Communing with spirits, of whatever variety, brings up a lot of demons to negotiate; inner and outer. In Western cultures, admitting to seeing and communicating with something many can’t see will bring up the spot fires of eccentricity or madness. And not just from those now referred to as ‘Muggles’. I have found myself having to leave groups because some people within them could not let go of the madness label when confronted with my confessions. For a long time I battled with it myself. My earliest writings about my experiences I never dated so I could pretend it was fiction if asked. Until I met someone who also saw and communed with spirits (and was happy to talk about it) I didn’t know what to think.
My dance with fire is a very personal one, and yet something I know that a lot of other people do. I don’t choose the spirits that come to me. I don’t choose their gender. I don’t choose their ethnicity. I don’t choose their colour. I don’t choose their type. They are just there and we either connect or we don’t. I commune a lot with spirits of Egyptian deities. One of them told me once that my soul was Egyptian. I commune with spirits of the Fae Folk. I was told by one I trust that our bloodlines had crossed at some point in the past. I commune with other spirits as well, those tied to my blood whether they be ancestral spirits or other kinds. One of them is Horned. And I commune with spirits of this land; with Indigenous spirits.
There is a lot of talk about the dangers of cultural appropriation. That unless there is some kind of ancestral link to spirits or deities then you should not work with them. Especially if they belong to a living practice and heritage. There is a lot of guilt mixed into this. People not wanting to take yet more from a people who have had too much taken already. People not wanting to give away something they have had to struggle to hold onto. I don’t know where I stand with this. Should I tell the spirits that I’m working with that I can’t work with them because I’m white? That would be rude, seeing as how they want to work with me. And yet many of the arguments I hear make sense with regard to the living.
Actually working with spirit is something I initially found hard to do. Not the engaging part, but the treating them as if they are living breathing people. My background, television, movies, books, all told me that I was to command the spirit and the spirit was to obey. If I asked a spirit its name it had to tell me. In reality, I found this to not be so. Spirits have agendas; they can lie; their concept of time, of ethics and morals, of purpose tends to be very different from mine; they speak in riddles or images or concepts that often loses something in translation. They require work. Some are easy to like and become part of me. Some are hard work and harder to shift, and yet somehow that’s fine. Some are hard to classify or define and most of the time they are around it’s difficult to know how to take them.
Grandfather is a spirit of an Indigenous Man, an Elder, an Aborigine. He tries to teach me things; to sing (but I can’t pronounce the words the way he can and it just comes out wrong), to make rhythms (only I don’t have the ear for them and struggle to get them right); to understand the land around me and everything that’s in it. I’m trying to work through that one. I understand now that when I share food with him and he gives it back to me in a different form that I need to pay attention to what I’m eating because there is lore there for me to learn. At the Winter Solstice he gave me a mix of different wattle seeds and the juice of a red berry he said came from a fire tree (because when it was in flower it looked like it was on fire). The mixture was like a cake and was to warm and waken the fire within me. Sometimes when I am with him and look down, my skin is dark like his. And sometimes it’s just my normal colour.
Recently I took a trip interstate and had a profound experience with the Indigenous spirits of the land there. Until then I hadn’t realised how asleep the land I usually work with is. When I looked around I saw the spirits of many Indigenous people around me. I had intense physical reactions to specific places; some good and some bad. There was a very special river that appeared to me like a huge white serpent. Spirits of an Indigenous man with a spear walked me around one of the places and began explaining some things to me. Then I seemed to become wrapped in a web and a spirit spider came to me. The land felt like home yet to my knowledge I’d never been there before. When I left I cried because it hurt to leave.
Coming back to Grandfather he took me to a place that I recognised because it was close to where I was born and grew up. It was a time from the past. There was a river and a cave. In the mouth of the cave was a young woman, who was frightened. A European looking man in olden day clothes forced her into the cave and began attacking her. Then a baby cried. He heard it, found the baby and smashed its head against the stone wall of the cave. Then continued with the attack. He strangled her. After he had finished. I was in shock from seeing that. Experiencing it. Yet it wasn’t over. In the back of the cave was an young Indigenous boy, about five or six maybe, or perhaps a little older. The man waited just outside the cave and the boy seemed to join him. Before he left the cave the boy painted three hand prints on the cave wall; two red and one yellow. I don’t know why Grandfather showed me that, but I know it was important. Since then, the boy has also started to appear. He told me his name. From what I understand, before I can learn certain kinds of knowledge I need to go through something very specific and traditional. I’m not sure how I feel about that. And yet there is an expectation of building community with these spirits that is leading towards it.
At the beginning, I was cleansing the land in a way that my ancestors had traditionally cleansed their land, according to a special spirit I work with. I did this with the help of Fae spirits that I work with. It was a very Western thing. Then the karmic healing work started and Grandfather began sharing things with me. Now I feel like I’m being drawn into something that’s quite different and it’s like dancing with fire. Beautiful, and warm, but a distinct danger that if I’m not careful I’m going to get burned. And the fire is very hot. Fire that destroys; fire that creates; fire that watches.
Green and Grey 