Honoring the Ancestors at Samhain

Here are some Halloweeny photos from the Philippine Wiccan Society's celebration of the Great Sabbat. This Samhain, we shared our sacred circle with the spirits of our beloved ancestors: we laughed, cried, communed and partook of the feast with those upon whose shoulders we stand. The light rains during the day made us worry at first, but thankfully the sky made way for the ritual to go through. And like a dramatic ending for the beautiful pagan ceremony, the rain clouds parted to reveal the enchanting full moon wandering in the sign of Aries - the sign of new beginnings. Having had stormy skies throughout the week, I couldn't help but swoon in her glory. Sometimes it's simple occurrences like this that remind me why I have come to believe...

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Necromancy

"You are a tiny little soul carrying around a corpse."-- Epictetus "The Fifty-fourth Spirit is called Murmur...his office is to constrain deceased souls to come before the exorcist to answer those questions which he may wish to put to them..." -- The Goetia I notice that even among the local Pagan folk, communication with the dead or necromancy is often categorized into the realms of the paranormal and rarely regarded as a form of spiritual practice. But making contact with human spirits, especially one's ancestors, has always been an instrinsic part of many pagan and shamanic traditions throughout history. Our modern culture gives it more bad rep that it deserves due to its association with death, but death - as with all other universal...

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Digital Diet

The Di-di Sigil (use as Facebook profile photo): You see two "D"s placed against each other depicting an hour glass containing your lifeblood - slowly, constantly, inevitably trickling down. What could have been real moments of life, love, beauty and bliss are spent instead on cheap amusements of pixels and bandwith. Stop now, and smell the roses. Log off and live truly. Kilovalo mirare utu'via...

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Hermetic Correspondences of the Minor Arcana

The school of Hermeticism sees the tarot as more than just a divination tool: for the magus, it is also a complete and complex model of human consciousness. Man being a mirror image of the cosmos, the tarot can also be seen as a metaphysical map of the Universe. To learn the tarot is to learn the processes and structure of the manifest and unmanifest Universe. The tables below summarize the tarot attributions given in the Golden Dawn's Book T and Aleister Crowley's Liber LXXVIII. It would be too lengthy to discuss the meaning of the correspondences here so it would just be well to read the books just mentioned. Whether one uses the tarot for divination, meditation, or magic, these books can provide valuable insight and deeper meaning of the...

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