The Greeks and Egyptians considered scent as a luxurious offering to the gods and even in the Temple of Seti in Egypt you’ll find a hieroglyphic inscription of Seti leaning forward towards a statue of the God Amun-Re, his right hand pouring a vase of water over a bouquet of lotus flowers while his left hand wafts smoke from an arm-shaped censer towards the god. Incense signifies reverence and prayer being lifted up into the heavens and it was used in similar purposes across numerous cultures throughout history. Smoke and scent were primary uses in spiritual rituals decades long before we bottled up and commercialised the idea. Not only a practical tool to use in the obvious scenario, but candles are important power sources to enable spirits to be drawn in and can be adorned with dried herbs and flowers to enhance its desired effect. Let’s break down some of the significant tools you’ll need: In fact, each of these ideas hold vital and significant clues in folklore surrounding the ways to connect to the spirit realm. It’s also interesting to note that a lot of 90’s films that featured people conducting séances depicted spirits appearing within mirrors, bathrooms and places near water (cast your mind to Candyman, What Lies Beneath or The Others). Keep your heart held in communicating in respect, love and healing and your séance can be a deeply moving and profound experience for everyone involved.Ī quick search online and you’ll find a large number of photographs taken during the Victorian era of past séances (usually led by a spiritual medium) with people holding hands around a levitating table, ectoplasm and ghostly faces mysteriously appearing beside their loved one. It’s important to understand that the kind of experience you desire from a séance depends greatly on the intent you hold during the space. But what if you knew a way to reach out to the other side easily and you don’t need to rely on the troublesome ouija board and unknowingly conjure a force beyond your control? What if it wasn’t like that at all? A séance can be conducted on your own by yourself, with a trusted group of friends or family members.
#Holding a seance series
what wisdom do our loved ones carry from beyond the other side? You might be forgiven in approaching the thought cautiously as the act of summoning spirits told within many books, films and television series have not been kind in depicting the classic séance experience. Well you’ve likely wondered at least once what the dead have to tell us. Townsley clearly knows hundreds upon hundreds, each one more dazzling than the last.So you want to hold a séance on All Hallows Eve when the veil of the spirit world is at its thinnest and listen to the whispers of ghosts. “How many ways exist to gild the darkness?” asks one poem, whose narrator claims to know of seven. This collection is a darkly humorous delight-a place where your cocktail will take a week to mix, where a medieval theologian narrates your naughty dreams, and where the safe word is-literally-“literally.” Like the best absurdism, though, there’s a swift undercurrent of seriousness in his play. “I push words in wheelbarrows no one depends on,” quips the narrator of one of the poems in Thomas Townsley’s Holding a Séance by Myself.
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– Brooks Haxton, author of Fading Hearts on the River, the true story of his son’s career in high stakes poker, and Mister Toebones, a collection of poems forthcoming in February 2021.
![holding a seance holding a seance](https://i.imgur.com/9XouNYU.jpg)
– Ron Block, author of Dismal River and Dirty Shame Motel (Big River Press)Īlert, skeptical, weary, fascinated with strangeness, Townsley writes like Groucho under the influence of Apollinaire. Reading him is a dark pleasure.
![holding a seance holding a seance](https://www.rockpoolpublishing.com.au/site/resized/90-16102020073554-1108x350-cropped-from-centre-seancephoto2.jpg)
Out of the fragments he melds animal fables, parables, liturgies, ghost stories, dream visions, political debates, a séance or two, or that ancient reminiscence called ubi sunt, Latin for “Where are they now?” What surprises me is how, in a work that Invokes ghosts from the past, in a mode of retrospection, he can’t stop inventing. Thomas Townsley still has a restless imagination.