When the Wheel Stands Still: Death, Despair, and the Starry Kin

There comes a moment in the turning of the year when the wheel itself seems to halt, pausing in breathless stillness. Time hangs heavy. Shadows lengthen, and the breath of the land draws in upon itself.

In Ireland, this moment stretches between the dark of Samhain and the first trembling light of the Winter Solstice – a season where the dead walk amongst us, and the living seek fire, food, and fellowship to keep despair at bay.

The old folk knew these weeks as a haunted pause. Spirits were said to own the fields and the doorways. To step outside after dark was to wander into the company of the ancestors, the fair folk, and the unquiet dead. Indoors, life gathered itself close: turf smoke curling in the thatch, a hush of prayers, and families pressed around the hearth. It was here that the balance was held – between the harshness of nature without, and the warmth of kin within.

Chairs for the Departed, Bread for the Road

In many houses at Samhain a place was set at the table – an empty chair, a plate, a cup – for kin who had crossed the threshold. A lamp or candle burned in the window to guide them, and a little of the night’s food was left out, a kindness to those travelling the old paths. The practice is Irish to the bone; the naming of it may shift, but the heart of it remains – welcome them, feed them, and remember.

Keening once rose in such seasons, and soft prayers in the kitchen did the work that modern folk might now call “death-doula” tending – not as novelty, but as the old work of minding thresholds. To speak the name of the dead aloud, to serve them bread, to keep silence for a time – these were bridges laid over dark water.

Food as Ritual, Fire as Remedy

Food in this stretch of the year was more than sustenance – it was spell and salve.

At Samhain, bairín breac (barmbrack) was sliced and shared, a speckled bread seeded with fruit and fate. Tokens once baked into the loaf – a ring, coin, or rag – were read as omens for the year ahead. Apples and nuts were gathered, not only to eat but to play at prophecy, bobbing and string-games carrying laughter into a night that might otherwise turn solemn. Colcannon – potatoes mashed with cabbage or kale and scallion – brought the taste of fields and labour to the table; in places, charms were tucked within as at the brack.

These were not borrowed fancies but the remembered pulse of Irish houses – simple foods doing double duty as feast and folk-magic, keeping company with the living and the dead alike. The hearth itself was medicine: to stir the pot was to stir courage; to eat together by the fire was to kindle the spirit against the long night.

As midwinter neared, tables grew heartier where they could – oats and breads, winter greens, cured meats from the late-autumn killings, butter hoarded like yellow sun. Yet even scant fare, eaten in fellowship, carried the same blessing – we endure, together.

Stones That Swallow Light

Ireland’s ritual does not live only by the hearth – it is written in stone and sky. Across the island, megaliths stand as instruments of time, their passages and portals keyed to sun and moon. At Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange), the winter-solstice sunrise threads a roof-box and floods the chamber with gold, making a brief summer in the belly of stone.

Drombeg – in my own West Cork – keeps the other end of the cord. Laid on a north-east to south-west axis, this recumbent stone circle marks the winter-solstice sunset and the summer-solstice dawn, a dialogue between dying light and its return. Beside it lie the remains of a hut-site and fulacht fiadh, reminding us that ritual and daily life once shared a field, food was always part of ceremony.

Myths of Bear and Sun

Winter teaches the language of muscle and bone. In the deeper memory of these lands the bear was a lesson in going inward – strength that sleeps and survives. The sun, too, is a great sleeper, born anew at midwinter, a child lifted from shadow. In Irish cosmology the Cailleach holds the rough weather and the stone memory of the year; in time, Brigid will lift the flame and the waters, but for now we learn from the old one – to keep close, to mind the fire, to spend light carefully until the day grows.

The Stars as Ancestral Memory

Look up, and the night is not empty. The Milky Way has an Irish name – Bealach na Bó Finne, the Way of the White Cow – a sky-river kin to the Boyne and to Bóinn, the bright cow-goddess whose story still glimmers in the dark. Some constellations carry folk-names in Irish; all of them carry the old reassurance: the pattern holds, even when we cannot see it by day.

Between Death and Birth

Thus the cycle is kept – death customs at Samhain, birth customs at Solstice. One tends the leaving, the other welcomes the return. Between them stretches the held breath of the year. In that pause, ritual offers both compass and comfort – for the dead, a chair and a share of the loaf; for the living, feasts, fire, and fellowship; for the land, a circle of stone that still catches light.

A Path of Constellations

To remember these traditions today is to mind not only the ancestors but our own mental well-being in the hardest season. Food, fire, stones, and stars draw us back into belonging – and belonging steadies the mind. This is the ground of Constellations of Being – my night-sky body of work at the Online Hedge School – where we read the dark as our elders did, and let the season instruct us. At this time of year, when the stars are fiercest and Drombeg’s sightline holds the last ember of the sun, we listen for the old stories – written in bread and flame, in stone and sky – and let them carry us through.

© 2025 Niamh Criostail and Heartlands Publishing. All rights reserved.

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