Spells for Halloween

Celebrate Halloween with White Magic Scrying, Spells and Magic

Oct 4, 2009

Many people celebrate Halloween by honouring the dead, strengthening family ties, and using scrying mirrors, spells and magic to find future happiness and love.

Halloween is the time of year when many believe the barrier between the living and those who have gone before becomes thinner and more transparent, and when spells for Halloween are thought to have particular resonance and power.

Those who celebrate Halloween's deeper history believe strongly in its traditions and rituals, and even those who do not believe in witches and the supernatural appear to have a wish for there to be some truth in the superstitions. People like to be beguiled by "what if."

Use Spells and Magic With Care

For centuries, there have been rituals performed by young women at this time of year to find out who their future lover will be, and no doubt performed just as frequently by young men although they don't appear to be mentioned in the books that cite these practices.

It is important to note however that true Pagans have always insisted that spells and magic must incorporate the issue of free choice, and that no spell should be performed that impinges on the rights of another to make their own choices in life.

Using a Scrying Mirror

Scrying is the practice of looking into a reflected surface such as water or a mirror, to divine the future, and one of the most enduring scrying rituals has been for a young woman to go to her mirror at midnight, light a candle and comb her hair. It was believed that if she concentrated silently on asking who she would marry, she would see an image reflected in the mirror of her future life partner.

There are many variations on this superstition; some suggested that she should simply allow her mind to open to the universe so that she would receive a mind image of her future lover's face.

An alternative to reflections in a glass was use the reflective properties of water as a scrying mirror. A woman would take a lamp to light her way to a moonlit pond or stream, and then leaning over the bank at midnight to see her reflection in the water she believed she would see the face of her future lover.

One of the many old Halloween magic spells involved taking a number of hazelnuts in their shells and lining them up against the fire in the hearth. Each hazelnut represented a man to whom she was drawn.

Reciting a rhyme that commanded the hazelnuts to pop or to char, she watched to see what each nut would do, and it's the hazelnuts that popped their shells and escaped the fire that represented the lucky man – or men.

There are contradictions in spells of course, and another that uses hazelnuts suggested that a nut that popped and escaped the fire signified infidelity, as in the following version: should a woman have a lover or an admirer, he and she could test their love for each other by throwing two hazelnuts into the fire, one to signify each partner.

If one hazelnut burned rather than jumping out of the fire, that person would be full of passion, and should both burn, they would marry. The hazelnut that jumped out of the fire suggested the person represented would be unfaithful.

An alternative hazelnut spell was to crush a walnut, a hazelnut and some nutmeg together, bind the fragments with butter and sugar and form the paste into little tablets which she ate before going to bed.

Dreaming of wealth and money allegedly foretold that she would marry into prosperity, and if she had a dream about strange noises and upsets in the house, she would marry a workman. Storms and forked lightning in her dreams suggested that she would be marrying a traveling man, though of which trade it's not made clear in the spells.

The apple is an ancient symbol of fertility and knowledge in folklore. One of the most popular spells using apples was for a woman to cut the peel from an apple in one long strip and throw it behind her on the ground. The peel might fall into the shape of a letter of the alphabet which would correspond to the initial of the man she would marry.

A version of the rhyming spell to accompany the apple paring might go as follows: "I pare this apple round and again / My sweetheart's name to flourish plain / I fling the pairing [sic] o'er my head / My sweetheart's letter on the ground be read."

Another version was that a woman should cut and eat an apple in front of the mirror at midnight, when it was believed that an image of her future lover would appear in the mirror's reflection and ask to share the apple.

White Magic

Doubtless there are some who are skeptical of the spells used over the centuries to divine the future and predict who someone would marry, but in social terms these spells were and continue to be practised around the world in the pursuit of future happiness and love.

White magic has always been presented as powerful and effective and yet there is no record of ill will being attached to such spells. Indeed, many practitioners still assert that as long as the practice of magic allows for free choice, the pursuit of true love and happiness cannot be anything but benign.

The copyright of the article Spells for Halloween in Pagan/Wiccan Practice is owned by Suzanne Bosworth. Permission to republish Spells for Halloween in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.