The spirit realm

The teaching

As the spirit lore of the faiths, the Platonists and the folk teaches it.

The beings between

The whole art rests on one idea: between the highest and ourselves the world is not empty. Thales said, as Aristotle tells it, that all things are full of gods. In Plato's Symposium the priestess Diotima teaches that everything daimonic stands in the middle, between the divine and the mortal, carrying the prayers of mortals up and the answers of the gods down, so that the whole is bound together.

The faiths of Abraham say it in their own words. There is one God, the maker of all things, and those he sends are named for the errand: the Hebrew malakh, the Greek angelos and the Arabic malak all mean a messenger, and the Letter to the Hebrews calls the angels “ministering spirits, sent forth to minister”. The old lore of the countryside has its beings of the middle too. Robert Kirk sets the fairies of Scotland at a nature between human beings and angels, and Paracelsus places his peoples of the elements between human beings and spirits. So the first word a student of this art learns is between, and the first thing asked of any being is where it stands.

Light, fire and clay

The traditions describe their beings by what they are made of. A saying of the Prophet names the stuff of three kinds of creature: the angels were made of light, the jinn of smokeless fire and Adam of clay. The angels do as they are commanded and do not disobey. Jinn and human beings have free will, are tried in this life and are judged, and the Qur'an gives the two one purpose, that God created jinn and humankind only to worship him. Iblis, who would not bow to Adam, was of the jinn.

Christian teaching, as Thomas Aquinas sets it out, knows two kinds of created mind: the angels, pure spirits without bodies, and human beings, souls joined to bodies. The demons are angels who fell. Here the two faiths part on a point that runs through the whole art. In Christian teaching the rebels are fallen angels; in the Qur'an the angels do not disobey, and the first rebel is named among the jinn.

The Platonists describe their beings by nearness to the gods. Iamblichus ranks gods, archangels, angels, daimons and heroes above the human soul, and Apuleius defines the daimon in five strokes: a living being in kind, reasoning in mind, open to feeling in soul, airy in body and everlasting in time. Paracelsus gives each element a people of its own, with a finer flesh than ours and no immortal soul. Folk belief adds the hidden people of the hills, and nearly every tradition adds the human dead.

The orders and our place in them

Where there are kinds there are ranks. The Celestial Hierarchy gathers the angels into nine choirs in three ranks of three, from the seraphim nearest God to the angels nearest the world, and teaches that each rank receives light from the one above and passes it to the one below. It gives the whole order a single purpose, likeness to God and union with him, so that the ladder of beings is also a road: the good comes down by it, and the soul goes up. The nine are taught each by name on the page of angels and their orders.

Human beings do not stand at the foot of that ladder. The psalm makes them “a little lower than the angels”, crowned with glory and honour. In the Qur'an God teaches Adam the names of all things, names the angels do not know, and bids the angels bow down to him. In all three faiths angels and human beings serve the same God, and the honour due to God is given to no other.

Honour, never command

From this follows the posture the traditions teach toward every being of the middle. Worship belongs to God alone in the faiths of Abraham. Maimonides counts among the principles of the faith that one prays to God and to no being beneath him, and Islam makes belief in the angels an article of faith while every prayer goes to God. The Catholic and Orthodox churches honour the angels and ask their prayers, and teach that this honour is of another kind than worship.

The faiths also forbid the seeking. The Torah sets the medium, the consulter of spirits and the one who inquires of the dead among the ways Israel must not follow, and Islamic teaching tells the faithful not to seek out the jinn, fear them beyond measure or bargain with them. Folk belief keeps a rule of courtesy: the good neighbours are not offended, followed or crossed, and their food is not eaten.

Here the sources part, and a student keeps them apart. Spiritualism holds that the dead wish to speak and can do so through mediums. The Siberian peoples send their shaman among the spirits on behalf of the whole community. The houses that honour their ancestors speak to them at the altar and ask their blessing. Each is taught here as its own people hold it, and the house itself gives no way to call, bind or question any being.

The guide at each one's side

Many traditions give each person a spirit of their own. In Plato's tale of Er every soul chooses its life and receives a daimon to see it fulfilled. The Romans honoured a man's genius on his birthday, and a woman had her juno. Christian teaching gives each person a guardian angel, from the saying of Jesus that the angels of the little ones always behold the face of the Father. Islamic teaching sets two noble recorders at each person's right and left, and a companion from among the jinn who whispers. These are taught on the pages of daimons and intelligences, of angels and of the jinn, and the house names no guide for any reader.

Spirits of place

The realm is also local. The Greeks gave springs, trees, mountains and the sea their nymphs: naiads of fresh water, dryads of the trees, oreads of the mountains and nereids of the sea. The Romans raised altars to the genius of a place. The Arabs before Islam set the jinn in deserts and ruins; the Irish and the Scots set the fair folk in mounds, under hills and beside thorn trees and wells; and Paracelsus set his gnomes in rock, his undines in water, his sylphs in air and his salamanders in fire.

Where beings dwell, a person is a guest, and the old rules of place are the manners of a guest: a thorn left uncut, a well kept clean, a path not built across, a place left as it was found. The fair folk and the elementals each have their own page, with the rules and the four peoples given in full.

The dead among the living

The human dead belong to the same realm. Where they are honoured they remain members of the household: their names are kept, their graves tended and their days observed, and in many houses they are told the family's news. Where a death or a burial went wrong, the old stories say, the dead walk. The ghost of nearly every culture is one who was left unburied, unavenged or unmourned, and the answer the traditions give is the rite that was left undone: a burial, a name spoken, a prayer said.

Whether the dead return at all is a question on which the sources differ plainly. Medieval Christians told of souls who came asking the living for prayers; Protestant teaching has mostly denied that the dead come back; Spiritualism holds that they speak. The ancestors, and ghosts and hauntings, each have their page, and what the traditions teach of death itself belongs to the art of death and what follows.

The fallen

Every faith that speaks of good spirits also speaks of rebels. Christian teaching tells of angels who fell through pride and now tempt, and the Gospels show unclean spirits cast out with a word. Islam tells of Iblis, who refused to bow, and of the devils, the shayatin, who whisper to the heart and slink back when God is remembered. The Greek daimon was no enemy by nature; the Christian demon is the old word turned to a new sense.

The answer in every faith is the same: prayer, the words of refuge and a steady ordinary life, and never a bargain. The lists of demons in the books of magic are taught as a history of books on the page of demons, and the house reads no trouble in any life as the work of one.

Testing first

One discipline governs all the rest. Every tradition that speaks of spirits teaches that an experience is tested before it is trusted, because an appearance proves nothing: Paul warns that Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. The test is by fruits. A true movement, in the Christian rules, leaves peace, honesty and care for others, and a false one agitation, pride and secrecy; Ignatius adds that nothing should be changed in a dark hour. The desert monks, the sages of the Talmud, the Sufi masters and the Zen teachers each give tests of their own, set out together on the page of testing the spirits.

The traditions and the doctors agree on the practical point. A voice that commands, threatens or will not stop, or a fear that does not lift, is a reason to see a doctor and to tell someone steady, and never a spirit to be obeyed.

How a student begins

A beginner does three things before anything else. The first is to learn the tests. The second is to keep the accounts apart: of any being or rank, ask whose account it is, whether it stands in scripture, in a later book or in the lore of a countryside, and what that tradition says it is made of, where it dwells and whom it serves. Michael is in Daniel and the Revelation; the nine choirs are in the Celestial Hierarchy; the word gnome is first found in Paracelsus.

The third is the practice the traditions share most widely, and it calls on nothing: the remembrance of one's own dead, by name, in one's own words or faith, on the days that matter. A reader may add a walk in which each of the four elements is noticed in turn, which is how the elementals are met today. Nothing in any of this is summoned, and nothing is owed.

The branches and how they stand

The page's branches follow the kinds. Testing the spirits stands beside them all and is read first. The beings of the faiths come next: angels and their orders, the jinn, and demons in the old books. Then come the beings of the philosophers, daimons and intelligences and the elementals; the hidden people of field and hill, the fair folk; the dead, honoured in the ancestors and restless in ghosts and hauntings; and last the human go-betweens, mediums and Spiritualism, and shamans and spirit journeys.