Er; wasn't Halloween originally Samhain?

Samhain is simply the Gaelic name for November; it's currency with respect to paganism is wobbly to say the least. So much of this folklorism was the work of aristocratic antiquaries, romantics & other diverse bourgeois fantastists with a particular axe to grind, so consequently trying to get any sort of handle on it is damn near impossible, especially taking into account the equally wilful obfuscations of neo-pagans too.

The paganisation of folklore is the result of the self-same Victorian paternalism that justified the evils of colonialism. It's there in the cultural condescension that would interpret any given folk custom as being somehow vestigial of something now long forgotten. For example, when the thoroughly aristocratic Lady Raglan first called her medieval ecclesiastical foliate head a 'Green Man', she did so fully in the faith that the Jacks-in-the-Green etc. were survivals of pagan fertility rites quaintly perpetuated by an ignorant lower order of society unwittingly preserving as mere superstition an ancient belief system that they themselves couldn't possibly understand, either in terms of its 'true' provenance or else its 'real' meaning.*

But Easter is ever so pagan.

Named after an Anglo-Saxon hare-goddess & celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full-moon after the Spring Equinox indeed! However, to call Easter one of our traditions is perhaps stretching the point. The entrenched, complex, highly organised and regimented theology of the 2000-year-old Roman Catholic Church is hardly a matter of folklore or tradition.

* A paraphrasing from here. Bloody hell - how Wav-like is that, eh? Quoting my own rhetoric & referencing via a link to my own website! But I've had a very busy day & I'm absolutely done in.

To make up for it, here's a picture of the lovely Abigail sitting so beautifully in the waters of The Wyre yesterday afternoon:

Abigail

I'm off to watch In The Night Garden, the only programme on TV right now that makes any sort of sense to me.