Tag: spirits

It’s Complicated

It is perfectly reasonable to ask, “If you believe that
these spirits are all doing their thing in some afterlife, how do you account
for ghosts? How about reincarnation and past life memory? Are the spirits out
there, down here, or inside me?”

One, let me state for the record that I don’t know. And I
don’t think anyone knows the entirety of what happens after we die. I don’t
think anyone fully understands what spirits are and how they operate. But I
have some ideas.

Let’s look at our own meatsacks as an example. Non-human
cells in your body outnumber human cells in your body by 10-1. That’s right,
you have ten times as many microbe cells in your body as cells you have
actually grown yourself. Those microbes are small, so they only make up about
3% of your total mass, but 3% is pretty significant. Also, does size really
matter when it comes to the ability of any given cell?

Chances are, our spirit-selves aren’t just some Jedi-ghost
version of you. Just like we have different organs and trillions of microbes
that make up our bodies, it may be a good bet that our spiritual selves have as
much complexity or more.

Let’s turn to our friends the Ancient Egyptians again, and
see what they had to say on the matter. After all, they probably studied the
afterlife more than any other culture on Earth. Keep in mind that Egypt was an
empire that lasted over 3,000 years and things differed from place to place and
in different time periods. The list I give here is not definitive and has some
of my take on the subject.

Depending on who you asked, the Ancient Egyptians believed the
soul had three to seven different parts. Let’s run with six of them:

Ib – The heart: Every person has one drop of their mother’s
blood in their heart when they are born. So it can be said that the heart links
us to our ancestors. The heart is the seat of emotion, all of them—love, hate,
jealousy, compassion, etc. That’s important because when you get judged in the
afterlife it is your heart that will be weighed to tell if you were a good
person. So you could say that it’s not so much bad decisions that you made or
weaknesses that you possess that fucks you, but your intentions. Did you do it
out of love or did you do it out of fear and hate?

Ren – Name: Your sense of self. What you answer when they
ask, “Who the fuck are you?” This would be the part of your own spirit created
by your accomplishments. When they really wanted to fuck you in Ancient Egypt
they erased your name when you died. This breaks your contact with the living
world. Everything here has a name. If you have no name, you’re nobody.

Ba – Personality: The translations become a little tricky as
we don’t really have words for some of these concepts. Your Ba is the part of
you that is fun at parties. Your unique perspective. It’s also the part which
actually travels between the afterlife and the living world. The Ba probably
comes closest to being that Force-Ghost. If you’re being haunted and that ghost
isn’t an asshole, chances are you’re talking to the person’s Ba.

Ka – Spark: Essentially, your battery. Having this makes the
difference between life and death. The Egyptians believed your Ka needs a place
to keep generating energy, which is part of why they preserved the dead. It
needs food and water, just like you do, but after death it comes in the form of
offerings. Prayers will do in a pinch.

Shuyet – Shadow: The shuyet is the symbol of you. It represents
your form, but may not actually be you, but certainly created by you. Your shuyet
inhabits representations of you such as statues and drawings. Which is why we
have that stuff on our ancestor altars, except you need to understand, that’s
not the actual person. Just the symbol. If a ghost comes back and does
random-ass annoying things it’s probably a shuyet.

Akh – Spirit: The akh is different from all the other parts
because it gets created after you die. After you go through the hall of
judgement, the gods slam back together various parts of your soul and you have
a shiny new akh. The akh does not start out as a god, but can become one. The
akh does all the amazing shit spirits can do and we cannot.

That all seems pretty intricate, but nowhere near as
intricate as say, a human body. So I would say the reality is probably much
more complex than that. And non-human spirits may be even more complicated. Add
to this that time is not linear and things can be so crazy you just chalk it up
to “things we weren’t meant to know.”

But for us magi, that’s what we call a challenge. We do our
best to figure that shit out, and we may never know in this lifetime or the
next how it all works. You can ask the spirits, and that’s helpful to an
extent, but they would have to put it in concepts your ape-self can understand,
which it can’t. That’s why magi study endless symbol systems to try and grasp
some iota of meaning out of all of it.

Your spirit may have as many parts as there are stars in the
sky. Keep grasping for them.

The Old Ways

“Crow Seidr” Trollwood Art, Nov 2016

You may have figured out that I am a huge fan of history.
That obsession with learning stories of our past has been with me my entire
life. In the past fifteen years much of that research has been pre-history.

Let me throw at you an impressive set of numbers. By conservative
estimates, Homo sapiens have been around for about 315,000 years. The Home
genus has been on this planet at least .5 million years, and some say up to 2.5
million years. Some of the oldest indication of any type of spiritual practice
is 300,000 years old, being grave goods buried with a Neanderthal. So our
species started all this before we even evolved into our current iteration and
the first known practice was some form of belief that life continues after
death. By comparison, the first civilization started 5,000 years ago. That’s
310,000 years of human existing on this planet before cities. As the Oracle at
Delphi says, “Know Thyself,” and to really know who we are as a species we need
to have some understanding of how we lived for the majority of our time here.
Evidence shows that we believed in some kind of life after death, and we were
animists. We believed in and had dealings with spirits.

People debate endlessly whether or not our species took a “wrong
turn.” Whether agriculture, or domestication, or if you believe Socrates, even
writing itself were bad ideas. I have my own opinions. But outside of that we
still must accept that knowledge does indeed get lost. While most scholars don’t
even like the term Dark Ages anymore, all will admit that some knowledge was
lost in the West. We lost the recipe for Roman concrete. We lost the recipe for
Greek Fire. Judging by how people seem to feel strongly about spiritual
practice, you can bet that much of what was discovered on that topic has been
destroyed. Think about what must have been lost in those 300,000 years? The
voices of those elders lost to time. I truly hope that Babbage was right and
with enough computing power we can go back reconstruct every vibration that
ever occurred in our atmosphere.

Another point, why do we even care? Certainly our species
has made great advances in the creation and retention of knowledge. Haven’t we
gone well past what our ancestors knew? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that I
think can be said is that the focus of that knowledge, and the uses for the
intellectual capacity of our civilization, has changed. Spiritual matters take
a back-seat to science and economics. Not that those are bad things. But what
does that say about magick? Has the art of magick advanced?

Yes, yes it has. Albeit at a much slower rate and with much
fewer resources. Many ancient cultures believed magick to be the highest form
of learning. All of the intellectual, economic, political, and temporal
capacity went towards the study of magick in a big way. Why am I obsessed with
the Ancient Egyptians? One need only look at the Pyramids and know that their
culture spent a lot of its time thinking about magick. The huge portion of the cultural
records that survive focus on preparing for one’s death.

The point of all this, besides raising some even more
interesting questions, is how it effects our relationship with the spirits. One
question you have to answer for yourself is, are spirits immortal? Many of them
claim to be, and I have no reason not to take them at their word. One can
research the names of many spirits through the gimoires and all the way back to
ancient cultures. Are these the same spirits? Maybe, but at the very least the
spirits seem to have knowledge of those ancient names. So even if the spirits
are not immortal they certainly know their history and the history of their
interaction with us.

What did that interaction look like for the vast majority of
our time on this planet? It seems to have involved a lot of drugs and
journeying through trance states. It certainly didn’t involve brass seals and
contracts written on virgin paper, because we didn’t have any of those things
through the majority of our history. Although maybe those methods are a
refinement of the communication process, a sort of updated technology. But this
does prove that those methods are not absolutely necessary. That the spirits
can be contacted by other means. So while grimoire purists may be advancing the
art, it may not be the only way or even the best way to contact those spirits.

In the end, it is best to remember the magick of your
ancestors. The spirits certainly remember, and what has been said and done to
them in the past will reflect on how they interact with us today.