All Hallows Eve

Spirits beyond the light

In our over-commercialized world of holiday (?) excesses, seemingly designed to boost the sale of cheap confections and allow dentists to afford a second home, many have forgotten that the Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a love story. Albeit, a noir tale of love rejected and the nefarious roguery of another suitor of the lovely Katrina Van Tassell.

Sleepy Hollow, New York (formerly the village of North Tarrytown, New York) is a real place. The Old Dutch Church, Horseman Bridge, and the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where author Washington Irving's grave can be found, are still visitations of literary interest. Irving’s tale was written during a tour of Europe in 1820 where he, no doubt, heard many stories and headless horsemen were staples of northern European storytelling.

But ironically, Irving knew a piece of local history dating to 1776 and the many battles of the American Revolution fought around Tarrytown. The haunting image of his story may have been based loosely on the real discovery of just such a headless British corpse found in Sleepy Hollow after a violent skirmish, and later buried by the Van Tassel family, in an unmarked grave in the Old Dutch Burying Ground. And some connecting inspiration emerged in Irving’s spellbinding tale.

All Saint’s Eve’s, or Hallows eve, origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain. A Celtic celebration of their new year on November 1st, this day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain and believed the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III co-opted the pagan festival as a time to honor all saints, re-naming it All Saints Day. The evening before was still known as All Hallows Eve and incorporated many Celtic traditions, like dressing in animal-like costumes, building large sacred bonfires and fortune-telling. At evening’s end when the celebration was over, people re-lit their hearth fires from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter. And so this was became a time to let go... and go softly into the light.

In the harsh low-light of winter’s short days, dampened spirits abound. But the march of winter’s tales do not haunt me as they once might have. I am comforted by something I can feel, but can not see.

Memories are like ghosts that brush up against our souls, sometimes in surprise and sometimes in measured meter, to remind us of who we once were, who we are and who we dream we might still become. Wind and water shape the earth we roam, but it is people and relationships that shape our souls.

Uninvited, yet somehow welcome, a ghostly essence has been floating around me quite a bit of late. I lack the wisdom to know the significance of that, but can not help but wonder why? But, as it is with many things in life, mystery is its essence. And so I take consolation in the words of one of my favorite authors, Norman Maclean. I took the liberty of combining some of his quotations in a meditation:

“We can love completely what we cannot completely understand. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear. The nearest anyone can come to finding one’s self at any given age is to find a story that somehow tells us about ourselves.”