All Soul’s Day Customs: Gwyliaumabsant

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Welsh All Souls’ Eve: Gwylmabsant: Honey Bee, Seed-Month: Hallowmonth

Through earth and waters deepe,
The pen by skill doth passe:
And featly nyps the worldes abuse,
And shoes us in a glasse,
The vertu and the vice
Of every wight alyve;
The honey comb that bee doth make
Is not so sweet in hyve,
As are the golden leves
That drops from poet’s head!
Which doth surmount our common talke
As farre as dross doth lead.

Here’s a few flowers! but about midnight more:
The herbs that have oil them cold dew o’ the night
Are strewings fitt’st for graves–
You were as flowers now withered; even so
These herblets shall, which we upon you strow.

– William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

Uriel is the twin brother of the sun god Mabon: Youth Son of Bees. Uriel tends the Cinquefoil Garden, the flower of immortality. White & Black Virtues. (33)

Down in the Hallowtide Garden of Dreams,
Nothing is shallow nor hard as it seems;
I built a rare bower of all the fair flowers,
For keeping us warm in the evening hours;
A Columbine cellar & Violet sills,
Dormers of Absinthe & Daffodils;
Cornflower tables & Lavender halls, [or ... Thistledown halls]
Doorways of Lotus in Quatrefoil walls;
Trefoil gables & Rose window-panes,
Fleur-de-Lys thatching to catch all the rains;
A Sunflower chimney uncharred in its seams,
Down in the Hallowtide Garden of Dreams.

Luis: Green herbs called livelong are plucked by children & hung up on Midsummer Eve. If still green on Hallowe’en, the one who had hung it up would prosper for the year, but if it had turned yellow or had died, the child would also die. On the Eve of All Souls’ Day, twenty-four hours after Hallowe’en, children in eastern Wales go from house to house singing:

An apple or a pear, a plum or a cherry,
Or any good thing to make us merry.

[French Ministry of Education Site: Centre national de documentation pédagogique]