Crease's Guide to A Fun Seance: A Recipe Blog
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Day 5: 23/12/22
So, you’ve gathered all your friends and somehow finagled enough candles to cosplay as Ebenezer Scrooge for the next three lifetimes, or to recreate the closing scene from Carrie. And now you’re confronted with the all-important question- how do I make sure that this seance is going to be fun for everyone?
Of course, since you’ve summoned all your friends to your room at 2:47 in the morning, you need to make sure it’s worth their while. And you’re going to disturb the spirit world at the cost of a blood sacrifice, and all that jazz too, so how do you make sure that it’s also a rewarding experience for the armies of ghouls that wait beyond the wall of death, ceaselessly tossing and turning about in restless decay?
That’s where I come in! Allow me to introduce you to CGAFS: Crease’s Guide to A Fun Seance! In this simple series of steps, I’ll try to help you through the perfect seance experience, a traditional set of instructions passed down my family for generations.* Seances are super fun, and everyone is guaranteed to have a good time, barring the occasional accident where someone is accidentally indentured to a cosmic eldritch horror for fourteen millennia. But eh, occupational hazards.
My great-great-grandfather was born at the very young age of three. It was a crisp autumn evening, and it was on one of the days when the boundary between our world and the next wanes. When he was four years old, my great-great-grandfather (hereafter, GGG) woke up one night from his bed, and quietly toddled over to the family Ouija Board. Accidentally spilling tomato-infused baby food from his bottle, which the spirit world interpreted as a blood offering, he ended up accidentally summoning his late grandfather, who gave him a nice scolding for being awake at these hours and playing with his father’s toys, and sent him back to bed. Since then, in an effort to rectify his soiled image with his forefathers, my great-great-grandfather has been slowly improving the techniques of summoning and how to commune with the world of the undead. On the night of his 12th birthday, one rainy night, when one of the age-old rafters of his ancestral house collapsed, warped by years of water seeping in, my GGG summoned his grandfather again, to ask what wood to replace the rafter with. Unfortunately, this was done without accounting for the fact that this was his grandfather’s siesta time, as well as the fact that GGG’s own room in the house had a stack of extra rafters designed exactly to prepare for this situation. This resulted in a rebuke from the otherworld, wherein my GGG realised that it is in fact possible to receive slaps from the nether if the ghost in question has sufficient closeness to the summoner.
Now, at the ripe age of 258, having artificially prolonged his life by absorbing the souls of his enemies as per the conditions of a demonic pact, he has decided to select me, as his favourite great-great-grandchild, to preserve his tips into this blog post. This selection involved several trials, and totally ruined the family holiday retreat when the parents found out that me and my cousins had all been whisked away to the land of the unliving in a macabre ceremony to solve a series of devilish riddles to save our souls from eternal damnation. Finally, after being the first to figure out that the Door of the Drowned could be opened only by stealing the key from Amdusias, Duke of Hell, I finally crawled out of the netherworld into the dining room covered in the amniotic fluid of the in-between. This also ruined lunch. Sorry about that.
Anyway, here are his tips-
For optimal spiritual resonance with the beyond, light the candles, and quickly arrange them in the shape of a Hopf Fibration stereographically projected onto the 3-dimensional Euclidean space of your room. Make sure each candle is placed exactly 1.618 centimetres apart, and is lit only by a lighter fuelled by Sphagnum peat moss from the Orkney Islands coated in barium sulphate. This is the most critical step. Here is a simple section of a Hopf Fibration for your reference- be not afraid.
Always have an excess of ectoplasm, just in case you accidentally bind your soul to a demonic contract and need to travel to the Arena of Twisted Fate to fight against an infernal gladiator to reclaim it. If you can’t make your own ectoplasm, store-bought is fine. My traditional family recipe involves sixteen lizard’s armpit wax, chili con carne with monkey brains, and four trapped ghosts to produce enough ectoplasm for three seances. The recipe is really simple and everyone, even the kids, love to take part in making it! I’ll make another blog post about it on another day, so hang tight until then!
Begin by drawing a pentagram on the floor using a ground mixture of chalk and salt. If you’re not sneezing by the end of it, your powder isn’t fine enough. My great-great-grandfather says that his sneezing scares away every malevolent spirit in a 3 kilometre radius. This is likely stemming from the fact that grandpa sneezes are potent sound-based anti-magical artillery, but your sneezes should suffice regardless.
Lightly dust with cinnamon powder and Demerara sugar to taste.
Fetch your summoning grimoire from the bookshelf. If you don’t have one, used international student editions should be available for cheap in a bookstore near you. Latin texts are generally the most preferred, but English should suffice, provided you do it in a posh British accent that sounds like you know what’s going on. Just like Frank d’Abagnale’s con strategies, a lot of the seance’s success depends on you looking confident enough that you’re doing exactly what is planned.
Find the page that pertains to what you’d like to summon. If it’s a family member, place one of their possessions into the centre of the pentagram. If it’s a demon, place the appropriate sigil (demonic sigils are another fun family recipe I’ll post some time in the upcoming weeks- it really spices up boring weekday dinners by having a lord of Hell bound within the confines of your house!). If it’s your neighbours, just scream loud enough and they should be summoned immediately, asking what on earth you’re doing.
Pick your least favourite friend. They don’t need to know this, of course, but deep inside, you know that they’re the weakest link. How delightfully devilish.
Using a blade made from obsidian, make a thin incision in their arm, and let the blood drip into the circle. If they resist, distract them with showing them how pretty the obsidian looks in the candlelight while your favourite friend knocks them out cold with a baseball bat.
If you’ve done all the steps correctly so far, there should be a strong smell of burnt toast as our world twists itself to accommodate the intrusion of another into the little pocket of space you’ve made. Watch as your spirit slowly bubbles out from the afterlife into your room. Tell all your friends to close your eyes. This isn’t really necessary at all but it makes it seem a lot more dramatic than it actually is. Bubbling out of another realm sounds cool, but it’s more like sewage slowly gushing down a pipe than a slow manifestation of an incorporeal form.
Let the spirit rest for 20-30 minutes. This allows its bindings to rise from the pits of the eternal.
Season with oregano, chilli flakes, and a little bit of grated parmesan cheese for optimal results.
Congratulations! You have now summoned a spirit! All my friends love this procedure, and it’s become a common weekend staple to have a potluck followed by a movie and then summoning the spirits of the damned. The spirits have always been cooperative too, because of all the hospitality you’ve showered them with, provided you don’t mind them sometimes burning holes through your ceiling and cursing your bloodline for the next six millennia. Some spirits can be a little aggressive at first, but if you whisk them properly with a mixer made of consecrated silver until stiff peaks form, they should be a lot more docile.
If you would like to know what to do now, you have to like, share and subscribe to my friend Melissa’s YouTube channel, where she posts helpful tutorials. Personally, I like discovering arcane truths about the universe in return for shortening the collective existence of humanity on our planet, but everyone has their own unique preferences. Do give it a try and tell me what results you get!
Prep time: about 6 hours
Serves: one person. You are allowed one question freely without indebting yourself to a service from the beyond.
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*Disclaimer, just in case: I have no experience with seances, nor does my family. I do not believe in ghosts. This is a parody of recipe blog posts where you scroll through page after page of family backstory in order to get to a poorly described recipe. That being said, if you do manage to arrange candles into a stereographic projection of a Hopf Fibration in ℝ³, please send me pictures at gggseances258@gmail.com. Also, this email address is not real. Nothing is real.