Bridges Between Worlds

“End? No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

Samhain: The Thinning of the Veil

Samhain, or Mid-Fall, is the last of the three harvests in the Northern Hemisphere, and the advent of Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. It is a time we know as a thinning of the veil — a time for honouring those who have crossed over before us, and it is traditional at this time of year to commemorate, commune, and communicate with them.

Scorpio’s Devouring Darkness

In the Thoth deck, Samhain falls in the first decan of Scorpio, presenting a powerful trio of images — and here we are faced with death, putrefaction, and an insatiable hunger for life.

It can seem almost cruel that, in the darkening of the year, we are awakened into such deep passions. The heady, lustful days of spring seem almost childlike by comparison to the voracious need of Scorpio’s intensity, a devouring darkness that demands total surrender: give your all, or die in the attempt. The darkly intense, secret needs of this much maligned and often misunderstood sign erupt into our lives in ways over which we usually have little control, in forms that can bring us to our knees, laying waste to our reason and our sensibilities, tormenting us, shattering our lives, so that we might be reborn stronger, wiser, and more whole.

The Three Cards

The Five of Cups, with its associations of disappointment, awoken hunger, and appetite for something intangible and beyond reach, drives us to break free from the emotional harmony we may have grown tired of, urging us to seek further, to reach for the forbidden fruit.

The Prince of Cups has his eyes fixed firmly on the snake in the cup, seemingly forgetting the lotus of love hanging from his other hand. He seeks renewed power and longs for an intense, devouring union.

Death, then, takes his scythe and reaps all that lies before him, laying waste, releasing the eagle of wisdom to fly free into the heavens with the souls of the departed, leaving all else to rot and wither behind him, fertilising the ground for future work.

Walking Between the Shadows

It is now, as the Sun departs and the dark presses in, that this yearning for renewed life is felt at its most raw and most consuming. We sense it not only in ourselves, but in the restless hunger of those who have already crossed over, the dead, who lust still for the life that has been taken from them, who press close against the thinning veil, longing for the warmth they can no longer hold.

By now, worn gossamer-thin by the turning year, the veil is barely there at all, and through it we may step, if only for a moment, to the shadowlands where the living and the dead stand face to face. Here we may commune with those who have departed, those to whom we remain bound by love, by lust, by grief, by pain not yet released, and in that meeting, find something of ourselves we had thought lost with them.

I created a spread specifically to look into the passing of a loved one, and to descend more deeply into the dynamic that still moves between the living and the dead. I found it, myself, profoundly revealing — and I hope that you, too, may find in it a way through your own shadowlands.

The Doorway Spread

Card 1: What does/did your life give me

Card 2: What do I share with you

Card 3: What does your loss give me

Card 4: What am I still holding on to

Card 5: How can I let this go

Card 6: Your message to me

Wishing you all a blessed Samhain. 

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