Thirty-one days ago, I shuffled a deck that didn’t exist and wondered what might happen if, instead of the usual tarot, we dealt ourselves a month of British ghosts, folklore, strange creatures, old magic and things that stubbornly refuse to be explained.
Since then, we’ve wandered down some very dark roads. We’ve met the dead, the damned and the decidedly peculiar. We’ve followed phantom hounds across the night sky, listened to voices from empty rooms, peered into mirrors we probably should have covered, opened books best left closed and, on more than one occasion, ignored some extremely sensible advice about not following mysterious lights.
But every journey eventually reaches a boundary. And perhaps it was always going to end here. Tonight is Halloween. Samhain. All Hallows’ Eve. The night when, according to centuries of tradition, the distance between this world and the next becomes just a little less certain.
So for the final card, there is no XXXI.
There is only the Joker.
The card that sits outside the order. The card that doesn’t quite belong. The wild card.
And on it, The Veil.
Tonight, the door stands open. 🖤
Your Final Card
Joker: The Veil
There is an old idea that refuses to die, that on one particular night of the year the distance between this world and whatever lies beyond it becomes just a little smaller.
We call it the thinning of the veil now. It is a beautiful phrase, although not necessarily an ancient one, and perhaps that is why it has survived so well. It gives shape to something almost impossible to describe, the feeling that there are places and moments when the ordinary world becomes strangely permeable. The dead seem closer. Old places feel older. Darkness arrives earlier, the year turns towards winter, and for one night we permit ourselves to wonder whether the boundary separating the known from the unknown is quite as solid as we pretend.
Halloween has become pumpkins, plastic skeletons, sweets, costumes and horror films, and I have absolutely no complaint about any of those things. But underneath the modern celebration lies a much older accumulation of customs concerned with darkness, winter, divination, spirits and the dead. Samhain marked a significant seasonal turning in the Gaelic year, associated with the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. Early Irish literature repeatedly places supernatural events at Samhain, when encounters with the Otherworld become possible and ordinary rules have an unfortunate tendency to stop working. History
That does not mean there was one enormous pan-Celtic Halloween exactly resembling the festival we celebrate today. Two thousand years of religious change, migration, folklore, commercialisation and people simply inventing entertaining things to do on a dark autumn night have seen to that. Halloween is a magnificent mongrel. Samhain is part of its ancestry, but so are the Christian feasts of All Saints and All Souls, medieval customs, later British and Irish traditions and eventually enormous American influence. History
What survived remarkably well through all those changes was the dead.
Allhallowtide placed remembrance of the departed at the very heart of the season. All Hallows’ Eve preceded All Saints’ Day on 1 November and All Souls’ Day followed on 2 November. Medieval souling traditions saw people go from house to house receiving food in return for prayers for the dead. In Ireland and Scotland, guising developed its own traditions of disguise, visiting and performance. The Halloween doorstep crowded with children demanding chocolate is separated by centuries from these customs, but the idea of somebody arriving at the door on this particular night has a considerably longer history than the fun-size Mars Bar. History
And doors matter.
Over the past thirty cards we have repeatedly found ourselves standing at boundaries. Churchyard gates. Fairy paths. Rivers. Wells. Caves. Mirrors. Ancient stones. Roads where something appears and disappears. Houses where the dead refuse to leave. Hills beneath which another world supposedly continues without us. Even the previous card gave us a literal doorway into somewhere else.
That is because folklore loves a threshold.
A threshold is neither one place nor the other. Stand in a doorway and, for a moment, you are not entirely inside or outside. Twilight is neither day nor night. Samhain sits at a seasonal boundary, harvest behind and winter ahead. Midnight belongs to two days. Shorelines constantly negotiate between land and water. Crossroads exist because separate journeys briefly occupy the same ground.
Give folklore a place that is neither quite this nor quite that and sooner or later something peculiar will turn up there.
Sometimes that something is us.
Accounts collected in Ireland well into the twentieth century continued to describe Halloween as a night particularly associated with ghosts, spirits, divination and possible communication with the dead. The Schools’ Collection, assembled during the 1930s and now preserved by the National Folklore Collection at University College Dublin, contains hundreds of Halloween traditions. One account from County Roscommon explicitly records the belief that spirits and ghosts could return and that communication with the dead was possible on Halloween night. Whatever we make of those beliefs today, they were not archaeological curiosities. They remained part of remembered folk tradition within living memory of the people who recorded them. Dúchas
But the visitors were not necessarily dead relatives popping round for a sentimental reunion.
The Otherworld of Celtic tradition is considerably stranger than that. Its inhabitants might be generous, dangerous, beautiful, deceptive or simply operating according to rules mortals do not understand. Samhain stories include journeys into supernatural realms and encounters with beings who ordinarily remain beyond human reach. The tale of Nera, for example, places its hero amid the uncanny events of Samhain and carries him into the Otherworld before returning him to the human one. History
There is a warning buried in stories like these. Crossing the boundary is easy. Understanding what happens after you cross it is another matter entirely.
Perhaps that is why food became so important. Across different periods and traditions, food was offered, shared, requested or deliberately left available. Later folklore includes customs in which the dead were symbolically welcomed back into the household, while other offerings were intended for considerably less familiar supernatural visitors. History
It is tempting to look at all this and imagine frightened people desperately attempting to keep ghosts away. I suspect that misses half the point.
Death was once far less successfully hidden than it is today. People died at home. Bodies remained within communities before burial. Families experienced infant mortality, epidemic disease, dangerous childbirth and accidents at rates thankfully unfamiliar to most of us now. The dead did not immediately disappear into institutions and euphemisms. They remained part of family and community memory.
A night on which they might return need not therefore have been entirely frightening.
There is something rather tender in the idea of leaving space for someone who is gone.
And there is something very human about wanting, just once, for the door not to have closed completely.
Perhaps this is why the veil survives even among people who would never claim to believe literally that the dead walk on Halloween. We still visit graves. We keep photographs. We cook recipes belonging to people who are no longer here. We tell their stories and repeat their expressions. We wear jewellery they once wore and keep ridiculous little objects because their hands touched them.
Memory is its own form of haunting.
The people we lose continue to occupy the world through us.
That makes Halloween a peculiar mixture of fear and affection. We tell stories about ghosts because death frightens us, but we also tell them because absence hurts. A ghost story contains, hidden somewhere beneath all the rattling chains and footsteps on empty stairs, an extraordinarily hopeful proposition.
What if leaving isn’t quite the same as disappearing?
Nobody can demonstrate that the boundary between worlds becomes thinner on 31 October. There is no instrument with which we can measure a veil, no supernatural barometer announcing that Otherworld conditions will become unusually permeable after sunset. The phrase belongs to belief, spirituality and folklore rather than measurable physics.
But perhaps literal proof is not really what the tradition asks of us.
For one night, we acknowledge the boundary.
We remember that generations stood where we stand now, worried about winter, buried their dead, told stories in darkness and wondered what happened when life ended. We remember people whose names survive and countless others whose names have vanished. We acknowledge that our own certainty about the world extends only so far before it reaches the edge of what we actually know.
And then, because human beings apparently cannot encounter an unknowable mystery without decorating it, we carve faces into vegetables, light candles, dress as monsters and hand sweets to tiny witches at the door.
I rather like that.
Thirty cards ago, we began this journey with the unexplained. Since then we have followed ghosts through old houses, strange creatures across lonely landscapes, witches into folklore, lights into the sky and stories into places where history and legend become almost impossible to separate. We have met the Wild Hunt, heard voices where nobody was speaking, found bones hidden in walls, opened forbidden books and, against all sensible advice, followed paths into the Otherworld.
So there could only really be one place for the final card to take us.
To the boundary itself.
The Veil does not ask us to decide what is waiting on the other side.
It simply asks us to acknowledge that there is another side – whether we understand that as death, memory, folklore, the supernatural, the unknown or the enormous territory beyond the limits of human understanding.
Tonight the old stories say the distance is smaller.
So light a candle.
Remember your dead.
Tell the old stories.
Keep something sweet ready for whatever knocks at the door.
And if, somewhere between the last light of October and the first darkness of November, the world feels just a little larger and stranger than it did yesterday, perhaps we do not need to explain it immediately.
Some doors should never close completely.
Joker: The Veil
The Veil is the card of endings, remembrance and the quiet possibility that separation is not always as absolute as it feels.
It appears at a threshold. Something has ended, or is changing beyond recognition, and you cannot follow it in the form you once knew. There may be grief here, but The Veil is not a card of despair. It reminds us that what has gone can continue to shape what remains.
People survive in stories, habits, recipes, photographs, ridiculous sayings and objects nobody else understands why we keep. Places remember footsteps. Traditions outlive the people who began them. Even when a door closes, something passes through before it does.
The Veil also asks us to become comfortable with not knowing. Not every mystery requires an answer. Not every absence needs filling with certainty. Sometimes there is courage in standing at the edge of what we understand and admitting that beyond it lies something we cannot see.
And because this is the final card, its message belongs to the whole deck.
We have spent thirty-one days looking into the dark.
We found ghosts and monsters, strange lights and old gods, witches, fairies, unexplained voices, impossible animals and stories that have survived for centuries because somebody thought they were worth telling again.
But darkness was never the destination.
The point was always to carry a light into it.
When The Veil appears, ask yourself: What do I carry forward from the things, places and people I have had to leave behind?
Remember them.
Tell their stories.
And keep the light on.
Some doors should never close completely. 🖤
Sources:
The National Folklore Collection’s Dúchas Schools’ Collection provides contemporary twentieth-century records of Irish Halloween beliefs and customs, including traditions concerning spirits and communication with the dead. Dúchas For the historical development of Samhain, Halloween and Allhallowtide, the HISTORY overviews provide useful secondary background and distinguish the various strands that eventually contributed to modern Halloween. History
Dúchas — The Schools’ Collection
