The following article, originally seeing digital print over on ChaosMagick.Com in early 2023, was designed to answer one of the recurring questions that I seem to encounter when talking to my fellow Chaotes as the Fox of Bones. It attempts to prove that there are definitely ways to reconcile a more materialistic worldview with the spiritual, albeit via a method which actually leeches most of the mysticism straight out of the equation. It also proves that necromancy needs not be a priestly topic, nor does it require falling back into the Abrahamic worldview to lay the foundation for its cosmology.

Ghostforms
Alternative Thoughts are the Afterlife
By Gavin Fox

My personal journey beneath the eight pointed star has been darker than most. Originally interested in the mundane aspects of the paranormal such as ghosts, myths and monsters, it was not until my early 20’s that I actively started exploring chaos magick as a system. And it goes without saying that the path I chose to walk would be forever tainted by that earlier reading. The following argument is highly speculative, but as a shard of my personal necromantic paradigm it has succeeded in answering a core question that has haunted me since childhood.

As a concept, the literal existence of ghosts has always vexed me greatly. Though I regularly interact with the wandering dead, my paradigm remains firmly at the sceptical end of the belief scale. The weight of evidence and current scientific understanding asserts strongly that one life is all you get. For now I consider the body to be an at times very pleasurable prison with death as the only, and very final, parole. I do not, as a rule, hold any real belief in a soul, or reincarnation, nor do I see Heaven or Hell as locations worthy of my presence. I am here, now, and that is all that matters. Until I am not, of course, but that is a problem for those who are left behind to mourn my passing.

There have been many competing theories for what a ghost actually is over the years. Spirits of the deceased, visiting ancestors, psychic projections, place memories and even extra-dimensional or supposedly demonic entities too. Every spiritual discipline eventually runs up against the sticky question of exactly how the dead could remain in our reality to interact with the living. Some religions actively use it as a stick to beat their congregations with, threatening an eternity as a wondering soul should they dare to seek a short lifetime of free will. Many of the most famous of mankind’s nightmares are born from such an admonition, vampires, Draugr and ghouls included.

While the gods can be explained as a form of egregore sustained by the attention derived from memetic contagion, the same cannot be said for hauntings, as individual people are highly unlikely to generate the prolonged public interest required to attain such a status. Even if they did the resulting facsimile would be deified through the lens of public perception only, as can be seen with the semi-fictional way that religions treat their originators. No, I have come to believe that the creation of a ghost, or more rightly a ghostform, has more to do with manifesting a servitor or egregore than anything exclusively spiritual. And not only is it thankfully rare, but it also seems to happen completely by accident too.

What little scientific research has been done in the field of near death experiences seems to agree that the love and light hallucinations experienced by those at the point of death are the product of consciousness struggling to continue to function while the mind itself shuts down. Studies in laboratory animals have also shown a spike in cerebral activity shortly before they succumb to complete oblivion too. While said results are obviously up for interpretation, and difficult to confirm in our own species due to the problems around human testing, it was enough to sow the seeds of an extremely radical idea in my practice.

I argue that the psyche experiences the void at the point of death due to the very real physiological damage caused by, among other processes, a lack of blood flow to the brain. During this period of heightened activity the ensuing fight to stay alive focuses the entire consciousness on itself as it struggles to stabilise a sinking ship. This is a peak mental state similar to the gnosis sought by magickians to fire spells, charge sigils, and birth servitors. Only in this instance the pseudo-entity being generated is an imperfect copy of the contents of the dying mind, blind fired into our joint reality and left to fend for itself while the original physical version ceases to be. Sorry to say, we do not survive death. But given the right circumstances our deeply flawed mental twins do.

Something is most definitely wrong with the classical view of the spirit world, and even if I was not naturally materialistic my time among those who inhabit it would still make me stop and think. You see ghosts appear to be missing major pieces of their consciousness when they are encountered. They act broken, malformed, looping the same actions again and again, almost like they remain lost in a dream and unable to wake. Their manifestations seem to be constricted by factors such as disease or disability when most spiritual systems agree that the soul returns to perfection once it is no longer tied to a damaged material shell.

In light of examples such as these my argument that they were created at the time the psyche ceased to function and reflect the confused or enraged state of the personality during that particular moment makes a surprising amount of sense. It may also solve the age old question of why ghosts tend to manifest as they appeared when they died, blood, guts, gore and all. Also, it is intriguing to note which belief groups tend to generate the highest proportion of hauntings. The strongly religious do not feature prominently in ghost lore, aside from the occasional monk or nun who were likely up to no good after mass. Neither do Atheists or sceptics in general.

Those who have enough time to make peace with their upcoming journey into nothingness rarely return either. Instead people who are traumatised, confused or even just surprised by a swift and unceremonious death top the list of supposed hauntings across the globe. All can be assumed to anecdotally share one single factor: a brief internal struggle to continue to exist instead of passing quietly into that longest of nights. And it is here in this liminal gnosis that ghostforms are made.

As a chaote, I am free to choose how I metabolise my personal bubble of reality. I set out to create an exclusively anthropocentric version of the afterlife that divorced the supernatural from the spiritual, in line with how I view the world, and it works well enough for me so far. Ultimately the Veil still stands regardless of what really dwells on the non-material side of that great divide, and the dead who walk amongst us will always have once been human no matter how they came to be formed. For now that will have to be enough, because I am in no hurry to earn my parole and find out more first hand.