#i think the idea of places being ‘‘haunted’’ is often just assumed to mean ghosts/spirits/etc but like. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

startwithbrooklyn · 3 years ago

Text

THE GREAT ND REWATCH OF 2021 / OCTOBER 5, 2019 // return of josh

oooookay folks! that's a wrap! below are my comments about tonight's ep + additional expansions on previously stated opinions. i'm not combining s2 ep 1 with this bc s2 is dead to me! so is s3! i only did this to gather up all these loose thoughts i had when this show with its one lonely season became such a comfort to me that i developed a second consciousness about it. but with these posts i am done! the evil is defeated! i will carry on through the 3rd and hopefully final season of nancy drew with less emotion and better spirits. thank god.

-"talk to owen" nancy firstly thinks of talking to owen only to see what happens w the agleaca; saying goodbye comes as sorta an afterthought mirroring tiffany's possession of george. yet nancy was unable to say goodbe to owen just like w kate. knowing this reveal about kate, i wonder if this was foreshadowing that something big will be revealed about him later? unlikely but still

-nancy + the reality of broken things: 'totems' like broken sand glass sculpture (good place) to show you it's not a dream; "owen broke that" ghost trap to ground him to reality, like how she reached for her locket in the good place, lucy's charm, ace's bear ('totems' idea borrowed from inception)

-george has never been an affectionate person, even with other women- so why does pda with nick suddenly become so important?

-lots of comments about ryan + women but what about carson/kate and karen? again with the hypocritical (interestingly, there is an aspect of violence to women connected with ryan (even though that violence is not his fault); but its not like kate or karen fared well either)

-ryan feels useless- relationships with women as stated by nancy- he seeks to redeem himself by showing up where nancy goes to prove he is good to have around/necessary/needed - but now that he is attempting to act as a parent he has to break through nancy's defenses all over again- firstly she didnt really consider him any kind of threat bc he comes off as incompetent- ie bad business deals- i think i mentioned last ep, their hauntings equalize them as they both attempt to gain peace by searching for answers but now ryan has changed the terms of engagement so he's back to square one, with carson. (which is how we find them s2 cowering in ryans car stalking nancy together)

-ryan's relationship to nancy exposes an interesting layer here. so far she doesnt know about nick/george but they still hold the cards (ie george gets one over on nick's ex/"the new girl") with the revelation of ryan being nancys father, nancy gains an interesting trump card in navigating the social fallout of being nick's ex. like george would take the new spot but then nancy comes out with george's ex in a much higher category. this plays out later on in the ep when george confronts ryan. george wants to talk about "them" but ryan shows up completely focused on nancy, thus illustrating the trump

-"i thought it was whitney with another insipid question" to me this sounds like whitney took bess's advice earlier about "asking aunt diana what she wants" (only to learn it actually annoyed the hell out of diana lmaoo)

-"then you need to fight for it" this hearkens nancy earlier by asking "arent you in by virtue of dna?" the test was positive; she is a marvin just like nancy is a hudson. thats not a fact that they can change. however, diana really acts like it can be changed- and in s2 we see it does change. its interesting for bess to be told to fight to be in a family she's already in and also foiled by nancy trying to fight her way out of her own family. would like to see bess stand up to diana and say something. i mean, she exists. as much as she may want to erase bess from the family, diana cannot erase her existence

-hannah's rolled up sleeves 💙

-"previous keepers records" -from s2- were those not her parents??

-mistaken murderers- everyone incorrectly assumes lucy was murdered just as they assume the agleaca killed owen

-even if owen weren't the price, how can they pay the toll without one of the people who called? i mean if it was anything other than owen and he still died they still wouldve been fucked

-"you don't need to check, i'm not even driving!" okay and giving up the goss. cassidy is me. lmfaoooo

-wonder if this locked marvin industries box will ever come back

-UNPOPULAR OPINION: george's confrontation with ryan comes waytoo late to do anything. i think i brought this up in an earlier post. its literally just her screaming at him now. like he is clocked out moved on. you know a good time for this scene? in the claw when he comes by to "check on her". hes vulnerable, fresh from rehab. and she has a chit over him for punching bookcases/the fuckin country club deal. therewould have been a perfect time to confront ryan on what happened- "what you did to me" okay sis. you admitted ep 1 you werent in hs anymore. youre of age now. admit you fucked up. take the L to force him to swallow the bigger L. and imagine how much more powerful the scene would have been- in george's domain, literally her own office, something ryan doesnt even have because HE DOESNT DO SHIT. ryan is SO EASY to trap but nobody notices. instead they have george try to get some kind of apology out of him when hes already done with that, and only for the sake of her establishing a new relaionship to boot. imagine how much more empowered she would feel if she just got that closure for herself- because she needed it, not so she could trot straight back to nick being all proud of calling a grown man to some random estate only to scream at him in a parking lot and have accomplished nothing. 🤦🏼‍♀️

-i get patrice thinking nancy is lucy but yeahhhhh this isnt how dementia works 😬

-i almost cant with nance and josh. how do you save your would-be murderer? (+ lucy's best friend and brother are in jail, her mom is lost to her mentally; all she has left is nancy and ryan)

-tbh i had no idea how to spell agleaca until bess said "theres no i in agleaca!" i thought it was igleaka like 😂

-damn how george just stares at nicks hand and then gets out herself is just so sad (like she immediately rectifies it but still...)

-"curiosity" part II; nancy who comes back to the sea after her mother died in it- agleaca drawn to lucy's trauma/to agleaca, lucy died fir "love"- would nancy be willing to risk the same? // this is also one of nancy's "mirroring mom" moments: winning sea queen, going to the velvet masque, getting caught by celia, having a "chat" with everett, and "falling" off the bluffs

-the collector 🎵👌🏻

-i wonder if there's any significance to the locations/means of their deaths; nancy's is pretty straight forward in terms of where and how, but why george and nick drowning, in the truck specifically? drowning in love? idk. ace's at the claw i get, but he gets himself caught? in what precisely? what does the fish hook mean? and bess's makes the least sense- burning alive? in the marvin estate? maybe the agleaca picked the most painful death for the marvin blood relation? idk. up for debate lmk ya thoughts

and lastly:

-i remember seeing this ending for the first time and i had just been traumatized by avengers endgame and since black widow is also a redhead seeing that shit at the bottom of the cliff it was like 😰😰😰 TOO SOON

-random thoughts-

these are just things i noticed, feel free to grapple with them or take note of them for extrapolation in s3 (lord knows i wont be) they probably belonged in recaps for previous eps but i either didnt find them in my notebook or couldnt fit them in

•nancy and truth/the perception of truth: using facts to suit theories instead of creating theories to suit facts- nancy often plays with the perception of truth and the details that fall between the steps; but she is also a victim to them by people who also know how to play the game (ie Carson) ex lying about the dress (tea cups and knives, trash got picked up, bail paid 1 hr ago) her inferences can be off from what others tell her ("people always lie") but she can also come to the wrong conclusions organically (carsons trial) more willing to believe the best in others/wanting them to be innocent (think nick ep 1) but later finding out the truths hurts more so she chooses to isolate herself and avoid involving others to be spared pain

•maybe i'm dumb, but who is "mr marvin" exactly? owen? the bald guy from the funeral? this comes from the guy who takes sailboats out like ep 4ish and says "ive worked for the marvins 20 years" she compliments the ship, he says "mr marvin and i just took her out this morning" so?? who is that? plus last ep just saying cassidy and isaac are her "late husbands children" dows thet mean sebastian? like did diana marry in? i feel like it would be odd for her to so embrace the "marvin way" if she wasnt a true born marvin

•ik college becomes a more s2 topic but none of the crew have ever been to college 🤔

•nick + the relationships with people whose reputations are tarnished: tiffany with investigating the hudsons/marvins, josh with murder/attempted murder, kate and 'stealing'/lying about nancy (esp compared to her almost preternatural kindness i mentioned before), george and her mom/family's reputations --> this kind of segues into nick + the concept of believing people you love could be capable of horrific things- accidental or on purpose (see- having to tell his family what happened)

•at the beginning, nancy kind of seems to be the "i'm sorry you're upset" kind of apologist and knows it. she also doesnt usually apologize earnestly bc shes never really sorry (she always has to get what she needs first ie coins mess) and she doesnt want to lie; to me it seems she doesnt like to bother with other people bc they require certain cues/niceties that are often lies- they ask "how are you" without meaning it, they dont really want an honest response except "fine", they dont like it when you call them out on fakeness, etc/ they require apologies for their bruised feelings even if youre right (and nancy can be pretty rude/nasty if provoked- a harshness unsoftened by sympathy)

•cont'd from the good place ep- since kate apparently means nothing to nancy anymore according to last ep ("stop calling her my mother") is her policy of "always seek the truth" now null and void? this mantra is now tainted bc the person who gave it to her broke it so much. can nancy disengage w it now? does she fall from grace to be complicit in "mysteries" of her own like everyone else? does she lose some of her "god-like" holier than thou act bc she is now literally born and raised in the "darkness" of sins/ugly truths like everyone else's? (ie truth is ugly but not to nancy, until now)

•did lucy disappear because her "murder" was finally solved? or simply because her trauma was addressed- she never meant to tell anyone about her suicide plans, the twisted trauma of which was too great to contain/unable to move on due to "sin" - or unable to move on because secret of nancy's parentage still remained? "lucy never wanted me to figure out how she died" she only wanted nancy to figure out her parentage without solving the mystery, yet did lucy see/witness nancy's revelation at the claw, or with carson, or even ryan? waiting for karen/josh to know? or just vanished?

•concept of imperfect mom figures- lucy, kate, celia, victoria, even karen- who all struggle with failings

•since karen dispelled one of lucy's attempts at nancy's haunting at the garden party, is that proof she isn't haunting karen?

•the crew + needing adult help: george's possession and victoria, club busted and owen, car accident and mcginnis, thom and cipher, larkspur lane and sal, bones and john, agleaca and hannah

•everett is always sitting- at his home office, at dinner, at yacht club (wonder if that was his actor + had to do with his recasting?)

-dad talk-

��both her dads think negatively on her "girl detective" thing but ryan sees use in it as a means to get answers, carson would never 'use' her in that way

•nancy + carson : suffering

"what about what i wanted?" + carson being imprisoned for weeks but she immediately rejects him (the DAY he gets his freedom no less) with no regard to his suffering (caused by herdiary!!) in regards to her own from this new knowledge (she does suffer a lot- "almost dying is my new normal" but still)/ the "thankless job" of parenting

•nancy + adults - connected to cop thing a few posts earlier : nancy is v precocious and smart for her age- she is "old enough" but also has trouble with the "adults" in her life- fathers, moms, karen, and cops letting her down but depends heavily on "adults" she cantrust- hannah gruen, john sander, lisbeth- highlighting her youth and occasional naiveté; nancy is unafraid to hold adults accountable for their actions (ie karen) but also loses them as allies along the way. both hannah and john are very nonthreatening and also experts in their fields, while her fathers and karen are revealed to be "just another brick in the wall" average, capable of mistakes, and not the people she expects them to be, while characters like john and hannah can only benefit nancy because either they do not mean as much to her or have no reason/nothing to gain by lying; they are purposefully shown to be small, demure, gentle, and nonthreatening as foils/opposed to karen, ryan, and josh whom she previously trusted; carson (+kate) is nonviolent as well but has the biggest betrayal which is perceived as an act of violence to her very personhood/shattering who she thought she was so she cannot be that anymore (admits truths to john "everytime i dig i hurt everyone" and hannah-agleaca) : unclear if redemption is possible for anyone :

•nancy bonds with carson over loss and then ryan over haunting. but actually, nancy rejects carson over loss bc she wanted to say goodbye and wasnt allowed to- so carson was with kate but nancy was not. nancy and ryan are more equals about haunting bc they both start around the same time and conclude together as well [nancy and ryan bond over thinking their parents conspired to kill lucy- think sitting on the floor at velvet masque] nancy is appreciated by ryan for her ability to get answers- he has no qualms about going through her/outside of police bc he wants results/instant gratification and thinks nancy is more so the expert in her field/respects her even through her age- once again acknowledging she is braver than he is (think lucy + claw parking lot) and her portent in the car freaks him out bc shes usually always in control, esp with him

•bc nancy was told "you can't be afraid of the truth" until she was / ironic bc shes braver than him except when the truth is they are related then she's scared to tell him while he actually starts to take some initiative

•nancy picked "the wrong person" to help her through her grief in her dad's eyes like her mom's best friend was somehow a better choice? carson truly "parents" nancy even during grief and haunting (which she rejects) whereas nancy and ryan are really equals in all their situations which is actually better for her and easier for her to maintain- nancy's expectations are low so anything that ryan gives is a bonus. nancy's expectations of carson were shattered by his lies so now she has nothing to connect with him about- they could barely even connect when sharing the same grief- carson actually very hypocritical hence nancy's upset at karen revelation yet carson doesn't agree bc hes the "adult" and shes the "child" not realizing she hadnt been one for a long time (hidden staircase perhaps?) whereas ryan better treats her with lack of controlling parental nature bc he is impressed with her competence before he receives that knowledge; "lucy was smarter than me too" acknowledging her intellect negates his ability to "parent" ie control her to leave him solely with caring about her wellbeing in her situations + aftermath - i honestly dont think carson would ever admit that shes smarter than him* bc he thinks shes not "all grown up" yet ("youve kept me on the bench for years"); ryan is more willing to meet her where she's at which is so important for all her good relationships - ace, owen, etc

*carson asks for nancy to figure out "who to trust" in ep 12, finally admitting that she is useful/ie acknowledging that her skills/abilities do help, are necessary, and can in fact save lives --> this is then s2 follow up by working for him (but it takes him that long)

•ryan/nancy/carson venn diagram - using sex to escape trauma

•if not carson vs ryan then what about celia and everett vs patrice (and josh)? at this point in the narrative, do you think ryan's parents would take his side should the knowledge become public (without their involvement), or deny nancy?

•"we were a family" + the disruption of family dinner- kate was really the one holding that family together and her death makes it unsustainable

okay!! that's all folks! i have exhausted my plethora of nancy drew thoughts + knowledge. you will never have to hear from me again!! TYSSM 😘

#brooklyn's ND primer #nancy drew cw #the Great Rewatch of 2021 #you best start believing in ghost stories miss drew - you're in one

1 note · View note

tipsycad147 · 3 years ago

Text

Graveyard magick: A Witch's guide

by Michelle Gruben

Just about every Witch loves to poke around in old cemeteries and graveyards. And yet, actually doing magick in graveyards is a guarded subject, even among people who practice their craft without shame.

Is it discomfort with death? Fear of not being taken seriously? The overwhelming influence of the white-light crowd? Who knows. Graveyards are often associated with curses and hexes, with secrecy, with people who take angsty selfies and write vampire poems—but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Here’s a handy Witch’s guide to finding, exploring and working within graveyards—no black nail polish required.

Why Graveyards?

Graveyards are amazing places for magickal work for several reasons:

Cemeteries are a shared spiritual space that doesn’t belong to any one religion or group. After all, death is the thing that we all have in common. No matter what words are said over the casket, we all return to Gaia in the end. For Witches and Pagans, graveyards can function as a neutral religious space, or even a temple when none is available.

Burial places are also one of the few types of land that has been mostly immune to commercial re-development. Even our materialistic society draws the line at digging up great-grandma to build more mid-rise condos. In mature cities, cemeteries are often among the last public green spaces available. If you want to be close to nature (but not run over by joggers and bikers) you could do worse than to cozy up to some tombstones.

Finally, there are the metaphysical traits. Graveyards are set apart from the hustle and bustle of everyday life—they remain quiet and sad while the world grows up around them. There is a stillness and a timelessness in graveyards. They often hold strong emotional energy, which can be attractive to visiting entities. They are a symbolic boundary between the world of the living and the Underworld.

Finding Old Cemeteries

You can often find quaint little cemeteries just by driving around, especially in older communities. Old churches and funeral homes usually have burial plots attached. Some large city cemeteries are historic landmarks in their own right, with splendid monuments to the city’s heroes, villains, and well-off boring chaps.

In witchy cities like New Orleans and Salem, graveyards can be a huge tourist draw. A tour company or visitor’s bureau can give you a list of cemeteries to visit. As ghost hunting and witchcraft have become more mainstream, many cemeteries offer special occult-themed tours. (Take the tour to scope out points of interest, then come back later without the crowds.) When traveling in rural areas, watch the side of the road for cemetery markers—the graveyard itself will usually be off the main road and up a hill. (To keep dead bodies out of the drinking water. Hooray!)

Another cemetery scouting tip: Photographers love graveyards almost as much as Witches do. Follow your local photography club, as they will do a lot of the legwork of sniffing out old and picturesque graves.

For cemetery visits that are off the beaten path, check in with the local historical society or civic clubs. Retirees and veterans often do the work of maintaining gravesites year-round. Historical groups can clue you in to little-known or neglected burial sites. Slave cemeteries, Jewish cemeteries, and pioneer cemeteries all have incredible stories to tell, and energies that are very different from what you will find at large memorial parks.

Some traditional graveyard spells call for a certain type of gravesite. (A murdered person for a revenge spell, rich man for money spells, child’s grave to conceive a baby, etc.) This is another case where it’s helpful to have history buffs for friends.

Like all other cultural artifacts, burial sites change over time. Headstones from the colonial period and earlier often gave a lot of biographical details, but later ones tend to have simple inscriptions. The stories of the deceased are in danger of being lost to time. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. The graves of regular people can sometimes become local legends, pilgrimage sites for wish-making and little rituals.

As colorful as old cemeteries are, don’t neglect modern ones for you magickal needs. (In fact, some Witches prefer fresh gravesites for gathering graveyard dirt and certain other tasks.) If your home is near a cemetery (old or new) I highly recommend spending some time there. The practice will help connect you with the history of the land and people who helped build your local community. Your magick will be better for the experience.

Know the Rules

There are mundane rules and occult rules for working in cemeteries. First, the mundane rules. These will usually be posted at the entrance, especially in newer and commercially maintained burial grounds.

The mundane rules should also be obvious to anyone with a trace of manners and common sense. Don’t litter (duh), don’t plant or bury anything, don’t vandalize graves, don’t disturb mourners or memorial services. Open flames and glass may also be prohibited for safety reasons. Very old and historic cemeteries sometimes restrict grave rubbings in the interest of conservation. But normally it’s not against the rules to take paper rubbing of an interesting stone or marker.

Observing visiting hours is a very important consideration for graveyard Witches. These are not always posted. In many places, cemetery hours are covered by state laws or local ordinances. The laws are on the books and you’re just supposed to know to leave at sundown.

I know, I know—but we’re Witches! We do our best work at night. Unfortunately, it is usually illegal (and bad luck, some say) to be hanging around in a cemetery after dark. Some Witches and ghost hunters rely on their stealth powers to get around this rule…but I don’t recommend it.

There’s still a lot of ignorance about the Craft. Caretakers may not be able to tell the difference between the itinerant Witch and the ordinary vandal (or may not care). Cemetery owners and neighbors will call the police if they catch you there at night. Nothing kills a magickal buzz like a criminal trespassing charge, I promise.

At night, you also run a greater risk of encountering living people who are up to no good: Drug deals, furtive sex, and goth kids drinking wine coolers. They might even try to read you some vampire poetry. Not cool.

The mundane rules are easy enough, but what about the magickal ones? Ah, that’s where it gets complicated. As human beings, we don’t know very much about death—and we’ve had thousands and thousands of years to make crap up. There are about a billion superstitions involving graveyard visits. Here’s a sampling:

Don’t point at graves or photograph them. (This rule probably gets broken the most.)

Say “sorry” when stepping over a gravesite. (Observed 100% of the time in Irish cemeteries, I’ve noticed.)

It is bad luck to wear anything new to a cemetery, especially shoes.

Don’t whistle in a graveyard, or you tempt Death.

Leaving coins on a grave is a token of respect.

Don’t yawn near a grave, or ghosts could get inside your body.

Smelling roses when there are none around is a sign that a benevolent spirit is nearby.

The person who takes something from a graveyard will return more than he took.

As silly as some of these adages sound, there is a grain of occult wisdom in most of them. However, don’t assume that they apply in all cases. Every cemetery is different. Different Earth energy, different spirits, and different customs mean different rules for the magick worker.

Well…that’s not very helpful. How do you learn the rules? As much as I would like to be able to generalize about cemetery work, there are few absolutes.

The only constant rule is respect. Respect for the dead is paramount while working in graveyards. If you behave like an ass with your actions or your intentions, you might or might not suffer some unpleasant consequences. Most likely, you will just find that the gates of magick are closed to you there while you are there.

Listen Harder

I can share one helpful tip for embarking on a cemetery working: Every graveyard has a guardian. In my experience, this has been true without exception. The guardian is a presiding spirit who watches over the boundaries and entrance of the site. The guardian is like the bouncer at a nightclub, basically. You won’t get very far without checking in with Him/Her/It, so follow the dress code and try not to get 86’d.

Tradition has it that the guardian is the spirit of the first person buried in the cemetery, who is bound to stay behind and watch over it. In the past, communities would sometimes try to cheat the curse by burying an animal or a vagrant in the first plot.

I don’t think this idea of guardianship is correct. However, I can’t definitively say who or what guardians are. They may be senior human spirits, Gods or emissaries of Death, psychopomp Fae, genii loci, random thoughtforms assembled from the social norms of visitors, all of the above or something else. (Insert your magickal worldview here, basically.) But guardians are real (enough) and powerful.

Cemetery guardians have a lot of jobs. They are largely responsible for setting the energetic tone of the site. They help control what entities can enter the ground, or stick around. They work with the caretakers and visitors to maintain the place physically, also. Sometimes cemetery guardians will set up a collaboration with a local sorcerer or priest/ess who works there often. If a graveyard you visit has been “claimed” in this way, you’d be wise to tread lightly and keep your magick compatible with theirs.

Open-feeling, peaceful cemeteries have guardians that welcome visitors. Haunted, forlorn, and forbidding burial places have guardians that don’t care for human company. The guardian(s) will ensure that you know which is which. They will also give you hints and nudges about the types of magick their domain supports. They may send you somewhere else if it’s not a good match. Remember that you are in their space. Respect it.

Developing a relationship with the guardian(s) is one of the best things you can do for your graveyard magick. It’s much better than just tromping through the gates with your candles and sticks and bones and expecting all the energies to fall into place for you.

So introduce yourself! The first time you visit a graveyard, pause at the entrance and share your energy and intentions with the guardian(s). Take in some of the energy of the place in exchange. See if you like the vibes—collaboration is a two-way street, after all. It’s not a bad idea to ask permission to enter or bring an offering to show you’re not a threat.

Once inside, open your super-special magickal antennae senses and see if there’s anything they’d like done around the place. Picking up trash is almost always a welcome contribution. Perhaps there’s a neglected area that needs visiting. Sometimes there’s a spirit with something to say, or a bit of energetic cleanup to be done somewhere. It only takes a few minutes, and then you can get on with your Voodoo, Hoodoo, or whatever it is you do.

What kinds of magick can be worked in graveyards? Just about all of them. Witches go to cemeteries to cast spells for love, money, healing, and success, as well as the darker workings like binding and revenge spells. Cemeteries are a good place to charge amulets, tools, and talismans. Since they are left alone most of the time, they are energetically “cleaner” than areas frequented by lots of people.

Plenty of graveyard magick involves the spirits of the deceased. Practitioners of many forms of magick believe that spirits of the dead can empower spellwork by the living. Prayers and offerings are made to spirits to earn their sympathy and support.

Graveyards are kind of temple for Pagans who connect with gods of Death or the Underworld (such as Hades, Morrighan, and Hecate). Witches and Pagans go there to contemplate mortality, to connect with ancestors, or just be in the company of the dead.

Burial places are a traditional spot to practice mediumship and spirit communication, and for a good reason: Cemeteries are where spirits go to be heard because they’re where the living go to listen.

As I mentioned before, a major part of effective graveyard magick is listening. If you’re not sure what to do, listen harder. Your instincts will guide you toward the right time and place to perform your working.

When in cemeteries, pay attention to particular areas that pull you in. You may see movement or light. Something may draw you to a certain gravesite—a visiting bird or pretty flower, a significant name or date. Cemeteries are an ideal place to receive oracles from the other worlds. Sit down and listen when invited to. The speaker is not necessarily the occupant of the grave. Keep an open mind.

On offerings: Flowers, liquor, coins, tobacco, and food are traditional offerings to a spirit who has helped you. Some offerings will be more appropriate than others. You wouldn’t want to offer whiskey to a non-drinker, for instance. On the other hand, anything offered in love and trust is unlikely to offend. Consider the ecology of the place—take trash home with you. Offer energy and prayers if you’re not sure what’s okay.

Some Witches trek into cemeteries for ritual ingredients: graveyard dirt, stones, tree branches. Specific magickal rules govern the removal of these items (though they vary by tradition). In short, don’t take anything that isn’t freely given, or fairly bought and paid for.

When choosing a gravesite for a ritual activity, check in with any guardians or spirits in the area. Necromancy—magick involving the dead—has come a long way in the last 500 years. Once upon a time, a magician would wave a magick wand and command earthbound spirits to do his bidding. But there has been a major paradigm shift in Western magick. These days, most Witches think of discarnate beings as collaborators, sentient folks with independent wills that should be respected. You will occasionally meet a Witch who claims to bind or boss around spirits as part of their magick, but this is quite rare.

Some people might argue that the right to give consent ends with death…but that’s a rabbit hole for another day. If you get a strong feeling that your intrusion is not welcome, move on to another spot. You’ll get better results from willing spirits, anyway.

Be Safe

Let me get this out there first: Graveyards are not unsafe places for magick. They’re not inherently dark or evil or unlucky to work in. That's superstition. What they are is portal places. As such, they carry certain magickal power and certain risks. It is possible to encounter negative or chaotic energies that you don’t want to bring home with you. At times, even the psychic impressions from ordinary human emotions can be overwhelming.

If you have a protective amulet or protection ritual, now is a great time to dust it off. Ground and center yourself before beginning your working. Ask your guides/angels/higher self to surround you with protection. Scan your body for attachments when you leave.

Scrying, channeling, and trance work should only be practiced in cemeteries if you’re confident in your ability to screen out unwanted garbage. This is yet another reason why building a relationship with the site’s spirit guardians is a good idea. They know the psychic geography of the place and can spot trouble before you can. They can be your allies and will act as gatekeepers if they support your work.

Remember that spirits don’t know everything just because they’re body-less. Don’t obey orders from a spirit that you wouldn’t obey from a person, and take anything they tell you with a grain of salt.

With just a few simple precautions and courtesies, graveyards can be a wonderful place to work your magick. Happy exploring!

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/graveyard-magick-a-witchs-guide

0 notes

daigeorge · 8 years ago

Text

New Paths in Irish Inheritance Poetry: Siobhán Campbell and Stephen Sexton

Back in March I had the pleasure of saying a few words at the launch of Siobhán Campbell’s new collection, Heat Signature. It was the idea of Seren’s poetry editor, Amy Wack, who matched us up on the grounds that Siobhán and I were kindred spirits, which I took to mean, roughly, that we were both poets trying to write about cultural inheritance in 2017, with a healthy degree of scepticism about how that type of writing so often turns out. Among other things, it offered a rare chance to talk about a Seren poet in the public round, without the anxieties about soft-pedalling a stablemate or biting the hand that feeds that would loom if I were commissioned to write a review. (For these reasons, I prefer not to write about Seren poets, which unfortunately means I increasingly don’t write about contemporary Welsh poetry at all. But that’s another debate, for another day.) Campbell’s a top-drawer poet, and one who should be more widely celebrated. With any luck Heat Signature – her second collection for Seren and fourth overall – should change that.

Above all, I admire how Campbell handles the weight of history in her poetry – the social history of a particular community, but also that swirling brew of anecdote and myth that makes up an individual’s or a family’s history. These are hardly new topics for post-Heaney poetry, but nor are they topics I can easily see my way around – the trick is to find the new and probing angle on them, and I think that Campbell does this very well. There’s a poem early on in Heat Signature that explicitly announces how her project emerges from Heaney’s classic brand of Irish inheritance poetry, but also how it resists that idiom like the work of Carson, Muldoon and McGuckian before her. The title of ‘Weeding’ recalls Heaney’s none-more-famous ‘Digging’, though in place of that great, over-anthologised call to verse Campbell gives us an altogether more modern, and less stable, celebration of ‘seeing things anew, filthy / with possibility’.

There seems to me to be an instructive switch between the durable and solid potato (or poetry) crop of ‘Digging’, and the essentially purifying, negative harvest of ‘Weeding’: it’s about getting rid of the calcified and complacent tropes that we too readily rely upon and build into monuments. Heat Signature is a collection for busting myths, though its method is always exploratory, ambivalent, imagistic, never tubthumping or didactic. In ‘Piebald’, horses turn into an objective correlative for an older, mythical nation, ‘where mis-remembrance is a dream to nourish, / where promise can out-run irony’, and ‘a quiver of legends misted into song’.

Campbell always urges the opposite of these values. She asks us to remember properly, but also to move beyond remembrance, to imagine alternatives and futures. The promise that we glimpse in her poetry goes hand in hand with the quickness of her irony. ‘Concentration’, which opens the second section of Heat Signature, spells out the dividend of this rigorous, attentive approach. It’s a poem that’s ostensibly about – not to put too fine a point on it – the speaker’s grandaunt squatting over a potty and peeing late at night. But what could be a hollow, mean-spirited poem, revelling self-indulgently in the ugliness and indignity of life, turns out to be anything but. The last stanza passionately articulates the moral purpose behind Campbell’s work:

When things attract our deep attention

they give back out the stare that we put in.

We know this is commitment of relation.

And though it seems innocent to say,

it is a form of love.

That’s what Heat Signature asks us to do, time and again: to pledge our ‘deep attention’, to make a ‘commitment of relation’ between the difficult and the beautiful in our lives, and to find there ‘a form of love’.

Round about the time that I was immersed in Campbell’s work, the results of the National Poetry Competition were announced. Granted, in all my time writing poetry I’ve never won so much as a raffle, but I hope it’s not just sour grapes that make me feel jaded about the prospect of reading competition-winning verse. It’s not even that I mind competitions per se, or look down on people for entering them (mazel tov); I’ve just got to the point where I don’t expect them to turf up anything that stops me in my tracks. Generally speaking, I assume poems triumph in competitions because they satisfy a consensus between the judges, which naturally leads to a bias against poems that are divisive, experimental or strange – you’ve heard the argument before. Anyway, I mention all of this just to hint at some of the obstacles standing in the way of Stephen Sexton, who had the gumption not only to win the NPC this year, but to do it with a poem so good that it made me consider giving up writing poetry altogether. It was tantalisingly close in intention to the type of poem that I might try to write, but executed in a way that felt beamed in from another planet.

‘The Curfew’ is a poem of inheritance about the speaker’s grandfather, a miner of ‘legendary’ kindness possessed of a surreal turn of phrase. His lovably Ringo-like aphorisms are delicious in themselves (‘If you can’t count your onions, what can you count’) but Sexton complicates and lifts them brilliantly. First, he undercuts anything that could get too loquacious or cute with a recurring caveat, apparently toneless but deeply equivocal: ‘He said a lot of things.’ I love the layers of irony in this sentence, which is at one level a cliché colluding in the norms of a more reticent community, one that would discredit the grandfather’s lovely, glinting verbal gems by reducing them to faceless ‘things’. Then there’s the hint of unreliability it introduces, ‘he says a lot of things’ being an innuendo one makes of a liar, a panderer or a teller of tall tales. But who’s being unreliable in the following lines?

The memorial fountain says nothing

of the weeks before the rescue failed

but mentions God which, as my grandfather

used to say, is just the name of the plateau

you view the consequences of your living from.

This subversive conception of God sounds like it could come from the speaker as much as his grandfather, perhaps more so – when the next sentence fudges it (‘Or something like that’) we’re not sure if it’s due to a failure of memory or a liberty of paraphrase. By this point in the poem we don’t even know the pivotal biographical fact that grandpa and his colleagues were caught up in a mining disaster; the memorial fountain is the first solid hint of tragedy, after the unstable, figurative exaggerations that foreshadow it:

… when no more than the thought of the pink crumple

of his infant daughter’s body came to mind

a glow would swell in the pit, the men

would mayhem bauxite by the light

his tenderness emitted.

An explosion is suggested, but so far it’s only one of ‘tenderness’. When the literal ‘mayhem’ finally arrives, it’s reported with a deadpan seriousness that it’s hard to place – or hard to take – amidst all the emollient blarney: ‘One by one eleven miners starved to death.’

The speaker can’t figure out the right way of paying tribute to his grandfather’s personality, or of honouring that tragedy down the pit. Those are the twin anxieties haunting the poem, and they place it in a vein of post-inheritance poetry we might date to Don Paterson’s first collection, Nil Nil. (I’ve alluded to this book, and what it represents, a good half dozen times in public down the years, at least. For good reason, I hope.) My first collection has a poem in it about a mining grandfather, ‘Seven Rounds With Bill’s Ghost’, another tribute to a man of tenderness and grit, this one an amateur boxer. I’ve written about that poem elsewhere, but ‘The Curfew’ made me see it in a new, less forgiving light. Paterson broke new ground by peeling away the piety of your average inheritance lyric to expose the feelings of distance, anger and alienation that fester beneath the surface of any class-conscious tribute to an ancestor. (Not by coincidence, the diction of that average inheritance mode ripples through ‘The Curfew’, as one of its many fluctuating voices: ‘my grandfather used to say’; ‘Among the other miners he was legendary’, ‘It would have pleased his handsome shoulders’, etc. There’s something so coercive about that past subjunctive mood – something that deserves to be parodied.)

For thirty-odd years, then, there’s been a fairly rigid dialectic in play between the earnest, affectionate, old-school inheritance lyric on one hand, and the streetwise, complicated post-inheritance poetry of Paterson et al on the other. That dialectic has led to some good poetry, a little great poetry, and plenty of not-so-great poetry, but I worry that it’s become a rigid structure in itself. The very rebels who would reinvigorate the project of writing about family history and class by exhibiting their anxieties about that project – well, they too are now writing in an established mode, carrying on an angry dance whose moves we know. (If it isn’t clear yet, I include myself entirely in this camp.) The great sadness of post-inheritance poetry, I think, has been its narrowing of the window for legitimate affection. If you say that your grandfather was legendary among his peers or had a wonderful tenderness, you sound complacent and naff, and maybe that’s because there is something inherently complacent and naff about believing those things (what was he, a saint?). But then what do we do with all that persistent, unfashionable affection we might still feel for our grandparents? Ignore it and write about something else altogether?

That would be one way out of the dialectic. But it seems to me that Sexton has found an alternative means to escape, and one that might be more appealing to those of us who, try as we might, can’t seem to escape this topic. By tapping into the anarchic spirit of the grandfather’s language, Sexton unleashes a menagerie of fantastic animals that somehow honour him while at the same time liberating the poem’s logic from the confines of linear, retrospective narrative. And because the poem licenses so many dissonant voices, it allows for an unlikely harmony to emerge between the voice of the speaker and the grandfather: ‘He grew wise and weary as an albatross / and left for that great kingdom of nevertheless.’

This is poetry that has its cake and eats it in the most exquisite way: a whip-smart and undeceived pastiche that finds a way to admit the genuine play and articulacy of that beloved voice. Small wonder, then, that in the last line the speaker can vow with a straight face, ‘I understand him’. If Sexton keeps this up, his first collection is going to be a thing of magic. In the meantime, I’m off to rethink everything again.

0 notes

tipsycad147 · 5 years ago

Text

Graveyard magick: A Witch's guide

Posted by Michelle Gruben on Feb 28, 2018

Here’s a handy Witch’s guide to finding, exploring and working within graveyards—no black nail polish required.

Why Graveyards?

Graveyards are amazing places for magickal work for several reasons:

Finding Old Cemeteries

In witchy cities like New Orleans and Salem, graveyards can be a huge tourist draw. A tour company or visitor’s bureau can give you a list of cemeteries to visit. As ghost hunting and witchcraft have become more mainstream, many cemeteries offer special occult-themed tours. (Take the tour to scope out points of interest, then come back later without the crowds.) When travelling in rural areas, watch the side of the road for cemetery markers—the graveyard itself will usually be off the main road and up a hill. (To keep dead bodies out of the drinking water. Hooray!)

Like all other cultural artefacts, burial sites change over time. Headstones from the colonial period and earlier often gave a lot of biographical details, but later ones tend to have simple inscriptions. The stories of the deceased are in danger of being lost to time. Sometimes, however, the opposite is true. The graves of regular people can sometimes become local legends, pilgrimage sites for wish-making and little rituals.

As colourful as old cemeteries are, don’t neglect modern ones for you magickal needs. (In fact, some Witches prefer fresh gravesites for gathering graveyard dirt and certain other tasks.) If your home is near a cemetery (old or new) I highly recommend spending some time there. The practice will help connect you with the history of the land and people who helped build your local community. Your magick will be better for the experience.

Know the Rules

The mundane rules should also be obvious to anyone with a trace of manners and common sense. Don’t litter (duh), don’t plant or bury anything, don’t vandalise graves, don’t disturb mourners or memorial services. Open flames and glass may also be prohibited for safety reasons. Very old and historic cemeteries sometimes restrict grave rubbings in the interest of conservation. But normally it’s not against the rules to take paper rubbing of an interesting stone or marker.

There’s still a lot of ignorance about the Craft. Caretakers may not be able to tell the difference between the itinerant Witch and the ordinary vandal (or may not care). Cemetery owners and neighbours will call the police if they catch you there at night. Nothing kills a magickal buzz like a criminal trespassing charge, I promise.

Don’t point at graves or photograph them. (This rule probably gets broken the most.)

Say “sorry” when stepping over a gravesite. (Observed 100% of the time in Irish cemeteries, I’ve noticed.)

It is bad luck to wear anything new to a cemetery, especially shoes.

Don’t whistle in a graveyard, or you tempt Death.

Leaving coins on a grave is a token of respect.

Don’t yawn near a grave, or ghosts could get inside your body.

Smelling roses when there are none around is a sign that a benevolent spirit is nearby.

The person who takes something from a graveyard will return more than he took.

Well…that’s not very helpful. How do you learn the rules? As much as I would like to be able to generalise about cemetery work, there are few absolutes.

Listen Harder

I don’t think this idea of guardianship is correct. However, I can’t definitively say who or what guardians are. They may be senior human spirits, Gods or emissaries of Death, psycho pomp Fae, genii loci, random thought forms assembled from the social norms of visitors, all of the above or something else. (Insert your magickal worldview here, basically.) But guardians are real (enough) and powerful.

Burial places are a traditional spot to practice medium-ship and spirit communication, and for a good reason: Cemeteries are where spirits go to be heard because they’re where the living go to listen.

Be Safe

If you have a protective amulet or protection ritual, now is a great time to dust it off. Ground and centre yourself before beginning your working. Ask your guides/angels/higher self to surround you with protection. Scan your body for attachments when you leave.

Scrying, channelling, and trance work should only be practised in cemeteries if you’re confident in your ability to screen out unwanted garbage. This is yet another reason why building a relationship with the site’s spirit guardians is a good idea. They know the psychic geography of the place and can spot trouble before you can. They can be your allies and will act as gatekeepers if they support your work.

With just a few simple precautions and courtesies, graveyards can be a wonderful place to work your magick. Happy exploring!

https://www.groveandgrotto.com/blogs/articles/graveyard-magick-a-witchs-guide

0 notes