Here is where we post the latest information on everything Tabula Mortem and more.
Ghosts, Instructions, Uncategorized

A Divining familiars

Posted on by Judas

Spirits can be many things, ghosts, demonic shells, even guides, but did you know that there is a kind of spirit that can help you see into the future? There is, and witches of old have always employed their help to access hidden information. For those that use them they serve as a friend, teacher, and a source of power. They are also easily obtained, in fact, you may have one already and not even know it. Once you learn to work with this magical friend you will be able to divine the future with, cards, palms, crystals and even The Tabula Mortem.

Over the years I have told fortunes for countless people, in person, on the internet and over the phone. One thing that gets said to me a lot is “how do you do it? I have learned the meaning of the cards and made all the studies you have but when you hold up a card and tell someone miles away, everything they needed to know, I think how did he get that from that card?” Until recently I didn’t know. It seems that I have had a divining familiar most of my life and did not know it. The divining familiar is a spirit familiar just like any other but this one serves a particular purpose; it helps you see into the future. When you have one and you keep it close to you then it works inside your head to help you see meaning hidden in symbols and signs.

You may be asking yourself, why do I need one of these to use the Tabula Mortem? The answer is that you can use the board without it just fine. But having one seems to make the difference between someone who’s readings are vague and scattered and one who can give information that will be of real value for the sitter. Anyone can memorize the meanings of the symbols on the board but each of those symbols can have hundreds of different meanings. The familiar will guide you to an understanding as to what that symbol is saying to the individual.

So, I guess the next thing I need to address is how do you go about getting one. Have you ever heard someone say that when a Tarot deck is new you should sleep with it under your pillow for a couple of nights? This is usually done to make a connection with them. Well, it turns out that this is one of the best ways to get a divining familiar as well. You do this by taking something you intend to use for divination, like a deck of cards and putting it under your pillow (for a spirit board simply put it under your entire bed). If neither of these places are possible you can put the object beside where you sleep, so long as it is close. Then, every night before you go to sleep ask if a spirit will come to you and help you see into the future. Do this until you meet a spirit in your dreams that gives you its name, don’t worry if it is the name of someone else you know, a famous person or even a demon. Your spirit is different and has chosen a name that it uses only with you, for this reason they like to test you by picking a name you may reject. Remember this name! it is very important, and this brings me to the second way to get a divining familiar, which is to have someone give one to you.

  Once you have the familiar you must never let anyone else learn its name, if they do then the spirit will depart and maybe even curse you as well. Before every reading simply call your spirits name in your mind, NOT OUT LOUD! Then as you are reading new insights will come to your mind. It is tradition for a witch to pass this spirit on to someone else before they die. You do this by choosing someone you think can use its services best and telling them about it, finally revealing its name. It should not be angry about this and should pass peacefully from one person to the next. A good divination Familiar is a one of the most valuable things a witch can have so use it well and may blessings be with you.

Blessed Be

Instructions, News, Pendulums, Planchette

Tabula Mortem Planchette/Pendulum Jewelry

Posted on by Jerome VanDyke

If you wish to make contact with your board, you could wear the planchette as a necklace for a couple of days when you first get the board.  This would help to make a personal connection with the board and would look like jewelry since the planchette is made from zinc and has an antique copper finish. 

News, Uncategorized

Tabula Mortem “Board of the Dead”

Posted on by Jerome VanDyke


Tabula Mortem is Latin to roughly mean “Board of the Dead” the classic spirit board has been completely redesigned to help awaken anyone’s psychic abilities and place communication with the spirit world at your fingertips.  This beautifully illustrated board beckons the user out of their everyday world into a shadowy realm of magic.  The strange symbols and glittering skulls arranged in a magic circle convey a feeling of power. The Veve in the center lets you know you stand at the crossroads where the spiritual world intersects with reality.  The Tabula Mortem is a magical tool that can contact higher forces through a symbolic language as old as magic itself.  Mastery of the board can give you the ability to contact ancestral spirits and guides to experience their wisdom firsthand.  You can use the elemental symbols in the inner ring of the board to call up the very forces that govern our physical world.  No matter what magical path you are on the Tabula Mortem can help you navigate it.


Ghosts, Stories, Uncategorized

Spirit Obsession

Posted on by Judas

 In this post I would like to address a subject I feel everyone using a spirit board or even practicing magic needs to be educated about, that is spirit obsession.  Obsession is when a spirit, usually but not always a husk attaches itself to a person, object, or place.

 I say, they are usually a husk because this is the kind of entity that is most often doing it.  So now I need to give a definition of what I call a husk.  First, I must point out that what I tell you here is from my own experiences and what I have learned in all my years of trafficking with the other side.  If Jerome and I were alive during the witch trials, we would have been found guilty without question.  But the spirits talk to us about the human soul being made up of parts.  Some are part of who you are, and you carry these from life to life, it is what the Fool in the Tarot deck carries in his bag.


But other parts are temporary, the sphinxes pulling the Chariot.  And these exist in a positive and negative form, think of them as an angel and a devil on each shoulder, the Sumerians did. They are the two parts of the ego, the part that wants to be an angel in people’s eyes and helps others and the part that wants to be a devil and dominate them.  We tend to see the angel as good and the devil as bad, but they are both incomplete and if left alone would lead us to destruction.  Trying to be too passive will only make you the pray for others and trying to be too dominating will make you a predator that others will avoid.  We need them both and to use them at the right time.  Like the Charioteer we need to keep to the middle while these parts of our ego pull to the extremes.

The thing to remember about these shells is that they are a mask made up over a lifetime to protect the inner self which is vulnerable.  That is why the Chariot Card is related to the sign of Cancer.  We need them, when we are alive because, like it or not, there are bad things other people do and this false image we project out to the world help us to live with others.

But when we die, we need it no more, just as when you are born you no longer need the placenta. So, it is cast aside.  It often stays close to the body because it is the ego that thinks the body is a part of us.  There is a line in Romeo and Juliet about how people have noticed these things and that they return to the body at a particular time, we have found it to be at 3:33 am by the way.

Were bloody Tybalt, yet but green in earth,

Lies festering in his shroud; where, as they say,

At some hours in the night spirits resort

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

This entity is not so much a spirit, but the husk of an ego thrown off at death and starting to divide into the two parts that make it up.  Because it is made by the person’s awareness of themselves it will eventually fade away.  But the ego thinks it is the person and now tries hard as it can to find someone or something to convince itself it is real.  If it can remember an object or place, then it often retunes to it when it is away from the body.  Therefore, some spirits haunt places or objects and we call it spirit obsession.  But if someone is willing to talk to it than that is enough to hold its memory of itself together.

You can usually spot these spirits by the way they behave on the board.  They will keep you talking and tell you everything they think you want to hear just so you will talk to them.  They will often tell you that there is something very important that only you can do.  Remember these things are pure ego and they will try to use yours to attach to you.

When you get one the best thing to do is stop talking to it immediately.  Do not let it attach, if it does find a ritual to get rid of it.  You can tell, if one is attached to someone because the inflicted person will get angry for no reason, they may suffer panic attacks and over time may lose hair and gain weight without a cause.  These things feed off the aura and as it becomes damaged the chakras become unbalanced causing many physical side effects.

The Veve of Legba was put on the board to keep these things out. He is the gatekeeper to the other side so hopefully you will not get one of these, but they can still get through at times.  One thing to keep in mind is that spirits of this kind are more dense and thus closer to our world.  They will remember their lives and how to read and write so they will use the alphabet to communicate with you.  The higher part of a spirit is more likely to have evolved beyond written language and will probably communicate using the Cave Runes.

As practitioners of magic, it is our place to help keep the balance between the worlds, but I will address this in a later post.  For now, we need to learn what we are dealing with, and I hope this helps.

Blessed Be

 

Cave Runes, Instructions, Pictures, Uncategorized

Rod Rune

Posted on by Judas

A native person looking out over a snowy forest. Charcoal pencil sketch.

In this post I would like to share some thoughts I have about one of the Cave Runes. The Rune that’s on my mind is The Rod, you will find it on page 59 of The Tabula Mortem Guidebook. At first sight this Rune my seem simple and in fact that is why I chose it as the first Rune to write about in our new blog. In the book I said that this Rune could symbolize power or fire because of its resemblances to a stick. Here I would like to give you some new ideas regarding this symbol and maybe broaden your interpretation when this rune comes up.



It does indeed, look like a stick but is that the only thing it looks like? To go deeper into this symbolism we must ask ourselves, what would ancient people have seen in their world that would have looked like this and what images does it call to my mind today?
To answer these questions, you may need to leave your modern conveniences, all the lights, sounds, and clutters that tend to build up around us and sometimes inside us in what we call our daily lives. We will need to travel back to the time when daily life was a risk and our place in this world was a mystery.
Imagine a world where everything around you are wild, where trees reach to the very sky, where there is little or no traces of other humans. Maybe it is cold, and the snow is just starting to fall. There is a strong smell of pine trees and dead leaves in the air and a campfire crackling in the distance giving off a smell of smoke. Everywhere you look is nature and everything you see, even the rocks seem green.
Now ask yourself where you see a straight horizontal line, is it a fallen tree, a snake on the ground, or even the horizon dividing the sky from the earth. Now imagine you’re in a dark cave, people are gathered around, and you can hear them dancing and beating on drums in a soft and steady rhythm. The walls are covered with symbolic drawings of fantastic beasts the seemed to come to life in the dancing fire light. You walk over to the wall, and you see this straight line drew out in ochre. Now ask yourself what it is saying to me, what does it mean.

If you did this meditation, then you may want to write down any thoughts that come to your head as they may be insights into this symbol that can help you in the future. From my own point of view, I would like to examine the idea of this rune representing the horizon. If you have ever seen a small child drawing a picture, one of the first thing they do is draw a horizontal line to represent the flat ground. Ancient people had no way of knowing the earth was round, in fact they probably didn’t think of the earth as one thing. To them every rock, every gravel and every grain of sand would have been a completely different entity. On the ground was everything they knew, and in the sky was the unknown, the land of the gods. Looked at this way this rune could represent all, everything, all that we know.

If we relate this rune to the ground, then it can also represent stability and strength. All that is solid and stable in our lives. It could be all that sustains us and what we build our future upon. The concept of the horizon also gives us the idea of distance and things that are far away.

It could be telling us that something is stable. Or it could be speaking of one thing that is made up of many things. It could be telling us that something is far off in the future. Or it could just mean the ground itself.

    • Keywords
    • Distance
    • Stability
    • The collective
    • Security
    • Solid

Legba, Stories, Vodou

Papa Legba Portrait of a Lwa

Posted on by Judas

Poppa Legba

For those of you who do not know him, Papa Legba is a Lwa (pronounced loo-WAH and can sometimes be spelled loa). Now you might ask yourself, what is a Lwa? The answer to that question is completed as there are many types of Lwa in the world but to simplify the subject I will speak here of them in the most basic sense. It is to be understood that I am not an expert on this subject but simply someone who has encountered Legba and can speak only from my own experiences and what little information one can gain from books.

Books on the subject range from enlightened works of true initiates to absolute garbage so you need be careful when researching the subject. As for the garbage I will not speak for too much credence has been given to it in the past. The better books will often tell you all that can be told to an outsider (such as myself) within the confines of a spiritual tradition with sacred oaths designed to keep much information secret.

Vodou, more commonly spelled Voodoo. I will be using the former as it is the traditional Haitian spelling of the word, and the more common Voodoo has become degraded through Hollywood movies and books about sticking pins into dolls to kill your enemies. Another reason for my choice in spelling is that when I first encountered a Lwa I reached out to traditional Haitian practitioners of Vodou to get an understanding of what it is was I was trafficking with and they all seemed to draw a distinction between Vodou and Voodoo, one being a deep faith that celebrated life and honored the dead, the other being a product of superstition and B movies. I will not make an attempt to explain Vodou as my knowledge of the subject is limited and there are some excellent books on the subject available to those who take the time to look. One advise I will give is to avoid books that use the spelling Voodoo as most of these I have encountered are not factual.

So why am I even discussing Vodou and the Lwa on a page dedicated to a spirit board? It is because one particular Lwa had a hand in the creation of this board. That Lwa is Papa Legba and I would love to share with you the story of how an ancient African spirit ended up with his portrait on the inside cover of a spirit board box.

This all began when my husband and I opened a small occult store here in the Appalachian Mountains. The store was small, and we had opened it with our own money, so the shelves were half empty, and we needed customers to get it off the ground. We had both studied magic and read about Voodoo (notice the spelling) but had very little real knowledge. We charred a lot of used books on magic and one day a customer wanted to sell us some old books, one of which was on Voodoo. I felt compelled to read the books as I usually do when I happen across a book on magic I have not read so that’s what I did. The book was small and had almost no information, but it did give some instructions for calling up the Lwa. I decided to try it and call on a Lwa that I thought could help the store to grow but first I would have to call on Papa Legba. At the time I had no idea who Legba was, but the book said he was a gatekeeper and must be called first (sometimes even a bad book can point you in the right direction). So it was, that I called to Legba in hopes of actually working with another Lwa. I say this other Lwa because we never made contact with them and now, I can’t even remember who it was. It was a short ritual and it felt like nothing happened until a few nights later.

I have always spoken to spirits in my dreams ever since my grandmother passed away and visited me right after. They tell me what it is like for them now and give advice. In this particular dream Legba came and talked to me and it seemed we spoke all night although after waking I could just remember pieces. He showed me a large tree that was sacred to him and told me why he has a dog that accompanies him, although I can’t remember the whole story now. He told me that the Fool card in the Tarot deck corresponds to him as the wanderer of the crossroads. He finished all this up by telling me something I did remember and that was that he wanted me to paint a picture of him. His only stipulation was that I had to paint him as old because age shows wisdom. When I stated telling people about my encounter with him, I was shocked to learn that most people already knew who Legba was, or should I say most people already had a misconception of who he was. I didn’t know it at the time but a popular T.V. show called American Horror Story had attempted to portray Papa Legba and because of this people were developing an interest in Vodou. Working in a store that sells occult products I got to talk to magical people from all walked of life. Some were people who had practiced for years while others were just starting to discover a whole world of magic and looked everywhere to find more. One of the things I noticed is that people new to magic tend to think that the stuff they see in movies and T.V. shows that deal with magic is true information. While this can be true, in most cases it is not. Here we may need a little understanding, the people who make movies or television have a job to do and that job is to entertain. It is not their job or respectability to teach you about anything. The stories they tell need to be exiting so they need characters that are exaggerated and/or embellished. For Legba this has become a double-edged sword. On the one hand this show has brought him to people who would not know anything about him without it but at the same time it created a false image of him that has more in common with the Christian devil then the wise gatekeeper he is. Nevertheless, I went on Netflix and watched the show and I immediately saw why he needed me to depict him as old. It seemed that the only real thing that bothered Legba about this show was that they made him young.

I had been doing a lot of digital art and just discovered a program that allowed me to paint as I would on canvas. So, I painted a picture I felt captured both his wisdom and dignity. Not long after that Jerome and I were asked by U.S. Games Systems to design a new spirit board. Now that is a whole other story that I intend to tell someday but as this post is getting too long, I will jump ahead and tell you that as the board evolved and we talked of different things we could put on the board it was the Veve of Papa Legba they wanted for the centerpiece of the board. After this I told them the story of Legba wanting me to paint him and they ask me to send them the painting. A year later when the board was actually ready, they sent us all the images that would make up the Tabula Mortem and on the inside of the box lid was Papa Legba. I can’t help but feel that he knew when he asks me to paint him that his image would be published and sold worldwide to those looking to make contact with the other side, after all he is the gatekeeper.