I’m standing in a bit of a crossroads where I know what I want to do and I know what I think I should do and those two things are in contrast with each other. On the one hand, I am being drawn towards building spirits up, making them more whole again, providing sparks back to those who’ve lost theirs, that sort of thing. On the flip side of that I’m also drawn towards then adding some of these who are willing to items to pre-house them before they’re even put up for being sold.
And therein lies the dilemma. Can one both help and then sell the dead even if they’re willing?
The difference between what I have up for sale now in this type of enterprise is that what I have up now are mostly spirits that would be offered up by certain entities or deities for use towards specific things that are generally for beneficial use. There are the corks I have there which are spirits that are not necessarily there willingly. Most are not. A couple are. And while I am American that doesn’t mean I necessarily want to make money any way I possibly can. I still do a lot of work for free for those that I am closer to or who have been brought to me by one of them. I don’t need the money but I would rather have more than less when my goals still aren’t met and require it.
Let me walk through some of what’s been happening lately.
In my search for better quality ancestry money for offerings, since most of it seems a bit generic to me, I’m naturally coming across resources to talk about different types of spirits that would be labeled as ‘hungry ghosts’ by a fair amount of Asia. Sometimes the specifics of what is and isn’t the hungry ghost or how detailed the descriptions are categories, classifications, and all that can vary a bit from here to there. It’s been pretty interesting to read the different versions that people are putting out in English thankfully. And I start to feel that pull that I normally feel when I know my path is going to kind of take a little bit of a turn. And yet I feel that this is only part of it and not all of it – meaning that there are other components that are going to come together to then flavor my practice in some other way in the area of necromancy with hungry ghosts and similar.
My work with Gamagin for the 76 Week Goetia had quite a few conversations about necromancy, separation of spirits, bolstering spirits, and similar. Some of this I had experimented with in the past a little here and there that hasn’t been really substantial or a greatly concerted effort to become really good at it I can do it. I can do a passably, but I’m not an expert in that particular area at all. Yet when he was speaking to me I could tell that this was also a nudge in that there was some part of that would also be part of my pack moving forward some but not all of it.
I’m also reminded that I felt it was really important to not close my little graveyard over here in my side yard, but rather put a link to it that I could take with me and I knew I needed to do that. I just figured it was for general reasons, but I feel that this has something to do with the two. I don’t necessarily know why, but I think I may know where that’s going, too. I literally just had a flash of inspiration where I saw what was going to happen with some of it but not all of it. Clearly there’s a pattern here and it’s beginning to take shape more solidly the closer I get to Hawaii.
Do I think it will all happen in Hawaii? No, I don’t think so. I’m not sure why. It couldn’t have happened here. Maybe it was a timing thing that I don’t know, but what I do know is that this is going to ramp up significantly in Hawaii. Now, the people on Hawaii have a tendency to take a much more solemn and respectful way of preserving the dead in their living lifetime. I don’t know that this will have much to do with any of the spirits there. It may or it may not I don’t know it’s not really up to me in a way. Whatever spirits come, come.
I was reading an article earlier tonight by by a girl whose link I’m going to put in this bottom of this article and she talked about some of the temples in Vietnam that have several thousand spirits attached to them or living there or something like that. I’m not entirely sure, because I only have her account. And it kind of really got me thinking. Of course pulled all these different aspects into shape once again – all being part of the whole and the whole still being not completely whole but a change in direction.
The more it looked at this the more I realized that this actually started this path this this turn started back in Hawaii. There was a ghost in Europe that was kind of harassing the building a friend of mine was living in at the time and so I used that Spirit, bound it, and then I think it was the shade ritual from The Necromancer. I pressed it into service. At the time, if I recall correctly, it was Hel that said that if I was going to do this then I should provide it a path to redeem itself and to try to help heal some of the issues that were happening. It was tormented day in and day out. And here I am getting ready to go back to Hawaii and this topic coming around again and this is the exact same thing that I feel I should be doing.
The dilemma is many fold. Pressing them into service can be problematic if one disagrees with the method. Yet in the temple in Vietnam they were pressed into largely self-cultivation on the other side of the veil in the yin world. They really had to work and had to try to cultivate themselves to be able to be redeemed and then be allowed to reincarnate as some something lesser than a human but able to then continue the work forward. Yet if I look at this it is still bound servitude albeit for a much better purpose in with a more pure intent. Really part of it is protecting the area and people around it, so it is a much much more pure path than what I would have in mind.
The next part is whether or not these sorts of actions would be considered unbecoming of a Taoist. There is the irony that for every wide there’s a black and every black there’s a white. But I’ve never really looked at that as some sort of carte blanche to then just do whatever the hell I want thinking that something else would balance it on the other side of the world somewhere something similar. I don’t necessarily think that everything has to be done with kid gloves and as softly as possible, upsetting as little as possible to get the job done. That just seems unrealistic to me when I look at humans which are essentially still animals just to higher functioning one. This part of the argument seems to keep coming back to me and I think there’s some unresolved things going on in my subconscious that I’m going to have to let be resolved in some way or work themselves out before I can really go forward with that. This topic keeps coming up in my head and that should be an indication that more time thought and reflection will probably needed even if I’m pretty sure of how I’m going to go about the path before me.
The final dilemma is one of profiting off of it. There are a lot of ways in which that one spare from Europe had to do some work for me that I would just make up sometimes because he needed a way to work off this imagined debt. He felt in a safe and supportive manner so he always knew he had someone to come back to a similar safe to come if he chose to. I don’t remember off the top of my head how long it took for him to come to terms with that but I know it was happened a little quicker than I thought it was going to. But I know I can feel spirits in my yard right now who are still hurting a bit or at least are conflicted and need more time and want something similar to that. It’s not necessarily my job to heal them completely or make them even mostly whole. They have to do some of that themselves or the lessons haven’t been learned that may need to have been learned. What am I to do with those? Just keep tossing them into corks that they can then stay in and when they choose to roam around when they don’t? Some of them wouldn’t mind actually being sold to experience different things in different places. I know because I’ve asked them. Yet, I look at the state that they are in and I can’t help but wonder if they’re saying this in a time when they aren’t completely clear even to themselves about what they want. There would have to be a mechanism, a feedback loop, to where if they were in an alternate location then they would be released when the time was right. But then what about the client?
I know that I will be working soon to help bolster those that need bolstering and try to do similar to what I do when I go to graveyards and spirits approach me for help. Here I’m just be doing it over longer period of time to try to help maybe make these spirits more robust and less animalistic over time. It is not going to be a fast process when it’s not perfected. I’m not necessarily concerned with there being danger from some of these spirits, although some of them are absolutely not safe. I’ve not had problems with my family or my pets and I think this is partially due to how I I treat these spirits in general and they sometimes police their own. But if I start working with these spirits that have lost more and more of their humanity, then there may be some instances where there are some issues. And if there are issues like that and they are too far gone to really be human again – what then would be the best thing to do?
And some of those spirits are in corks that I won’t sell. I had realized that argument and that I had already been doing some of that through Hecate and Hel. They’ve provided spirits for those corks that they deemed to be too dangerous to allow to roam around and bothering people and be more safely stored away. That same practice is now coming back around and I’m really wondering what I’m going to do with that area.
So, I know I will be starting to work on those spirits and working in these areas with them. I’m not sure about how fast and how heavy. I’m still doing my daily cultivation for Taoism. I’m doing the 76 Week Goetia. I’m still doing rituals to help people achieve some of their goals that they want that they’ve been struggling with. I’m not sure how much time I will have. I do have the feeling that it’s not going to be something I can just ignore. Is going to come knocking on my door and the more prepared I am for it I think the better off I’ll be which sounds like a really simple thing to say and I guess it really is. But I’ll make sure that when I know you’ll know too and that way you could kind of keep along side what I’m trying to do to gain more knowledge in this area.
Until then, I’ll reflect and practice.
Hungry Ghosts and the Cầu Siêu Ritual
