Dead Tree

Ore packed up his notes and instruments and loaded them onto the green Triumph motorcycle Yuri had left behind when she departed from this world. He wasn’t going particularly far, New Jersey isn’t that big a state, but he didn’t want to be found, and most cars now had GPS tracking. Moreover, it would be easier to hide a bike when he reached his final destination, so nobody would go looking for him as they would if there was an abandoned car left in a parking lot.

He thought back to his first camping trip with Yuri when they were still teenagers. They had gone to the Shenandoah Valley because Ore wanted to see the musical organ in the caverns there, a weird instrument that used the vibrations of dozens of stalactites and stalagmites to make sound. On day three of their trip, they took a day-hike on a trail that the travel guide said ran past an old, abandoned cemetery. It took a while to find, but was worth it. Even back then, they both appreciated a gloomy, decaying aesthetics. The cemetery belonged to a small village, now long gone and reclaimed by the forest. The dates on the moss-covered tombstones went back to the 18th-19th century, with many death dates falling within a few months of each other towards the end of the 1800s. What happened back then to wipe out a whole village?

On the way back, Ore and Yuri took a wrong turn and it wasn’t until they reached a group on a corporate team-building retreat that they realized they were going in the wrong direction from where they had parked. They double-timed back, but it was already getting dark. About a mile from their destination, they saw flashlights coming towards them, which was a bit of a relief, as they had no light of their own. The light-bearers turned out to be park rangers, who saw that there was still a single car left in the parking lot, and went looking for its owner in case something happened to them. While it was good back then to have someone come looking, with so much of their life together still in front of them, this time Ore had no desire to be found.

Ore had one stop to make on the way to where he was going. Not many know that one of history’s most famous magicians, Aleister Crowley, found his final resting place in New Jersey. After Crowley died at age 72 in a boarding house in Netherwood, England, only 12 people attended his cremation. No English cemetery wanted Crowley buried there, for fear that his grave would become a site of magic rituals, so his ashes were mailed to his publisher and successor at the Ordo Templi Orientalis, Karl Germer, in Hampton, New Jersey, who buried them under an old tree on his estate.

Germer’s house was gone now, but by consulting old township records, the inquisitive were able to track the location, which was now a dairy farm. Ore arrived there in the evening as the farm was closing, hid his bike in some bushes, and once night fell, snuck in. He thought how fortuitous it was that the place was now a dairy farm, since milk is the main offering substance in ancient Greco-Roman necromantic rituals. Ore recalled that in the Greek magical papyri, the milk of a black cow was described as particularly potent. Just as he was thinking about how difficult it would be to find a black cow in the dark, he was startled to hear a cowbell behind him. A pitch-black cow, with strange green eyes was standing behind him, like a familiar summoned for a magician’s purpose. Ore petted her head to make sure she wasn’t aggressive, and taking his time, went about filling up his canteen with milk from her udder. He put the canteen in his bag and when he looked up the cow was gone.

As Ore continued on towards the tree, he thought back to the German philosopher Hegel’s line in his Phenomenology where, talking about the importance of otherness and mediation, he said that those who think that all is one in the Absolute, make the Absolute “a night where all cows are black.” Schelling, who was Hegel’s roommate in college, and later helped him secure his first job as a tutor after telling Hegel to write a poem with Rosicrucian symbolism as part of his application to a rich household whose head dabbled in the occult, never forgave Hegel for the cow quote, thinking it was directed at him.

The line did gnaw at Ore though. Not of uncertainty as to whether the green-eyed cow was black, but because he wasn’t sure if there would be any sure way to distinguish things in the night of the soul as he continued his going under. Like with Yuri’s voice over the telephone, what way was there to distinguish the real from the grieving imaginary, the ghost from the hallucination? Was there a Turing test for ghosts? The doubt passed through him like a shudder, a vibration rattling his being, before disappearing whence it came. He had arrived at the tree.

While movies and TV shows depict necromancy elaborately, requiring intricate diagrams on the floor, robes, ceremonial implements, and dozens of candles, ancient necromancy is quite simple in comparison. Ore followed the instructions given by Circe to Odysseus in book 11’s Nekuia, the Odyssey’s necromancy sequence. He dug a small pit before the old, gnarled tree. Taking out several bottles and the canteen from his bag, he poured three libations. First, a mixture of milk and honey - the melikraton, then some sweet wine, followed by water, with a sprinkling of barley on top. He recited several prayers for the dead, took out a pocket-knife, and cut his hand to pour some of his blood into the pit, having neither the desire not the stomach for an animal sacrifice, and figuring human blood would work better anyway. He then lay down with his head pointing towards the pit and went to sleep, so as to begin his dialogue with the Beast .