This article is scheduled for publication just before my birthday of November 7th. I’ve always been fond of saying that I was born 7 days after Halloween, but I have only recently become aware that my birthday may be the actual date celebrated by the ancients as Samhain.
The ancient calendar (or so I was told) was based on the Equinoxes and Solstices that divide the year into quarters. The Cross-Quarter Days, were the midpoint between those, which, being a middle space, heralded the Opening of the Ways.
Apparently our modern November 7th is the Cross-Quarter Day midpoint between the Autumnal Equinox and the Winter Solstice. It’s 15 degrees through the sign of Scorpio which sits between the Libra of the Equinox and the Sagittarius of the Solstice. The equinoxes and solstices are 90 degrees apart on the zodiac, and 15 degrees of Scorpio is 45 degrees from either side.
So, like I told the clerk at the store the other day, I am Halloween.
That certainly would explain a lot.
Since last week’s article fell before the Samhain/Halloween holiday, I thought I would adorn this week’s posting with pictures from my Haunted Firehouse setup. The props are things I have collected or made over the years, employing lighting and basic stage trickery to delight and frighten the visitors. It seems to have been effective. The lab experiment is a hairdresser’s mannequin I acquired in one of my other lifetimes when I worked as a professional stylist. That was between being the cemetery caretaker and international man of mystery.
The good news is, we all get Halloween for another week, and that can’t be a bad thing. I no longer have to call it second Halloween. It’s Halloween. Which I guess makes the other Pre-Halloween, but let’s not spoil it with technicalities. Tis time, Tis Time!
My birthday this year commemorates 57 trips around the Sun. I still have a little time ahead before my second Saturn return, but when you get close, you start feeling it. The first one in our late-twenties/early-thirties usually knocks us on our ass, dropping a load of adultness on us in one fell swoop. I am hoping that this second round is a tad more refined, mature, and circumspect, owing to those changes in myself. I think, perhaps, I needn’t be conked on the head quite so forcefully this time to get the message.
Though if this year is any indication. the conking has begun. My family has been visited by death three times closely, and three more times nearby, and the year still has a few more weeks to work. Despite the months that have passed, I still find myself working through things related to the realization of the permanence of these losses. Regardless of all other things that may come to be, these things will never be altered. They are now a permanent part of the web of memory and thought and emotion that constitute who I am in the universe.
So pardon me, Saturn, if I say I’m ready to get through this return thing sooner rather than later.
This blog is partially due to hearing that ticking of the clock a bit louder every day. Now, I am in relatively good health, I am taking steps to improve my health and hope to see Saturn return at least once more, if not twice (it’s possible). But as you reach certain points in life, you start thinking about things that you’ve put off, or allocated to someday.
My life has been full. It has moved in unexpected ways, and I consider every twist and turn to be one step closer to where I stand now. Some of the things that have happened I planned. Some of them I dreamed. Most were thrown at me by the universe in a mad game of existential catch. I’ve done my best not to drop the ball, though I’d be a liar if I said I hadn’t a few times.
In walking down that road, some things that were the dreams and ambitions of my youth were cast aside, to be filled with more useful, enjoyable, and worthy pursuits. But there are those that linger, that I still find joy in, and thanks to the advent of the Internet and the broad community connected to one another by it, I have opportunities to explore those things.
The fire department has excellent fog machines. They are used to simulate the conditions inside a burning building and boy howdy do they work. It was difficult to get pics of the various stations of the spooky tour, and this clip from the video is about the best shot I got of my coffin. Yes I have a coffin. Oddly enough I got it at work. Not the job at the cemetery.
The series of articles I have been posting here since around April are part of that. Originally I intended this to be something of an aside to the webstore, which I still hope will appear on this domain. But life, the universe and everything frequently interferes with my plans, and this has become a larger, and hopefully more enjoyable, offering.
I get that even today a written blog is fast becoming an anachronism. In an environment dominated by “influencers” and social media, anyone wanting to be seen and heard has moved on to the podcast circuit, and my friends know I considered that at the beginning. It’s not been completely ruled out, as I have the equipment from my filmmaking work. But the time required to produce, record, edit, and publish a regular podcast is just not something I have right now. Maybe in 2023. Or 2024. Still lots on my plate.
The weekly dribbling from my mind’s eye that you will find here was initially motivated in a previous incarnation by my feelings that many in the modern occult community were getting a lot of surface but little depth. I think that may still be true for a lot of people, but either the tide is turning, or I am just becoming more aware of the deeper voices.
This clip is Charlie who you might just make out on top of the coffin in the previous image. Charlie was made for a sculpture class I took in the mid-90s. Over the years, the latex and foam rubber have naturally degraded to give him a wonderfully creepy countenance. He comes out now and again. He was seen briefly in my short film Silent for the 48 Hour Film Festival, but usually he stays in his cage. It’s better for everyone that way.
I have been working with the unseen since I was about 7 years old and got my first Tarot deck. Along with a book on a broad range of esoteric disciplines, and a later book on witchcraft directly, this journey was undertaken in comparative secrecy and on a solitary path. After decades, it is likely that I will always be more or less solitary, but in later years the secret part has slipped away. This is the result of moving from a very restricted rural community in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to the suburbs of the largest city in Texas. There are more weirdos here than me, and I have been lucky enough to meet up with a few.
I am that guy on the Hermit card. While it is relatively easy for me to be loquacious on the most bizarre of subjects here on the internet, in person I am less so. This is a holdover from those years when talk of such odd things was considered evil sacrilege or worse by the local populace. But I still am not entirely trusting of people I meet who present a strange and unusual vibe.
Let’s be honest. Some of them are crazy. For that matter, I might be crazy, too. But there’s a good crazy and a bad crazy, and I have had that experience of sharing perhaps too freely with someone who needs professional help.
There are doubtless some who might say I would probably benefit from professional help, myself. But it’s hard to find a reliable alchemist these days.
See, that flippancy is what the therapists call a deflection. Avoiding the deep complicated stuff by making a joke. There’s the meme that goes around about “sarchotic” being the state where people don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or if you’re psychotic.
I never know either. But it’s usually fun, and it can be entertaining for those paying close attention. For the rest, well, I’m not really all that interested in keeping their company. There’s that Hermit thing again.
The world has over 7 billion people on it, and a lot more in it. You can’t possibly be friends with all of them, and you’ll go mad trying. In my youth, I lived in a community where conformity was the standard. Think about that. Being like everyone else meant you had to be like everybody else. That’s soul-crushing and sadly not isolated to small towns in remote regions.
I chose not to conform, and that rebellion ultimately got me cast out. Figuratively at first – being ostracized from the social groups, both in school and afterward. I was considered as weird by “adults who should know better” as my so-called peers. The kids had to learn it from somewhere. Eventually I just up and left, because there was a wider world beckoning.
And in that wider world, I ran across, from time to time, others who had a similar outlook, and formed connections both short and long. I also ran across people who were utterly despicable, wasters of my time, lost souls, mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I was lucky enough to recognize those encounters and move away from them as fast as was practical and possible. You can’t always tell the boss to shove it.
Esmerelda here was probably my favorite setup. The Temple of the Golden Idol had to be drastically scaled back to comply with new fire codes, so the Fortune Teller ended up being a big hit. Of course when you have Tarot Cards and crystal balls around the house, it’s a fairly easy scene to put together. Esmerelda has been seen on my instagram multiple times as Erasmus. It’s handy to have gender fluid props when trying to set up something like this.
I find as the years pass that some of that latter group might simply have appeared to be that way because of who I was at the time. And to be honest, some of the “friends” I made along the way turned out to be that only because of who I was at the time. We change, we transition. we hope that we grow. Or at least learn not to mistake simple change for actual growth. I am as guilty of seeking greener grass as the next person.
The Hermit is not at the end of his path. He is just at a stopping point for this moment.
“The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began.”
I use my birthday as a kind of regeneration. I attempt to assess, improve, reject, and jettison any unneeded parts of myself that have ceased to serve. In a way, it’s a personal Samhain. It signals a new beginning for the next year.
I hope that you will continue to join me for it. Back next week with hopefully less introspective content.
So we are in the Halloween Season, and since I have been dropping a lot of somber, contemplative, and downright depressing stuff in recent articles, I thought I’d just jump in here with some good ol’ fashioned spookiness.
Besides, it’s the one time of year when most of us can talk about our weird and witchy sides without getting the side-eye from the normal people. Simply put, I dig the dead. After all, there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
And yes, before you ask, I have dug graves. They were not occupied. I’ve never run across poor Yoric or any of his kinfolk. The cemetery is pretty good about keeping track of who is planted where. I have also dug the graves of many of my beloved cats, And I have built tombs for bees and praying mantises, when I was a child. Death and I go way back.
I mentioned that death was never far away in my Appalachian birthplace. This is somewhat a result of a harder life that even today is not mitigated entirely by the conveniences of the modern technological world. But it also is the consequence of having large extended families in close proximity to one another. Because your great aunt Fannie just lived over the ridge, her passing was known and felt by you, and it rippled through the community.
There is a sort of fatalist bent to the people in that part of the world because of that, and certainly it mirrors generations of their forebears living in tiny villages back in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. We are all of us descended from coal miners, dirt farmers, and the wretched refuse of Europe’s teeming shores, quite accustomed to sudden reversals of fortune, loss and sorrow. I am sure this had some effect on my own interest in the macabre and morbid.
Ghosts and ghostly visitations were considered by most a fact of life in my childhood. In a culture that was an amalgam of various Protestant faiths, the survival of the individual soul after death was considered an absolute truth, so these spirits remaining, or returning, to the earth to interact with the living was not in any way out of the ordinary. Traditions such as covering the mirrors (or photos of the dead) in the house were aimed at encouraging the departed spirit to go on about it’s business and ascend (hopefully) to its eternal rest. People often took an indirect route leaving the funeral or the church, in order that the dead might not follow them home.
And yet almost everyone had some personal ghost story to tell, usually about being visited by the loved one shortly after their passing, but in some cases seeing them in later years. My grandmother told me that the night her mother was buried, she had a dream that her mother had come to the backdoor of the house, and was trying to get back in. In this instance, she did not take it as a good sign, but instead assumed it was an evil spirit trying to trick her into letting it loose in the house. Such doppelgangers are not unique to mountain lore.
I personally have been visited in dreams by the dead, often that same grandmother. Modern clinical thought would suggest that this is simply my mind replaying memories. That’s a possible explanation. Yet the nature of human consciousness is not even barely understood by science. As there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy, I do not know what a dream really is, or what my mind really is. I can’t say that it is not a communication with a mind that is no longer in corporeal form.
This is, of course, the basis of the work of the medium, to contact a spirit mind to mind, and provide a conduit for direct or indirect messaging. I have conducted a séance or two in my lifetime, but it’s not my usual practice. I’m not proficient at it, as I don’t consider myself psychically gifted, rather just intuitive and observant. But I do often talk with the dead, and there are times I feel their presence.
Our modern sensibilities regarding luminous see-through spirits may be informed by this optical trick from the late 19th century. Dubbed “Pepper’s Ghost” for the English scientist who popularized the technique, it consisted of a “ghost” performer offstage, brightly lit, reflected into a pane of glass between the actors onstage and the audience. This method causes the reflected figure to appear as a phantasm interacting somewhat with the live persons on stage. If you’ve ridden the Haunted Mansion ride at one of the Disney parks, you’ve seen it in action.
A variation on Pepper’s Ghost was invented by cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan for the film Metropolis. In the process, a mirror is used in place of the glass plate. The mirror is set up at a proper angle to the camera. Behind it is a miniature model. Opposite, so that it will reflect into the mirror, is a set that matches part of the model, with actors. This set is positioned far enough from the mirror so that the set and actors “fit” into the space of the model. The reflective substance around the area of the set’s reflection is removed, so that the camera sees the background model, with apparently tiny actors inside it. This was used to create the Molloch sequence shown in my article on masks, as well as many others. Like Pepper’s Ghost, the technique has been disused with the advent of digital compositing and sophisticated projection systems, but it’s a great way to spook up the house for Halloween.
The typical ghost of folklore and legend, however, I have encountered more than a few times, and it’s never been that glowing see-through shade that we all saw in the moving pictures. When I have seen ghosts, they look like regular people who just happen to be there. Sometimes it is just out of the corner of the eye, but other times they walk right past.
I had such an experience earlier this year when I was visiting Salem, Massachusetts. The encounter was hardly dramatic, nor was it witchy (as one might expect). A youngish man passed me on the sidewalk. He was wearing a suit and hat from around the late 1940s. It was near the end of the day, and I was tired, and drained from the sensory overload, and it took me a minute to notice that he was out of place for the crowd, the location, the weather, and the century. When I turned to look after him, he was gone.
Now certainly, in a town like Salem where there are a number of eccentric personalities, this may simply have been a local whose particular affectation was period costume. It might have been an actor on the way to a performance. And they may simply have ducked into a storefront in that moment it took my hazy brain to realize something was odd about them.
But it didn’t feel that way. I was sure I’d seen a ghost.
In reflection I had noticed him coming down the street, in that way that you see something and the rest of the picture seems to be less important, like something you are looking at is yelling out “look at me” – “pay attention to this”.
I don’t doubt the person who passed me was not of that time and place, though what he actually was I cannot with any certainty tell you. It was a great ending to a very powerful day.
Most of my ghost encounters have been of this character. I don’t feel that I have ever run into a malevolent ghost – that is, as the spirit of a dead person appearing to me on the material plane.
But there are mischievous and malevolent spirits out there that “haunt” the usual places, old houses, castles, cemeteries, and the gallows hill. These are the goblins our ancestors believed waited behind bush and tree, waiting to carry off the unwary, to a gruesome fate that might involve a large bubbling pot.
There’s a fair argument that such hauntings are more akin to the popular idea of the tulpa. Much of modern magical thought employs this word, derived from, inaccurately, a Tibetan concept, interchangeably with words like servitor or egregore.
These Chaos magic ideas essentially assert that it is possible to create a more or less autonomous force using focused thought. These forces are believed to be capable of carrying out the magician’s will without a direct or constant intention. This might be similar to some elder concepts of the familiar spirit, but in the case of a haunting, it is the raw psychic force generated by a location, event, or person(s) that remain as a roving presence.
The angry ghost is now a trope of paranormal shows, occupying abandoned prisons and mental hospitals where the trauma and abuse of malevolent treatment is common. The pain, suffering, and madness of the inmates has taken on a life of its own. That such things continue to exist in the abandoned places is perhaps because in our own experience of the “ghosts” we feed more psychic energy into it, keeping it alive for generations.
I had the experience the first time that I visited His Majesty’s Tower of London of encountering a malevolence that occupied a part of the stairwell in the Bloody Tower. As I ascended I was almost overcome by a powerful dread. My heart raced. My hair stood on end. The entire time I was in the room at the top, I felt like there was something stalking around in the corners. This was broad daylight, with a number of other visitors. The only other person who noted the presence was my wife, who, while not as odd as myself, does admit experiencing these things from time to time.1 Though she plays it down now, she admitted to having played with two young boys at the Tower when she was a child. Like the man from Salem, they were gone inexplicably. Our family believes that these were the two princes Edward V and Richard Duke of York, who had supposedly been murdered by the usurper Richard III.
Curiously, when we returned a few years later to take our daughters, the presence was not there. I can only assume it was wandering some part of the vast ancient castle. That there should be unhappy dead in such a place is not surprising. The Norman White Tower was erected by William the Conqueror in 1066 on the remains of a Roman fortress. It has been a prison, torture chamber, and place of execution, often with the heads of the dead displayed on pikes on her outer walls. Indeed, the celebrated ravens of the Tower are descended from those corvids who came for the sweet morsels of beheaded criminals. The Tower Guard tell many tales of spirits and spooks that inhabit the place. Whether these are actual personal experiences or retold folklore depends on the person.
The executioner’s tools from the Tower of London are grim testimony to the political realities of pre-democratic times. The axe here may have ended the lives of millions whose crimes were simply displeasing the monarch or their policies of the day. Henry VIII was notorious for sending both wives and advisors to the block, though the royal and upper class offenders were probably done with the sword. In the ensuing chaos of his first daughter’s reign, Mary established an autodafe in England that was an extension of her husband’s Spanish Inquisition. Hundreds and maybe thousands were imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for heresy and witchcraft. When Elizabeth took the throne, despite initial overtures at reconciliation, attempts on her life by Catholic Spain in conspiracies with France and Scotland caused her to institute her own purges.
One would think if horrible death were a prelude to haunting that this old block of good English Oak would be swarming with the vengeful spirits of it’s victims. In an age when strangling, burning, and drawing and quartering were considered acceptable means of capital punishment, and the prelude to execution was often weeks or months of torture and imprisonment, the swift moment at the block may actually have been a merciful end to torment.
The Tower, of course, is much associated with Henry VIII and the subsequent, often tragic, Tudor dynasty. In the break between Henry and the Church of Rome, there followed many years of attendant bloodshed. Henry’s second wife and mother of Queen Elizabeth I, Anne Boleyn was beheaded at the Tower, and is said to roam the grounds. But she was not the only victim of the English Reformation. The persecutions and executions marked the reign of each succeeding monarch, and eventually contributed to the Witch Persecution in Salem in a later century.
When we visited England with our children in the mid-2000s we also went to Henry’s other palace, Hampton Court. This sprawling Tudor marvel is associated with ghosts. One is supposed to be Jane Seymour, who succeeded the beheaded Anne and gave birth to Edward, the son Henry had shed his previous two wives to get. Tragically she died from complications a few days later, and is said to haunt the stairway up to her chambers.
A second ghost is that of fifth wife Catherine Howard. Howard was much younger than the aging king, and is supposed to have openly flaunted extramarital relations. She was also beheaded at the Tower, but according to the story, her spirit replays the desperate attempt to get Henry’s mercy by running screaming down one of the hallways. Henry was engaged in prayer in the chapel on the floor below, and she never reached him.
I have seen neither of these ghosts, but on approaching the doors of that chapel at a later point in the tour, our family all experienced that same feeling of fear and dread that I had felt on the previous visit to the Bloody Tower. There is what is termed as a “cold spot” in that hallway near the chapel. It could, of course, be just a factor of the antique structures air currents. But none of us wanted to go into the chapel at the point. We satisfied ourselves with a swift look in the door, and then went on out to the warmer and merrier kitchens.
I don’t as a general rule frequent abandoned prisons and mental asylums, so I can’t relate any of the stories of those places that are so popular in the public imagination. I think there is a certain carnival sideshow fascination with places like this, and I am not certain to what extent this mystique is not creating the psychic phenomena, or at least perpetuating it. The link in the earlier paragraph on the tulpa leads to a long anthropological article on the subject of popular fascination and the possible creation of thought-form beings. It’s verbally more dense and clinical than even the kind of stuff I write, but if you are up for a challenge, I think you’ll find it interesting. As a bonus it invokes both Mulder and Scully, and the Winchester brothers. How often are you going to find a legitimate scientific article like that? Look for the connection with contemporary occult author and practicing sorceror Jason Miller near the end.
Again this time of year is a busy one for me. It’s my favorite holiday almost immediately followed by my favorite birthday, and also is that time of year when all the obligations and goals of the previous several months either come to fruition or need a final push. I hope you continue to find these articles of some interest. I will be back next week for another one before the doors to the other world swing fully wide.
My paternal grandfather passed away when I was 18. I don’t remember going to the funeral, although I must have. I know that I didn’t attend the graveside service. The cemetery was within sight of my house, and I sat on the back deck and watched from there. It was a nice sunny spring day, not a cloud in the sky.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground, there was a clap of thunder.
I know it was thunder. I eliminated the possibility that it had been blasting at one of the nearby strip mines. These shook the ground, and sometimes threw up a cloud of debris. It wasn’t that. Nor was it any other phenomena that was easily explained.
It was one loud clap of thunder, and then silence.
When the burial party returned home, my mother asked, “Did you hear that thunder?” It was a rhetorical question. We all heard it. There wasn’t any speculation or spiritual debate. It was a sign. My grandfather had been accepted into the next world.
Some years later, my cousin’s father (who was technically also a cousin, but due to age was regarded like an uncle) also passed. We had the same experience at his grave. Warm clear day. No sign of rain. A single thunderclap as the coffin was lowered.
My cousin who had been in attendance at my grandfather’s grave found this gratifying. Its fair to say that our relationships with these men, and the paths they had walked in the world, were complicated. And yet all of us took these signs as a favorable portent. The individual had received life everlasting.
I should clarify that I was not deeply religious and certainly not Christian at this time in my life, nor do I think I really ever have been. But in rural Eastern Kentucky, the biblical is interwoven into the culture. Like the ever-present tobacco and coal smoke, you can’t help but take some of it in.
I have seen this same grandfather go cut a fork from a sapling tree, hold it out before him, and where the tip would dip, water would be found. He did his dowsing for the construction company that employed him as a carpenter and woodworker. He pointed. They drilled. That was how they situated wells on new homesites.
The ancients had many means of divining the future. Elaborate rituals often involving animal sacrifice were carried out by a priestly caste, to determine the most propitious time for state events like the crowning of kings and waging of wars. Dream interpretation was practiced by the ancients as well. Usually this would be the dream of a chief or king, since those persons personified the state or tribe. But there were clearly priests and cunning folk who provided such services for the common people, for a fee, of course.
Modern superstitions such as a black cat crossing your path are possibly Medieval in origin. Cats in general were considered ill portents in early Islam. The witch’s cat was frequently cast as the devil in disguise in witch hunter manuals like the Maleus Malificarum.
Poor Bast earned such a bad reputation that feral cat populations were eradicated in many places, leading to a growth spurt in the rodent population of Europe’s cities. The fleas on the rodents carried the germ Yersinia pestis, which spread rapidly through the population. In the end one-quarter to one-third of the people died, leaving whole villages empty of life. We call it the Black Death. Better they should have kept the cats.
No one considered this the least out of the ordinary. Nor was the thunder roll that sent him off unexpected. He had some power about him, though he was a lay preacher in the Hardshell Baptist church. He had the intimate knowledge of nature that comes from relying on it for your food, medicine, and shelter. He knew what every kind of tree was, from bark, leaf, nut, and sap. He knew the wild herbs, and we routinely collected them. American ginseng was part of our autumn harvest, and would go to buy Christmas presents for the grandkids.
He was, generally speaking a good man, but he was also a hard one, and that comes from a hard life in a hard place. I learned things from him, but I can’t say that I ever really knew him. I experienced him when we went hunting or foraging or fishing. I didn’t care for many of those activities so perhaps the distance was as much my fault. In any case, there’s things the older me would have liked to have asked him. I know I have spent much time looking for things in books that I could have listened to when he was around.
Every generation we get away from the dead we lose some of who they were. My children never knew him. He is a complete abstraction. He’s a name for a man in a picture. I had the same experience of my great-grandfather, who was, apparently, the only other left-handed person in memory of our family.
Left-handedness is one of those “signs” in many cultures. Often viewed as evil, or unnatural, it’s a minor genetic variation that is frequently suppressed in early childhood. The term “Left-hand path” is almost synonymous with malefic magic and those who practice it. In Latin, the right hand is “dexter” whence emerges our word dexterity. The left hand is sinister. Well, guilty as charged.
Signs and portents are not necessarily magical. Some of them are quite natural, but people either don’t know about them, or they don’t pay attention to them. Those who do then acquire the prestige of a prophet, simply because they looked around. For instance, I can usually tell you when it’s going to rain. There’s an ache in my left ankle that seems to increase a day or so before a front comes through. I am fairly certain that this is the result of a change in barometric pressure, that my arthritic joint picks up as well as a column of mercury. If I also happen to notice the ants are building their hills up higher, and the leaves on the trees seem to be floppy and turned over, I am sure it’s going to come a gulley-washer.
The ants, of course, are responding to some indicator that they sense in the air or the magnetic field of the earth and preparing for the inevitable flooding of their tunnels by dredging. The trees are pulling the fluid out of the leaf that makes them rigid, in order to be less likely to be torn or pulled off by wind. This is probably, again, some response to changes in air pressure that are sensed in the very cells of the plant.
Okay, so it isn’t Doppler radar. But in context, and in the absence of Doppler radar and other prognosticating tools, it was how the wise knew it was time to put up the chickens and get in the house.
There’s a storehouse of lore about many important survival skills that predate modern industrialization and factory-farming. “Planting by the signs” is as old as the hills, as they say, but likely is a mixture of immigrant traditions and indigenous knowledge that survives in a few places still. The “signs” most typically is the phase of the moon, and then the moon at certain times of the year. This was determined to be most propitious so that the chance of a late frost wouldn’t blight the seedlings that just emerged. If you have heard the term “harvest moon” then you know of what I speak. There are interpretations that it meant a moon so bright you could bring in the crops by it, but that is not right. It was the right moon, at the right phase, in the right month. Any later and there’d be frost on the pumpkins, and you would have lost valuable and vital food. You might find this information in a modern Farmers’ Almanac, which was first compiled for this purpose. You’ll find a lot of other omens and signs there as well.
Birds are considered omens of good and ill in many cultures. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner the man who killed the albatross is considered to have slain a good sign. But when the winds pick up and the ship sails northward from the polar seas, they hail him heroic for killing the bird that “brought the fog and mist”. Of course, the Mariner’s hellish voyage was just beginning, and none that condemned or hailed him would survive the trip.
These two birds visited me this year. The white ibis, bird of Thoth, the Mercury of the Egyptians, arrived on a February morning. That night my wife’s mother passed away. The black crow that came and sat on my balcony arrived a day after my father had died. These can, of course, be seen as coincidence. But I watch the birds more closely now.
As death was always near in mountain life, there were signs to look for. Remember that these people were descended from those who knew the cry of the Banshee or the Wailing Woman. The caterwaul was a creature, like Texas’s jackalope, that has evolved into a tall tale. Originally as a kind of Banshee spirit, its mournful cry presaged a death in the community. I have heard a wildcat screech at times that sounds like the keening of a woman in pain or fear. This is the beast they speak of. Sometimes, of course, it’s the call of a screech owl, echoing over “holler and hill” that mutates into the warning of impending loss. So too, was the call of the whippoorwill. Owls, of course, are birds of ill omen anyway, companion of witches and creatures of the night. But any bird that flew into the house meant that someone under that roof would die soon.
Shooting stars are another sign of bad things to come, at least in the area where I grew up. A meteor was reason to believe death or hard times were on the way. Closer to earth ghost lights and “fireballs” were often seen in the deep woods at night. While many of these may have been optical illusions, caused by atmospheric conditions and the moon or even terrestrial campfires, some of the older generation swore they’d been chased by them. They were often seen near so called “Indian mounds” like the barrow wights of English lore. These earthworks, if indeed they were not naturally formed, carried their own mystique, so the association of protective and malevolent spirits with them is not unusual. There are prehistoric mounds to the western part of the state, and northward in Ohio, so the presence of smaller ones in Eastern Kentucky is not impossible. Unlike their European counterparts, most are believed to have been ceremonial rather than funerary. Yet the spirits linger.
As we moved into cities and towns, and got electric light to drive off the night and weather forecasts on the color TV and geological surveys to drill our wells, much of the mystery and wonder of the old ways quietly slipped into the nothing. I am probably the last generation to have some direct connection with the tales and experiences that give meaning to “superstitions” that may go back to Medieval times or earlier. My children and their peers, and the generation that is coming up, can only respond to it as a recorded abstraction to be read about on the Internet.
The mantic arts are so popularly believed now that Halloween decorations tout the Tarot and “Fortune Telling”. Tarot like many systems, is based on random patterns being interpreted as portents of things to come. Random information could come from cracks on heated bones, the shapes of clouds, or the spots on a goat’s liver.
Other oracles were based on random outcomes of coin tosses or dice rolls. In the case of the former, a set number of tosses were combined and read as a pattern or value. This value was then looked up in a list. Later, yarrow sticks were then shaken in a bundle. The sticks that fell out gave the meaning. This is known as the I Ching, and is one of the most popular Chinese methods of predicting the future.
While there are certainly still wise folk in the hills, like Byron Ballard, who are recording and bringing forward these practices, there is a difference between living it and reading about it. Like the coal smoke on a brisk fall evening, you breath it in, and it becomes part of you. Otherwise, it’s not the same.
I hope you have found today’s tales worth the telling. I will return next week with more autumn thoughts.
I grew up in a temperate climate, and by this first week of September the signs of arriving autumn were well and truly underway. The family garden had largely been harvested. Dry brown cornstalks rattled in the morning breezes, waiting my scythe to fell them. The trees were already starting to color, and soon would burst forth in a final glory before dropping their leaves in advance of the coming winter.
Despite having lived longer in semi-arid and semi-tropical parts of Texas, where no such natural alchemies occur, my brain has not rewired the calendar of childhood. When August ends, my mind turns to thoughts of fall, dimming days, longer nights, and the inevitable grip of the Winter Dark.
September is also a frequent metaphor for those of us looking at our later years. Careers are winding down; children are raised and gone. A few pleasant years of retirement ahead, and then that inevitable long slumber, our own encounter with final darkness of the human experience. Hence this time of year my thoughts turn toward contemplation on endings, and the melancholia that attends such.
You’ve been warned.
When one is younger, the fact that we are all marching toward that same destiny is hardly noticed by most. As teenagers we are invincible and immortal, and even into our 40s and early 50s we may still occupy our minds with the daily grind. What is being ground away is pushed deep down from our consciousness. When we start seeing 60 on the horizon, though, the ticking of that clock becomes much louder. Despite encouragement from Blue Oyster Cult, we all still fear the Reaper.
This fear is hard wired in us. It’s deep down in our anatomy in a place fittingly at the bottom of our brain called the amygdala. These nerve clusters are considered to be essential for our experience of the emotions of fear, anxiety, and aggression. It is the center of the “fight or flight” response. Fear and hatred are interlinked at a cellular level.
The amygdala and it’s connected processes are sometimes referred to as our “reptile brain”. These are the parts of the brain that respond instinctually, to carry out the primary purpose of the organism, survival. There are few commands in this primitive part of our brain.
Eat. Mate. Repeat if necessary.
Presumably this is the wiring of all those nifty Cretaceous critters that you see when you go to Jurassic Park (because Cretaceous Park wouldn’t fit on the sign, I guess). They’re Eaters who want to make baby Eaters. They do that and keep doing it until a bigger Eater swoops in and eats them.
This is the whole reason for fight or flight. The Eater had to determine (and very quickly) whether or not the thing confronting it was predator, prey, or mate, and consequently whether to try it’s luck or run away like a bunch of English knights from a vicious rabbit.
Since there were only three options, the wiring didn’t need to be too complex. A basic pattern of friendly, not friendly, and edible was put together, probably based on the pheromones in scent, and things went merrily onward until an asteroid hit the planet.
With most of the Eaters now extinct, evolution filled the gap with mammals. Mammals are also Eaters, but they are a bit more sophisticated about it. What existed of the amygdala in the reptile brain, started wiring into other areas of the mammalian brain. It formed more complicated relationships that included support for nurturing, community, and hierarchy. These structures were necessary for insuring the safety and survival of the young, which were born largely unfinished. The weeks, months, and sometimes years needed for a mammal offspring to reach adulthood and begin it’s role eating and mating compelled this adaptation.
Fast forward a few million years and one uppity group of mammals started doing things like using tools, and maybe even fire, and we got the primate brain. I don’t make a distinction between primate brain and human brain. There’s ample evidence that while we have some significant increase in size and capacity, we aren’t always using it any better, and sometimes not nearly as well.
But primate brain seems to have one major distinction over the basic mammal brain, and that is an awareness of death. That is, when comparing something like a pride of lions, and a colony of chimpanzees, a death in the group is responded to in very different ways.
Chimps are known to mourn, or at least appear to mourn the loss of one of their members. They experience grief in a way at least similar to our own.
Lions, while the Discovery Channel might narrate otherwise, seem less attached. A couple of nose nudges, and then the pride moves on. Sorry, Disney.
Velociraptors, of course, would just eat the dead one. There’s no code for friendly but dead. The default is edible.
The cults of death are as diverse as they are common. Ritual and taboo have evolved around the basic necessity of insuring that the decomposition of our mortal remains occurs in a safe manner for our food supply and watershed. In elder days it was also handy to keep predators from sniffing around the cave or village. From this the physical and metaphysical lands of the dead were born, and remain with us tens of millennia later.
We start to see “human” behavior regarding death in the species called Neanderthals. These homonids are the first indications we have of intentional burial. The finds also often include personal artifacts.
While it is tempting to believe that early humans included these as tribute or memento, it is more likely they were simply taboo. The resources required to fashion a stone axe or arrowhead tend to preclude it being buried as an offering to the ancestor, at least at this point in our pre-history.
But if it were the possession of someone who suddenly stopped walking, talking, and breathing, that might not be something you wanted to keep around. It could potentially be the thing that stopped them walking, talking, and breathing, so best to leave it behind in the grave.
Burial originally might simply have been a means of keeping predators from being attracted to the rest of the group. Of equal value would be insuring that the process of decomposition occurred out of sight, and any possible contamination (physical or spiritual) was contained. We dispose of our dead today for similar reasons, so it’s not hard to imagine that being how it started.
The awareness of death, and the absolute inevitability of death, sends all kinds of messages down to that reptile brain. After all, it’s purpose is to survive.
Eat or be eaten.
So far, however, nobody has been able to get away from that biggest Eater of all.
Our rational primate brain would rather just avoid the subject, and engage in things like small talk, online gaming, and whatever the hell reality TV is about.
The mammal brain admits that apparently death happens, but there’s a really nice cool water hole over there.
Meanwhile the reptile brain sits down there at the bottom of our consciousness screaming day and night, “YOU FOOLS! WHY DON’T YOU DO SOMETHING? FIGHT! RUN! SOMETHING?”
It’s that downstairs neighbor tapping on the ceiling with a broom while the mammals and primates are having a loud party upstairs.
It’s the Serpent in Eden, and it’s terrifyingly real.
We have no control over the situation. We may live to well over 100 years in peaceful health, and harmony. We could step in front of a bus in the morning.
From the moment that we first experience the loss of another’s life, we are unable to ever go back. We know now.
We have left the Garden.
The terror and pain are real and immediate. Grief and mourning are the process whereby we convince ourselves that despite what just happened, the rest of the world is spinning onward with general indifference.
As cold as that may sound, it’s what we need to be able to get up and go out in the morning, without spending every moment wondering and waiting who will be next to go. And whether it might be us.
And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun but it’s sinking Racing around to come up behind you again The sun is the same in a relative way but you’re older Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
—Time – Roger Waters / David Gilmour / Nick Mason / Richard Wright
Some people seem more attuned to dealing with the idea of mortality than others. I place myself in that group. I surround myself with emblems of death. Skulls and skeletons decorate my home and my wardrobe. I visit cemeteries and battlefields and charnel grounds. I listen to the unquiet dead whispering on that autumn breeze. ” Come away. Come away…”
Yes, of course, I’m a fan of Poe. Even named one of my children Raven.
But there are lot of writers and artists and musicians and entertainers that seem to enjoy this spiraling dance with death and things macabre. Horror and fear are big industries in the part of the world where it can be purchased as entertainment. I think perhaps that the numbers of people who are comfortable, if not chummy, with human mortality is less in the parts of the world where sudden horrible death is a daily occurrence, I can’t believe that there are not some who still walk that path with Thanatos.
Anubis and I are old friends. In some ways meeting him, in a photo in an old library book, started me on the path I now walk. We were finally able to connect “in person” when I visited the Cairo Museum in the mid 1990s. I have seen many cult images of the deity, and have a few myself, but for some reason I feel this one from the celebrated treasury of Tutankhamen is the one he lives in.
I don’t have any idea why I am that way. We lived next to a large cemetery that started out as just family, but had expanded through marriages and kinships to a broader community. My grandmother oversaw the maintenance. In my teens and twenties, I was hired as caretaker, but I often accompanied her and my great-grandmother (when she was still able) down to the graveyard. My grandmother knew who all the dead people were. Even if she had not met them, she knew them because they had been the mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters of people she did know. It was a small community, and everyone knew everyone. Even the dead.
I did not get the chance to visit it when I was last there, and it would be about 20 years since, but I wager I could still tell you who was who, and how they were “kin” to one another, and maybe where they lived and what they did for a living. The oldest resident I know was corporal in George Washington’s army. My grandmother and great-grandmother have since moved in. They may be the last generation of my family to take up residence. My own parents have decided on cremation, and I doubt my brother’s line will be much different. As noted, I live in a far away world now.
I suppose they will miss me. The dead, I mean.
Cemeteries can be beautiful peaceful places for reflection and contemplation, as well as warehouse for human remains. But in a world bursting at the seams with living humans demanding resources, the real estate can be a little wasteful. And filling the ground with metal and plastic boxes holding chemically preserved bodies is not really green.
Like the jackal associated with Anubis, the vulture of Nebkhet is something we associate with death and dying in our modern world. The Ancient Egyptians saw these creatures as protective. Since they were so closely associated with death, surely evil spirits and the like would be frightened away by them. Some cultures practice “sky burial” where the vulture and other carrion birds do what they do to the remains of the deceased, thus taking their mortal coil on to the heavens. The process is both natural and sanitary, if horrifying to modern Western eyes.
The most interesting final disposition I have heard about is a company that will mix your cremated remains with potting soil, and then plant you with a seedling. You get to go back to the earth and come back as the tree of your choice.
I’m not sure what the regulatory agencies (and you would not believe the number of government agencies at multiple levels that have their fingers in the death pie) have determined regarding the potential “public health issues” of this kind of thing. To my mind if your ashes can be dumped in a field, scattered in the ocean or thrown to the wind off a tall building, you can damned well be a shade tree in suburbia.
Now, if I go that route, I know I am going to be that gnarled ancient oak way back in the forest that the animals avoid and nothing grows near. That would be so cool.
The hard thing about being comfortable with death, dying, and the post-death experience is deciding which way to go. I mean, if I’m honest, I want a pyramid. However, looking into the costs of even a small one is discouraging. Maybe I can donate myself to science and pick one of those teams that is always trying to recreate how the Egyptians did it for the History Channel.
Being intimately connected with the family plots, I had sort of just assumed that someday I would have a little piece of the field there. But time passes and things change, and you start thinking odd thoughts as you get older.
Part of the cemetery thing means having perpetual ownership. In other words, when the subdivision moves in, they best not be moving my final resting place. And woe be unto you if you do that Poltergeist thing and just move the headstones, cause I am definitely going to haunt those people. Honestly I will haunt anyone there anyway. I’m just that petty.
But, my kids have no real connection to that place. And if I were in the ground there, they’d either feel obliged to visit a place they hate, or they’d never show up at all. Just like I don’t.
I have deep love and appreciation for my grandmother, but I never visit her grave. I just don’t feel that it matters. The paths I have walked in my life cause me to wonder whether it matters where or what is done with your mortal coil once you have shuffled it off. Spoiler alert – it doesn’t.
If we believe that we are spirits or souls or energy forms that are driving around in our meat puppets for three score and ten, then what becomes of those meat puppets is entirely irrelevant.
Excluding true atheists, everyone has some belief in life after death, and if you don’t, then you aren’t really going to be upset much.
How that life after death turns out is not known. It’s fair to say that someone will have gotten it wrong. Maybe everyone.
That’s an exciting thought.
Owlsong
Dawn rises. Cool mists cling to the forest floor A lone voice proclaims It is not quite through with the night.
Death and witches seem to go hand in hand. The stories are universally grim (and Grimm). Witches were purveyors of poisons, casters of curses, and throwers of bones. The spirits that attended them could just as well be your departed Aunt Fannie as Buen or Baelzebuth. Witches routinely caused the death of livestock, villagers, and crops. They were a living harbinger of death in whatever community they inhabited.
I often wonder if Baba Yaga was just an old woman who had the same fascination with mortality that I have had all my life. The accumulation of bones and apparent indifference to death may have led to tales of cannibalism that feature in her story as well as others. I’ve never eaten anyone, but I’d be perfectly okay with the loud neighbor kids thinking I might. Keeps them off the lawn.
Other people, of course, can’t help but hear that screaming amygdala and yelling back “shutupshutupshutup!” Death is never discussed, never thought of, and avoided whenever possible. Grieving for them is harder and longer, because the event is shattering. The screaming reptile brain is shouting “I told you so!” and that is never productive.
If you are a person upset by this article, I expect that you may have already hit the back button and ducked out. I really would have liked for you to have read it. On the other hand, if you are part of that group of crazy kids who hang out with Anubis, can’t wait for Halloween, and really understand that the profound truth is that the mystery beyond death is where we’re all headed, then thank you for reading this. I know it’s not as directly witchy as the usual, but when you reach my age, you may find that it’s important to face this kind of thing, and realize that the clock will run out.
Addendum — I try to write my blog several weeks ahead. This was originally penned in late June or early July, because in truth, I think “Autumn thoughts” all year round.
A week ago, my father died.
I am fairly sure at the time that I wrote this, I was thinking about this inevitability, even though at that point he had not been diagnosed as terminal. The timing is neither ironic nor really unexpected. Part of being strange and unusual is living a bit out of sync with linear time, and accepting the insights that this brings.
I am confident that he is no longer in pain. I feel that he is both at peace, and has achieved some manner of perspective that will aid his spiritual path in the future.
My view of the cosmos assumes that future, for him and for all of us, so I don’t mourn in the fashion of my ancestors or my immediate family.
I add this epilogue as an observation and affirmation of the rest of the article. To borrow from Gandalf, Death is just another journey, one that we all must take.
I am writing to you from the future. By my calendar, this article will publish on August 3rd, 2022, and I will have written it and moved on by the time you read it for the first time.
By the time August 3rd gets here, I’ll be working on an article for late October or possibly even November. What I am doing here is always in the future, even though you’re reading it in the past.
Sounds a bit backward doesn’t it. I’m really writing this now, for future publication on August 3rd. So really it’s written in the past for the future, and you’ll read it in the future.
That’s how things work, right? Linear time and all that.
That is a very unmagic way of thinking.
Tying ourselves to one place and time is surrendering to an objective reality, with all it’s rational rules, interlocking causality, and very little that is wonderful and unexplainable. It’s analogous to being on a one-lane one-way road, with no exits, and nothing to see but the same damned boring road in front of you.
I personally prefer to pull over every now and again, and take in the sights. Maybe even have lunch and meet the locals. Marvel at the largest ball of twine in the Tri-State Area. It broadens the spirit and refreshes the soul. That’s what travel is all about.
I am speaking about astral travel, of course. The art of displacing ones identity outside the physical limitations of objective reality has been practiced since ancient times. Modern psychology calls this an altered state of consciousness.
There are a lot of altered states of consciousness. For example, your awareness in that moment when you sneeze is different from the moment before or afterward. It passes so very quickly that we hardly notice the difference, but it’s there. Your consciousness when you’re hungry and your blood sugar is low is different from when you’ve just eaten and the brain is lulling you into a torpor so it can digest the meal. We dismiss these mundane fluctuations in our perceptions because they are part of everyday activity. Our brain, however, is different, it reacts differently, decides differently, and perceives differently. We are rarely as fully awake, alert, and fully focused as we imagine we are.
The human dream state is sometimes acknowledged as a basic form of astral projection. We are encountering things that didn’t exist in the real world, but generally we are not aware that we are in this state. We’re not conscious of dreaming when we dream, only when we wake up. Because we are only pmartially invested in the dream world, our worst consequence may be a nightmare, or other frightening nocturnal event.
This painting by surrealist icon Salvador Dali is called “Dream caused by the flight of a bee around a pomegranate a second before awakening“. The imagery is exploring how our brain rewires stimuli when we are in the dream state, and is influenced by Dali’s interest in Freud’s work on the subconscious.
Aside from the usual fabulous beasts, the painting plays with time, space, and proportion as we experience it in the dream world. Gravity does not apply, Gaia (she was Dali’s wife and chief model) floats above a landscape that could make her a giantess. Distant Gibraltar rises, about to stomped by the Space Elephant (Dali’s name). A tiger leaps out of the mouth of another tiger that leaps from a fish that springs from a giant pomegranate. The actual pomegranate, with the eponymous bee, hovers just in front of the scene lower right among floating rocks.
From the psychoanalytical perspective this is happening in Gaia’s mind and are distortions of remembered images. From the occult perspective, it is happening on the astral plane and the things are very real.
Folklore frequently says that we never die in our dreams, because if we did it would kill us. Of course, like the afterlife itself, there are few people who have the experience to confirm or deny this assertion.
Science says we hardly remember most of what we dream about, so it’s possible we die all the time and just don’t remember we’re dead. Given the theory that ghosts frequently remain because they are not aware they’ve died, we may all be a bunch of dream zombies. That is both fascinating and horrifying to me. It’s a wonder I ever sleep at all.
Sleep is an altered state of consciousness all it’s own. And it’s a weird one. We’re not dead, but aside from some simple autonomic processes like breathing and cardiac activity, we might as well be. We don’t move. We don’t talk, hear, see, smell, or otherwise respond. Fortunately it is usually easier to leave sleep than enter it. A loud noise, or gentle shaking, is enough to rouse the sleeper into a more or less conscious state, though it may take a few moments to orient and react with full wakefulness.
Then there are the states that are like sleep but aren’t sleep. Coma, absent brain death, is like a deep and prolonged sleep, which defies efforts to arousal. Yet coma patients have reported being aware of the presence of people in the room with them, and remember conversations, Sleep doesn’t work that way.
There’s somnambulism, which is a cooler sounding term than sleep walking. People who walk in their sleep, get up, walk around, sometimes have eyes wide open, dress themselves, speak and answer questions, and even have unlocked the door and left the house, all without any awareness. Folklore also says you shouldn’t wake a sleep walker because it will kill them. As far as I know this is completely without scientific merit. There’s a lot of folklore about sleep and death, probably because the two states are so eerily similar. And we’re all dream zombies.
I experienced sleep walking in my younger years, as well as having very bad insomnia. Later in life, when I was attempting to get healthy and removed the stimulants from my bloodstream, I started falling asleep in traffic. I was finally diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. I now sleep in scuba gear and lull my good lady wife into slumber with the dulcet tones of Darth Vader breathing. But I sleep.
The “really bad snoring” that is characteristic of the type of sleep apnea I suffer from has been around since childhood, and probably also afflicted my father and grandfather. To what extent it was responsible for my childhood sleep disorders, I will never know. The diagnosis was unknown to the doctors of rural Appalachia. I tend to think it didn’t help to calm my overactive brain and the severe anxiety that an overactive brain produces.
So naturally, in exhaustion and desperation, I tried to find any means of quieting the noise in my head. Hypnosis was a natural choice. There wasn’t any real good reference on hypnosis available to a pre-teen kid in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, What I started with was the bad Hollywood hypnosis we see at least once in the life of every situation comedy:
“You are getting sleeeeeppppyyyyy…..”
It didn’t work. Well, actually, it sort of did.
I was trying very hard to make it work. I was trying oh so very hard to make myself get sleepier and sleepier and sleepier.
I didn’t get sleepier.
In trying so hard, however, I became hyper-focused, and that is an altered state of consciousness in itself. Although my desired goal of becoming drowsy and drifting off on the boat with Winkin’, Blinkin’,and Nod was for naught, I had effectively silenced the chatter in my brain and just concentrated on the one thing.
This is meditation. It is the directed and controlled contemplation of a single thought, in an effort to remove all external distractions. Once in this state, it is possible to open up the mind free of background noise, and experience heightened perceptions and potentially extradimensional realities.
When we first attempt to enter an altered state of consciousness in this way, it’s difficult. The brain, absent distraction, invites distraction in. This is you waking up at 3 AM wondering if you left your car keys in the refrigerator. It’s the one off-key instrument in the whole orchestra being the tuba. It’s infuriating and frustrating and pulls us out of the moment and shatters that whole inner peace thing we started meditating for in the first place.
That frustration can be a wall. We concentrate on the frustration, and not on putting it aside, starting again, breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in, breathing out. In. Out.
Sometimes that is what it takes. Ultimately that is what worked for me, was just concentrating on my breathing (and snuffling and coughing…it was not an easy road) and with every breath just relaxing a little bit further. There are a lot of mental exercises that amplify this technique, and others may work for you that won’t work for me.
Likewise, there are physical techniques such as yoga or tai chi that either put the body in an unordinary position, or focus on repeating movements, in order to jolt the brain into an altered state. Acupuncture works on various points of the body to address the flow of chi, and thus may also be a method to a different awareness.
Certainly there are altered states that result from the consumption of certain compounds, whether it is mugwort tea or lysergic acid diethylamide. I’d be lying if I said I had never experimented with these methods. The choice is a personal one. Like any practice it may have benefits and it will certainly have detriments. It is my experience that short-term use may improve vision while reducing control and impairing memory. Long term use is not advisable. Your mileage may vary.
Like reciting the aum syllable, any ritual or rote performance can open the doors of perception. The process of drawing the mandala or casting the circle focuses the mind on specific structured tasks. The investment of thought and energy properly and effectively on each of those tasks is necessary for the successful completion of the ritual, but it also serves to direct the mind into it. It prepares one for the working ahead, and creates a state of hyper-awareness where things more subtle and rare may be more readily apprehended.
The ability to focus the mind and shift at will from one state to another is a practiced skill. We are all capable of “zoning out” from time to time, but to cultivate this state on demand requires dedicated repetition. Eventually you will learn to feel the change, then learn how you caused it. It works a bit in reverse.
Approaching it from a conscious word-thought direction will not aid you. I don’t think about the keys while I am typing. I learned to touch-type in high school, so I know instinctively where the keys are. Beyond that, though, I don’t think about which letters I am typing. I know the word I want to use. It comes out of the fingers onto the keyboard without articulating it in my head.
Shifting from a “normal” state of consciousness to one of hyper-awareness, or focused intensity, or dissociation, is similar. You learn what it feels like, and then you just do it.
That last one, dissociation, is probably harder than most. It involves being able to disconnect yourself from the here and now and place your conscious awareness somewhere else. This is what the ancients spoke of as astral travel.
It’s hard, because we first of all are afraid to let go of the here and now. We have a natural fear that we won’t come back. That’s a healthy reflex. The old books I studied called this the Silver Cord, which links our astral self back to our physical self that is hanging out in the real world apparently asleep. It’s an interesting visualization tool, I guess, but I always was more pre-occupied on my cord getting caught on something. If you’ve ever played an electric guitar, you know this feeling. So much was made of the need to protect the Silver Cord that it’s safety overrode my will to travel.
I don’t believe in the Silver Cord, myself. I find the construction too distracting, and if it doesn’t work, well, I have no issues in rejecting it. I’m not worrying about being swept away on the astral wind with no way home. I’m not entirely sanguine on the astral wind either.
People who have not studied magic talk about out-of-body experiences (abbreviated OOBE by those trendy folks in the paranormal community). Most of these are near death experiences (NDE) but every now and again, someone takes a walk without themselves for no apparent reason.
In the NDE, the OOBE is characterized by leaving the body, floating up to the ceiling and watching medical personnel attempt resuscitation. Some drift off toward a bright light, experience meeting dead friends and relatives, or otherwise affirming they are in the afterlife, if only briefly. These experiences can have profound effects on a person’s outlook, or not.
An OOBE without an attendant NDE, shares a number of similar reported events. One feels light, floats or flies, and can see and speak to people (or things) that aren’t there in the room with the normal people. The environment being brighter or suffused with light is also not uncommon. The difference, of course, is there’s no crash cart and someone yelling Code Blue.
OOBE are reported by mediums, psychics, and mystics around the world. The CIA even had a program in the 70s to train people for OOBE in order to have them secretly spy on the Soviets (who we were sure were secretly having OOBEs to spy back). The program was dubbed Project Looking Glass, if it is anything other than a CIA misinformation campaign. But it supposedly involved several OOBE experiments including projection to the past and future, as well as other planets, things detailed in the old magic books as astral travel.
Doctor Strange’s “mystic eye” has been made more popular by the recent movie version. The third eye in the forehead is a comic book rendition of the sixth Chakra, Ajna.
This energy center denotes enlightenment and perception. It is considered the opening through which one can perceive higher levels of existence.
The third eye is a feature of many depictions of beings in the pantheons of Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. In those instances the eye is typically vertically oriented, rather than the Cyclopean image in comics and movies.
The three eyes of the deities pierce beyond the material world, see past, present, and future, and strip away the illusions that obscure cosmic truth. A handy power to have if you intend to go trapsing around the astral plane without your mystic eye amulet.
Like how I am writing this in the future and sending it back for you to read in the past. That’s a mirror of what we usually expect, hence “looking glass”. If one can train their mind to disconnect without physical detriment, then the limitations of the physical need not apply. We have followed Alice down that rabbit hole, and emerged we know not where. I needn’t worry about the physical reality that Saturn is several million miles away from the Earth, I could go there and watch the sunrise. There’s a wonderful little Bistro on Titan with the greatest views, now that the clouds have all been rained away.
Some would call that fantasy, and they might be right. The capacity to discern what is in our heads, including whether or not we can leave them, is a finer skill than meditation. In the end it is a matter of what your experience feels like. Should it bend solely to your will, then perhaps it is made up, dragged up out of your subconscious even. But if you aren’t calling the shots, who knows.
I choose to believe what I want to believe. I have recurring dreams and I know that much of that dream imagery is my brain processing surreal images of real world things, usually things that were frightening to me as a child. These are now magnified and morphed into a sometimes terrifying landscape that is nonetheless absolutely familiar.
But there’s the other side of the coin that these are real places, altered not by my dreaming brain but by the nature of the strange worlds where they exist. In that case, it’s only logical that I would see them repeatedly, since most of us travel the more familiar rather than the exotic.
There are folks who go and live on these worlds on a more or less permanent basis. Modern psychology considers this a mental illness, but that is only one viewpoint. Who is to say that the catatonic or delusional patient hasn’t simply moved elsewhere. It would be tragic if they had gotten lost and their Silver Cord was cut and they just couldn’t find their way back, no matter how many anti-psychotics got pumped into them.
This is perhaps another sign that your travels are fantasy. They’re pleasant and friendly and welcoming and a nice retreat from the real waking world. It is my experience that every place has a shadier side. There are neighborhoods in Paradise you still don’t want to get stuck in after dark.
The clearing of the mind is also about preventing self-deception. Discernment of what is within and what is without, comes from looking at it over and over and waiting for one of you to blink.
If it’s you, then you’re probably a dream zombie.
I thank you for continuing to read my ramblings, even if they are written from the future and can’t help you now. Since last week’s article was so long I am going to give you a little respite and end this one now. I have to get it into the time machine mailbox before 5 PM, or it will end up in 1985 again. If you manage to escape the temporal loop and not break your Silver Cord, please join me next week for further confusion.
In addition to my penchant for Shakespeare, I spent a good deal of my youthful free time engaged in the adventures of a certain consulting detective residing at 221B Baker Street. Like the works of the Bard, many of Conan Doyle’s stories have been adapted and revised for film, but it is the written word I first encountered, and still connect with.
Latter day incarnations of the Great Detective portray him as an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. To my semi-adolescent self, this person was, if not a kindred spirit, at least a similar one. His command of vast regions of abstruse information and the ability to rationally synthesize viable patterns from the mundane was a great inspiration to me. I never saw him as cold, rude, or brutal. But then I also may have been an anti-social know-it-all with no people skills.
Imagine you are playing a group guessing game. I’m not sure how many people would remember charades, though it pops up in modern commercials. Now suppose that you have figured out the clues. You know the answer, but you have to wait there while everyone else makes ridiculous guesses.
Sherlock Holmes lived that 24/7. It’s a wonder he didn’t kill anyone. His choice to turn his faculties toward the solution of crimes is showing wonderful restraint.
Modern interpretations make the same mistake universally, and that is seeing Holmes’ best friend and sidekick as being ill treated by the genius detective. The problem with that is that John Watson is not Holmes’ friend. He’s not even a character. He’s a literary device. His sole purpose is to be a mask over Holmes’ thought so that when the why and how is revealed at the end, it’s a wonderment.
Watson is there to give us a version of the story without all the details and clues and trivial tidbits that Holmes sees as valuable. Or rather his job is to make them seem like trivial tidbits. His job is misdirection.
Conan Doyle didn’t invent Watson. He stole him from Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wrote about a genius detective and his thick friend in the first half of the 19th century. The Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin astounds his unnamed narrator by deducing who committed the murders in the Rue Morgue (which sadly about a street and not a morgue).
Poe only wrote two other stories about the amateur investigator before his passing, but it’s enough to credit him with the creation of the detective story, and why the Mystery Writers of America give out an Edgar instead of an Artie for exceptional work.
It evens out, of course. Agatha Christie stole the same device from Doyle to use for Hercule Poirot. Without the dunderheaded sidekick, the Great Detective can’t appear great. You would see how the sausage is made.
Doyle, I will say, shows us how Holmes does it, if only after poor Watson scratches his head and looks dumbfounded at the clues. He spells it out very well in A Scandal in Bohemia. Watson visiting for the first time in a while since he married and moved out, is told by Holmes that he has gained weight, been out in the rain, hired a lazy servant girl, and has returned to his work as a doctor. Watson’s incredulous response is the usual jaw dropped.
“My dear Holmes” said I, “this is too much. You certainly would have been burned had you lived a few centuries ago.”
Holmes and Watson per illustrator Sidney Paget in the Strand Magazine on their way to decipher the odd goings-on at Baskerville Hall. The pair would be transformed into House and Wilson in the Fox Networks House M.D series. British actor Hugh Laurie gave us the first modern reworking of Holmes as self-absorbed and brutal monomaniac. This take was further refined by Benedict Cumberbatch in the BBC series Sherlock and Robert Downey, Jr. in the film versions. Keen observers will notice that the four actors in the last two photos have migrated from Baker Street to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Strange isn’t it?
Holmes then patiently lays out all the little signs that make up the bigger picture. The weight, well he looks heavier, obviously. The servant girl is marked by a cut on the inside of Watson’s boot, made, while scraping off mud; hence the rain. As to his medical practice well he smells of antiseptic, and has dented his hat with the earpiece of a stethoscope. All easily seen and connected dots according to the master.
Watson’s jaw remains dropped. To which Holmes adds:
“You see. You do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
This was a fundamental idea for me. As with any young person who is impressed by a fictional character, I strove to emulate that hero. I endeavored to learn to truly observe.
Humans think they see a lot of things.
Science says that our brains aren’t capable of processing all the visual information our eyes take in, so we fill in the gaps. This is sort of how digital video compression works. A frame shows everything, and the next frame only shows what changes.
Our brain fills in the gaps so that we can function in a visual world without walking off a cliff or driving into a tree because if we had to process all the pixels, we’d never respond in time.
That seems a bit unreal to me, but it’s one of those widely held theories.
We’re really much better at just making things up.
This faculty of imagination would seem to lay at cross-purposes with Holmes’ rationalist approach. But it requires a certain degree of imagination to take all those little bits and pieces and concoct a working theory. Yes, it does have to be strained through the sieve of logic and reality.
“Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”
So the capacity to leap beyond logic and experience a world that cannot be wholly explained rationally can still work in concert with that rational critical world. It’s a matter of knowing when to apply each.
If you’ve gotten to this point and are starting to wonder when I’ll start talking about the usual weird stuff, just hold on. It’s coming.
A reliable and effective use of the mantic arts is based upon knowing when to apply imagination and when to refine that information with critical reasoning.
Pure intuition, while it may have the cachet of a psychic experience, is not always useful in the absence of the reasoned context. I’d like to believe that my “gut instincts” will serve me effectively in every situation, but it has been my experience that it doesn’t. And this is following five decades spent honing that instinct and learning how to listen to it.
Sometimes, you’re wrong.
Ordinarily we filter these kinds of things automatically. We experience an input from the beyond, and assay it’s relative chance of being real and useful. But this process can be improved, and the controlled application cultivated.
You may know that Conan Doyle was deeply involved in the Spiritualist Movement. It is surprising to a lot of people that the creator of a character so attached to reason and logic would hold such a powerful belief in the existence of spirits.
He’s also known for his staunch defense of the photographs known as the Cottingley Faerie Hoax, and continued to persist in the reality of the Bright Folk. Some would suggest that had he applied Holmes’ methods he could have discovered the hoax. It seems obvious he didn’t want to. Belief can override our senses. We see what we think we see.
We may be doubly damned if we’re used to hearing these kinds of revelations from our own “inner voice”. Some of the meditative practices I have been working with lately involve going deep down into one’s own mind, and then bringing up that consciousness to the everyday. My experiences with this have been startling in the results. I have received “signs and portents” relating to what I am studying at a much higher frequency than before.
Or perhaps I am imagining it. Perhaps it is a trick my mind is playing, or rather replaying. My tricksy brain is externalizing the material I am working with to “create” correspondences in the real world. It is possible that because I am engaged in heavy study of the subject matter than I am subconsciously identifying that material in the world around me. As they say, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
But what if it’s both?
What if my brain is projecting the work I am doing through meditation into the world, as a means of improving my perception? In other words, yes, I am seeing signs and portents because my brain is subconsciously engaged in signs and portents. But also, the signs and portents are there, and this process has me noticing them more. It’s really not possible to say objectively if my “heightened powers” are a quirk of neurochemistry or a “real” external phenomena.
And it actually doesn’t matter.
A person with schizophrenia can perceive things that aren’t there. We consider that mental illness in our modern society. In other times and cultures these people were considered touched by the gods, and sacred oracles. And other times and cultures they were considered possessed by demons and burned as witches.
The degree to which our perceived world is a detriment to how we function in society varies from person to person and culture to culture.
Persons on the autism spectrum connect to that “exterior” world very differently than neurotypical people do. Sometimes this can manifest in a preternatural eye for detail, much like the fictional Mr. Holmes. Complex patterns may be observed that are only otherwise discoverable with cutting edge search algorithms. This can be attended by obsessive behaviors, difficulty or inability to communicate emotions properly, and a host of other challenges. These are not the result of impairment, but of a brain that moves differently from idea to idea, linking them in non-standard ways; at least by the “standard” of the general populace.
For a short time Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini were friends. Houdini spent a good deal of time debunking “psychic phenomena” including divination. Houdini had been a stage performer since a young age and had witnessed hundreds of “mind-reading” acts. The trick with mind reading on stage is to start with something general, which is likely to be true for most of the people in the audience. Then you circle in with some details, the letter of a name, a piece of clothing. This is still quite vague, but you start to get a reaction. “My Uncle Henry” someone will shout, and then you keep drawing the circle closer, looking for the mark to give you more clues.
It’s part trick, part observation, and part suggestion. People want to believe, so they’ll let their brains be led, especially if you lead them in a way that can be a kind of hypnosis.
Now if you think this is disingenuous, I invite you to go find an old recording of a TV preacher faith healing in the 1980s. This is exactly the process they are using. 1Obviously I personally believe that the televangelists were as aware of this being a show as the stage magician, but your mileage may vary. Watching the observable practice of both, the similarities are obvious. Were there preachers who believed that their schtick was doing the Lord’s work? I don’t know. Most of them got paid as well as a headliner in Vegas. The extent to which someone who is anxious, or depressed, or suffering from a psychosomatic illness being “healed” by such a practice is equivalent to the audience member believing he received a message from his Uncle Henry. But I am extremely skeptical about the lame walking, the blind seeing, and cancer going into spontaneous remission.
To be fair, and openly honest, when I was reading Tarot for clients, I also employed this technique to some extent. I very closely observed the client as I drew cards and performed the interpretation. You can pick up things from body language, vocal tone, etc. that indicate when what you are saying is hitting a nerve. The setting for a reading is almost universally made intimate, and often dramatic, to encourage a receptive mood in the client. It has the added effect of eliminating distractions so that I can concentrate on what I am picking up from them.
Now some people call this a psychic connection, and I am not about to argue that. I personally don’t consider myself any more psychic than Sherlock Holmes. I know his methods and I apply them. When I get a “vibe” from a client it is because I have spent many years honing my perceptions to pick up those cues. And these cues are vital.
A modern incarnation of the Great Detective was the television series House, M.D. An anti-social iconoclastic diagnostician whose genius was such that it mystified all his associates, Greg House flaunted convention at every turn until he was able to ferret out the mystery disease (spoiler alert: it’s not lupus). House had a maxim that was proven out in almost every episode.
“Everybody lies.”
The Tarot client comes to you either skeptical, or timid. They either don’t believe you or they don’t trust you and in either case you will not get the full story from them unless you employ these deep observational skills.
This is not a trick. It’s not a con. It’s a method to get inside the head of the client and really truly help them, which is why they came to you in the first place. If I had an M.D. I could call it psychiatry and charge $150 an hour. But my parents couldn’t afford medical school, so here I am with a deck of cards, and a spooky knack for reading people.
My cards are not mere props, nor is the reading just a fun mask for psychoanalytic counseling. The client and I, in our little purple draped space, are participating in a ritual that is hundreds, if not thousands, of years old.
Ritual is in itself an altered state of consciousness. The roles we both play are not what we are outside the curtain, this event is special, the space sacred, the time suspended. Both reader and client are engaging in a semi-hypnotic symbiosis.
In this state, the interaction of keen observation, willing responsiveness, and the mnemonic and evocative imagery of the cards produce a result that is more than the sum of the parts. The skilled reader will already have a deep understanding of the codified meanings of the cards, but in the moment, they may see something beyond.
This is also the result of heightened observation. For example, a few weeks ago I did an article on the Tower card, and used an example from my set of the Via Tarot. One of the messages is, in general, the fall forecast in the Tower is redeemed in the Star card that follows it.
Now as I was mixing decks for the article (because I have about 50 and I like showing them off) I didn’t immediately notice an artistic conceit in Via’s Tower and Star combination. The temple shown on the Star card (XVII) is the same as the “House of God” (XVI-the Tower in most decks). On XVI, when the tower is falling, all is in chaos, and the wolf is literally at the door, the viewpoint is close. In XVII, the viewpoint is more distant, the perspective relaxed, and overall feeling much light. Yet this is the same building architecturally.
The Tower and The Star from the Via Tarot. This deck derived from Thelema doctrines and influenced by the Thoth Tarot was produced around 2005 in the UK. As Thoth took inspiration from the modern art movements of the time, Via has several images that remind me of the artist Michael Whelan. Whether that is homage or coincidence I can’t say.
The dome behind the star is a cleansed and renewed version of the House of God in card XVI. If we step back from the central arch of the Tower edifice, we can see that it is a much bigger building, able to accommodate more entrances. The piercing Eye of Omega has become a gentle nourishing afterglow. Isis approaches us, no longer wearing her veil. The Light that burned and broke is now refracted through the stellar heptagram, and cast as the steps of the rainbow she descends.
The 7 points of the Heptagram are the old Chaldean planets, – Sun, Moon, and Mercury through Saturn. The twelve pillars of the temple roof are the Zodiac. The Pentagram in center is the Microcosm and Macrocosm, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Spirit.
Tarot is a journey through symbols. It’s equivalent to a waking dream. While the images recur, the meaning changes.
So what meaning does that give us? Is this even an intended meaning, or did the artist do it unconsciously? Is my connection a “trick of the mind”? It doesn’t matter if the idea gives me a new avenue to explore when these cards show up in a reading.
I’ve had this deck for the better part of two decades, and I never saw this until I was writing that article. The additional study, contemplation, and multiple exposures to the various cards stimulated a number of new observations.
Some times, even when we observe we do not observe.
And sometimes we take in a massive amount of seemingly trivial data until some trigger causes it all to coalesce into a meaningful pattern. 2Meaningfulness is a relative term. When we are talking about the landscapes of the mind, symbolism has as much weight as literalism We may have symbolic connections that are ours alone and not even fully understood, consciously.
Dream interpretation is a mantic skill going back to the Stone Age. If we don’t know what the flying hot dog going into the train tunnel means, we’ll often just accept someone else’s explanation. It relieves us of the responsibility of uncovering it.
I wonder about the damage done to our psyche when we overwrite the subconscious source code with the wrong answer.
This is aim of the Tarot. It exists to be that one electron spark that starts the lightning strike. But for lightning to strike the conditions must be right. The mind must be receptive, alert, and observant.
The skilled reader will develop a rhythm that achieves these conditions naturally, without stopping to think about “Am I watching their body language?”; “Does this card in this position mean something differently than normal?”; “Am I listening to my intuition?”
For the novice this can be terribly frustrating, and made even moreso by the myriad decks and books on the subject. Even if you have a “talent” for the cards, for reading people, and observing their reactions, getting comfortable with the basic and reverse meanings is a process. It goes beyond just not having to check the book (and sometimes even old hats still have to). It’s about knowing them well enough to see where they sit in context of the a reading. And then once you get that working, you can start to see where they sit in context of your client and how they are responding that day.
It can help to just start with the Major Arcana. If you really go deep into a standard Waite Deck that alone can keep you busy for weeks. Once you’re happy with that, pick a suit and work through them the same way, until you get all 78 more or less.
Don’t expect to recite the full pages of the text. Get it down a to a few sentences at most, so when that card comes up you know immediately what you are dealing with. That’s actually on Pixie Smith’s cards, which is why the deck became so popular, and why it’s the best “starter”.
Don’t worry about esoteric meanings, numerological, astrological, qabbalistic, or alchemical meanings. Just learn that this card means this, and if it’s upside down, it either means the opposite, or that the meaning is lessened.
When you get past that point, you will start to make those connections naturally, and then be able to expand upon them. And then you can go back and find all those other meanings that may or may not have been intended or even connected to the cards.
Or not. If you and your clientele are served well by a basic understanding, don’t you dare feel intimidated by others who claim you should know more to be a “real” Tarot reader.
I have a passion for Tarot, both as art and method. I have spent many years working with it, reading about it, collecting it, and writing about it. At some point in time I am likely to make one or more decks, and possible write a book or two. But you should not look at my example as what is normal or required.
Everyone can benefit from the mental exercises of meditative observation. If you never pick up another card, or have never picked up one, you can still get more out of your life by looking around, paying attention, and trying to puzzle out what meaning it has.
Thank you for coming all the way to the end, here. I know this one was ponderously long, but it is something that needs explanation and example, so I do appreciate your making the effort. Join me next week for another descent into the maelstrom.
