Adventures in Google Books, continued.

Before about 1885 nobody talks about "the veil between the worlds".

After that, Spiritualism gets going, with its belief in personal survival after death and the possibility of contacting 'the departed'. For the next 100 years, give or take, two groups of people talk about "the veil between the worlds" - Spiritualists (who believe the veil can be lifted) and Christians (who believe it can't). C. S. Lewis refers to God being able to make contact with people through the veil, but the idea of the veil being at all permeable is unusual.

In 1978, the New Age shopkeeper Herman Slater set out an elaborate Samhain ritual, including this:

"Consider that in ancient times this night marked the end of the year, and that on this evening the veil between the worlds was thin."

This seems to be the earliest reference to seasonal veil-thinning.

This from 1984 is interesting:

"If you're going to try your hand at the occult Halloween is the night". says the proprietor of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Frater Marabas, a practising pagan. His mail-order-only shop (painted black of course) in Burley Lodge Road in Leeds is boarded-up to repel casual callers. Two thousand customers also subscribe to his Lamp Of Thoth magazine.

"The psychic veil between this world and the next is very thin at this time of the year. It's a time when you meet departed spirits and practise divination." Marabas says. He is bearded. aged 35 and peppers his speech with esoteric words and symbols.

"This was the time the ancestral spirits returned to the homestead. Winter begins and the Earth Mother is in retreat and the Horned God, the male aspect of the universe, takes over. In our Celtic syslem it's called Samhain. It is the time when the animals are brought in at the end of the summer.

"The ancient Egyptians fed their mummies at this time - our Celtic ancestors opened up the barrows, the long earth mounds they used as tombs, often removing their skulls and welcoming them back into the ancestral home for the duration of the festival. (this is believed to be the symbolic origin of the turnip lantern).

The veil+thin+Samhain combination had obviously entered the language by 1984 - and presumably it went back a bit before 1978, unless Herman Slater actually made it up. Maybe not much more, though. I've been looking at Ed Fitch's Magical Rites from 'The Crystal Well' (as you do); this is a book published in 1982 and bringing together a collection of ideas for rituals, originally published in a small magazine called The Crystal Well, which in turn was founded in 1965. Samhain appears once - in the index - and the veil is supposed to get thinner at the Full Moon:

"This is the time of the fullness of the symbol of our Lady, the Moon. All things wax and wane, and on this evening the powers of life, of magic, and of creation are at their highest. This is the time of building, of doing. It is a time when the veil between the mundane world and the strange and beautiful realms of elphame becomes thin indeed. On this night one may transcend the boundaries of the worlds with ease, and know beauty and enchantment."

(Yes, it's spelt 'elphame'. I don't know either.)

Funny to see that phrase 'our Lady' floating up in this context - in England, references to "the old religion" meant Catholicism for a long time before the New Agers got hold of it.

It's very much of its time. Here's how to prepare for the Full Moon ritual:

As the members of the coven arise, sweet incense shall have been lit

"What do you mean, as they arrive it shall have been lit? I was following along up to then!"

Ahem.

As the members of the coven arise, sweet incense shall have been lit, and numerous candles of light pastel colours shall burn about the area. Background music may be medieval music, cheery folk songs, or such as Gwydion's "Lord of the Dance" or "Spring Strathsby" [sic].

You know about Gwydion's "Lord of the Dance"? I didn't. This is Gwydion Pendderyn (Thomas DeLong to his parents), who wrote a celebration of male and female pagan deities called "Lord of the Dance". By a bizarre coincidence, it has the same melody, and about half the same words, as a song of the same name by Sydney Carter. Let's hope he cleared it with Stainer and Bell.

Dance, both formal and improvised, shall start the evening. Singing too shall be encouraged. When all have arrived, artificial lights shall be extinquished [sic] and all shall proceed out-of-doors where the High Priestess, and/or any other designated for the evening, shall perform a dance in the moonlight to begin building power. The dance shall be magical and sensuous. The music should be faint and, if possible, have a particularly elvish quality to it.

'Extinquished' is probably just a typo, but it goes well with all those 'shall's somehow. Candle, thou shall be extinquished!. I like the provision for the High P. to bale out of the sensuous magical dance if she's not in the mood ("designate Sandra, I should, she'll be well up for it - look how sensuous she got at the club the other night"). 'If possible' in the last sentence is a nice touch, too.

When the dance has been completed all shall adjourn within to begin the readings and meditations. "She walks in beauty" by Byron, "My love has wings" by Wayne, "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge, "High Flight", "Who rides the wind", "Helen" by Poe, Tolkien's "The road goes ever on", "Elbereth, Gilthoniel", "Goldberry", "Lorien" or such. Perhaps two or three minutes should pass between each reading, in order that the text and the implicit meanings may be absorbed by the listeners and the readers.

I can't trace "My love has wings" - there are several candidates (including one featured on Star Trek - surely not...) but none with a writer called Wayne. I like the idea of sitting in silence, reflecting on the implicit meanings of "Elbereth, Gilthoniel" - or "Kubla Khan" for that matter. (I once gave a seminar paper on the implicit meanings of "Kubla Khan". Nobody understood it.)

Anyway, it looks like veil-thinning around Samhain is a 1970s thing...