Would you bury your own grimoire for someone to summon you in a thousand years?

[kvzlx]

This came to me at the mountain this morning, so forgive the rambling. Bear with me.

A lot of the spirits we work with were once people or gods. Astaroth is Astarte. A good number of the Goetic kings and dukes read like euhemerized rulers or demoted pagan deities, remembered now as little more than a name, a seal and an office. Somebody wrote the name down, drew the sigil, said what the spirit grants, and centuries later here we are calling it. That is the whole machinery: a name, a seal, an office, and a rite to open the door.

So here is the thought. A practitioner spends a lifetime on their own grimoire, their real notes, their own results. What if, near the end, they buried it. Not to hide it, but to plant it. You add your own name. You draw your own seal. You state plainly what you will grant. You write the rite for how to call you. And you leave it in the ground for whatever inhabits the earth in a few hundred or a few thousand years to dig up. You would have made a summonable spirit out of yourself.

The pieces are all old if you go to the sources. Grimoires were buried and walled up for real; the Cyprianus and Black Book traditions live on exactly that fear of a text found by the wrong hands. The Egyptians were blunt about it: while your name is still spoken you are not fully dead, and erasing a name was the real death, which is why the Book of the Dead reads like instructions for persisting and being called. Necromancy is just the near end of the same idea. Deep time is the only new part, and even that we already do, we leave warnings on nuclear sites for people who will not share our language.

I want to be honest: I have not found this exact practice named in any old text, so the packaging is mine. But every thread it is woven from is documented.

So I will put it to you. Would you do it? Would you bury your personal grimoire, with your name and your seal and a way to call you, for some future finder? Or does being summoned by a stranger in a thousand years unsettle you more than death itself? And if you have ever met a spirit you suspected was once just a person who pulled this off, I would love to hear it.

 

[Faria]

It was obvious early in my work that it wasn't going to hit the right audience in my lifetime, so I've long planned for the deep future and genuinely see that as where it will eventually land. I believe that about 75 years after my death, many of the large North American population centers will be uninhabited. Planning for my work to emerge long after that, I have deposited a little acrylic tablet with a spell to summon me for instructions in places where I travel, concealed with something valuable (gold and rubies) to make the future searches worth the effort. Will it work? Who knows. Is it a good idea? Maybe? But it's cool, and I can, so it's there. There's a guide to finding them written in my incomplete personal grimoire, pictures and so on from wherever they are, so people will have fun with that in the future and I enjoy that prospect.

 

[kvzlx]

It was obvious early in my work that it wasn't going to hit the right audience in my lifetime, so I've long planned for the deep future and genuinely see that as where it will eventually land. I believe that about 75 years after my death, many of the large North American population centers will be uninhabited. Planning for my work to emerge long after that, I have deposited a little acrylic tablet with a spell to summon me for instructions in places where I travel, concealed with something valuable (gold and rubies) to make the future searches worth the effort. Will it work? Who knows. Is it a good idea? Maybe? But it's cool, and I can, so it's there. There's a guide to finding them written in my incomplete personal grimoire, pictures and so on from wherever they are, so people will have fun with that in the future and I enjoy that prospect.

Faria, this is pretty much what I was going on about up at the mountain, just from the other side. We talk about Astarte turning into Astaroth as if it simply happened to her over centuries. You're doing it on purpose, leaving a door with your name on it for whoever comes later. I love the gold and rubies too. Nobody goes digging for a spell, but people will dig for treasure, and the spell gets found along with it.

I spend a lot of time with old manuscripts, and what always hits me is how little say the original author ends up having. The texts we work from are copies of copies, with names bent, sections moved around and whole chapters credited to Solomon that he never saw. So a guide in an unfinished personal grimoire, some photos and a few tablets spread across different places honestly sounds a lot like how the old material actually survived. Whoever finds one of your tablets will fill the gaps with their own world, and whatever answers them will probably be shaped in part by what they bring to it. I don't mean that as a knock on your idea. I think that's just how a spirit's reputation gets built.

Will it work? I don't know either, and I appreciate that you don't claim to. I'd still rather someone plant something like that than not.

When you wrote the summoning, did you set any terms for the person calling you, like something they have to offer or a way to know it's really you answering? Or did you leave that open for them to work out?

 

[Faria]

When you wrote the summoning, did you set any terms for the person calling you, like something they have to offer or a way to know it's really you answering?

Originally the idea was to get buried on private land, have disciples dig me up after a bit and preserve my skull in bronze like John the Baptist, then use that for their rituals. I wanted to be summoned specifically for evil, to be the dark power behind a cult of demoniacs hell-bent of destroying all other magic, the Nemesis Magus. The spirit Gaap convinced me that might not be the best idea, so here we are. Lots of little piles of loot rather than one big cache. There's just no way I would ever find a use for my massive hoard of gems and I'm not interested in calibrated Ebay lots so instead your great grandkids get to play Indiana Jones. It has a lot more to do with inspiring people to seek out magic in daring ways than trying to become Acererak the Demilich, so even if I ultimately get nothing out of it, the ide of future generations even thinking about it makes me happy.