Twilight Path Studies

Research

Exploring Cities of the Dead

Many years ago, I had the pleasure of reading Leilah Wendell's "Necromantic Ritual Book." This is a rare little tome, and it contains some intriguing exercises. Many of the rituals involve going to a cemetery, and some require the practitioner to enter a mausoleum. Although I was a little leery of the notion of breaking into a cemetery at night for obvious legal reasons, there was no denying the power of directly performing rituals in a cemetery, among the slumbering dead.

Most people are not comfortable with the lessons of letting go inherent in death-work, and a large majority of magickal workers still equate necromancy with the Black Arts (capital "B") because of the precedents set in the Middle Ages, the confusion in that day & age with the terms necromancy and nigromancy, and the polemic writing produced by Cornelius Agrippa and others on the subject.

Necromancy, when it involves calling up the spirits of the dead in order to find treasure, answer petty questions, or titillate some bored aristocrats, is in my mind definitely wrong.  The dead do not change status once they cross over.  They are still people.  They have rights and those rights should be respected.  So I would never even attempt those Medieval arts that seek to summon, bind and compel the dead.  They're an affront to the spirits.

But connecting with the dead in order to better understand the nature of transition -- that's another thing entirely.  Asking their guidance when it comes to understanding the little deaths (changes) we undergo regularly in our lives, this is empowering and transformative. Although this transformation comes from destruction, it is not at all evil.

And the cemetery *is* a good place to do this, not precisely because it's a haven for spirits, but because, within the imagination, it is a powerful symbol of death and the dead.  A cemetery is a place the living have set aside in their own world for the recognition of the dead, and in this respect it can serve as a kind of gate between this world and the next.  It is a threshold, and the nature of death is all about thresholds -- transition and change.

So the rites that involve trying to connect to these revelations through the medium of cemeteries and graves, these I can really relate to.  I did a great deal of my early shamanic work stretched out beneath a headstone, reaching six feet below me and feeling the *memory* of the person sleeping below.

And I think connecting with these energies, learning about change and transition, accepting the lessons of the impermanence of the body but harnessing the truth of the immortality of the soul -- these are essential for the aspiring magickal worker.  Especially if you seek in anyway to obtain a level of spiritual immortality, you must be able to confront death with eyes wide open, see it as no more than changing a set of clothes, and walk through that door with no fear that you might not come out on the Otherside, still who you are and whole.

--Michelle Belanger