What do the Dead Know?

  I noticed two things recently. One was a slogan, “the dead teach us,” and one was someone asking for the source of a proclamation which JSK attributed to Crowley, in which Crowley asserted that there was no reason to bother with the dead because they don’t know anymore than they did while living. These represent two very opposing views on the dead. For a long time in modern magic, the dead were overlooked. Neither modern NeoPagan religions, nor ceremonial magic systems spent much time on necromancy or ancestor veneration. People would talk about how the dead and ancestors were important at Samhain. People didn’t teach or explore necromancy. As a teen, I collected together the handful of materials I could find on necromancy because I thought it was interesting and a rare approach to magic that wasn’t presented in readily available sources. I was proud at age 15, back in 1997, to have collected more necromancy items on my AOL webpage than I’d seen gathered in one place anywhere else. I think it only took about four pieces of material to achieve the goal of presenting more sources on necromancy in one place than I’d seen anywhere else. I’ve always assumed it was because relationships with the dead occur in religious areas of cultural development, and the “magical revival” developed in a social-fraternal context separate from the main culture rather than as a completely integrated cultural answer to religious needs. Maybe that’s why, or maybe people just thought like Crowley apparently did, that the dead don’t have much to offer so why bother?

The lack of conversation about the dead, about ancestor veneration, about necromancy, allowed space for people to come up with some weird weak-sauce ideas about the subjects. Despite the space for these ideas to take flight, fortunately, most haven’t spread. The main one I’ve encountered commonly is that all work with, or related to, the dead is necromancy. So, Samhain celebrations, much of Halloween, Dia de los Muertos, and any form of ancestor veneration are necromancy. That is…absolute nonsense - we’ll explain why in a little bit. I had the misfortune of attending a class where a teacher explained that fueling your car is necromancy because of the dead dinosaurs in the gasoline - hopefully they were joking, but I’m not so sure. These are examples of bad ideas and bad explanations that happen because people want things to be magical, but they don’t really have a grasp of the magic they’re trying to point to, so they just start applying magical thinking to every random thing. The aforementioned class did show me that there are a lot of other bad ideas about necromancy out there, as the teacher spent most of the class warning people about the nonsense they might encounter, but most of the other ideas fall into the territory of bad explanations that arise because people want to be creepy and spooky and so they make up outlandish things for shock value because it sells well to a certain audience. Fortunately, those ideas seem to stick to their niche of creepy books bound in black leather and sold for way too much money. Again, I wouldn’t have even known about (and honestly have forgotten about) most of those weird ideas had I not attended a class where the teacher began by disabusing everyone of the creepy nonsense out there. 

The lack of widespread acceptance of crazy ideas has had a practical benefit beyond protecting people from attempting silly or dangerous things. A little more than a decade ago, folks started digging more deeply into historical and traditional magical systems. A boom in publishing older magical source texts kicked off, and authors began to write about grimoires, goeteia, and all sorts of underexplored systems of magic, and magic-adjacent spirituality. As this exploration deepened we began to see more attention given to faeries and their forgotten place in learned magic. The works of cunning folk began to be explored and people began to realize that they weren’t the illiterate folk magicians NeoPagan books had long painted them to be, but they were educated professional magicians blending literate magic and folk magic into practical workable approaches. We began to understand that ancestor veneration was more than the occasional Dumb Supper at Samhain, and could be, and for many people should be, a major part of their spiritual and magical work. Connections between necromancy, goeteia, and witchcraft began to unfold into people’s awareness. The world of magic got deeper, and with that depth we found ourselves to be neighbors with the residents of the deep other spaces within the sphere of the earth, the faeries, the dead, the aerial spirits, and a host of other beings who previously were not so commonly discussed. 

The lack of weird ideas and misconceptions about ancestor work and the dead made it easier for good material and good ideas to spread without the pushback that new ideas and improved resources sometimes run into. 

Now, there are a handful of books on ancestor veneration. There is at least one business devoted entirely to spiritual classes and retreats focused on ancestral wellness. Ideas no one spoke of before like “generational curses” and “ancestral trauma” have become popular buzzwords. Ancestor altars and ancestral veneration are commonplace. Necromancy even has a place in mainstream occult publishing and amongst classes taught at conferences. To some degree, the attention to these forgotten parts of spirituality and magic have resulted in some things being a bit overblown. That kind of instant ubiquity is common when something new and useful becomes familiar to more people. Unfortunately, the excess noise that constellates around sources of new excitement can cause some people to miss opportunities for deep engagement. It’s easy to get distracted by the sizzle that everyone is selling, and in that excitement, end up forgetting to actually eat the meat. Despite that, for many people, the new prominence held by the dead has opened up doorways to very meaningful experiences. 

I would usually kick off the transition towards actually discussing the nature of the dead and our ability to work with them by asking a question like “So, with this newfound popularity the dead have, who is right? Those who agree with Crowley, that the dead don’t know anything and shouldn’t be bothered with, or those who see them as teachers, leaders, protectors and guides?” The question, while an easy rhetorical set up, would seem ingenuine to anyone familiar with my work. It’s pretty clear that I see work with the dead as beneficial and meaningful. I clearly am on the ancestor veneration side of the fence with no real equivocation about whether or not it is an important or beneficial thing to have within our lives. I believe modern Anglophone culture has a severely unhealthy relationship with the dead, largely because we avoid any kind of real relationship with them. We’re hurt by this fact, and it’s good that the bolts are shaking loose and more of us are finding the door open to reconnecting with those who came before us. 

While I’m solidly on Team Dead People (I should put that on a t-shirt…), I can’t dismiss the alleged Crowley comment as an example of him simply not knowing any better because he didn’t have the best resources available to him. There are definitely opinions and practices in the post-Golden Dawn approach to magic that can easily be explained that way, but this isn’t one of them. The idea that the dead don’t know much wasn’t a new idea. 

This may surprise some people, but the idea that the dead more or less only know what they new in life is kind of well attested. Joshua Trachtenberg wrote a brief section on necromancy and the dead in Jewish Magic and Superstition.  In it he presents the dead as relatively banal, and not in a “fires of banal” kind of way, but in the sort of boring and pedestrian kind of way. He literally describes them as people who spend a lot of time complaining about the clothes they’re forced to wear because of what their families chose to bury them in. Trachtenberg suggests that magic to contact the dead wasn’t especially common in a Jewish context because the dead didn’t know anymore than they knew in life. He presents a picture which leaves the reader to suppose that the dead’s concerns were generally the same kinds of concerns they would have had while living, but within a smaller community formed from the people buried near them. 

This wasn’t just a Jewish perspective on the dead though. Daniel Ogden in Greek and Roman Necromancy describes similar beliefs around the dead. He doesn’t present the Greek and Roman dead as complaining about the clothes they’re buried in, but he describes them as only knowing what they knew in life, or what they might have heard from people passing by in the cemetery. The dead are essentially the same people they were before, but now they have time to pay attention to the good gossip, if someone happens to speak it within earshot. It’s neither an exciting picture of what one is able to get up to in the afterlife, nor of the dead’s ability to meaningfully give us useful information.

Those who have crossed Acheron may fare no better. Having traveled the River of Woe and entered into the underworld, the dead were greeted by a Cypress Tree and a question as to who they were. If one was not taught the mysteries which allow survival through death, then their soul would drink the waters of forgetfulness and who they were in life would more or less be erased. What happened from there varied. Some accounts describe hordes of passive souls in the dark and quiet gloom, others seemed to think that these souls became the material of new souls to be born into the world as new people, having had their old identities erased. This certainly does not indicate that the dead would be useful beings to call upon. 

Despite that, necromancy was present as a system of magic amongst Greeks and Romans. Not only do we know that people utilized necromancy, and that oracles associated with openings to the world of the dead existed, we also know ancestor veneration was common. Both the Greeks and the Romans had cults of the dead. Historians, Pagans, and NeoPagans alike will sometimes talk about the Iron Age Celts as having been head hunters who had a prominent cult of the dead, as if this was their primary religious engagement and as if it was a mode of religiosity that was unique relative to their Mediterranean neighbors. Given that we have information on other modes of religion amongst the Celts, I would imagine that their cult of the dead is not decontextualized from other religious behaviors and that it was a prominent and important part of their culture just like it was for Greeks, Romans, and numerous other traditional cultures. For the Greeks and Romans, in addition to having household religious practices focused around the dead, there were important figures who were honored collectively by the community as heroes or ancestors shared by the community as a whole. There were multiple holidays throughout the year focused on the dead. Some focused on propitiating the dead, some focused on honoring and affirming connections with them. 

The dead were important. The dead were ubiquitous. This is part of why I can easily say that necromancy does not encompass ancestor veneration. In the ancient world, necromancy was, like it is in many cultures today, the work of specialists. In some cultures, these specialists are priests or powerful figures in the community. In others, as seems to have been the case in much of Greece, those who did this kind of magical work were outsiders at the periphery of society. Roman literature continues this trend of showing the necromancer as one who does questionable things and who lives outside the bounds of normal society. Ancestor veneration was wholly within the social norms, and was a necessary part of complying with social norms. In the medieval and early modern periods we still encounter the idea of necromancy. Veneration of the dead, and spirituality founded upon concepts of death and the afterlife were the normative central form of religious devotion through medieval and early modern Europe. Necromancy was a separate series of illicit magical practices outside the bounds of normal religion and society. Necromancy has always been separate from what the average person does in relation to the dead in cultures where the dead remain actively present in the spaces of the living. 

Jumping back to antiquity, we find a world where myths and stories tell us of the dead having their memories erased. We encounter a world which viewed ghosts as limited to the knowledge they held in life. Still, it was a world where the dead were honored and respected. We might ask ourselves why they were honored and respected if they weren’t seen as knowledgeable or effective in the world. From a modern perspective, it’s easy to settle on an answer. Even if the dead are gone, and have no part of our world now, we respect what they gave to us in life; we respect the heritage we have received from them, and we respect the comfort their memory gives to us or to others who knew them. They don’t have to have personhood or agency or the ability to connect with us for us to respect them, so it doesn’t matter if once they die they’re essentially gone aside from their existence in our memories.

That answer works in a relatively materialist world where we give lip service to the idea that basic respect is the baseline that everyone should start with. The reality is that we don’t live in a materialist world, and the kind of respect that becomes veneration usually develops when there are reasons suggesting that someone or something deserves that attention from us. This would have been even more true from the perspective of the ancient world. Clearly, people felt there was value in connecting with their ancestors, and they believed that people who had the ability to raise and empower the dead could gain useful information or accomplish necessary tasks by doing so. 

While Crowley’s apparent perspective, “the dead only know what they knew while alive,” might have been a common perspective in some ancient and medieval cultures, the idea that this meant “don’t bother with them,” doesn’t seem to have been commonly held. If they only know what they knew, what can we learn from them? Why should we connect with them? 

Well, first off, that question is only necessary if we assume that the perspective that they don’t know more than they knew is true just because it’s old. That’s not necessarily the case. It might even be that in the ancient world there were competing views about the afterlife and our relationships with the dead. Maybe some people didn’t hold the view that they were the same as they were while alive, or maybe some people held a view that multiple things go on when you die and so more than one thing can be true at the same time. It would be hard for us to ever know for sure what people used to think. Even if we could know what the average person in 253 BCE thought, we have to answer these questions based on our own perspectives now since these answers will inform our lives, not the lives of people 2000 years ago. 

Answering these questions could mean asking what happens when we die. This is a question I get asked a lot, I suppose because people know that my personal spirituality and magic both involve a fair amount of interaction with the dead. I often demur to giving a solid answer when asked this. I think people find it surprising because one would assume working with the dead would include feeling some certainty about what happens after death. To me that’s a bad epistemological assumption. Personally, I believe lots of things probably happen in the afterlife, even things which would be contradictory in our own living perspective. I don’t think while we’re alive we can or should grasp it in full. Even if the spaces of the dead are open to us, they aren’t open to us in full. Walking too deeply within them, without balancing that association with vibrant living anchors, can open us up to certain dangers. 

There are some things I’m comfortable saying based on my experience. The dead don’t gain access to omniscience or some deep well of all knowledge. They mostly know what they knew while alive, and a little beyond that because they experience things in the afterlife. The afterlife isn’t always entirely the same for everyone. There are better and worse experiences of the afterlife, and our interactions with the dead can and should include helping improve their experience of the afterlife just as we look for them to help us in our experience of life. The dead are more or less who they were while alive, but a lot of the baggage, and damage that is caused by that baggage, is stripped away and healed - death is a weakening of the body and a healing of the soul. In that regard, some of the bad elements of who they may have been, or how they seemed to us in life, aren’t always still there. Opinions and perspectives they had which were problematic might improve because death gives a new and broader perspective. This doesn’t mean the dead automatically become good, or who we want them to be. That broader perspective means that they may be aware of, or have insights into things we don’t see, both in the world of the living and the world of the dead. The elements which remain from who they were while living mean that they understand human experience and human needs in a way other spirits don’t, and it often means they are invested in us. The part of the person we interact with and see is not the only piece of them which exists; various components of our soul complex experience different things as the body separates from the rest of the complex. 

Learning from the dead, engaging with them, and connecting to them both for memory and for veneration, are not limited to an exploration of what knowledge they possess. In an esoteric sense, the world is built upon the sea of the dead. The world of the living sits upon the boundary between our world and the world of the dead. Elements of the afterlife mirror life. We are born into the world of the living, and we die from this world to be born in the afterlife. We grow and develop differently in life and afterlife, but both occur. The dead remember us, and we remember them, and when we support the dead we open doors for them to support us. We live adjacent to the dead even though a river separates us, and two worlds grow from that river, the world of Life and the world of Afterlife. 

Less esoterically speaking our world is built upon and from the dead themselves. Everything in our experience was once something else or a part of something else. The old thing is not what it was before, or is not in the condition it was before, and in a way no longer exists. It is the same idea expressed by the saying “you can’t step in the same river twice.” The very act of stepping into the river changes it in some way, even if it is a small and fleeting way. In a very direct sense, our furniture and our books are made from the bodies of slain trees. Our clothes and our food come from dead plants and animals, or at least parts of them that are no longer attached to a living organism. Plastics, gasoline, and natural gas come from the remains of ancient, now dead, organisms - but apparently, most likely not from dinosaurs. We think of things made from metal and stone as inert and not alive, but from an animistic perspective these things also have life and removing them from their context or changing them significantly might change elements of that life from what it was to something new. In terms of a continuity with organic material, as bodies decay, minerals which were in them leak out into soil and may become part of new stones or dirt, and so the more quotidian cycle of life and death might have touched the development of these non-organic materials as well.  

Living upon the sea of the dead in a world built from the dead means our potential for interaction with the dead and learning from the dead is near endless. There can be deep meaning in learning from the dead in fully exoteric ways. We can hear stories of those who came before us and learn what made them successful or what made them fail - both generally and in specific endeavors - and we can learn how to apply those lessons in our own lives. We can read books, journals, notes, instructions, and recipes left by those who came before us. We continue chains and lineages of teaching in numerous disciplines where things that were taught to someone generations ago are passed down to our teachers, through them to us, and then so forth to those that we will teach. We can look at remains that have been left behind, whether we mean clothing, tools, buildings, or bodies, and learn things about the world around us and how people once interacted with it and this can inform how we move forward. 

These means of learning from the dead are so necessary in life that they are virtually omnipresent. We don’t think of them as learning from the dead or engaging the dead most of the time. When we do, it can add deep meaning to them. When we do things like make a soup, or bake a cake, we might use a recipe our father taught us that he learned from his mother, that she learned from her father. When we prepare it we think back on memories of our father making it when we were young. We are reminded of visits to our grandmother, and her stories of her father who we might have never known. 

There is a comfort and connection produced in linking together these people who now reside within us and whose impact continues through our own interactions with the world. This gives us a space in which we can understand the comfort of ancestor veneration and the continuity that it solidifies into meaningful contact and connection without us needing to consider at all what the dead know or how we can speak to them to learn the secrets of the afterlife. The dead teach us in numerous ways. Those ways gain meaning when we understand that they are the dead teaching us and that the dead continue through us as we will then continue through those who learn from us. 

This is not all there is though. Nothing about what I described there is magic. It can be spiritually meaningful, and may even be part of how we engage the dead spiritually. The broader use of the word magical to explain a sort of comfortable sense of wonder certainly applies there, but the more proper “magical” -  the magical that is intended when we speak of sorcery and witchcraft - doesn’t have to enter into those exoteric ways of learning from the dead at all. The magic remains, and so that tells us that there is more. 

We live upon the sea of the dead, and from that sea forms and currents can arise which take the shape of powers and personages recognizable by different cultures. Elements of the dead give power and life to these forms which coalesce from our communal awareness, our aspirations, our needs, and our desires, interacting with echoes of people, legends, myths and stories that tell us about what came before and which carry the character and nature of those desires and aspirations. The power and life these forms have comes from the power and life of the collective dead, and their knowledge comes from the collective insight of that power spoken through the voice of the identity through which it manifests. 

The dead themselves can also, often with our help, arise through that sea. With the heat of fire, and the exchange of gifts, they can move through the river from which both worlds arise and speak with us, work with us, and aid us. Depending on how clearly we need them to speak, or how powerfully we need them to work, we might use different techniques to contact them and bring them forth. We might give them different things to give them a stronger voice, or to empower their hands to shape things in our world. We might have to link them to the world more, or speed their wit and brighten their memory. This is part of the depiction of the dead in the dark gloom of Avernus. The fog of beings who have forgotten who they are and who have lost the voice with which to speak becomes able to interact with us and aid us when given elements of life. That necromantic approach doesn’t require that we buy fully into an afterlife predicated upon drinking the waters of forgetfulness. It does imply that we understand that the state of the dead is not the same as the state of the living, and that some types of communication and interaction are more difficult and need more empowerment. 

Getting into the specifics of an ancestor work approach versus a necromantic approach and when to use one or another is outside the scope of what we’re exploring here. But, we’ve touched on both in the paragraph above. We can reach out to the dead and connect with them in a variety of ways. Those ways will impact our experience, as well as the experience of those we call upon. The different ways we call upon them and interact with them will color how they’re able to interact with the world - but we can experience communication with them either way, even though there may be differences in how we experience communication depending upon the mode of contact used. 

When we call upon the dead to speak with them and learn from them directly it is not unlike calling upon an older relative, friend, or mentor for guidance. We don’t have to be looking for deep esoteric secrets. We don’t have to be asking for hidden truths beyond the depths of the perceptions and understanding of the living. We can ask them about how to deal with the things we’re experiencing. We can ask them to guide us to answers that will show us how to do things or understand things that they didn’t have the chance to teach us in life. They will have perspectives based in their own life experiences, but also in their afterlife experiences. Those afterlife experiences may include awareness of elements of our lives and the spiritual components impacting our lives which we do not see. The dead have helped me figure out what spirits to call upon to deal with things, how to pray about a situation, how to adapt the magic I was going to work. They have also shown me simple things like when to wait, when to be patient or kind, or when to neglect or ignore things that seemed important to me so I can focus on things that truly needed my attention more. These aren’t necessarily the big questions that John Dee called upon angels to get answered, but they’re useful things that speak guidance and help to us drawn from the perspective of someone near to us, but who can see far more broadly than us. 

With that in mind, it doesn’t matter so much that the dead don’t tap into the expansive sources of universal knowledge. It’s ok if they’re like us. It’s good that they’re human. They understand us and our lives in ways other spirits don’t. Even if they only know what they knew in life that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother with them. Living life means we can’t opt not to bother with the dead because everything is touched in some way by death and the dead. But like those of us who are living, the dead still learn things about their world, and observe things when they have access to our world. Their knowledge remains a form of human knowledge, but it isn’t bounded solely by the moments which held their first and last breaths.

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Starting with the Dead

People frequently ask how to get started with spirits. Often they will ask “which goetic should I conjure first?” I think there are three parts to answering that question.

First, the pedantic answer…”goetic” isn’t a type of spirit you don’t conjure a goetic, goetic describes a host of practices. The spirits are demons, or devils, or infernal spirits.

The second part of the answer would be…summon the spirit you need. There is no reason to call one just to call one. They each have things they do. Make a choice based on what you need to call one for. Of the handful that seem appropriate to your need or goal, do divination to pick the right one…or work with your spirits. Wait, you don’t have spirits? Well then that leads us to the third part of the answer.

The third part being…that might not be the place to start if you’re just trying to experience spirit contact. Develop the skill set. Develop facility with the spirit world. Develop a support structure in the spirit world. If you were born with spirit connections you should have spirits – usually of the dead sometimes not; who have come to you and developed with you through life. If that’s not the case, spirits of the natural world, of the places you frequent, they are easy to approach. From there, the Olympic Spirits and The Dead are the easiest to start with. Beginning work in a more formal structure is probably best started there…although both involve much less formal structures than what you’ll do when working with infernal spirits.

So how do you get started with the dead especially if you don’t have a group of spirits you work already?

If you have work that connects you with the world of the dead, journeying there in spirit, approaching its guardians and asking for access to the spirit with whom you want to make contact can be a good way to start. But it’s a method that can be kind of involved.

If you have deceased relatives who you knew in life, they can be easier to connect with initially. They may also be harder to choose to connect to depending upon your relationship with them. One thing to remember is that your pool of ancestors is much bigger than the people you knew in life. Those people might just seem more immediately reachable. But your blood ancestry spreads back multiplying over and over. Beyond them you have friends, friends of family, professional ancestors, and many others who may have a connection or interest in you.  

So how to reach them without a katabsis?

Start with prayers to those who keep the dead and those would can help you reach those keepers and the dead themselves. Move to prayers for the way to be made open and for the dead to be brought. Offer that those who aid may receive a portion of whatever is offered. Once everything is set, light a candle for the dead, or for each of the dead, say their names as you do so. Then pour water for them. Either a glass or a small cup for each.

Offer the candle light as a guiding light for the dead, but also as warmth and energy with which they can burn through into this world, and as a shining place which they can inhabit as we sit with them. Offer the water to cool and soothe them and as a way to receive their presence.

From there, incense, food, honey, flowers, liquor, and other special tokens can be given as offerings.

The big thing at this point is just talking with them. Let them know you’re happy they’re with you, thank them for help they’ve given you, ask them to keep looking after you. Tell them what gifts you’re giving them. Talk with them about your life. About your concerns, about your family. Talk with them about things you’d talk about with someone who cares about you.

In the end thank them for the time they’re giving you and for sitting with you.

That’s pretty much it.

While its going on just be open, listen, feel, but don’t chase it. Don’t hope for it, don’t worry about what comes or doesn’t. Rest in the space of the work and you’ll get to the point of connection more easily than you might expect.

For the purposes of this post, I want to draw some attention to something cool…the Luxumbrian Church of Light and Shadow. Witchcraft Christianity.

So the example I’m going to give for ritual will be one modeled for that context. When you build a model for working with the ancestors, model it to your religious context, or at least your beliefs regarding the dead. This example will work for you if you’re working from a Luciferian Catholic perspective.

You will need a candle, an incense burner and coal, incense – preferably Church or Temple incense, or Frankincense; a candle for each of the deceased and a small cup for water. Any other offerings you wish to make.

Light an initial candle.

Say: Lord hear my prayer, and let my cry come unto thee.

With the words “pray for us” make the Sign of the Cross

Saint Peter, pray for us

Saint Cyprian, pray for us

Saint Benedict, pray for us

Saint Lucy, pray for us

Saint Barbara, pray for us

Saint Joan of Arc, pray for us

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us

Saint Azrael the Angel of Death, pray for us

Lord, those who die still live in Your presence. Their lives change, but do not end. I pray in hope for my family, relatives, and friends and for all the dead known only to You. Unite us together again in one family, so that we may reside together in peace forever and ever.

Morning Star, who marks the dawn of the day, Evening Star who marks the dusk. Light Bringer who is at our beginning and at our end, be with us now. Christ, whose spirit is joined to the spirits of all mankind, Lucifer who serves the Father as the Light of the World, be a light for the souls of the dead, be the light by which our sacred flame shall serve to guide, bring forth, and cradle the souls of the beloved dead.

Hail Mary, mother of our Lord Jesus Christ, Queen of Heaven, Lady of the World, Empress of Hell, have mercy on us and on all people, both, living and dead in need of your mercy and your strength.

Saint Peter, foundation of the Church, be as to us the foundation of this rite. Christ gave to you the Keys of Heaven and Earth, call forth from the Book of Life and make open the way for our beloved dead.

Put a bit of incense on the coal and say

May the world be made sweet to receive the dead and the blessings of the Lord and his retinue.

At this point light a candle for each ancestor you wish to invite saying their name and pouring them a cup of water. Make any offerings you wish to make for them and for the Heavenly powers that aided in bringing them. Then talk with them openly and candidly. The more you treat them like you would other guests the closer they will come.

Again, if this isn’t your jam, then you can use this same structure but change the prayers out for the powers and spirits appropriate to your approach.

If you enjoyed this, my book Living Spirits: A Guide to Magic in a World of Spirits has copious amounts of material on ancestor work and other work with the dead.

To explore the intermingling of traditional Witchcraft and traditional apostolic Christianity check out The Church of Light and Shadow.

For more spirit talk, join us on FB at Living Spirits, and remember to share with your friends and follow us on Facebook!

Local Dead? Local Friends.

A few weeks back my fellow Brodepti and I took a field trip. Apart from our regularly planned dinner at a bar to discuss magical things, community stuff, our current work and things about which to be aware we decided we would take a trip to a local cemetery. There are three in the area I want to visit, one because it's near me, one because it has a folk legend associated with a statue that has since been removed, and one to find a relative. Hanging with other magicians seemed the perfect opportunity to check one of the cemetery visits off the list.

My town does not have a lot of cemeteries. In fact, I believe we just have one historical one, with the other more active ones all being in the neighboring city, or in other towns adjacent to us. The one we have though is essentially walking distance from me, maybe about a 10 minute walk, and I pass it multiple times a week just going to and fro. So it seemed like the most reasonable option for creating a relationship with the local dead.

I work with my ancestors quite a bit, but with the exception of my father, none of them lived in my town. Obviously most spirits with whom we interact won't be ones tied to our locality, but our location can be a big factor in our magic. So we should make connections with the local nature spirits, with the land itself on which we reside, and with natural features that are nearby, particularly if they impact us our our communities.

Working with local magic helps in a few ways. It connects the work you're doing to forces already tied to the place where you are likely looking to have your impact manifest. Other people in your area may interact with or be impacted by local spiritual forces even if they aren't aware of it. These spirits might also have concerns related to things around you, or connections giving them greater influence over things around you. If you're dealing with a spirit that means something to the people of your community, like one which is associated with a natural formation, or a folk legend, or the spirit of a local hero or historical figure there is also a significant local awareness that feeds and empowers that spirit within the environment in which you're working.

So, don't overlook your surroundings.

Creating ties to the local cemetery is something I've wanted to do for awhile, and it's something I still have further work to do to deepen. But this was essentially what was involved in my first step.

We went to the cemetery with offerings, and supplies for our work. We went a little before dusk on a weekend, so that while hopefully there wouldn't be a lot of people around, it wouldn't be completely unusual or suspicious if someone happened upon us since it wasn't at night. This particular cemetery is an historical cemetery and so there are no gates or walls, it just sits right along one of the town's most major roads, next to a building run by one of the biggest land developers in the state. So it's not particularly discreet, but it's also somewhere no one really goes these days. We were unlikely to be bothered, still, we chose our time cautiously, and I carried four bay leaves in my pocket, one to hide us in each of the four directions.

When we got there we set to work looking for the oldest grave. The first body buried in a cemetery is that cemetery's equivalent to the first man to die, the ancestor of all ancestors who oversees the passage between life and death and the people who live in the space of the dead, the cemetery. They're basically the head honcho spirit for that location. Now, admittedly, my planning was poor here. I did not look up who it was before hand. One of the other Brodepti decided to contact her town's historical society and they were able to tell her which graves were the oldest in her local cemetery. So I would advise anyone engaging in such an endeavor to start by doing that.

Since we didn't know the grave we were looking for, we searched through row by row, eventually we found a plaque that explained the history of the cemetery, including when the church was built and when they decided to begin using it as a cemetery. Most of the oldest graves were 160 years old, and so many were pretty worn, we settled on a head stone which seemed to be the oldest marked grave. The individual there was laid to rest within the year following the opening of the church, and so she seemed a good candidate for the oldest, and if not the oldest, at least a reasonably respectable contender to a position of importance within the cemetery.

We began by taking snow (in less wintery weather dirt or salt or one of the libations could be used) and making a three-way crossroads on the grave and making prayers to Hekate, and prayers to the gods and goddesses of the land of the dead to grant us access to the spirit of the person laid there, and to join her in receiving the offerings which we would now make.

We then poured out libations of wine, honey, milk, and olive oil on the grave with prayers to strengthen the spirit, stir it to life,to give it sustenance, and to remind it of the pleasant things in the world of the living. We left cakes of grain and fruit to further feed the spirit and asked that we might form an alliance with it and take a small amount of dirt from her grave as a connection to her.

Once we had completed our work with that spirit we took whiskey and more cakes and laid them out in a place towards the center of the patch of graves but in a space where no one was buried and we made an offering to the dead of the cemetery in general and asked for the same friendship with them, and to be allowed to take dirt from the cemetery generally as well.

So in addition to linking to the specific ancestor of the cemetery we linked to the cemetery itself, and had both grave dirt and graveyard dirt to bring home for magical work and for installing in our ancestor altars in order to further feed and develop that connection, and to empower our own dead further by linking them to a local place of power and soil rich with the presence of the dead. 

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Do You Have Any Dead People?

I have a friend who occasionally asks me questions about magic. While talking the other night when we got to the subject of conjuration he noted that he didn't really feel he had the position or connections to get heavy into spirit work yet, and so I of course asked “do you have any dead people?” I think a big hurdle for people with ancestor work is needing to have someone die. If you're not brought up in a culture of acknowledging your ancestors, it might be a little foreign to think of if you don't have your own dead people. In any case, he responded with a few questions about necromancy and the religious affiliations of the dead. Now the great thing about him asking questions, is I'm rather fond of him and enjoy talking with him, and so I tend to answer his questions by rambling out short extemporaneous essays...which...sometimes become blog posts. So what follows is me being pretty candid about different elements of different modes of work with the dead, with some of it expanded or clarified. I hope you enjoy it and it's useful to you.

I run a bit beyond the questions, but what kicked if off was essentially this:

“Concerning necromancy, what's your opinion when it comes to dealing with ancestors who in life would be completely opposed to the idea of magic and especially necromancy? Do you think those feelings would continue after death? Or do you think the rite of passing itself would distance them from their worldly dispositions and opinions? Or even simpler they'd have no care for religious matters?”

So there is a bit to unpack there...first...necromancy...and ancestors...and the rights of spirits to have opinions...

If you're working necromancy, it can often be more coercive, but doesn't have to be. So it depends a bit on the spirit and the relationship. If it's a random dead person then their views don't matter so much. If it's an ancestor that you're contacting through more necromantic means then you might use a method familiar to their religious view out of respect and to help maintain the relationship.

To really answer these questions we have to look at the particular sort of relationship we're dealing with. I would distinguish between necromancy -- ancestor work -- ancestor worship

Necromancy is ritual magic where you conjure and empower the dead with life and magical force and request that they perform tasks or provide information you need. Alternatively you can descend to the underworld to speak with them. But necromancy is largely associated with raising the dead because its mode of spirit magic involves bringing them into this world and feeding them with elements to enliven them to bolster their ability to interact with you or perform tasks for you.

A lot of time you'll use gods or spirits to exert authority, such as requesting access from Hades and then commanding that spirit in Hades name, or in a Christian context perhaps using Azazel. Similarly you might make a pact with the dead. You could gain access, feed them, and then ask them to do something with the offer that you might do something else for them or continue feeding them. Reginald Scot gives examples of procuring a pact with a dead person and then sending that now bound dead spirit to fetch and command other spirits for you. All of this falls under necromancy.

Ancestor worship is performing rights to honor the dead, or having meals with them to maintain a relationship so they look out for you and don't fuck shit up for you. A lot of traditional religion and magic recognizes that restless dead can be problematic and so you recognize and make offerings to them to help keep them from messing with you, or maybe to purge out missteps you've engaged in which might bring their ire. This is a sort of pagan version of “cooling the dead,” not so much removing the suffering or torment of purgatory, but soothing the difficulty an impact of being dead and displaced. There is a similar component with ancestors who have gone on to where they need to be. Ancestors want to be part of the family, they don't want to be forgotten, and they want to help their family continue well. But they also don't want you to do stupid shit, or mistreat what they've left behind. Ancestor worship maintains and strengthens the bond between living and dead members of the family so the dead ones stay happy, retain power and influence, and focus on having your back.

In my view ancestor working or ancestral magic is somewhere between ancestor worship and necromancy and has elements of both, but it also drops features from each. For example it isn't coercive like necromancy but it isn't passive like ancestor worship either. It kind of looks like ancestor worship but with a more direct expectation that they will help with specific things you ask for, introduce you to spirits or help keep good relations with you and spirits, assist in your magical work and maybe help guide spirits to outcomes you need. So you build a relationship like in ancestor worship and empower them like in Necromancy and they look out for you like in ancestor worship but they also do specific stuff for you like in Necromancy.

But the interaction differs, at least in my view. Both in terms of methods and the way each one feels as far as the interaction with the spirits.

Like when I work with my dead, I make offerings, set lights, ask Charon to bring them, and thank them for stuff and ask for any help I need. If I want their help in magic I tell them what spirits I'm working with and ask them to help and maybe explain how. Alternatively I might call on them before beginning a conjuration or magical rite and ask for them to assist. Or I might leave a tool or object on their altar and ask for their blessing or empowerment before I use it for magic.

When I do necromancy it's got a more intense flavor. There's libations poured out on the ground, coins thrown into cross roads, chthonic gods called with Orphic hymns, maybe stuff involving blood and meat, or food abandoned in the night. Going to places where people died or where the dead are resting, or other liminal places at liminal times.

If I'm honoring an ancestor for like a birthday or holiday it's kind of like having dinner with them and is pretty laid back, and can also be pretty personal and emotional. There's some prayers and then we eat and I tell them what's new in my life or other family members. We maintain a familial relationship and connection the same way you would with living relatives, you basically visit with them, and keep them feeling like they're part of the living family.

Ancestral magic is kind of the daily traditional household magic, necromancy is intense goetic sorcery, and ancestor worship is visiting the dead for thanksgiving style catching up.

As to the religion thing...if they're Christian none of this will be familiar to them. Except in some traditional folk Catholic contexts, but anyone who is a product of a few generations of life in America as a Christian probably wouldn't die with the expectation that their relatives do this stuff. But once they're on the other side...maybe.

So I don't think it matters because for MOST people I don't think their expectations impact their afterlife. They get their and they find out what's what. At least the part of them that remains as that person continuing on.

If they weren't magical you probably want to talk with them about magic first and make sure they agree to help you with magic before you call on them to help with magic. You could still call on them to look out for you, and help you fix problems in your life. That's a little more of a hit the ground running kind of thing than being like “Hey, Aunt Judy, I know you didn't do magic...but I'm going to make this sweetening jar and I need you to help empower it, and maybe introduce me to a spirit who can help accomplish it's work.” I feel like it's like talking to a living person. You don't want to catch them off guard with a request. But just because it might catch them off guard if it wasn't discussed before that requests like that might happen, doesn't mean that they won't be cool with the request if they know it's coming. Make some offerings, have a conversation with them about the relationship you want, and what kind of help with magic you will want, listen for what they're cool with too, they should be talking back, it should be a conversation. Let them know you'll be working magic and you want them to be a part of it. I think most will be ok with that. Since you talking to them is kind of magic already.

But that said, they keep their opinions and ideas, at least on some level.

Like not 100% but if they were about helping people they still are, if they were about what's yours is yours they still are. Like basic core elements of how they saw things. But family is also important to them and contact and interaction and offerings and physical stuff, because that's what attaches them to our world, so it helps them maintain a piece of that existence. Even if it wasn't stuff that they'd be into when they were alive, the elements of this connection should become important to them now. But their thoughts and feelings and personality should also be similar to what it was in life.

These offerings, and this relationship isn't just important to them though, it should be important to you. It strengthens them to help us. So if you want the relationship to be useful to you this stuff needs to be there.

But yeah, as far as whether or not you need to call them within the context of their religion. Call them under the power of the gods who rule the world of the dead. They live in their kingdom now, whoever where their gods when they were living, the gods of the land of the dead are their gods while they're dead.

Unless it's like a Saint or a Blessed. If you're asking one of them to be in your ancestor court they're specifically empowered by Christian ritual and belief already. So it's like working with a god or mighty dead spirit from a religion, you contact them within that religious context. Part of what you're drawing on is the power associated with their religious role, so call on that within the context of that power. They're built into a different spiritual structure, and you're not working on the personal identity of that individual so much as that identity empowered with a religious iconography and spiritual power fed by a tradition of religious veneration. You're approaching a legend as much as a person.

So Azazel, Azrael, St. Peter, probably St. Christopher, St. Cyprian, St. Benedict, maybe St. Nicholas or some Saint associated with the dead or funeral customs would be the authority or the gate keeper, or assisting spirit to call upon when trying to access the spirit of a Saint or Blessed canon figure to work with in the context of your ancestors.

Otherwise, regular dead people, call them how you'd call them and talk with them about what you'd want and see if they're good with it.

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Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt. 2: Devotion

Yesterday's post kicked off this week's special series of posts giving an introduction to various elements of spirit magic and conjuration. This is post 2 out of 8. Please like and follow us on Facebook so that you won't miss any of the action, and please share the series so others you know can also enjoy it.

Beginning Conjuration and Spirit Magic pt. 2: Devotion

So this topic was actually one I was planning to post about on its own initially but it definitely has it's place within our discussion of beginning conjuration. I had a conversation with a friend recently about the importance of devotional work in magic. The A.'.A.'. system assigns Devotion to the work of the Philosophus and it is with this work that initial elements that could lead to spirit conjuration start to pop up. Aside from that though, devotional work with spirits and divine figures helps with conjuration work, and also, with life in general. It has a lot of elements which overlap with magical practice without necessarily being magical practice, so it can also be a good practical starting point.

So what do I mean by devotional work? Devotion, for many people, would imply some sort of religious commitment to some deity or saint. In our context it could mean this but it does not have to. All we're talking about here is creating an on going relationship with a spirit or spirits who will act as allies for you, both in life and magic. This borders on religious practice and can look like religious practice.

Some theorists on Indo-European religion talk about the guest-host principle as a basic ordering concept of the universe and society. This suggests that at times an individual may be a guest or a host, and that as a guest he must act in a certain way out of respect for his host, and the host must therefore provide him hospitality, and further in the future he will at times act as the host, and his former host is therefore deserving of being welcomed and treated well as a guest. This does not necessarily mean a literal house guest scenario, but rather, if you help your neighbor it should be expected that your neighbor will appreciate the help, and also make efforts to help you later, and that you will show the same appreciation and seek later to again help your neighbor; creating then a cycle of mutual appreciation and aid. Devotional work with spirits works much the same way.

So if it is a God or Saint that you select, you are not necessarily selecting them as an object of worship. You're selecting them as a guide, or source of inspiration, perhaps, or more simply as a benefactor who will help and protect you. The God or Saint receives the offerings you make, the benefit of any prayers you make as part of your devotion, and at times perhaps public recognition. It does not necessarily receive you as a devoted worshiper, but rather a devoted friend. You make routine offerings, spend time in prayer or meditation for them, maintain objects for your devotional work such as an altar, or perhaps simply a statue, an offering bowl and some candles. The means of outfitting your devotional efforts can be between you and the spirit. But having some physical central focus is both helpful in bringing your focus onto the spirit, but also it can provide faster means of connecting with the spirit. If there is a space dedicated for the spirit to take up as a residence, or some tool used as a conduit for contact with the spirit you may be able to more easily reach out and communicate with spirits with whom you have some alliance.

Other than Gods or Saints, the ancestors or the dead are common, and very good, choices for devotional work. Again, you're not entering into this as some kind of religious self subjugation or some deification of your ancestors. You're keeping open channels of communication, and maintaining, strengthening, and creating connections with spirits who can be powerful allies. I've spoken before about the benefits of work with the dead including the fact that they were once alive, and because they were alive they are aware of and ready to work towards the concerns of average people. It's also easy because we see this kind of relationship in historical magic as well as in folk customs and practices. It's a lot easier to sit down having prepared a deceased relative's favorite food, and then leaving out a plate of it for them while telling them all about what's happening in your life and your families' lives than it would be to do really hardcore necromancy. Fortunately you're probably not conjuring a deceased person to bind them in a pact. All your devotion with your relatives needs to be is routine contact to maintain the relationship, and the offering of food, drinks, or gifts periodically to not simply assure their favor but also to assure their strength and their connection to this world.

Both with the dead, and with Gods and Saints, our devotional work will often involve meditating at an altar or before some devotional object or picture. Frequently you'll give gifts and talk about what's happening with you. There may be prayers involved for the benefit of the spirit, or simply generally for your blessing. Otherwise most of your devotional sessions don't need to involve you asking for something. A lot of modern society associates all prayer with asking for something. Sometimes it's just about pausing to connect. Other times you might be thanking the spirit, or you may have discovered the spirit just likes certain poems or prayers and so they become part of your offering.

So by in large the basic devotional work of a magician can be pretty simple, or it can get more complex. It doesn't need to be tool heavy, but it can be if that's how you're called to approach your spirits.

Your spirits. In this case it means those spirits with whom you have a relationship. But it could also mean a familiar spirit, or a spirit given to your charge by a higher spirit. Some people build living vessels for their familiars and so work with the familiar may be very much like devotion work. For now I want to treat them as separate. Devotion work can be a little more casual, than other spiritual work. You don't have to seek to control the spirits, or move them from some far off place. For this, you're largely working with spirits that already have some overlap or connection with the world. But you're strengthening it by inviting them in and making gifts to them. You're asking them to work in this world and you're feeding them substances of this world. You're not just strengthening their spiritual capability by feeding it more spiritual substance; you are linking the spirits to the world by stirring up memories and desire.

So why go through this trouble, why not just get to the magic? Well, this is part of the magic. It's not just the act of magic, but also the preparatory acts which make us ready for magic which are a big part of success. When you have allies in the spirit world they become a spiritual currency for you, or spiritual street cred. Your ability to call upon and command spirits should increase as you strengthen the spirits who work with you and they are able to help provide you with authority in the spirit world. They can also help with controlling unruly spirits and keeping them to task. Another benefit though is the sort of invisible hand effect. They want to help you and they want to keep enriching your relationship with them. So as things happen in your life your spirits, especially those who have been alive previously, may recognize issues you encounter and help you with them prior to you asking because your spirits know you, they know what you need. So those little catastrophes in life might get smaller, or they might bring about less extreme problems, or problems from fewer converging sources than what we might expect with no one helping. With these things in mind, it's a good idea to keep your household or personal spirits in happy conditions.

So what does a devotional practice look like?

Let's say you have three ancestors you're working with as your personal spirits. You do your initial rituals to set up a connection and awareness. Then after that maybe you keep an altar with a picture of the three ancestors, a candle for each of them, and an offering bowl, or maybe one for each. Basically simple things. Maybe small possessions belonging to the departed. Perhaps once a week you light the candles, make a small offering of whatever their favorite drink was and say a prayer or two or simply tell them about your life. You might mark special occasions like birthdays, and other holidays, particularly May's Eve, and November's Eve with extra ritual work or prayer work or special gifts. For saints you might use their prayer candles and cards and other Catholic resources. Similarly for Gods obtaining a statue or image and other devotional gifts can be simple. But all in all this model can work fairly easily regardless of which type of spirit, though for Gods and Saints it's useful to draw on the traditions to which they are native and accustomed.

As you put together this part of your practice sometimes there is a tendency to pick one spirit, usually a God or Saint, and think of them singularly as your patron. Or conversely some people grab on to every God, Saint, and Ancestor they can find and try to juggle two dozen at once. Start small. I started with one ancestral spirit, and then selected a few others who felt significant. Then, and this can be an interesting devotional task in ancestor work, began exploring stories of my family's past to flesh out my sense of my pleroma of ancestors. Now your ancestral practice does not need to involve setting up devotional shrines for each ancestor or markers to remember all of them. Your personal maiores (great ones), the handful to whom either you or your work are most connected maybe two or three early on, those should have objects set for interacting, others can be considered and acknowledged more generally. If you're working with a God, don't jump to tie yourself down to a patronage but note two or three who might help with your work, similarly you don't need to set altars for a whole pantheon of deities, the same is true for Saints.