I’m something of a “psychic Anthropologist” myself.
Let’s talk about the Picts! I know you missed it.
Differently from other psychics out there (no hate, but I had to say it…), I’m not channelling aliens. I talk to spirits from planet Earth the old-fashioned way.
Before we start, I need to make a few things clear:
- If you don’t have an open mind, do yourself a favour and go read something else. I’m not here to reassure people in the comments because they read my stuff and it shattered their biases. Like my Pictish friends say using the little English they learned, “we dead. Not deaf”. So, no, for the record, they didn’t call themselves “Picti” back when they were alive — but now some of them do, because guess what, it’s a useful term. Other ones keep using tribal or kingdom names. It varies. It’s confusing at times. It’s not my fault. Welcome to Anthropology!
- This is not an article about Metaphysics, Theology, or any such abstraction. I couldn’t care less whether every soul has the same fate after death. Yes, I know, belief in reincarnation is a thing. So is belief in resurrection. Or rapture. Or “absolute end”, atheist style. I don’t know why there are Picts still roaming the Earth. I don’t know why some of them apparently disappeared either (or, if you prefer, reincarnated). Take your own conclusion, fill in the blank with your belief. I won’t disagree.
- My only agenda with this article is to show you that spirits deserve to be accurately observed and described, just like the living. I’m fed-up with “spirit workers” (god only knows if they’re legit…) who think that just because the dead are spirits, they can be stereotyped and reduced to simplistic caricatures (or worse, wishful idealisations) of who they once were. I’ll never agree with that. Those are people. Human beings. They have feelings, personalities, sense of humour, likes and dislikes. Imagine if they were your grandparents! Would you dehumanise them and reduce them to a faceless and soul-less mythical monolith? Yeah, that’s right, you wouldn’t. So, don’t do that to dead strangers either — no matter how tempting.
I didn’t set out looking for Picts when I found them. I simply… found them.
Serendipity led me here. This is probably why I saw so much. There’s this maxim in spirit work, and to me it rings true: you can only see that which you’re prepared to see. This complements nicely a similar maxim used in oracle: you can only hear that which you have room for hearing. Both allude to the fact you need to do away with biases and expectations first; And then maybe, just maybe, you might be serendipitous and learn from spirits.
Context matters too, of course. I live in Ireland, particularly in a place where Picts have visited (and temporarily settled). Maybe if I were in the US, I’d be talking about spirits of Native Americans instead. And this leads us to the third thing I want you to keep in mind:
Spirits have free will. They won’t approach, and you can’t force them to approach, the people whose antics they don’t like. Even if you’re related.
Before anyone comes with, “oh, this article is fake, she doesn’t even have Pictish blood” — dude, are you always happy to meet every one of your relatives? Are you sure? Even that uncle who voted for conservatives and always embarrasses everyone at family get togethers with conspiracy theories and flat earth bullshit? Yeah, as I thought… But what makes you think the dead are any different? They’re human, FYI.
The hard-to-swallow pill is that the dead won’t approach people they don’t like… And sometimes, this includes you. Sorry, not sorry. It’s less to do with blood, and more to do with feeling good in each other’s presence.
I’m not accusing you, specifically, of being a dumb motherfucker; Maybe you aren’t. In fact, maybe you aren’t a bad person at all. But you still have conscious and unconscious biases hidden in the way you conduct yourself, who you associate with, what you consider “normal” and what you’d rather question and go against. And these biases speak VOLUMES regarding what kind of spirit will consider you a friend.
It wasn’t just the Picts I got to know. I happen to attract native and tribal spirits, as well as nomads and other traveller communities, everywhere I go. I also attract Greek spirits from most periods in History, definitely not just the ancient, and that’s a topic for another article (but it still fits here, in a way. I mean, they weren’t tribal, but had their culture appropriated by the Romans, and other empires later on, and still remained non-expansionist. Kingdoms? Sure. Cultural exchange with some neighbours? Yes. An Empire of their own wreaking havoc and dehumanising people on a massive scale? No, definitely not. Only engulfed by other people’s empires again and again. I honestly don’t blame them for the nationalist sentiment now). I attract spirits from all of these backgrounds because I’m fiercely anti-Imperialist and anti-expansionist. I oppose Colonialism without shame or apology. I’m not comfortable with the world the way it is, and particularly not with most of Europe as it is, trying to hide under the rug a History of conquering and undermining entire cultures. If you look into Pictish History and learn about who they befriended vs who they fought against, you’ll easily understand how they fit into this paradigm.
Of course, back when I first met the Picts, I didn’t even know any of that.
When I walked into that ancient forest in 2018, straying from my usual path, to hear what I had ignored for over a decade — spirits calling — I had been an atheist for so long that I didn’t even care who it was. I just spontaneously decided to get out of denial. This video, childlike as it is, captures the sentiment:
My first reaction was “are these people local? From… millennia ago? What’s happening?”, and being that I didn’t speak their language, and they didn’t speak mine either, it took me a while to learn that actually, no, they weren’t Irish druids or some shit. They were a tribal, close-knit community who had ties with the Irish but weren’t Gaelic themselves.
Now… I’m anticipating that because I used the word “tribal” and mentioned that I met them in the few untouched woods where no humans are settling, you might have taken conclusions that aren’t very accurate. However, provocative as this may be, allow me to suggest that the first Romans who met these guys took the same wrongful conclusions that are going through your mind now.
“No roads? No centralised imperial capital? Prefer to “hide” in the woods? They must be backwards savages.
Well… no, not exactly. We know through Archaeology, and this has also been confirmed by my communications, that the Picts were actually quite sophisticated. For starters, they farmed the land — so, no hunter-gatherers. They had a stratified society with well-defined roles; a complex religion and cosmology, linguistic sophistication (so much so that it still hasn’t been deciphered), artistic sensibility, an organised military and very rich traditions. There’s nothing primitive or “backwards” about them. They just escape the imperialistic norm we’re used to seeing. It is true that they didn’t build roads, but I doubt they wouldn’t be able to do that, given the architectural complexity of other things they built and still survive. Perhaps they just… didn’t prefer roads? They thought roads were too linear and limiting? And honestly, I agree. As a dyslexic, I love their alternative way of viewing transportation.
The Picts, just like literally every other kind of spirit that approaches me, are people who keep to themselves. So, they’re going to pursue dwelling places in a quiet area, even if that’s the woods. No, they’re not “hiding”. But I understand that some people view it that way, when the comparative standard we have is show-off narcissism where everybody parades their cultural superiority like peacocks and compete to see who is conquering who now. So, compared to whatever the hell is that chaos… It makes sense that more laid-back (“type B personality”, if you will) societies would be deemed as “primitive”.
Yes, I said what I said. The Picts are laid-back. They’re a very chill bunch of lads. Imperialists only encountered their “war-like” aspect because, huh, let’s see… *checks History books* oh, yes, they fucking invaded without an invitation. That’s bloody why. Self-defence is not savagery, karen.
I feel protective of them because they were my first guides back into the world of spirituality, so excuse me for sounding a bit biased.
When you approach spirits with curiosity instead of wishful thinking, you end up learning a bunch.
For example…
- You get shown how to prepare face paint with natural pigments… Including the foreign woad (yes it’s foreign here in the Isles, yet another proof that the Picts weren’t “isolated” and had a trading network). Most natural pigments they used (including purple lychen, woad and dandelion) need a stabilising/thickening agent to be worn as temporary makeup — yes, you read that right, makeup —and this used to be lime. Not quicklime, just lime. The kind you add to the soil to make it alkaline. Any garden centre will have that. Experiment and you’ll see it works. From this kind of lesson, I started noticing that not only was their concept of makeup different than ours (it wasn’t gendered, all genders would make designs on their skin for special occasions, or less carefully for war, and it wasn’t applied to fill lips or eyelids with colour; instead it was applied more randomly, reminiscing temporary tattoos)… But it also highlights their own idea of beauty: soft skin without blemishes was valued for women and men alike. They’d hide scars and other problems under some of the designs.
- You notice that the Christian and Early Medieval Picts don’t practice the body painting, but weave and paint similar designs in daily objects.
- You also learn that there’s a “normal” and a “ritualistic” way to harvest heather, and using one or the other in the wrong context is a huge taboo. Even the Christian subscribe to that. It must have been a very central tradition.
- Another huge taboo which didn’t change with Christianity was seafood. Big no-no. The sea was sacred and so were all of its creatures. They even gave their priests and priestesses names that alluded to the sea, even if some of this clergy didn’t work with water at all. It’s all in the name of sanctity, Pictish style.
- Perhaps you notice that their math is unique. They use non-standard units of measurement which don’t agree with common imperial systems either. For example, their shortest interval of time is slightly less than a second, reflected in music; the shortest length is a bit smaller than half a millimetre — which probably explains the ease with which they made art with minute details. This goes on and I won’t pretend to know them all, I’m only noting what I picked up.
- They cold plunge in the winter, particularly the northern Picts — but not without retiring to a Pictish house near the fireplace a few minutes after.
- And the quickest thing to notice about the Picts is they’re very, very good at navigating without roads or man-made signs. Any spirit, even children, were able to lead me to the ogham stone in Roslyn Glen from a variety of different starting points. I have since lost contact with the fellow spirit worker who was with me there in 2019, but in case she’s reading, she will confirm. Later, I repeated the experiment in some places in Aberdeenshire, alone with the spirits.
The list above isn’t exhaustive, but it goes to show the amount of interesting information you can gather from making offerings and hanging out with spirits, without the pretense of controlling what you want or don’t want them to teach you.
I won’t give you a guide on how to befriend and work with human spirits just yet… But I will say this:
DO NOT start by making an offering to the spirits “you want” to see. Unless it’s a very broad category such as “I’m only interested in the good guys, not the energy vampires” — in that case, feel free to specify. But don’t go deluding yourself that just because you idealised this or that ethnicity, this or that culture, this or that society or profession or whatever… that they’ll necessarily reciprocate. Sometimes the energies don’t match very well even though you’re convinced they do. Every relationship between two people needs mutual consent; not just one side. It’s no different with the dead.
When you find the crowd that naturally likes you and feels good in your presence, then and only then, feel free to offer them some of the things you know they enjoyed in life. The more interest you show in them, the more you’ll learn.
