SAMHAIN IS A season that makes a particular invitation for magic, the supernatural and the dark; suburban streets full of eerie things, children’s painted faces, supermarkets full of pumpkins and sweets, the imported idea of trick and treat.

Yet, there was a time when an Irish Halloween offered up reasonably straightforward instructions for understanding magic and enacting prediction. The shape of the future arrived in small acts, peeling an apple in one continuous strip, then casting it over your shoulder and examining the letter it made upon landing.

It might be a J or an M, or a T, apparently the initials of the person you will surely end up marrying. My grandmother used to tell me that two nuts placed in a fire would most certainly reveal the fate of a romance; for a long time, I doubted her belief in this particular type of fortune-telling.

As children, we would exuberantly dig our way through the barmbrack-a ring for marriage, a coin for wealth, a rag for poverty, a pea for a life unmarried, or a stick for a life full of quarrels. We all wanted the coin, a life of wealth, its own particular yearning from the vantage of a rural Irish 1980s childhood; an occasional argument though would ensue about the ring, depending of course on its quality.

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These old Irish rituals with their magic, prediction and unruly games seem increasingly distant from contemporary Halloween. The veil between the living and the dead still grows thin at this time of the year; the spirits wander, but very few children remain eager about bobbing for apples in an old kitchen basin full of water.

Instead, retailers remake magic and the supernatural into commercial opportunity and plastic skeletons and high-tech ghosts abound. Yet the appetite for magic has clearly survived, and the recent flourishing of tarot activities in Ireland shows that many of us still want a hand in the practice of turning over fortunes; we still, it seems, yearn for magic in our lives.

In many towns and cities in Ireland, it is possible to organise an entire social life around the tarot with beginner courses, tarot circles and weekly tarot meetups, tarot and matcha gatherings, yoga, sound baths and tarot sessions, tarot and art workshops and of course (most importantly) tarot and wine evenings. All manner of opportunities now exist to explore intuition, spiritual guidance, and psychic development with other people. Bookshops sell beautifully illustrated tarot and oracle cards aplenty, and witchtok and other forms of social media offer an endless procession of readers (some genuine, some clickbait) shuffling cards towards cameras whilst announcing that a particular message has found you just at the very moment you needed it.

While I would like to pretend that I have observed all of this from the objective distance of an anthropologist intrigued by how magic is replenishing many of us in this world on fire, the growing number of tarot and oracle decks in my own home would suggest otherwise.

I have been........

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