Celebrating Day of the Dead in Los Angeles became the bridge for Paso Robles ceremonial priestess Charlotte Eléa Dovechild to further explore her ancestral roots by observing the Gaelic tradition of Samhain.
“It’s the end of the light time of year, and it’s the beginning of the darkening time of year,” she said. “It’s the time when the dark side of the goddess makes herself known. Dark energy is catabolic and releasing. It’s taking away all that that we do not want anymore and it’s releasing it back into the earth.”
Pronounced “sao-wen,” the word “Samhain” means “summer’s end” in Irish Gaelic. It’s traditionally celebrated on Oct. 31 as the Celtic New Year. According to Dovechild, true Samhain is the cross-quarter day between the fall equinox and the winter solstice. In other words, the exact middle date between those two times isn’t actually Oct. 31. This year, Samhain fell on Nov. 6, and Dovechild led a group in observation at Crows End Retreat in San Luis Obispo’s Squire Canyon.
Dovechild, the founder of the 11-month-old spiritual community Goddess Temple Central Coast, observes Samhain in two ways. Samhain is the period when there is a “thinning of the veil” between the physical world and the realm of the spirit.
“What that means is that there is a heightened opportunity to connect with our ancestors who live on in the spirit realm. That is why Samhain is often a time of deep ancestral connection,” Dovechild said. “People will build altars for their ancestors, and for me personally, at Samhain, I do a lot of ancestral healing at that time because there’s also a time when we may make contact with ancestors who carry wounds.”
The second way she honors Samhain focuses on release and letting go. Like a snake shedding its skin, Dovechild said, this aspect allows people to let go of emotions they don’t want to carry around anymore. In Goddess Temple Central Coast’s Samhain ceremonies, where groups of people observe together, the act of letting go looks like movement, breath work, vocalization, and sometimes even crying.
Many of the temple’s ceremonies are for women-identifying observers only. Together, they pay homage to the goddess—another name for the creator of everything in the universe.
“Some people will call this source God. But since I’m a priestess, I’m here to really uplift the divine feminine,” Dovechild said. “I call her goddess, also, because I know the creative source of the universe is feminine. … There is a special mission of the temple and myself of really helping women embody and remember their own divine feminine.”
For Grover Beach Sourdough Manager Cheyenne Goossen, Dovechild’s Samhain ceremony this year was her first time observing the tradition with other people, even though she’s practiced on her own for 10 years.
Goossen, who was raised as a Christian, added that she’s very particular about whom she shares her spirituality with.
“I think, honestly, this time in society where there’s so much confusion and fear, I really feel called to connect with my local community more and to build communal relationships that are interconnected, where we can help each other kind of lead and offer each other services without using necessarily, the capitalistic, patriarchal structure that we are normally forced into using,” she said.
Ever since she began observing Samhain, Goossen has felt more connected to both sides of her lineage. She doesn’t know much about her paternal and maternal sides of the family, but the Samhain ceremony helped her heal in ways she hadn’t predicted.
“I definitely connected with my maternal grandmother,” she said. “I haven’t had a relationship with my father since I was young, so opening up that side has been a little more challenging. But I find every year that the more attention and awareness and consciousness I bring to it, the more I’m able to open up that receptivity in my mind and in my spirit.”
Practicing alone for Goossen involves being in a quiet room with music and candles. She then brings things that once belonged to her grandmother, meditates, prays, and asks for guidance. She likes to jot down the results in a journal to study later.
Her group session with Goddess Temple Central Coast was a different experience. For three hours, nine people including Goossen joined to celebrate Samhain. Dovechild kicked it off with a cacao ceremony. The priestess made thick unsweetened concoction of cacao harvested in Peru, which the group drank together.
“We give honor and gratitude to the hands that made it, and we respect their traditions,” Goossen said. “Cacao does have a very calming, soothing kind of opening effect on human beings. We started our cacao ceremony, then invited the spirits of Samhain to come in.”
It helped that the group was women-identifying. Goossen said she felt safe to express herself and could explore the more mystical parts of her spirituality without judgement. She hopes to attend more group Samhain ceremonies in the future.
Still, Goossen said she faces pushback for her spiritual beliefs.
“I come from a fundamentalist Christian background, and I have received a lot of backlash from my family afraid that I’m a witch or that I am going to try and convert my nieces and nephews to the dark side,” she said.
Instead, she wants detractors to understand that observing Samhain is a grounding practice that connects people to the earth itself.
Misconceptions about Samhain and other pagan practices have almost always existed. Historically during the phase of veil-thinning between the physical and spiritual worlds, according to Dovechild, people would stay indoors and out of the way so that the representatives of the goddess could collect and transport left-behind souls.
“When Christianity began to kind of take over and replaced the pagan practices, they began to label the spirits as evil, right? But they weren’t evil,” Dovechild said. “That’s how we get these sort of contemporary Halloween traditions of dressing in scary costumes and carving pumpkins, because people began to try to dress in certain ways and decorate their house to scare off these spirits who they thought were evil.”
Dovechild said she hasn’t received flak for practicing Samhain. She’s been an intuitive spiritual practitioner for 10 years and a priestess for five. Dovechild said she felt drawn to heal some core wounds and wanted to do so by deeply connecting with the earth.
The greatest impact of Samhain, she said, is inculcating the ability to connect to the divine energy within oneself and surrendering to it.
“It’s almost like a child who’s upset and curls up in the arms of her mother, and then she’s immediately comforted, and she lets go whatever is bothering her,” Dovechild said. “It’s the same thing that we are connecting to this great, spiritual, loving energy within ourselves, and so then we can just let go of what doesn’t serve us anymore from that place.” Δ
Reach Staff Writer Bulbul Rajagopal at brajagopal@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Holiday Guide 2024.
