Every year, as October moves toward November, the veil is said to grow thin.
The veil is the name often given to the unseen boundary between the physical world and whatever may exist beyond it—the world of spirits, ancestors, the dead, the divine, and forces we cannot ordinarily see. When that boundary is believed to become thinner, communication between those worlds is thought to become easier. Dreams may become more vivid. Divination may become more significant. Ancestors may feel closer. Spirits may move more freely between worlds.
But why now?
Why should the final days of October and the beginning of November be any different from the rest of the year?
In the Northern Hemisphere, this period has always been a visible threshold. The harvest ends. Daylight disappears earlier. Plants retreat into dormancy. Trees lose their leaves. The abundance of summer gives way to winter, and the natural world begins to resemble death even though life remains beneath it.
For people whose survival once depended directly upon the seasons, this transition was not decorative. Winter meant uncertainty. Food had to last. Animals were brought in or slaughtered. Crops had already been gathered. Darkness occupied more of the day. One cycle had unmistakably ended before another had fully begun.
These spaces between one condition and another are sometimes called liminal spaces—thresholds where something is no longer what it was but has not yet become what it will be.
And human beings have repeatedly imagined thresholds as powerful places.
In Irish tradition, Samhain marked the beginning of winter. Medieval Irish literature places extraordinary supernatural activity around Samhain, and later Irish folklore remembers Halloween as “ghost night” or “spirit night.” The dead might return to the family home, supernatural beings were believed to be active, divination was practiced, and people took precautions when traveling after dark.
This is part of the world from which our modern language of a thin veil emerges.
But Ireland is only the beginning of the story.
Travel thousands of miles away and something curious happens.
In Mexico, communities prepare for the temporary return of deceased relatives during Día de Muertos. Paths of flowers and candles help guide souls home. Favorite foods are prepared. Altars are built. Families visit graves. UNESCO describes the celebration not simply as remembering people who have died, but as an annual encounter between the living and their ancestors.
Travel again, this time to Haiti.
During Fèt Gede, beginning in early November, practitioners of Haitian Vodou honor the Gede—the spirits associated with death and the dead. Cemeteries become places of ceremony. Food, drink and candles may be brought to graves. Music and dancing accompany a relationship with death that can be remarkably alive rather than quiet or mournful.
And these traditions are not identical. They emerged from different peoples, histories and spiritual systems. Christianity and colonization also affected the calendars and forms through which some of them are practiced today. Día de Muertos itself reflects the meeting of Indigenous Mexican traditions with Catholic observances introduced by Europeans.
But underneath those differences sits a similarity that is difficult not to notice.
Again and again, around this time of year, the living turn toward the dead.
They prepare for them.
They speak to them.
They feed them.
They pray for them.
They ask for guidance.
They welcome some spirits and protect themselves from others.
They behave as though death has changed the relationship—but has not necessarily ended it.
And perhaps that deserves more consideration than we usually give it.
Many of us have been taught to divide spiritual experiences into categories. Prayer may be sacred while divination is forbidden. An angel may deliver a message, while an ancestor delivering one may be considered dangerous. A vision from God may be accepted as divine communication, while communication with another kind of spirit may be dismissed as superstition—or condemned as something darker.
Yet underneath those distinctions is an extraordinary point of agreement:
There is something beyond what we can see.
The disagreement often begins with what we believe is there—and who we believe we are permitted to communicate with.
So when cultures separated by oceans, languages, histories and religions repeatedly preserve traditions in which the boundary between the living and the dead becomes more permeable, perhaps the most interesting question is not whether they all practiced spirituality in exactly the same way.
Of course they didn't.
The more interesting question is:
What if they were experiencing different expressions of the same thing? What if this particular transition in the year really does alter something we do not yet completely understand? What if generations of people were not simply inventing stories about the dead becoming closer? And what if the veil is not merely an ancient metaphor we inherited—
but something human beings have been noticing for a very long time?
When the Dead Come Near
If the veil is thinning, what do people actually do about it? The answer depends entirely on where you are standing.
In Ireland, the traditions surrounding Samhain developed around a dangerous and powerful threshold. Samhain marked the transition into winter, and early Irish literature repeatedly associates the occasion with supernatural encounters. Later folklore surrounding Halloween describes a night when the dead could return, supernatural beings traveled through the landscape, and ordinary boundaries became less reliable.
That possibility produced both hospitality and caution. In some traditions, food was left for the dead. The household fire carried significance. Divination became part of the evening as people sought information about marriage, death, fortune, and what the coming year might bring. At the same time, there were spirits one did not necessarily want to encounter. Protective customs developed alongside practices of remembrance and divination. The unseen world was not treated as uniformly benevolent simply because it was unseen.
That distinction matters because the idea that the spiritual world contains forces we might welcome and others we might avoid appears again and again across spiritual traditions. Perhaps this is one reason protection and communication have so often existed beside one another. Opening yourself to what cannot be seen also raises the question of discernment: if something answers, how do you know what you are speaking to?
Then Christianity enters the story. November 1 became All Saints' Day in the Western Christian calendar, followed by All Souls' Day on November 2—a period devoted to saints, departed Christians, prayer, remembrance, and the fate of souls after death. The evening preceding All Saints' Day became All Hallows' Eve: Halloween.
Over centuries, Christian observances and older seasonal customs encountered one another, overlapped, survived, changed, and traveled. Irish and Scottish immigrants later carried Halloween traditions to North America, where they continued evolving into something increasingly recognizable as the holiday celebrated today.
The costumes, pumpkins, candy, haunted houses, ghosts, skeletons, witches, and horror movies can make Halloween seem almost entirely commercial now. But beneath all of it, death is still everywhere. We decorate our homes with graves, hang skeletons from porches, become ghosts, tell stories about spirits returning, and deliberately frighten ourselves with the possibility that something dead might still be present. We may have changed the language, but we did not entirely abandon the fascination.
Travel to Mexico, however, and the relationship with the dead takes on another character. During Día de Muertos, death does not simply arrive to frighten the living. The dead are expected, and families prepare for them.
Ofrendas may hold photographs, candles, flowers, food, water, and objects connected to people who have died. Marigolds are associated with guiding the dead. Graves may be cleaned and decorated. Families gather, remember, eat, tell stories, and maintain relationships with people whose physical lives have ended. There is grief here, certainly, but there can also be color, humor, affection, food, music, memory, and celebration. The dead have not become strangers simply because they are dead.
That distinction is important because Día de Muertos is sometimes flattened into a Mexican version of Halloween. It isn't. Its contemporary form developed through a complex history involving Indigenous Mexican relationships with death and ancestors alongside Catholic All Saints' and All Souls' observances introduced during Spanish colonization. And yet we arrive once again at those first days of November. Once again, the dead are near. Food is prepared. Candles are lit. The living deliberately make space for those who are no longer physically present.
Then there is Haiti. Fèt Gede brings us into a spiritual world in which death can become even more immediate. Within Haitian Vodou, the Gede are spirits associated with death and the dead. During the season of Fèt Gede, cemeteries become important ceremonial spaces. Practitioners may visit graves, light candles, make offerings, pray, sing, dance, and honor both the Gede and those who have died.
Here again, death does not necessarily require silence. The Gede can be irreverent, sexual, humorous, provocative, and startlingly alive in their personalities. Their presence complicates the idea that spirituality surrounding death must always be solemn. Death and life are not necessarily treated as opposites that can never touch; the boundary between them can become a place of relationship.
Different countries, different histories, different spiritual languages—and still we find ourselves standing near the dead.
This is where the similarities become difficult to ignore. A person in Ireland leaving something for the dead is not practicing the same religion as a Mexican family preparing an ofrenda. A Haitian Vodouisant honoring the Gede is not performing the same spiritual act as a Christian praying for departed souls on All Souls' Day. We should not erase those differences, but neither should we erase the similarity.
Across these traditions, death does not always mean disappearance. The dead remain capable of relationship. They can be remembered, welcomed, prayed for, spoken to, honored, feared, consulted, celebrated, or protected against.
And that brings us back to the question underneath the veil, because many religions already accept the existence of an unseen world. Christianity asks believers to accept God without seeing God. Angels appear throughout Christian scripture. The Holy Spirit communicates, guides, and moves through human lives. Visions and prophecy occupy important places within the biblical tradition. Miracles require the possibility that forces beyond ordinary physical explanation can affect the material world.
So perhaps the disagreement was never simply about whether an unseen world exists. Perhaps the disagreement is about who is allowed to inhabit it.
One tradition calls an unseen presence an ancestor; another calls it a spirit. Another recognizes a saint, another speaks of an angel, and another encounters a lwa. Depending upon the spiritual worldview through which that encounter is interpreted, communication with the unseen can become sacred, forbidden, ancestral, divine, dangerous, or ordinary.
If we already believe there is something on the other side of the veil, who taught us which voices on the other side we are allowed to hear?
Who Is Allowed to Speak?
Perhaps one of the strangest things about the unseen world is how certain we can become about its rules.
We inherit ideas about what exists beyond us long before most of us are old enough to examine them. We learn which spiritual experiences are sacred and which are suspicious, which beings can be trusted and which should be feared, which practices constitute prayer and which constitute something forbidden. Often, these distinctions feel less like beliefs we were taught and more like facts about the universe itself.
But move from one culture to another and the rules change.
A person who dreams of a deceased grandmother may understand the experience as grief, memory, an ancestral visitation, a message from the dead, or simply a dream. The experience itself may be remarkably similar. What changes is the framework through which it is interpreted.
The same thing happens with spiritual communication. Hearing from an angel may be understood as divine intervention within one tradition, while hearing from an ancestor may be regarded as dangerous. Someone may ask a saint for intercession but feel uncomfortable with another person asking a deceased relative for guidance. Prophecy may be sacred while divination is forbidden. Holy water may carry spiritual significance while spiritually prepared water from another tradition is dismissed as superstition. One person lights a candle and calls it prayer; another lights a candle and calls it ritual.
The actions are not always identical, and their theological meanings certainly are not. But the boundaries between what is considered sacred and what is considered forbidden are often far less obvious than they first appear.
History complicates those boundaries even further. As religions traveled through conquest, migration, missionary activity, enslavement, trade, and colonization, spiritual systems encountered one another under profoundly unequal conditions. The tradition holding institutional power often possessed something else as well: the authority to name what other people were doing.
A practice could become superstition. A spirit could become a demon. A healer could become dangerous. An ancestral tradition could become primitive. A ceremony that had carried meaning within a community for generations could be reinterpreted through an entirely different religious worldview.
Yet traditions have a remarkable way of surviving.
Sometimes they survive openly. Sometimes they adapt. Sometimes one spiritual figure becomes associated with another. Sometimes an older practice continues beneath the language of a newer religion. Sometimes people simply continue doing what their mothers, grandmothers, elders, or communities taught them to do, even when the explanation for the practice changes.
This makes the first days of November particularly fascinating.
Christianity has All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day. Mexico has Día de Muertos. Haitian Vodou observes Fèt Gede. Irish traditions surrounding Samhain and Halloween preserve stories of spirits, the dead, divination, and supernatural encounters. These traditions are historically connected in some places and independent in others; centuries of migration, conversion, colonization, and cultural exchange make any simple explanation impossible.
But something survives beneath all of that complexity: human beings continue making room for the dead.
Perhaps that is because grief refuses to accept disappearance easily. Perhaps maintaining relationships with ancestors helps communities preserve identity and memory. Perhaps rituals surrounding death allow people to live with something every human being eventually has to confront. Anthropology, psychology, religion, and history can offer compelling explanations for why these traditions persist.
But explanation does not necessarily settle the question.
We can explain why people pray without determining whether anyone hears the prayer. We can study the neurological experience of meditation without determining whether consciousness can encounter something beyond itself. We can trace the history of divination without proving that every answer it produces is coincidence. Understanding how a spiritual practice developed tells us something important about human beings; it does not necessarily tell us everything about the reality they believed they were encountering.
The same is true of the veil.
Perhaps autumn's darkness, the end of the harvest, and humanity's awareness of mortality created the perfect conditions for stories about spirits and returning ancestors. Perhaps centuries of religious observance reinforced those ideas until they became tradition. Perhaps human beings simply need ways to keep the people they love present after death.
Those possibilities deserve consideration.
But so does another one.
What if people kept telling us the dead were near because, sometimes, they were?
And perhaps that is where this question ultimately has to leave history, culture, and tradition behind.
Because whether the veil can become thin depends upon something more fundamental: whether you believe there is another side of it.
Do you believe consciousness ends when the body does? Do you believe there is an afterlife, a spirit world, heaven, another realm, or some existence beyond the physical one we occupy now? Do you believe the people who have died are completely gone, or simply no longer here in the way they once were?
There is no historical tradition that can answer those questions for you. No collection of similarities between cultures can prove what exists beyond death. And no editorial should decide what you believe on your behalf.
But perhaps it can make you examine whether you have ever actually asked yourself.
Because before deciding whether the veil is thinning, there is a more fundamental question:
What do you believe is on the other side?
As for me, I am a believer.
I believe our ancestors remain connected to us, that death does not necessarily end the relationships we have with the people who came before us, and that there are moments when they may feel closer than others.
So this Halloween, I will light a candle. I will place food out for my ancestors. I will speak their names, welcome their presence, commune with them, and happily pay homage to the people whose lives made mine possible.
Whatever you believe is on the other side of the veil, that answer belongs to you.
As for me, when the veil grows thin, I will be listening.
— Ameynra J. Alquemi
Founder, Haus Of Alchemy
Manifest your vision.
