Maža nime, ja tire lömažele

After succumbing to a fever of some sort in 1705, Irish woman Margorie McCall was hastily buried to prevent the spread of whatever had done her in. Margorie was buried with a valuable ring, which her husband had been unable to remove due to swelling. This made her an even better target for body snatchers, who could cash in on both the corpse and the ring.

The evening after Margorie was buried, before the soil had even settled, the grave-robbers showed up and started digging. Unable to pry the ring off the finger, they decided to cut the finger off. As soon as blood was drawn, Margorie awoke from her coma, sat straight up and screamed.

The fate of the grave-robbers remains unknown. One story says the men dropped dead on the spot, while another claims they fled and never returned to their chosen profession.

Margorie climbed out of the hole and made her way back to her home.

Her husband John, a doctor, was at home with the children when he heard a knock at the door. He told the children, “If your mother were still alive, I’d swear that was her knock.”

When he opened the door to find his wife standing there, dressed in her burial clothes, blood dripping from her finger but very much alive, he dropped dead to the floor. He was buried in the plot Margorie had vacated.

The black knight.

G. Max, from Gedichte (Poems), by Ludwig Uhland, Stuttgart, circa 1845 (?).

Zion National Park, Utah, USA

So today pulling into Stop and Shop, this lady cut me off and nearly drove into me, and then, when I tried to pass her, she swung to the right and nearly hit me again, and then flipped me off.

So somebody is having a bad day and taking it out on me. That’s fine. It’s harmless, and I don’t know what’s going on in this woman’s life. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt she’s not just a piece of shit and is just having a bad day.

But then I park and she follows me, and gets out of the car and starts swearing at me and getting in my face.

Now I go from “indifferent” to “I’m gonna fuck with this woman’s head.” Now I would say I’m a gentleman of size, and in all black and bemohawked I probably look spookier than I actually am, so props to this lady for getting in my face. Now of course I’m not going to hit her, or even threaten violence. That’s shitty. Nobody should get threatened with violence.

Instead, I take a step back, narrowing my eyes like I’m studying her face really closely, and then I touch one of the several piece of “occulty” jewelry I’m wearing (none of which, by the way, are magicked in any way at all). Then I mumble some nonsense under my breath, and then make the fig gesture and the horns at her.

She stops, wide-eyed.

“WHAT THE HELL DID YOU JUST DO TO ME?”

I chuckled, and shake my head. “Nothing at all.” I say in a not-terrible convincing voice. “But every time something bad happens to you today, you’re gonna be thinking of me.”

Hi there lovely! That sounds tough. We have two things to say to you about all this. 

1. Here’s your unpopular opinion for the day:

We think the natural born witches thing is obnoxious nonsense. 

We’ve talked about this several times before but here’s the clifnotes: “Witch” is a title that only indicates that you’re practicing witchcraft. It doesn’t indicate bloodline, baptism, or some sort of punch card situation. If you’re born a baby like everyone else, you’re not born practicing, so you’re not a natural born witch. Because that’s not a thing.

I do believe that some people are born with different spiritual sensitivities or inclinations, but  that does not mean they are born witches. I have a friend who has been sensitive to entities her whole life, but she’s not a witch because she doesn’t practice witchcraft or identify as such. 

The Dark Hedges, Northern Ireland

Could the Funeral of the Future Help Heal the Environment?

The lives of humans leave indelible marks on the environments they choose to call home. But you might be surprised at how much environmental damage a person can do after they’re dead.

For 48.7 percent of the about 2.6 million who died in the U.S. in 2013 alone, here’s how the average death went down: The person who passed away passed into the hands of a mortician at one of about 19,000 funeral homes. Their body was washed, disinfected, massaged and posed, and embalming fluid was pumped into their veins. They were gussied up with makeup, clothing and hair products and placed in a metal casket.

After the service, the body was transported to a cemetery in a hearse or other vehicle. The family bid them goodbye and the casket was lowered into a grave dug by a backhoe and several workers with shovels. There, the casket rested in a liner structure designed to keep the grave from collapsing inwards: either a concrete box within the grave or a plastic, metal or concrete structure with no bottom. The grave was sealed up, leaving time and anaerobic degradation to do their thing.

“If people think they’re in a cemetery, we’ve screwed up,” says Kimberley Campbell who helps manage Ramsey Creek Preserve in Westminster, South Carolina. Ramsey Creek is known as the nation’s first “green cemetery,” but Campbell says it’s more than that. “The whole process of modern death seems to deny decomposition and prevent people from returning to the earth,” she says.

To help the dead get as close to the land as possible, her team facilitates burials that look more like those of 1816 than 2016. Graves are dug by hand—not a bulldozer in sight. Bodies are preserved with dry ice and lowered directly into the ground in simple boxes or plain shrouds. This cemetery doesn’t have traditional headstones or lawnmowers, and it’s hard to tell where the graves are—rough-hewn stones serve as the only markers. Proceeds from the funerals go towards restoring the land and funding local nonprofits.

For Campbell, green burials give the dead a chance to literally create life as they mingle with the earth in which they are buried, giving microbes, plants and insects fertile soil in which to flourish. “How do you want your death to impact the world around you?” she asks. “Something good can come from your death.”

If someone tells you that graveyard dirt is a euphemism for ground mullein or patchouli, don’t listen. When it comes to graveyard dirt, those people don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.

Graveyard dirt is, quite simply, dirt from a graveyard. No mystical herbal mixtures or what have you. It’s dirt. More specifically, it’s dirt from the graveyard at large rather than a certain grave.

Grave dirt is the dirt from a particular grave, used to hire that specific spirit.

Graveyard dust, though the term is often used interchangeably with graveyard dirt, isn’t the same thing. It refers to the fine particles that collect on the headstones and can be brushed off into a small bottle.

Goofer dust, which is also improperly used to refer to graveyard dirt, is something different altogether. However, graveyard dirt is a component of goofer dust.

So let’s review.

Graveyard Dirt: dirt from a graveyard

Grave Dirt: dirt from a specific grave

Graveyard Dust: dust and particulates from headstones

Goofer Dust: a specific mixture which includes graveyard dirt

Hello, and of course! However, please keep in mind that I’m just one person, and that the views and interpretations in this post are mine alone. I encourage you to speak with other death workers to glean their perspectives as well.

That said, “death work,” as its name suggests, pertains to any activity related to death or dying that possesses a strong religious and/or spiritual aspect. Lots of death-oriented activities do not always carry this connotation, such as "vulture culture,” hospice work, death midwifery, being a funeral director, etc. However, they can and do fall under the category of “death work” if they are done for the religious and/or spiritual benefit of the practitioner or the persons receiving the service(s). An animist who tenderly cares for animal bones and skins to honor the spirit of the deceased creature could be a death worker. A priest who councils people at the ends of their lives could be a death worker. A licensed mortician could be one, and so can any student.

Some death workers venerate their ancestors at shrines in their homes, or maybe they go to their families’ cemeteries and tidy the graves. Some might honor the fallen warriors of their country by regularly visiting war memorials and leaving flowers. Some might be spirit-workers and commune with the deceased that way, while others might care for the remains of animals. Some death workers might work in hospice or provide home funeral services. Some are advocates, hoping to change the way their cultures approach death and dying. Some might believe in One True God; others might believe in many.

On a personal level, I consider myself a “death worker” because that’s what my god has asked me to be. I focus on ancestor veneration and the alternative death movement (which encompasses death acceptance, home funerals, and green burials). Death work, to me, is intensely spiritual and the strongest way for me to connect with the divine. The journey thus far has been incredibly educational, and it has made me come to terms with the fact that every one of us will die. That notion is scary for a lot of people, but I think an integral part of being a death worker involves meeting that fear head-on, reconciling with it, accepting it, and inevitably making friends with death.

I am often asked, “what is the best spell for a beginner?”

Here is my comprehensive answer.

The best spells for beginners are:

Spells which have quantifiable results

In addition, good beginner spells…

Are accurately recorded

Are objectively judged

Quantifiable results

This means, spells where you can point to an actual outcome and say, “my spell worked” or, “my spell did not work.” An example of an unquantifiable spell is a luck spell. A lot of ‘lucky’ or 'unlucky’ things happen to us on a regular basis, but how can we really judge that? Will you succumb to confirmation bias and start deciding that every fortuitous happenstance is evidence of your luck spell working? Or if something lucky does happen, how do you know it wasn’t already going to happen in the first place?

Another example of an unquantifiable spell is something that is supposed to stop an event that wasn’t happening anyway. For example, nobody has broken in to my home, ever. In the last 3 years I have placed protections on my home to keep out intruders. Do these protections actually work? I have no way of knowing – because it is “stopping” an event that was never going on.

Quantifiable spells are those which cause something specific to happen that probably was not going to happen on its own, or stop something that is already happening.

For example, a money spell. Either you come across more money (by finding it the street, working more hours, getting a promotion, etc) or you don’t. Finding money in the street and getting a new job are unusual enough occurrences that we can reasonably say, “this wasn’t happenstance, my spell worked.”

Another example is a banishment spell. If someone at your job is bothering you, banish them. If they quit work and leave forever, your spell was a success. If they stay and nothing changes, the spell failed.

Other ideas for quantifiable spells are friend-finding, prosperity (money finding, job finding, reducing bills, reducing debt, holding on to money), banishment of peoples and situations, and emotional and mental spells cast on yourself or others.

Spells should be accurately recorded

So let’s assume that you cast your first spell, and it was a success! But you cast your second spell, and your third, and neither seem to work. What happened? What went wrong? You will have a much easier time telling what happened if you have accurate notes of all of your spellwork.

Maybe the first time you cast a circle, but later you did not. Or perhaps you used a special technique or phrasing or way of raising energy that worked for you. Many who do magic will attest to that 'spell space’, and once you are done casting magic everything within that 'space’ gets blurry and hard to remember. It is not so easy to recall exactly what happened during certain spells, and trust me when I say the smallest thing may be the key to unlocking your puzzle.

To record spells, I make notes of what I plan to do beforehand, then annotate them afterwords with what I actually did.

You can also create a custom form to fill out whenever you do a spell, which could include fields like the date/time, moon phase, day of the week, weather, whether or not a circle was cast, if spirits were called (and who they were), ingredients and tools, chants used, exactly what was said, how the spell was sealed, how the spell was delivered, etc.

Spells should be objectively judged

It is tempting to misjudge the success of spells, either for or against them. Skeptics like to look to other causes, and optimists like to buy in to magic whole-heartedly, without questioning their results.

But the fact of the matter is that spells don’t work just because you really want them to work; spells can fail for lots of reasons.

My way of judging a spell is to ask myself,

A) did the spell do what it was supposed to do?

And B) was it reasonably likely that the results would have happened anyway, without the spell?

I see a lot of half-result spells like, “I did a money spell and found a quarter on the sidewalk!” Or spells where the results don’t match the original intent, like, “I did a spell to make more friends and my BFF stopped talking to me. I guess I am learning who my true friends are after all.” So the first question to ask is, “did the spell do what it was supposed to do?” In the first example, yes – money was found. In the second example, no – the opposite happened. A spell to make more friends should not cause your other friends to stop talking to you.

And then I always ask, was this result likely to happen on its own? I think in our first example, it is reasonably likely to find a quarter on the sidewalk. Magic isn’t necessary to find loose change on the street now and then. Now if you found $20, that is another matter.

An Announcement: The Sacred Bones

I’m happy to finally announce that my secret, personal project is now public: The Sacred Bones. I created this website for two purposes:

As a free educational resource for death workers, especially for beginners.

As a community hub for death workers on the Internet, hosting a Slack chat and a list of other sites and blogs run by death workers.

You can visit the website by going to http://www.thesacredbones.org.

If you like the idea and the information offered, please consider sharing the website with others who might benefit from its contents. Otherwise, thank you for visiting!

Creekside Path Through Dark Foggy Forest