Halloween

To mark the end of summer--and the coming of winter--the ancient Celtic festival Samhain, pronounced Ireland: "Sow-in" Wales: "Sow-een" Scotland: "Sah-veen," celebrates the innevitable decay of all things.   A mark of seasonal hardship and a time when the dead were remembered.  and is one of the 8 sabbats in the pagan calendar

which means "summer's end"

great burial mounds of Ireland (sidh mounds) were opened up  Barrows go back to the Bronze Age!

Think barrows (or barrow mounds), cold and darkness, Phooka the Irish fairy and her destruction of crops, Cerridwen the Underworld goddess and the Fairy Hag mixes a brew in her cauldron that inspires and transforms. 

Cold be hand and heart and bone,
and cold be sleep under stone:
never more to wake on stony bed,
never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. (Tolkien)

she is primarily worshipped in her Crone aspect, by and through her Cauldron of Wisdom, Inspiration, Rebirth and Transformation.  Now a book publishing house!

(Scottish, Welsh) [KARE-id-ooín or KARE-id-win] Moon Goddess; Great Mother; Grain Goddess; Goddess of Nature. The white-corpse eating sow representing the Moon. Wife of the giant Tegid and mother of a beautiful girl Creirwy and two ugly boys Avagdu and Movran. Welsh Bards called themselves Cerddorion (sons of Cerridwen). The Bard Taliesin, founder of their craft was said to be born of Cerridwen and to have tasted a potent brew from her magic cauldron of inspiration. This potion known as 'greal' (from which to word Grail probably came), was made from six plants for inspiration and knowledge. Gwion Bach (later called Taliesin) accidentally drank the remaining three drops of the liquid. Her symbol was a white sow. Death, fertility, regeneration, inspiration, magic, astrology, herbs, science, poetry, spells, knowledge.

Cerridwen is the goddess of dark prophetic powers. She is the keeper of the cauldron of the underworld, in which inspiration and divine knowledge are brewed. She is often equated with the famous Greek crone, Hecate, and to the Irish Badb. She is also sometimes related to the Greek Muses, only in a more violent and dark form.

The image of her cauldron, holding the magickal potion of wisdom, is the mythical origin of the Halloween image of a cauldron-stirring hag, making up her witch's brew

it was believed that the dead could return to the earth on that one night (wiktionary) the barrier between our world and the Otherworld is thinnest on this day.

Phooka, pooka, puca is a shape shifting fairy.  Commonly seen as a horse, also can be a rabbit, dog, goblin.  Sometimes will take humans on a ride, but not known to harm them (just scare them a bit).  "Puca's share" is a small offering of harvest left out.  Anything not harvested by Nov. 1 is considered destroyed by Puca.