I’m not sure where, precisely, this new movement began: this sudden emphasis on necromancy, the contact with my ancestors, the renewed spiritual drive and craving, the strange focus I feel in this area. But I think the boulder started rolling when my family started dying, and after a couple mourning periods, one right after the other, they began to leave impressions on me that couldn’t be shrugged off so easily.
First, I began to pray to the father of men, the first ancestor, Dis Pater. For a number of things: for advice, for guidance, for comfort. My feelings about Dis Pater are complex and interwoven between gnosis and fact and are not a topic for discussion here, but suffice it to say that for the first time in my life I stirred my ancestors and led them to pay attention to me, in an attempt to fill a spiritual gap that I still can’t quite explain.
My family is spiritual by nature. My heritage is followed and guided by spirits and gods, and my entire lineage, the entire family tree, even just ever so slightly touched by the divine; it manifests in different ways among us, but some of us are touched just enough that we can reach out and touch back, and one night I fell into the otherworld and confronted my ancestry–or, more accurately, my ancestry confronted me.
They were all one, stemming from a single great root, as if a statue with many faces embedded in the earth, or a gem with a thousand facets. The many individuals ran through the landscape, there and yet not, projections of the one heritage, contributors and guides. They reached forward and grabbed me and flung me deeper into the heritage, a hundred different faces examining me, brushing past me, and for the first time in my life, I felt that elusive spiritual sensation of the power of one’s ancestors. I wondered, for a long time, just how an assortment of individual human souls, rarely enlightened, barely cohesive, could ever hope to hold power over the physical world, or influence over their collective descendants–and now, suddenly, I knew.
Before them, I didn’t feel like enough. The gods don’t make me feel too inexperienced or as if I am not important enough to bother with; Cernunnos, even, seems to have endless patience for me. But perhaps that’s the difference that impatient human souls make. I asked them to teach me, to tell me things, stories, secrets, and they gave nothing. I was, they let me know, not enough; not enough skill, not enough patience, to bother with. Instead they sent me off with sparse advice and admonitions.
My blood, a woman told me, isn’t to be squandered willy-nilly to empower every spell, to charge every charm; it’s not a catch-all anointing oil. She was irritated (angry, even?) that I was spilling blood, her precious blood, for anything pettier than a pact or anyone less than a god. Another told me, irritated, not to do anything halfway; there were spiritual transformations I had begun and never finished, actualizations I’d never completed, left strewn messily behind me, and she told me exactly how to carry out the remaining steps, how to do it well and do it fully and do her proud. They told me that to be worthy of time and consideration, I had to contribute something, make something, learn. I was sent away, kicked back into the physical, with a vision of a rose, pink and white and thorned in a small white pot, fed on my blood, devoted to the ancestors and to the bloodline, held close to my self like a part of my soul.
Visions, advice, and other unhelpful things; they didn’t fill the weird gap.
I could feel that impulse again. I get that impulse, sometimes, to open up my head and invite in the spirits, to grow spiritually and as a person, to let myself be touched ever more by the divine, as if I need any more exposure (is it like tanning, where one eventually acquires melanoma?). It was that impulse that led me to my ancestors, and it was that same impulse that led me down the street to a cemetery I’d never seen before. I felt it out and immediately felt The Pull. You know the one: the spiritwork pull, the come-hither-and-listen pull. The dead, rising up from their graves yet again to give me a firm once-over.
This time, The Pull came, I think, partially from my state of readiness for it. This past year has been awful, painful and surreal; first it was the death of my mother’s mother, which hit our family fairly hard, and then it was a heart attack here and there, and then my mother’s brother died only two weeks or so past. I watched him die in the hospital bed and felt the pain, mostly, of that gaping hole in the family, and felt his soul tear away. Then came the discussion with my mother: the spiritual pull we both feel, the holes in our family that have been left, the way she saw her mother rise up to heaven with her own two eyes and the way I felt my ancestors pulling me in. So, following that, sitting in the service room during my uncle’s funeral, I thought, first, He goes to join the ancestors, and then I could reach out to speak with him, and finally If there is no one else in our family who will do it, then I will; then it’s my duty; then it’s my right.
And so I sucked up my complaints, put on my big girl panties, and began.
The rose, first, the ancestral rose. I got it, I tended it, I fed it on blood-sweat-and-tears, and I care for it like a child. Then the formal study of necromancy and the souls of the dead: I know what I know, but study never hurt anyone. I gathered my tools and replaced old ones and conducted the necessary rituals to begin my work this time around: spirit washes and oils, mostly, since those run out quickly, and the tools to construct a certain other necessary tool, and the necessary offerings. I revised my altar. I drew my symbols and washed my clothing. And the cycle began once again.
I don’t know why I keep running from it, why I keep falling out of practice. Is it fear? Laziness? Fallow periods? I don’t know and, furthermore, I don’t intend to find out, because the holes left in our family put us in disarray and left us filled with death and decay and anger, and I don’t intend to let that remain, now or ever. This time, I’m not putting the mantle down or taking it off. I am going to grow, and change, and work, and work miracles as we do, and I’ll not be deterred in the slightest.
Sometimes, I think, it takes a slap in the face to wake up, and if that was the case, then okay.
Nemeton Nigromanticos 