A Night out of Time

Heather Fae Speaker at the grave of Sarah Christiana Krom at Old Tongore Cemetery in Tongore, NY (near the Ashokan Reservoir) in Ulster County, New York. Photo by Eric Francis / Book of Blue.

It’s sometimes said — and I’ve said it a number of times here — that Scorpio time is when the veil between the worlds is the thinnest. Not everyone has a concept of what those veils are or how they work. You can think of them as an ‘outer’ experience of dimensions, where the psychic space that we share here on the physical plane adjoins a nearby nonphysical realm that we access, among other ways, in dreams.

Hurricane Sandy at peak intensity off of Florida on Oct. 25, 2012.

This is sometimes called the astral plane. There are a number of close-by regions, including the causal, mental and etheric realms. We are not divided from them by anything physical, though the body is the thing that most often seems to get in the way. At the center of it all is soul, that which illuminates all existence, despite how much clutter we put in the way.

What is beyond the veil can be just as accurately thought of as inner realms that we contain and can access, if we’re open enough. It’s not the body that veils our awareness; it’s our belief in the supremacy of the body, or that it’s the only thing that actually exists. To investigate any other possibility is what’s usually described as a ‘spiritual path’.

Legend, tradition and observation suggest that while the Sun is in Scorpio, the sign of death and transformation, the veils are thinner, which is another way of saying we have deeper access to ourselves. This is the time of year when we honor our dead (but still spiritually alive) ancestors. We can make contact with them; we can welcome them into our homes and our awareness; we can thank them and we can seek their help.

In Western industrial society this is played out as Halloween — lawns are turned to bone yards, houses are decorated as if haunted, and it’s appropriate, for one night a year, to openly acknowledge the macabre fate that we all share.

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