A Samhain ritual for the ancestors and the season's final invitation.
This weekend is Samhain.
The veil between worlds is at its thinnest. The dead are close. The year is turning toward its dark half. And we are five days past the Full Moon in Taurus, the Hunter's Moon, which illuminated everything solid and real and worth preserving as the season deepens.
Mercury is retrograde in Scorpio. Venus is retrograde in Libra, having moved back from Scorpio last week. Two of the most communicative planets are moving backward at the same time, which means this is not a time for rushing forward. It's a time for finishing, for witnessing, for tending what's been unearthed.
And Samhain is exactly the right ritual container for all of it.
This is the night when we say the names of the ones who came before us. The ones who survived long enough to make us possible. The ones who held things so we could eventually set them down. The ones whose patterns we're still untangling… not with resentment, but with the clear-eyed understanding that they were doing what they could with what they had, and we get to do something different.
✨ SPELL
Even when the moon isn’t new or full, we don’t have to wait for a “special” sky to practice reclaiming ourselves.
Ritual isn’t about the calendar—it’s about interrupting the grind, reorienting to what matters, and reminding yourself you’re not just here to produce.
Here’s a ritual for this week, aligned with the current zodiacal season. Minimal supplies. Maximum reclamation.
Fire for the Ancestors
A Samhain ritual for naming the dead and tending the line.
Supplies:
A candle
Optional: a photograph of or object belonging to someone who has died
Steps:
Light the candle.
Say the names of your dead. Biological, chosen, historical, ancestral. However many names come. Let them be imperfect names, partial names, names you only half-remember.
For each name, speak one truth: what they gave you, what they couldn't give you, or simply that they existed and made your existence possible.
Then say aloud: "What ends with me, ends. What continues through me, I choose deliberately."
Let the candle burn as long as feels right.
The veil is thin. They can hear their names.
✊ HEX
You don’t need a rundown of the headlines. You’re living them. Whether you’re in the U.S. or just suffering under its ripple effects, the harm is real—and relentless.
This isn’t catharsis. It’s counter-spell.
Each HEX is a ritual of refusal—a channel for holy rage, spiritual disruption, and deliberate, directed dissent.
Here’s who we’re targeting. And what to do about it.
Fear Is a Spell, Too
I cannot read the future. Neither can you. But let me tell you what I can read.
The Army rehearsed digging temporary mass graves for its own dead. The Pentagon is paying $41 million to develop a battlefield ketamine wafer. And this week Senator Chris Murphy said he’s been briefed on a reported plan to restart the Iran war after the election. “Their plan is insane,” he said.
My read, not a briefing: a military preparing for a bigger war. That is frightening. It is not a plan for you. We do not plan from fear. Fright responses do not allow us full access to our prefrontal cortex. We literally cannot think clearly when we are afraid.
Trump also canceled his Kansas and Iowa rallies in favor of phone rallies. The stated reason is strategy. Then he reinstated the rallies today. Nobody on your timeline knows more than that. When something goes unexplained, fear moves in. For some of us, though, it’s more anticipation and hope that we’ll be popping bottles soon. Either way, the point is, your social media feed is not psychic. The news media is not psychic. And fear is permeating everything right now.
Some fear is information. Some fear is a leash. Election experts say the bigger danger this November is distrust, people deciding it’s rigged or pointless and staying home.
Here’s what else happened this week:
In Serbia, students who started with vigils after a train station roof killed sixteen people spent two years organizing, held nightly assemblies with no single leader, and on Sunday their list won more than half the vote. Turnout hit a thirty-year high. A party that held power for fourteen years conceded.
In France, high school students shut down hundreds of schools and marched by the hundreds of thousands. The government gave ground: smaller classes, more teachers, more university seats. The students say it isn’t enough, and they’re still in the street. But it’s a concession when the government initially said they’d get nothing.
In Brazil, voters re-elected Lula after a grassroots push that, in one Brazilian lawyer’s words, started with a few students and some people on WhatsApp who believed in the impossible. Brazilians are sharing what worked, and in case you haven’t seen the strategy:
One. Organize where you already are. Group chats, your church, your block. Coordinate with the people already in the room, and talk about the same thing at the same time.
Two. Don’t feed the bait. Don’t comment on it, don’t share it, don’t quote it, because every bit of engagement boosts it. If you need to show what they’re doing, screenshot it and talk over it. Then pour your energy into the voices you want to follow. Watch them. Share them. Save them.
Three. Show up. You don’t have to be thrilled with your candidate. Vote anyway. “You can organize the revolution later, but not if you’re dead.”
So today we hex the fearmongering.
We hex the people who manufacture it on purpose.
We hex the ones who profit from our panic.
We hex the algorithm that serves the scariest version first.
And we hex the part of us that shares before it checks, and the part that quote-posts the bait.
Then we call in better ancestors.
Tomorrow is Samhain, when we say the names. A lot of us, especially white folks, inherited ancestors we’d rather not claim. So we choose who we carry forward. And we have some new ancestors now that we can call upon to help us through this period: Patrick Stewart, raised by a violent father, who became best known for playing gentle ones. Dolly Parton, who put free books in children’s hands. Tim Curry, who made a whole generation feel allowed. Catherine O’Hara, who made being a glorious mess look like joy. Peter Cullen, who told us to be strong enough to be gentle.
Not instead of facing where we actually come from. In addition to it.
Four days. Make your plan. Bring somebody. Stay in line. And vote!
Don’t let fear do their work for them.
📞 Action
Start a group chat today with five people and make your voting plan together: when, where, who’s driving whom. Check your polling place at vote.gov. You can reply to this email and share your voting plan with me if you’d like. I’ll check in with you on Tuesday!
Pick one voice you want to follow and amplify it this weekend. Watch, share, save, comment.
If you hit problems or intimidation, call 1-866-OUR-VOTE.
Don’t engage with anything right-wing online. And before you share anything scary, find the original source. If you can’t, don’t pass it on.
With the dead named and the candle burning,
Keli Lyn Jewel
PS: Samhain is one of the Spiral Path's Cyclical Immersion seasons. It’s the place we do ancestor work, tend the threshold, and move through the dark half of the year together rather than alone. If you've been feeling the pull to go deeper into this work in community, now is exactly the right time. Come inside. And if the retrograde season has been surfacing something that needs 1:1 excavation, The Deep End is where we go beneath it.
