Grief Spells For Scorpio season + Samhain: making home in the unknown

The Veil by Helen Lundeberg

Dear Shapeshifter,

I hope that wherever you are in your grief today, you are feeling held, and perhaps even a little at home.

This season has me thinking about water and grief, festivals of death, and the fertility of our fault lines, thresholds, and the unknown.

Water is our first home. We grow in a watery womb and come into this world through water breaking. Water holds, immerses, nourishes, cleanses, protects, sustains all life. We are intimate with water, and yet the ocean makes us feel small, in awe of its unknown and unfamiliar realms. 

Grief reveals to us the ways we are water: it draws it out of us, it draws us to it, it reveals to us our shared shapeshifting and multidimensional nature. We see storms, thrashing waters and we relate, we find peace in calming waters, renewal in submerging ourselves in bodies of water. We cry salt water. We experience our emotions, memory, imagination in the metaphors of water: we melt, we get flooded, we freeze, we swim, we drink in, we drown, we flow, we channel, emotions cascade and roll and crash like waves. We remember, again and again, the ways we are water.

The season of Scorpio, a water sign, offers particular reflections for us on thresholds, water, and liminality.  Here we dwell on the threshold of winter, one foot in this world and one foot in the underworld, where we are invited to dive into the portals of the unknown and our subconscious, to deepen our intuitive and magical practices. 

Samhain is the Gaelic celebration of thresholds and liminality, a festival marking the transition to the darker half of the year, a festival of the dead. It’s said not only the spirits of the dead but all manner of supernatural beings could move more easily between our world and the Otherworld during this time. Ancient burial grounds were opened, divination using nuts and apples was practiced, feasts and bonfires were had, costumes and disguises were worn as people traveled around their neighborhoods trading verses for food, and the dead were set a place at the table.

The festivals of death at this time of year remind us that grief and joy are woven together. These are festivals after all, where we are invited to pour libations, celebrate the liminal, thresholds, the dead, the thinning of the veil, our undying connections to them.

And grief itself is an altared, liminal state, in which we may experience not just sorrow but an impossibility of ignoring the sacred and the magic of being alive at all. The unknown extends a hand, asks us to dance.

This time of year can be so interesting for those of us in grief, for this time of year, connections with the dead, death, loss, mystery, and liminality are more widely celebrated, or at least acknowledged and given a place at the table.

We might use this season’s wider support and curiosity to lean into and validate even more deeply our own experiences of grief, death, and intuitive grief practices and rituals, as well as to beckon others into community and festival around the unknown, grief, and death. Have or attend that death café. Create some death and grief related art together. Create that altar to your beloved dead, whether they are your animal companions, your friends, your parents or relatives, your ancestors - whether or not they are your blood relatives. Cook a dead loved one’s favorite meal. Tell their stories. Play their favorite music or learn to sing their favorite songs. Tell their favorite jokes. Go to one of their favorite places. Get low to the earth somewhere, whether it’s the floor of your bedroom or the forest, and allow yourself to pour open, saying and feeling whatever needs to be said and felt. Create a grief spell in the form of a dance, a poem, a song, a prayer, a cup of tea, a meal. Make this moment full of delicious offerings to the ways we are cracked open by our love of life and one another, honoring our inklings and how even what might feel like scraps of our ancestral practices or embodied knowledge for relating with death and grief persist.

Our bodies and hearts are wise, even and especially in the breaking. I’m thinking about the fertility of our fault lines. Bayo Akomolafe, says: “Do not pray exclusively to the ancestors of the land, make room also for the spirits of the fault line, the new gods that scream through the cracks with the first musical notes of worlds to come.”

Perhaps one spirit of these fault lines is some descendant of Venus, who I associate with the Star of the major arcana in Tarot. If you aren’t familiar with the image, the star performs a ritual with water and earth, pouring the water in a circular motion with two pitchers. They are naked and crouched on a threshold of the shoreline, feet in the sand, mixing the waters of the subconscious with the soils of the conscious world. And they look quite comfortable in the mystery of their ritual. Laeticia Barbier says the Star is "welcomes us to the other side, after the death card… She teaches us that death can be fertile ground." The star as Venus teaches us that love isn’t a thing we can waste, that we can trust the ways it cracks us open. What pours out of these cracks is sacred, is nourishment, is courage, is a kind of homecoming.

“This homecoming is not an arrival in the sense we would like to understand it. It is a coming to the precipice of our own skins – where rational sense ceases its reign as the monologue that weaves the world together; it is a realization that we are not the centre of the universe or in control of it. The ‘old’ modern assumption that the world is a protracted sentence, to which we must keep adding new phrases of progress, is being interrupted. We ‘now’ live in a lisp. At the tip of the tongue. And as our faith in the normal – in our ability to harness technology to create a ‘better’ world, in the integrity of our political institutions, in the trajectory of piety – implodes, we find ourselves on a continent we have never traversed before. We are lost. The correct answer is no longer enough… Yet, this tragic decentering of the ‘human’, of language, of story, is ‘our’ greatest hope. This stuttering nonsense is the syllable of radical difference.” (Bayo Akomolafe)

How can you honor your own breaking as courageous and nourishing for this world? How can you sit with the dead, your own grief, and being with the unknown, invite others along with you, all while not knowing, and validate that there are so many ways to do this? If your grief is not related to the death of a loved one, but another loss- perhaps of a relationship, a home, or collective grief for the onslaught of collective loss in this world, how can you use this time of year to recognize and hold as sacred that loss and grief too? Because it is. 

Griefy questions for a watery, liminal season

What if instead of seeking closure in grief, we imagine grief as an opening?

What if we embrace the ways we have been cracked open?

What if this being together in grief is a portal?

What if we approached grief rituals as opportunities to sit together with the unknown? 

What if we gave ourselves permission to not know what we’re doing, to be messy, and to create something together anyway?

What if grief makes it impossible not to join the mess of the world?

What if instead of tending to grief with the hope of its banishment, we tended our grief with welcome and nourishment? 

What if we held our broken pieces with reverence, saw their sacredness, celebrated their brilliance? 

What if the point is to be so completely broken open that we cannot help pouring ourselves into this world? 

What if instead of trying to put the pieces back together, we gave ourselves permission to become something else?

What if this being together in grief is a homecoming?

Into the dark and unknown, let’s make a home here together.

Grateful for you,

Mara June

P.S. Writing has always helped me to bear the unbearable, has always felt like part spell and part love letter. Grief spells is a monthly creative project/love letter/newsletter for fellow grieflings that I’m just starting, and part of a bigger dream of building my own accountability in writing + art making. You’ll receive little love notes like this one, resources, and updates on offerings. Sign up here.

P.P.S. You can still access the recording of the memorial waters workshop here.