As we enter into Spooky Season I’d like to talk about Fear in relation to spirit work. Specifically, the value and benefit of fear, which is not a topic I see raised.
Hear me out. I know many people will quote Dune “I must not fear, fear is the mind-killer” or tell you to “push past the fear.” You may also hear that fear is “lower vibration” (whatever that means).
However, sometimes it is your ancestors/ spirit guides or whatever/whomever trying to send you a message. That message is DO NOT.
In one personal example from my late teens I was planning to visit a friend I really wanted to see who lived out of state. A series of things happened that delayed me, including completely misplacing my car keys. The whole time I had this pronounced feeling of dread about the visit, but I dismissed it because there was really no reason for it. I wanted to see them and I went anyway. While driving on the highway headed to see them, I got in a car accident though no one was harmed.
As another example, a few years ago (but still during the pandemic) a friend that I had gifted the Sixth Pentacle of Jupiter was going to meet with a client and felt a great fear about it. It was really unusual. This was an existing client and there was really no obvious reason for the fear. He hadn’t been particularly fearful about work with other clients. Turns out his client was sick and got my friend sick. This prompted asking the spirits of the pentacle about the fear, and they confirmed that they do sometimes cause this fear to try to get a person to avoid a dangerous situation. It was not in the power of the spirits of the pentacle to stop the transmission of the germs, so they tried to make him cancel the appointment to avoid the danger.
Even when people are not practitioners, I personally believe that in some cases where folks feel like their intuition has warned them in advance of a disastrous event, it is really their unknown spirit allies. We all have ancestors, after all.
Just some food for thought. Not all fear is a spooky warning and some fears are truly unwarranted, but fear itself exists to help us avoid danger.
Remember as practitioners we don’t need to be ruled by our fears, and we have more tools than most for getting additional information, like divination. However we should also not dismiss our feelings or intuition.
Author: Alison Chicosky
Alison Chicosky is a scholar and practitioner of a variety of forms of thaumaturgy with a focus on results-based magic. While especially interested in both Solomonic magic and the Graeco-Egyptian magic of the Greek Magical Papyri, she is also well versed in soul-flight and psychic magic of various kinds. The founder and force behind Practical Occult (www.practicaloccult.com), she strives to provide pentacles and other enchanted items drawn from a broad background of rigorously studied ancient arts, leveraging the systems of the past for practical modern use.