Samhain Challenge Day 2: Of Masks and Monsters

Today's post covers the Pagan origins of dressing up on Samhain — and asks you to shed the skin of your identity and let your more-monstrous, more-than-human self speak.

Welcome to Day 2 of the Samhain Creativity + Ritual Challenge! I am so happy to have you along for the ride. If you create anything inspired by these posts, please tag me or leave a comment — I’d love to see it.

I am also sending you love and warmth today. I’ve been walking with some monsters lately, and yet writing, as always, remains my best and most steadfast way of speaking with them and making peace with their presence.

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Hello all, and happy Samhain! Today the veils between the worlds tremble and thin. Today we stand on the border between summer and winter, and between this world and the next.

In many Celtic traditions, and particularly on Ireland, the dead, the fey, and other spirits would come to walk among the living on this night. All of these entities required their own tributes. Ancestors would be offered places at families’ tables, while fey and the like would be appeased with food and drink and other tributes.

These rituals create space both for the dead and the spirits of the earth, acknowledging their presence instead of ignoring it. They mark these entities as interwoven into our lives in a tactile and visible way, honoring the dynamic forces they represent instead of seeing them as somehow less real or less important than living humans.

Whether or not you believe in actual spirits, you cannot deny that the dead and the gone live among us as powerful memories, arguably just as real and present as any flesh-being.

And whether or not you believe in dancing fey rising out of fibrous portals in emerald forests, it’s hard to deny that we are truly at the whims of the earth’s transformations, its rains and its fires and its plagues and its yearly ritual of decaying and death. No matter how you see it, these forces — of the dead, and of the numinous — exist.

On Samhain, perhaps they’re just a little bit easier to see.

Dressing Up the Ghost

In Druidic traditions, Samhain was a time of prophecy. As the veil between our world and the Otherworlds thinned, the spiral of linear time also began to gently unwind.

Often huge communal bonfires would be built on this night, and during these celebrations, Celts would wear costumes that often included animal heads and skins. In the glow of the flames, they would divine each others’ futures.

In some places, people would also wear disguises in order to confuse or scare wandering spirits. They also often dressed up as the souls of the dead and traveled from house to house sharing spice-filled “soul cakes,” which may be the earliest form of trick-or-treating.

Later, as Christianity overtook these pagan traditions, it became more common to dress up as saints, angels, and devils. Eventually, these Celtic traditions were carried over to the United States, where they morphed into the feverish, increasingly erudite costume parades that we see today.

But in the early 20th century, costumes were often much more terrifying than they are now, and Halloween was viewed as a way to escape society’s norms and constraints.

To summarize, humans have always ritually dressed up and transformed and metamorphosed into powerful or dangerous entities. The very act of putting on a costume is an act of shape-shifting, un-selfing, and connecting to creatures other than ourselves.

On Halloween, we get to embody and give voice to creatures that are part of the more-than-human-world. We become animals, we become walking skeletons, we become wielders of magic, we become living myths. For just one night, stories get to rise off the page and into our bodies.

Many of these traditions that I’ve been discussing bear a great deal of resemblance to other traditions across the world — especially Indigenous and shamanistic traditions that are still very much alive and well today — and there’s so much more to say about all of that.

What I am talking about here is, of course, not simply relegated to one time or place, and this, I believe, simply reaffirms their power, shows how interconnected we are, and underlies how our spirituality shares so many common roots and themes.

As any actor, creative writer, shaman, or person who has dissolved their self through meditation or psychedelics or mental illness knows, the boundaries of the self are quite porous. It’s easy to forget yourself or become someone else, as easy as unbuttoning an uncomfortable dress.

But if that dress is all you’ve ever known, then shedding it and exposing the naked reality of your lack-of-self to the cold night air can be terrifying.

The truth is, though, that what we think of as “human” and “real” is really a collection of agreements that can change at any time. On Halloween we get to test the boundaries, slip on other skins, become other, and honor our own other-ness — reminding ourselves of the fact that we were never really separate from others in the first place.

It is also telling that we have a tradition of dressing up as monsters on Halloween. Ghosts, zombies, and vampires are often emblematic of what we most fear: the unknown, brainwashing, our own hunger, and being consumed by a predator much more powerful than ourselves. And yet sometimes only by facing our fears and looking them in the eyes can we transcend or at least calm them.

Sometimes embodying our own monstrous selves (in the safe form of art, performance, or ritual) can help us connect with, empathize, and hopefully neutralize those whom monstrousness slips out of the realm of story and into the embodied real.

We are all connected, and we all share similar violent and primal instincts and impulses. We need safe, open fields to let these wild forces out, be it through writing or performance or movement or screaming in our cars or howling at the moon or donning a costume and gallivanting out into the night.

Today’s Samhain Challenge: Embody the Monster

This Samhain, in the spirit of the season, I am inviting you to write or create something from the perspective of a ghost, monster, or part of yourself that scares you just a little bit.

Shed your skin. Tell a ghost story from the perspective of a choice you could have made. Write a poem from the perspective of a vampire about the person you love so much you want to drain all their blood (metaphorically…right?) Embody your inner changeling, the person who never felt quite real on this Earth and like you always belonged only half-inside the world of men.

What would your inner monsters say, if you could let them speak?

In the spirit of the Celtic traditions, you might also prepare a more tactile offering to the spirits today, leaving out an array of food or a colorful drawing or a letter outside your doorstep along with a note lovingly asking that any tricky energies leave you be and allow you to be peaceful during this time. Milk, butter, bread, and alcohol were traditional Samhain offerings for wandering faeries. If you do leave an offering, though, don’t be stingy, as the spirits won’t necessarily respond well to that.

It’s never a bad idea to do a little protection work before you engage with any spirits, even just envisioning a white light surrounding you and allowing yourself to ground into the Earth. Remember that you never have to invite in or engage with any energy that doesn’t feel right, and always trust your instincts.

But also remember, fear gives monsters their power. When we fear the unknown, we give it energy. When we fear each other instead of looking at each other with love and standing our ground firmly rooted in our truth, we give away our strength. When we meet even monsters with love, then everything changes.

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If you do any kind of exercise inspired by this post, I would love to see it, so share your work in a note and tag me!

And — Happy Hallowe’en. May the monsters and spirits you meet on your journey through this life walk side-by-side with you. May you share tea with them. May you honor the more-than-human world and all the more-than-human, wild sides of yourself.

May your bonfires be tall and blazing. May stories and myths hold and warm you through this long strange night on this fertile rock wheeling through an infinite sea of stars.

P.S. Here’s a song that perfectly embodies the Halloween wavelength I’m on here —

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