Living Haunted: Thoughts on Cleansing and Banishing

My dogchild died, but he's also still here.

Grief is weird when you can perceive spirits. It's also really hard to blog about it because it all still feels so raw and vulnerable. Laddie hasn't been gone even a month yet and I'm still going through all the layers. My body still misses his body. I'm glad the box that contains his ashes is unopenable because to remember his warm, soft shape doesn't exist anymore drives me a little insane.

Every day, I say good morning at his shrine with that box and I feel him respond. I say goodnight at the same spot and I feel him. I place a bowl of roasted chicken or his daily stick treat on his shrine and I really feel him, so close it feels like stabbing.

Laddie is not the only one who regularly spends time around me. A week after his passing, I was given Sofia, a tuxedo cat Lucifer promised me as a familiar. True to most cats, she sees spirits and sometimes fixates on one part of the room or the the other. I usually ask her, "Is that Daddy?" in reference to Lucifer. Often, it is, in his usual close proximity. But one time, it was Laddie in his red sweater that I have upstairs in bed, looking back at her. Another time, it was my grandmother over my shoulder.

One of the first things you are usually taught as someone entering magical and/or spirit-based practice is to cleanse and banish. Something seems off? Cleanse and banish. Had a bad day? Cleanse and banish. Afraid you got cursed? Cleanse and banish. Someone haunting your house? Send them away, cleanse and banish.

"Spiritual hygiene" is seen as a safe practice, ahead of developing your intuition in order to discern if what is happening is actually a cause for alarm or simply momentary discomfort. To be fair, it's not dangerous, and honing one's intuition or spiritual perception takes years of effort. However as someone who has reached a higher level of perception, I have come to question if secular society has so stigmatized spirit contact that most newbies go overboard in their response to harmless surrounding entities.

For instance, I seem to keep ending up in housing situations that involve ghosts. The first two back in the northeast were cis men, agitated about me being in "their" space and occasionally acting in ways that were disruptive to express their possessiveness. So when I moved to my current abode and immediately discovered upon entering the basement that someone incorporeal resided there, I freaked out. I asked Lucifer, "Could I send them away?"

"You could," he responded, to suggest I literally could, but that didn't mean he recommended it. Because he was the one to help me pick out my new residence, he knew of the ghost before I did and I realized it unlikely he would send me here if there was hostility toward me.

So I tried befriending the ghost. I left them some coconut water. I introduced myself. They were confused about the coconut water, but were happy about the introduction. Because the laundry is in the basement, I come down at least once a week and say hi. After repeated exposure I came to perceive the ghost was femme-presenting. She would get annoyed if she didn't hear that I greeted her. Then, I realized she was a child, about 6 years old. Perhaps because of these factors, she was not possessive over the house. In fact, she eventually came to my apartment and sometimes I can hear her running and playing throughout.

I wouldn't banish Laddie. I wouldn't banish my grandmother. I wouldn't banish Lucifer, as if I could. Now I wouldn't banish the little girl.

Cleansing, I still do. I have, in fact, written about how to do a Luciferian cleansing bath. But I have come to have the opinion that so much of cleansing is no longer necessary with modern hygiene standards. Unlike most people in the past, many of us have the option to shower every day. Many popular house and body cleaning products contain rosemary or lavender or such herbs that are often used for cleansing. I know some people, usually from "Greek" paths, who cleanse their bodies every day, which is a pace I can only temporarily manage. Buddhism, too, has its ideas about purification, but Lucifer has offered the equivalent of a shrug when I have asked if I personally need more of it. So I spray or wave a smoking herb bundle around my tools, evil eyes, and altars maybe once a month and that works out fine. I do the same for my body a couple times a week whenever I remember.

This is all to say, it's okay to have things present around you and on you. So many people new to spiritual practice panic at the mere inkling of their tarot cards suggesting there's a spirit hanging around, but it is desirable that we have spirits around us. Now that I finally live alone again, except for the cat, my spirits are more perceptibly active than ever and I enjoy it as a way of life. In fact, I should put "living alone" in quotes because I am so very not alone and it's wonderful.

Neither, for that matter, are you alone.