death – A Sacred Life

June 28, 2023June 27, 2023

The End of All Songs

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,
All murthered—for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!
Richard II – Act 3, Scene 2 – William Shakespeare

Card XIII is one of the most dreaded cards to see in any reading. It is simply called Death, and carries with it all the foreboding baggage we attach to that word in our communal culture. Death is without doubt one of the most feared parts of the human experience. It is an inexplicable enigma that haunts our steps from the day we enter into the world. Yet it’s place in Tarot is very much open to discussion.

death-rws-tarot — I took this scan from my own RWS deck, which is approaching 40 years old now. The reproductions are not nearly so clear as the digital versions I have been using, but I had the deck handy and thought I’d use it.

The Rider-Waite-Smith version departs from previous imagery of the Reaper mowing down humans indiscriminately. Instead, Pamela Colman Smith chooses to show the figure of Death as the Black Knight, mounted on horseback, with his black banner dominant over all. The banner is marked by a five-lobed white Tudor rose. That this may be seen as an inverted pentagram is not without intention. His horse is white, its red eyes mark it as an albino. The bridle barding is a sequence of skulls and crossed bones. The horse and rider are taken from the Apocalypse of St. John, in the book of Revelations. “And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” This figure of Death on horseback is something we begin to find in the Renaissance, particularly in the work of Northern painters like Albrecht Durer. He is perhaps not so nobly depicted as he is on the 14th trump card, but the figure clearly is the Pale Rider. Much of the rest of the tableau depicted here comes from older memento mori imagery. Before the horse stands a bishop or other prelate, praying for Death to spare him. On her knees next to him is a swooning woman, and a child. They are both crowned with roses, and the child holds a bouquet of these flowers. Just in front of the child is the bishop’s crozier. The front right hoof of the horse is poised above it, ready to stamp down and smash it. Underneath the horse is the body of a king, his crown upside down in the dirt behind the horse’s other foreleg. In the background is a landscape, at the rear of which is a river. A single boat is in the middle of the river. Behind the bishop we see the suggestion of a waterfall, and above the waterfall the river leads toward two towers, with the sun setting between them. The sky is a uniform gray, and the part of the landscape from the river’s edge backward, is covered in the shadow of evening, as the light is dying.

This card is positively ripe with symbolism, probably because we have been working with visual metaphors for death since our earliest human consciousness. Death, as a thing, is both easily expressed and yet completely unexplainable. It is a cessation of a number of biological processes that we use to determine if something is “alive”. Although when we get down to the level of something like a virus, these processes are much simpler, for human beings we think of things like breathing, having a heartbeat, walking, talking, eating, excreting, making babies and similar things that we all have in common. When we stop doing that, we are considered dead. The body ceases to operate. The meat suit is no longer inhabited by us, and begins a number of other biological processes which are the result of other life now regarding the meat suit as just meat.

death-pulp-tarot — This rendition is from the Pulp Tarot by graphic designer Todd Alcott. The deck is a novelty theme based on the old paperback book covers from the late 20s into the 1950s. Some of the designs are more successful than others. One thing I will say for them is that in most cases they are keeping the key pieces of the RWS deck while playing with the format. Although the king is still living here, and the knight is trying to defend against the looming giant figure of Death, the pieces are there to look at, and the message is the same, even to the novice reader.

The thing that makes Death such a mystery is that it is inherently and almost always a permanent state. It is, in fact, the only permanent state that human beings experience. Everything else about us is changeable. We grow, we age, we move, we hunger, we sleep, we reproduce. Nothing is ever exactly the same way twice. But when all that stops, well, it stops forever. So in our modern culture we tend to consider that forever as Death, when really what we mean is loosely termed the “afterlife”.

Afterlife as an idea has been around a long time. It’s hard to say whether our near neighbors the chimps and bonobos have some concept of loss when a member of their community stops functioning. In my personal experience, though, I believe that animals do experience a sense of death, and of loss, both for other animals and for their humans. My grandfather’s dog died the day he did, even though my grandfather died in a hospital several hundred miles away. We found the little dog, who had been healthy and really should have lived for several more years, quietly passed in his pen. I have heard numerous such stories from friends and family.

But as humans, we seem to have become aware of something significant occurring as far back as the Neanderthal times. It is in this culture that we start to see what archaeologists call “grave goods”. That is, there are things buried along with the bodies of the people. Let’s examine what that may tell us about those early humans.

The reason to bury the dead is actually fairly basic. It’s sanitary, and keeps the decomposition from attracting big scavenger/predators to the rest of the tribe. But when it comes to a reason for burying things with the dead person, it becomes a bit more complicated.

Firstly , it may simply be that those things belonging to the dead might have been related to the death. That is, there was some fear of contagion. This potentially grew from folklore passed down when someone did get sick and die when they kept poor old Ugg’s mammoth hide cape. Now to a culture that doesn’t have sophisticated bacteriology, this idea of quarantine is as much about spiritual causes as it is about the bug. True, it may have been a nasty bacillus that brought down Ugg and sadly young Groont picked it up from the fleas in that mammoth hide. But to the people of the tribe, this was the work of an evil spirit, or an angry god, or something like that, because they didn’t have any idea about the bacillus. Hence for the future, all mammoth hides would be buried with their owners when the time came.

Secondarily, such a culture might determine that it was Ugg himself that had caused the harm to Groont, because he had really liked that mammoth hide, and he didn’t feel like Groont was going to take proper care of it. This idea that the spirit of the dead, once out of the meat suit, could still affect the affairs of the living folks, is something that evolves throughout our history. There is some point in time where the giving of grave goods served the dual purpose of appeasing the spirits of the dead, and providing them with access to their stuff once they’d shuffled off the ol’ mortal coil. If there was no more Ugg, why would he care if Groont got his cape or not. But, if Ugg was still hanging around, even though the Ugg meat suit was taking the long dirt nap, it might be very important to keep him pleased. Who knows what sort of mischief an irritated invisible Ugg could get up to? And, well, how do you get rid of him if you can’t kill him?

death-shadowscapes-tarot — Of all the Tarot decks I own (somewhere around 50 now) this is the only one that presented the concept of Death as transformation in a more pleasant light. The Shadowscapes Tarot of Stephanie Law is so unusual that you will only know this is Death by looking at the label. This is the benu bird of Egypt, the Phoenix, hatching from the egg found in the ashes of its former self,. The gentle spirals, expanding in the natural expression of what is called the Golden Section, express the endless magical order of this cycle of birth-death-birth.

So offerings get made, stuff gets buried, and the dead become the Venerated Ancestors because somewhere in our early caveman days we began to conceive of this concept of afterlife. Afterlife is heaven and hell and ghosts and zombies and vampires and the numerous other incarnations of the unquiet dead. It’s also reincarnation and karma and past lives and the search for Nirvana.

But it’s not Death. Death is a moment. Death is the moment where the meat suit goes from being us to being meat.

And as with many moments that exact point is still sort of nebulous and mysterious. And scary. As people progressing through our living years, we all create or internalize some sort of belief about afterlife that gives us a shield against the inevitability of Death itself. But no matter how assured we are of inhabiting the spiritual Disneyworld promised by many religions and beliefs, that actual moment of Death still shakes us down to our very cores.

So when that card marches out in a reading, you still hear the sudden intake of breath. The pupils dilate. Sweat forms on the upper lip. No, surely, it is not my time. No!

Oh, no. It’s just symbolic. A sign of transition. Of changing from one state to another. That’s the usual response. Please don’t panic, Death isn’t really Death.

Except, of course, when it is.

The origin of the images on this card is the Middle Ages, and the Black Death. The Grim Reaper, who is more plainly drawn on the Tarot de Marseilles, is another emblem of this terrifying time in European history, when at least one quarter of the local humanity died. The great Bubonic Plague coincided with widespread belief that the time of Christ’s return was at hand, as it had been about a thousand years since the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. As an invisible Angel of Death swept whole villages from the earth, it was very easy to believe that the end times had come.

death-deviantmoon-tarot — At the other end of the spectrum in the Death card from the Deviant Moon Tarot. This deck has a darkness about it, possibly even a madness about it. I recently got a copy of the artist’s companion book that not only contains the Tarot meanings/prompts, but also discussed his personal journey in arriving at the images. It affirms my impression that these are at least loosely inspired by the Venetian Carnival masks, though there are clearly layers beyond such a simple attribution. Death here, is Death. There’s no hopeful light on the horizon, no glorious or great beyond awaiting. It is just brutal, and bleak, and final. But perhaps we may look upon Her swollen belly as being a presage of new life. I have a hard time not seeing it as the distention of the corpse as it decays.

Ironically the mass extinction event changed the economic structure of Europe. Feudalism, based on a large population of people to work the land, was no longer sustainable. Labor and skills were in short supply, and in basic economic fashion, when supply is less than demand, the price goes up. People were able to rise in personal property and social status, by contracting themselves to the highest bidder. This brought about the flowering of art and culture we call the Renaissance.

So in it’s way, even the big bad Black Death on that XIII card was a transitionary force. The old society died with it, but the new one grew from the ashes.

The plague killed without distinction. Young, old, rich, poor, noble, slave, pious, and sinful. The figures surrounding the Black Rider represent this idea that Death was the great equalizer. No amount of money, or power, or faith, could protect you.

The catchphrase of the time was “Memento mori” – “Remember you will die”.

While this may have begun as church propaganda to convert the heathen, it could certainly have been a bumper sticker on the daily death wains that roamed many Medieval towns and cities calling for people to bring out their dead.

The injunction, of course, was aimed at cajoling the populace into proper Christian behavior, since, at any moment, they too, could make that final journey. In the climate of the day, real fear was attached to dying with sin on your heart, unable to make final confession and atonement, before facing the final judgement.

But consider this message in a different light.

Let’s say you’ve been told you have a fatal incurable disease and your have that proverbial six months to live. Assuming this illness doesn’t impair your abilities terribly, and is not contagious, what choice would you make to do with that six months?

Some people, sadly, would spend the entire time in fear, depression, and anger, bemoaning whatever mad fate put upon them this horrible doom. They would be miserable, and they would make everyone around them miserable, and when they were gone, their loved ones would carry that misery around forever as their last memory of the person.

Some people will pull out that bucket list, crack open the bank accounts, and live life to the fullest seeing and doing all those things they dreamed about until the very end when the dark comes upon them. That leaves behind a better legacy with their families and friends, unless, of course, they were hoping to inherit what got spent on that last blast of gusto.

But there is the third option, to do something that lasts. Maybe they make a painting, or write a novel, or go spend six months feeding the poor in the some wretched forgotten corner of the earth. But they give up that last measure of their days to leave something behind, so that when the meat suit is fully consumed, and the material nature of the life they lived is gone, something remains in the world that is a mark of their having been in it.

death-journey-into-egypt-tarot — I don’t want to leave you with such a hopeless version of the card, so consider this offering from the Journey Into Egypt. The subject is the Pharaoh Hatsheptsut, one of the few female pharaohs, and certainly the most powerful. Her funeral temple is the structure shown in the background at the base of the cliff at Dier El Bahri. It is lit internally by torchlight, as our own bodies possess an internal light. In the foreground her body lies inside a splendid golden coffin, but her own inner light, the Ka, looks back at us. She is beginning her journey into the realm of Osiris, where she will live a life of ease and playfulness for millions of millions of years. The Death of the Ancient Egyptians is drawn on the column, leading her to the court of the Lord of the Dead. His name is Anpu, rendered via the Greeks into Anubis. As noted with last weeks image, there is an astronomical notation to these cards. This one references the full moon in Scorpio, which occurs when the sun is in Taurus, roughly the month of May, or the full flowering of the spring time. Scorpio is connected to Pluto and thus the underworld, but the Full Moon is when the moon is opposite the sun, thus in this we have both Death, and Birth.

The Renaissance, for all the secular humanism and often hedonism, is this bright shining of life and light as compared to the long dark fear of Death that marked the world of the Middle Ages. In many ways, our modern world still has not fully come to terms with that phobia that rose from the Plague Years. Nor do we always live up to that promise of using the time we are given to best effect.

The sun is always setting somewhere. And always rising somewhere. While the funeral ship is sailing into the lands of shadow, there is another ship setting off to meet the dawn.

Our entire existence is a world that is dying or dead. The majority of the stars we see above burned out a long time before our earth even spun in space. It is the merest memory of their life that makes up our reality. It is fair to say that we are constantly in that moment of Death, moving from the things that were to the things that will be. The past lies lost behind us, and the future is never quite reached. The now is what we have, and we better make use of it.

The Death card is not simply a marker of transition or change. It is the proof of the inevitability of change. Nothing that is, remains. It is a goad to get up and go out and live while we can, to not wait for the moment when we are asked to hop up on that horse, and only then beg and lament our wasted days.

I do not fear Death. Even the pain that may accompany it, if that be my fate, is transitory. It ends. Death is over quickly, and what is beyond Death, I cannot say. What is on this side of Death though, lies within my willingness to act. And act I will.

I hope this has helped you understand a little more about this complicated and often dreaded card. Next week we shall explore Temperance, which is not only a rather odd card to work through, but also sits in a strange place in the sequence of trumps. I hope you will join me again.

As a footnote, I would like to thank all those brave souls who asked me to read the cards for them at the Writers for New Orleans event this past weekend. I know there were some that time did not permit me to visit with, and I hope we will have a future opportunity to explore the Tarot together.

I’ll be back next week.

June 21, 2023June 19, 2023

Not Heaven Or Hell

I used the term “betwixt and between” as the title of an earlier article, but it is applicable here. The terms “heaven” and “hell” can also be somewhat accurate, in a context I will get to at a later point, but despite the seeming obviousness, “As Above, So Below” is not an apt rendition to deal with this thirteenth card of the Major Arcana, styled XII in a line after the O of the Fool. Behold, the Hanged Man. (I’m pronouncing that mentally as “hang-ed” in the Shakespearean fashion. I think it better suits it and sounds less like a kid’s paper game).

hanged-man-rws-tarot — Smith’s version of this is more generous to the figure than the older models, where in addition to being hanged, the man is also being burned alive.

The Hanged Man is suspended by his right ankle, which is tied to the horizontal beam of a rough cross. His other leg drops down behind it and the bent knee causes it to mirror the cross beam above. His arms are bound behind him, possible around the upright of the cross. The wood of the cross appears newly hewn and has drooping leaves still attached, The figure wears humble soft shoes, red leggings, and a blue tunic. Behind the head is a halo of light. The background of this card is an empty drab grey.

This card’s meaning per Waite is emblematic of the Martyr God, Christ on the Cross, Odin on the Tree, and carries with it the context of secret wisdom gained at a sacrifice. By extension we can connect the murdered Osiris, and we are back in Ancient Egypt again, with the promise of resurrection and afterlife. From this springs the card as a symbol of transformation, of a change from one state into the next (though this is frequently assigned to the following card Death). This is therefore metamorphosis, a pupa in the cocoon. The past is gone, but the future is not yet written.

Originally this card depicted and was called the Traitor, and in place of his hallow was simple fire. He was being burned at the stake, or the gallows, upside down, for a crime against the state. While we can draw allusion to this being the fate of prominent martyrs such as Jesus and St. Peter, who was crucified upside down, there was not that original context. In the first flowering of Tarot, this was a bad man, who met a bad end. It was justification for the power of the state, to mete justice, and execute prisoners, which was shifting from a Divine Right and ecclesiastical authority, to a secular humanist one. Ironically this symbolized the shifting between two points that I frequently find the Hanged Man represents.

As noted, St. Peter is reputed to have required the Romans to hang him upside down on the cross, since he felt he had failed Christ and was unworthy to have the same death as his master. The inverted cross is nowadays associated with the idea of Anti-Christ and Satanism, though these distinctions I believe are more the result of the popular film culture of the sixties and seventies than any legitimate tradition. Inverting a cross, might have been a ritual of the so-called Black Mass, which included saying the Lord’s prayer and other holy texts backward, in a mockery of the Catholic rite. The Black Mass is possibly a whole creation of the Inquisition and Witchfinders. If it was practiced by witches in the 17th century and later, they may simply have been aping the alleged process, rather than following any specific tradition or teaching. The story of Peter may be apocryphal as well. One of his distinctions in the Biblical story is that he denied Christ three times during the trial and crucifixion. This idea of him inverting the Cross might indicate some esoteric tradition where he was a final time, disassociating himself with the faith he was considered guardian to. Bear in mind that the inconstancy of Peter is symbolic of the difficulty of following a philosophical discipline when faced with the temptation and privations of worldliness. In such an instance, one might find themselves “hanging in the balance” between doing what is good for their soul, and what is pleasurable to their body. It is not a coincidence that this idea stems from contemplation of this card.

shadowscapes-ghosts-and-spirits-cosmic-tarot — Three versions of the Hanged Man. These are from my Shadowscapes, Ghosts and Spirits, and Cosmic Tarot decks. I have combined them here because they all are full of tree imagery. While the RWS version does show greenery on the gallows, it is fair to say that it’s a tree that has been cut and converted into a means of torture or execution. This probably ties back to the undercurrent of Christian symbolism that I find troubling with Waite’s version, even though it does seem to agree with much earlier images. The two images on the side show living trees here, and the figure seems more or less suspended of their own free will. This can connote one of the possible readings of the card, that we need to alter our perspective of things.

In the Shadowscapes version, the figure reminds me of Peter Pan, at play with the faeries in the forests of Neverland. If we look upon the Hanged Man as symbolic of this transitory moment, of being neither one thing or another, then perhaps the perpetual child from Barrie’s classic is as apt a metaphor as any. There is, however, a possibly darker meaning here. The Egyptian ankh hangs on an upper branch. We find the ankh prominently figured in the Thoth Tarot of Aleister Crowley. The Hanged Man is suspended from it. Yet here he is separated. indicating, perhaps, that he falls, or hangs between, this life and the next.

Certainly this is more evident in the central card. The Ghosts and Spirits deck can be a disturbing read at times. The imagery is powerful, complex, and often horrific. We might see here a Tree of Death, instead of the Tree of Life. Yet many of the cards in this deck need to be interpreted as expressing the journey of the spirit outside the flesh, so in this case, like the Shadowscapes, we are possibly witness to a soul in between incarnations.

The Cosmic Tarot has a lot of Hindu and Buddhist overtones, in addition to other magic systems. If we view the Hanged Man similarly here, we might be looking through the Barod Thodol, commonly called the Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the spirit is trying to free itself of the entanglement of desire, so to break the endless cycle of reincarnation and merge back in the the Nothing That Is Everything (i.e. the Fool Card). If he let’s go, he is bound to fall to earth, and into another fleshly incarnation. The balance between is a means of avoiding incarnation, but it cannot be maintained. Only by eliminating the I, can the illusion be shattered.

There are several other possible connections that we can make when dealing with the Hanged Man. A notable one that often springs to my mind is that of the infant Zeus, taken by his mother Rhea and given to the nymphs. In one version of the story, he is kept suspended from a tree, touching neither the earth nor the heavens, and is thus kept invisible to Chronos, his father, who wants to kill him to avoid the prophecy that Kronos will die by the hands of his children. This idea that the Hanged Man occupies a kind of non-space is interesting.

The idea of Limbo is a Catholic expression of the place between places, which in “Neither in Heaven, nor Hell, nor upon the Earth”. Its place in the Catholic dogma is utilitarian. It resolves certain questions regarding the fate of those who, though they led just and noble lives, were not born under the covenant of the Christian Baptism. Per this doctrine, Christ when passing through death at the crucifixion comes first to Limbo, and redeems the souls there, such as Adam and Eve, Moses, and the other Hebrew chosen.

In theory, this would mean Limbo ceased to exist with the Resurrection, but there is an unofficial doctrine that says it now contains the souls of unchristened children, who, innocent of all but the original sin of humanity (i.e. they were born after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil). Since they did not receive the initial tabula rasa by the Rite of Baptism, they technically weren’t going to get into Heaven, but as they didn’t live long enough to actually give into that sinful nature, it wasn’t proper to send them into the torments of Hell. According to variations on this theme, during the Final Judgment foretold in Revelation, these lost children will be redeemed and allowed to ascend into Paradise.

Some Protestant offshoots also believe that Limbo is where all souls are waiting for the Judgment Day, when the physical resurrection will occur and the world will become an earthly paradise. We’re getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, as all that happens with Cards XIX and XX in a few weeks.

Getting back to our Hanged Man, I want to delve into one of those personal epiphanies that I have had over the years of working with these cards. Now, I will here caveat that the Unverifiable Personal Gnosis is just that. This is something that came from inside my head, possibly from a source I know not where, and there is little to no external verification of it as legitimate, or useful. That said, Tarot is an intuitive experience. Imagination is the key to using the toolkit, and this series of articles is about taking the cards beyond the face value, beyond potential connections and inferences, and letting the images on the cards inform your mind. So, onward.

At some point in recent years, not longer ago that a decade or so, but not so recently that i can readily remember. I started forming the impression that the Hanged Man is falling. Like the figures from the Tower, he has not hit the ground, nor is he on a firm point where he started from. I don’t know if there is a version of this card in one of my decks that started me thinking this way (I will endeavor to look before publication, but there’s a lot of decks to go through, and so far it’s not one of my usual ones).

Secondary to this, I also got the distinct impression that this person falling was the Morningstar, That is, Lucifer the Fallen Angel, who would later become synonymous with Satan, the Devil, etc. Obviously the Devil has his own card a few steps hence, but here again is that card between one state and the other. This is the Fall from Grace. It dovetails quite nicely with the idea that this card was originally a symbol of betrayal and treason to the established order, and that this was the punishment.

I confess to a bit of Luciferianism, in the sense that many depictions of the Fall and the Rebellious Angel are metaphor for the development of our own human psyche from the animal one we used to inhabit. Like his Greek counterpart Prometheus, Morningstar is being punished for bringing to man the Fire of the Gods. The gods feared what man might do with it, and justly so. We’ve really managed to foul things up with the exothermic reaction, and it’s numerous toxic by-products. Yet once the deed was done, the extreme punishment seems overkill given the nature of the crime.

Prometheus has his liver plucked out daily. Satan is cast into the pit of Hell. Adam and Eve are barred from the Garden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever”.

Seems awfully vindictive to me. So the question here with the Hanged Man, is, was Justice served? Coming as it does on the heels of that card, I am forced to wonder if we are meant to perceive this as righteous punishment. Again, I am not typically one adherent to the idea of a linear “Tarot journey” but I think there’s a relationship inherent in the order of the cards here. And that brings us back to the question of the placement of the Justice card as XI rather than Strength, which occupies that slot in some versions of Tarot.

hanged-man-wildwood-journey-into-egypt-tarot — Two very different takes on this card. The left is from the Wildwood Tarot and the right from the Journey Into Egypt. I selected them both because they involve water and because they address the same subject in a totally untraditional way.

Wildwood works from a kind of Pre-Celtic or Proto-Celtic shamanic perspective, but often ties to the later Arthurian myth and Grail stories. The authors would appear to believe that the Arthur stories are a folklore from this more ancient time, and are simply retold in the wake of the fall of Roman Britain as the chivalric romances. In this case, we are confronted by a water spirit, which could as well be called a kelpie or similar name, holding a bronze mirror and a seeing stone, In the foreground is one of the heron’s we see in the Wheel image from a couple of weeks back, with a small sack around its neck. Behind them is a boat, which appears to hold a corpse. The boat is anchored or tethered. Behind the boat is an island with three trees. The text accompanying this card has a good number of esoteric ideas. It says also that many aspects of the traditional Hanged Man have been moved onto the Blasted Oak, which is this deck’s version of the Tower. I personally see the falling man from the Tower card having something in common with the Hanged Man, but here he is the figure in the boat, neither on this shore or the next. While the death metaphor seems very obvious, the text says this is about initiation, about reaching a point of injury or pain, that allows one to being open to the voyage to the island and healing. It is, according to the authors, not a journey that may be sought, but one that comes to us.

The Journey To Egypt deck is an amazing artistic expression. It diverts from the traditional take on the cards and yet manages to still impart much of that message. The figure here in isolation in the background, does not appear to be drowned. He is on the shore and apparently high and dry. Look again. His reflected self in the water is our Hanged Man, upside down, the world wrong side up. The man on the shore is bound to the man in the water. Neither of them are going anywhere. On facet of this deck is that it associated each card with astronomical events. I think it rather interesting that this one represents the Summer Solstice, which is the day this article is being released.

Remember that all of the cards are unnumbered in the original versions. The respective values of these cards in the Tarocchi game would seem to be more or less equal, so the ordering and numbering seems to have occurred when they began to be used by the adepts for purposes of divination. Levi gives us an order based on Kabbalah and the Hebrew Letters. He potentially inherits that from earlier sources, and later creators keep it roughly the same with the exception of cards VIII and XI. Justice might logically precede execution and death. But then justice might also fit between the force of an established state symbolized by the Chariot, and the isolate contemplation of the individual in the Hermit. It’s a question as to whether Strength fits better between the random chaos of the Wheel and the uncertain suspension of the Hanged Man. If Strength is the assertion of the Will over Nature- even individual nature, then a possible reading of the Hanged Man is equilibrium in the space of Chaos. He is not punished for having done wrong, he is simply unable to find a firm footing in an unstable universe. He cannot cling to the dogma he knows to be false, nor can he firmly embrace the totality of free will and personal responsibility because there is no assurance of accuracy or correctness. He lives in a quantum reality where the actual nature of things is only known by probability, potentiality, and only known too late. There’s no wonder that he is in torment.

There’s always some context where the seeker has to identify with the Rebel Angel. There is a point in our exploration of the universe and our own minds where we will question the truth of everything. We are not venerating in this sense, only stating that we can, in some way, feel empathy with Prometheus chained to that rock, waiting for the vulture to come again with the dawn. For Prometheus is aware of that eternal agony that what we believe to be true is always under threat from our own spiritual growth. We can either be content to remain ignorant, celebrating blind faith in something that we ourselves doubt, or risk the eternal damnation of never really being sure of anything ever again.

So we hang there on the tree, neither in Heaven or in Hell, unable to free ourselves to fall to the ground, or to climb back up to where we started from. In many ways this is a very pessimistic card, and they tend to get less cheerful from here.

I can only offer that there is a quiet to living in Limbo that can be very freeing, or at least restful. You know that change is coming. Change is inevitable. Yet now, you have the satisfaction of having endured change, and perhaps the confidence that you can endure the change to come, so being betwixt and between is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s hard to take any calls there.

I thank you for reading this week’s article. I am attending Heather Graham’s Writers for New Orleans later this week, where I will be part of a panel on occult subject matter. I will be reading Tarot for some of the folks in attendance, for the first time in many years. I am looking forward to seeing how the experience of articulating my views of these cards here will impact my readings, and I am wondering how the experience of cold reading will impact the remaining articles in this series. Since next week we face down Card XIII, with all the baggage it carries along, it should be informative. I hope you will join me then.

October 19, 2022October 19, 2022

Ghosts and Goblins

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.

Peppers_Ghost — 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

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.

Headsmans axe — 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.

Image By Fabio Alessandro Locati – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,

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.

September 7, 2022September 7, 2022

The Taste of Ashes

Fear is the mind-killer.
—Dune – Frank Herbert

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.

The Grim Reaper.

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 — 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.

nebkhet — 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 — **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.

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !

Please Share and Enjoy !