This is a little late, but our Samhain celebration was truly a gift in many ways.
My daughter and I decorated our Samhain altar with pictures and items that represented our ancestors and our Beloved Dead. For pictures, we had some of my grandparents, my dad, and my childhood mentor. For items, we had a boat to represent my daughter’s Kashmiri ancestors and Beloved Dead, some pins that belonged to my close friend and mentor Okey Napier, Jr., and my grandfather’s Masonic ring. On the night of Samhain, we had a feast consisting of some of our loved ones favorite dishes. For my daughter’s Kashmiri loved ones, she made haak (collard greens, Kashmiri style) and rice, and for our Appalachian loved ones, I made brown beans and cornbread. It was a very nice celebration. Per my previous coven’s practice, we leave the altar us through All Souls Day/el dia de los muertos.
We also did some outreach to any spirits in our home as we have been experiencing some interesting paranormal activity. I am always hesitant in calling these things paranormal or supernatural because to me, in my Wiccan beliefs, these things are completely normal and natural. They are a part of the natural world. For my daughter, she’s not as experienced with these things, so to her, they are a bit unusual. We have both seen an apparition – her more so than me. Things in the home have moved, my soon-to-be ex-husband has felt something touching his feet, and my daughter has felt things like someone placing a hand on her neck and hugging her. The apparition even waved to her at one point.
Now, many people would hear/read these things and scoff at them, suggesting they were mind tricks or hallucinations. As someone who has lived with mental health disorders for many years, I can completely understand this position, and to some extent, I might think the same thing in some situations. However, in this instance, it’s not just one person experiencing these things – it’s multiple people.
I have had a suspicion on who the spirit was, in particular, that it was someone from the Indian side of my daughter’s family. One of the reasons I thought this was because the spirit does not interact with me much, which makes sense considering that I’m cutting myself off from the family by divorcing her father. Secondly, the spirit touched my ex’s foot, which in Indian culture, is a sign of respect when greeting an elder.
Additionally, one day when my daughter and I were talking in the living room, we heard the Amazon Echo in the bedroom start making noise. We went to check it out, and it was playing a song by a band neither one of us had heard of, and the song had lyrics about fathers and sons and about being poisoned (more on that later). This incident was very ominous to the both of us.
Because of these things, my daughter wanted to do a seance on Samhain. I guided her against doing a full seance on the night when the veil is the thinnest because of the possibility of inviting someone in who should not be here. Instead, we used some witchcraft methods to communicate directly with the spirit that is here (I will discuss these methods in a later post).
Given that I already had my own ideas of who the spirit was, I didn’t want my biased energy to possibly influence things, so I let my daughter lead the questions to ask. To make a long story short, the spirit identified itself as the person that I thought it was – my ex’s younger cousin who tragically died at a young age. The spirit also confirmed some things I had suspected – he was specifically here to visit my daughter (the last time he saw her when he was alive was when she 3-4 years old), and he is upset with me regarding the divorce (hence why he doesn’t bother me much). He also stated that he was happy to see various family members that lived in the area close to us. My daughter didn’t ask anything about the nature of his death because she knew that would be too upsetting for both of them (he was murdered, very little known about the case, who or why, only that he was poisoned – and in reference to the above-mentioned song, his father had also tragically died in a traffic accident a few years before him).
After this communication ended, my daughter was a little wigged out because she had not experienced such things before (she has been raised Hindu all of her life, with little exposure to Wicca or any Neo-Paganism practices). I, on the other hand, thought it was all very normal. I grew up in a house that had a spirit – again, more than one person experienced things – so, these things are nothing new to me, nor do they wig me out. Because of this, I think it’s high time for my daughter to learn a little more about Goddess spirituality and real witchcraft – as in, not the mockery you see in movies and TV shows. So, as should not be a surprise, I’m having her read “<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="http://<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062516329/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062516329&linkCode=as2&tag=thejasminegar-20&linkId=60d56e5546eb8c9593c663e36041c5fa">The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 20th Anniversary Edition</a><img src="//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=thejasminegar-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0062516329" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="" style="border:none !important; margin:0px !important;" />" data-type="URL" data-id="<a target="_blank" href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062516329/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0062516329&linkCode=as2&tag=thejasminegar-20&linkId=60d56e5546eb8c9593c663e36041c5fa">The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess: 20th Anniversary Edition</a>![""]("//ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com/e/ir?t=thejasminegar-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0062516329")
More to come on what she learns and her reaction to it all.
Jimel Beckett 