A Simple Samhain Tarot Spread for the Thinning Veil
Still no frost, though temps have started to slowly dwindle down.
I said at the start of this month that I was waiting for the frost, and alas, I am still waiting. The days keep coming in warm, the leaves are changing ever so slowly, which isn’t the most terrible thing. A slow transition to autumn means beautiful colors and time to pause and observe nature all around.
If autumn is my new year then Samhain is the actual turning point. Long before it became Halloween, this was the end of the harvest and the start of the dark half of the year. The old year closed, the new one opened, and the gap between them was thought to be thin enough that things could cross.
That is the part I keep coming back to. Not ghosts, exactly, though I love a spooky story. Just the idea that at certain points in the year the distance shrinks between what you know and what you cannot quite see yet.
What the thinning veil actually meant
The folklore is less spooky than some would have you believe.
Cattle came down off the hills and families worked out which animals they could not afford to feed through the winter. The corn dolly plaited from the last sheaf, which had been cut weeks earlier, at the close of the grain harvest, was already up in the barn, where it would hang until spring. This was the end of the farming year.
In some places people doused the hearth on Samhain night and relit it from a communal bonfire, so the household began the new year from a shared flame. The bonfires were deemed to be protective and symbolic of the sun. A ward against winter.
As winter was symbolic of dying, it seemed like an appropriate time to honor the dead. For a few days, the boundary is thin as the seasons change. The dead are nearer. So are the fair folk, which is why people carried iron and salt and turned their coats inside out.
You don’t need to believe in any of that literally to find it useful. A few days a year when you deliberately pay attention to what is just out of view is a good practice no matter whatever you think is on the other side of it.
The Thinning Veil spread
Four cards, laid out as a threshold. Card two goes down horizontally, across the middle of the row, because it is the thing in the way.
Lay card one on the left, card two across the centre, card three on the right, and card four underneath.
1 · This side. Where you are standing right now. Not where you think you ought to be by the end of October.
2 · The veil. Laid across the others, because it is what you are reading through. A fear, a story you have been told about yourself, something you keep not looking at directly.
3 · The other side. What is close enough to reach you this week. At Samhain that might be someone you have lost, but just as often it is a part of yourself you have been separated from, or a possibility you had quietly stopped considering.
4 · What crosses. The one thing you can carry back with you when the veil closes again.
How to read it
Read card two last. It sits in the middle but it makes far more sense once you know what is on either side of it. I always want to start there and it is always better not to.
Write down card four. The rest can stay in your head if it wants to, but this one is the whole point of the exercise. One line is enough.
If card three lands uncomfortable, that is the spread working. The veil thinning is not a gentle idea. It is about proximity to the things we normally keep at a polite distance, and a card that makes you flinch a little is usually the one worth sitting with.
As ever, I am not using this to predict anything. It’s a check-in. The cards nudge me towards something I probably already knew and were simply waiting for me to say out loud.
Three cards, if four feels like a lot
You can drop card one from the spread if you’re more interested in guidance about what’s on the other side out of view and what comes back with you. You may already have an idea of where you stand currently or how you’re feeling so The veil · the other side · what crosses still work well together.
This works with tarot or oracle cards. I have been using it with my own Samhain Folklore Oracle, which has a Thinning Veil card in it, so you could always lean into the theme and take that card out deliberately, set it face-up in position two, and draw the other three around it. You can do the same with the High Priestess or the Moon from a tarot deck.
And then listen to your instincts, what does your gut say? Write that down. You usually have the answer within yourself already, sometimes you just need something to lay it out for you.