It's odd to me how much the uninitiated fear and despise "haunted" objects, places, etc. Or rather, I suppose I should say, it's ALIEN to me--I understand the mechanisms behind it (fear of the unknown, religious dogma, horror movies, possible bad experience with malevolent spirits), it's just... the opposite of my views. I'm sure it's easier to say as somebody who can pick up on malicious vs. benign energy signatures in haunted objects (and eliminate/absorb malevolent spirits up to a pretty high pedigree with aura magick alone), but I find something delightful about objects with sprits attached or just with powerful energy that may at some point spawn a homunculus (or just permanantly impact the "energy" of the space in which it resides).

There's just something endearing about being in a room full of life, energy, and power, even if that life isn't exactly physical. Sometimes I'll get blasted, open my third eye, turn the lights off, and slip into liminal view watching the orb flit about, the homunculus dance and spin, the amorphous lightning spiral. I can't really pinpoint visually which spirits go to which artifacts (aside from the one I BELIEVE is the homunculus, the ribbon being?), but the environment is a very intentional creation. There's such an energy in the air, a subtle passive crackle of power. A tangible metaphysical fog to be breathed into and out of, to mingle with the puffs of ritualistic smoke exhaled during rituals so arcane even I couldn't tell you how exactly they began.

We obsess over extraterrestrial lives on potential distant planets, but ignore, fear, even malign the interdimensional lifeforms sharing this backwoods middle-of-nowhere planet here with us. I get it, bad spirits exist--fine, exorcise those, banish their asses, tear them into such miniscule etheric particles their cohesiveness as a single beast is compromised and then absorb their life force to recharge (my favorite option)--but bad people exist, too, and I'd hope if you met an alien lifeform that they wouldn't put you down the way we would a serial killer because you happened to be the same type of lifeform. Considering "spirits" and "entities" are far from homogenous, one could take it a step further and compare such folly to an alien council executing humanity because we're carbon based lifeforms like the spider that bit their wife!!

And yet, that's all people see. If they are even willing to acknowledge that such beings exist, they act like that's it, there's some species called "ghost" and they're all assholes. I think a lot of this comes from religious belief, in sects where the view on "ghosts" or any sort of energy being is basically "there are good angels, which you will never ever see because they're at Starbucks in heaven or whatever all the time, and the fallen angels, who larp as everything else metaphysical you might encounter... to convince you that if other beings exist, God isn't real, dun dun dunnnn!" The Islamic concept of djinn is actually much more interesting and nuanced to me, where spirits aren't seen as the larping technogoths of the fallen angels from Satan's old bluegrass band (bet you thought I was gonna say rock, didn't you?), but rather as a separate type of lifeform that is also capable of making moral decisions and even, in many cases, converting to Islam. While most of the spirits one encounters are beneath entity tier and don't appear to be capable of this level of understanding, that's probably the closest mainstream religious view on spirits to my own beliefs regarding entity level beings and their potential morality or lack thereof.

To circle back around, I just... really wish others could feel the same way about these liminal creatures that I do. Not out of some desire to be "right" or anything, just because it's such a unique and fascinating experience to coexist with mysterious interdimensional life forms. Reading their energy it appears they enjoy the arrangement as well, often seeming to attempt to get my attention and seeming pleased to be acknowledged. While most seem horrified by the feeling of "something else being there," I've come to find it oddly comforting. There's a peace to just sitting there vibing with spirits, like the space itself has a life of its own. We watch sitcoms about people living with aliens, we bring in once-ferocious species of other carbon based lifeforms as housepets, and we obsess over the idea of extraterrestrial/extradimensional life, so why not purposefully coexist with those lifeforms as well?

They're also helpful for magickal and psychic training activities... I can tell my third eye is properly opened when I can see them (there's always at least one orb just having a good old time). And, if I'm in the right state/charge and have the time to aim for it, I can tell I've reached gnosis when I'm able to keep my eyes half-opened in a dark room, let the borders fade into each other until indistinguishable, and see the spirits weaving about overlaying the full view indistinguishably. From here, if I'm able to perfectly maintain this trance state, I'm able to open my eyes further and maintain full open-eye view of them and even summon my own local spirits (and create new ones) in a remarkably tangible fashion! Their presence also provides a protective presence against malicious beings and attacks, and in my experience is a passive boost to astral abilities as well (such as connecting to the astralnet).

To be clear though, I'm not telling you to go out and buy a bunch of haunted artifacts and shit. If you know how to get an energy read on it yourself and assure that its inhabitant, if any, is benevolent, then sure, knock yourself out. But I don't want you to run out to your local junk shop, find a doll from 1827 with no eyes and a sign that says "CAUTION--DO NOT TOUCH--VERY ACTIVE HAUNTED SPIRIT DANGEROUS!!!" around its neck, drop 1000 bucks on it and then get your fucking neck slit by the ghost of some murdered child. And if you aren't confident that you could tell the difference between buying a safe artifact and buying that homicidal murdered newsie in a TY Beanie Baby--WITHOUT the "CAUTION" sign--then you shouldn't play this game, at all. That's not the point of this article at all. I'm not telling you to run out and adopt a lion, I'm saying to not avoid taking in a stray cat solely because you saw a TV show where a cheetah pissed on somebody at a zoo one time.

Okay, that frees my conscience if you're a dipshit and get possessed by a demon inside a taxidermied ostrich at your local Goodwill. Let's talk artifact hunting--haunted artifacts in particular. If you suppose your spirit sussing skills are up to snuff, or just want to practice them, I highly recommend finding your local antique malls. If you're tuned into energy at ALL, or at least have the tendency for it even if totally untrained, you should get a "feeling," an overall "vibe," upon stepping into an antique mall. That feeling is a pretty good solid indicator of the average item you'll encounter there, which is to say an antique mall with a sinister vibe upon entrance is saturated with negative artifacts and likely malicious spirits, one with a pleasant vibe is full of positive artifacts and likely benevolent spirits, one with no strong feeling overall means it's balanced or there's hardly any artifacts at all (if any at all), and so on.

While you will eventually be able to do energy scans of objects from a decent distance with practice, honing and charging, it can be helpful at first to hold your hand very close to an object, almost touching it, to get a good read on it and see if it is in fact an artifact. It can be very hard at first to distinguish if something has any liminal beings attached or if it just has strong energy, but either way, you can't go wrong with good energy and can very well go wrong with bad energy (plus, the boundaries between types of artifacts easily blur, especially over time--see homunculi).

You'll want to avoid touching the object directly until you get at least a preliminary scan, but if you don't detect anything dangerous, you can also touch the object to get a much more powerful and detailed read. However, while I hesitate to say anything is impossible, I have never personally encountered a highly dangerous entity in an object that didn't emit such a powerful aura it would be immediately noticeable at proximity to even the least trained of energy workers/aura magicians... which is to say, you should feel such an incredible dread and foreboding radiating from an artifact that is truly cursed/dangerous/malicious that you would have to fight past your insticts to engage with it. Because of this, while you do want to avoid getting a low level hex or risking getting attacked by a weak enemy, it's usually not a disaster if you do accidentally touch something you haven't totally read yet... since you would have sensed this sensation beforehand if it were horribly dangerous.

It's like a palpable real life "ゴゴゴゴ" from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and something I've encountered only twice. The first was a dark wooden box carved into the shape of a monkey, its face contorted with pain, its hand and foot joints bent backwards. Its tag said only "VERY OLD," and the dealer was asking several hundred dollars for it. The energy coming from that artifact was the most malicious and powerful I've ever encountered in the physical plane, and I wish I was as trained in telepathic communication with liminal creatures then as I am now because the entity in that motherfucker was broken beyond belief. The message I got from its energy was clear: it wasn't inhabiting the monkey box... it was sealed inside it.

The most powerful thing about it was its ability to get inside your mind and contort your perspective. I was with my now-ex at the time and they reported feeling all this before I did, so I know it wasn't just me who was affected by it. You'd feel it coming when you'd get near it in the maze of aisles, like a portal to hell. Pulsating, radiating, creeping, shrieking energy of pure darkness, pure malice. But where I normally would go wide-eyed, follow such a dark beacon, and declare "I MUST OWN IT," something about the radiant halo of negative energy surrounding the thing had me horrified to my core. It's probably the only time since I started magick training that I've ever really felt that sense of awe and horror the uninitiated display when encountering a metaphysical threat. I'm sure it was manipulating perception instead of reality, but whenever we would try to get away from it, we'd somehow end up walking straight up to it again. We took turns leading and each time came back to it, no matter which turns we'd take to avoid it or which landmarks in the labyrinth we'd note to mark our progress in by aisle. It was like being beckoned by death directly and facing its inevitability bearing down upon you with each turn.

We debated what to do about it. It was so wildly powerful that we honestly feared it getting into the wrong hands. What if an evil magician took control of the entity and used it to cause unspeakable anguish? Should we buy it, we reasoned, and put it in a safety deposit box or safe somewhere far away, contained? Probably, but tough shit, because that shit was like 400 fuckin dollars and we were broke as fuck (I'm still broke, but I was broke then too), and then... somebody bought it. I don't know who, or why, especially when all they knew about it on the surface was "VERY OLD" and it was... 400 dollars. That further concerns me about it being a magickal purchaser obtaining it for unsavory reasons with potentially catastrophic results, but oh well, nothing to be done about that now I suppose.

Oh, and the second time I wrote about in this "oddity" article. But yeah. Ahem. Between those examples, hopefully you see how why you don't want to stumble into such a search blind, or ignore your intuition and charge into an antique mall or thrift store or whatever with highly negative energy as its overall vibe. But if you follow the right protocols, follow your instincts, and follow those guidelines, it can be a great way to find haunted objects and other artifacts. Fuck, I had another section I was about to write but then the edibles kicked in. Oh my god that's right I took two. One second.

...and we're back. The last principle this all ties into is: the bigger the chaos field, the stronger the chaos magician. I'll write something on this in more detail eventually, but just like each of those locations have their own distinct "vibe" inside, it's possible to create zones of heightened magickal energy within a given space by means of rituals and artifacts. Inside such a zone, magick is easier and one's powers have more potency: it's easier to astral project, to open your third eye, to reach the trance state, to do aura magick, to create/train/view local spirits, and so on. It's a big advantage! If this shit was an RPG, this class of item would be broken as fuck, dude. And we're all in the simulation, so I guess this is an RPG. So guess what, motherfucker? GO EQUIP THESE ITEMS AND LEVEL UP, BABY!!!

Adding artifacts with liminal creatures to this mix certainly enhances the effect over just artifacts of other types, so if you find one with a cool, friendly liminal creature attached for sale at Big Billy Joe's Junkporium, maybe don't immediately panic and run away screaming when it hops off the shelf to be like "yo wassup can we crash at your place my dudio?" Or, you know, do. That's probably the correct response. I might just be weird. But all the benefits are definitely real in spite of that, so, if you can push past that (probably more normal) reaction to it hopping off the shelf to be like "yo wassup can we crash at your place my dudio?"... you'll like, totally gain those magickal benefits, dawg.