October is days away, and I cannot wait. But before we get there, I want to take a moment to revisit the cards I pulled for September. Just as much as I think it’s important to write about the cards you pull or the experiences you have in the moment, I also think it’s incredibly important to go back, read them, and connect those dots backward. Do you still agree with your initial assessment, or do you learn a bigger lesson by looking both forward and backward?

Week one: Seven of Wands, Tears, Cauldron. A person on a cliff with six pointy wands all aimed at them. I read it as the circus that shows up in your online comments and as the voice that tells me my practice isn’t worthy. I asked if any of those wands were threats at all (you can’t see anyone actually holding them). Then the Cauldron card led me to do a reel on Cerridwen, whom many of you had thoughts on in the comments and my DMs (which is funny, considering my read on the Seven of Wands).

Week two: The Empress, Mind, Initiation. The Empress taught me about pouring too much into people and ending up emptier than I started. The Mind card had me talking about the versions of our friends we carry around in our heads that don’t match who they actually are. And initiation got me to say out loud that I do, in fact, consider myself a witch. Again, roll the comments. haha

Week three: Knight of Wands, Test, Enchantment. A knight and his adequate stick, charging off to a joust rather than a battle, and the Test oracle card telling me that this Knight keeps charging off to the same thing over and over, expecting a different outcome. The Enchantment spell card gave me a body butter recipe I never made, so I told you how to take 20 seconds to use a scented oil to draw a rune on yourself instead.

Week four: Page of Cups, Disillusion, Athame. Then there was the kid holding a fish who needed to let the disillusionment with his job crumble and use a knife that was never meant to cut anything, but to create a safe space to hold boundaries.

I told you at the beginning of the month that I identify as a Cauldron person and that I desperately need to embrace the athame and do some cutting. The words I wrote were circling around a friendship, and I spent three weeks circling the idea. In many ways, it was what I thought I would be nipping, but that isn’t actually what ended up being cut.

The most unhealthy relationship I discovered I held was with my job, which had a hold over my energy and my time. If you missed Thursday’s post, go back and read it. That’s where the reveal occurred. I had already built in boundaries and limits to protect myself, but I hadn’t considered the guilt I would feel by actually holding them. Guilt that no one handed me other than myself.

Reading the same spread at the end of the month, I saw it sitting there from the very first card I pulled. I looked at the Seven of Wands and connected it to the obvious thing when writing for social media - comments and my own imposter voice. I never once connected it to where I’m at five days a week, giving the most hours of my waking life. Then I saw the Page of Cups as me holding up a small, ornate cup with my shiny little fish, wanting some kind of permission or recognition that no one was ever going to give me. And then there was the athame, the knife, the thing I thought I’d wield like a sword to sever some dramatic metaphorical ties. It actually ended up being a tool for drawing myself a circle that I could stand in and be protected.

I don’t think the cauldron or the blade is great on its own. It was a necessary pairing that allowed me to process and then act. If I’d done it any other way, it probably wouldn’t have had the same outcome.

This is also one of the great things about journaling: looking both forward and backward. I didn’t see any of this in the cards when I originally pulled them. They still taught me lessons when looking forward, but the moment of reflection is the one I’ll carry forward.

There is one card I never wrote about, though, and it was one of the very first: Tears from the Poesis deck. It was paired with the following poem by Megan King:

Reading this now, at the end of the month and a few weeks away from Samhain, it’s giving me all of the feels.

Yesterday’s carousel explained that Samhain is a season, not just one night. I hope to practice some of the traditions I’ve learned about and take the time to sit with the dead this month. My grandma Rosie has been a constant source of inspiration as I continue to build out this project, and I want to take the time to honor her this year, along with all the strong women who are no longer with us and made me who I am today.

On a personal note, I never included this in my practice before moving to Texas. When I came here, I found myself surrounded by the beauty of Día de los Muertos—and not in the Disney, let’s-just-decorate-a-skull kind of way. I was inspired to see how people celebrate this holiday of joy and light that’s all about honoring death.

I now know real people who have been celebrating this holiday every year. They’re the same friends who’ve also inspired my deep appreciation for ancestor work. That appreciation has inspired me to slowly start learning about the holiday’s Mesoamerican Indigenous roots, but I want to tread lightly here, because this tradition isn’t mine to hold. In New World Witchery, Cory Thomas Hutcheson notes that it’s tempting to lump Halloween and the Day of the Dead together, but “these are not equivalent holidays.” He talks about celebrating life by remembering that death is the great equalizer, and how the dead live on in our memories and hearts… which is just really beautiful.

As y’all know from my last newsletter, I’ve been digging into how my Anglo-Saxon ancestors practiced various forms of religion and spirituality. So I was curious how they may have observed this season, and the good old monk Bede and his writings are about to make an appearance again. He recorded that the English named October for the coming of winter and that they called November Blod-monath (the blood month). And it’s as gruesome as it sounds. That name reflected the fact that livestock that couldn’t be fed through winter was slaughtered and dedicated to the gods as sacrifices. So I tried referencing Ronald Hutton, but he doesn’t say whether that was a Blod-monath festival that happened close to Samhain or just another day on the farm. Regardless, I will not be doing this to honor the season. For I have no farm, and I currently worship no deity requiring animal sacrifice.

Samhain itself seems to be Irish. Hutton also says that there isn’t really any evidence that it was a big deal across the Celtic world, or that there were religious ceremonies on it. There are plenty of people on the internet to argue its origins, but I couldn’t care less. There doesn’t seem to be clear, documented, four-thousand-years-unbroken ways to honor Samhain, and most of what we celebrate today is a modern interpretation of what we think they did back in the supposedly four-thousand-year-old days. I don’t need something to be ancient to want to do it, which I’m finding is what most of my practice is built on.

There is, however, some evidence of rituals or customs done to honor the dead way, way back in the day. By the end of the Middle Ages, the English had turned All Saints’ and All Souls’ into what Hutton calls Hallowtide. During the night of Hallowtide, churches would ring bells to comfort the souls of the dead, sometimes all the way until midnight. Then the Reformation tried to ban it, but the people kept ringing anyway. Those same people then got hauled into church courts to be tried for their… crimes of ringing bells?

After that, people stopped ringing the bells and began finding other ways to honor the dead. In the 1800s, Catholic families in Lancashire would climb a hill near their home at midnight. While one person held a pitchfork of burning straw, the rest would kneel in a circle around them and pray for their relatives and friends until the fire went out. And then on the western side of England, folks baked soul cakes and kids started going door to door asking for them (sound familiar?)

It is unsurprising to me that this holiday, which has seemingly always battled to exist, ended up moving into the shadows and getting wrapped up in fear because of Protestant suppression. And this wasn’t even about attacking the pagans; this was infighting amongst Christians.

So seeing the joy of this holiday, held out in the day with vibrant colors and laughter, wasn’t something I’d ever experienced (apparently going back generations) and something I long to incorporate more of as I keep building out my own path. Regardless of whether it’s Pagan, Christian, or something else… I no longer have to do it in the shadows, and I’m grateful for that.

Some of those people eventually crossed an entire ocean and ended up in the Appalachian Mountains, where I was born. Jake Richards writes about Decoration Day in Backwoods Witchcraft. It’s when families would get together, eat (obviously), and then head out to the cemetery to clean and decorate the graves. They’d bring fresh flowers, plates of food, toys, liquor, cigarettes (because the South), and extras to place on graves that might not have even been part of the family but were considered forgotten.

Decoration Day is often associated with some customs of Día de los Muertos, but it happens in late spring, not in the fall, so it’s definitely not the same holiday. But it’s the closest thing my people did that mirrors the same reverence.

I actually don’t remember anything called Decoration Day from when I was a kid, but I do have clear memories of my grandma doing these very things at the cemetery. Cleaning the tombstones, providing fresh flowers (she was a florist), and sitting with the dead were things she knew well. And in some ways, I bet if she knew about Día de los Muertos, she would very much agree with its practice.

So here’s a little to-do I didn’t mention in the Samhain post to help us get ready to honor our loved ones who’ve passed. Write their names down. That’s it. Just take about five minutes to write the names of the people you want to remember this year, whether it’s family, friends, or pets. It doesn’t matter. If you know where any of them are buried, write that down too, and plan to take a trip to sit with them. We’ll be using that list later in the month.

I’m excited to move through this month with y’all (upcoming retrogrades and all) and can’t wait to share more exciting news in November.

xo,
Chad

Below are a few books I’m leaning into for this month’s posts.

The Alchemist Papers arrive about once a week. If it's not for you anymore, the unsubscribe link is at the very bottom, no hard feelings. Want to say something back? Just reply, and it comes straight to me.