The year is turning. The light thins a little more each evening, the air carries woodsmoke and leaf-rot, and somewhere between the last harvest and the first frost stands the old gate of Samhain (spoken sow-in) — the Gaelic festival that marks summer’s end and the beginning of the dark half of the year. Of all the stations of the wheel, this one has always been the strangest and the softest.
The old lore tells that at Samhain the veil between the worlds grows thin. Bonfires were lit on the hills, doors left unlatched, and an extra place set at the table — not out of fear, but of welcome. The dead who came were family, returning home for the night. Something in us still remembers this. It is why late October carries that particular ache and beauty, the sense of standing in a doorway between two rooms.
But somewhere along the way, “the veil grows thin” got rebranded. Listen to the season’s marketing and you will hear that the spirits have messages for you, that the cards know your fate, that for the right fee someone on the other side will tell you what happens next. Let us be honest with each other, as we always are in these pages: that is not the work. It was never the work.
The veil does not thin so that someone else — living or dead — can tell you who you are. It thins so that you can finally hear what was always yours: the deep voice that gets drowned out by the noise of the year, the knowing that has been waiting all summer for the world to grow quiet enough to be heard.
The Hermeticists wrote it as “as above, so below; as within, so without.” At Samhain the without grows still — the gardens die back, the fields rest — and so the within becomes audible. What our ancestors experienced as the otherworld drawing near, a Jungian would recognise just as readily: the material of the unconscious rising to be seen. Two vocabularies, one threshold. What surfaces now is not prophecy. It is the self, asking to be met.
This is why the tarot belongs to this season — not as a crystal ball, but as a mirror. The cards do not predict; they reflect. Each card is an archetype, a room in the house of the self, and a spread is simply a way of walking through that house with a candle. The honest Samhain question is never “what will happen to me?” It is “what in me is asking to be seen before the year turns?”
You do not need to book anything to step through the gate. Here is a simple three-card spread for the threshold — light a candle, shuffle while breathing slowly, and draw three.
Card I — What I Am Releasing. The first card answers: what has completed its season in me? Whatever name it gives itself — a habit, a grudge, an old self-image — thank it for what it carried you through, and let it fall like the last leaf.
Card II — What Is Emerging. The second card answers: what is quietly knocking, asking to be born through me over the dark half of the year? Do not grade it by size; seeds look like nothing on the surface. The only question is whether you will water it.
Card III — What I Carry Through the Threshold. The final card answers: what one flame is worth keeping lit as I cross from the old year into the new? This is your anchor for the season ahead — write it somewhere you will meet it again in February, when the light returns.
A word on the startling cards. If Death, The Tower, or The Devil appears in your mirror spread, resist the old reflex to panic. In reflective work these are not omens; they are illuminations. Death is the tarot’s great pruner — an ending that makes room. The Tower dismantles only what was already unsound. The Devil points out the chain you have outgrown but keep wearing out of habit. Meet them as you would meet any shadow at this season: with a steady candle and an honest question, never with fear.
When you have drawn your three, resist the urge to rush for a guidebook. Sit with the images a while, and write down the first sentence that arrives uninvited — that is usually the one your depths composed for you. If it feels right, set out a third cup of tea for someone who loved you, and ask what they would have you release, and what they would cheer to see begin. This is inner work, but you do not have to do it alone in any sense.
And if you would like a companion for the crossing — someone trained to hold the mirror steady while you look into it — that is exactly what a deep-dive Tarot session at Hermetika is. We map where you currently stand, name what is surfacing, and part with a strategy for the season ahead. No fortune-telling; just you, met at depth, at the year’s most honest threshold. A Tarot reading starts from €45. Until then: light the candle, turn the cards, mind the gate. The veil is thin — and you were never really separate from what you were seeking.