I can’t help myself, I’ve been thinking about doubt again! Reading over some of the posts on this blog I started getting a bit anxious about all the uncertainty that our hip postmodernism seems to be embodying  (self-referential narcissism also being a PM trait J) If faith based belief systems seem inaccessible to us, what as a magician do I do in order to prevent a descent into madness?               

In my day job as a psychological therapist I was recently reading a great article by the systemic psychotherapist Barry Mason. In it he maps out the shift in his understanding of how certain he felt he could be in his work with families and asks the question, “is uncertainty mainly a path to creativity or a path to paralysis?”

As he grapples with this question, he outlines three types of knowing: unsafe certainty (based on out dated or inaccurate assumptions), unsafe uncertainty (one’s environment provides neither safety nor coherent beliefs) and finally safe uncertainty. Safe uncertainty exists when one’s environment and strategies for managing life allows for uncertainty to be lived with and even embraced.

Now I like this a lot – in my own journey I have experienced faith based certainty which gave a period of respite. For me it provided a warm fog that “protected” me from much of life’s sharpness. As I have previously, I felt a genuine grief when I had to walk away from certainties that were no longer congruent with my experience of reality. My certainty was no longer safe.

unsafe uncertainty, lol!

Mason talks about the need to cultivate curiosity and seeks to frame the therapist’s role as being one of an explorer who seeks to embody “authoritative doubt”.

Magicians are generally those interested in exploring the terrain of the psyche and body rather than rushing toward union with the divine. Curiosity, experimentation and reflection create an interactive process where the Self becomes a lab from which working hypotheses can be derived and refined. Such reflective experiments can be wide in their parameters and address the big issues of our sex lives, the food that we eat and what we think about death.

I have to confess, my problem with “believing” in things has followed me on my journey. I am a half-hearted Thelemite and a piss-poor pagan. Crowley both annoys and inspires me and I find most polytheistic theologies inane. What I have always been drawn to are those outsider Gods of consciousness. These are the Magician Gods that embody the archetype of the individual who is seeking to wake up. Shiva, Odin, Set, Sekhmet, Mercury – truth seekers who themselves are wrestling with the mysteries of the universe. Wisdom and power are hard won for these Gods – eyes are sacrificed, brothers are killed, and periods of celibacy are embraced. It’s this type of consciousness or awareness that I am seeking.

In the face of not knowing, I can still step up and exercise some existential heroism. As a magician I chose myself as the locus of my Work and attention. I may need a school or good friends to check my narcissism, but as a magician I have given up pleasing Gods – I will start with transforming myself. If they happen to like this Promethean willfulness, good for them! This act of Becoming is my expression of the law of Thelema. While I have it, I choose to revel in this gift of consciousness.

This focus on becoming and the discovery of Will has not been an act of teeth gritting and über-humanity; one of my primary goals has also been the cultivation of receptivity. In and through a greater awareness of the space between things, the life force (Kia, Tao etc.) can then flow. This is less a magic of enforced will, more an exercise in observing where the fault-lines of probability are and then enhancing them.

Coming back then to my initial question of how to minimize my impending breakdown, I choose to act. Paradoxically this also entails the action of non-action -“sitting with” and accepting mystery and the limits of what can be currently known. My own personal praxis centers on the use of approaches that at once develop Will and also help me sit with mystery and not knowing. Still curious, still exploring.

SD

There are eight Sabbats and eight colours of magic (in the system devised by Pete Carroll) and so (as someone steeped in both the Wiccan Paganism and chaotic/eclectic occultism) it makes sense to me to explore how these systems can relate to each other. Of course the esoteric cake can be cut any number of ways and so this is simply my (current) serving suggestion. A Brother of mine in Germany has been working on similar lines and has come up with some slightly different ideas, and that’s all good.  There is an immediate difference between these models in that the eight rays of the chaosphere are simply indicative of the many, many arrows which rush out from the singularity of Kia. (I could begin to discuss the great mystery of the ‘other colours’; of the ☀☀☀☀, ☀☀☀☀☀ & ☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀☀ rays…but then I’d have to kill you 😉 [Censored! Classified information… NW]

But if we stick to the 8=fold symbolism for now…

We start with the ‘conventional’ colours of magick as given by Pete in Liber Kaos:

The Eight Colours of Magic

I asked Pete recently why he chose the locations for the colours as given in his diagram above. Of course these energies/colours/styles are in opposing (or perhaps ‘complementary’ pairs). However the diagram doesn’t fit with either the Qabalistic system (if you overlay the chaosphere on Isaac Luria’s ten-balls-and-twenty-two-sticks model of the Tree it doesn’t match up). Neither is there any obvious astrological relationship (like the order of the planets as given on the heptagram shown in Crowley’s Book of Thoth). Mr Carroll told me that the order was ‘essentially arbitrary’ and therefore by changing the position of the colours (while maintaining the complementary pairs) I wouldn’t be ‘committing any great heresy’ (phew!)

So my proposal is that the order of colours as given by Pete Carroll can be re-arranged to give a neat fit between the core symbolism of each Pagan sabbat and each colour of magick. I’ve only been using this model for a few months, but by working with love (the type of love that allows a mother to nourish her baby with milk) at Imbolc, and the more cerebral vibe of opening out my ability to communicate at the most recent equinox, it seems to be working out for me.

The symbolic links between the directions and colours are:

Yule – Octarine, the Sun at Midnight, the paradox and play of festival, the birth of the God Son.
Imbolc – Green, love and sacrifice, parenthood, the promise of Spring.
Spring Equinox – Orange, the incoming power of the year, East.
Beltane – Purple, sex.
Midsummer – Yellow, the self, the waking consciousness.
Lammas – Red, agriculture, war, John Barleycorn must die.
Autumn Equinox – Blue, wealth, reflecting on what we have gathered in the year.
Samhain – Black, death.

The Wheel of Chaos

This type of re-configuration is, of course, one of the delights of modern magickal culture. We can create blends that suit our own spiritual tastes. Rather than going from system to system, abandoning one psychic structure to invest in a nice new shiny one, we can also manufacture hybrids. The alchemy of birthing such ceremonial chimera helps to keep our styles of magick strong and vigorous. And as a dedicated chaos magician and witch I’d rather be a robust mongrel than a sickly pedigree!

JV