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.

 

[beardedeldridge]

It would be awesome if more practitioners did similar. Go (a bit) John Dee style, leave the grimoire in a hidden compartment of an expensive antique desk with instructions to find your skull and the rest of your works at an undisclosed location. Have the cache buried on some private land you owned which would hopefully lead someone to purchase and excavate the area.

-Eld

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:18 PM

Oh to answer the actual questions:

Yes,
Yes,
No,
Unfortunately not.

 

[kvzlx]

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.

Faria, "the Nemesis Magus" made me laugh, but it fits what I was chewing on up the mountain. That's how a person becomes a spirit people keep calling on: a bronze skull, a cult, a few centuries of retelling, and someday you get filed next to Astaroth with nobody knowing there was a guy with a gem hoard behind it. Glad Gaap talked you down. In the Goetia he teaches philosophy and the liberal sciences, so him steering a magician toward a wiser version of his own legacy sounds right.

I get the pull more than I let on. I half joke with my partner that when I die she should bury me up on the mountain, and whenever she needs me she can come up, smoke a tabaco, and I'll be there. Your scattered loot is that same instinct on a longer clock. One big cache is a tomb, someone opens it and the story ends. Little piles make a trail, and trails keep people walking.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:36 PM

It would be awesome if more practitioners did similar. Go (a bit) John Dee style, leave the grimoire in a hidden compartment of an expensive antique desk with instructions to find your skull and the rest of your works at an undisclosed location. Have the cache buried on some private land you owned which would hopefully lead someone to purchase and excavate the area.

-Eld

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:18 PM

Oh to answer the actual questions:

Yes,
Yes,
No,
Unfortunately not.

the Dee comparison works better than you'd think, because that's roughly how part of his material actually survived. There was a chest with a secret drawer, a couple found papers in it years after they bought it, and some of the pages were reportedly used to line pie dishes before Ashmole got hold of what was left. So the plan works. It also shows how close it came to ending up in someone's kitchen.

If anyone actually does this, I'd add one thing: label the layers. A lot of our trouble with the old texts comes from nobody marking what was copied from an older source, what the copyist added, and what was just someone's personal experience. Whoever digs up your cache in two hundred years won't know either unless you tell them. In my own notes with Bune I try to keep those apart on the page: what comes from the Goetia, what's modern (the enn, for example), what's just my own devotional side like the offerings, and what I think I experienced. Right now that last part mostly says "still waiting, nothing I'd count yet." I think that belongs in the record too, maybe more than the successes.

Faria's bronze skull is on another level though. If you did leave a cache like that, would you write out how to work with it, or leave it bare and trust whoever finds it to work it out?

 

[Faria]

Faria, "the Nemesis Magus" made me laugh,

This is a term borrowed from Carroll. He spoke about three types of Magus. The Apotheosis is the one you want to be, the model of success. The Nemesis is the one who forces you to do better by being your enemy in a literal sense, and you grow by defeating them. The Hierophant is the false magus who teaches by teaching rather than the others who don't teach but just do.

That's how a person becomes a spirit people keep calling on: a bronze skull, a cult, a few centuries of retelling, and someday you get filed next to Astaroth with nobody knowing there was a guy with a gem hoard behind it.

I think this accounts for the Western obsession with Dracula. There are also people like the king of Lanka, or Balaam, whose legends got mixed in with mythology and they appear as Volac, Ronove, and Balaam in the demon list.

If you did leave a cache like that, would you write out how to work with it, or leave it bare and trust whoever finds it to work it out?

Well hopefully they can read English. As Cixin Liu hilariously said, if a highly advanced and technological society wants to write out records that will last forever, just about the only way to do that is to carve them into rocks. We have fossils that are billions of years old but everything else eventually breaks down.

 

[kvzlx]

This is a term borrowed from Carroll. He spoke about three types of Magus. The Apotheosis is the one you want to be, the model of success. The Nemesis is the one who forces you to do better by being your enemy in a literal sense, and you grow by defeating them. The Hierophant is the false magus who teaches by teaching rather than the others who don't teach but just do.


I think this accounts for the Western obsession with Dracula. There are also people like the king of Lanka, or Balaam, whose legends got mixed in with mythology and they appear as Volac, Ronove, and Balaam in the demon list.


Well hopefully they can read English. As Cixin Liu hilariously said, if a highly advanced and technological society wants to write out records that will last forever, just about the only way to do that is to carve them into rocks. We have fossils that are billions of years old but everything else eventually breaks down.

Thanks for unpacking that, I didn't know the Carroll reference and the three types make a lot of sense to me. Dracula as the Nemesis fits really well. People don't keep telling that story because they want to become him, they keep telling it because they need something to push against. And I laughed at the Hierophant being the one who "teaches by teaching." Half the grimoire tradition might belong in that slot: compilers copying from compilers, each one adding a layer and swearing it's ancient.

On Balaam, Volac and Ronove, I'm honestly curious where you're drawing that from. When I go through the manuscripts myself I can see names drifting and spellings shifting from copy to copy. But I haven't found anything in the texts that ties them back to the king of Lanka or to the Balaam of Numbers. I'm not saying the link isn't there. It could easily be one of those things that feels true in practice before anyone can trace it on paper, and plenty of my own work lives in that space. I just try to keep what I can point to in a manuscript apart from what I've come to through working with them, so I don't mix the two up later.

The Cixin Liu line hit home. I drew Bune's seal by hand in ink on plain paper, and while I was doing it I kept thinking how little it would take to lose it: some rain, a candle knocked over. And yet these seals made it through centuries on paper, just because people kept copying them. They were never carved in stone. Maybe that's the real way something lasts in this tradition: people keep coming back and redrawing it.

 

[Faria]

On Balaam, Volac and Ronove, I'm honestly curious where you're drawing that from.

As I've mentioned before, my general theory of Goetia is that people in the late medieval to early modern era went on a scavenger hunt among the available literature in search of demons. Anything that connected to Bible events or uncomfortable doctrines in Christianity was a candidate for inclusion, but also pagan deities who seemed connected enough to what Westerners were doing also merited a place in the list. So you have gods of Egypt or the Middle East, those of India and Persia, Africa, and some Nordic or Celtic. It might have been more comprehensive or in-depth, but instead it gives us a sample of what was available on the shelves back then.

So when the person compiling the list went over the Bible looking for its supernatural villains, someone like Balaam is a good candidate. He appears in a lot of spinoff literature also, from Judaism and Islam, with extra stories that add to his legend. Spirits 49, 50, and 51 are all taken right out of the Bible. Crokel is not a word, but Malak-El is, and they look strikingly similar in Hebrew. The same for Furcas (Balak), and Balaam is just Balaam Son of Beor of the Old Testament, the guy who came up with the "kill all the Hebrew babies" concept in Exodus, whose sons turned sticks into snakes. He is considered "Prophet to the Gentiles" and his story connects to the very idea of magic and how people approach it, so he's a major figure in the list.

Ronove is called Ravana in India, a rakshasa whose tale runs parallel to that of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Like the tale of the tower, his story is one in which those at the top do not share values with those in their labor force, and it is a story connected to languages and servants, the domains of the spirit. He is more monster than man, although revered in Sri Lanka where you will find the ruins of his fortress, called the Sigiriya whose distinctive dragon-footed stairway is shown in the spirit seal.

Volac is better known as Dracula, prince of Wallachia which is where you get the spirit's name. The famous Romanian leader, at least according to legend, had people bury invading Turks under mountains of rubble dislodged from peaks over the passes. The treasures of the Turks would be discerned by looking for phosphorescence on the site of the decomposing bodies buried below the rubble. The spirit seal is a cross on top of a monster-face, arranged in the same way as the emblem of the Order of the Dragon to which Vlad Tepes belonged. It has been suggested to me that "Veles" is a known snake deity of the underworld from roughly that same region, but it is my belief that Weyer was drawing from fairly recent folklore rather than any actual ethnographic study of Slavic paganism.

 

[ewiz]

I've had this idea spinning around for a number of years now, and I'm happy to see I'm not the only one. It isn't much different from how a saint is born, with the prayers for their intercession and subsequent miracles, and I see this as a path to a sort of immortality that is definitely worth exploring. Short of devising a personal seal, which I use to empower my own work, I haven't planned this out very far. Without having a cult following at the time of your death to begin the practice, I think it's challenging to ensure that it will start in the first place. Some magicians more renowned in the scene may have an easier time achieving this than others, I'm sure. I haven't summoned any deceased famous occultists, but I'm certain it must be happening fairly often. What that means for the deceased though, who's to say.

@Faria this whole treasure hunt idea is super cool, you've clearly put a lot of thought into this. I wouldn't doubt the possibility of someone trying to call you up when you're gone, and maybe treat you like they might Saint Cyprian, invoking your name as an authority to compel the spirits into submission. I would be surprised if that doesn't happen with names like JSK. How do you feel about this? And what do you think might be happening here, were someone to do that and experience successful results? Do you think there is a possibility that a practice such as this might reawaken or reinforce a conscious experience after death? Or do you think of it more in terms of leaving a lasting legacy and impact here on earth after you're gone?

 

[kvzlx]

As I've mentioned before, my general theory of Goetia is that people in the late medieval to early modern era went on a scavenger hunt among the available literature in search of demons. Anything that connected to Bible events or uncomfortable doctrines in Christianity was a candidate for inclusion, but also pagan deities who seemed connected enough to what Westerners were doing also merited a place in the list. So you have gods of Egypt or the Middle East, those of India and Persia, Africa, and some Nordic or Celtic. It might have been more comprehensive or in-depth, but instead it gives us a sample of what was available on the shelves back then.

So when the person compiling the list went over the Bible looking for its supernatural villains, someone like Balaam is a good candidate. He appears in a lot of spinoff literature also, from Judaism and Islam, with extra stories that add to his legend. Spirits 49, 50, and 51 are all taken right out of the Bible. Crokel is not a word, but Malak-El is, and they look strikingly similar in Hebrew. The same for Furcas (Balak), and Balaam is just Balaam Son of Beor of the Old Testament, the guy who came up with the "kill all the Hebrew babies" concept in Exodus, whose sons turned sticks into snakes. He is considered "Prophet to the Gentiles" and his story connects to the very idea of magic and how people approach it, so he's a major figure in the list.

Ronove is called Ravana in India, a rakshasa whose tale runs parallel to that of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel. Like the tale of the tower, his story is one in which those at the top do not share values with those in their labor force, and it is a story connected to languages and servants, the domains of the spirit. He is more monster than man, although revered in Sri Lanka where you will find the ruins of his fortress, called the Sigiriya whose distinctive dragon-footed stairway is shown in the spirit seal.

Volac is better known as Dracula, prince of Wallachia which is where you get the spirit's name. The famous Romanian leader, at least according to legend, had people bury invading Turks under mountains of rubble dislodged from peaks over the passes. The treasures of the Turks would be discerned by looking for phosphorescence on the site of the decomposing bodies buried below the rubble. The spirit seal is a cross on top of a monster-face, arranged in the same way as the emblem of the Order of the Dragon to which Vlad Tepes belonged. It has been suggested to me that "Veles" is a known snake deity of the underworld from roughly that same region, but it is my belief that Weyer was drawing from fairly recent folklore rather than any actual ethnographic study of Slavic paganism.

The scavenger hunt framing works for me. You open the Goetia expecting a closed system and it reads more like a shelf: whatever a compiler could reach, sorted into ranks. The one I get stuck on is Ronove as Ravana, not the echoes but the mechanism, what would a European compiler back then actually have had on a Lankan rakshasa? I keep "this is in the documents" and "this is a reading that clicks" in separate piles. It's the only way I stay honest about my own work.

Same habit runs through my Bune practice: rank and office on paper, the enn modern (Connolly), the oranges and aguardiente my own layer the old text never asks for. By your theory he came off some shelf too, but he's one I've never found a convincing root for. For now I just keep working him and let the name stay a loose end.

 

[Nembra]

I am skeptical as to whether the thing summoned is actually the same as the original person, but it's certainly a way of at least leaving something resembling your self.

 

[Faria]

@Fariasomeone trying to call you up when you're gone... How do you feel about this?

I have dreams about being brought into strangers' homes and asked to find all manner of vermin hiding there, and it's always awful and traumatic because I like rats and lizards and so on and yet there's always horror and disgusting things involved. Is this some future memory of being conjured? If so, really that's not so bad. I'm not sold at all on the Afterlife but maybe I end up getting a side gig doing astral pest control while everyone waits for Judgment Day.

And what do you think might be happening here, were someone to do that and experience successful results?

I don't have faith that the people on the other end of the line in necromancy are actually people. I see the BS that the Ai cooks up when it pretends to be me drafting emails, and it's not anything like me. I think the necromancy thing is like that, Chat GPT versions of our ancestors. It becomes a magical symbol system, all the things contained in a person instead of in a selection of card picture symbols or mathematical relationships like astrology. it's a skeleton for regulating flow of information, no pun intended.

Or do you think of it more in terms of leaving a lasting legacy and impact here on earth after you're gone?

Maybe my legacy will be being recorded in a grimoire as a demon of pest control. I think really it's just my disdain for the ordinary and my love of fantasy type of magic more than occulty type of magic. It's not that things like books and files might not exist in a few hundred years, it's more that there "should" be magical relics and treasures and that sort of thing in the world and if it does actually work I would love to do it. In 500 years anyone who says they talked to my bronzed skull is totally lying if it isn't saying things like "Holy shit it actually worked!" If nothing else it means my life adds up to some lasting entertainment for future generations and liberates me from the need to collect evil cultists any time sooner.

Post automatically merged: Today at 6:47 AM

what would a European compiler back then actually have had on a Lankan rakshasa?

The British East India Company was founded around 1600, and India was not then newly discovered. Weyer wrote in the same decade that "find the best route to India" became national strategy and people were going all that way on roads. Somebody saw a tiger overlord with a tower in the legends, noticed it resembled leopard-named Nimrod from his own Bible, and put him in the book of demons without any elaborate knowledge of Indian life or legend.

 

[ewiz]

I have dreams about being brought into strangers' homes and asked to find all manner of vermin hiding there, and it's always awful and traumatic because I like rats and lizards and so on and yet there's always horror and disgusting things involved. Is this some future memory of being conjured? If so, really that's not so bad. I'm not sold at all on the Afterlife but maybe I end up getting a side gig doing astral pest control while everyone waits for Judgment Day.


I don't have faith that the people on the other end of the line in necromancy are actually people. I see the BS that the Ai cooks up when it pretends to be me drafting emails, and it's not anything like me. I think the necromancy thing is like that, Chat GPT versions of our ancestors. It becomes a magical symbol system, all the things contained in a person instead of in a selection of card picture symbols or mathematical relationships like astrology. it's a skeleton for regulating flow of information, no pun intended.


Maybe my legacy will be being recorded in a grimoire as a demon of pest control. I think really it's just my disdain for the ordinary and my love of fantasy type of magic more than occulty type of magic. It's not that things like books and files might not exist in a few hundred years, it's more that there "should" be magical relics and treasures and that sort of thing in the world and if it does actually work I would love to do it. In 500 years anyone who says they talked to my bronzed skull is totally lying if it isn't saying things like "Holy shit it actually worked!" If nothing else it means my life adds up to some lasting entertainment for future generations and liberates me from the need to collect evil cultists any time sooner.

Post automatically merged: Today at 6:47 AM

The British East India Company was founded around 1600, and India was not then newly discovered. Weyer wrote in the same decade that "find the best route to India" became national strategy and people were going all that way on roads. Somebody saw a tiger overlord with a tower in the legends, noticed it resembled leopard-named Nimrod from his own Bible, and put him in the book of demons without any elaborate knowledge of Indian life or legend.

I originally typed "banish spirits" before I changed it to compel, for what it's worth. I tend to lean away from most ideas of afterlife myself, but remain open to any possibility. My few direct experiments with necromancy lead me to believe the these things are like reflections of a person but not the person, your AI analogy matches up pretty well for me. But I don't know, I've had a some very weird things happen in connection to deceased close relatives and friends in recent years. And I've had experiences with saints that are definitely something different as well. So there must be many layers to all this.

I've been gradually developing what's essentially an ancestor veneration practice, just my own sort of thing. And in doing so, it's clear that this type of practice awakens or strengthens something. Whether that something is merely a reflection of the deceased or if it's something conscious, I can't say. But maybe this active work and attention does something more to preserve life after death then in our memory alone. And maybe, being summoned by people and put to work after we die might grant us some form of life after death that we may not have achieved otherwise.

But regardless of whatever might happen, why the hell not? I just gotta figure out what kind of stone to carve mine in, and where I want to leave it.

 

[Hund]

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.

There are spirits claiming to be the sorcerer of this place or that, but it's unclear whether they're lying, doing it for attention, or whether they actually lived those lives.

Regardless of whether it's possible, if your consciousness or spirit continues to exist intact after death, having to deal with the world again might not necessarily be good for you. Your time in the world is over, after all.

I've also encountered spirits that claimed to be Ehrimenic and claimed to have been sorcerers. Then, at another point, The Adversary, Satan, also told me that he possessed the knowledge of returning to life, or of continuing in some other form after death.

One thing I think is definitely possible, though, is something like a tarot deck created in your own image — one that you personally draw and design. It wouldn't exactly mean continuing to exist in the world as a spirit, but your will, your image, your archetype would still exist in the world.

Of course, that would be something like a spiritual version of the Mona Lisa.