Fiction Meets Reality

As you may have guessed by now, I'm a big reader.  I'm one of those freaks who likes to read about five books at once (I get it from my dad).  I read everything: sci-fi, mysteries, history, instructionals, everything.  Of all genres, fantasy is by far my favorite.  There's nothing I like better than being swept away by a magical tale - what witch wouldn't?  But in the best fantasy writing, there's something more than good storytelling going on.

You see, I have a theory about our best authors.  They're more than wordsmiths.  I think they're a very special kind of seer.  Reality is a large and rather incomprehensible thing.  There are more worlds than we can ever know, more universes and versions of reality than the human mind could ever comprehend.  All of those worlds, those parallel and crosswise realities, create ripples in the energy of reality and - just like a radio tuner can pick up certain frequencies and bring them to our ears - some people can pick them up in their minds.  Maybe it comes to them in dreams, in bursts of sudden inspiration, or a slow growing knowledge, but somehow these folks pick up bits and pieces of what's happening in other realities, other times.  The best of these folks then spin those truths into a cohesive story. Totally out there right?  I admit it, this theory is a bit nutty, but it's what I think. 

Have you ever stood right next to a huge bell or drum when it's been hit?  You get that weird resonance that flows right through you and makes the world seem to shake?  That's what happens to me when I come across TRUTH.  That's the feeling I got when I went to my first ritual, the feeling I got the first time I was truly in the presence of my God, the feeling I got when I first saw the energy of the earth.  It's the feeling I use as a litmus test  to figure out whether something I think or read is true.  I get that feeling when I'm reading certain versions of mythology that hit on something important. 

I get that feeling when I read certain parts of certain books.  Does that mean that I think the exact storyline I'm reading has actually happened exactly as written off in some far flung version of reality...not exactly.  That feeling tells me that there's something in what I'm reading that is important.  It can be a bit of storyline, a bit of cosmology, philosophy, or morality.  Sometimes it's the existence of an entire world. 

Why does that matter?  Because when something hits that resonance it seems to be my God's method of telling me I need to pay attention to it.  It has something important to teach or a warning to give.  I feel that that mean it's real, but honestly it doesn't much matter.  The important thing is to pay attention to that feeling and find out what needs to be learned.  Do you ever get that feeling when you're reading something that's just supposed to be a bit of fun?  What lessons have your Gods been trying to tell you?

Why Ghosts of Children are the Worst

It's no secret that I'm not exactly the motherly type.  I don't like children.  I really don't like children.  One of the few things I like less than living children are the ghosts of children.  Oh, but aren't they sad little darlings who need love and acceptance to be shown into the light you ask?  Not so much, at least not in my experience.

Almost by definition, all ghosts of children died untimely deaths.  The death of any child is a terrible tragedy; an unthinkable crime against the natural order of things.  However, the incredible bereavement of a family is not what creates a ghost. Children can become intelligent ghosts (as opposed to mere residuals) for lots of reasons, but the grand majority of them were children who were murdered or mistreated in some horrible way.  This does not necessarily create the most sane and stable spirits.

Children do not have a fully developed sense of morality.  The younger they are the less likely they are to understand the difference between right and wrong, the difference between innocent play and a horror show.  Anyone who's watched a five year old pull the legs off a spider one by one knows this.  Children who have been mistreated their whole lives are even less likely to understand good behavior verses bad behavior.  Do you think this gets better when they die?  Nope.  So now, rather than having a mistreated and slightly feral child, you have a mistreated and slightly feral ghost who no longer has the constraints of a physical body nor the slightest fear of punishment for any action.  Darling little angels my ass.

The ghosts of children are much, much more likely to engage in poltergeist activity and to scare the living daylights out of you; largely because they think it's fun and have no idea that they shouldn't.  The ghosts of children will move objects, follow you down hallways, pinch, kick, push, and generally make your life hell.  Sometimes it's because they desperately want attention and acknowledgment, but sometimes it's just because they think it's funny.  The spirit of an adult can be reasoned with, placated, threatened, or cajoled; not so much with children.  The ghosts of children either quiet down when they get a little tlc or they run amok until their banished.  I really, really don't like dealing with them.

Another huge problem with the ghosts of children is that just because something says it's the ghost of a little child doesn't mean it actually is one.  There are lots of very bad things out there that will pretend to be the ghost of a child because people usually won't put up protections against what they think is an innocent.  What are you more likely to let into your life, something claiming to be a five year old that lost its mother or something claiming to be a non-human that wants to eat your life force? Hmmmm?  How do you know the difference?  Honestly, if you can't feel energies are aren't psychically looking for masks I don't know. 

If you think you're in the presence of a ghostly child you need to put up all the protections you would for any other unknown metaphysical being.  Unless you're an expert you really don't know what you're dealing with, and even if you are you still probably don't know for certain.

I really, really hate dealing with dead kids.

Ritual for Cutting Ties

A few months ago a very good friend of mine had a really bad break-up.  The relationship had been fairly toxic and she had really cared about the douchebag in question.  It was one of those relationships that creates a really strong bond between the people in it, the kind of bond that isn't easily broken.  Even after a month or two my friend was still in pretty bad shape, to the point where the baggage from the old relationship was affecting any new ones she was trying to cultivate.

She asked for my help in creating a ritual to help her really cut ties with her ex so that she could move on and I was only too happy to help.  The trick, of course, would be doing something strong enough to cut the bond and cauterize the wound without actually harming him.  It's very difficult to do magick regarding someone you're angry with without "accidentally" cursing them.  There are few things more effective at making me angry than hurting my friends, so I was pretty damned pissed at this guy and my friend was pretty irate.  Here's what I came up with:

Ritual for Cutting Ties
A ritual for cutting ties with someone that is no longer a part of your life.  If you really, truly mean to stop giving energy to someone (including in hate form), then this will help you to do so.  Your behavior must support the intent of this spell.  Once you've done it there shall be no more online stalking, driving by the person's house, or musing on what the person is doing right now. You have to mean it!

As with any banishing, this is best done during the waning or new moon.

Ingredients:

• 1 plain poppet, mostly sewn but unstuffed (basically a rag doll, should be colored in a way that reminds you of the person)
• small items representing the relationship (such as ticket stubs, printed emails, etc.  If you don't have much you can write all of your feelings about the relationship on a piece of paper and then rip it into strips)
• slip of paper with the person's name on it
• a photo of the person (if you have it)
• dried herbs for stuffing (rue, nettle, anything thorny and unpleasant - but not toxic when burnt)
• twine/yarn (at least three feet)
• a pair of scissors
• a safe place to burn the poppet and matches

Spend a good week or so gathering the ingredients for this spell.  Think of this phase as bringing all the last scraps of the relationship into one place.

Sew together your poppet and fill it with the items that represent the relationship and the dried herbs, along with the photo and person's name.  If you're into embroiders you can embroider the person's name on the poppet.

On the night of the ritual case a circle, call the elements, and any appropriate dieties.  We called on the crone, as the mistress of all things "cauterizing."

State the purpose of the ritual.  You should do this aloud and in your own words.  You need to state why you want to cut all ties and show that you mean it.  The powers you have called on will judge your sincerity and give or withhold aid based on how they find you.

Now bind yourself with the string to the poppet.  (We looped the yarn several times around the poppet and then several times around my friend, with a little extra back and forth for good measure.)  Then say, "I now cut and cauterize all my ties with [X]," while cutting the yarn with the scissors.

Unravel yourself and the poppet, thank any powers you've called on, and dismiss your circle.

Now, burn the poppet.  If you don't have a good place to do so you can unpick all the stitches of the poppet and then bury the components.

Being Ethical is Hard

This is a rant.  There will be no redeeming value in what follows.  Just go with it.

More often than not I enjoy my job.  It's stimulating enough to keep me from getting bored and I like the satisfaction of actually accomplishing something everyday.  However, there is one HUGE problem with my office - our communication culture is utter crap.  I'm part of the IT department at my firm.  I work on case management sysyem.  I don't really deal with the day to day support that the rest of the team deals with.  This gives me a rather unique perspective: not fully IT, not fully attorney. 

We have a gal in our office who submits a lot of help tickets to IT.  Really a lot.  Like 8-10 a day.  Often repeating what she asked about in a previous ticket.  Her tickets are almost always in all caps, with multiple exclamation marks.  Not once have I read a ticket from her that actually contained enough information for us to actually help her.  She raises all of our blood pressure.  We do not like her. 

Despite her inherent obnoxiousness we still have to help her.  The things she needs are actually important for the proper functioning of our business. A few weeks ago she submitted a ticket to us for something that was not actually an IT issue and we couldn't have helped her.  Did anyone actually tell her this?  No.  The ticket languished unclaimed in the system until one of my co-workers decided to just close it.  Without actually telling her that it wasn't an IT issue would she please go talk to the folks who are actually responsible for that.  Yes, she is obnoxious but if we don't tell her to change her behavior then we are partially responsible for it.  If someone (the particular person who first noticed this) had just taken the time to respond to the damned ticket when she saw it we wouldn't have gotten yelled at.  Our behavior turned something that wasn't actually our problem and made it our problem. 

Take the 30 seconds to communicate before it becomes a problem.  Why is that so fricken difficult for some people?  My urge to hex everyone involved is large.  As much as I would love to see some just desserts it would just make things more difficult.  I'm going to have to create some kind of mini-altar to communication on my desk instead.  Probably better in the long run but not nearly as satisfying. *sigh*

On Demons and Demonology

This weekend I read a book called Encounter with Hell by Alexis McQuinllan.  It's a supposedly true account of a woman with some psychic ability and her encounter with a demon.  It's a very quick and rather thought-provoking read, though I'm not entirely sure if I liked it or not.  The basic gist of it is that Alexis moves to a smallish town and immediately becomes obsessed with a haunted house.  She goes there and ignores a bunch of metaphysical red flags that would have had me out of there in a heartbeat.  She goes blundering about and eventually really pisses off the demon that happened to be living in the basement.  She then fails to get proper help in dealing with the situation she's created for herself and her life becomes a living hell for a while - as it would.  This book is a worthwhile read as a cautionary tale of what never to do.  The author seems to realize this and repeatedly points out the mistakes she made, which I respect.  I certainly didn't do everything (or if I'm honest even most things) right the first time I came up against a demon, but at least I had a better idea of what I was dealing with.  If you're interested in how demons tend to actually behave this is a worthwhile read, just do not emulate the author.  If you think you've encountered a demon get help, serious help, wherever you can find it.

Reading this book really got me thinking about demons and demonology. What most people think of as demonology is based in Ceremonial Magick (see The Lesser Key of Solomon and other Goetic grimoires for more info) and Ceremonial Magick is based on Abrahamic lore.  There are lots of books and websites (like Demonicpedia) that list out all of the Goetic demons, their descriptions, habits, dominions, and places in hell.  That's all well and good if you believe in the Abrahamic cosmology - heave, hell, purgatory, and all that.  However, I don't.  Therefore, the classical view of demonology just doesn't work for me.  Yes, yes, I know that all of these cosmologies are just frameworks through which people learn to relate to things we don't understand rather than how things actually are; and yes this framework is so pervasive that it's gotten enough energy put into it to make it "real" even if things weren't that way originally.  However, I just can't work with this.  Further, it just doesn't fit with my experiences.  

I've had the misfortune of dealing with a couple of demons in my time (and I sincerely hope that I won't again).  In my experience demons are essentially distilled malevolence with independent thought and a lot of power.  Now, that picture probably has a lot to do with how I experience energy; I feel it intuitively and sometimes "see" it.  I didn't learn about energy from within an existing framework with ideas of how things should be, so I didn't immediately label particular energies (e.g. oh that energy is a pixy, that energy is an imp, that energy is Amon the seventh lord of hell).  Rather, I'd feel the energy and look at the behavior it exhibited and try to fit it with the best label I could find (this is the method behind all the identifications in my book Defense Against the Dark).  Using this method of feeling out what things are, nothing I've encountered and labelled as a demon makes me think they were any of the Goetic demons. 

In my experience demons seem to evaluate people as either prey or a threat.  If you have the misfortune of being identified as prey, well you're going to have a very bad day.  Demons are insidious bastards and will do everything they can to sour every good thing in your life without you realizing what's happening until it's too late.  They threaten, cajole, and generally manipulate the shit out of you.  If you are identified as a threat you are probably going to be attacked - hardcore.  I'm talking scratching, biting, pushing, screaming, nightmares, visions, and anything else it can think of to get you to run far, far away and never come back.  They are horrible miasmas of malevolence.  There is nothing good about them and they need to be banished back to wherever they came from or completely dispelled.  There are no other ethical options in my opinion.

Goetic demons are an entirely different thing.  They seem to be intelligent, non-human, amoral entities that can be worked with as long as the practitioner understands their natures and is cautious.  I personally believe that Goetic demons are just thought forms and that calling them demons at all is a misnomer, which is why a lot of practitioners call them daemons (after the greek intermediaries) rather than demons - totally different connotation.  

It's for this reason that I don't think traditional demonology is terribly useful in defensive situations, except psychologically.  If you encounter something horrible and decide it's a particular Goetic demon then you have a psychological advantage.  Something with a name that other people have dealt with is a lot less scary than dealing with an unnamed, unseen malevolence (think of the difference between scary movies that show you the monster verses the ones that just suggest it and leave your imagination to fill in the blanks).  In the human mind if you can name something you can have power over it.  So, using traditional demonology as a tool can be helpful, but it's just not quite accurate. 

The entities I call demons are not the same as Goetic demons and require a very different method of approach.  In my encounters with demons the best defense you can possibly have is a strong sense of self, extreme confidence, and either massive shields or a totally uncracked aura (easier said than done).  Demons can taste weakness and will exploit it to the Nth degree.  All the circles, incense, and prayer in the world won't help unless you KNOW that they will keep you safe.  All it takes is one seed of doubt for your fortifications to crack and let it in.  Demons are not to be messed with by the inexperienced - they are scary, scary bastards and can take down even the most skilled and experienced if they get caught on the wrong day. 

If you think you might encounter a demon one day be diligent in your shadow work and heal those cracks in your aura.  Every internal demon you vanquish is one less thing for an external one to prey on.  And, for the love of all that is good, get help IMMEDIATELY!

Apropos of Nothing

This is my little Halloween kitty.  Cordelia will turn one year old on the 31st. 

I just love the fur between her toes!

Eastwood Cemetary

A few weeks ago a friend and I were traveling through Medford, Oregon and decided to spend our evening exploring their old settlers cemetery, Eastwood Cemetery. 

Entrance to Eastwood Cemetery

It was just an hour or so before sunset when we arrived, the side light giving the place quite an other worldly atmosphere.  Near the entrance is a little outbuilding with information on notable people you'll find in the cemetery.  We noted that there were more than an couple notorious people, so we figured we were in for an interesting time.  We weren't wrong.

One of the oddest things we experienced was the presence of a white cat.  Yes, yes I can hear you thinking, "What on earth is so odd about a cat?" Well, you kinda had to be there.  This was a pure white cat with gold eyes that sat calmly be the entrance of the cemetery, then led me off to a corner of the graveyard where it promptly sat under a tree and just stared at me.  It didn't hiss, meow, or run away when approached.  It just sat there calmly looking through you. It set of all my spidey sense and if I had to guess I'd say it was actually a Fay taking the shape of a cat.  It's hard to describe the energy this "cat" emitted, but as someone with three cats I can safely say it wasn't normal.

An interesting feline.

It even went back to the entrance as we left to see us off.

Another odd experience happened in the back of the cemetery, a little off to the Northwest. I was wandering around, and suddenly smelled smoke.  The ground was incredibly dry, so I worried that something might have caught fire.  I looked around and didn't see anything so my next thought was that maybe I was smelling someone's grill (as this part of the cemetery was very near some houses).  I wandered around a bit trying to find the source of the smell and came to the odd realization that I only smelled the smoke when I stood directly in front of a particular tombstone.  I had my friend Rae come over and check if it was just me, but she had the same experience.  Makes me wonder if this person was a firefighter or perhaps died in a fire (or maybe was just a big pyro).  Who knows?  Gotta love phantom smells.

When I stood directly in front of this tombstone I smelled smoke.

However, undoubtedly the most disquieting experience I had started just as the sun finally sank behind the hills.

Sunset

I was moving through the back of the cemetery when I began to get the distinct impression that I was unwelcome.  I heard the voice of a little girl saying, "No, no, no.  He's a bad man! A bad, bad man!"  Not the most comforting thing to hear I must say. I could feel the spirit of the little girl leave and something much darker take her place.  It felt heavy and wild.  The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up and then I felt a sharp pain on the back of my hand.  It was the first time I had ever been physically scratched by the unseen.  Now, I was not going to take any of that nonsense so I quite firmly stated that if whatever it was felt the need to do that again I would smack it into the next world.  It didn't touch me again, but I could feel that it was angry and did not like my being there. I'm not sure if it was a ghost or something darker.  I get the feeling it saw itself as some kind of guardian, so perhaps it had a good reason for wanting me out of there.

 

I decided it was time to head out and leave the shadows in peace.  We walked out under the mistletoe infected oaks and bid farewell to the not quite cat. 

Mistletoe growing on an oak tree.

Quite the kitty.