Calling the Dead on All Hallow’s Eve

At this time of year, the air is cooling, the garden beds have been put to rest, cider is mulling and apples are transformed into a myriad of treats, whether candied, cobblered or sauced. Crisp autumn leaves fall and dry, skittering across sidewalks and pavements when the winds lift. In the Northeast, the green world is dying and we feel the approach of winter’s arrival. In this time of in-between our connection to the Dead is strongest.

My Ancestor Altar stays up year round as my ancestor work is every day of my life. They walk with me always. My altar lives on top of a bookshelf and holds a photo tree with pictures of my deceased grandparents and great-grandparents. I have a special glass I use to make oblations, liquid offerings, to the ancestors and a candle holder I light to act as a beacon. It is also decorated with pieces of petrified wood and fossils. I add items and take some away during the year but this altar is my working altar.

Samhain night, Halloween, is the time of year that you don’t have to be a sensitive to communicate with the dead. Just as in our world, it would be hard to call your friends without a phone, spirit work is no different. There are tools that help strengthen those connections: names, candles, personal objects, and offerings to entice them. I make another altar specifically for this holiday, decorated with items appropriate to the season, like petrified wood, bones, tree bark (I’m partial to birch), little pumpkins, festive candles, and autumn leaves. It pulls the energy of the outdoors inside my dwelling for those nights when the idea of being indoors feels stifling. It’s a means of opening our personal space; the spirit world does not take much notice of walls, but we do.

This time of year prompts many people to remember the loved ones no longer with them. The visual loss of leaves on the trees stirs an introspection from deep within and we emotionally feel each person we have known who no longer breathes reflected in the dying of the natural world around us. I refer to them as my Beloved Dead, and it is specifically this group I reach out to communicate with on Halloween. I place photos of them on my altar, though I do not include photos of anyone living, for superstitious reasons. I use post-its to cover the images of the living when I have no other photos, so as not to get them confused with the dead.

I have personal items that were passed down to me after loved ones died, as well as items gifted to me by them that I add to my altar. I strengthen the connection with objects the spirits are familiar with and might have a lingering attachment to. It also helps me focus my intent more strongly. I have a glass ring that my Great-Grandma Elsie gifted me when she began her decline into Alzheimer’s that I place on the altar every year. I also put out our cat Luna’s food bowl, with her collar and her favorite patchwork mouse toy, into which I’ll sprinkle some of her favored catnip treats, in hopes that she too will return for the night.

On Halloween, when the veil between worlds is thin, light a candle on the altar and call in your Beloved Dead by name. Invite them into your home. Pour a drink for them. I leave a glass of water for the wandering spirits to quench their thirst, an emotional memory from their living years. I also pour a cup of Blackberry Tea for Elsie, a cup of coffee for my Grandpa, and a shot of rum for my more spirited ancestors, as a treat. Our memories are made up of sights, sounds, tastes and smells. Our spirits can still access them even as the ability to touch fades.

Allow yourself to sit in the silence of the evening, interspersed with the giggling hordes of lively trick-or-treaters. Be open to the impressions that come from the balancing energies of life and death. Once the doorbell has stopped ringing, attend to your altar. If you sense that you are not alone, speak gently to the room about you.

This night is the time to say the things you need to say to those who are no longer physically with you. It’s important for our own lives, for the ones we live here in the world, that we not feel the weight of things left unsaid holding us back from moving forward from our grief. Just because a loved one dies, doesn’t mean we are silenced. This night is also the perfect time to honor those who came before you, to remember them and to keep their memories alive for your children and grandchildren. It’s the perfect night to reminisce and share some of your favorite stories of those who are gone. What is remembered lives.

I light a candle for my Beloved Dead, calling in their names individually, inviting them to my home for a visit. And then I put out tea lights, one for each person I know who passed since last Halloween. This year, I have five spirits to light candles for, five souls who have passed within the last twelve months, five Newly Dead. I will ask nothing of them but speak prayers for them to be at peace, and to reassure them that those left behind will be all right.

As part of my larger work, I will unroll the names of ancestors and dead I have gathered from the multiple shrines I’ve tended over the last year. I will read each one aloud and burn them in a Samhain fire, sending smoke out into the thinning veil, sending prayers from the living who remember them still. To Those Who Have Gone Before, be at peace and travel well. Until we meet again. Ase.

Crafting Spirit Stones

Early in my practice, I relied heavily on the use of tools to connect with the larger natural world. Without them I wouldn’t have evolved such a deep understanding of the interconnected web. When I was learning how to trust my intuition, I used divination as a means to verify what I thought I was sensing. In the pagan world, we often use divination as a means of interacting with the spirit world to help clarify events and situations.

In our daily lives, it’s difficult to be in a situation and see it clearly, so we seek advice from friends or mentors to help us gauge how best to proceed. When we’re asking for guidance on the human plane, the best place to look for it is spirit world. For me it’s almost a therapeutic interaction. In Psychology, Cognitive Touch Therapy is used to help your body ferret out truths your mind is trying to keep you from. Your muscles betray your subconscious lies. Just like that, divination helps me tap into my intuitive body and see more clearly things I already know.

I am not psychic, not at all. But I have a high-sensitivity to the spirit world, which is why I have the interactions with ghosts that I have. The spirit world is active around us all the time and the more closely you vibrate in accord with the natural world, the more you will see some of what remains invisible to others. Divination acts like a translation tool between the energies you tap into and our own human language.

No one can say for certain if the energy used for divination comes from an external spirit world alive around us or whether it’s from an internal ancient knowledge that lives within our bloodstream. I believe it’s both. We humans are the conduits between earth and sky, the vessel that meets within and without. In my practice, magic and science are close relatives. I see divining as a gift of guidance, accessible when our intuition is finely tuned to the natural world.

I spent years looking into and studying different forms of divination: tarot, runes, ogham, scrying, obi, palmistry, reading tea leaves. The more help the divination tool used to speak to me, with the use of elaborate visuals or concrete definitions, the more unsure I was as to what I was intuiting versus what I was interpreting, so it was clear that for me, a simple casting method would work best. I began to understand that the way I was intuitively communicating with the spirit world was not represented well enough with any divining medium I learned. The spirit world I interact with and the work I do is not bound to a specific culture. My own ancestral lineage spans multiple cultures. I needed something with both an ancient history and a broad scope. I had to find my own language.

I found myself drawn to the form of casting lots. Many cultures throw bones as divination. It was a simple enough concept and memories of childhood games of Yahtzee made it an enticing one. As far as connecting to spirit, stone pulls me in best and helps me reach that vibration. To me stones are the bones of the earth, the layer where the ancestors are buried. It is that layer within and without I am trying to contact so I looked to throwing stones instead.

I chose to throw seven, as it is a magical number for me and one that resonates with my ancestor work. One stone would represent the intention, situation or question. Then I chose six stones, three of one kind and three of another, two sides of a coin. I used snowflake obsidian for my intention stone, which I used for meditations often, and snow quartz and black obsidian as the six vibration stones.

You can’t just get stones and cast them and expect answers. You have to create a relationship with them first. I spent a moon cycle with the snowflake obsidian, wearing it in trance as a means of harmonizing it to my frequency. I spent a moon cycle with the snow quartz, charging them with clarity, with yes, with light and harmony. I spent a moon cycle with the obsidian and charged them with confusion, mystery, chaos and caution. Then I spent one last moon cycle charging them with the energy of web and interconnectedness, dedicating them to my ancestors. I made them all equal parts of importance in a hive mind.

When I cast them, I ask yes or no questions. I chose to interpret them in a common way, similar to obi (divination with coconut or cowrie shells). The closer my question stone is to more white stones, the more favorable/true/positive the answer. The closer my question stone is to more black stones, the more unfavorable/false/unknown the answer, with all the myriad of uncertainty in between. It suits me and allows me to trust myself.

I make petitions of my ancestors, when I need guidance from them, when I need them to send energy to a specific situation, and I use the stones to speak to them. What do they need from me? What do they ask of me? Am I doing enough to honor them? Do they hear me when I can’t hear them? Just like my candle is the lighthouse I burn to call on them, the stones have become the medium I use to hear from them. It works for me, part of the path I have built for myself. It’s important to me that everyone finds their own way to meet and engage with spirit. It is the experience of working on your spirituality that builds trust within yourself, so that you may learn to trust in what you are experiencing.