The Oldest Thing We Still Do
Of all the things attached to Samhain, divination is the oldest and the most stubbornly persistent. Long after the fires stopped being lit on hillsides, people were still peeling apples in one strip and throwing the peel over their shoulder. The folk practices survived because they were fun, they were cheap, and they were done in kitchens rather than temples.
This is a guide to the divination of the season: the old kitchen methods, and the more familiar tools done in a way that suits the dark half of the year.
What divination is doing here. None of what follows predicts the future. What these methods do is give the part of you that already knows something a way to say it out loud, whether that is a structure, an image, or an interruption to ordinary thinking. Treat the answers as material to think with, not instructions to follow. The methods that survived are the ones that were good at that.
Why this season
Practically: the harvest was in, the work had stopped, the nights were long, and there was time. Divination is a winter pastime because winter is when people are indoors with nothing to do.
Symbolically: Samhain sits at the seam of the year, and seams (thresholds, dusk, doorways, the turn of a season) are traditionally where divination is thought to work best. Whatever you make of that, it does concentrate the attention, and attention is most of what these methods need.
The kitchen methods
These are the genuinely old ones, recorded across Ireland, Scotland, England and Appalachia. They need nothing you do not already own.
The apple peel
The most widespread of all Hallowe'en divinations.
- Peel an apple in a single unbroken strip. This is the difficult part and it is meant to be.
- Hold the peel, turn three times, and throw it over your left shoulder.
- Read the shape it lands in as a letter, traditionally the initial of a future love.
Read it more usefully as: whatever letter, name or word you find yourself reaching for is worth noticing. The peel is a prompt, not an oracle.
Colcannon charms
Irish, and still done. Small objects are hidden in a dish of colcannon (mashed potato with cabbage or kale) and each diner reads whatever they find in their portion. The traditional set is a ring (marriage), a coin (money), a thimble (a life alone), and a button.
Charms in food are a genuine choking hazard, and small metal objects should never be served to children or to anyone who has not been told the charms are there. Wrap each one in baking parchment, tell everyone at the table before serving, and put nothing smaller than a coin in the dish.
Barmbrack
The same idea baked into an Irish fruit loaf, and the version you can still buy in shops in Dublin in October, charms included. The same warning applies.
Roasting nuts
Two hazelnuts named for two people, set side by side near a fire or on a hot pan. If they roast quietly together, that is read one way; if one cracks and leaps away, another. Hallowe'en was called Nutcrack Night in parts of England for precisely this.
Egg white in water
Drop a little raw egg white into a glass of warm water and read the shapes it makes as it spreads. It is a form of scrying that requires no equipment whatsoever. Traditional across a wide area, and genuinely absorbing.
Mirror scrying
The classic Hallowe'en method, and the one with the most theatrical reputation.
- A dark room, a mirror, one candle placed behind you so the flame is not reflected directly at you.
- Sit far enough back that your face is soft rather than sharp.
- Let your eyes unfocus and rest on the middle distance in the glass, not on your own features.
- Twenty minutes, no longer. Set a timer.
- Write down what you saw immediately afterwards, before you interpret any of it.
What you are likely to experience is the Troxler effect: hold your gaze steady on a dim, low-contrast image and your visual system stops updating the unchanging parts of the scene, so faces distort, features dissolve and shapes drift. Knowing the mechanism does not spoil the practice. It just means the strangeness is reliable rather than lucky, and it is why this method has stayed in use for centuries.
Stop if you feel genuinely distressed rather than pleasantly unsettled. Mirror scrying can be quite disorienting, and it is not a good practice if you are unwell, exhausted, or working through anything acute. Twenty minutes, lights on afterwards, eat something.
A Samhain tarot spread
Five cards, laid left to right. Designed for the turn of the year rather than for general reading.
- 1. The harvest. What this year actually produced, not what you hoped for.
- 2. What is finished. The thing that has genuinely ended, whether or not you have admitted it.
- 3. What comes with me. What is worth carrying into the dark half.
- 4. What waits in the dark. What the coming months are for. Often the least comfortable card.
- 5. The one at the table. What the dead, or the older part of you, would say about all of it.
Lay it once and leave it out overnight if you can. The fifth card frequently reads differently in the morning.
If the cards themselves are still new to you, the guide to the tarot suits and the Fool's Journey are the two places to start. There is also a daily draw on the site if you would rather sit with one card at a time through the season.
Pendulum work
The pendulum suits this season because its answers are blunt, and Samhain questions tend to be ones you have been avoiding a straight answer to.
Keep the questions closed and specific. "Is this finished?" is a good Samhain question. "What should I do with my life?" is not a pendulum question at all. The beginner's pendulum guide covers establishing your yes and no before you start.
Black mirror and bowl scrying
If you would rather not look at your own face:
- A dark bowl of water, candlelit, is the oldest form and the easiest to improvise.
- A black mirror. A picture frame with the glass painted matte black on the reverse. Ten minutes to make.
- A polished piece of obsidian, if you have one.
The technique is the same as mirror scrying and so is the twenty-minute limit. Water made under the moon is traditional here if you keep any. See how to make moon water.
Write it down, then leave it alone
The step almost everyone skips, and the one that makes the difference between a party trick and a practice.
- Record immediately. What you saw or drew, before any interpretation. Raw.
- Interpret separately, ideally the next day. Mixing the two contaminates the record.
- Date it and put it away.
- Read it back at the spring equinox. This is the whole reason to keep records: six months later you can see which readings were genuinely useful and which were you telling yourself what you wanted to hear. Nothing improves divination faster than that comparison.
A grimoire or book of shadows is the natural home for this, and a dream journal kept over the same season pairs with it unusually well, because the dark half is when most people's dreams get louder.
When not to do this
Divination is not a good idea when you are looking for permission, or for reassurance about something you have already decided, or when you are in acute distress and hoping the cards will make a decision you cannot face. It is at its best when you are genuinely undecided and want a structure for thinking.
And it is not a substitute for medical, legal or financial advice, or for a conversation with a person who can actually help. If you find yourself reaching for the cards several times a day on the same question, that is worth noticing in itself.
The dates
Samhain 2026 falls across three dates: Saturday 31 October, the solar cross-quarter on Saturday 7 November, and the Scorpio new moon on Monday 9 November. For divination specifically, the new moon on the 9th is the strongest of the three by the logic of the practice: the darkest sky, the empty page, the actual turn of the year.
Do the kitchen methods with company on the 31st. Save the scrying for the 9th, alone.