You may have figured out that I am a huge fan of history.
That obsession with learning stories of our past has been with me my entire
life. In the past fifteen years much of that research has been pre-history.
Let me throw at you an impressive set of numbers. By conservative
estimates, Homo sapiens have been around for about 315,000 years. The Home
genus has been on this planet at least .5 million years, and some say up to 2.5
million years. Some of the oldest indication of any type of spiritual practice
is 300,000 years old, being grave goods buried with a Neanderthal. So our
species started all this before we even evolved into our current iteration and
the first known practice was some form of belief that life continues after
death. By comparison, the first civilization started 5,000 years ago. That’s
310,000 years of human existing on this planet before cities. As the Oracle at
Delphi says, “Know Thyself,” and to really know who we are as a species we need
to have some understanding of how we lived for the majority of our time here.
Evidence shows that we believed in some kind of life after death, and we were
animists. We believed in and had dealings with spirits.
People debate endlessly whether or not our species took a “wrong
turn.” Whether agriculture, or domestication, or if you believe Socrates, even
writing itself were bad ideas. I have my own opinions. But outside of that we
still must accept that knowledge does indeed get lost. While most scholars don’t
even like the term Dark Ages anymore, all will admit that some knowledge was
lost in the West. We lost the recipe for Roman concrete. We lost the recipe for
Greek Fire. Judging by how people seem to feel strongly about spiritual
practice, you can bet that much of what was discovered on that topic has been
destroyed. Think about what must have been lost in those 300,000 years? The
voices of those elders lost to time. I truly hope that Babbage was right and
with enough computing power we can go back reconstruct every vibration that
ever occurred in our atmosphere.
Another point, why do we even care? Certainly our species
has made great advances in the creation and retention of knowledge. Haven’t we
gone well past what our ancestors knew? Maybe, maybe not. One thing that I
think can be said is that the focus of that knowledge, and the uses for the
intellectual capacity of our civilization, has changed. Spiritual matters take
a back-seat to science and economics. Not that those are bad things. But what
does that say about magick? Has the art of magick advanced?
Yes, yes it has. Albeit at a much slower rate and with much
fewer resources. Many ancient cultures believed magick to be the highest form
of learning. All of the intellectual, economic, political, and temporal
capacity went towards the study of magick in a big way. Why am I obsessed with
the Ancient Egyptians? One need only look at the Pyramids and know that their
culture spent a lot of its time thinking about magick. The huge portion of the cultural
records that survive focus on preparing for one’s death.
The point of all this, besides raising some even more
interesting questions, is how it effects our relationship with the spirits. One
question you have to answer for yourself is, are spirits immortal? Many of them
claim to be, and I have no reason not to take them at their word. One can
research the names of many spirits through the gimoires and all the way back to
ancient cultures. Are these the same spirits? Maybe, but at the very least the
spirits seem to have knowledge of those ancient names. So even if the spirits
are not immortal they certainly know their history and the history of their
interaction with us.
What did that interaction look like for the vast majority of
our time on this planet? It seems to have involved a lot of drugs and
journeying through trance states. It certainly didn’t involve brass seals and
contracts written on virgin paper, because we didn’t have any of those things
through the majority of our history. Although maybe those methods are a
refinement of the communication process, a sort of updated technology. But this
does prove that those methods are not absolutely necessary. That the spirits
can be contacted by other means. So while grimoire purists may be advancing the
art, it may not be the only way or even the best way to contact those spirits.
In the end, it is best to remember the magick of your
ancestors. The spirits certainly remember, and what has been said and done to
them in the past will reflect on how they interact with us today.
