The Night Out of Time

Heather Fae at Old Tongore Cemetery in Olivebridge, NY. Photo by Eric Francis for Book of Blue.

Dear Friend and Reader:

It’s dusk in New York, and on Oct. 31, that means that a year is ending. This, in the Pagan calendar. Since the new year doesn’t begin until daybreak, tonight is the night between the years, or as I call it, the night out of time. Its always one of my favorite nights of the year — the veils are indeed thin, and the ancestors are close by. If you’ve been following Planet Waves this week, you know we are at one of the cross-quarter times — midway between an equinox and a solstice.

These are the true Pagan holy days, or sabbats: the current one is called Samhain (it’s pronounced sahwen, and if you don’t want to get on the bad side of a witch, please don’t say sam-hain). This is opposite Beltane (the May, or Midspring). The smaller ones are Imbolc (Midwinter, which became Candlemas and Ground Hog Day, around Feb. 2) and Lughnasadh (Midsummer, first harvest or second planting, either Aug. 1 or 5).

On the 1st of November, Day of the Dead, I try to get to a cemetery every year and commune with those on the other side. I have a new favorite one in Olivebridge, called the Old Tongore Cemetery, and I plan to arrive tomorrow with some rum and frankincense and other offerings. That is, unless my dad gets back to me fairly soon with the grave locations of my grandparents Sam and Vera Coppolino, his parents, down in Orange County.

The photo above, of Heather Fae, was taken a few weeks ago at Old Tongore. Here is a photo of Heather in more or less normal waking consciousness. As soon as she was undressed and touched the ground, she went into a trance and entered the world of the dead. I know her pretty well, and this was no version of personality that I’ve ever encountered. She was describing what it was like to be in the world on the other side of the veil. She tapped into the sense that most of those around us didn’t know they had crossed over. Talking to her quietly through that portion of the photo shoot, I felt like I was talking to someone who was buried in that old graveyard.

Her personality took on a slumbery, semi-conscious air. She made contact with either a child in a grave a few feet to her right, or with a woman named Sarah Christiana Krom (the marker she’s sitting next to), whose grave I had photographed this summer for someone through Find-a-Grave.com. In any event, she was speaking as if immersed in their dusky world, that of the not quite dead, not quiet alive, and it didn’t feel that different than our own.

The experience felt natural and real and neither of us were spooked.

I think that we need to make peace with death: with its pain and its loss of control; with its indignity; with its evocative curiosity; with its allure; and most of all its sense of impending inevitability. We need to remember that we’re not so far away from all those bones under the ground in their dark and silent (and mostly forgotten) tombs. We need to do this not to scare ourselves, but rather to make peace with existence: its transience and beauty, and with the appreciation that we can only indulge in the sensual, tactile world when we’re alive and in our bodies.

The May (Beltane) is the celebration of life and fertility, and hence, sex and passion. We make peace with one kind of surrender — to beauty and the anarchy of passion. Sahwen flips the coin over to the other side, and encourages us to make peace with the prospect of nonexistence, with with how fragile we are and with the legacy we leave behind.

Scorpionically yours,

Eric Francis

PS, here is a fun Onion video that I dedicate to Genevieve. It was like they custom made it for her personally.