the other day i tried a guided meditation vel tarot reading from jenna matlin's "tarot book of the dead". i only have the sample of the book but the experience was positively surprising, it's making me want to read more.
sidebar: the book does suffer from a pet-peeve of mine, where an author jumps on a theory they're excited about without even mentioning the (i thought?) established, mainstream understanding first, and just presenting Their Thing as the Obvious Real Thing. ok, pop culture references to the danse macabre, but what about the triumphal processions? you can't be like "this first part ends in death - death conquers all these previous figures, and also: there's some celestial stuff stuck onto the end". when the triumphal procession already explains all that. it clearly continues, culminating in the kingdom of god, world without end etc? maybe there's more on that later but i'd have expected that to be knocked out in the intro, you know? so we can focus on her particular interpretation after that's out of the way.
firstly i was surprised that when it came time to do it, i reached for one of my "rejected"/mid-tier decks, the morgan-greer. somehow none of the top decks felt up to the task. i mean there's the drowning world that "my dead" often speak through, but i remember from an interview with the author that she doesn't recommend pip decks for the sort of death/mediumship work she teaches and i didn't know if this reading would be in that same vein. so idk, maybe i reached for it because it's a close RWS clone, so - familiar, its warm comforting colors, and maybe because this is one of the few decks that "remember" all my dead relations from life? they "met", even if i haven't read for them either at all, or with this deck in particular.
but i wanted to write about my grandma. she was part of this meditation/visualization experience as the accompanying guide. it could have been anyone, any person or mythical being and i had no idea who the figure would resolve into. but once it was clear it was grandma K, i was both surprised and it was the most obvious and logical thing in the world. so mostly i was surprised at my own surprise! why didn't i just Know this?
grandma often talked to me about Death, as a being. from what i gather she hasn't told many of these stories, only a few and only to a few people. for some reason she shared the most with me? maybe because i was into tarot and witchy things very openly from a very young age? i seemed the right Receptacle?
there were a couple of times in her life where she was at death's door and would give Kostucha a dressing-down, trying to shoo them away, categorically refusing their presence and the ensuing process of dying. those stories we all knew from childhood sleepovers and other occasions.
but when i got older she mostly talked about her own mother and how she came to symbolize death for my gran. great-grandma died in childbirth with the youngest of a gaggle of children, when gran herself was very young. the baby boy lived for a little longer, while my grandma kept an eye on him as the "oldest child" even though she wasn't even a teen yet.
maybe this was a way of her making sense of her grief or shock as a child, or maybe it was something woo... but the story goes: she's in the kitchen and the baby starts fussing. maybe not crying and wailing so she takes a while, but ends up going to check in on him. she pokes her head around the door and sees her dead mother standing over him, lifting him out of the crib.
at first little gran is frozen - with fear? longing? is it mother, a positive spirit?? or something that's no longer "of the earth" therefore automatically evil? she makes up her mind to rush in, but just then her father lays a hand on her shoulder. he'd come in from the fields and noticed her standing there all stiff and frozen. he holds her back and whispers: don't, don't come between a mother and her child. they leave the scene with the spirit nursing the boy.
a few days later the baby dies and is buried next to his mother.
ever since then, dreams of her mother meant a death in the family. the content of the dream was usually great-grandma asking gran for a favor, for taking care of her. make me some tea, love. bring me that dress from the wardrobe, darling. in each case gran would reply "let brother/sister so-and-so do it" and a few days later she'd get the phone-call that so-and-so had died.
i don't know if she shared these stories in wonder or maybe in guilt - as if she were sending her siblings to their deaths? as far as i know these weren't lucid dreams, so it's probably not that. she also wasn't religious, i haven't seen her in a church aside from weddings and funerals, and she never talked about god or her beliefs. but she relayed various supernatural phenomena she experienced, just as a fact of life, i suppose.
she also had a kind of psychic connection with all of her grandkids. interesting that it was the strongest with the oldest - went both ways - and the weakest with the youngest. she always knew when the oldest was in trouble and they could call out for her, in a way (i personally remember one particular instance with a car crash.) with the middle she often "heard" them from afar, but they couldn't intentionally reach out in either direction. with the youngest she only sometimes heard/sensed them, very faintly.
(the two younger ones being my cousin and i share a bond like this of our own, not too strong and definitely works better the closer we are physically. it's very much an Understanding, a Hearing of Intent. but on the other side of the family my father and his mother shared a much stronger connection which came in very handy for everyone's reassurance when we moved abroad in the times of very expensive international calls. now that i think of it, it's quite peculiar to have grown up with no-nonsense non-religious people who nonetheless completely accepted this sort of thing, not making much of a fuss out of it.)
so in a way, i always associated grandma K with death and i wouldn't be surprised if now that she's crossed over herself, she'd be a kind of psychopomp/guide for me as well. all this brought to you by the upcoming festival of the dead. time to light some candles and lay out some offerings. may your spirits be restful and happy.
