Materia & Spiritus

Materia & Spiritus

Eriol Claw

I had been out on a nature trail and ventured off the main trail into what was a natural slate-stone stair from an old creek bed, and I could see two realities just to the side of the physical trail. In one I saw a dragon’s skeletal corpse, as if I had been walking along its spinal column and within the rib cage and out its maw. A dragon’s corpse. In another, I saw a curiously gleaming purple and pastel temple. I pulled a name for the dragon whose corpse I had found, did my best to offer something to balm the parched bones on many occasions. I asked and was able to take a stone for myself, and that stone still occupies a central place on my altar. It’s often helped me literally earth myself.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve had a series of spirit contacts, and to a good degree, I’ve been learning what spirit contact can be like for me. I’ve pointed to how spirits can talk through me, as if they’re filling me or using me like a sounding board and I “echo” what they say. I’ve learned that daydreams and images that come to mind can be me “just” daydreaming, but many spirits communicate through visual and imagistic means, or even through “moments”—scenes that you briefly inhabit or witness, little one-act plays or brief dreams that are themselves experiences but also communications. My own receptivity matters for the clarity of this contact, and some spirits prefer some modes over others. Some spirits want you to face particular directions or prefer particular times, or other protocols of set and setting and staging.

And I had the notion that herbals and lapidaries and bestiaries are, in a way, another kind of “spirit list.” And while we like to taxonomize magically plants and animals and stones by sephira and elements and planetary associations, I think the Neo-Platonists we inherit much of that lore from over-determined the whole phenomenon. They’re all persons with personalities, traits, quirks. They may align well with Mercury or fire, but I think it’s less a top-down hierarchy from the heavens as Mercuriality and Fire trickle down into a particular thing. It’s honestly, like so many of these things are, a far more “organic” or definitely rhizomatic eruption from the Depths. I am rather Mercurial—but so can plants and animals be.