The Morning After the Veil Closes

Or, why your Samhain ritual may have sucked, why it may not be your fault, and what to do about it for the next year and a day

A postscript to the Samhain series

If you're joining us fresh: over the three weeks before Samhain, I offered an electromagnetic reading of the Craft's core tools and timing. Those posts are still up. This one starts from a different question.  

It's the first week of November in Indiana. The clocks fell back on Sunday, which this state has only agreed to do since 2006 and still does with the visible reluctance of a man asked to hold his wife's purse.[1] The pumpkins on the porch have begun their slow collapse into something a biology teacher would enjoy. Somewhere in your living room there is candle wax on the carpet that will outlive us all. 

And some of you, if we're honest, woke up on the first of November with a feeling. I know it well.

I don't mean a good feeling. I mean the other one.

You know how it goes. The circle was cast. The quarters were called, more or less. The East's caller read the invocation off her phone, which lit her face from below like a camp counselor telling a ghost story. At the exact moment the High Priestess called on Spirit, the smoke detector chirped for a new battery, because smoke detectors can detect sacred intent and choose violence. Through the front window, the neighbor's twelve-foot inflatable skeleton loomed over the proceedings with the bland goodwill of a Menards greeter. The furnace kicked on. Somebody's watch reminded them to breathe, which, to be fair, they needed.

And nothing happened.

Not nothing exactly. It was pleasant. The cider was good. The cakes were moist and, unlike last year's, not too sweet. But the thing that happened last year, or three years ago, or that first time in the woods behind your aunt's house when you were nineteen and the air went thick, didn't happen. The circle never clicked. The veil, if it was thin, was thin somewhere else.

Then came the part nobody writes about: the faces. Twelve grown adults held the serene expression of a hostess whose TikTok quiche has collapsed, nodding slowly through the closing. Afterward, everyone said "that was really nice" in exactly the voice you use at a mediocre wedding. The High Priestess thanked the quarters with the dignity of a pilot announcing a delay. And on the drive home down I-65, a small, cold question rode in the passenger seat.

Was any of it ever real?

That's the Watercooler Enforcement Mechanism, by the way. It doesn't only work the office anymore. The morning after a flat ritual is when it moves into your own head, sets up its clipboard on your nightstand, and starts asking very reasonable questions in your own voice.

This essay is for that morning.

First, the Load-Bearing Honesty

Before I offer you any comfort, I owe you three things, in the same spirit as the last three posts.

Most rituals are flat. Not every circle clicks. Most don't. That's equally true of D&D sessions, band practices and conversations at parties, most of which consist of debating the color of the upholstery until the room settles on Moss, or possibly Regret. A flat night is not evidence that the Craft is a lie. It is evidence that you are a human being who did a human thing on a Saturday. The great nights are rare because they're great. If every one of them were great, you'd stop noticing.

Sometimes it is you. You stayed up too late on Friday. You had three glasses of the good wine at dinner. You spent the whole circle thinking about your mother-in-law, or that comment on your last post, and what it might say about your mother-in-law. Preparation matters, and the Tradition has always said so. I'm not here to tell you that every failure belongs to the universe. Some belong to social media. At least one belongs to a cakes-and-ale recipe that somebody wrote down from memory.

What follows is a hypothesis, not a diagnosis. I'm going to propose a reason some rituals may fail that the Tradition has never had the tools to look at. It's an idea worth testing, not an excuse to hand out. I'll keep labeling which is which, and you're entitled to hold me to it.

All right. Comfort, with tongs.

The Survivors' List

Every tradition has a canon, and every canon is a survivors' list.

The texts we still have, from the Emerald Tablet and the Sefer Yetzirah to the Abramelin operation, the Golden Dawn's knowledge lectures and Gardner's Book of Shadows, are not simply the best ideas the Western Mystery Tradition ever produced. They are the ones that made it through. Some survived because they resonated with enough practitioners, across enough generations, to be copied, taught and defended. Others survived because they happened to be in a library that didn't burn, on a press in a city that didn't get sacked, or in the trunk of somebody's great-uncle that nobody cleaned out.[2]

The ones we don't have, and there are immeasurably more of those, weren't necessarily wrong. A lot of them simply didn't find their room. A lot more just had bad luck with candles.

So the canon isn't a map of truth. It's closer to a map of reception, a record of what landed, where and when, blurred by a great deal of chance. That means every text you own was written in a particular room, for a particular room, by someone who never imagined yours.

The Recipe That Forgot the Air

Picture a practitioner in twelfth-century Toledo, sitting down to write out a working. He records what he considers the working parts: the words, the names, the geometry of the space, the timing by planetary hour or phase of the Moon, the materials, and the preparation of the operator, including fasting, prayer and purification.

What he doesn't record is everything he couldn't see because it was everywhere.

You don't write "breathe air" in a recipe, because every kitchen has air in it. (You do write down the sugar. Ask anyone who was there for last year's cakes.)

Here's what was in his air, in the sense of conditions too ordinary to mention:

• No artificial electromagnetic noise. There was no power grid humming at sixty cycles a second through the walls, no radio, no Wi-Fi and no cell tower. The low-frequency electromagnetic background of his room was set by the planet itself, the Earth's magnetic field and the Schumann resonance from the first post in this series, with nothing manmade drowning them out. That part is simple history.

• Real darkness. The darkness the human eye evolved in, without a charging light, a streetlight leaking around the curtain, or an inflatable skeleton lit from within. Darkness changes the nervous system in documented ways. It shapes melatonin, the body clock and the eye's own adaptation over twenty or thirty minutes.

• Long silences. Hours of quiet, rather than thirty seconds between notifications.

• A body clock set by the Sun, not by a screen held a foot from the face until midnight.

• A good deal of solitude. The Western esoteric practitioner has nearly always worked alone or in small, closed groups at the edge of ordinary social life.

None of that made it into the instructions. It wasn't secret. It was just air.

Now the honesty box, because this part deserves one. These conditions don't all point the same way. Darkness, silence and isolation are known to make the brain perceive more. Spend long enough in sensory deprivation and people begin to see lights and patterns that aren't there. Prisoners in dark cells called it "the prisoner's cinema." In the 1950s, sensory-deprivation experiments at McGill University found that a brain with nothing to process soon starts generating its own content. If you've ever seen shapes in the dark after lying awake too long, you've run a version of that experiment yourself. That cuts both ways. The conditions that might open the door also give the brain an empty room to decorate. The Tradition has always known this. It's why discernment exists, and why every good teacher you've ever had made you write things down and check them later. So I'm not saying the medieval room produced truer experiences. I'm saying it produced different ones, and the instructions never said which conditions were doing the work.  

I'm also not recommending the twelfth-century lifestyle. It came with dysentery.

The Fourth Explanation

So you followed the book exactly. Words correct, geometry correct, timing correct, preparation observed, and the night was flat.

The Tradition's usual explanations fall into three bins:

1. You weren't ready. You haven't reached the grade, the degree or the inner state.

2. You made a mistake. Something was mispronounced, mistimed or set up wrong.

3. It's beyond you for now. Come back to it after more development.

All three are sometimes true. But they share an assumption: that the text contains everything necessary, so any failure must come from the practitioner.

There's a fourth possibility the Tradition has never systematically checked:

4. The room was different. The working may depend, partly, on conditions the original author never wrote down because they were as ordinary to him as air. The ritual is correct. You were sincere. The room is wrong, and nobody knows it's wrong because nobody described the room when it was right.

And there's a fifth, which the honesty contract requires:

5. Nothing was wrong. Some nights are flat, the way some sunsets are gray. That isn't a problem to solve. It's weather.

My hypothesis is that number four accounts for some flat nights, not all of them. And unlike the first three, number four is something we can actually measure.

A Suspicion, Clearly Labeled

Here's where I have to be especially careful, because this is the part I most want to be true.

When I read accounts of workings that went right, the experiences the old texts promise, I notice a pattern. The practitioners often worked somewhere rural or remote. They worked at night, in real darkness. They fasted, kept vigil, kept silence, or otherwise stepped well away from the noise of ordinary life. And they tended to credit their success to attainment, discipline, grace or the favor of the powers they worked with.

Those credits may well be right. But the conditions may also have been doing some of the work.

Now the honesty box. That pattern is an impression, not a finding. I haven't surveyed the literature systematically, and it's wide open to survivorship bias. Of course the dramatic accounts come from remote hermitages at midnight. That's where people go to have dramatic experiences, and where they have the time to write about them afterward. Nobody kept a diary of the perfectly pleasant working in a busy market town. An impression like this is exactly what a real study exists to confirm or kill.

That's where you come in. I'll get there in a minute.

Pikachu and Tiphareth

One more thing before the practical part.

New transmissions appear whenever someone has a genuine experience and has to describe it in the vocabulary of the room they're actually standing in. That vocabulary used to be Greek, then Arabic, then Latin, then Victorian English with a lot of capital letters. Today it might be a video game, an anime or a meme.

So when somebody in this group uses a Pokémon oracle deck and reports real results, I don't think she's degrading the Tradition. I think she's doing what the Tradition has always done: carrying a signal in the language her room understands. If the room knows Pikachu better than it knows Tiphareth, then Pikachu is the carrier wave.[3]

Five hundred years from now, someone will try one of our workings in a room we can't imagine, and it may fall flat for reasons we never wrote down, because they were our air. The least we can do is start writing down the air.

The Year and a Day Protocol

Here's the call to action, and it's the real reason for this post.

A year and a day is the old span of study before initiation. It's also, conveniently, long enough to collect a full turn of the Wheel. So here's a protocol for anyone willing to treat next Samhain as the end of an experiment rather than another roll of the dice. It extends the Wheel journal and the field kit from the last two posts, and it costs nothing.

1. Log the room, not just the ritual

After every working, before anyone talks about how it went, fill in a few lines:

• How dark was it? Use your own words, or a free light-meter app.

• What was on or nearby? Router, phones in pockets, TV in the next room, an LED strip, the furnace.

• How quiet was it? Note traffic, neighbors, and the leaf blower that runs at dusk for reasons known only to God.

• Indoors or out, and where? Suburb, town, farm or state forest.

• How rested and fed were you? Late screens? Alcohol?

• NOAA's Kp index for that night, the free space-weather number from the second post.

• How did the circle feel? Settled, scattered, charged or flat. Did it click, and when? Write it down before you compare notes.

2. Log the good nights too

This matters more than it sounds. If you only write down the failures, you'll build a beautiful record of everything that goes wrong and none of what goes right. Record the great nights with the same care and the same boring details. Especially the boring details.

3. Run one blinded test

This is the one I'm most excited about, because it can be done properly with no equipment.

You can't blind a circle to darkness. Everyone knows whether the lights are on. But you can blind it to the invisible stuff. Before a working, have one person who isn't attending flip a coin. Heads, they unplug the house's Wi-Fi router for the evening. Tails, they leave it alone. They write down the result, seal it in an envelope and tell no one. The circle works as usual and records its ratings. Open the envelope afterward.

Do that over a dozen workings and you'll have a small, honestly blinded test of whether the invisible electromagnetic clutter in your house makes any difference you can feel. If it does, that's remarkable. If it doesn't, you've ruled out one suspect cleanly, which is real progress too.[4]

Safety box, and I mean it: unplug devices, not circuits. Don't open your breaker panel unless you know exactly what you're doing, and please don't wire anything to anything. The point is to subtract noise, not to add an electrician.

4. Try a second room

At least once this year, do a working you know well somewhere genuinely dark and quiet: a back field, a state forest campsite or a friend's farm. Then do the same working at home, and log both the same way. One comparison proves nothing, but a few dozen covens doing it might suggest something.

5. Write your predictions down first

Before you test anything, post your prediction somewhere with a date on it. A comment on this thread is fine. "I predict our router-off nights will rate higher" is a prediction. "I knew it all along" is a memoir. One of those is science. The other is your uncle at Thanksgiving.

6. Send it in

If enough of you keep these logs, I'd like to gather them. They'll be anonymous, with no names and nothing that outs anyone who isn't out of the broom closet. They'd go into a pilot chapter of The Entrained Civilization. It wouldn't be proof. It would be the first time anyone has looked at working covens this way, using the observations of the people who actually stand in the circle. Null results are welcome. They're just as publishable as hits, and frankly more trustworthy.

I'll check in at Imbolc to see who's keeping the log and how it's going. No results yet, on purpose. Peeking at the data halfway through is how good experiments go bad, and I'd rather we open the envelopes together next Samhain.

The Morning After, Revisited

So, back to that question in the passenger seat on I-65. Was any of it ever real?

Here's what I'd offer, rolling Perception rather than Insight, as the D&D players in the group will put it: sticking to what you witnessed rather than guessing at what it meant. The night that went thick in the woods when you were nineteen happened. You were there. A flat Samhain in a living room with a chirping smoke detector doesn't reach back and un-happen it, any more than a dull conversation un-happens a good one. The room was different. Maybe that mattered and maybe it didn't, but now you can find out.

The Tradition's great achievement has been transmission. Across centuries of persecution, burned libraries and lost lineages, the signal has kept moving. People received it, put it in the language of their room, and passed it on.

Its blind spot is that it never examined the conditions that made those transmissions work. It kept the procedures beautifully and the symbols with extraordinary care. What it couldn't keep was the description of the air, because nobody thought the air needed describing.

Every grimoire has a blank page between the last line of instruction and the first moment of practice. It's the page where the author would have written and the room should be like this, if the room had ever been different enough to need describing.

The room is different now.

Let's write that page together, one boring, honest log entry at a time, for a year and a day.

Footnotes

[1] Before 2006, some Indiana counties observed daylight saving time and most didn't, which meant that driving to your cousin's wedding could involve crossing into a different hour, and sometimes back again before the reception. Hoosiers spent decades as the only people in America who could be late and early to the same event.

[2] Some of the most important texts in this Tradition survived because one manuscript happened to reach the right reader at the right time. The Corpus Hermeticum reached Florence in a single copy carried by a monk. Luck is underrated as a preservation method.

[3] Tiphareth is the sixth sephirah on the Tree of Life, the center of beauty and balance. It has never once been sold in a booster pack, which honestly may be a marketing failure.

[4] One honest limit: a phone's compass app measures the Earth's magnetic field and nearby magnets, not Wi-Fi or cell signals, so it can't tell you whether the router is on. That's why the coin and the envelope do the work here instead of an app.