Tag: ancestors

Frater T Explains the Egyptian Coffin Texts

The Egyptian Coffin Texts – Spell 1, Paragraph 1.

“Here begins the book of vindicating a man in the realm of the dead. Ho! You are the Lion, you are the Double Lion, you are Horus, Protector of his father, you are the fourth of these four gods who are powerful and strong, who bring water and make the Nile through the power of their fathers. raise yourself on your left side, put yourself on your right side.”

Frater T’s Interpretation: Remember magus, when dealing with spirits, if someone asks if you are a god you say, yes! Your ancestors are strong and if you have been honoring them they will back your play.

Emergent Magick – Ancestors

Much
of the mythology we know today comes from what has been well preserved. For the
most part, what gets preserved in any culture are things important to the
ruling class. The major gods and goddesses and their stories were certainly
known to the commoners, but for the majority of people, household gods, local
heroes, and ancestors played a more important role in daily life. Any Roman who
had the means kept a room in their home for the ancestors. Many households in
Ancient Egypt and Greece had a small shrine to venerate important family
members that had passed. Even after the spread of Christianity, the cult of the
saints informed public life more than the scripture itself. Ancestor veneration
is well entrenched in almost every human culture.

Emergent Magick – Ancestors

Our ancestors also compel us
to learn our history, especially important for the magi. Just a brief survey of
your ancestral culture is most likely to unearth a rich magical tradition. We
have been led to believe that our current societies had been swiftly converted
to monolithic faiths, instantly erasing eons of animist and pagan traditions.
Nothing can be further from the truth. Vestiges of the old ways live on
everywhere if you know where to look for them. From Catholic grandmothers
burying statues of saints in the yard, to Baptist hoodoo practitioners driving
away evil spirits with salt, to the seer stone used by Joseph Smith in the
founding of the Church of Later Day Saints, the magick of our ancestors
continues.

If you dig a little
deeper, you find that many of our traditions come from much older, pagan roots.
Many Catholic saints were once pagan gods or folk heroes. Our holidays correspond
with celebrations of our pagan ancestors. All of them believed in magick. Your
ancestors will teach you this.

I got to see my brother for the first time in a few years. We went out to our mom’s grave and I left some of her favorite cigarettes. Then we went back to his place. He gave me copies of many family documents–birth, death, and baptismal certificates, prayer cards, and probably the most interesting, the ship’s manifest showing foreign travelers when my great grand parents and their then four children (my grandmother would be born in Chicago) came to the US. Then he fed me a pretty good traditional, Polish, Easter diner. An excellent day.

Emergent Magick: Operative Magick

Most folk magick requires
contacting spirits, the most common being ancestor spirits. Ancestor veneration
is perhaps the oldest form of religion and the oldest form of magick. Why
ancestors? Spirits that were never human have difficulty understanding what
people want or need. Their perspective comes from the beings or things they
inhabit, or they may never have had physical form at all. A magus can never
assume, no matter the amount of coercion or offerings used, that a non-human
spirit has the magus’ best interest in mind. They have their own agendas that
can be totally alien. An ancestor on the other hands, has been human and
understands the needs of human beings.

The second oldest form of
Operative Magick, and perhaps the most popular today, is to call upon a spirit
that’s considered to be a god or has been elevated in some way. Prayer may be
the last refuge of the scoundrel, but it has the benefit of being proven to
work, and most magi have been scoundrels at one time or another.

In a way, prayer is
ancestor worship. Most anthropologists agree that gods evolve from honored dead
who become culture heroes and then eventually deified. But any god worth
calling on already has many other devoted followers. Also, deities tend to
specialize, being the god of grain, or of sex, or of writing, which can be
perfectly fine if what you want to accomplish fall along those lines and you
already have a relationship with that god. Other gods may claim dominion over
everything, but will exclude certain persons from their favor, and demand total
obedience. In the end, any magus’ connection to any given deity will be tenuous
at best, and any spirit that has risen to such heights has their own agenda
first and foremost.

The spirits of the dead,
while they may not have the raw power of gods, are much more likely to have
your interests at heart. If they want attention, they have few options, so the
magus becomes their sole provider of contact to the material world, giving the
relationship more equality. In the end, most people value family relationships
and will help a family member when asked.

Ideally, a magus should
have two sets of ancestors. Their own personal ancestor spirits and the spirits
shared by their Emergent Tribe. Personal ancestors, or the mighty dead, need
not be blood relatives at all. A close friend or mentor that has died can be
more amiable than a blood relative that cares little. Though a magus should not
fall into the trap that makes them preclude ancestors they have had
philosophical issues with. Once a spirit moves past the veil, few hold on to
the prejudices they had on Earth. A magus may find that a relative who was a
die-hard monotheist, who would have no tolerance for their spiritual practice,
will be totally understanding after death. Having your body rot away and
becoming a being of pure consciousness tends to elevate your perspective.

My father, Michael Wilber. The man I never knew. He died when I was three months old.

This is the only picture I have of him, and I couldn’t tell you which guy it is. I know he served in Germany during the Berlin Crisis. That’s about it.

There’s a reason why I have so many main characters in my novels named Mike.

My grandmother, we called her Busia, Lucille Bujnowski. By the time I knew her she was a weird and tough old bird. She would ride the train into the city every morning at 5 AM, work a union job at General Foods, and made good money. They honest to goodness gave this line worker a gold watch when she retired at 55. It was a wondrous time, if you ignore all the racism.

She came over from Poland when she was very young, and the Great Depression hit right after she got married and had kids. She taught me the secret of feeding an entire family on one can of Campbell’s soup – just keep adding water.

She helped raise us after my dad died. I wish she had taught me some Polish.