ZOZOBRA #3
“HEXORCISM“
Part 1
or GHOST PUNCHING 101
Words by KEATS ROSS
Illustrations by ERIC J. MILLAR
WHEN DID THE GHOSTS START PUNCHING BACK?
“Oh, dear,” one thinks when the first rough and tumble of their first altercation with a formidable phantom happens in the home. “Regretful it’s come to this,” one sighs over the burning and burial of the magickal items that assuredly didn’t help ex-hex this infested home. “Last time I use a valuable antique as an altar,” one tells themselves as their magickal artifacts cinder as the ghosts jig around your crumbling…life.
How did we get here? When did the ghosts start punching back? Why didn’t the spooky inoculate the spooks? How did my mythology pique into a pitiful crescendo? If it’s all in my head, how come it’s levitating the bed?
When did the magick quit working?
There is, unfortunately, always a defensive scramble when the haunts of yesteryears RE-GRUNTS and regrets aren’t hushed any longer. “GTFO!” or “GHOST THE FUCK OUT!“ one scrambles amidst a spectral infestation… running room to an effort to establish foregone dominance by smudging and stuttering incantation after incantation. And then it sets in… this house is not a home… and come one, you most certainly haven’t an ounce of the ghost-ticular fortitude or material wealth to embark on a Winchester Widow trajectory. All the guilt and no bread to co-exist with all these spooky sycophants.
Sorry friendo, but your haunted past is beginning to cat-house you!
Oh lord, forget the psychical and metaphysical implications of such an invasion… what about the socio-economic symptoms of such a bad moon rising in your bedroom such as this!
“What will the community think?“ You flounder… “How am I to pay for this?” What psychic pesticide doesn’t need all your body and soul, let alone care and attention to rid these damn things! What am I to do in such a dour empathetic empire?
Forget that. Burn that paranoia post haste. But how?
EX-HEX / UNBIND
It’s not the home, no, the home was always mirrored from inside out. That’s right, these ghosts will follow… but what if we were to treat this material space as we would our mental innerspace? What if we were to finally marry the home and the heart, treating the debacle outworldly as if it were coming from inside the house, as it is coming from behind your eyes?
You see, regrets, rather regrunts, can be anthropormophisized as literal poltergeists. Thoughts being causal, you no doubt navigate the tough terrain of your brain through the vector of everyday life. And like the negative ideations that are casted to the side, or doused and covered and ignored, weeds tear through the cement pillars of your waking life. Suddenly, the ghosts manifest from psychic aches to dastardly decisions. Like the zombies in 21 Days Later, the ghosts adapted to run rather than loom–no more do mythological methods of psychical-only exorcisms expel these faster, better, stronger specters. You have no choice but to go nuclear. The ghosts are now hosts of this unhappy cathedral of stunted catharsis.
Perhaps you, like so many other impoverished workhorses in cosmopolitan areas, decided to play house in the narrows of your town. You know, that part of town, i.e. the other side of the tracks, in both life and the afterlife. The psychic ghetto.
Every home echoes of dark and torrid bouts of somatic strife, whether it of financial or interpersonal woes, or even terribly long bouts of doubt and artistic ebbs. Everywhere ricochets the dashed hopes and burning yearns of the individuals housed within. As much holy ground as gilded palace of sin. Not even the music made, the mushroom trips or the endless bouts of artistic expression win out the memories left within. This is why exorcisms are needed for posessions, because we posess nothing, truly, but our reactions… our actions
Let me personalize the diatribe from here on in… my recent home was made, initially, with a former partner (because how else were to afford such lavish space on a vagabond’s pittance?) – the cabinets were chalk-full of gonna’s and wouldn’t-it-be-grand’s, the corners filled with plans upon plans. A place for two lives intertwined and the beasts that reside.
Maintanence was never a forethought, always a missed opportunity. Most graduations are made hastily-that is made with desire and without rational resolve to begin with. I think that’s how so many of us build only to burn, addicted to the climb that’s never truly earned: “No more dingy basements or mattresses upon mattresses upon a sea of peas!” We thought. Nevermind the financial burdens of keeping up such a sham of a relationship, the space shall do you two good!
We all symbolize our dwellings as our being-ness, our sanctuaries. Perhaps we simply put too much damn stock in wooden structures to begin with. Wood absorbs and wood bends and wood buckles–echoing centuries of the energies that swelled within, only a thumbprint of which was our time therein. So, are homes ever ours to begin with? Weren’t they always the ghosts’? Home is where you make it? No, you are always home.
So, in the end the ghosts won another one. The past will-out. The place became some other space, disconnected and dejected from those initial wide-eyed appraisals. They beat me.
I became alone in a palace of pain I was so used to fighting so hard to make my own, and for what? Did I believe I was to expire there? Did I want to be another dead dream blinking inbetween the wall beams? Really? No. I was just king shit on fuck mountain when all was said and done– in a hypnogogic state of befuddlement on a cold winter night- amongst the shambles of my failed relationships (multiple, mind you) and cardboard boxes of shit I never needed. In a hinterland of cat shit and dog piss; pickle jars open and awaiting further instruction, memories of malt liquor quivering from my bones.
The ghosts truly took hold when I caught myself trying to get warm from the open oven, wrapped in multiple pajama bottoms, and ponder what would it take to stick my head in this time? If I can’t beat ‘em join ‘em quoth Yosemite Sam. I snickered, because my humor had become so dark that suicide was a punchline rather than a surrender, and I joked often… I was so desensitized with the drab that I made light of such a harrowing sentiment.
I began a dialogue with myself that stays with me still:
You knew it’d come to this didn’t you? You daft prick, you wanted these bad energies to swell and pulse because you wanted motivation to change! You let the haunted orderlies order you around! You waited for your sour memories run amok to make you burn the place down, didn’t you? You probably had no material or societally acceptable reason to back your need, no, your lust for rebirth, so you allowed the dirge of these dour memories to make the decision for you, didn’t you!?
That’s when I came to. I knew I had to punch back. I stood and brandished a fist, alert and at the ready: I am not this. I am not, as I was anymore, nor will I ever be, this again. Ever again.
So this is how I ex-hex’d this former home as I would my ailing bones. The following is my ritual for a HEXORCISM, or the cleansing of old magickal talisman for the means of casting out of self-imposed demons:
INGREDIENTS FOR HEXORCISM:
- Previously Used Altar
- Hammer
- 1 lone sock, preferably found in an otherwise absurd place in your bedroom
- 1 condom (wrapped)
- A gaggle of Himilayan Pink Salt
- 1 Purple Sharpee
- 1 ghettoblaster
- 1 mixtape with a song for each room to be exorcised (I.e. bedroom would be a favorite “get it on,” kitchen would be a favorite “gettin’ together,” etc.
- 1 a utility bill
- 1 a portrait of Wendy O. Williams (or your preferred God of Destruction
- 1 twig-woven ankh (Or symbol/sigil for life woven from living materials)
GOD OF DESTRUCTION
All hail Chaos, All hail torrid affairs of terrible turbulence! Where else would our mettle be tested? How else would we ex-hex without feeling the afterburn of an ex’s hex, eh?!
Before we jump into the rhyme and meter, I conjure a force to be reckoned with:
Let us give thanks to the true lord of chaos, a pragmatic plasmatic, god of destruction Wendy O. fuckin’ Williams. Let’s inhale her and beautiful brutality by enchanting our attitudes–no better way than to vex, to exorcise than conjuring the brutal bounties of this god of war!
Remember, we are not just letting go, we are not just “moving on”–no, we are kissing the malformed memories and the magnificent magicks performed upon this altar… and like the great WOW, we shall transmutate it, as she would, and summon the destruction!
STAY TUNED for the NITTY GRITTY in
PART 2!
NEXT TIME: HEXORCISM PART 2: BURNING ALTARS
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