“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.
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