Tag Archives: spirit communication

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Concerning the Vision of Spirits in the Air

I was due to present a magickal working, but couldn’t think of anything specific, so (on my way out) I grabbed an old grimoire from the shelf with a vague idea of using it to demonstrate how silly old books can be put to use in personal magickal practice.

The book was A.E. Waite’s Book of Ceremonial Magick, which I’d picked up somewhere years ago for a quid. When the Baptist’s Head was starting out, from this same book we adapted a ritual for communicating with the Archangel Uriel and had been blown away by the results [1]. I hoped that A.E. Waite would turn up trumps again.

In its gloriously obtuse prose, here is the text for the ritual I chose:

Concerning the Vision of Spirits in the Air

For the Masters of Black Magic, as for the author of the Comte de Gabalis, the air is the abode of far other beings than the bird and fly, but the process by which they are rendered visible is complicated through the exceptional nature of the required materials…

It’s now widely recognised that many of the ingredients for ‘spells’ are either symbolic, or were chosen deliberately for being difficult-to-come-by, in order to put casual readers off the scent of the true purpose for the ritual. In an age where it is considered politically correct to make ourselves understood to as wide an audience as possible, this tactic strikes us as bizarre. But reflect for a moment on the trolls that would flock to the comments section of a blog which made magick simple enough for everyone to understand, and suddenly it starts to make sense.

Cardboard box with magick words and things inside.

The ingredients for the spell, ready for burning.

Waite almost gives the game away in the passage above, with his implied inference that if the materials weren’t such a hassle to obtain, then it would actually be easy to see the spirits.

It is, of course, quite possible to secure the brain of a cock, and dissection with that object may perhaps be performed by deputy; the kitchen-maid or the poulterer’s assistant would be easily secured…

Easy for him to say! For me, locked in an urban lifestyle, lacking domestic help, animal offal is not so easy to come by.

The dust from the grave of a dead man is the second ingredient of the process; but a visit to the nearest cemetery will not be sufficient, because it is useless to collect it on the surface; that which is next to the coffin will alone serve the purpose…

Do I need to point out how insane it would be even to attempt this?

In addition to these substances there are only oil of almonds and virgin wax. A compost must be made of the four, and it must be wrapped in a sheet of virgin parchment inscribed previously with the words GOMERT, KAILOETH, and with the character of Khil.

This didn’t sound too hard. ‘Virgin parchment’ means ‘a blank sheet of paper’, and ‘virgin wax’ (correct me if I’m wrong) is no different from ‘wax’, is it? Instead of ‘almond oil’ I decided sunflower would do just as well. Because this is where we hit the nub: how do we suppose magick ‘works’? Do we suppose a chemical reaction renders the spirits visible when a cock’s brain is mixed with corpse dust?

No. Magick doesn’t ‘work’. I learnt magick from the tradition of Chaos Magick, which avers that results arise from shifting one’s belief, thereby altering one’s reality. Over time I’ve come to regard this as too ‘causal’ an explanation. Alan Chapman and I realised at an early stage in our collaboration that chaos magickal rituals still lead to results even when alteration of the magician’s psychological state (‘gnosis’), supposedly another essential component of ritual, is completely left out. These days, I often don’t bother with either gnosis or belief-shifting. I make no effort to ‘believe’ in the ritual I’m performing. I know it’s a pile of ludicrous rubbish. But I do it anyway, and the results are just as striking.

This cannot be an original discovery, because the key feature of magick has always been that its means are causally insufficient to realise its ends. Magick does not and cannot ‘work’. Results are not the effects of the ritual, but arrive as uncaused, meaningful synchronicities. These are indeed complete ‘coincidences’, things that probably would have happened anyway, even if the ritual had not been performed.

However, the ritual was performed, and it’s this formalisation of intention on which the act of magick seems to rest. So, on the night in question, because it would be insane to dig up a corpse, someone instead pretended that he was dead. We sprinkled dust on him and declared this our desired ingredient.

‘I never saw a cock that had a brain,’ someone jokingly remarked, which provided inspiration to push a cashew nut into the tip of a banana, and improvise around its extraction a routine that was a lot more fun than cracking open the skull of a fowl.

The materials being thus prepared, it remains to set them alight, whereupon the operator will behold that which the Grimoire characterises as prodigious, but does not specify except by the indication of the title. This experiment, it adds, should be performed only by those who fear nothing…

Again, the game is almost given away by: (1) the instruction to destroy the ingredients that have taken such effort to assemble; and (2) the refusal to specify an outcome. (Because there won’t be an ‘outcome’ – except smoke.)

Things on fire!

The ingredients burnt with an unexpected ferocity.

Fearlessness is needed because anyone who fears the spirits will be in dread of certain things happening, and inclined to overlook any other stuff that happens instead. Fearlessness is really only the capacity to adopt a wide mental focus. Without that, wasting time on something that does not work really is a waste of time.

It is easy to deride the process, but reflective persons will see that it is the quintessence and summary of the whole art. This is Black Magic – and most of the white kind – in the proverbial nutshell – a combination in equal proportions of the disgusting and the imbecile. There are many more elaborate experiments, but few of such a representative kind. It is not necessary to add that it has been exceedingly popular and is to be found in most of the Grimoires.

Offensive, stupid, ridiculous, funny, arbitrary and tedious: these registers feature in ritual not purely because of their psychological repercussions, but because they are symptomatic of performing actions least likely to have a causative impact.

To be honest, I hadn’t really planned what to do with the ingredients after the demonstration. Some arrangements were made, but I was unwell and unable to follow them through. Experience has taught me there are often negative effects from leaving magickal intentions hanging, so a few days later I took the ingredients into the woods and finished the ritual alone.

Rusted ironwork with a pattern like a face.

Earth spirits. Parts of a rusted bedstead that look like faces.

For the first time in a while, my tiny mind was blown by the results. On my route that morning, I found three playing cards in the street which amounted to a divination of intense personal relevance. And later, having discovered a secluded spot, the ingredients burnt with a ferocity I had not expected (but which was presumably a consequence of the oil and wax).

The original author of the spell perhaps avoided describing his or her results in order to avoid sounding lame. The spirits I encountered in the wood that morning were in the sensation of warm sunlight, the sensuous motion of intertwining branches, and a shoal of white clouds, whale-like in their indifference, which pursued a slow vector across the blue sky out to sea.

After a while, some earth-spirits also appeared. The atmosphere reminded me of Marvell’s poem, ‘The Garden’ (c.1650), with its mysterious sense of nature pushing and insinuating into human consciousness.

Old sock covered in moss on woodland earth.

Another earth spirit, in the form of an old sock covered in moss.

These were the immediate results on the etheric level of experience, the level of emotions, feelings and forms. Later on, an astral result arrived – an experience at the level of symbolism and meaning. (I’m still coming to terms with it. Oh dear — I think it might involve extraterrestrials…)

A.E. Waite had delivered the goods, yet again. So is it true that this ‘spell’ works? Does it actually cause something to happen?

No, of course not. Don’t be silly.

That’s why it’s so good.

Audio

I used the paulstretch audio utility (on default settings) to create this ‘ambient soundscape’ from a recording I made of the ingredients burning.

Note

[1] See Alan Chapman & Duncan Barford, The Blood of the Saints (Brighton: Heptarchia, 2009), p. 312.

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Inside the Entrances to Hell

Last May, Alan Chapman and I visited four of Brighton & Hove’s seventy-two entrances into hell (as featured in previous articles on this site) to make a short film of our exploits.

At Daffivisionomy we performed for the first time our ritual for opening hellmouths and encountered a psychotic spirit. At Chesney Peck we employed tarot and the magic 8 ball to make contact with a thieving gnome. Vomitory we used as an opportunity for some practical sorcery. Finally, we used a ghost box to chat in real time with spirits inside Yizmeduck.

Entrances to Hell - view on YouTube.

Entrances to Hell - the movie. 11mins 44 secs. Click to view on YouTube.

Although I’ve logged their locations and characteristics, I’ve never set down in detail what I consider the nature and function of these entrances into hell. In my view, psychogeographical magick consists of a few basic techniques. Standing still is the simplest: you simply stand in a specific location, observe what happens, and interpret the experience as a message. Following is another: either you move from location to location following specific signs or cues from the environment, or else you choose locations or directions at random. (This is, in essence, the technique of ‘drift’ or ‘dérive‘, so commonly favoured by psychogeographers.) Finding is slightly different. You decide beforehand the outcome of the journey, and then look to experiences during the journey as the provision of that outcome. (My walks to discover the chakras of the city were an example of this.) The entrances to hell, however, represent a fourth category in the psychogeographical repertoire, which I describe as going behind. It differs fundamentally from the previous three by assuming a dimension of experience separate from the manifest environment.

With this type of magick, we’re not so much interpreting experience as a message or allegory, but the experience itself is perceived as originating directly from the allegorical realm. So whereas with the first three techniques we can observe, discover and track our quarry, by going behind what is manifestly real we interact with our object more directly, on its home ground.

Splitting the world into ‘the manifest’ and ‘the concealed’ is itself a fundamental magical technique, one so powerful that it’s not limited to magick. Realising that a ‘here’ originates from a ‘there’ releases the potential to change ‘here’ simply by interacting with or intervening in ‘there’. Science does this all the time, intervening in things we can’t perceive in order to change those we can. Similarly, but in a different sphere, therapists, politicians and teachers influence our unconscious processes, in order to modify conscious behaviour. The domain of magick, however, is neither physical nor social reality, but individual consciousness, which is why in magick this technique is worked entirely consciously instead, and limited within the minds of a specific person or group.

Entrances to hell are necessarily funny. This is because ‘funny’ arises from a split between what is actually said and what was meant, or between what really happens and what ought to have happened, and so on. All traffic with spirits is at least faintly ludicrous, because of the way that what’s ‘up there’ is necessarily forced to manifest through whatever happens to be available ‘down here’. For instance, when the angels made Dee and Kelley schlep around Europe for months on end, to reprimand its kings for their sins, and later instructed the pair to swap wives – this was at least as absurd and funny as it was dangerous and embarrassing. Similarly, when Crowley, possessed by Choronzon at Bou Sada, sneaked out from the protective triangle and leapt on Neuberg – that was bloody hilarious!

Bathos and magical manifestation tend to go together. If the results of magick aren’t faintly silly, it’s worth checking that they have been truly situated as coming from some place other, and aren’t merely the product of an over-valuation of what’s to hand. I remember looking at an altar, lovingly set up for a session of group magick, when a senior magician came in and remarked, ‘What a pile of tat!’ What magick infers or represents is important, not the forms through which it manifests. Mistake the forms for the meanings and you end up with the kind of superstitious fetishism that many mistake for magick.

Comedic techniques are frequently put to magical uses, something almost as frequently overlooked. A joke, for instance, has an enormous power to entirely transform our mood, or make someone look and feel ridiculous. And the use of laughter as a banishing ritual is endemic among chaos magicians. However, comedy comes in two flavours: ironic and humorous. The former turns the world dark; the latter floods it with light. Imagine that a condemned man is led to the chopping block. If he remarks to the executioner, ‘How lovely to meet you!’ then that would be irony. But if he paused to inspect the axe and ask, ‘Are you sure that thing’s safe?’ then that would be humour. In the former, the prisoner highlights how bad things are by pretending they’re good. In the latter, he draws attention to the manifestly bad (the axe), but pretends good might come of it. The ironic remark shames the executioner, whereas the humorous one releases and absolves him. Indeed, it releases and absolves everyone, including the prisoner.

In magick, irony manifests demons and humour draws down angels. Entrances to hell are portions of the city overlooked, ugly, decayed. By awarding them attention and deciding they are intentional, and that behind them lives an organising intelligence, this ironically exposes the chaos ‘here’, by supposing that ‘there’ the chaos is planned. The disadvantage of demons is that they mess things up; the advantage is that in places messed beyond repair, a demon has control. No doubt for this reason, we heard the entities of Yizmeduck describe themselves as ‘the rape of truth’ and admit that ‘we play violent’.

So to visit and open an entrance into hell is to negotiate with the messed-up city, with all that disgusts and alienates us from our environment. We may not like it, but these forces have power over what manifests – in certain locations, at least. The alternative view is that wastage occurs by accident, and there’s no intelligence behind decay, but surely it’s better to honour and negotiate with the city’s demons rather than to accept alienation as accidental and inevitable?

So much for demons and hellmouths. Where are the angels? The technique I’ve tried for finding these I call going beyond. It involves letting go of the manifest, or – at least – holding onto it so lightly that ‘there’ unavoidably bleeds through into ‘here’. There’s nothing new or original in this. By making the angels in his film Wings of Desire (1987) so concerned with mundane aspects of human experience, Wim Wenders similarly erased the split between the other world and this. So far (perhaps) I’ve found two angels in the city: one of air, and one of earth or fire. But this is a work in progress, because they seem far harder to locate…

P.S.

Oh, in case you’re wondering… Having opened one, to close an entrance to hell merely recite thrice backwards the traditional opening formula. So just say (three times): Sasaz atanatasan, sasaz, sasaz!

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A Conversation Between Worlds?

Mark L. Cowden is the author of Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds, a book that ought to be causing a stir on the paranormal scene.

Cowden specialises in audio technology, and in this capacity joined the Northern Ireland Paranormal Society (now renamed ‘PSI Ireland’). Members of the team, including Cowden, featured in a BBC television programme, Northern Ireland’s Greatest Haunts, which has so far completed two series.

Spirit Voices by Mark L. Cowden

Mark L. Cowden, 'Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds' (Anomalist Books, 2011). Click image for more information.

In episode one of the second series, during the investigation of a supposedly haunted location, Cowden succeeds in using specially adapted equipment to record the ‘voice’ of a spirit replying to questions asked in a separate room by mediums Marion Goodfellow and Andy Matthews. When Goodfellow later hears Cowden’s recordings, which support the inaudible communications she claimed to be receiving, she breaks down in tears. ‘For the first time ever,’ explains Cowden, ‘other people could hear exactly what Marion heard when she was communicating with a spirit’ (p. 145). A clip of this incident, and the full episode of the show, are currently available on YouTube. Cowden describes how he was able to repeat this feat at a second location, later in the series.

However, the book is more than a description of a technological process. It is mainly the story of how Cowden awoke to his own psychic talents. ‘[T]he recorded evidence I was getting had little to do with the equipment,’ he writes. ‘I was getting results because I was evolving in the right direction with my own spirituality’ (p. 150-1). The right direction, according to Cowden, is to undertake paranormal investigation in aid of a greater good, which involves liberating earthbound spirits and awakening ordinary people to the reality of spirit.

Although in the television programme he is portrayed as a member of a sceptical paranormal team, in his book it is clear he has come to regard himself as a spiritual practitioner, like the mediums. The only difference is in his use of electronic equipment to augment his psychical abilities. Otherwise, Cowden is swinging a pendulum, sensing energies, and receiving communications from entities just like any common or garden psychic. ‘I was becoming more interested in just how my intentions and my own spirit related to the success of my recordings’ (p. 119), he writes.

But just as sceptical materialists harbour untested assumptions, mediums and psychics can also do the same. Medium Andy Matthews, listening to Cowden’s recordings on the television show, comments that they are a clear demonstration of ‘intelligent contact’. Yet we have to question this, I think, because Cowden’s remarkable work foregrounds the important question of what a record of the paranormal actually is.

Not all ‘records’ are analogues or pictures of what they represent – such as a hologram, for instance. A web page is another example (one that I understand better), which is also not an image so much as a series of instructions for constructing itself on a specific device. (Select ‘View Source’ from your browser’s menu to see exactly what I mean. A web page isn’t an image; it’s code.)

Mark L. Cowden

Mark Cowden demonstrates his recording set-up. (YouTube clip. Click image to view.)

What if a ghost or spirit were something similar? I think there might be good reason for supposing that it is. Cowden, however, contrasts the intelligent communications he captured with another type of recording, which he aligns with the famous ‘Stone Tape’ theory of hauntings: ‘The voices didn’t seem to be interacting,’ he remarks of these. ‘I had tapped in on conversations conducted hundreds of years previously’ (p. 142). Clearly, Stone Tape phenomena would be images of past events. But what if the ‘intelligence’ manifested in the other type of recordings is not originating from some supposed mind behind the voice, but from the execution of a set of ‘instructions’? If a ghost were a bundle of meanings and feelings triggered to run on contact with a human consciousness, this might create an impression of intelligence, but it would be artificial.

This has certainly been my experience, when working with spirits of the dead and other discarnate entities. In spirits of the dead we encounter a very limited constellation of emotions and motivations. A living person can be different things to different people at different times, whereas the dead are trapped within a specific story. This is not a person; neither, in my view, can it really be considered an ‘intelligence’, it is only the remains of one. An animal has a far greater range of responses and a more expansive personality that what we ascribe to a ghost. That’s probably why it seems an act of kindness to help a ghost ‘move on’. Becoming nothing restores a ghost to a nature that is paradoxically more human than the obsessive and static collection of attributes we ordinarily suppose a ghost to be.

The same is true of other kinds of spirits and of deities. We turn to them for the attributes they offer. We couldn’t work with Ganesha, for instance, if he had the ability to one day become more like Kali – as a human might do, either willingly or unwillingly. Working with gods and spirits produces change, but our consciousness is what executes those changes, not the gods and spirits themselves. Our consciousness can turn itself to anything because it isn’t, in itself, anything. Ganesha’s clearance of obstacles, Kali’s cleansing destruction, and uncle Albert’s inability to realise he died in 1941 are all nowhere without a human consciousness that turns itself towards them and manifests them.

And yet Cowden’s achievement was to record voices. So surely something is actually out there, operating of its own accord? Watching the television programme, it’s not that Cowden recorded the specific words that Goodfellow claimed to hear (does she even claim to hear ‘words’?) but he certainly obtained responses that followed the gist of the conversation Goodfellow claimed to have. Just as every different type of web browser interprets the instructions for building a web page broadly the same, yet with slight differences, so it seems that Cowden rendered not an exact image of what Goodfellow clairvoyantly received, but something that conveys its general sense.

The utterances captured didn’t sound to me what we might expect from a speaker of eighteenth century English – the period in which had lived the historical person identified by the mediums as the ghost. Likewise, in Cowden’s book, when he divines the name ‘Darren’ for the spirit of a mill worker (p. 37), you have to wonder how common that name would have been back in the day. (Cowden doesn’t consider this and I’m no expert, but my guess is ‘possibly not very’.) And when a female spirit is recorded saying, ‘It’s okay’ (p. 156), then that word dates her to possibly no earlier than 1790, but – again – no comment is made on this.

The 'Philip' Experiment

The 'Philip' Experiment. A still from a dramatised reconstruction. (YouTube clip. Click image to view.)

If we assume that ghosts are actual people from history on another plane of existence, then such assumptions must stand or fall on details such as these. However, if we accept that there’s no ghost without an interceding, interpreting human consciousness, then it doesn’t much matter. The ‘Philip’ experiment at Toronto University in 1972 demonstrated how human belief alone can produce a ghost with tangible physical effects, even though the historical back-story intentionally ascribed to it has no basis in historical fact. Cowden’s recordings can stand, not as the actual voice of a ghost, but as the manifestation of a ghost’s voice mediated by human consciousness.

Since my night alone in the company of one, I’m less inclined to view ghosts as evidence for survival of the personality post-mortem, but I’m more inclined to the view that working with spirits facilitates our own spiritual development. Beyond the grave, I think that non-existence awaits. Anything that endures on this side is karmic traces, the remnants of a personality. On the basis of my experience so far, I don’t believe there’s another world, but instead the lack of one, which – to the extent we can approach this through spiritual practices whilst still alive – suggests something far more amazing.

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The Reference Problem in Spirit Communication and Magick

I took part in a working that revealed who I was in a former life. The name given was a not uncommon German name. But the spirit also supplied the era and an image of a man wearing a peculiar hat. When I googled the details they all checked out: the name, the era, and even a photo of a person with the same name (possibly the same person) wearing a similar hat.

When I told this anecdote to a friend he raised a reasonable objection: that I couldn’t know the individual I’d identified was the person intended. Surely, there could be others with the same name who lived in the same era and wore similar hats. In this case, this was not ‘information’ but only coincidence.

The criticism raises a wider problem in magick: how, when we specify persons or places in our intent, does magick ‘find’ its specific target? Likewise, when an oracle provides a message that has a general application, what justifies us in assuming a particular meaning?

Let’s stay with our original example: I receive information about my name in a previous incarnation. How do I know to which individual this name refers? The name is a sign that potentially could point to a number of people. If there were real information here, then the spirit supplying it would have given signs that narrowed the range of referents to a single person. Isn’t it reasonable to demand this?

Perhaps it would be, if we ourselves obeyed the same rule, but we don’t. If I think to myself ‘I will see Stephanie at the weekend’, how do I know that the Stephanie named in my thought is the same as the one I intend to meet? How do I know that any object that arises in my thoughts as a name that can have more than one referent is the particular one I’m referring to?

It seems a nonsensical question, because I just know, the reason being that ‘Stephanie’ is not functioning exclusively as a sign, but as the object of my intention. ‘Stephanie’ is only part of what will happen at the weekend, because what I’m actually referring to is something I’m going to do. I’m not simply ‘naming’, I’m specifying something that is going to happen.

In language, when considered as a whole, names can be used to refer to an individual, but in a personal act of speech or thought – whether spoken or mental – names can be used differently, in precisely the way we’ve just seen, in order to define an object of intention. In this case the function of the name ‘Stephanie’ is not so much to define an individual, but to describe an intention I am seeking to fulfil.

When we open ourselves to communication with a spirit, the only means it has to communicate with us is our own thoughts, feelings and acts. The medium of magick is always subjective personal experience. Therefore signs received, in magick, are often in the context of individual acts of speech rather than in consensual language. The two never wholly match up, but they can overlap. The greater the extent to which a subjectively meaningful experience can be translated into consensual language, the more dramatic and impressive the result. For example, if I receive a vision of a ravenous many-headed monster, I get a powerful sense of what that means; the people I tell it to, less so. But if the monster has the logo of a particular multinational corporation tattooed on its head, then the vision includes an aspect of consensual language, and everyone gets a sense of what it means.

At the moment the spirit told me who I was in a past life, what I received was only a sense of ‘that one‘ or ‘it is him‘. The intention of the spirit has no specific referent. It is like sensing the intention of another person; we feel I will meet Stephanie, but because we do not share the other’s experience we do not know to whom or what ‘Stephanie’ refers. We have a vague sense of what the spirit intends, and we must try to arrive at specifics as best we can by encouraging the intention to clothe itself in commonly understood signs.

Attention to emotional tone is the primary means of achieving this. An angry intention, for instance, provokes different images and associations in the mind from a sorrowful one. Likewise, a feminine temperament feels different from the masculine, and inclines the mind to different images and words. These will suggest themselves when we take our awareness deeply into the intention, but they are not the form in which the communication is expressed. We can arrive at signs, but the original communication is an intention.

Although some people will inevitably write-off all messages received in this way as nonsense, it should be remembered that this is precisely the way we often receive communications from ourselves. We often sense or intuit something from within us that we have to make a conscious effort to feel and enter into, before it can be resolved into language. Dismiss this process as invalid, and we dismiss the possibility of accurate information concerning our own inner life.

On the other hand, we can also have an intention and know it directly without any need of language. In spirit communication, however, that intention is not our own, so our means of coming to know it is by necessity more indirect. It is much harder to clothe the intention in language because it does not reside in our own thoughts or experiences.

The situation is as if we were caring for someone who was cut off from the means of expressing their intentions. We know that the person has desires and wishes, and we can sense in a general way whether that person inclines to sadness, anger or generosity, but we have only our own mind with which to discern what specifically they want to express by their intention. If we assumed there were no intention or they didn’t know what they wanted, this would be to obscure or override the source of the communication, and what would come through instead would simply be our own thoughts.

This is not to claim that if we respect the spirit’s intention we will always arrive at ‘truth’. I see no reason that a spirit couldn’t intend to lie or mislead, in which case its message would be untrue even though it were accurately received. What I would suggest is that if a message lacks specific referents to pin it down to particular objects, this needn’t invalidate it, because its source lies in intention, which operates outside the level of consensual signs.