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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in parting the veil

Posted by on in Studies Blogs
Open The Door Softly

Over the last several years, I have noticed more people expressing that they are encountering a thinning of the veils, openings between the worlds, crossings to and from the neighboring realms, and so on. These reports have been increasing in number and the intervals between reports have been decreasing. Significantly, these encounters and observations are less linked to the times and places that are traditionally thought of as naturally liminal or during the times in the changes of the seasons of the Sun and Moon when these passages are expected. I have read and heard a variety of suggestions to explain this phenomenon, and many of them are reasonable and plausible. I’d like to propose that there is also a slow and steady shift in the Astrological tides that is also one of the root causes of this change. There will be just enough Astrology in this post to offer an explanation without bogging down in a lesson in Astrology.

 

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
[The Books of the Dead] A Prelude

Oh, yeah. The vault. That's where the stuff I can't handle goes. Kerplunk! - Finn, Adventure Time

For those of you who have been with me for long enough, you know I have an unsteady relationship with death.  I'm not one of those Witches who can see spirits, talk to ghosts and visualize the other side of the Veil.  Or really visualize very much at all, though that's improved a little over the years.  I tend to "see" things in words, song lyrics, poetry and emotions.  You can imagine how fun this was as a baby Witch where every exercise ever starts with "Visualize . . ."  My sister, the Divine Miss M, who is not a practicing Witch and not really all that Catholic, has a much more open dialogue with the other side than I do and does not spend her dreams with dead people telling them that they're dead like I do.  She catches omens, portents and prophecy at a rate that is completely annoying given that she's not into the occult.

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  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I've read that the dead sometimes visit us in our dreams. If you haven't already got it in your collection of books you might wan

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Of Gates and Veils

At certain times of the year—especially around Samhain—you hear that “the Veil between the Worlds grows thin.”

This language speaks to something that many of us, I suspect, have ourselves experienced: those times when our Known World becomes an Otherness to us, often with such intensity—perhaps in response to that same Otherness within ourselves—that it seems we could step through and enter into the Interiority of things. In the lore this sense is frequently associated with the temporally and spatially liminal ( <Latin limen, “threshold”), the times and places of the In-Between.

As a quick web-search will demonstrate, the notion of the Veil Between Worlds comes to the Craft from Spiritualism; mediums are said to “part the Veil” to enable contact with the dead now in the Other World. Most likely Spiritualism derives the metaphor of the Veil (probably via Freemasonry) from the Veil of the Jerusalem temple, the curtain (Hebrew parókhet) that separated the “nave” of the temple from the Holy of Holies.

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My joy knew no bounds for I had returned to Isis Temple on the Isle of Philae in Egypt's Nile River. Wondrous feelings of devotion of the goddess Isis flowed through my psyche as I sat on that block of pink granite levitating. I recalled how Isis appeared to me in a New Years eve meditation. She was dark haired, dark skinned and wore the vulture headdress and the solar disks upon her head. She was sober looking and her message to me in that meditation was one of being blessed as I continued my spiritual journey. 

I discovered a few years later that I had been a priestess in the Temple of Isis during the reign of Ramses II around 1300 BCE, and that I used to kneel on that very stone that had not yet been placed back inside the temple! When I recently saw who I was -- Nefertari -- I had just released myself from a prison that I had been held in for 3000 years. The process is called the CCMBA, Complete Conscious Mind Body Alignment technique that Dr. Sharron Forest, of British Columbia had discovered. When I did the CCMBA with Dr. Forest I saw that I had become the wife of Ramses II because I was of royal blood and I was living in the temple as an initiate at the time I was chosen. At some point in my queenly journey I agreed to go through an initiation in the Great Pyramid in a closed sarcophagus. By this time evil priests had taken over the feminine Egyptian sacred sites.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
The Ancestor Vigil

We've been doing the Ancestor Vigil here for about 20 years and every year it is a little different but the intention is always the same. It is not a Samhain ritual, it is not a celebration of Hallowe'en, it does not glom onto the trendy love of Dia de los Muertes. It is a ritual commemoration of the Recent Dead, the Beloved Long Dead and the Mighty Dead.

We set up a central altar, a candle-lighting station and a place to get more info on Mother Grove Goddess Temple and to leave your food donations for the food pantry. People are invited to place mementos on the altar and there is a place in the ritual where we speak the names of the dead that are closest to us.

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Posted by on in Culture Blogs
"Because There is No Veil..."

Several weeks ago, I was honored to help a team of folks create funerary rites for a recently-deceased member of our community. The primary facilitator lives several states away and we spoke over the phone a few days before he was scheduled to arrive for the memorial.

He and I are in different traditions and it was helpful to hear how they do things and to figure out the best way for me to contribute, to help. He told me early in the conversation that the intention for the ritual was to dance the deceased through the Veil--something that might be tricky so far from Samhain. It was to be a joyous celebration with song and poetry and drumming. I offered to help with the drumming (I play a big frame drum) and we chatted a bit longer about the general shape of the rite.

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  • Tess Dawson
    Tess Dawson says #
    "But the Ancestors haven't been apart from us here in years. You have only to sit in a quiet place and you begin to hear their mur

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