I was talking
with a non-magic friend the other day and he asked me about spirits connected
to places. The idea of a place having a certain character or spiritual presence
is a pretty common one even outside of the magical world. The idea that ghosts
attach to particular places is also a common one even for people who have no
real experience of the spirit world. Sometimes, we might wonder about spirits
which might have broader ranges of activity, or types of spirits associated with
a place or a culture. Do those show up elsewhere?
When we talk
about Gods or Angels or Devils there is generally an assumption that they can
go wherever. They can hear a call from someone wherever that person is. That
doesn't mean there aren't spatial associations with those beings. Angels and
Devils have associations with particular directions, particular times, and
particular astrological moments. We might expect them to arrive from a given
direction. We might expect communicating with them, or getting them to do
things in the world, to be easier at certain times. We tend to think of gods as
less limited, but in many cultures gods still have homes that are physical
places we can go to. Many goddesses are identified with rivers or natural
formations. Some gods live in particular monuments or particular land
formations associated with their myths. In certain periods of Greek culture,
and in early Christianity, this was explained as spirits in service to those
gods residing in temples or in physical places and being approached and
interacted with as the god, rather than the god itself living there.
When we look
at "small gods" or various other-spirits that we might consider
fair-folk or something similar to the fair-folk, the spatial quality becomes
more pronounced. Some types of spirits are known to live in houses, some live
in the woods, some live in rivers, some live in deserted or unclean places. It
depends on the type of spirit but based on the type of spirit they have places
they live. While we might recognize similarities between spirits in one culture
or another we can also see that the particular "species" or type of
spirit differs. Different cultures have different spirits which have their own
appearances, ways of interacting with people and their own tastes and
preferences. Since those spirits we known by people residing in different
places, and those spirits often have particular types of residences in those
places we might consider that they have a tie to a particular physical
location.
People who
work with the fair folk in diaspora tend to have the opinion that "the
other crowd" tends to follow along with their people as their people
migrate. If a significant portion of a people travel and explore new places,
some of their household spirits might go with them. Other folk spirits who
reside near and interact with the people might go along for the adventure, or
flee whatever the people are fleeing, and end up in the new place as well. The
fair folk are often seen as being closer to people than some other spirits, so
the idea that they might travel the world as people do is reasonable.
Some cultures
have spirits who are well established as being tied to particular places.
Sometimes it might be a land formation and sometimes it might be a ritual space
like a temple. Whether people of the culture believe that the spirit resides
more strongly there or exclusively there will vary based on the culture, and
possibly the spirit. In some such cases, people will carry direct, or stones,
or bricks from the place belonging to the spirit to new places where new
temples or shrines will be built. This way the new space has a link to the
original place of power and that connection becomes a conduit to make it easier
to connect with that spirit. My own work uses this method at times as well, and
when we do things in magic with stuff like grave dirt, or water from specific
rivers to various churches we're tying to this same idea.
With these two
interpretations we see ideas where spirits might be tied to a place, but have
the ability to move, or the ability to extend what constitutes that place. We
might also view it as the spirits being tied in part to place, but also in part
to the people and the elements of the place and the culture. We'll go a little
more into some implications around this in a moment.
For a lot of
magical practice, ideas around the dead seem to be those which could more
easily be attached to concepts of time or space. You see some magicians who
insist that you can't connect with dead people of even a few decades ago
because they have long since moved on. Others claim to read archaic ancestors
and paleolithic humans when they do ancestor readings for people. Some say the
dead can remain as long as they are remembered, others day the dead are only available
briefly, and some say they're available indefinitely. It's possible that one
view is right and others or wrong, but it's possible that all of them are right
simultaneously despite appearing mutually exclusive. We have to consider the
relationship between time and spirit-realities in order to consider how any of
these could possibly be true.
Another area
that connects the dead with time is the idea that the dead behave in a manner
related to human time, in the sense that they are more or less active at
particular times of the day. One system to considering timing of the dead
considers death as part of a life cycle. We're born, we reach adulthood, we
die, we become an ancestor, we are born. The cycle of life and death moves in a
circle like the sun rising, peaking, setting, vanishing and rising again. As
our cycle of death and life moves like the sun moves through the day, the world
of the dead moves through a daily cycle like the world of the living. We rise,
we're active, we rest, we sleep, we rise again. The dead do the same, but when
the sun is at its height in our world, it is at midnight in theirs, when it is
at midnight in our world then it is at its peak in ours. Thus, the time between
noon, and the heat of the day, and dusk, when one rests, becomes the peak of
celebration and activity in both worlds. By noon we're well roused, and between
about 3pm and 7pm we are free to be active and do things finished with the bulk
of our work and not quite ready to settle in for the day. Contacting the dead
is easiest in the corresponding timeframe. By midnight they are up and moving,
and by 3am they are lively and partying and ready to talk and celebrate with
us.
That view is
not the only one that ties increased activity with the dead to particular times
of the night. Midnight to 1am and 3am to 4am are commonly thought of as
"witching hours" or times when spooky things, particularly activity
involving the dead is heightened. Folklore around particularly haunted graves
often has the dead of the cemetery gathering at the chief grave site at
midnight.
These times
are relatively artificial though. We don't look at them as the dead being more
active when so much time has passed between sunset and sunrise, but at
particular times of the clock. Around the world, these times of the clock will
vary. Do we assume the dead live in parts of the world that have a physical
correspondence to our own and so they experience that time of their day when we
experience it for our region, and the dead of other regions experience time
matched to the people of those regions? I think that would be a little silly
and would also require that the dead are spatially tied to the living with whom
they interact, that doesn't seem to be the case.
Even if the
dead are not spatially attached to communities or families - since ancestors
are able to be called upon remote from where they lived and by their
descendants around the world - we can still recognize concepts related to space
and location tied to the dead. In many ancient, medieval and early modern forms
of necromancy, the grave of the dead person is significant. In contemporary
magic, dirt from a grave can connect us with the power of the inhabitant of
that grave. The spot where a person died, or the space where they lived the
bulk of their life, or a place with an important emotional connection to them,
can all be powerful places for calling or connecting with the dead. Remains of
the dead, or possessions associated with them also have a usefulness in
contacting the dead.
Spirits don't
seem completely bound by time or space or physical concerns, they can be
contact throughout the world and more than one person can be in contact with
them at once. Time and space still matter though. If time made no difference we
could contact ancestors who haven't been born yet. We've addressed several
examples where space and time seem to come into play. But for those who exist
in a manner which seems to not be limited by our physical experience of space and
time, how do we map out the impacts of physical points of reference?
If we consider
all the elements we have discussed, they seem to be about relationship and
experience rather than the spirit world having a shape that relates it to space
and time in the way our physical reality does. If we consider the spirit world
to be shaped by the experiences of spirits and their relationship to other
spirits, including embodied spirits, and their relationship to their own
histories, then all of this starts falling together. Their relationship to time
connects to the spirits who rule particular hours and days, it connects to the
experience of time that the spirits they are connecting with - both embodied
and disembodied - are engaging. Connections to particular physical sites, or
items, or remains, then connect to history, experience, relationship and
sentiment rather than to purely where a physical location sits on the map.
Spirits move with people not just by getting on the boat as people journey to a
new land, but by traveling along pathways of cultural connection and the
portability of community bonds.
It's more
abstract than thinking of time and place as being about the physical picture we
draw on a map or the physical ticking of the clock. Rather time relates to how
experiences play together and feed into each other. Time relates to our
awareness of the juxtaposition of activities. Place relates to things we've
touched, people we're bonded to, spots where we've walked, objects which share
the nature of those people and places. What have we left our marks on, what's
left its mark on us, who have we entangled with? We can think of these not just
as building a mental picture of connections but as shaping a fluid sort of
fabric of being. Like vast objects moving through space warping and re-warping
the gravitational field, the shape of non-physical existence can be a
multi-phased ever shifting series of interactions and connections allowing
multiple moments, spaces, and relationships to overlap because they're parsed
based upon experience rather than based on a linear synchronous limit.
In such a
world, spirits can move on quickly, be accessed indefinitely, and strengthened
by memory and interaction. Spirits can powerfully reside in a given space and
appear in other places which share connections to that space or the people of
that space. Spirits can operate when they choose but may have more powerful
times for operation, and those times might be accessed based on the experience
of the person approaching the spirit rather than the spirit and the person
experiencing those times in synchronous correspondence. Direction can be
important, because direction is relational, and since we see spirits tied to
directions without some ultimate residence that becomes the cardinal defining
limit of that direction, the concept of direction only ever exists as a
relational origin rather than a localized origin. In other words, you will
never be so far west that the king of the west stops being west of you.
Off the cuff,
these concepts can kind of seem like "well, yeah, I guess that's
obvious," and to a degree they might be. They're still very different from
how we tend to approach the ideas of space, time, contact, and
interconnectivity. They imply that connection causes shared space, shared time,
and conditions of being in contact that remain in a fashion such that they can
be engaged or not engaged without having to redefine physical space but adjust
the nature and shape of spiritual space.
This shouldn't
be confused with the kind of modern "time outside of time, space outside
of space" approach to magic. Time and space are sacred realities which
have gods and spirits which that impact and oversee them. These spirit elements
are part of this relational quality and the interconnective element being
described. There is a relevance to things like where you are, when you're doing
things, what you're holding or touching or doing or saying. The apparent
physical relevance might not be the same for you as the nature of how that
relevance shapes the spirit experience of space, time and connection. Space and
time need specific limiting natures on a macro-physical level. Maybe they get
more squiggly on extreme micro-physical levels, but it's not really my place to
speak on that. On a broader level incorporating the spirit world time and space
clearly don't have the same kind of fixed linearity that defines our
experience. Meaning becomes part of the defining character we consider in
understanding this broader reality. What is the meaning of the space, what does
its reality and nature convey, what are the spirits attached to it. This plays
into time, it plays into object, their associations, their form, their powers
and their spirits characterize their ability to be active in forming moments
and interactions, and this is the shape of the existence that unfolds as things
come together to form the meaning that is some particular moment.
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