Letters To Daphne – And/or how to write letters to a cave creature
Alright friends, a new paranormal activity just unlocked and we want your help! We are going to experiment with writing postcards to supernatural entities — and we want all of you to participate with us. Who knows — you may even end up with a non-corporeal pen-pal!
First I'll give you a complete set of instructions to play along, and then you can read the backstory and context on why we decided to try this! It's a doozy!
Instructions For Writing A Postcard To A Magical Place
Find a postcard. You've probably got one in a drawer somewhere? Right? If you don't, try a thrift/antique store or make your own!
Now: think of a location that has personal meaning to you – maybe a spot in a forest that you love, or a memorable building that burned down, or a place you encountered an unexplainable presence. We're not trying to write to another living human being – think of some thing that doesn't regularly get mail.
Now, address the letter to the 'Current Resident' (or use their name if you suspect you know it) and pen a quick letter reaching out to that place with a courteous check up.
You can choose to put a return address (or not), completely up to you.
Don't worry too much about putting the correct “to” address on the back – just do your best to write generally where it should go, but rely on the magic of the universe (and the postal system) to get your letter to the proper location. If they can deliver to Santa Claus, pretty sure they get it to your new cryptid pen-pal.
Bonus points if you rub some Bay leaves (in honor of Daphne's laurel) to give your postcard a little bit of extra magical oomph!
Apply the appropriate stamps and pop that puppy in the mailbox! If you're mailing internationally, here are some tips on how much postage you'll need: https://www.usps.com/international/letters.htm
Now sit back and wait for a response! Let us know if you get one! If you receive any kind of reply, please share your results: this could be in the form of strange mail, a bizarre dream, or maybe even a 'visitation'!
Backstory
Over the summer I had the incredible good fortune to travel through various parts of Europe: Istanbul, Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. When not sipping sardines on the beach and taking cool baths in artisanal gelato — I visited highly curated mystical and magical destinations all around the Mediterranean.
Just outside of Athens, Greece I made our family do a detour to a remote mountain about an hour outside of the capitol: Mount Pentelicus. I had heard rumors of a cave, nicknamed 'Daveli's Cave' after an outlaw had hid there while on the lam; the location had a swirl of strange conspiracy theories and mysticism about it: originally a spot where the stone for the Parthenon had been mined, a spot for the ritual worship of Pan and a supposed nymph shrine, an old 11th century church built into the mouth of the cave, government closure and experiments in recent times — and even UFO sightings! So you know I had to see it!
Getting up there was a bit of a struggle — google maps had us going in various roundabout and altogether perilous routes. “Roads” that turned into dropoff cliffs or were completely washed out. Rather than plummet to our untimely deaths, my 9 year old son and I decided to walk the rest of the way to find the cave. The site was quite remote, there were no other people around whatsoever. We found the cave entrance and even opened up the doors of the tiny church, still adorned with iconography and scattered furniture – but otherwise quite empty. My son and I made a few little offerings – some sesame snacks and some verbal thank you's — and we even heard a bizarre sound deep in the cave that had us quickly pack our things and decide we'd had enough for one day! On the way back to the car, the wind picked up and my son had a spontaneous nosebleed. Weird spot, for sure!
So about this time in our journey through Europe, I was re-reading a pivotal book in the world of paranormal/fortean phenomena – 'The Mothman Prophecies' by John Keel. In the book, the author makes repeat visits to a small town in West Virginia, writing and interviewing folks about their bizarre encounters involving 'The Mothman'. Towards the end of the book though, the phenomena seemingly starts to take in interest in the author himself and he reports HIS OWN EXPERIENCES. While the people of the town were seeing a larged winged cryptid with red eyes and UFO/ men-in-black type encounters, John Keel himself was having strange interruptions with his communications. Phone calls that seemed 'tapped' or 'bugged', unexplained voices and noises on the line – and weird mail. Letters opened, missing, or written to him with information that no one should have known. One particular passage really struck me though:
“Second, I was able to communicate by mail by sending letters through the U.S. Post Office to addresses which I later discovered were nonexistent. I would receive replies by mail, often the very next day, written in block letters. Some of these replies covered several pages.” – John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies
Immediately I came up with an idea: what if I wrote a postcard to the entity or 'Current Resident' that lives in that remote cave on Mount Pentelicus?
And what if I got a reply?
I brought up this idea last night on our regular #WUFO (Wednesday Night UFO Watch Club) live stream, and we started discussing the possibility of running an experiment as a sort of 'letter writing campaign' to supernatural entities or locations with personal meaning to individuals. Co-host Jeremy Puma, always the clever magician, had recently designed a homebrew 'magic eight ball' with block letters suspended in a solution of mushroom ink in a crystal ball. We shook the new divination device and asked it about this postcard experiment and we received two sets of scambled letters as they tumbled in the murky water. Dumping these long string of random letters into an anagram generator gave us a slew of possible words combinations, two of which stuck out to us:
“INBOX” “DAPHNE”
Naturally, the word inbox had a certain ring to us given the postal part of the project, but Daphne was a bit more of an obscure word. We did some cursory research live on the stream and come to find out Daphne was a mythological figure related to directly to Apollo, Delphi and some of the experiences I personally had later that day shortly after leaving Daveli's Cave.
I didn't know this, but apparently in the myth of Daphne, she escapes the pursuit of Apollo (yuck!) by pleading with the Earth Goddess Gaia who turns her into a laurel tree. This is part of the reason Apollo wears the laurel wreath on his head that you may be familiar with.
After I left Daveli's Cave, we traveled on to our next destination which was the small town of Delphi; I went to visit the ruins and came in cold – not knowing much of the historical context of the location other than that there was an priestess would deliver Oracles, but hoping to learn and experience as soon as I touched down. When you go visit the site you start towards the bottom of a hillside and slowly work you way up using switchbacks, encountering ruins and archaeological plateaus further and further you travel up. Towards the beginning there is a large bolder called the Sybilline Rock, which was the original site where the Priestess, through a tradition of Gaia (Earth Goddess) worship, would give her prophecies. It's a powerful location and it felt amazing to stand beneath it imagining her there in antiquity towering above you prophesying about the Fall of Troy or whatever other mystical insight she had gleaned.
As you move up the mountainside though, you come to a later addition to the Delphi ritual space – a temple built to Apollo. I found this strange as just a casual observer, especially as I learned about the supplanting mythology around Apollo killing the 'Pythian' snake associated with Gaia and this larger temple built literally 'over' the Sybilline Rock. Now, without knowing the scholarly consensus on this (please take it with a grain of salt), at face value, it sure as hell seems like there was some kind of Apollonian monkey-business afoot.
So you can understand perhaps that Jeremy explained Daphne's relationship to Gaia and Apollo ... I was overcome with chills. Perhaps we are supposed to send a letter to Daphne?
After the WUFO live stream I went outside to look at the sky for UFOS at 10pm, as per tradition. Instead of any aerial entities, I spotted a random star above me that piqued my interest. I like to do this sometimes, using the stars as a sort of natural 'tarot deck' – researching a random twinkling thing that speaks to me and learning about any relevant mythology and folklore associated with it. I held my camera up to it using the Stellarium app and learned it's name: Epsilon Delphini in the constellation Delphinus, which looked like a dolphin.
Now remember, this was a completely random star, out of all the billions out there to pick from. So you can imagine my surprised when I looked a bit deeper into the folklore around this specific celestial body:
“The common dolphin is Delphinus delphi. Delphi was the site of the sanctuary to Phoebus Apollo because Apollo appeared there in the guise of a dolphin. It was the site of the Pythian Games and the legendary Oracle ‘Pythia‘ (“the Python”; constellations can have a number of related symbols). Delphi was also known as the center of the world. This earliest oracle [at Delphi] was protected by a horrible dragon named Delphyne or Python, who was devastating the countryside. When Apollo was still very young, he slew the dragon, claimed the oracle for himself and established funerary games (the Pythian Games) in order to appease the dead monster’s spirit.” – https://www.constellationsofwords.com/delphinus/
If that's not confirmation that we're on the right track...
So please, write a letter to a place you love! But if you have the gumption, we'd would really love it if you sent two additional letters to these folks:
a) The current entity living in Daveli's Cave, Mount Pentelicus, Greece b) Daphne, c/o the ruins at Delphi, Greece
This is also an experiment to see if we get results from 'mass emailing' a destination vs. sending a magic postcard to a personally meaningful location. Pseudo science for the win!
And don't forget to join the Liminal Earth Discord (here: ____) and share your postcard with us. Tell other folks that you're writing #LettersToDaphne with #LiminalPost.