SUBLUNAR SPACE - death

Katabasis 19

2026-10-10T11:40:00+02:00

Part three of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. Now, let's descend into the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

In the previous discussion, I already briefly touched on the COVID‑19 pandemic as a kind of catalyst for the systemic changes already set in motion in the years preceding it.

Here, I want to force our attention back to what many have worked hard to forget and put more emphasis on how COVID-19 manifested as a too visceral, world-changing threshold between what was and what came after. Half a decade has already passed and most of us have managed to piece together a new narrative, so we could get back to a routine and a normal life. This is a remarkable feature of us as humans that allows us to persevere and continue on, no matter what.

Yet when we think ourselves back to 2021 there is a lingering feeling of shared rupture in our sense of continuity and belonging, fuzzy and blurry. If we honestly compare life before and after, it becomes impossible to ignore the existential tremor that shook the foundations of how we live, work, and connect with one another.

Let's go back to the "plague years" and take a closer look at what actually occurred in that valley of darkness. Besides the fear and suffering, wasn't there also hope?

Black Swan

As far as I remember the months leading up to the disaster most of us followed our daily lives, fought our struggles, pursued our dreams, took for granted some narrative framework that defined our reality: Capitalist Kenoma. And suddenly, out of nowhere we encountered the Black Swan: an impossible Other that our narrative had not anticipated. An unannounced experience of the Real:

The real is an altogether different matter than the possible, without any possible communication or mediation between the two. What lies outside possibility or beyond the range of possibilities – literally, the im-possible, or the event – is real, because the procedure whereby we fabricate the possible out of the real is always incomplete and deficient and falls short of the real. [...] Radical contingency, or the event, shakes the range of possibilities and updates a whole new world, which may be incompatible with the previous one. Historic events are history-changing.²

The Real manifested as a viral agent, alien to the immune system and to medical science. COVID-19 brought disease, suffering and death on a massive scale. Almost overnight it forced us to leave our workplaces and shopping malls, our factories, schools, and airports. Everyone grounded. Curfews confined us to our homes and confronted us with the reality of our fragile bodies and more importantly: our own finitude.

Death came peeking out of where we had hidden him for decades: behind closed doors, in hospices and convalescence homes. Death returned to where he used to belong: the midst of our homes, surrounded by family witnessing final moments.

The paradoxical, ambiguous nature of this moment is so confounding, so bewildering! I mean, how excellent that our arrogant species receives this collective slap-in-the-face reality check, waking us two-leggeds up to the simple truth that we are not at all in control, have never really been in control, that we live at the behest of powers—of a complex interplay of powers—far beyond our ability to fully fathom, to predict, or to steer. What hubris to have imagined we could do whatever we want with this exquisitely interwoven wonder of a world! And yet how awful that this lesson must come at the expense of so many unsuspecting human lives, so many innocent souls now shivering with fever and fright as they struggle to draw breath.³

Despite the zeitgeist of hypostitional reality-denial and conspiratorial scapegoating I will forever acknowledge and extend my gratitude to the countless care-workers and unpaid care-givers within and beyond our families who ceaselessly powered on to keep us fed, healthy, and alive. While these unwavering heroes sustained us, the frail systems scrambling to retain control over this unknown agent forced many of us into confinement, loneliness, and boredom.

This mandated dead time challenged our awareness of the meaningless distractions that once consumed our attention, and of the relentless pace that had come to define our lives, and it opened a capacity for interiority we forgot was possible. Stillness, quietude, suspended temporality that allowed inner monologue, undisturbed trains of thoughts, inner vision. Many of us were forced to deal with ourselves. Our world became more intimate.

And between the extreme modes of ceaseless care and the suspension of time came the temporal disorientation. Hours seemed to melt into days, days and weeks dissolved into some nebulous glob of experience. Everything seemed to be slowing down. Time itself stopped making sense.

Dead time—moments of withdrawal, of what old mystics called Gelassenheit, releasement—are crucial for the revitalization of our life experience. And, perhaps, one can hope that one of the unintended consequences of the coronavirus quarantines in cities around the world will be that some people at least will use their time released from hectic activity and think about the (non)sense of their predicament.⁴

Gaping Wounds

COVID-19 brought everything to a halt, not just us as individuals. The virus landed some of its hardest blows on the most powerful nations and seemed to have stalled even the great engine of capitalism itself.

It suddenly laid bare the gaping structural faults of a system that have been papered over for decades: the corruption, the dynamics of exploitation, social injustice and biopolitics, biodiversity and violence, all the ignored shortcomings underlying our neoliberal reality.

The cognitive dissonance between our beliefs in functional systems of governance and the sudden exposure of their fictionality led many of us to question the very structures we once believed were holding the world together.

The unpopular but legitimate medical imperative for quarantine was eerily mirrored by a more primitive tribal impulse: the urge to redraw boundaries, to quarantine imagined enemies, and to protect our fragile identities under the guise of safety. Fake news, conspiracy theories, paranoia, xenophobia and racism exploded. The collective mind virus of Hypostition emerged, as contagious as the physical pathogen itself.

Given what the virus did to us and what we did to ourselves in response, we had many reasons for despair. [...] Our adversity elicited psychological responses that are common to our species: we felt sadness and grief; responded with anxiety, fear, and anger; and tried to hide the truth from one another and even from ourselves. [...] These emotional responses and behaviors can themselves rightly be seen as foundational parts of epidemics. We might even say that the definition of an epidemic disease should include the fact that it can have outsize psychological effects. [...] To cope with a plague in the twenty-first century, we responded not only with familiar interventions, but also with familiar feelings.⁵

Between the paranoia and conspiracy theories the pandemic also blew open the Overton window of long avoided conversations around topics like mental health or the rigidity of the 9-5 workday. It suddenly became socially acceptable to prioritize self‑care in ways unheard of before.

Remote work suddenly became feasible for many jobs, revealing our standard model of office work as arbitrary, exploitative, and unnecessarily taxing, often forcing people to choose between their career and their well-being.

Radical political and economic ideas that had previously been dismissed as unthinkable were suddenly back on the table: universal basic income, housing the homeless, generous investments into public health, reduction of weekly work days, shorter supply chains, local solidarity and an economy geared towards resilience rather than profit margins.

The Pleroma was suddenly imaginable on a mass scale. Something had suddenly re-emerged: "the spectre of a world which could be free".

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.⁶

Of course we were not the only ones noticing the emperor was without clothes. So did the powers that be. And they knew exactly how to exorcise this dangerous "spectre" that emerged out of interiority, contemplation, class consciousness, and the suspension of time itself.

By speeding things up, averting attention, undermining communality, asserting control. Fear was immediately weaponized as the driving force of hypostitional narratives: The virulent conspiracy theories got accelerated, driven by social media algorithms and political influencers. Fearmongering drove us apart, made us end friendships, relationships, rupture family ties. We got split into irreconcilable camps and incompatible individual identities.

Chthonic Potential

There is no return to normal, the new “normal” will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.⁴

Collectively we had a chance for change. We decided against it. Out of fear and confusion amid the uncertainties, lack of leadership, lack of vision, out of habit. It's tragic but understandable. We should not hold a grudge or grieve our inabilities. It's human nature.

The story of how exactly we lost hold of this momentum again, why and how we chose to forget is yet to be gathered, retold and analyzed in depth, but that is not a goal of this essay.

What I want instead is to hold this memory of the liberating potential for change, this fragile moment pregnant with real possibilities. Gnosis. Pleroma. Made possible by slowing down, by stopping the engine, by a sudden capacity for interiority, by communing with each other, by questioning Capitalist Realism, by class consciousness.

There is a war taking place in heaven concerning the soul of humanity, and it will be fought in each person’s heart, every day, without rest, and into the foreseeable future. I have no choice but to sound metaphysical and religious, because this is where the psyche goes when it enters the liminal.⁷

Most importantly we should remember where the potential for change came from: Not from an incursion from a cosmic Outside, but breaking out from the Inside. Inside of Us. From Underneath.

The above was written in August 2025, over a year ago. Then it sat there, unpublished forever. I told myself it was for lack of time. But the truth is: I forgot. Both, forgetting and melting time, seem to come naturally when you descend into the plague years. Faced with the daunting climb back up, forgetting becomes the more comfortable choice.

The old Greek word for a journey like this is katabasis¹: a descent into the underworld. What separates the myths is what one brings back up. Orpheus went down for Eurydice and returned with nothing, because he looked back. Inanna was stripped of one garment at each of seven gates, and got out only by sending someone else down in her place. Aeneas went all the way down and came back up carrying the future of Rome, shown to him by his dead father.

A katabasis is not a fall. Not even a forced one. One descends on purpose in order to return, and one should not return empty-handed. So what do we carry back up from Twentytwentywhen? The answer is dirt simple: firsthand knowledge. It's not a blueprint or a manifesto, but the tangible, lived experience of which direction the opening lies in.

It's the opposite of the Gnostic ascent, of Fisher's future, of Land's Outside. It's downward and inward, toward the ground, the soil, the dead. It's not a direction toward some destination. It is the direction. And it has a name, one I've been quietly attaching to these essays all along, without once saying it out loud...

...continue with the next part, in which we stop mapping and start digging, and find out we were never the only ones breathing down here.

Wikipedia: Katabasis ↩
Ayache, Elie. The Medium of Contingency: An Inverse View of the Market. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. pg. 20 ↩
David Abram, In the Ground of our Unknowing, Emergence Magazine, April 7, 2020 ↩
Žižek, Slavoj. Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World. OR Books, 2020. ↩↩
Christakis, Nicholas A. Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live. Little, Brown Spark, 2020. ↩
Arundhati Roy, The pandemic is a portal, Financial Times, April 3, 2020 ↩
Zachary Stein, Covid 19: A War Broke Out in Heaven, What is Emerging, March 26, 2020 ↩

The Bitter Last Spoonful

2026-05-14T12:00:00+02:00

A complicated but sincere eulogy for chaos magician Gordon White.

Gordon White died yesterday while traveling in Peru. The surprising news hit me a bit more than I'd like to admit.

May the gods have mercy and bless his soul and ease the grief for his family and friends.

I fell out with him five years ago, when conspiracy peddling, doom-mongering, and anti-scientific charlatanry had taken over much of his intellectual output and Rune Soup turned more and more into a sect. Whatever came after reached me only from a distance and through the social media grapevine, as he seemed to have completed his transformation into a full-blown "Alex Jones of occulture", an online army of cultists included.

Much as his early departure from this realm surprised me, on second thought, it didn't really. With his Goldilocks approach to "shamanism" and healing traditions, and skepticism of medicine in general, he was practically courting disaster. Let alone the years he spent bullying entities for which he had neither sufficient understanding nor respect.

Rest in Peace

That said, I genuinely wish him a safe journey into whatever comes next, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt as to how much of what he put into the world in the last years came from his own heart, and how much came from forces that had taken hold of him.

I definitely owe Gordon thanks for all the inspiration, brilliant ideas, and sharp hot takes. My ventures into magic and animist ways of seeing the world would probably never have happened if my cynical atheist old self hadn't discovered and become obsessed with his podcast and writings back in the 2010s.

Through Rune Soup and Gordon's idea of "finding the others," I was fortunate to make a number of meaningful connections and dear friendships with likeminded fellow seekers and disillusioned Ex-Soupies, for which I'm deeply grateful.

O Lords, may his troubled soul rest in peace through your mercy. Amen

Dawn of the Dead

2019-02-13T19:40:00+01:00

Death Cycles

At my morning walks along the canal this last week it has already become apparent that the winter is slowly fading and the sun is growing in strength. Nevertheless the all encompassing greyness and hardly visible but relentless February rain is just occasionally broken apart by blue sky and sunlight. From Capricorn to Aquarius, Saturn rules this time of the year and it seems appropriate. Before All Saints and All Souls got shifted towards the end of the year, the ancient Romans celebrated Parentalia during mid February - starting today and lasting for nine days of remembering and communing with the spirits of the dead ancestors.

To me it feels like a nice framing of time to connect with the dead in November and then again in February - almost like two twilight moments like dusk and dawn with the winter solstice at its darkest midpoint. It is the twilight between the world of the living and the world of the dead, liminal periods where the two realms bleed into each other and where it seems more easy and appropriate to have interactions between the two.

Magician and blogger BJ Swain has a brilliant chapter about ancestor work in his highly recommended book "Living Spirits". He touches on concepts and beliefs from the Kongo and how traditions there understand and conceptualize life and death. I found it very enlightening because it ties in with what I wrote in the previous paragraph about the worlds of life and death mirroring the daily and yearly solar cycle and puts in words what I could only describe as a feeling until now: the Dikènga cosmogram. It serves as a fundamental law of the universe and is especially suited to describe a cyclic relationship between the living and the dead. It also struck me as heavily resonating with ancient Egyptian cosmology:

Coded as a cross, a quartered circle or diamond, a seashell spiral, or a special cross with solar emblems at each ending - the sign of the four moments of the sun is the Kongo emblem of spiritual continuity and renaissance par excellence. [...] The horizontal line indicates the divide between the world of the living and the world of the dead. It also indicates the divide between night and day. The circles at each quarter point can indicate the sun, or they can indicate moments in the life and death cycle. This cycle is characterized not simply by each step feeding the next step until we return to where we begin, but also by the idea that life and death reflect each other. So when we are born into the world of the living we die from the world of the dead and vice versa. When the Sun is at noon in the world of the living it is midnight in the world of the dead. We do not simply exist in a step by step cycle but in a symbiotic reflection, where what occurs for us is coordinated with what occurs for them, and what occurs for them predicts what occurs for us and so forth. [1]

I dove deeper into the fascinating Dikènga rabbit-hole and found this description of the concept as a whole:

the stage known as Musoni is the stage of the conception of ideas, human beings, and ail things conceivable. Musoni corresponds to when the sun is at midnight and is represented by a yellow color. Although the sun has set and therefore cannot be seen directly by the observer, it is understood to still exist. Similarly, when a person dies, he/she is understood to still exist in the same fundamental way as the human being is conceived of as ntângu a môyo 'a living sun' (Fu-Kiau 1994: 26).' By the same token, matter is not created or destroyed - it simply changes form. [...] After Musoni, the next stage is Kola, illustrated in Black, which represents birth, sunrise, and [...] the beginning of the story. Next, Tukula, associated with the color red, represents the sun at noon. It corresponds to the highest point in a person’s life [...]. The next stage is Luvèmba, shown in a grey color. This represents sunset. This is the stage of the transformation that occurs when a person passes on. However, in the Afrikan worldview, this is not truly the end. Indeed, Fu-Kiau asserts that “Dying is not an end. Dying for the Kongo is just going on vacation” (Fu-Kiau 2001b). The underlying concept is articulated in the proverb "tufwanga mu soba — we die in order to undergo change" (Fu-Kiau 1994: 27) Luvèmba is where the story comes to its closing formula but continues to exist in other forms. [2]

Croissants, Coins, and Crows

The Romans celebrated Parentalia not only at home but visited the family tombs in the liminal space just outside of the cities to commune with their ancestors and bring them offerings of flower-garlands, wheat, salt, wine-soaked bread and violets. I really resonate with this practice and especially during these periods of the year really would like to do similar rites. But today not many of us still live in the same place where our ancestors were buried and we do not have a ritual space to be near to their physical remains. For me it is the same. I live around 700km away from my grandparents graves and I only have very few chances to "visit them."

But I discovered a magical solution to the problem - or it was rather Saturn who sent a cold black spark of inspiration that led me to a solution. But first let's rewind a bit...

It was during a visit in my hometown around Christmas two years ago. I was on the way to visit my sister at her home to have breakfast together. Before, I wanted to buy some croissants and other delicacies at a French bakery around the corner of where she lives. Upon entering I checked my wallet to see if I had enough cash. In my usual early morning pre-breakfast clumsiness I managed to drop a handful of coins on the street right in front of the bakery. Mumbling curses I managed to pick most of them up and realized that among them were also three Chinese coins that I occasionally used for I Ching divination. There were only two of them on the pavement and I crawled around looking for the third one. Then I saw the gully...

Pointing my phone's flashlight into the shaft while dodging confused customers who tried to enter the bakery I spotted the lost coin. It was lying on a layer of rotten leaves that had clogged the shaft, just a few centimeters below the gully's opening. The slots on the lid were too narrow to put my finger through so I decided to try again on my way back after breakfast.

Two hours later I returned, confident of victory, armed with a magnet, a string, and a coat hanger made of wire. The first blowback was to find out that the damn coin did not stick to the magnet, so I tried it with the coat hanger. I got more frowns and suspicious looks from bakery customers and owner, crawling around on the floor poking around in the gully.

Eventually...instead of managing to stick the end of the wire through the coin's square hole, I poked a hole into the layer of leaves and the coin dropped right through it and disappeared in the darkness.

I chuckled when I looked up, still on my knees - because the bakery's entrance had a little black iron crow as decoration of their doorstep - and they had dressed it with a red scarf and a Santa hat for the Christmas season. It seemed to mock me - I guess I deserved it.

Graveyeard Wormholes

I don't remember if it was on the same day or a day after, but in the afternoon I walked through my favourite cemetery that I use as a shortcut on my way from my parents house to the inner city. Some of my relatives from my mother's side are buried there, so I decided to visit their grave. When I walked past the beautiful crematorium building in the middle of the cemetery that was built in the late 1900s and looks like an antique temple I was suddenly struck with an insight and a plan:

Today was Saturday, the day of Saturn. The crow in front of the bakery: a Saturnian animal. It all suddenly made sense to me now and I instantly knew what to do: I remembered that had wanted to collect earth from my ancestors graves for some time already and I also remembered that in the African American Hoodoo Rootwork tradition you offer coins to the spirits in exchange for graveyard dirt. In this particular moment these two thoughts developed into a magical idea...

I walked to the crematorium because I remembered the beautiful mosaic of a skull and a sand clock it has on the floor of the front gable. I placed my remaining Chinese coins on the mosaic, recited the Orphic hymn to Kronos and did an impromptu request to Saturn to cleanse the coins of all previous influences. Then I asked him to aid me in fusing all of my Chinese coins together to one etherically interconnected network of magical tokens that by themselves should act as portals to exchange magical energies with each other across the network. I waited for a moment and recollected the coins.

After I went to the grave of my grandparents and uncle, recited a requiem prayer and asked for permission to take some dirt. I placed one of the freshly created Saturnian portal coins into the earth and told my ancestors that through this object we will be connected with each other beyond space and time.

A few days later I did the same at the grave of my father's parents on a different cemetery and also at the grave of our old neighbors who were close to my heart because they were also like grandparents to me when I was a child.

Back home in Berlin I placed all the collected earth from the graves into a beautiful glass container and put another of the Saturnian coins on top of it. This acts as a proxy or portal to the physical graves of my ancestors and when I want to give offerings to them I pour libations over the coin or wave it through incense smoke and imagine how the offering's energies travel across the etheric network and reach their graves. I also imagine the portals to be open for exchange and meditate on this image while communing with my ancestors spirits.

Feel free to use this idea yourself and see if it helps you to be closer to your ancestors if you whish so. It certainly helps me. I can also imagine that instead of coins you could use a rock or other item broken into pieces or make up a batch of tokens with the same sigil on it.

Spirit Communion

The general protocol that I have currently settled with for my own practice of communing with my ancestors is mainly based on the ritual outlined in this highly recommended Sphere & Sundry article, but also heavily inspired by a Shinto ritual that I love for its powerful minimalism. I combined the two and I work with Tehuti as psychopomp, because I already had a relationship with this god through my Tarot practice.

The full protocol is suitable for first contact or special occasions and can be easily simplified for more casual subsequent communication. The calls to the ancestors in the ritual outlined below are a spin-off from a general prayer to the ancestors that I wrote a while ago and which I frequently use in other ritual settings:

You ancestors who came before me. I call you. Mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons. All you, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. May your blessing and guidance bring out the best in me, for the benefit of all, whom I may meet in this life. Amen.

Full Ritual

Preliminaries

Ritual bath
Anoint with oil
Light candles
Light general incense (Frankincense)
Place a bowl of Natron or Butsudan ash powder in the center of the altar

Orphic Hymns

I prefer to do this rite during planetary hours that combine the hour and day of Mercury and Saturn. Hour of Mercury on Saturdays or hour of Saturn on Wednesdays. I start with the Orphic hymn of whoever rules the day, then the one of whoever rules the hour. For Mercury I use the hymn to Hermes Chthonios. You can find different versions of the Orphic Hymns. The recent translation by Patrick Dunn flow very well in English. Or use the free ones you can find here. For best pronunciation in Greek check Susan Chang's amazing video. Light Storax / Benzoin incense before you start. One for Mercury, one for Saturn.

Prayer to Tehuti

Burn some Egyptian papyrus or Kyphi incense and give an offering of Natron.
Pray the Hymn to Tehuti down to "Who enters duat, knows those in it"
Call to Tehuti:

Tehuti, I call you! Thrice greatest Tehuti, scribe of Ra, Silver Aton, leader of souls in the hereafter. I invoke you in your great, divine names: ALIPS, THABLIPS, STSILIPS, GAGARPAOTHAR, THANASIMA, QHAH, ORTHOMENKHROÔN, BALSA, ALABAKHABEL [4], Come to me here and now to this place that will serve as a meeting place for myself and my ancestors, guardians, and leaders who now dwell in the afterlife, whose blood runs through me, and all whose spirits have helped shape me.

Thrice greatest Tehuti, I humbly ask you to aid me as a messenger and as a light for those I seek. Open the veil between this world and the hereafter. Find my ancestors and make sure they receive my words, gifts and intentions.

Thrice greatest Tehuti, accept these offerings of smoke, light, water, food and wine. Accept them in gratitude for your help, and please spread them to the dead I call and invite them to attend and see to it that no uninvited intruder comes to this place.

Be praised, oh Thrice greatest Tehuti, forecaster of the future, notary of Ra!

Peret kheru ta, heneket, khau kau apedu, khut nebet noferet wabet ankhet netjer im. [5]

Offerings to the Dead

Place all offerings on the table, smudge them with incense.
Place a lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the rear right of its center. This is for all women in your bloodline.

I call you: mothers and grandmothers, sisters and cousins, daughters and granddaughters. All you women, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. Come to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

Place another lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the rear left of its center. This is for all men in your bloodline.

I call you: fathers and grandfathers, brothers and cousins, sons and grandsons. All you men, from whose community I came forth, whose blood flows through my veins, whose traces and memories I carry within me. With deep compassion, I think of your sufferings and your pains, through which you had to go on your life's path. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. Come to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

Place a third lit stick of incense into the bowl of Natron, a bit to the front of its center, so all three sticks shape a triangle. This is for the lost and forgotten ones of your bloodline and the ones who are not genetically related to you, yet important.

I call you: all you forgotten dead, you unborn dead, you who died as children. I also call you, all you friends and acquaintances, and all those who have stood with and helped my family and me, whose influences and benevolence I carry within me. Come also to this altar in your honor and accept my offerings, giving thanks for the sacrifices you made for our family. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.

(Optionally, call the mighty dead.

I call you: you inspiring ancestors, you artists and magicians, poets and thinkers, you role models who have given your lifeblood for the benefit of all, you mighty forefathers, who have made this world a better one before your transition to the next world. With gratitude and love I think of your struggles, your dreams, your achievements, your courage and your strength. They live in me and flow through my veins, they inspire my existence and from them I draw strength. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Accept these gifts, along with my gratitude and love.)

If it is the first time you do this ritual, I recommend to say something about the collected earth and the Saturnian tokens:

Dear grandparents and dear uncle (or whose graves are connected with each other through the token network), through this earth and through the tokens, which are consecrated by Saturn and connected to each other beyond distance, I can always be close to your graves. All of you other ancestors, I ask you to acknowledge this earth as symbol also for the earth of your graves and to recognize the network of tokens also as a symbol of our inseparable connection.

Play music, commune with the present spirits, have a party, do whatever you want to do.

Closing the Space

Thank you all, my ancestors who have appeared. May your blessing and guidance bring out the best in me, for the benefit of all, whom I may meet in this life. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. I hereby grant you a license to depart. Return to your resting places and do not stay in this house. But come back soon when I call you. My love and gratitude are always with you!

Thrice greatest Tehuti, make sure that all the souls called here today find their way and return to their resting places and close the veil again between this world and the hereafter. This ritual is closed.

Requiem

O Lord, grant all eternal rest. And let eternal light shine on each of them. May the souls of the ancestors rest in peace through Your mercy. Amen

Family Troubles

I know that it can be difficult to connect with the own dead relatives, be it because some of them have been abusive towards members of the family and caused traumata and grief, or because they would not have agreed with their descendants life-style, beliefs, sexuality, identification, etc. or vice versa. You can find important thoughts about these issues in the linked Sphere & Sundry article above or in BJ Swain's book, and many other places, but my own are as follows:

First of all nobody has to talk to the ancestors, there are other ways of getting help from the dead. A good example would be working with the "Lost Souls" in "purgatory", as I recently heard and read about in this great article by Agostino Taumaturgo or in the pure Shinto way. You can also tie Catholicism and pagan Roman rites together and do a kind of Parentalia Novena.

An important point that made a huge difference for me was involving a psychopomp in aiding to make contact with the dead. You can ask them to filter out unwanted ancestors, either by explicitly naming them or by asking him to not let the ones come who are not comfortable supporting your current life, or something along those lines. You can also ask them specifically to invite only your magically operand ancestors, or the artists among them, or the queer ones, and so on. Use them as a bouncer to your party.

Incarnations

Coming back to the "Saturnian coins": I came across an article on Gnome School that had a quote from a book by Henry Rogers about very intriguing objects that I can very well imagine being used for such an "etheric network":

From the period 8500-3000 OLD, a large number of artefacts known as tokens have been found. There are small clay objects of simple geometric shapes: spheres, cones, tetrahydra, cylinders, disks, lens-shaped disks, etc. tokens of this period are known as plain tokens. They are associated with the beginnings of agriculture [and] were used for record keeping… some have been found stored inside sealed, hollow clay balls forming envelopes around the tokens… these envelopes represented a way of safegaurding the record of the contract. If there was a disagreement, the envelope could be broken, and the evidence of the tokens would be inside. [3]

This magical network concept lends itself also to many other potential magical applications. Some research revealed that it is apparently also nothing really new. The famous DKMU "Ellis" aka. "Linking Sigil" and Chaos Magick 101's Sigil Matrix followed a similar line of thought. My plan is to further explore this technology of linking talismanic tokens to each other.

(1) Swain, BJ. Living Spirits: A Guide to Magic in a World of Spirits. Independently published. 2018
(2) Kambon, Ọbádélé. "Akan Ananse stories, Yorùbá Ìjàpá tales, and the Dikènga theory: worldview and structure." Contemporary Journal of African Studies 4.2 (2017): 1-36.
(3) Rogers, Henry. Writing systems: A linguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
(4) translation from demotic spells with secret names of Tehuti from Louvre E 3229 papyrus (Betz PDM lxi. 63-78 and PDM Suppl. 149—62) found in: Betz, Hans Dieter, ed. The Greek magical papyri in translation, including the Demotic spells. Vol. 1. University of Chicago Press, 1996. pg. 288 and 328.
(5) Common Egyptian offering formula. It translates to: "A voice offering of bread, beer, a thousand of beef and fowl, and every good and pure thing on which a god lives"