stellarhouse | Halloween, Samhain, All Hallows, All Saints or Hallow-Eve is the season of the Crone. In ancient
paganism, the word Crone denoted an elder priestess or tribal matriarch; a cognate word is "crown," the symbol of a
leader. The word was made pejorative when the Christian Church redefined all elder priestesses of the old religion
as malevolent witches. Similarly, the word "hag" was once derived from Greek hagia—a holy woman—and also
became a Christianized term for a witch.
The divine Crone was originally a part of the trinitarian Goddess, who appeared in Maiden,
Mother and Crone forms, associated with the three phases of woman's life, the three phases of the moon and the
annual cycles of nature. Viewed as an underworld deity who cared for the dead, the Goddess as Crone ruled autumnal
harvest festivals, when the spirits of dead ancestors could visit their descendants and share in the harvest feast.
Among the Celts, the well-known "death's head at the feast" used to be an actual skull of an ancestor, set at the
table to receive offerings, often with a candle set within it, to simulate the warmth of life and the light of
vision. Such was the origin of the jack-o-lantern.
