor ate them (Aristophanes, Plutus 594 to 597; Demosthenes 54.39).

And the first necromantic rite of Europe is written in Homer: Odysseus at the edge of Ocean digs a pit a cubit each way, pours milk and honey, sweet wine, and water, sprinkles white barley, promises the offerings, and the dead come up out of Erebus, brides and young men and old men and girls and warriors with their wounds, and he holds them off with the sword until Teiresias has spoken (Odyssey 11.23 to 50). The Temple's Necromantic Rites keep that shape: the offering, the calling, the holding off, the speaking, the sending back.

The Egyptian Rites of the Dead and of Osiris

In Egypt the living fed the dead, and the festivals were the great feeding days. The Wag feast, on the 18th of Thoth, the first month of the year, sent every family to the tombs with bread, beer and lamps, and the families spoke the names of the dead over the offerings, since the name spoken was the dead one fed (the calendar of Medinet Habu; Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, 2005, 309 to 329).

At Thebes the Beautiful Feast of the Valley brought Amun across the river to the necropolis and the families dined at the tomb chapels through the night.

And in the month of Khoiak, which falls in November, every nome kept the Mysteries of Osiris: the priests moulded the Osiris of earth and grain in a form and watered it until it sprouted, gathered, bound and raised the dismembered God, sent the great procession of Wepwawet, the Opener of the Ways, out before the barque of the God at Abydos, and on the last day of the month raised the djed pillar upright, and the God stood (the stela of Ikhernofret, Berlin 1204; the Osiris chapels of Dendera, Chassinat, Le mystère d'Osiris au mois de Khoiak, 1966 to 1968).

The priest who conducted the embalming wore the mask of Anubis, and a mask survives, of painted pottery, from Harageh, with eyeholes under the jaw, and the reliefs of Dendera show the masked priest at work (Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, inv. 1585). The Egyptians didn't fear the jackal's face: they put it on.

The Roman Days of the Open Mundus

Rome opened the gate of the dead 3 times a year by the book. The mundus, a vaulted pit on the Palatine held to be the mouth of the underworld, was opened on the 24th of August, the 5th of October and the 8th of November, and on those days, Varro said, “the gate of the gloomy Gods below stands open,” and no battle was joined, no levy held, no ship launched, no marriage made (Festus s.v. mundus; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.16 to 18).

The 8th of November is 8 days from Samhain, and is the Roman Samhain. The Parentalia, from the 13th to the 21st of February, sent the families to the tombs with a tile, a garland, a sprinkling of grain, a few grains of salt, bread soaked in wine and loose violets, and the city closed the temples and no one married (Ovid, Fasti 2.533 to 570).

The Lemuria, on the 9th, 11th and 13th of May, was the private rite of the householder at midnight: barefoot, with the thumb between the fingers, he threw black beans over his shoulder 9 times, with these I redeem me and mine, and clashed bronze, and said 9 times ghosts of my fathers, go out, and didn't look back (Fasti 5.419 to 492). The Temple's Closing of the Gate keeps the Greek formula and the Roman manner.

The Other Nations

Every people kept a night when the gate stood open, and the Roman book says what the night was for: no battle, no levy, no ship, no marriage; the dead are visiting.

The outer festival is the feast of the dead. The inner festival is the Mystery of the mask.

The ancients put the mask at the centre of their most secret rites, and the evidence is in stone and clay.

At Lykosoura in Arcadia, where the Mysteries of Despoina were a second Eleusis, the marble veil of the Goddess carved by Damophon shows a frieze of dancers with the heads of animals, a horse, a pig, an ass, a ram, a cat, women in the masks of beasts dancing the dance of the hall, and Pausanias, who saw the sanctuary, says of what was done inside it that he's afraid to write the Goddess's true name for the uninitiated (8.37.6 to 9; the veil is in the National Museum at Athens).

On the vases of the Lenaia the mask of Dionysos hangs on a pillar hung with ivy, and the women ladle the wine before it, and the God is present in the mask and not behind it (Frickenhaus, Lenäenvasen, 1912; Otto, Dionysus, 1933, 86 to 91). In Egypt the priest who was Anubis for the rite wore the pottery jackal's head, and the Dendera reliefs show him at work with it on.

And at the Navigium Isidis, the spring procession of Isis, the first thing to pass was the anteludia, the masqueraders: a man dressed as a soldier, another as a hunter, a man as a woman, a gladiator, a magistrate with rods, a philosopher, a fowler, a fisherman, a tame bear dressed as a matron carried in a chair, an ape in a straw hat as Ganymede, and an ass with wings as Pegasus (Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.8). That is the oldest costume parade in literature, and it opened a procession of the Mysteries.

The teaching under all of it's one teaching. The appearance is hidden so that the essence may appear. The dancer in the horse's head isn't pretending; she has put off the face that pretends. The priest in the jackal's head isn't playing Anubis; for the length of the rite there's no one else in the room. The dead come without an appearance, because the appearance was the first thing they left, and the living who meet them on this night put theirs aside too, so that the meeting is between what is and what is.

Scorpio is the sign of the night, the water that hides what lives in it, and the sign has 2 images, the scorpion that hides and the eagle that sees; the one who hides his face rightly on Samhain comes out of the night with the eagle's eye.

Plutarch says that to die and to be initiated are the same word and the same experience, and Apuleius, who was initiated into Isis, said what he could: “I approached the boundary of death and trod the threshold of Proserpina, and after being carried through all the elements I came back; in the middle of the night I saw the Sun flashing with white light; I came face to face with the Gods below and the Gods above” (Metamorphoses 11.23).

The initiate of Samhain goes through the gate with his face hidden and comes back with it shown, and the Psalm's second movement says the rest in the words the sources allow.

The Zevist reads the night inward. The weighing of the heart is the weighing of the year of life that Beltane opened: the Scales were the equinox's sign, and the balance here is Anubis's, and the feather weighs nothing. The open gate is the proof, repeated once a year on the body, that death is a passage; the one who has sat at the dumb supper and heard the chair creak doesn't need to be told.

And the mask, put on after the gate is closed, is the sign that the one who has met the dead goes back among the living hiding what he saw, as the mystai did, and showing it only by how he walks.

The names in this table are the same essence under the tongues of different peoples. A Zevist of any nation may address the 3 Gods of the night under the name that the ancestors of that nation used, provided the essence of the God is understood as one. The Temple sets the Greek name first because the Greek sources preserve the fullest theology; it doesn't set it as the only name.

The ancients themselves did the same: Herodotus wrote Greek names for Egyptian Gods without hesitation, and the Romans wrote Jupiter over every altar of Zeus they found (Herodotus 2.42 to 2.50; Caesar, Gallic War 6.17; Tacitus, Germania 9, 43).

Samhain alone is the Rite in its original form, because the dumb supper was always eaten by 1 person and an empty chair, and the householder at the Lemuria walked his own house barefoot at midnight with no one watching. Begin in the afternoon with the 2 writings. The first is the sheet of names: the dead of the family, as far back as they're known, and the dead of the Temple, and any dead the Zevist owes a visit; 1 name to a line, written slowly, because each name written is a knock on the gate.

The second is the paper of the year: an account, in plain words, of the year of life since Beltane, what was done, what was left undone, what was done wrong, what was done well, in the first person and without excuse, a page at most. It's read to the feather in the third hour and burned, and its ash goes out with the dead at dawn; no one reads it but the jackal.

At sunset put out every light in the house and stand in the dark for a moment before striking the 1 flame. The dark is part of the rite; the Irish did it with the whole island. Light the fire, the altar and the lantern from the flame, and set the lantern in the window with its face outward. Then the Rite, in the order above.

The 3 Rituals of the Gods together take about 90 minutes in full; the Zevist alone may halve the Hades Ritual and take the 2 last segments of the Persephone Ritual, and the Anubis Ritual should be done whole, since it's the shortest and the night is his at the end. The Psalm takes about 40 minutes in 6 parts.

The opening of the gate and the dumb supper take as long as a meal taken slowly in silence, which is longer than a meal taken with talk; eat the whole plate, drink the cup, and don't hurry the chair. If the chair creaks, the Zevist has read the Necromantic Rites and knows what to do, which is nothing. The weighing takes a quarter of an hour, and should take no less.

After the Closing, put the mask on and go out. Samhain alone doesn't mean Samhain indoors: the night belongs to the living too, and the one who has sat with the dead for 3 hours is the one who most needs the street, the fire on the hill, the apple on the string, the company of people in borrowed faces. Come back before dawn.

At dawn, in white, with the mask off, face the door and speak the old cry, put the lantern out, and carry the plate and the ash out of the house to a tree or a crossroads without looking back. Then sleep. The 1st of November is a quiet day, the first day of the year of the dark, and the fire of Tlachtga, or its unburned candle, is kept until the Winter Solstice, when the new Sun is lit from it.

The gathering for Samhain keeps the ancient division more sharply than any other festival, because the dead are the guests and the guests must be received by the house and not by the crowd. The outer feast, the fires, the masks, the games, the procession of the lanterns, the supper and the apples, is for everyone: members, candidates, families, children and the guests of the gathering.

The opening of the gate is for the gathering's members, in the hall, under the Keeper of the Gate; and the inner rite of the ranks is held apart, at its own hour, and no one is told when. A gathering that can keep the night on a hill, with a fire, does; the Irish did, and so did the Druids at Tlachtga.

The Offices of the Night

The Order of the Gathering

1. The Banking of the Fire, at sunset: every light in the hall and on the hill put out; the Hierophant strikes the 1 flame in the dark with the Fire Formula; the Torch-Bearer lights the fire of the hill from it, and every household lights its own lantern from the fire of the hill, the Child of the Lantern first.
2. The Procession of the Lanterns, from the fire to the hall, the Child of the Lantern leading, the Chorus singing the first passage of the Psalm, the lanterns set in the windows of the hall.
3. The Rite, in the order above, the Hierophant presiding, the Chorus carrying the Psalm, the Herald calling the hours.
4. The Opening of the Gate, in the second hour: the Keeper of the Gate pours and sprinkles over the bowl of earth; the Reader of the Names reads the book of the dead of the gathering; each household adds its names aloud; the uninvited are forbidden.
5. The Dumb Supper, the Keeper of the Table filling the plates of the dead first, 1 for each house, the Herald calling the silence; the whole gathering eats in silence with the empty chairs among them; the Herald ends the silence with the first line of Movement IV.
6. The Weighing, in the third hour: each celebrant comes forward to the Weigher, reads his paper of the year to the feather in silence or in a low voice, the Hierophant speaking the Weighing Formula once for all, and gives it to the fire; the ash is gathered in 1 bowl.
7. The Closing, and the bell.
8. The Masks and the Night. The masks go on, the Mask Formula spoken once by the Hierophant for all; the dance of the Chorus; the fire on the hill; the games of the Keeper of the Apples; the feast: apples, nuts, pork, bread and salt, the pomegranate, the first wine of the vintage and the last beer of the summer; the children's soul-cakes at the door. The inner rite of the ranks is held apart at its own hour.
9. The Closing of the Gate, at dawn, outdoors, in white, the Keeper of the Gate facing the door of the hall with the old cry; the Keeper of the Table and the Weigher carrying the plates and the ash out to the tree or the crossroads, no one looking back; the lanterns put out. The Torch-Bearer takes the fire of Tlachtga into keeping until the Winter Solstice.

A gathering that keeps a book of the dead, and reads it every Samhain, has done the thing the Egyptians did at the tombs, and it's the beginning of the hall the Temple intends.

The dead are the guests, and the guests are received by the house and not by the crowd: the gathering opens the gate together and keeps the inner rite apart.

The Psalm is sung in 3 pairs of movements, 1 pair in each hour of the night: Movements I and II to Persephone after her Ritual, with the mask lifted at passage 15; Movement III to Pluton after his Ritual and Movement IV after the dumb supper, as the first speech after the silence; Movements V and VI to Anubis, around the weighing. Each passage stands in 3 columns, Ancient Greek, transliteration and English. 72 passages: 24 to the Queen, 24 to the King, 24 to the Opener, as the hours of a day.

The full Psalm stands on its own page: Psalm VIII: The Psalm of Samhain. The first 24 of its 72 passages are shown here; the drawdown below unfolds the remaining 48.

1. Homer, Odyssey 10.491 to 540, 11.23 to 50, 11.634, 24.1 to 14; Iliad 15.187 to 193; Hesiod, Theogony 455 to 458, 767 to 774, Works and Days 465 to 468; Orphic Hymns 1, 18, 29, 57, 71, 87; Plato, Cratylus 403a to 404b; the Bacchic gold leaves, OF 476, 488 to 490 Bernabé; Inanna's Descent 164 to 172 (ETCSL 1.4.1).
2. Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae, Plutus 594 to 597, Acharnians 1076 and scholia, Frogs 218 and scholia; scholion on Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesans 2.1 (Rabe, p. 275 to 276); Herodotus 2.171, 4.26; Philochorus FGrH 328 F 168; Photius and Suda s.v. θύραζε Κᾶρες; Demosthenes 54.39; Theophrastus, Characters 16; Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 12 to 19, 61, fr. 178 Sandbach.
3. Pausanias 8.37.1 to 10 (Lykosoura; the veil of Despoina, National Archaeological Museum, Athens, no. 1737); Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.8, 11.11, 11.23; Cicero, De natura deorum 2.66; Varro, De lingua Latina 5.66; Festus s.v. mundus (p. 144 to 145 Lindsay); Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.16 to 18; Ovid, Fasti 2.533 to 570, 5.419 to 492; Zosimus, Historia nova 2.1 to 7; Caesar, Gallic War 6.18.
4. The Pyramid Texts, Utterances 213 to 222; the Book of the Dead, spell 125 (Faulkner, 1985); the stela of Ikhernofret (Berlin 1204), lines 17 to 23; the Osiris chapels of Dendera (Chassinat, Le mystère d'Osiris au mois de Khoiak, 1966 to 1968); the calendar of Medinet Habu; the Anubis mask of Harageh (Pelizaeus-Museum, Hildesheim, inv. 1585); Papyrus Jumilhac; Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (2005) 309 to 329.
5. The Coligny calendar, month SAMON (Duval and Pinault, Recueil des inscriptions gauloises 3, 1986); Sanas Cormaic s.v. Samain; Serglige Con Culainn 1 to 2; Tochmarc Emire; Cath Maige Tuired 84; Echtra Nerai; Keating, Foras Feasa ar Éirinn (Dinneen, vol. 2, 246 to 249); the Dindsenchas of Tlachtga; Ado of Vienne, Martyrologium, on 1 November; Jotsald, Vita Odilonis 2.13; Robert Burns, Halloween (1785) with the poet's notes.
6. Rig Veda 10.14 to 10.18; Garuda Purana 2.10; Sigvatr Þórðarson, Austrfararvísur 5 to 8; Ynglinga saga 8; Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España 2.28 to 29; the Tomba dell'Orco, Tarquinia.
7. K. Danaher, The Year in Ireland (1972) 200 to 227; R. Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (1996) 360 to 385; J. Rhys, Celtic Folklore (1901) 1.315 to 326; W. F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (1933) 86 to 91; A. Frickenhaus, Lenäenvasen (1912); M. Jost, Sanctuaires et cultes d'Arcadie (1985) 172 to 178; W. Burkert, Greek Religion (1985) 194 to 199, 242 to 246; H. W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (1977) 53 to 54, 82 to 88; S. I. Johnston, Restless Dead (1999); D. Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (2001) 163 to 190.
8. The Temple's own pages on Samhain, the Zevist Calendar, the Necromantic Rites (the Open Gate; Honouring the Ancestors), the Zevistic Funeral, the Afterlife and the Four Domains, Beltane (the year of life) and Lammas (the weighing), and the Ereshkigal / Persephone / Libera, Hades, Anubis and Hekate Power Rituals on the ritual site of the Temple.