The Witches' Book of the Dead (28 page)

Regardless, connections between Samhain and the dead remain conjectural, and those connections are often reverse-engineered through the legacy of folklore regarding stories of the Celtic otherworld at that time, as well as surviving folk practices—particularly divination. Raven Grimassi, in his book
Witchcraft: A Mystery Tradition
, draws on serious sources of Celtic scholarship to make a compelling argument that Samhain's obvious connections to the otherworld, and to the Celtic father deity, Dagda, with his own association with cauldrons and sows (both underworld symbols) as well as apples—the fruits of the underworld also seen above in the Roman holiday of Pomona— suggest connections to the dead that cannot be ignored.
⁵⁴
And, of course, we're still bobbing for apples at Halloween.

Despite the mystery surrounding the nature of Samhain as the end of the Celtic summer and the beginning of the cold winter, it was certainly a likely time for the Celts to honor their dead. I do not think we can discount the folklore of Scotland and Ireland in alleging the supernatural roots of the holiday or, perhaps most importantly, the choice of the Catholic Church to place its own death holiday, All Saints' Day, at the same time of the year. While I personally believe that the Celts absolutely honored the dead at Samhain, it is also my belief that Samhain was not the only influence on the holiday of Halloween. Practices of both Halloween and the religious Samhain observed by most Witches today can be traced not just to the Celts, but also to the ancient Greeks and Romans, whose practices are documented in historical records.

And so we come to the Witches. After the repeal of the 1951 Witchcraft law in England, the father of modern Witchcraft, Gerald Gardner, released his 1954 book
Witchcraft Today
, giving birth to a religion that drew inspiration from the pre-Christian fertility cults and magical folk practices of old, celebrating the full moon, new moon, the four Celtic fire festivals, and the solstices and equinoxes. In Gardner's new faith, Halloween was returned to the Celtic Samhain of old—a festival of the dead held to honor those who have gone before and a time to divine the events of the coming year. Much of Gardner's work has been accused of drawing more from the earlier
pre-Christian Witch-cult theories of the 1920s book
The Witch-Cult in Western Europe
by Egyptologist and anthropologist Margaret Murray; Charles Godfrey Leland's controversial 1899 work,
Aradia: Gospel of the Witches
; and the magical writings of infamous twentieth century magician Aleister Crowley, than on any true connection Gardner might have had to the ancient coven he claimed initiated him. However, it cannot be argued that Gardner did not do his research, since much of what is contained within the “Book of Shadows,” Gardner's primary religious text, draws from the many of the surviving remnants of ancient magic. Still, Gardner must be credited with having laid the foundation upon which most modern Wiccan and Witchcraft groups are based. While I do not consider myself “Wiccan” per se, even
my
practices cannot escape Gardner's influence. It pervades all that modern Witches do, and his influence in the practice today is unavoidable.

The Witches' New Year

Whatever the true origin of Halloween—and I don't believe there is only one origin—it has become the spiritual heir to all of those festivals of the dead that have gone before: Samhain, Parentalia, Lemuria, and Anthesteria; and it is sister to those traditions still thriving: The Church days of All Saints' and All Souls' Days, Mexico's Día de los Muertos, Japan's Obon, and the Hungry Ghost Festival of China. The dead don't really care about the cultural context in which we show them honor and remembrance—what's important is that we honor and remember them at all. In my years as a Witch, it has always amused me to watch this tradition or that group attempt to find one “true” path to the absolute truth of the past, because virtually all faiths and practices have blended. Moreover, while I feel that history is important, there is something far more important than that: honor and remember the dead for they shall honor and remember you!

Here in Salem, Massachusetts, we're known as the “Halloween Capital of the World,” and nearly half of our city's million or so annual visitors arrive during the month of October. They fly in from all over the planet
to learn about the infamous Witch Trials of 1692, when nineteen people were hanged and one person crushed because the local Puritan populace thought that some of their neighbors were worshipping the Devil. They come to meet some of the many hundreds of modern Witches who live here today, none of whom worship the Devil because the Puritans were completely wrong about the practices of Witches. They attend our many Halloween parties, including my own Vampires' Masquerade Ball and, of course, The Official Salem Witches' Halloween Ball, which, for Salem Witches, is the party of the year. They get psychic readings to discover their destiny at shops like HEX, OMEN, and others listed in
appendix C
. And, finally, they attend public ceremonies such as the ritual that Sicilian Strega Lori Bruno and I host on Salem Common on Halloween Night—for this is the most magical and spirit-filled evening of the entire year, and it is a time when the living aren't the only tourists in Salem. The dead come to visit as well!

Since Halloween is a time for the dead, I wanted to end this chapter with some actual rituals that my coven does here in Salem at this time.

The Dumb Supper: A Dinner with the Dead?

Every October here in Salem, close to Halloween, we hold a large feast in the grand ballroom of the Hawthorne Hotel. Participants are each blessed by Witches as they are ushered into the dining area through a 15-foot “veil between the worlds.” Dinner is served in reverse order—dessert first, soup last—with the silverware reversed. A large, 12-foot altar crowns the back of the room where participants leave photos and mementos of their dead, that their energy might be drawn to the space. At the center of the altar is Robert the skull, who waiters know must be served each course first. Guests enjoy the sumptuous meal in total silence. Nobody speaks for the duration. Instead, they listen to songs of the dead from many cultures and styles—everything from modern Witches' chants of the dead to Schubert's “Ave Maria,” Luther Vandross's rhythm and blues ballad “Dance with My Father,” and even a live
recording of a New Orleans Jazz Funeral. This is by far my favorite event of the year. It is the Dumb Supper, when each participant remains silent and the guests of honor are our beloved dead.

Over the years that we've held the Dumb Supper in Salem, the spirits have manifested in some rather exciting ways. The most fascinating experiences are reported by those I call “the husbands,” men brought by their wives who cluster together in the corner with their cocktails, wondering just what the heck they have been dragged to. Most years there's a husband who comes to me after the dinner, talking about a ghostly experience he had after coming to the event with a cynical attitude. One such guest, a quite respectable man with a civil servant's job in a nearby city, told me how he saw the spectral forms of his grandparents dancing across the ballroom floor and even had a vision of his recently deceased dog. This was a far cry from the skeptical attitude he brought to the dinner. Even the waiters and waitresses, who are also not allowed to speak, get caught up in the spirit of the evening. My coven-sister Leanne once pointed out to me that not only were they serving Robert the skull at each course, taking the obviously uneaten plates away as each next course arrived, but as they went to refill everyone's water, they'd attempt to refill Robert's as well! If nothing else, our annual Dumb Supper has become a powerful psychological journey into our relationship with the dead.

Like Halloween, the modern Dumb Supper features elements of a number of ancient traditions. My own Dumb Supper updates the tradition even further with the addition of music, mainly to aid the many non-Witches present in maintaining silence in a room of nearly a hundred people. While many Wiccan and Witchcraft books imply that the tradition dates to the ancient Celts, my research for this book took me down a different road. I found many references to the Dumb Supper throughout the twentieth century, but few had anything to do with the dead. The story generally involved a group of girls making a dinner of cornmeal and salt and eating it in silence, waiting for the “spirit” of their future husband to appear. If a girl saw nobody, she would never marry. If she saw “a black
figure, without recognizable features,” it meant that she “would die within the year.”
⁵⁵
Other versions required every step of the meal to be set backwards. None involved the dead. The spirit visage of the future husband is more reminiscent of astral projection, the ability to travel outside the body in spectral form, or perhaps a type of precognitive vision. From what was accessible to me in research, I was able to find only one story prior to the Wiccan revival of the latter twentieth century that involved a woman using the Dumb Supper to call up the spirits of the dead, and it was an African American folktale referenced in 1929.
⁵⁶
Prior to that point, one 1920 version alleged that supernatural signs might manifest, such as “two men carrying a corpse” or a “large white dog.”
⁵⁷
References to the Dumb Supper go back no further than 1901 with the ritual culminating not in the appearance of the spirit of the future husband at the table, but rather in his appearance later in the dreams of those girls who were able to stay silent through the entire meal.
⁵⁸
I thought this was the end of my journey, but I later found British references to the “Dumb Cake,” a ritual similar to the earliest references to the Dumb Supper, in that girls who could stay silent while eating it would dream of their future husbands that night. In one instance, actual visages of future husbands supposedly would chase after the girls, while those who were to die unmarried would have terrible dreams of newly made graves.
⁵⁹
The earliest example of the Dumb Cake ritual I could find dated to the script of a 1713 British comedy play called
The Wife of Bath
,
⁶⁰
although the
Oxford Dictionary of Folklore
says that the practice was documented as early as 1680.
⁶¹
I was also able to find a 1909 reference that asserts that the Dumb Cake originated on the Isle of Man, where it was called the “Soddag valloo”—but again it appears as one of the many matrimonial divination rituals long associated with Halloween and the supernatural.
⁶²

After all this research, I became somewhat discouraged to find that my beloved Dumb Supper may not always have been a ritual of the dead, and, if it was, there seemed to be no evidence for it. But then I realized that if Halloween and our cherished Festival of the Dead are truly a syncretic
blending of all those traditions that have gone before, then I'm not sure that it matters. As we have discovered, leaving food for the dead is an ancient custom. So is the silent repose of mourning. To combine them into a beautiful ceremony may in fact be a twentieth-century invention, but it's one that I will continue as long as doing so carries the dead through the doorways of spirit that we may commune with them once more. Whereas most rituals of the dead help us to raise the spirits with the power of our voices, the Dumb Supper helps us to find the mighty wisdom hidden within the silence.

Ritual: The Dumb Supper

I recommend that you perform a dumb supper of your own, for it is an inspiring way to reach the spirit world that really works. You can do it alone, with a coven of other Witches, or even with family and friends. It can be held on or near Halloween night, or on the birthday or death day of a particular person you want to honor. If your dinner is dedicated to a specific person on the Other Side, make the meal one of his favorite foods! Otherwise, try to have a balance of different foods that appeal to those you have lost.

To begin, take pictures, mementos, flowers, the skull, incense burner, and other items that you normally keep on your altar of the dead and place them across the center of your dining table, much as you would at your altar. The silverware and glassware should be set opposite how you normally place it. The meal itself should be served in reverse—dessert first; appetizer, salad, or soup last—based on how
you normally do things. This helps to create the shift in conscious-ness necessary to allow you to experience the spirits.

At the beginning of the meal, burn some necromantic incense to set the mood (see
appendix A
). Shake your ritual bell or rattle over the first course to call the spirits, making sure not to speak. Set the rattle down on the table and begin the meal. Nobody should speak over the course of the dinner. If you would like, you can play music like we do in Salem, but it should be either music honoring the dead in general, or music once enjoyed by the person you are trying to invoke. Was grandma a Sinatra fan? Play him! This can help participants slip into the mood of the evening, though perfect silence can work great with smaller numbers of people. As you sit through the dinner, make mental note of the visions that come to your mind, the scents that come to your nose, and the whispers that speak into your ears. You will find that few can go through an entire Dumb Supper without experiencing something. After the dinner is complete and everyone is done eating, it's always fascinating to go into another room with coffee to discuss some of the visions people had!