Armies of
the Dead
I wish to debate the matter on the ground of experiments and observations such as are appealed to in other inquiries for definite objective proof.
frederic w. h. myers, founding member
of the society for psychical research
This chapter has popped in and out of the book several times. My promise to you was to sell you as little of my personal belief system as possible. Working with the ancestors is probably the cornerstone of what you could consider my “resting belief system.” There are two reasons why the chapter eventually made the cut. Firstly, ancestor veneration seems to be humankind’s first spiritual practice and remains the most widespread so it is highly unlikely to upset anyone. The second reason probably will, however.
Consider that the primary form of enchantment associated with success magic is to do with having good luck through the wearing of luck charms or oils and so on. A chapter about dealing with the dead made it into the book because you will never find a more effective, broad-based, “luck” practice than providing offerings to your ancestors and the dead. The differences it will bring to your life are night and day.
I have no simplistic explanation for why this might be the case. There have been numerous studies on the psychological benefits of genealogy and becoming more aware of your own family story. Typically these are stress and anxiety reducing effects as your sense of self and identity becomes embedded in something bigger and more meaningful—an essential salve in today’s isolated, modern world. These effects are certainly real, but they are only parts of a much greater sum. Properly enacted, chaos magic allows you to iterate through various magical forms until you land on ones that actually work, and incorporating ancestors and the dead into your sorcerous practices certainly fulfils that criteria.
Immortal Remains
It positively defines stuff white people like to suggest that other cultures have a somehow deeper understanding of ancestral spirits. This may be narrowly true today, but it is a much more recent phenomenon than most people realise. Most people involved in western magic are aware that at least some of the Catholic saints are direct adoptions of pre-Christian gods and goddess. Saint Brigid springs immediately to mind. However, viewed in their entirety, the saints are very obviously a continuation of the classical veneration of the honoured dead. When you consider that when they were alive, many local saints were effectively holy men and women—very useful in Dark Age communities—who are commemorated with the parading of their earthly remains or with specific foods and feasts, you can discern where this spiritual practice originates.
Adding to this are the regular masses said for deceased relatives, the existence of both family and community relics, and the persistence of folklore surrounding ghosts and spirits of place—it becomes apparent that we have been collectively ignoring our dead for only a very brief period of time. My personal suspicion as to why these practices never filtered into modern Paganism is that they were caught up in the identity politics of the postwar era where anything to do with the church was abandoned in favour of new gender and ecological perspectives. Whilst these perspectives were probably necessary, we threw the baby out with the bathwater and ended up paying for flights to Finland to have a shaman introduce us to our grandparents who were in front of our face the whole time.
Today’s magicians must possess the sophistication to separate the paedophile banking component of the Vatican from the continuous cultural practices of our ancestors. What we might call “rural folk Catholicism” bears as much similarity to what happens before the throne of Saint Peter as the experience of flying on Air Force One has to you walking to your mailbox. At the folk level, you have the continuous survival of Mithras, Isis, the stars, the planets, and your own deceased relatives. Anyone looking to connect with an authentic, continuous magical practice really needs to get over their unexamined objection to church trappings and realise that this is the form that western European ancestral veneration (and eastern, for that matter) took for almost two thousand years. It is ahistorical to ignore it and “jump over the top” back into the classical world. Such an action is, by definition, a modern recreation.
One of the most potent ways of re-entering this ancestral tradition is through the largely ignored Catholic notion of the lonely soul, a stand-in for all the souls trapped in purgatory, trapped between this world and the next, an heuristic for all the spirits floating “out there,” waiting for contact. Thanks to the work of writers such as Jake Stratton-Kent, we can see that there is a long-standing view of these spirits that has informed the entire western esoteric tradition. From the perspective of the magician, having the spirit work with him or her is part of her spiritual progress. We can read in numerous grimoires that the sorcerer promises to pray for the salvation of the wandering spirit they are seeking to summon. In Discoverie of Witchcraft, a ritual to summon what is effectively a fairy queen first requires summoning the spirit of a criminal on the promise of praying for its salvation and it is that spirit who fetches the sibyl for the magician.
“Salvation” in an early-modern context is closer to the exhortations of television psychics that souls must “move towards the light” than it is to any attempted post-mortem conversion to Christianity. There is a quid pro quo component to these interactions that is evidently very valuable to both sides and goes back thousands of years, perhaps even tens of thousands. In José Leitão’s truly excellent The Book of St Cyprian: The Sorcerer’s Treasure, the author points out that there is an implicit relation between the spirits the sorcerer frees from purgatory and the sorcerer him or herself. They become bound to him or her. Functionally, this is near-identical not only to the acquisition of magical assistants in the ancient world but also with the shamanic acquisition of spirit allies that must date back to before the Neolithic. Viewed from such a perspective, it becomes clear that the west has not really lost its spirit wisdom. We changed telephone providers but kept our old number.
The simplest way to begin with the spirits of the dead is to buy an Anima Sola/Lonely Soul statue or card, light a white candle before it and offer them spring water to quench their/his/her thirst. (Spring water makes the best offering for the spirits of the dead because it comes from under the ground.) Incidentally, this simple practice is also an effective way to “cool” minor poltergeist or spirit phenomena in a house or business.
A potentially more substantial way would be to visit a crossroad and begin a relationship with Saint Nicholas of Toletino, a thirteenth-century Italian mystic who spent years praying for and having visions of the souls in purgatory, ultimately becoming their patron. Much of his hagiography involves stories of ghosts and fetches. My favourite miracle attributed to him was the saving of nine souls caught in a sea storm. They prayed to him and he appeared floating in the sky, wearing his black Augustinian robes, with a lily in his left hand, radiating blinding, gold light. He waved his right hand and calmed the storm. Rock star.
Unlike so many saints who have made it into the western esoteric tradition, we know that Nicholas of Toletino physically existed. (Not that a lack of physical existence implies a lack of magical utility.) That may seem like a small point, but it is significant for the sections of the magical community that may have an aversion to Christian symbology. The practice of visiting the graves of dead mystics and wizards or otherwise asking for their aid predates Christianity by millennia. Whilst Nicholas’s own beliefs were Christian, when viewed from a magical perspective we see a dead necromancer who continues to work for and with the dead. You could not ask for a better intercessionary being to begin or continue your relationship with them. His obscurity in the occult world needs to be rectified.
The Rite of Saint Nicholas
O merciful God,
In your providence you have chosen Saint Nicholas as a special intercessor on behalf of the departed.
Take pity on those souls who have no particular friends
and intercessors to recommend them to Thee,
Who, either through the negligence of those
who are alive, or through length of time are
forgotten by their friends and by all.
Spare them, O Lord, and remember Thine own
mercy, when others forget to appeal to it.
Let not the souls which Thou hast created
be parted from thee, their Creator.
Most holy Saint Nicholas
May this offering bring refreshment
and hope to the souls in your care.
May the spirits of the dead remember
and look favourably upon me
As I remember and look favourably upon them.
May the souls of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.
Hidden in Plain Sight
It is difficult to conceive of just how disorienting the appearance of electric light, the beginnings of modern science and the eventual rise of Darwinism had on western worldviews. Before electric lighting, there was the sun or fire. For every single prior evening in all of human history, night was a time of dancing shadows. It seemed as if the world of magic was to be permanently obliterated by the march of science. Leading Victorian art critic John Ruskin put it thus in a letter to his friend at the time: “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.”41 But the dead are not so easily banished.
In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was formed in London and continues to this day. At the time they advanced an idea whose radicalism has faded as the premise of materialism appears to be running its course. The idea was that you could develop a science of religion, that the spiritual experiences of the last thirty thousand years could be explored—if not quite explained—by recourse to these new scientific techniques.
Spiritualism is what happened when those early pioneers dragged a clunky electric light to the crossroads and illuminated the bones of our ancestors. It emerged in the years that overlapped the spirit customs of the pre-industrial age and the steam-powered ambition of the industrial one. It is a pivotal moment in the entire story of the western esoteric tradition that we have largely mistaken as being the end of it. The magical community’s view of spiritualism has been shaped by the opinions of Victorian occultists such as Aleister Crowley—for whom it must be remembered spiritualism was competition—and the general sexism that it is little more than a hobby for grieving widows. It isn’t. French Kardecism would go on to have a huge impact on the colonial spiritualities of the New World. Ouija boards outsold copies of Monopoly in 1967.
To dismiss Spiritualism is to dismiss the uninterrupted thread of western spirit relationships tracing back thirty thousand years. It is also to dismiss some supremely useful evidence that hearkens back to the previous chapter’s goal of becoming invincible and may even have magical praxis implications.
The Scole Experiments
If ever the Society for Psychical Research had a case that deserved your undivided attention, it would be the Scole Experiments in the 1990s in the east of England. It is widely regarded as the society’s most important case ever. (There are numerous, full-length documentaries on YouTube, and the book is readily available secondhand.) Observed phenomena included:
From a magical perspective, two components of the Scole Experiments have escaped wider notice and they seem significant to me. Firstly, the core group engaged in twice-weekly séances for more than a year with just minor phenomena before the extreme manifestations began. Secondly,
the entities making contact with the group—who came to be known as “the spirit team”—required this initial sustained contact and chose to escalate the communication for their own reasons … which were to provide definitive evidence that human consciousness survives physical death.
Right here we can discern the magical need for regular contact with the spirit world. It enables us to boost the fidelity of the signal. Somewhere in the one hundred and thirty years of SPR experiments we begin to see the “evidence” that sustained contact with the spirit world “works better” than sporadic requests for assistance. This may well be the key to why incorporating the ancestors and the honoured dead has such a beneficial impact on the probabilistic outcomes of your life.
Near-Death Experiences
If it seems to you that near death experiences (NDEs) are a modern phenomenon then you are largely correct. We can find examples in historical literature that match the accounts that are now commonly reported, but they are scarce. There are also individual retellings such as the ones that temporarily capture the public’s imagination in today’s world. Individual experiences are certainly life-changing for those who go through them—and legitimately qualify as becoming invincible—but they remain anecdotal for the rest of us, interesting, not definitive. However, we are now closing in on five decades of accumulated data from which we may draw some fairly firm hypotheses.
Five decades? Prior to 1967, if you had a heart attack, you almost certainly died. But from 1967 onwards, portable defibrillators began to be used in emergency medicine. Since that time, the cause of death that is the most likely to trigger an NDE is cardiac arrest, because it is the cause of death that can most easily be reversed in a triage situation. It was only from 1975, when Dr. Raymond Moody published his bestselling Life After Life, that we even have the term “near death experience.”
The most common way materialists dismiss NDE evidence is to claim that a brain starved of oxygen begins to hallucinate lights and colours, similar in experience to when jet fighter pilots black out during extreme manoeuvres. Even from a materialist perspective, such dismissals do not hold the slightest volume of water. Firstly, a single incident in which it can be demonstrated that a patient undergoing an out-of-body experience (OBE) or NDE returns with information they could not possibly have—such as in cases where the patients leave their bodies in operating theatres and travel to their family homes, returning with accounts of what transpired—obliterates the oxygen-starvation hypothesis. And there have been thousands of such incidents. Secondly, OBE/NDEs have occurred when patients have been inside MRI machines that can prove there was zero brain activity, so how could the brain be hallucinating? As for hallucinations—which certainly do happen during medical procedures—the defining characteristic of an NDE is that it is the most vivid and most real experience of the patient’s life … which does not sound like a sputtering hallucination of a dying, anesthetised brain.
Dutch cardiologist Pim van Lommel—who studied NDEs in a clinical setting for more than twenty years and published his data in the esteemed medical journal The Lancet—explains the challenge to the “brain hypothesis” in his highly recommended Consciousness Beyond Life:
We still do not know how it is possible for people to experience an enhanced consciousness during a cardiac arrest, that is, during a period when the brain displays no measurable activity and all brain function, such as bodily and brain-stem reflexes and breathing, has ceased. Looking at the interaction between consciousness and the brain, we concluded that consciousness cannot be seen as the product of brain function. In fact, sometimes the opposite seems to apply: the mind influences brain function, both in the short and long term as a result of the empirically proven principle of neuroplasticity. Our current scientific knowledge cannot account for all aspects of the subjective experiences reported by some cardiac arrest patients with complete loss of all brain function.42
Because of improvements in medical resuscitation, the number of NDEs is actually increasing. Dr. van Lommel estimates that 4 percent of the total population has experienced one, which is about 9 million Americans and 20 million Europeans. From a magical perspective this is hugely fascinating as there has never been such a high number of Otherworld ambassadors in all of human history. Although the metaphysical community has largely ignored the available data, any of our wizardly predecessors would have positively leapt at the insights afforded by them. According to linguist and author Georgi Mishev, Bulgarian folk magic—a more or less continuous evolution of Thracian magical customs—treats what we call NDEs very seriously.43 Of all the ways one can become a healer in the Bulgarian folk tradition, being close to death through illness or trauma and then returning is the most potent. In Bulgarian, they are called preneseni, which literally means “transferred.” Those who are “transferred” back are believed to have powers of healing and prophecy, often taught to them by ancestors, saints, the Blessed Virgin, etc. Whilst the research that modern patients who have undergone NDEs have significant life improvements in terms of happiness, reduced anxiety, and so on is very robust, the contemporary Western world is not really in a position to quantify whether these experiences result in improved magical ability. It strikes me as a missed opportunity.
Although such a term would presumably cause mild discomfort to the hundreds of medical practitioners around the world diligently researching NDEs, we really must see the field as a continuation of the Western tradition of spiritualism. Near death experiences sit in that liminal zone between the estimable achievements of modern science and our shared spiritual heritage pertaining to the dead and their influence on our lives. From a chaos magic perspective, the data they offer afford us an unparalleled opportunity to calibrate our necromantic practice with some seemingly quantifiable evidence. On a personal level, the final nail in the coffin of “the brain as generator of consciousness” for me was learning that there are cases of blind people having NDEs who leave their bodies and are able to visually describe objects and faces in the operating theatre. Explain that one to me if these phenomena are simply a case of waking up during surgery!
Here are some of the other insights from Dr. Lommel’s 2001 study published in the Lancet, which encompassed 344 patients in ten Dutch hospitals over a thirteen-year period.44 Eighteen percent reported some recollection of the time during which they were unconscious. Of that 18 percent:
Beyond the actual awareness of being dead—which is presumably a prerequisite for entering the Otherworld—the greatest percentage experience was meeting dead relatives … meeting ancestors. Imagine that.
Ancestral Altar
You probably already have an ancestral altar. Paintings or photographs of deceased relatives sitting upon a mantle are a direct continuation of a 20,000 year tradition of the removal of skulls of the dead to be set in the dwelling places of our palaeolithic ancestors. Viewed in such a way, it is only polite to maybe make them a little bit nicer: perhaps a cloth, some flowers, and some glassware only used to provide offerings to your ancestors. Available evidence suggests it is these beings who will meet you on the other side of the tunnel. Who else is more likely to have your back in this life?
Ancestor veneration does not rely on either the matching of blood types or moving sequentially back up your family tree. Adoption, for instance, was a common classical custom and—when it came to highborn families—was regularly undertaken specifically so that the adoptive parents would have someone to perform ancestor rites. You also do not need to know all or even any of the names of your ancestors to begin such a process. Modern adoptees are by no means excluded from ancestor work. In fact, they technically have around double the ancestors as nonadoptees. (Two family trees, you see.)
In situations of family trauma or childhood abuse it is important to realise that you are under no obligation to include all family members or ancestors on your altar. There is an unbroken chain of blood stretching from you right back to the first human on earth. Skip entire generations if you feel it appropriate. Having one’s name or memory erased after death as a result of misdeeds in life was a very common and truly terrifying punishment in ages past. It remains very satisfying to mete out.
Hermanubis
Ah, Hermanubis, the most magically useful god you have never heard of. Emerging from the sometimes-literally psychedelic period of Greco-Egyptian syncretism, Hermanubis is a hybrid form of the Egyptian funerary god, Anubis, and the Greek messenger-trickster, Hermes. The combination of the two provides a psychopomp par excellence. He is depicted as having the body of Hermes and the head of Anubis. His most famous surviving statue is viewable in the Vatican Museum.
Cynocephalic (dog-headed) gods are supremely ancient and widespread. As for Hermanubis specifically, his origin is something of a moving feast. Plutarch, for instance, identifies Anubis with Hermes and with the star Sirius (the dog star). But the dog/messenger/Sirius connection is found at least as far back as the early New Kingdom where we see cynocephalic figures greeting the rising sun at the four doors of the eastern horizon on one of Ramses II’s obelisk. The rising of Sirius marked the beginning of at least two of Egypt’s simultaneous calendar systems. Firstly, the return of Sirius to the eastern skies in late summer after a seventy-day period (the same length of time as the mummification procedure) heralded the flooding of the Nile, the natural phenomenon responsible for Egypt’s bounteous agricultural harvest. Secondly, Egyptian sacred calendars ran on a much longer year, the Sothic year—named for the heliacal rising of Sirius/Sothis—lasting 1,461 solar years.
This calendric notion survives into the Egyptian concept of the decans—mighty spirits that hold sway over sections of the night sky. The sequence of decans begins with Hermanubis, and here we can see his role as psychopomp and opener of the ways. He appears from the underworld and travels across the sky at the head of the entire parade of star gods.
From here, the whole notion of Sirius/dog/initiator and the late summer skies is absorbed into the mythology of the early European church. If you look at the calendar of saints from the end of July to the beginning of September, it is filled with dogs. Most famously is Saint Christopher, beloved of mad taxi drivers and mothers with large prams the world over, on July 25. His hagiography states explicitly that he was a giant from the land of Chananeans/canines whose only form of communication was barking. In southern France you find Saint Roch, August 17, and Saint Guinefort, who was/is an actual dog, on August 22. Another direct continuation of Hermanubis is found via Saint Bartholomew on August 24. In Myths of the Dog Man by David Gordon White (no relation), we read:
[W]e find a version of the Coptic Acts of Bartholomew with a Latin codicil … The codicil reads: “These are the acts of Bartholomew who, upon leaving the land of Ichthyophages, went to Parthos with Andrew and Christianus, the cynocephalic man.” A similar codicil is found much earlier, in the approximately fifth-century Syriac version of the acts of Matthew and Mar Andrew: it says that the apostles converted the “City of Dogs, which is ‘Irqa,’” situated north of the Crimea.45
Given that there is zero archaeological evidence for any of these people and a growing academic theory suggesting that much of the Christian story is a retelling of star lore (twelve apostles, twelve zodiacal houses, and so on), then “converting the City of Dogs” could represent the incorporation of the Sirian corner of the sky into the emerging religion. Saint Christopher’s feast day falls on the ancient ritual known as the kunophontis, the “massacre of the dogs,” a sacrifice performed to appease the restless dead ancestors of Apollo’s son, Linos, who was killed and eaten by dogs. It was quite common to see cynocephalic statues of Christopher at the gates to European cities right up until the Middle Ages. Here we have the “way opener” meet the dog-headed crosser of boundaries and spiritual insight. Before our very eyes, Hermanubis has continued along with us in the march of western culture.
Christopher is the only cynocephalic being in the post-Christian western world to be given a name, although there have been dog “races” and “people” for centuries. These peoples are from Libya, Egypt, northern India, and the Horn of Africa, which most of the time was considered the same place. Thus cynocephaly was a visual shorthand for eastern spiritual influence. Interestingly, it currently appears that dogs were first domesticated in southeast Asia.
Other direct continuities are found in Origen’s accounts of the beliefs of the heretical gnostics. He writes that the gnostics believe “men … [after death] assumed the shapes of these theriomorphic spirits and were called lions, bulls, dragons, eagles, bears and dogs.”46 Note that all these animals can be found in the constellations of the classical world, giving us a very poignant indicator of where the gnostics located their afterlife—among the stars. Returning to David Gordon White:
The cynocephalic Hermanubis and Erathoath (Hermes-Thoth) are products of the Greco-Egyptian astrological tradition, and we may further glimpse, in the Coptic commemoration of Bartholomew’s martyrdom on the first day of the month of Thot (August 29), an evocation of that animal-headed Egyptian deity whose symbolism was carried over into the Hellenistic world in the figure of Hermes Trismegistus. Second-century Alexandrian coins depict Hermes-Thoth together with cynocephalic apes and the caduceus, and another Ophite source, an “Abraxis” gemstone, depicts the cynocephalic Hermanubis holding a sceptre in each hand and standing between a half moon and a star, on the other side is the archon Michael. These Hellenistic traditions were the sources of Christian zoomorphic depictions of the four evangelists as well: these first spread from Asia Minor and the Coptic Christians of Egypt into Sicily, Visigoth Spain, Merovingian Southern France, and Celtic Ireland, with the cynocephalic Christopher hard on their tails.
Why dogs, death, and late summer? Why would this be my recommended route into magical dealings with the dead? This is a very, very old Indo-European association … possibly a dozen millennia old. In numerous Indo-European traditions, the dead are compared to a herd or flock, with a divine shepherd and his dog or dogs managing the herd. We see echoes of this tradition with Hekate—to whom dogs are sacred—hounding lost souls; we see it with Cerberus guarding the threshold to the underworld; we see it in the Roman tradition of household gods and spirits, Lares, often depicted wearing dog-skins. In book XXII of The Iliad, Homer describes Sirius as the hound of Orion. During the dog days, Orion’s hound “redoubled the fiery heat of the sun, bringing, in the afternoon, suffering to all living creatures.”
Suffering and illness are consistently associated with the dog days and their presiding spirits. The origins of this connection are likely functional. Even today, high summer is a time of mosquitoes, viral outbreaks and water-borne illnesses, the baking heat leading us to drink from smaller and more dubious water sources. Thus the threshold between the former year and the new year was fraught with sickness and danger. It was and for much of the world still is a dangerous, liminal time. Liminality gave both Hermes and Anubis some of their many titles. In some places, Anubis held the title of Apherou, meaning “way-opener.” Hermes had many similar titles such as Psychopompos, meaning “conductor of souls.” You could not find a better hybrid to deepen your interactions with the dead. Following are several ways you can do that.
Working with Hermanubis
One of the purposes of running you through cynocephalic history at some length is to announce that you can get yourself a statue of Saint Christopher from almost anywhere and have a ready-made, almost-hoodooized home for Hermanubis on your altar. (Ideally, try to find one with a lamp, a sacred symbol of Hermes.) I traded up to a Saint Christopher from my previous print-out of the statue of Hermanubis from Wikimedia I put in a dollar store frame. Both work, but Chris looks better among my other god dollies.
Suggested offerings include spring water (obviously), rum, and aquavit. Suggested incense is storax or myrrh. Job done.
Hail Hermanubis! Come to me!
O high one, O mighty one, O master
of secrets for those in the Underworld,
O Pharaoh of those in Amenti, O Chief Physician, O Good Son of Osiris, he whose face is strong among the gods.
You should appear in the Underworld
before the hand of Osiris.
You should serve the souls of Abydos in order
that they live through you, these souls,
the ones sacred to the Underworld.
Come to the earth! Reveal yourself to me here today.
You are Anubis. You are Hermes. You are the one
who went forth from the heart of the great
Agathodaimon, the father of the father of all the gods.
Come to the mouth of my vessel/indwell
in this form dedicated to you 47
And receive my offering and praise. For I am Isis the Wise, the sayings of whose mouth shall come to pass.48
Some notes on possibly unfamiliar terms: Amenti is the Western Lands (of the Dead). As for Agathodaimon, it was originally a Greek presiding spirit of vineyards and wine, but by this point in history had been syncretized with Serapis and the Logos, thus stitching together wine, dying, resurrecting gods, and the creation of the universe, which should sound very familiar. (Consider Jesus descending into hell to free all the Pagans who died before his appearance on earth, for instance.) Here is a highly fruitful line of enquiry I commend to you but sits outside the scope of this book.
The spell indicates the invocation should be repeated seven times. That is certainly recommended for your first few run-throughs. Eventually you will get the ship in the air faster than that, so to speak. From here, the rite splits. If it is a standard offering, then continue as below. If it is the bowl spell, jump to the next point.
Hermanubis, bring in a table for the gods. Let them sit.
Hermanubis, bring in a table for
the Honoured Dead. Let them sit.
Hermanubis, bring in the bread and wine for the gods,
bring in the bread and wine for the Honoured Dead.
Let them eat, let them drink.49
Here is the part where Hermanubis becomes extremely useful and directional when it comes to speak with specific groups of the dead. For example, “Hermanubis, bring in a table for the spirits of the priests of Heliopolis” or “the spirits of the ancestors along my Portuguese bloodline.”
You can also use this invocation at the beginning of a séance, for instance. Or you can call in a particular group of spirits simply to feed and honour them, and/or communicate with them via cartomancy.
Note: Offerings should be left on the altar/in the ritual space for a respectable length of time, such as overnight. Remove any foodstuff before it spoils. Ancestral offerings can be disposed of as you would any leftover foodstuff for your family (which is what they are). Err on the side of caution with offerings for other spirits and leave them at crossroads, in graveyards, or other between-spaces not located on your property. Much as on the African plains or in the open ocean, there is something of a food chain when it comes to spirit offerings. The big ones eat first. Then the others do. You do not want to be feeding or attracting the others to your house.
Another Offering Rite
Another adaptation from the Greek Magical Papyri. The spell calls for brass, but I picked up a copper curry bowl on Brick Lane in East London and use that instead. I’m nothing if not opportunistic/cheap/hungry.
You are wine, you are not wine
But the head of Anubis.
You are wine, you are not wine,
But the feet of The Messenger.
You are wine, you are not wine,
But the guts of Osiris,
The guts of IAO SABAOTH
APHEROU ABRASAX.
Then speak your request to Hermanubis.
Once done, be sure to bid all assembled beings depart in peace and mutual respect. Disposal of the offerings is as above. Often I just let the spring water completely evaporate.
The Grateful Dead of Baar
I appreciate some fairly bold claims regarding the continuity of practices pertaining to the dead and ancestors have been made in this chapter, so let us close with the story of the Grateful Dead of Baar. The earliest version of this tale is from a thirteenth-century German book of miracles, the Dialogus Miraculorum.
Once there was a man from Baar who would always stop and offer up a prayer for the dead every time he walked past his local churchyard. It came to be that he was pursued by armed bandits one evening, so he ran into the churchyard to hide among the tombstones. The bandits followed him in, whereupon all the graves flung open, the dead rose and came to the defence of the man who prayed for them, wielding swords and greatstaffs. The bandits fled in terror, never to bother the man from Baar again.
This story was popular right across Europe for several centuries. The scene was regularly depicted in churches as far away as Sweden. It served as a potent reminder to the faithful that the dead are never quite gone. In the twenty-first century we are fortunate enough to have more than one hundred years of empirical observations suggesting the same thing. The combination of knowing that you survive death, along with your ancestors and the heroic dead, is an immovable backstop that provides you with the courage to move forward in all fields of life.
And sure, you could probably pursue success without a skeleton army, but where is the fun in that?
41 Deborah Blum. “Those Dreadful Hammers.” Wired. Accessed April 12, 2015. www.wired.com/2010/11/those-dreadful-hammers/.
42 Dr. Pim van Lommel. Consciousness Beyond Life. HarperOne, 2011.
43 Georgi Mishev. Thracian MagicPast and Present: Avalonia, 2012.
44 Dr. Pim van Lommel. “Near-death experience in survivors of cardiac arrest: a prospective study in the Netherlands.” The Lancet. Volume 358, No. 9298. December 2001.
45 David Gordon White. Myths of the Dog Man. University of Chicago Press, 1991.
46 White, Myths.
47 If making a standard offering, use first half of this phrase; if doing the “bowl spell,” use the second half.
48 Hans Dieter Betz. The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells. Second Edition. University of Chicago Press, 1997.
49 Ibid.