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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Is it a Bird? Is it a Ghost? Is it a Bird and a Ghost?

Any given day, scrolling a Facebook feed full of posts from magical and NeoPagan forums of varying levels of experience you have a fair chance of seeing a post in which someone describes having seen some sort of bird and wanting to know the spiritual significance of seeing a bird.

 

The correct answer is obviously: You live in a place with birds.

 

It doesn’t always make sense to try and find a spiritual significance to everything, but people sometimes do because they’re new and excited and they’re now paying attention in ways they didn’t before and so the ordinary seems extraordinary.

 

There are times when little things like this might have meaning. I was once hanging out with a friend who worshipped Hermes and had a living statue hosting a daimon given by Hermes. We had lunch by a pond and then walked the trail surrounding it. We noticed a turtle, then another, then another. Turtles everywhere. The significance? We were at a pond. Turtles are normal. But we were surprised by how abundant they were, so we counted how many we had seen to see if there was some Hermetic number. If they had been some peculiar number, or if we’d been in a place normally devoid of turtles, or if we’d just asked for a sign from Hermes and a turtle appeared, or if say a turtle carrying a harp rode up on a cow wearing sandals…it might be a sign. In the end, it was just a bunch of turtles. One of my favorite animals, in abundance, on a pleasant day, with good food, and the company of a friend. So, something nice, whether it had greater spiritual meaning or not.

 

If you hang around forums enough, you’re also bound to see people asserting to always look for a mundane cause before considering a magical one. Most things end up being completely mundane if we really examine them.

 

This is bad advice though.

 

Something having a mundane cause doesn’t mean it doesn’t also have a spiritual cause or a spiritual reality to it. In fact, the fact that a thing exists or an event is occurring means it does in fact have some spiritual reality to it and there are spiritual causes at play. Those spiritual causes and realities may be ordinary and not especially significant though. In some cases, the mundane cause may be less important than the spiritual one.

 

We have to look at our situation, look at what we’re encountering, and determine which is important or if both are important, and how to respond to each element appropriately.

 

What got me thinking of this was telling a non-magical friend about a bunch of weird occurrences associated with the dead which happened a few years back. Yesterday, Jan 27^th, was the 10^th anniversary of the death of my fencing coach. He was a pretty awesome man who left a major impact on the lives of people he encountered.

 

He died just shy of three months after my father died. I was 28, my dad had died suddenly and unexpectedly, and less than 3 months in I was still barely beginning to process it and the adjustments it was causing for my family. Coach was killed in an accident, so it was also unexpected. I was coming up on my Saturn return (the funeral and my birthday were the same week I believe), and the year that followed was pretty intense.

 

By the time the second anniversary of Coach dying came around, I had made my way through most of the Saturnine effects and had begun to settle back in. But that day came with something that seemed super unsettling initially, but ended up being pretty nice.

 

Early the morning of the 27^th I had come home from helping with an OTO 3^rd degree initiation. I can’t go into details of the initiation, but it’s publicly known that the mysteries of the 3^rd degree relate to the mysteries of death. My drive home was occupied with thoughts about how the dawning day was my coach’s memorial day and I was entering into that day with my head buzzing in a headspace concerned with death, the afterlife, and the continuation of our influence beyond death. It was weird timing for working that kind of initiation but in a way maybe healthy and helpful.

 

As I got to the door, my thinking stopped.

 

I was unnerved and confused.

 

Before I got to my door, I could see someone had placed something within the screen door, leaving it slightly ajar. Coming home in the middle of the night and finding your screen door propped open is a little unnerving on its own.

 

As I got closer, I found that it was two antique-style fencing foils. Decorative ones. I had no idea where they had come from. We had similar ones at the fencing club.

 

I considered driving to the club to see if someone had taken them from the club and brought them to me. I couldn’t imagine who would have had access and would have also known where I lived. I wracked my brain trying to figure it out. I wondered if I was experiencing the most miraculous haunting with materialization of antique foils. No answer that crossed my mind made sense.

 

Then I looked down and saw there was also a bag. The bag had a book I had loaned to a friend years ago, but he had lost. That same friend had taken my nephew to a Baltimore Blast (indoor soccer) game that day because I couldn’t attend due to the initiation. I calmed down and determined my friend must have left the book and the foils since I had not been around to see him when he picked up or dropped off my nephew. I called my friend later in the day and he confirmed he had left them for me. He didn’t know it was Coach’s memorial day, he had picked up the foils as a late Christmas/early birthday present for me and had figured it would be a convenient time to give them to me.

 

So, death initiation, memorial day for my fencing coach, and mysterious antique foils appearing in my door. Quite the string, but not the end of it.

 

Later that day, in the proper morning, one of my Uncles texted me to let me know he would be in town and had to drop something off for me. He and my cousin stopped by that afternoon and presented me with a framed double portrait. The portrait was a 16x12 image featuring two pictures of my father. One was the last serious photo taken of him before he died (about a month earlier) and the other was a photo of my father when he was 8 years old. My other Uncle had put it together for my Grandfather and my Grandfather had a copy made for me.

 

So, two points in that day which included gifts that were like touch points for the dead.

 

The foils and the portrait have mundane explanations. My friend thought the foils would be something I’d like; my Grandfather thought the portrait would be something I’d like. The mundane cause doesn’t invalidate the possibility of a spiritual cause. If the dead wanted to reach out and let me know they were there with me, these gifts showing up together juxtaposed to elements of timing that highlights them is a more elegant way than rattling chains at the foot of my bed.

 

The spiritual world doesn’t encroach onto our world, it is a living part of it that underlies it and helps to shape and build it. It interacts with us constantly and we with it. Not every interaction has meaning. Just like there isn’t a social implication that arises concerning each person we pass while walking down the street. But when those people intersect with us in meaningful ways there is some social consideration, similarly, when the spirit world expresses itself we shouldn’t write it off because we can see the mundane path it used. We can’t take this as an excuse to find signs and omens everywhere or paint ourselves with a gilded air of magical majesty and importance. We should be settled and reasonable but also attentive and engaged – we should be ready to be enriched by more fully noticing the small things which communicate the greater depth of the world to us.

 

Not every bird is a sign. But two ravens sitting next to a one-eyed vagrant under a tree on a Wednesday might be. In the right circumstance, despite the apparent means to explain them away, less spectacular seeming things might be too. Vast worlds can exist in small moments. 

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A Simple Sacrifice

Sometimes magic and our relationships with spirits need to be touched through simple things. These simple things should not only be those that we are weaving into the regular occurrences of our lives but rather things in which we find the magical in our lives. I’m not going to write about all such spaces in which we can do this but just give an example or two.

          Sometimes we can do things as simple as walking around outside and talking with the elements of nature and the spirits thereof. This not only reminds us that the living magical nature of the world around us does not only exist when we do magic – it is something which surrounds us at all time; but it also reminds those spirits we know them and they know us and we have bonds with them.

          Similarly, if you have some touch point for your ancestors or household spirits or gods near the entry to your home, speak to them when you come or when you go or both. Again, they’re not only there when you do magic, they watch over you always and are part of your family and your household. In my own practice, I have a picture of my father, which my grandfather had made for me after his death, that hangs on the wall immediately upon entry to my home. I great the picture every time I return home from going anywhere. My ancestor altar is also in the walkway as I enter my home, and so I greet my ancestors whenever I return home. With this greeting I thank my father, my ancestors, and my gods, angels and other allies for all help they have given me in recent times.

          Sacrifice crowns the title of this piece and so I should perhaps reference sacrifice. We often think of sacrifices as big things, or things where we give up something close to us. This is not always the case. It’s just to separate something out, to make it sacred, and give it over to the gods or spirits which aid us. It’s a moment where we can give a gift, and we can show respect, and when it is woven into our lives it becomes a moment where they participate with us in life. It’s a moment where we turn our thoughts to them outside of more formal ceremony.

          So, I have two examples to give, which are really essentially the same thing. In many cultures fat and bone were the objects of sacrifice. Meat was for mankind, but the glistening fat and the rich smoke that rose therefrom was desired by the gods. When cooking we often have meats with much extra fat. Whenever I cook chicken, sometimes when I cook beef, there is fat to be cut off. I imagine this would be the case with pork and mutton, but I don’t cook those. When I’ve cut the extra fat away, I take out outside and burn it as an offering. I usually make a prayer like this, “May the smoke of the fat rise and please the gods, may the ash fall upon the earth and please the gods of the underworld and the dead. May they be pleased with this and be pleased with me and pour their blessings upon me.” When cooking ground beef, the fat which cooks off into grease I’ll generally drain off and let cool. Then I go to a spot that receives offerings pour out this fat, with the prayer “May the fat of the animal become the fat of the land, may the spirits of nature, the gods of the underworld and the dead receive its richness, and may they likewise pour their richness upon me.”

          Simple, right? Not everything needs to be complicated. We can find simple options. I like this because it’s part of something as normal as preparing a meal. It’s part of an essential daily activity, so it brings our spiritual life into those daily activities. It also allows us to make meaningful something that we might otherwise cast off. There are a lot of other things you can do with fat, if you prepare other foods, or compost or whatever other useful thing, this specific act may not be for you, but the idea is there. Find small things that tie your spiritual life to your daily life.

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If you would like to explore more of my ideas on magic please check out my book Living Spirits: A Guide to Magic in a World of Spirits, and keep an eye on this space for information on my new book, Luminarium: A Grimoire of Cunning Conjuration, which will be coming out soon.

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.

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Dies Parentales: A Novena for the Dead

A novena is a common Catholic prayer practice which can be used as a devotional or an offering or a means of gaining focus and connection. The essential structure of a novena is a prayer, repeated over nine days. Typically one strives to make the same prayer at the same time in the same place during each of the nine days.

There are many times throughout the year which might make sense as a novena for the dead. Halloween or Samhain is an option. The memorial day for a deceased loved one, or of an important ancestor, could also be an option. There are surely other days of personal significance and other holidays which have reasonable links that may suggest on going prayer for the dead.

Making some daily prayer for the dead at a significant, or even a not significant time, can do a few things for us. Most simply it keeps them in our focus and helps link our attention to them. It shows respect and devotion. It provides a gift of our time. More esoterically, if the dead are in a place where they suffer or if they are in need of elevation prayer can be means of reducing suffering and aiding in elevation. Acts which draw the dead into our awareness are also acts which give the dead further hold in our world. Part of their connection to the world is the memory and attention given them by the living, and the active interaction the living seek with them. So praying for or praying with them can help them be more effective allies for us in the world of the living. With the opportunity to create connection, to link them to the world, and to aid them in a comfortable afterlife, prayer is often an offering enjoyed and desired by the dead, at least in my experience.

With it being February we have another opportunity that suggests a novena for the dead. The Dies Parentales, or Parentalia. This was a nine day Roman festival for the dead, which incorporated several other holidays. The dead during the Parentalia are both our positive and protective ancestors and the troublesome and unsettled dead, there are also opportunities to address those elements of our positive dead which are more negative and frightful.

For our purposes, a magician could explore the cycle of holidays which are part of the Dies Parentales or they could simply approach it as nine days in which the dead are available and so we can approach them with prayer, reflection, offerings, and other rites and customs for interacting with them. For many people this second approach is going to make more sense, which is why I began with the concept of a novena. Some have suggested that the idea of a novena stems from the nine days of Parentalia, but I’m sure there are many religious practices which could have inspired this mode of prayer. Regardless a novena would be a simple way to observe these days for someone not seeking to engage in Roman customs, or someone who is just beginning their journey in befriending the dead.

If we want to be more Roman about it, during the Parentalia the temples were closed, people did not show signs of their office and other civic religious practices were on hold. The focus was on the dead.

The first day of the Parentalia was for the ancestors, the positive spirits who are honored by the family and look after the family. This was celebrated with offerings of grain and salt, wine, bread, and flowers made at the cemeteries outside the city. This occurs Feb 13^th and begins the nine day cycle.

Lupercalia, the holiday which likely influenced the advent of Valentines day, occurs Feb 15^th and celebrates the wolf and the shepherd who aided Romulus and Remus as babies. These figures are in a sense ancestors of Rome in general. The holiday was celebrated with naked youths touching people with bits of leather to make them fertile. This may make less sense for us to adapt in our work with the dead directly, but we could acknowledge the day as a way of noting the mythic ancestors of our community or our non-familial ancestors whose work or efforts still helped shape us. In particular it may be a time to seek help from those ancestors in achieving fertility, or perhaps fecundity and prosperity.

Quirinalia occurs Feb 17^th and is the day dedicated to Quirinus or Romulus, the first King of Rome, and one of Rome’s two founders. Again, to adapt this holiday we might acknowledge the civic ancestors of our community.

Feralia wraps up the primary holiday cycle on Feb 21^st. Feralia is the night to appease the darker aspects of our ancestors and to remove the more harmful and unsettled dead. Offerings would be made, as well as signs of mourning, but for the more dangerous dead there may have also been rites to exorcise and banish.

February 22^nd the holiday was concluded on Caristia, with a day of joyful celebration and feasting to bring the family together and celebrate the positive relationship with the ancestors. Food and incense were offered to the dead, and the family joined together and settled disputes in honor of the positive relationships and echoing the positive ties which they had just strengthened with their ancestors.

So if you wanted to follow something like this cycle

Day One/Two – Honor your ancestors, deceased parents and grandparents in particular, with wine, grain, bread and flowers. Celebrate them, mourn them, give them attention.

Day Three – Honor those whose work laid a foundation for you, honor mythical figures whose stories reflect the values and culture of your community

Day Five – Honor your community’s civic ancestors

Day Nine – propitiate any spirits you have wronged, address any grievances your ancestors may have, make offerings like on day one and call for your ancestors to restrain anger or harmful acts. Work to remove those other spirits who might plague you or your family who can not otherwise be propitiated and brought to a good relationship

Day Ten – celebrate your living family, and with them honor the dead and your relationship with the dead.

On the remaining days I would continue focusing on the work from day one.

Otherwise, you might take a simpler approach and just pick a prayer and make that prayer each day, or give nine days of offerings. Or even make offerings the first day and propitiations the last day and leave it at that. There are a lot of approaches you can take should you decide to take advantage of this traditional time for building relationships with the dead.

But just remember, the focus here is the dead themselves, not the gods who rule them or the guardians who keep them.

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