I did some research into 'the veil between the worlds' a while back. Not a single example of a pre-Victorian use.

The concept of 'thin places' (where the 'veil between worlds' is thin) was even worse - deemed 'ancient Celtic', actually invented in 1938.

Obviously if 'the veil between worlds' is a Victorian invention then the belief that Samhain is when 'the veil is thinnest' is equally bogus

Currently trying to track down the earliest reference to Samhain being 'the time when the veil grows thin'. Suspect it will be in 1970s.

The fact that we unwittingly view ancient seasonal celebrations through a lens of 19th century Spiritualist Christianity is a big deal to me

Marking Samhain as 'the time when the veil grows thin' isn't perpetuating Old Ways, it's misrepresenting them.

So far as I can tell, 'the veil' as a theological concept began as 'the veil between Earth and Heaven' & was co-opted into Spiritualism...

... in which context it served an almost theatric role as the barrier between the desired-for ectoplasmic manifestations & the attendees

Point I'm driving at is that this belief that mortal & spirit worlds were divided by a 'veil' is COMPLETELY ABSENT from such lore as we have

The insistence that the earthly & mortal is in one place & the spiritual & eternal is in another is being IMPOSED on the old traditions

Nowadays we don't think of spirits' or Gods' realms as physical places, but as 'planes'. But back then, the Gods lived on Mount Olympus.

Heaven was believed to be as physical as Earth. Hell could be reached through openings in rocks. The whole cosmology was different.

Human experience of the world was such that the place where the Gods lived was imagined to be a place like this, only not near here.

Of course, now that the Earth is mapped, we needed to imagine otherworlds as 'higher planes'. It was the only place for the unknown to be.

The idea of superimposition, borrowed from photography, was a convenient analogy for how people thought the spirit world interacted w/ ours.

The less magical the world was believed to be, the more it became necessary to posit a division between us and the realms of wonder.

Hence the Spiritualist concept of the Veil, born of parlour room seances & now retrospectively cast as a key element of Samhain.

But here's the thing. The Sidhe, the 'people of the mounds', were believed to live in the mounds. The tumuli. A *physical* reality.

There was no pious division of things into the mundane & the spiritual; the idea of the mundane hadn't been invented yet.

Mundanity is a product of modernity, and the Spirit Realm behind its sodding Veil was only imagined as a necessary contrast (& salve) to it.

In summary, Samhain is not a time when the Veil grows thin, because there never was a Veil in the old tales, and magic was *everywhere*.

This isn't meant as snark or cynicism. People learn this stuff and pass it on in good faith. Just please interrogate what you inherit, ok?

It's not necessary to buy into the whole 19thC metaphysical hooha of a Veil in order to appreciate the tales of, say, fairie folk riding.

And there's certainly no suggestion that the trolls who descend from their fastnesses on that night do so because the pesky Veil is thin.

Afterword: the very earliest reference I can find to Samhain/Halloween being a time 'when the veil grows thin' is indeed from the 1970s.

Specifically, it's in 'In Search of Lost Gods: A Guide to British Folklore' by Ralph Whitlock, 1979.

The remarkable thing is that following Whitlock's book, the concept steadily becomes more and more popular and widespread, until we now...

... face a situation where practically any reference to Samhain anywhere online will include a line about the thinning of the veil.

But before 1979, so far as I am able to tell, this now-ubiquitous belief (or a belief in a belief, I suppose) just wasn't there.

As a final closing thought, please consider this:

the retroactive conceit of a 'veil' that 'grows thin' implies that the Things of Darkness who roam abroad on Samhain night only do so...

... because on other nights, they are *unable* to. Think about what that says about the world. A vision of things where spirits...

... both benign (departed loved ones) and malevolent are constantly straining against a barrier, which only yields on certain nights...

... and maybe consider some alternative ways to interpret this. Maybe the fairies ride and the goblins roam on Halloween b/c they LIKE to.

Maybe the implied model of a human world constantly under siege from dark Otherworlds isn't actually reflective of ancient belief?

Thread continues here https://twitter.com/Cavalorn/status/926395634961219584