193. The Cycle of Samhain: Reclaiming Balance from Dominance

Samhain — pronounced Sow-in — is the original Halloween. It was the most sacred night in the Celtic calendar: the end of the growing season, harvest time, the beginning of the dark half of the year, and the moment when the boundary between the living and the dead grows thin enough to cross.

My family never needed to be told this. I grew up in a household where the dead visited, where fairy dens were pointed out on walks through the woods, where my mother stood on the cliffs of Old Head in Kinsale, home to her ancestors, on her first visit and experienced deja vu, and during that same trip, my father entered a trance-like state and unknowingly climbed a set of stairs that led straight to one of his family's ancestral homes in Cork City. The supernatural was not a belief system in our house. It was just what happened.

It's an Irish thing, brought to America with my ancestors; the mindset crossed with us. And it is older than Ireland as we know it.

Before the Celts

The Celts arrived in Ireland between 600–300 BCE, but the people who came before them had been marking this threshold for thousands of years. Ireland's first farmers, who migrated from Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) around 4000 BCE, constructed the great passage tombs that still stand across the landscape — instruments for conversation between the living and the dead, between the light and the returning darkness.

In March 2023, I visited Loughcrew, one of Ireland's great Neolithic tomb complexes. Cairn L is oriented so that the rising sun at Samhain travels directly through the entrance passage, penetrating the darkness of the chamber and illuminating spirals carved into the stones five thousand years ago. A shaft of light entering a stone chamber at the moment of the year's great turning. The builders knew exactly where the sun would be on this morning, at this hour, on this specific day. They recreated an act of generation, bringing light into an earthly womb, honoring it in stone. It was a form of reverence that understood the masculine and feminine as equally divine — balanced, interdependent, the source of all continuity.

The original builders were gone long before the Celts arrived — replaced around 2500 BCE by Bronze Age peoples from the region we now call Ukraine, whose descendants built the stone alignments in County Cork that I walked through in 2017. When the Celts arrived, they wove this ancient land art into their mythologies, calling them sídhe — fairy mounds, home to the Tuatha Dé Danann, a supernatural race of ancient deities who, according to Irish mythology, ruled Ireland before retreating into the Otherworld, where they remain. 

The scale of these tombs commands awe. Their construction, seemingly impossible for the time they were built, has withstood the passage of five thousand years. Like modern-day cathedrals, they were containers for belief, sites for the supernatural. It was among these spaces that I came to understand something I had not been able to articulate before. These stones were not monuments to the past; they were technologies for staying in relationship with it: the ancestors, the planet, and the cosmos itself. 

What Samhain Actually Is:

For the Celts, the year was divided into two halves: the light half, beginning at Bealtaine in May, and the dark half, beginning at sunset on October 30th - Samhain.

The harvest was in. The community gathered around fires - the tine cnámh, bone fires. Knowing they could not feed an entire herd through the harsh winter, farmers ritualistically culled the excess or weaker animals. Their meat was preserved for winter survival, and their bones were cast into communal flames as offerings. This is where "bonfire" comes from. No waste. A sacred exchange. Life and death, found together in the dark by a shared fire and shared gratitude.  

They were not being dramatic about death. What kept them from joining the ancestors was the abundance of the landscape around them. Taking care of the land was not a political position. It was survival. Without a healthy living planet, they understood that there was no future.

We, however, have stripped the land and waters of that abundance and replaced it with easily discarded, commoditized bodies housed in warehouses, turned machines, churning out depleted resources. Our fields are infested with toxins, producing food that makes us ill. We live in a system of taking. No reciprocity, no permission. Take and be damned the consequences. A system of domination.

In the United States, an estimated 443,634 lives are shattered every year — without consent, treated like the other generative bodies our world needs for survival but takes for granted. Jane Doe at Cornell. Bernadette Greene Placentia, a congressional candidate in Arizona. E. Jean Carroll, who named our sitting president. All of the others named in the Epstein files. Pete Hegseth's own Jane Doe. Elizabeth Cooney named Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Employees named Elon Musk. Dominance exhibited by those who lack it. These names are not an abstraction. They are the endpoint of a system that has been permitted to destroy - lives, the land, our health, our bodies, minds, resistance.

A few have hoarded our resources, constantly feeding the channels of their self-indulgence, shooting or deporting those who made them possible. We have forgotten our knowledge of health, food, medicine, connection. We are pawns in a dangerous game. 

The midterms fall during this transitional time: November 3rd. Sovereignty, respect, reverence, humanity itself - all of it is on the ballot. The answer is woven into how our ancestors lived. The land was not owned. It was tended. The body was not controlled. It was honored.

Fear not the witches at this time of year, but those who burned them at the stake.

The ancestors are ready to assist. The boundary between worlds is not a wall but a membrane. Those who have passed live in a parallel realm, existing alongside our own. Close, available if asked to help or guide. Samhain is the liminal point when boundaries dissolve, and the ancestors are welcomed back as an active, vital part of the community's ongoing story.

This Samhain, they count on us to preserve what they revered.

The Medicine of Endings, Cycles

Reishi draws its life-giving medicine from the energy of death — dying trees. It does not grow on healthy wood. It grows where something is ending.

Reishi is called the Mushroom of Immortality. That is not incidental. It is the point.

A dying tree does not disappear. It transforms. The mycelial network that produces Reishi spends years threading through structures that can no longer support life, decaying roots and stumps, breaking down what no longer serves a purpose, recycling energy into the life-giving fruiting bodies that nurture our bodies and minds.

Samhain understands this. The dark half of the year is not the absence of life. It is life in a different form — concentrated, internal, doing its quiet work out of sight before the return of the light.

The disruptions we are living through - the fractures, the upheavals, the stripping away - are the moments that break something open. They are not interruptions to the story; they are the compost, fuel for change. Challenges arrive the way autumn arrives: on schedule, part of a cycle, carrying medicine you will not recognize until spring.

This is what every tradition has always known. Difficulty is not a detour. It is the territory. And like the seasons, it moves. The wheel turns, the spiral circles, light returns, and something that could not have grown in the bright half of the year quietly transforms in the dark.

This is what our Reishi Blends are for.

Herbs of Renewal

The dark half of the year is when our bodies turn inward. The outward energy of summer — the doing, expanding, producing — gives way to something quieter and more fundamental. This is not decline. This is maintenance. Repair. The invisible work that makes spring possible.

Our Benjamin Button Got His Groove Back tincture was formulated for just this reason.

The herbs in this blend address health at its roots: oxidative stress that damages cells, cellular aging that slows the body's ability to repair itself, the fatigue that sets in when cells can no longer produce energy efficiently, and chronic low-level inflammation that quietly accelerates decline. The herbs protect your chromosomes, keeping your genetic information from fraying, and they help balance your gut and internal clock. They are for rebuilding, quietly beneath the surface.

The parallel to Samhain is not a stretch. A forest in November looks finished. It is not. It is transforming. The trees that lost their leaves have directed their energy below the surface — in preparation for reemergence in spring. Challenges work the same way. Given the right support, the body rebuilds. It adapts. It finds its groove again.

These herbs don't fight the season. They work with it.

Herbs for the Dark Half

Winter is when animals slow down, turn inward, rebuild. Bears do not hibernate because they are weak. They hibernate because rest is how a body consolidates. The quiet is the work.

Nettles are nutritionally dense — high in protein, iron, calcium, magnesium, and Vitamin K. Iron binds with proteins to build red blood cells. Calcium, Magnesium, Vitamin K, and protein build bones. Paired with Oatstraw, whose silica content supports the structural integrity of bone and connective tissue, a quiet rebuilding occurs that mirrors exactly what the season asks of everything else: slow, steady, invisible work beneath the surface. Our Vite-Achoo Tea of Nettles and Oatstraw, steeped overnight, is one of the simplest and most potent things you can do throughout the winter. The long steep pulls the minerals fully into the water. Your bones, blood, and nerves notice.

These are not flashy herbs. They do not promise transformation. They promise support for the quiet work the body is already trying to do.

And there is cacao. Sacred medicine from Mesoamerica, used by the Olmec, Maya, and Aztec for over 3500 years. Delicious, whole-bean, cold-milled, mineral-rich. Calcium and magnesium for your bones and nerves. Iron for your blood. Our Ceremonial Grade Cacao Paste ends sweet cravings and heals from the inside.

What My Ancestors Knew

From 1400 to 1700, my father's family, the Troys (Ó Troighthigh), ran an herbal medical school in Munster, closing only when British laws barred Irish Catholics from education and professions. My mother's family name, Lee, stems from Ó Laoidhigh, and the word leighis, the Irish word for Physician and Medicine. On both sides, knowledge was the inheritance.

What gets passed down through families is not just stories. Research now shows that trauma and resilience travel genetically. The epigenetic memory of famine, of loss, of the land being taken — lives in the body. So does the memory of the healers, the ceremonies, the fires on the hill.

Samhain is the night to acknowledge that. To recognize that the thinning of the veil is not a metaphor. It is an invitation to stay in relationship with those who have passed, with your lineage, with the parts of yourself that only emerge in the dark.

How to Mark It

We are living through a time of portals. Big choices. And there is really only one left.

Samhain reminds us of what happens when we step out of our role as guardians of this world — and is an invitation back into it. Our ancestors knew how precarious it was to live out of balance, and they knew the solution: put nature back at the center of every decision. That is the portal we must choose.

Look past the plastic of Halloween to what this season has always asked of us. What does the earth need from you?

You do not need a ritual. You need intention.

Light a candle. We sell gorgeous soy-based candles in the shop. Savor a cup of our Ceremonial Grade Cacao Paste — sacred Mesoamerican medicine, mineral-rich, grounding. Brew our Vite-Achoo tea of nettle and oatstraw, steeped overnight to rebuild from the inside out. Grab one of our Reishi Blends for resilience, and some of our Benjamin Button Got His Groove Back so the body can quietly rebuild.

Write down what you are leaving behind this year. Say the names of the people who have moved to the other side of the veil. Set intentions for the near and far future.

Step outside and look up.

The Pleiades rise high on Samhain night. Known as the seven sisters, you can find them in the eastern sky shortly after sunset. They climb high overhead during the late evening hours, remaining a brilliant fixture of the winter night sky through March, when the cycle shifts, the days grow longer, and their misty blue starlight is increasingly drowned out by the extended evening glow. The ancient Irish watched for them. Your ancestors watched for them.

You are not separate from any of this. You never were.

Donna Troy Cleary

Clinical Herbalist, Registered Nurse

Spiral Herbal Remedies is at 810 Washington Ave in Brooklyn.