The Night the Year Turns
A Hampstead discovery. An ancient Irish festival. And the human need for ritual.
London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, a story that began yesterday evening at my kitchen table.
As so many good London stories do.
Well, mine anyway.
Every Saturday evening I send out an email to the people who are coming on my Sunday morning Hampstead Walk. It’s what I call an advancer. A detailed briefing about the walk, the neighbourhood, the weather, the meeting point, and, above all, what’s going on in Hampstead that particular Sunday.
And yesterday’s was a corker.
The antiques fair. Exhibitions at Burgh House. Freud’s house. Keats’s house. Kenwood. Choral Evensong at St John’s. Music. Art. History. Cafés. Gardens.
Hampstead doing what Hampstead does best. Offering up an embarrassment of riches.
And then, almost as an afterthought, I came upon this little entry in the local events calendar.
“Sunday, November 1st. Rosslyn Hill Chapel. SOW-in Samhain Pagan Ceremony. Join us to turn the Wheel of the Year with ritual, poetry and meditation.”
Well, hello.
SOW-in Samhain?
The Wheel of the Year?
A pagan ceremony in a Hampstead chapel?
I confess I knew next to nothing about it.
But something about those words caught my attention.
I included the event in my advancer, made a mental note to look into it, and carried on with the evening.
Except that I couldn’t quite leave it alone.
And here we are.
Another London door opening onto an unexpected world.
First things first.
Samhain. If you pronounce it the way it’s spelled. But you don’t. It’s pronounced roughly SOW-in. SOW rhymes with cow. The H is silent.
It’s an Irish word. An ancient one. And it marks the beginning of winter.
In the old Irish calendar there were two great halves of the year. The light half, beginning around the start of May. And the dark half, beginning around the start of November.
Summer and winter.
Light and darkness.
Growth and dormancy.
SOW-in Samhain marked the transition between them.
Now imagine living in a world without electric lighting. Without central heating. Without supermarkets stuffed with strawberries in February.
A world in which the seasons weren’t simply something you remarked upon.
They governed your existence.
Winter wasn’t an inconvenience. It was a threat.
Would there be enough food? Enough fuel? Would the animals survive? Would you?
By the time SOW-in Samhain arrived, the harvest was gathered in. The livestock had to be provided for. The long nights were closing around the community.
The world was changing.
And people marked that change.
They held gatherings. Feasted. Told stories.
In the old Irish tales, SOW-in Samhain was a time when extraordinary things could happen. The supernatural world seemed unusually close. Otherworldly beings might appear. The familiar landscape became, for a night, something strange and mysterious.
Imagine that.
The world you knew by daylight behaving differently after dark.
And what happened to the dead?
Well, over time SOW-in Samhain became closely associated with the belief that the boundary between the living and the dead was less secure at this season.
A night of encounters. Of spirits. Of the supernatural.
Not entirely comforting encounters, either.
The old Irish supernatural world wasn’t populated exclusively by kindly ancestors dropping in for a cup of tea.
Far from it.
There were dangerous beings abroad. Mischievous spirits. Creatures that might do you considerable harm.
In Irish folklore there’s the púca, a shape-shifting spirit that might appear as a horse, a goat, a dog.
And here’s a delightful little detail.
In parts of Ireland people were warned not to eat blackberries after Halloween.
Why?
Because the púca had been at them.
And what had this supernatural fellow done to the blackberries?
Well, let’s just say they weren’t fit for human consumption.
There are some things even a London Walks guide won’t elaborate on.
But now we come to something rather interesting.
Halloween.
The name itself is Christian.
It comes from All Hallows’ Eve. The evening before All Hallows’ Day, better known as All Saints’ Day, November 1st.
And November 2nd is All Souls’ Day, when Christians traditionally remember and pray for the departed.
So there we have it.
Three days. October 31st, November 1st, November 2nd.
A remarkable concentration of traditions concerned with death, remembrance, the supernatural and the passage of time.
Over the centuries, older seasonal customs and Christian observances have become entangled.
But we need to tread carefully here.
There’s a very familiar story that Halloween is simply an ancient pagan festival which the Christian Church appropriated.
It’s wonderfully neat.
Possibly too neat.
The distinguished historian Ronald Hutton, who has spent much of his scholarly life investigating Britain’s ritual traditions, points out that the evidence is more complicated than that.
For example, the assertion that SOW-in Samhain was universally celebrated as the Celtic New Year is much less securely established than popular accounts suggest.
So is the claim that it was originally one great annual festival of the dead.
Some of those ideas owe a good deal to nineteenth-century scholars, particularly Sir John Rhys and Sir James Frazer.
In other words, some of what we think of as ancient tradition has been shaped by comparatively modern interpretations of the past.
And that brings us rather neatly back to Hampstead.
Because tomorrow evening’s ceremony at Rosslyn Hill Chapel is part of something called the Wheel of the Year.
Eight seasonal festivals marking the annual cycle.
The solstices. The equinoxes. And four festivals falling between them, including SOW-in Samhain.
Now here’s the surprise.
The eight-festival Wheel of the Year, as a complete system, isn’t thousands of years old.
It took shape in the twentieth century, associated particularly with the development of modern pagan traditions, including Wicca and modern Druidry.
Ancient ingredients.
A modern arrangement.
And isn’t that fascinating?
We often imagine tradition as something handed down unchanged, generation after generation, century after century.
But human beings are forever rearranging their inheritance.
Taking old ideas. Giving them new meanings. Adapting them to new circumstances.
Sometimes inventing traditions to satisfy needs that are anything but new.
Which brings us to Rosslyn Hill Chapel.
And what a setting for this particular story.
There’s been a dissenting religious congregation on that Hampstead site since 1692.
Think about that date.
William III was on the throne. The Glorious Revolution was still recent history. Religious liberty was a fiercely contested question.
The people who gathered there were Protestant Dissenters.
Nonconformists.
People who stood outside the established Church of England.
The present Gothic chapel was built in 1862 and subsequently enlarged.
It has beautiful stained glass, including work by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
And this evening, beneath that Victorian roof, in a building belonging to a Unitarian congregation, people will gather for a pagan ceremony.
Poetry. Meditation. Ritual.
And remembrance of those who have gone before us.
I find that extraordinarily moving.
Not because I subscribe to pagan beliefs.
But because it says something about the extraordinary variety of ways human beings try to make sense of existence.
And about the capacity of a London building to acquire new meanings without losing its old ones.
Now let me bring this a little closer to home.
Every Sunday morning before I guide my Hampstead Walk, I arrive early.
And I have a ritual of my own.
I go to St John’s, the parish church, at the far end of Church Row.
If the choir is rehearsing, I sit in the very last pew, just inside the door.
And listen.
Those beautiful voices soaring through that beautiful church.
Sometimes, if the weather’s good, I sit outside in the churchyard instead.
The music drifts out through the building.
The birds are singing. The squirrels are busy. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of the churchyard fox.
And for half an hour or so, I simply take it all in.
In yesterday’s advancer I told my walkers that this was how I got myself aligned before the walk.
Those were the words I used.
“Get everything aligned.”
Well, now.
Isn’t that interesting?
This evening, not very far away, other people will gather in another Hampstead chapel.
And they too will use a ceremony to get themselves aligned.
Aligned with the changing seasons. With the passing of time. With their memories of people they’ve loved and lost.
Different traditions.
Different beliefs.
But perhaps something very similar going on beneath the surface.
And that, I think, is the real story here.
Because we live in a city which, in so many ways, has insulated itself against the natural world.
We switch on the lights and banish the darkness.
Turn up the heating and banish the cold.
Buy strawberries in January.
The seasons no longer dictate our daily lives as they did to our ancestors.
But they haven’t disappeared.
The light still fades.
The leaves still fall.
Winter still comes.
And people still die.
For all our technology, for all our sophistication, we remain creatures living in time.
And time takes things away from us.
It takes summer.
It takes youth.
It takes people we love.
Perhaps that’s why rituals endure.
They give us a way of acknowledging things we cannot control.
A way of stopping the clock, just for a moment, and saying: this matters.
This season matters.
This memory matters.
This life mattered.
And there’s something else.
We tend to think of rituals as religious observances.
But they needn’t be.
Think of the minute’s silence on Remembrance Sunday.
Think of laying flowers at a memorial.
Think of lighting a candle.
Think of returning every year to a particular place on a particular date.
Or, come to that, of sitting in the same back pew of a Hampstead church every Sunday morning to listen to the choir.
We all have rituals.
Some elaborate. Some entirely private.
Some ancient. Some invented yesterday.
And perhaps the need for them is as old as humanity itself.
Which makes this evening’s ceremony at Rosslyn Hill Chapel not some curious survival from a vanished world, but something thoroughly contemporary.
Londoners in the twenty-first century doing what people have always done.
Finding a way to acknowledge the turning of the year.
And the turning of their lives.
And now, our Word of the Day.
I think it has to be SOW-in Samhain itself.
We’ve already met its meaning: the seasonal turning point that marks the beginning of winter.
But its history has an extra little gift for us.
The traditional explanation divides the word into elements meaning “summer” and “end”.
Summer’s end.
There’s also an interpretation in an old Irish text connecting it with the idea of summer going to sleep.
Summer going to sleep.
Isn’t that lovely?
Not summer being murdered. Not summer disappearing for ever.
Summer sleeping.
The world resting.
Waiting for its return.
The precise etymology is debated, but I love that ancient image.
And I love where this story has taken us.
Yesterday evening I was sitting at my kitchen table, compiling an email about things to do in Hampstead.
A practical exercise.
A list of recommendations.
And one small entry caught my eye.
A pagan ceremony.
A word I didn’t know.
A question I hadn’t thought to ask.
And suddenly, there was an entirely new London story waiting to be discovered.
Which is what I love about this city.
You don’t necessarily go looking for its stories.
Sometimes they come looking for you.
And if you’re curious enough to open the door, there’s no knowing where they’ll take you.
Tonight, at seven o’clock, in a Victorian chapel in Hampstead, people will gather to mark the passing of summer, the coming of winter, and the memory of those who have gone before them.
The seasons will turn whether anyone notices them or not.
Perhaps the ceremony is simply a way of making sure we notice.
And perhaps that’s what rituals are for.
To remind us to pay attention.
Because time is passing.
And life is happening.
And there are things worth remembering.
This is London.
And this is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
See you tomorrow.