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You offered me an eagle's wing
That to the sun I might soar and sing
And if I heard the owl's cry
Into the forest I would fly
And in its darkness find you by.
And so our love's not a simple thing
Nor our truths unwavering
Like the moon's pull on the tide
Our fingers touch our hearts collide
I'll be a moonsbreath by your side (3x)
Music and lyrics by Loreena McKennitt
From: Parallel dreams (1989).
Samain or Samhain or Samhuin was a Celtic feast at the beginning of November,
and corresponds to the pagan Hallowe'en and the Christian All Saints Day.
From "The Stone Circles of the British Isles" by Aubrey Burl (Yale University Press, 1976, page 128):
Of the four annual Celtic feasts: Imbolc, Beltane, Lughnasa and Samhuin, Beltane on 1 May was the celebration of the god Belenus, 'one of the more ancient and widespread Celtic gods associated with pastoralism' (Ross, 1967, 57), whose name supposedly means 'the shining one'. His is a solar cult that may reach back to the early farmers. At his festivals Druids drove cattle between two fires, perhaps as symbolic offerings to the sun. The other major pastoral celebration of the year held on the night before 1 November, Samhuin, was a time of malevolent spirits, often in the form of birds, when all the forces of the other world were loosened. Then countryside and human were threatened, the god mated with the raven-goddess, doom-ridden, and ceremonies and sacrifices had to be most solemnly performed to ward off the evils that came with the decline of the sun (Ross, 1972, 200; Powell, 1958, 116). A lesser-known pastoral festival, Imbolc or Oimelg, on 1 February, celebrated the coming into milk of ewes and the return of light.
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