BECOMING FAMILIAR

w/rites for Autumn and Ancestors
A seasonal ritual for the sunset of the solar year, with Dages Juvelier Keates

Thursday, October 29
3 to 4:30 pm EST on Zoom
$30 drop in | free for Portals members

Haunting is a seasonal fixation. Our work is to turn ghosts into ancestors.

Summer wanes, winter waits, and autumn sighs, and as the light slants low and the first frost shivers the last gasp of golden grass, we arrive at the sunset of the solar year, the season of Metal, of breath and boundaries, of letting go and clean endings, when the falling leaves lay down a rich carpet wafting woodsmoke and decay, that sweet, mineral fragrance of things returning to earth, and the trees, far from dying, perform one of the most alive acts of their year by letting go.

Across the British Isles this threshold was kept as Samhain, the end of the agricultural year, and it was said that the fairies departed on Samhain eve and would not return until Beltane, when the hawthorn blooms, while from the candlelit cemeteries of Stockholm to the altars of Día de los Muertos people gather with their dead in these same days, because as things fall down, spirits rise up, and this is the season when we might ask: to whom do I belong, what gives my life meaning, and to what am I connected?

In this ritual we will work with scent, which a Kabbalistic teaching holds to be the only sense left undamaged by the eating from the tree of knowledge, a pathway back toward wholeness, and we will brew a chaga chai together, a bit of kitchen witchery with the dark fungus of the birch, remembering that the only difference between poison and potion is measure. We will breathe into the lungs, the organs of reception and release, the threshold where heaven enters the body and where we hold both our celebration and our grief, and we will create an ancestral offering, because memory is the best medium, so that the ghosts we live with might be invited to become ancestors and we might become a little more familiar to ourselves, the animal companion and the witch at once.

No experience is needed. Come as you are, and bring:

• images of your ancestors, biological or chosen

• a song or playlist that connects you to them

• a writing implement and paper

• a candle and a cup

• for the chaga chai: 1 tablespoon chaga chunks (or 1 teaspoon chaga powder), 1 cinnamon stick, 4–5 cracked cardamom pods, 3–4 cloves, a few black peppercorns, a few slices of fresh ginger, milk of your choice, and honey or maple to taste

A note on chaga: if you take blood thinners or medication for blood sugar, check with your practitioner before drinking it.

• Where: Online via Zoom, recordings available

• When: October 29, 2026 3-4:30 pm EST (recording provided afterwards)

Tuition: $30
(free for Portals members - check the main Portals page for your code)
DM me any questions :)