SAMHAIN: THE NIGHT OF ANKOU

"You’re dead, you’re dead", repeats the family grouped around the corpse in some countries. They tell this because a lot of deads don’t know they’re dead. It is because they are repelled at the notion of spiritual life and are longing to take their place again among the alives.

Celtic peoples from Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall and Brittany created for the deads a particular place. Night belongs to the deads, day to the alives. From the sunset to the crowing of the cock, the houses are open to them. Long ago, people avoid to bolt the entry door and the dining room remained dressed with their preferred dishes, during a particular night.

It is the done thing to be discreet because deads don’t like to be spied on during their nostalgic walks at twilight. The "an Anaon" are the souls who appear on the lanes among broom and heather. The alives are used to hum for warning them of their presence. Tact but also cautiousness is necessary because deads are quick-tempered and can take revenge. But the deads remain discreet abovall and are used to disapear at dawn because they are afraid of light.

On the Menez mountain, you meet a funeral cart drawn by two horses, one scraggy, the other rather fat. The driver of this cart is a high character all skin and bones with white hair under his hood, bringing a scythe or also, it can be a skeleton into a shroud. He turns his head everywhere searching for victims. He has two companions who help him to drive the horses and to collect the corpses. It is the Karrick or the "Karriguel ann Ankou" , the cart of Death, the God Ankou . If you meet this funeral carriage, you will die under one year.

According the great Caesar himself, in his Memories, the Gallic people believed to descend from the God of Death, a same spirit animating the deads and the alives. And so, teached the gallic Druids. Even, the antic historian Procope, placed the Kingdom of Deads in the Island of Brittany where boatmen conveyed the souls inside boats.

More than other peoples, Bretons keep fascinated by the notion of death and so their believes are full of ghosts and fantastic creatures: the night washerwomen wash at night the clothes of the deads and the night crying people go on calling for the alives who have been marked by the God Ankou.

Again, at the beginning of the previous century, in Brittany, during Samhain, the night before the All Saint’s Day, people stood up all the night waiting for their deads... The dining table was dressed up with care specially for them. Families spent their evening waiting for their beloved shadows and when the time was arrived the eyelids were heavy, the alives saw their dead guests for a moment...

During the feast of Halloween, when little children disguised in reapers and monsters knock on the doors promising tricks and claiming for candies, they carry with them this antic believe: "Be aware! the deads are not dead!".

At terrificator.com’s we already know this, since a long... long time.