All you need to know about Samhain.

Samhain: Descent, Ancestors & the Feminine Underworld

As the final leaves loosen their grip and return to the soil, the festival of Samhain arrives like a whisper from another world to remind me its time to remember and descend. 

In the Celtic Wheel of the Year, Samhain marks both an ending and a beginning: the death of the light season and the first breath of winter’s descent. 

It is the Witches’ New Year, a threshold time when the veil between worlds thins, ancestors draw close, and the darker half of the year begins its reign. 

To walk consciously through Samhain is to step into a deeper layer of feminine wisdom, one that honours death as a holy rite of passage.

The Celts began their year in darkness.

This alone tells us something profound about the cosmology Samhain emerged from. Winter was the fertile void from which all future life would be born. 

What is Samhain?

Samhain (pronounced sow-in) is an ancient Celtic festival held on the night of 31st October, marking both the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter in the Wheel of the Year. 

It is traditionally viewed as the Celtic New Year, a liminal threshold when the veil between worlds is thinnest, allowing closer connection with ancestors, spirits, and the unseen. 

Rooted in bonfires, feasting, and ritual, Samhain honours death, descent, and release as natural parts of the seasonal cycle, inviting us to reflect, let go, and enter the dark half of the year with reverence and intention.

In Stations of the Sun, historian Ronald Hutton notes that Samhain was the most spiritually charged of the Celtic fire festivals, a time for divination, ancestral rites, and communion with spirits. 

Meeting the Crone 

If Beltane celebrates fertility and Brigids’ bright fire, Samhain belongs to the deep well of the underworld. 

In this moment on the Wheel of the Year, the feminine is not the maiden of blossom or the mother of harvest of Beltane, but the Crone - keeper of thresholds, memory, and endings.

At Samhain we meet the Crone in her many guises: the Cailleach of winter storms, Cerridwen with her cauldron of transformation, the Morrigan as sovereign of life’s inevitabilities. 

These figures are fierce initiators who teach what can only be learned in darkness. Their stories echo another layer of myth shared by cultures across time: the Descent. 

Whether we look to Persephone descending into Hades or Inanna stripped at the seven gates of the underworld, we meet a truth that feminine spirituality has always known, there can be no rebirth without descent. 

As Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Perera writes in Descent to the Goddess, the underworld journey confronts “what has been split off, disowned, or forgotten in the psyche,” returning a woman to herself in a state of greater wholeness.

Wheel of the Year print and accompanying booklet by Moon Phase Studios

Death and Blood Rites of Samhain

This is why Samhain is not merely seasonal folklore. It is archetypal. 

It speaks the language of womb healing, the menstrual cycle, and the feminine psyche. The earth’s descent into winter mirrors the body’s descent during menstruation and the soul’s descent during shadow work. 

In each case, the old is shed so the fertile ground of emptiness can receive the seeds of what will come. 

Modern culture - obsessed with productivity, unbroken light, and perpetual summer - teaches us to fear this phase. Yet the ancients understood that descent is both necessary and holy. 

When we honour Samhain, we also honour the dead—both our beloved ancestors and the silenced feminine ancestors of culture and lineage. 

Samhain Rituals

Ritual gives form to remembrance, voice to silence, and belonging to the unseen. 

When we light a candle for our dead, sit in meditation with our wombs, or speak aloud to those who walked before us, we step into an unbroken lineage of ancestral practice. 

The Celts marked Samhain with offerings of food left at altars and hearths, believing their dead travelled through the thinning veil to visit the living. 

Today, when we create a small altar, share a silent dinner in honour of our ancestors, or journey inward to meet our shadows, we are not inventing something new, we are remembering something old.

Shedding the Old

Samhain also invites us to reflect on the myths beneath our personal stories. 

Which parts of us are ready to die? Which identities are tired, defensive, constricting, or simply complete? 

The descent is not gentle, and the Crone does not bargain. But she offers something more valuable than comfort: clarity. 

In many Celtic stories, the sovereignty goddess appears in her hag form, offering wisdom only to those courageous enough to face her without flinching. 

Likewise, the parts of ourselves we resist may be the very key to our transformation. Shadow, when met with courage and compassion, becomes power.

To honour Samhain is to live in alignment with an ecological truth: no seed grows without burial. For women reclaiming their cyclical nature, this is especially resonant. 

Questions for the Descent

• What am I being asked to lay to rest?
• What story, identity, or pattern must die?
• What do my ancestors want me to remember?
• Where does my womb want me to surrender?

Close up of 13 Moon Journal by Moon Phase Studios

Ways to Honour Samhain Today

• Ancestral Altar — Photos, candles, offerings of bread, milk or apples
• Candle of Remembrance — Speak the names of the dead
• Womb Descent Meditation — Journey into the inner cave
• Grief or Release Ritual — Bury or burn what you are releasing
• Silent Night Walk — Listen to the land in darkness

Walk the Wheel as a Feminine Spiral

If your body is remembering the Old Ways, if you feel the primal pull of the seasons, the ancestors, and the descent, I invite you to journey the full spiral with me.

On 31st October, I open the temple for:

Reclaim the Wheel of the Year as a Feminine Cycle

A year-long online journey through the 8 sabbats - with ceremony, myth, womb wisdom and seasonal rite.

Enter the circle: https://wildsamsara.co.uk/online-wheel-of-the-year-immersion/

Blessed Samhain.

May your descent be holy, your remembrance deep, and your rebirth inevitable.