Within some of my work with St. Cyprian, I have taken an adjustment to how I engage with the interwoven existence between myself and the dead. This cyclical progression of rising and falling like waves and tides ebbing and flowing with the push and pull of the moon has been a focus of mine and how I do my Necromancy and my work as a whole.
I have begun to rely on St. Cyprian in the ways that a researcher in a museum would rely on their fellow researchers. We both provide and pool together ideas, concepts, knowledge, resources, and speculations to gather more information about a subject or a particle that we are focused on. The importance and relevance of the subject is not as important as how we have reached our conclusions and how we have shared and gathered information. Like a team of archivists, I have gathered and amassed several others with me that have loaned their skills and expertise. It’s been a pleasure having such resources available to me. The team I have that supports me as a Necromancer is imperative to the matters that I am keen to study as well as understand. How these subjects impact me and effect me as not necessarily the focus of this particular article but I will tell you that they are important in regards to the subject matter of “Past Lives”.
Death and Life are not linear in any regard. As it has been expressed to me already and I know and understand it (and St. Cyprian reminds me of this often), “You are both dead and alive mutually in conclusive being. You’re everything you have been and not been. You are a corpse inside of this body. The spirit of something dead. You are dying. You are alive. You are being born.”
Through this crucible of gnosis, I work closely with this prospect of endless strands and strings connecting like threads between myself and other parts of me that have existed previously. But unlike threads and strands, I find that the places I have been and existed are not consistent with a comprehensive understanding. Impactful moments in time and space are not perfect nor are they linear to the prospect of multiple realities and universes. They are more like a spill - an ink stain in time and space. Therefore there are places and times where things have not happened that are occurrences and events that are familiar and documented in our current understanding of time and space and the histories that it relates to. The same is true for the opposition to this statement. Events and occurrences have not happened that have happened. This is, suffice to say, a very confusing way to word it, and I apologise for the vague way of speaking of this statement. I hope that it, in some regard, sits well with some readers if not all.
Within this dedicated team of Support that I work with, we behold Eurynomous. This is the crux of our integration of crucial information and materials that there are to be worked with. Understanding that I, myself, am dead. I am not alive and yet I am alive simultaneously. I have died already before on a number of occasions. I am used to the concept. How I have died in the past no longer haunts me as it did when I first ripped the veil off of such matters. At first it was a sort of blissful agony. I was anchored to a reality where I am and was alive (here within the context I am speaking of) and at the same time I could enjoy the crescendoing precipice of my death and transition from one state to another. Some were graphic and violent. Others were whispers in the dark of the cosmos. Some were rightfully earned. Others not so much. There is not a right or a wrong to any of these. They simply are. They are byproducts of a life lived and then changed. But they were never removed from me.
I am dead. I am a corpse inhabiting a body. I have never been alive in a linear way nor will this form ever last in a way I wish it to. But for now, I can occupy it in a way that serves a purpose until it does not serve that purpose anymore. The spirit that is occupying this body can do more than the body itself - this is a front. It is like any vehicle I could pilot and use to carry out tasks and accomplish needs that I have. But what it cannot do, my spirit does. I cannot take in the other lives that I have had with my body. I must do this with my spirit.
This is where the principles of Eurynomous holds sway in the Office of the Dead. I am a corpse. I have many corpses. They are scattered throughout time and space. They are behind me and in front of me, a bloodbath trail like footsteps in a cold winter night. I can follow them if I have a keen enough eye. I can perform anthropology on myself, occupying my mind with the history of my being. What objects were important to me? What sort of life did I live? What did I do for a living? Where did I even live? Did I have a straw bed or did I lay upon silk and furs? Who were the faces I met and hands that I shook? There is a lot to uncover but what is important is that I find and I locate my body. In a way I can revive this body. I can bring it back to life. Breathing some sort of energy and focus into the leftover husk that it once was. I can reconstitute this body, in spirit. I can even occupy it. Or I can allow it to occupy me. Or both.
Eurynomous is known as the Eater of the Dead. There are several ways that we can interpret this, but the most commonly observed and curated analogy is that it is the cyclical return of energy. The circle of life, so to speak, being incorporated through the things that are decomposers. We ourselves may physically decompose and become no more - depending on our circumstances, I should say - but this does not mean that the things we dropped behind us are gone. The echo of our past is a firm and strong imprint upon the worlds and reality that you have occupied in times passed. In this, you can find yourself.
You can travel far and wide, tracking down your own steps and retracing the lines of places that you have gone, went, passed by and seen in a bygone life. Furthermore you can extend your current occupancy to those other parts of you. With Eurynomous I have been offered myself in a way that I was not anticipating. I was offered myself to dine upon. To eat the self.
The idea of autosarcophagy may seem unnerving at first. But what is it, if not putting what was once yours back where it belongs. You are a corpse inhabiting a body that is alive. You are already dead. A corpse eating a corpse. You are the cycle itself incarnate and this is part of the Divine Relation you have to all of your past selves. To make yourself whole - that is the exercise that I have been taught with my current workings with St. Cyprian and Eurynomous. There is a sacredness to the spirits you left behind. And in time and in places, you may have been eaten by those that you shared that same time and place with. Others may be reaching back the same as you. A leg. An arm. A liver. A kidney. Something of your spirit may have drawn others to the same time and the same place - other people that you knew or once knew or were familiar with. They may have taken a bite. They have Taken a part of you. Out of love or out of hate or out of curiosity with what you did to them in that life that you shared, they may eat you. Like the memories that come flooding back to you when you have that one drink or eat that one food. It reminds them. It revives them and their haunted remembrance of you. Even just a little. The same goes for you. You consume the memories and echoes - those corpses of those you knew when you find them. Taking them into your mouth to chew and swallow them down so they become a part of you. Energy here works like this, I think. Not as a fuel but as a currency of understanding and awareness of yourself and the Past.
Autosarcophagy is the Sacrament you accept into your mouth. You are the body and soul of something genuine and raw. Flesh and tissue in a way that is no longer corporeal but impotent to the worldly structures - now loose and free in the place that it had fallen. These remnants of you, these pieces that are scattered across time and space, can be eaten. They can be made whole into yourself as you take them into your spiritual body. By doing so you integrate and commune with who you are in a way that weaves the fibres of your essence into something both alive and dead, living and dying, and being born all at once. You are you and you deserve to be eaten. To be consumed. To be made part of something that is deserving. You are deserving. That is the lesson of Eurynomous I have been presented with over these last two months in my work.
As I uncover and chisel at the basalt that has formed around a part of me I am like an animal clawing and biting at restraints to get to food I know lies just beneath the surface. Iced in, that part of me is locked in a tomb of clear ice, impenetrable through usual means. I have been being held at bay for some time and it is slowly giving way to my dedication, pressure and the unyielding forces that I share that accompany me and endorse my voyage to this part of me. For what reason or purpose I have been prevented from indulging in this particular corpse of mine, I cannot say. But it is mine. And I will have it.
But throughout this endeavour I have been allowed such incredible resources, experiences and incredibly important value to materials I otherwise would not have had without the support of St. Cyprian and Eurynomous. Together, we have made an indomitable team in this work and made such impressive headway into this interest of mine. I have many thanks to offer and yet I know they are unimportant to the both of them - for gratitude is not needed, only the rejoice in what we accomplish together. The value we give to ourselves and to our bonds and those we connect with through time and the sacred value of our deaths and past lives is all that matters to any of us. So I would like to thank the both of them in this document for having been so good and gracious with me and patient with my frustrations and my embittered tongue and self restraint.
You are a corpse. And you deserve to be eaten.