The Geography of Allantide

Today the snow comes and despite many fears, with the snow there is always hope. We are at the end of High Allantide, the Eleventh, the Feast of Martinmas, now called Armistice Day. Allantide refers to several things. It can be used to refer to the Feast of Saint Allan, October 31^st, which can also be translated as the Feast of Saint Hallon or Hallows, so Holy Holy, the holiest feast, Hallowtide. It is called in Cornish,  Kalan Gwav, or first day of winter, and anyone looking can see that there is a similarity in all of these words. So this is the holiest feast which is the feast that celebrates the beginning of wintertime and the final end of summertide. The Thirty First of October is now mostly known as Halloween while Wiccans and druids often call it Samhain, but the focus is on the commencement of winter and the memory of ones mortality as well as honoring those who have passed on. All Saint’s Day and All Souls eventually came to be part of this season, and though it is the first three days that make the Height of a Tide, the Greater Tide is generally eleven or twelve days and so Great Allantide ends on the Eleventh with the Feast of Saint Martin of Tours, Martin the Soldier. His death is celebrated on the (Eve of?)the 8^th and his feast on the 11^th, thus making a closing three days to the tide. Fittingly enough, and probably not by accident, the Feast of the soldier saint was chosen as Armistice Day to commemorate all the war dead, and I keep it as both. It is the the final death commemoration day.

In America, perhaps because we do not like to look at death, or perhaps because we already had Memorial Day, Armistice Day was renamed Veteran’s Day. Our dislike of death is so great that Memorial Day, once called Decoration Day is now the “unofficial beginning of summer” and Veteran’s Day has lost much of its original meaning, so here we will continue to call it Armistice Day.  

This leaves us with Low Allantide. The lowtide is the rest of every season. Though some might extend it to Yule, for me it extends until Thanksgiving and the beginning of Advent. At Hallowmas we entered he Turning Castle from one door and the Dead entered from another. Others bid them goodbye. The witch does not. We always travel in the otherworld. Together we and the dead leave, reunited, through a new door, on a new road to a wintertime conception and a rebirth which we will celebrate at Montol, Christmas, Yule. We are winter wheat, the final harvest has come, and now we turn from commemoration to thanks. For the rest of this time we are focused on the final harvest in the metaphorical as well as on the ground truth, and practice Thanksgiving.  Though a national American holiday with vague Christian origins, the final decision to place Thanksgiving at this time of he year is ancient. Ceres, Saturn and Father Time and the Grim Reaper are one, and they all bear the sickle of Harvest. Thanksgiving is a true feast to me and there will be more to say on this later, but in this house Allantide wraps up at Advent, the end of all things as well as their beginning, where we light the purple candle, and await the Holy Child.