But it’s the Celts, the Iron Age and medieval tenants of what is currently known as the British Isles, who connected the Pleiades and their movement across the sky to the harvest, the dying of the light, and our relationship with our own death. Their festival of Samhain is the great-grandmother of our Halloween. It was celebrated when the Pleiades reached the highest point in the night sky. This coincided with the moment in the year exactly between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. On Samhain, pre-Christian Brits would look at their cattle, their pigs, and their sheep and decide
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