Your ancestors are watching.

Try not to be embarrassing

Western civilisation is not good at dealing with ideas connected to death. For the last 2000 years, Christian, particularly Protestant, thought has been focused on keeping the dead buried and preferably forgotten.

There are some notable exceptions.

In Bulgaria, the Orthodox church was never reformed and carried out interesting rituals for the dead on the seventh anniversary of the person’s death. The priest will summon the dead person to attend a feast which is held in the church for everyone in the community. I have attended one of these by design (for my father-in-law) and two by accident while visiting a church and stumbling into the ritual.

Psychically, there was a presence in the church and in all cases, I picked up an image of a shell of a person (which looked like an empty shirt being tumbled in a washing machine). In the times when I entered the church and did not know that a ritual was happening, I saw and felt the shell before I realised what was happening.

Bulgarians have a festival where they take food, particularly cherries, to relatives’ graves. They have a meal with the dead person. Another odd ritual is that after a person’s death, posters of them are made and hung on walls and electricity poles, where they watch the living with frozen expressions until the paper finally peels off.

The dead are very much among the living in Bulgaria.

I noticed something similar in China, where parts of the house are set aside to make offerings to ancestors. There is a very real fear that if the dead are not given offerings and prayers, they will become “hungry ghosts” and haunt the living.

However, you can feel the dead even more closely in temples. Once, I hiked for hours to find a medieval temple, only to find it was just a tiny shed of ancient timber. But the place was crawling with dead people, and it was not possible to put up with that sort of pressure without making an offering.

In Ancient Rome, most houses had similar altars to the ancestors, or at least the more famous ones who deserved recognition. The Romans believed that if you said a dead person’s name out loud, they continued to “live”, and there are tombs where this act is requested.

Necromancy, or magic involving the dead, is one of the more exotic forms of magic and was feared by the establishment and overstated by modern magicians.

How it works

The tradition which I was taught is that when a person dies, their body rots (or is cremated) and returns to the elements of the universe. While this body has energy that slowly dissipates, there is not much to see here. If you were to visit a grave, you could use some of that slowly breaking down energy in spells, but this is mostly symbolic.

The next part of the body is an energy field called the sphere of sensation. It comprises all a person’s memories and personality. While most people think that it is “them”, it is little more than a computer program. It runs on set patterns which are changed by life but remain frozen upon death. It has considerable power and some of humanity’s magical powers – importantly, the ability to imagine.

What most spheres of sensation do is use this power of imagination to build “a heaven” on the astral for them to inhabit. Unless there is some intervention, such as the Bulgarian rituals I talked about above, the sphere of sensation slowly goes to sleep in their heaven and breaks down (usually over a couple of hundred years).

Before they break down, the dead person’s sphere often forms links with others on the astral plane, particularly with loved ones or family members. They are aware of these people entering their heaven, but can only recognise those whom they knew in life. However, the sphere contacts the ancestors if they had much to do with them during their lives. This is less the case in modern times, but ancestral spirits were much closer to the same family remaining in a physical area for centuries. This shared interaction keeps a sphere of sensation alive, particularly if there is some form of ancestral acknowledgement among the living, such as offerings or grave visits. In some societies, such as that of Ancient Egypt, the sphere of sensation is trained before death to experience some form of a longer post-death “life.”

The last part of the body to be mentioned is the soul. Soon after death, this separates from the sphere of sensation, having downloaded all the experiences it needs and carries on to its own adventures (which no one can ever agree on).

Pathologies

Like a lot of things in the universe, sometimes things go wrong. Sometimes the energy attached to the body lingers in an area, forming what most people would call a ghost. These things are less than intelligent, project themselves into space, and keep themselves alive by feeding on the energy of the living. Despite the fear of ghost stories, these do not cause many problems unless they attract a demonic presence and gain some degree of independence. This creates an odd fusion of the human person and the demonic force.

Another pathology is when the sphere of sensation has nothing beyond their earthly life and lacks the imagination to build a new life for themselves, or when they feel they still have work to do before they move on. This creates something called the earthbound dead, who are trapped by the ties that bind them to earth. If it is about a message they need to get to the living, they will move on after making sure it is delivered, but this is rare.

However, because they are built from a sphere of sensation, they have all the human’s memories and intelligence.

Both of what I have described above need human energy to exist. This leads to rooms feeling cold, or psychics and children feeling or seeing things. In a bad case, children in puberty can power one of these beings up to the point they can create physical changes in the environment or mimic people’s voices. One of my atheistic ex-girlfriends had a problem with one of these “poltergeists” in her flat, who turned out to be a former resident.

“It was strange because we could see it pull pins holding up posters or somehow take posters off the wall without removing the drawing pins or tearing the posters,” she told me.

“The creepiest thing was when it started to mimic our voices so we would be having a conversation, not aware that the person we thought we were talking to was not in the house.”

Most of the time, they will not hurt anyone and can be cleaned up with a basic home blessing or exorcism. For a couple of years, I worked with the earth-bound dead in my area. I would call them in and summon the God Osiris or Anubis to help them move on. It is not work I would recommend because it is depressing.

In such experiments, I never noticed a trapped soul in an earth-bound, dead shell, so it is unlikely such an important spiritual being is trapped in matter.

Cult of the dead

The cult of dead relatives, present in all ancient cultures, is a way of nourishing the dead with energy. Because of their blood connection to the living, they have a greater affinity and can more easily receive the cult’s benefits, though this is not limited to the genetic link.

Many processes in their living descendants depend on dead ancestors, to the point that the line between a good and a bad life can turn on this. Likewise, for magic practitioners, their invisible presence can catalyse the success of spiritual work.

Proper treatment of them and respect are crucial. I mention this because there is a person who wrote a book where he claimed his ancestors gave him the lottery numbers, and if they got it wrong, he refused to give them offerings (effectively torturing them). However, ancestors are shells of the dead and can only provide information they knew while alive.

As previously noted, after death, the sphere of sensation is drawn on the astral, often forming a hive mind of ancestors that can be approached as a collective. That group can restrain a difficult member and limit trouble. A troublesome aunt might find themselves overruled by hundreds of years of other ancestors who might agree with you.

Because this ancestral hive mind is flexible with people slowly fading into the astral, you will often find that one or two of them act as spokespeople for the others. These are often the strongest personalities in the family tree, and you will often have a soft spot for them. Grandparents often end up being the strongest spokespeople.

There are rare cases where a soul returns to reconnect with one of their former spheres of sensation, acting as a guide for a modern family member. When this happens, the person might believe that they are talking to a famous person from history, and it turns out that they are incredibly distantly related to.

What if you don’t have any ancestors?

A special case is that of people who, having been adopted in early childhood, do not know who their biological parents are. In this case, something unusual occurs; they become linked to the dead of both branches, that is, their genetic ancestors, from whom they have often only obtained their bodies, and to the ancestors of their adoptive parents, from whom they have received their emotional and intellectual life. While not knowing their biological parents may seem complicated to them, their body is the only necessary link, so they can care for them even without knowing their names, but with the protection of the ancestors of their adoptive lineage.

In other cases, you can make your own ancestors. There’s a later Confucian tradition which says a person who does not know their ancestors should take the wise and virtuous of the past as their ancestors. This was like a Roman idea, in which some families believed their ancestors were Gods. Julius Caesar’s family, for example, considered themselves descended from Venus.

Work with the dead has always been structured and maintained. Done properly, it can stabilise a family line and support the living, but it is not a casual practice and demands commitment.

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