Samhain

Do you believe in witches? "Samhain" is a Halloween classic, to be read out loud around a fire at night.

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SAMHAIN

by Chiara De Giorgi

 

Photo by Joshua Newton on Unsplash

The thing is, they didn’t really believe in witches.

 

Human beings. They live short and troubled lives. One breath and they wither and die, like cut flowers. That is why they are afraid. They want to give a name to their fear, and, when they have found it, they kill everything that bears that name, because, if you kill what you fear, it stops threatening you, and you no longer need to be afraid of it.

So it is not that they believed in witches. Nor did they believe that witches could harm them. They just wanted to destroy their fear. They wanted to destroy a thought, an image, an idea. They wanted to destroy Fear. So they gave it a body, they gave it an appearance, a name, distinctive characters, so that it could be recognised. And then they set it on fire, leaving nothing but ashes. The witch’s screams were the screams of Fear dying, withering away on itself. The witch was not a person, a woman, a human being like all of them. The witch was Evil, she was Error, she was Fear, and she had to be defeated. On the night of Samhain, on the night when the veil between the worlds is parted and the spirits walk among the living to find warmth and dispense advice, on that night Fear was embodied in a woman with skin as white as milk, with hair as red as copper, with a mysterious gaze with one blue eye and the other hazel. A woman who whispered ancient rhymes, stroking her cat in the light of the fireplace flame.

The woman was captured, her hair was pulled out, her face scratched, and her beautiful eyes blindfolded, so that she could not cast her gaze on mortals and bewitch them. She was thrown into a damp, dirty and smelly stone cell, in the cold and dark. They threw things at her, they hurt her. The cat disappeared, a black blur into the black night.

No one thought that, were she truly a witch, she would not let them capture her. But, as I said, they didn’t really believe in witches.

 

The next morning, the sun did not show its shining face, but remained hidden behind ominous grey clouds, while the men built a large pyre in the town square.

As the hour of execution approached, the wind began to blow. A small crowd had gathered to celebrate the victory of Light over Darkness, of Life over Fear. Someone had caught the cat and brought it, visibly battered, to the pyre, locked in a wooden cage. The witch was taken to the square on a cart, blindfolded and bound.

No one thought that, were she truly a witch, she would undo the ties that imprisoned her and flee. But, as I said: they didn’t really believe in witches.

 

They tied the woman to the pole on top of the pyre and placed the cat’s cage next to her. They set fire to the pyre with torches and shouted to the sky: Death to the witch! Smoke began to rise from the burning bundles, flames crackled and gave off tiny sparks.

No one thought that, were the woman truly a witch, she would not allow the fire to start. But, as I said, they didn’t really believe in witches.

 

When the flames reached the hem of the woman’s robe, the wind suddenly howled and blew harder, raising dust, rags, and even small children from the ground. It started exactly from the place where the witch was tied up and blew in every direction towards the outside of the pyre. The flames changed course and caught at the executioner’s cart, at the trough, at the well. The men began to scream and flee towards the houses, but the fire advanced, pushed by the wind and fed by the wood of which almost everything was built. Everything was burning, and there was no way of quenching the fire, which was only sparing the woman tied to the pyre.

No one thought that, were the woman truly a witch, this would be her way of taking revenge. But, as I said: they did not really believe in witches.

 

Later, all that remained of the village were piles of charred and blackened ruins. A heavy rain fell and extinguished the last small fires. The woman and her cat walked slowly out of the village, without looking back.

There was no one left who could believe in witches.