Today, Halloween has become another commercialized and Americanized holiday long removed from its pagan and Irish roots. It was not only a day to celebrate the bounty of the year’s last offerings, but also a time to honor the dead. Spirits and other beings from the underworld were free to roam the realm of the living, encouraging many to stay home safe by the fire and provide offerings of appeasement. Children took up the practice of “trick or treating” to mimic the wanderings of Samhain spirits through the community. As Christianity colonized the British Isles, old pagan traditions were either absorbed and assimilated or were recast as evil. Samhain became a sabbat to the Christian world, a secretive event in which witches convened to partake in feasting and general malfeasance.
But I have always thought it fitting that World Vegan Day, November 1st, coincides with the witch’s new year, Samhain, also honored on November 1st. Samhain Oiche, or Halloween as we know it today, falls on the eve of All Souls Day, the Christian reimagining of the older pagan festival. At this time, the prehistoric peoples of Ireland and later the Celts celebrated the last harvest of the season and prepared themselves for the oncoming cold season. Children carved turnip lanterns (and, when immigrants reached North America, also pumpkins). Families convened at holy celebration sites, feasted, and lit up the encroaching darkness of chilling Northern Europe winters. The masculine season of the sun shifts into the feminine season of darkness.
The Final Harvest
Samhain was historically the time for killing livestock for winter supplies, creating a distinctly ominous air. It is likely that Nonhuman Animals who were not thought able to survive the winter (presumably sick, old, disabled, or otherwise vulnerable) would also be slated for slaughter, as well as those who were simply thought too expensive to keep alive. Vegans will recognize this as systematic violence against “unproductive” or “burdensome” individuals who are especially marginalized in an increasingly capitalistic society. The leaner months of winter meant that pigs, cows, and other animals constituted more mouths to feed, making it more prudent to turn those mouths into food. Samhain, then, represents the final “harvest” season, focused as it is on the culling of weaker animals. Witches have acknowledged this history, identifying Samhain as well suited to rituals for releasing weaknesses.
As might be expected, this mass slaughter is interpreted as an invitation to feast on the bodies of Nonhuman Animals. Many witches in Western cultures suppose that eating other animals on Samhain is in continuation of traditional European practices and a means to honour and connect with ancestors. Sometimes the very blood of these slain animals would be baked into cakes and puddings, while bodies themselves were more customarily cooked and carved for ritual feast.
Who Count as Ancestors?
Samhain truly is a festival of death, one in which witches and pagans are expected to remember loved ones and ancestors who have passed on. Festivals of the dead reach back across an ambiguous number of generations to accomplish this, but few, if any, seriously consider the full extent of the human practitioner’s ancestry. Vegan witchcraft would remind that humans have descended from apes only recently in the evolutionary time scale, and before this, humans are linked to all manner of pre-humanoid species including small mammals, fishes, and even microorganisms. In addition to Nonhuman Animals, the earth itself is an enigmatic ancestor who has provided the first elementary ingredients (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on) for what would become sentient life. Trillions of Nonhuman Animals over more than four billion years of Earth’s existence have thus contributed to human flourishment. Acknowledging this lineage of interconnectivity could disrupt human supremacy.
Remembering and Reclaiming
If Samhain is a time to reflect on death, it is also a time to reflect on injustice. Some modern witches take it as an opportunity to remember the violence of the burning times and recognize it as a powerful time for hexing the patriarchy or individual perpetrators of misogynistic acts. Leading ecofeminist witch Starhawk strategically and compassionately makes space for grief in her San Franscico Samhain events given the city’s tragic association with the AIDS epidemic. Hungarian feminist witch Z. Budapest identifies Samhain as “the night of the revengeful Mother, who is the fierce protector of her sisters when aroused” (1986: 90).
Falling as it does on the eve of World Vegan Day, Samhain might serve as a space for communally acknowledging the grief associated with the global violence on Nonhuman Animals. Indeed, The Vegan Society chose November 1st to celebrate veganism as founder Donald Watson declared the founding of the organization in November 1944. It also happens to align with All Saint’s Day. The vegan version of All Saint’s Day, which follows the Day of the Dead, could celebrate the promise of life following death, or a more peaceful multispecies society that could be achieved beyond speciesism.
Samhain, for vegans, should be a time to honour ancestors, but also recognize that “harvest time” has been a period of intense violence across the ages. Just as the mass killing of witches has been cause for sombre remembrance, so should that of Nonhuman Animals who have been harassed, killed, and “sacrificed” for entertainment, sustenance, religious bargaining for a deity’s favour, scientific advancement, and so on. For those who practice it, Halloween might be a time for vegan baking and sharing plant-based sweets, but it might also be a time to hold space for other animals. This could mean lighting a candle, providing food and shelter for other animals, or taking a tip from the feminist witches and hexing the anthroparchy.
Like Samhain, World Vegan Day functions as a sort of sabbat for vegans, marking a time to celebrate our harvests and embrace our rebellious feminine side. Veganism, after all, is a celebration of the feminine in rejecting patriarchal violence against other animals and honoring the earth and its many inhabitants with the ritual consumption of plant-based foods. Rather than laud human supremacy over animal sacrifice, vegans come together to break bread, nourish one another, and pay respects to the animals now suffering and those who have already passed. Like Samhain, the vegan celebration is a liminal event in which the living and the dead come in close proximity. The illuminating fires of vegan vitality always transpire in conjunction within the shadow of animal holocaust. Practicing veganism is not just a political resistance to oppression, but also a necessary rite that binds vegans as a community. It offers a bonfire of light and hope in the darkness of speciesism.
Dr Corey Wrenn is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology with the University of Kent. She is the author of Vegan Witchcraft (Routledge 2026) and Vegan Feminism (Bloomsbury 2027). She is Book Review Editor for the Society & Animals Journal and serves on the Vegan Society’s Research Advisory Committee.
Instagram: @witchcraftveganized Youtube: @VeganWitchcraft Facebook: @CoreyLeeWrenn Web: coreyleewrenn.com
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Reference: Budapest, Z. 1986. The Holy Book of Women’s Mysteries. Oakland: Consolidated Printers.
