Esoteric philsophy | The Blog of Baphomet

I’m sitting in Julian’s front room and I’m surrounded by a multitude of artefacts from past rituals and hours spent in meditation. While the wood burner and main altar space provide a natural centre piece, today my eyes are drawn to the array of cut-up collages that deck one of the walls. These are not elaborate or overly wrought attempts at occult art; rather they represent raw, psychic high-dives in order to explore fragments of self and the processes that unfold as we try to explore darker, stranger terrain.

Cut-up

Having recently read and enjoyed Queer by Meg-John Barker and Julia Scheele, I started reflecting on the possible connections between how cut-ups and Queer dynamics might interact in our process of exploring Self. I have already written a post reflecting on how cut-ups might interact with aspects of ego psychology, but their book got me to wondering further about how cut-ups might represent a highly queered and magical form of expression. As I observed back then:

“Like collage, cut-ups seek to use existing material in new ways that often involve the combining and juxtaposition of words and images so as to create new insight and meaning.

In tracking the lineage of cut-ups as an approach, from the surrealism of the Dadaists, Brion Gysin, Burroughs and Genesis P-Orridge, we can begin to see the depth of magical thinking embedded in this technique. As we seek to engage with and manipulate reality, the cut-up not only embodies the desired efficacy of our sorcery, but also the fluid shape-shifters that our arte forces us, the magician, to become. If our magic has any real depth, then our ego must undergo a similar process of reassembly.”

Cut-ups for me are a potent means of challenging our attempts at fixed certainty and polarity. Ideas and images that we previously kept apart are cast together in potentially abrupt disruption. These cut-ups don’t allow for tidy answers or for a buttoned-up, linear sense of self, rather they represent a bubbling up from the unconscious that may reveal as much about the dynamic tensions at work as they do potential answers. Apparently unconnected images are juxtaposed with stark headline text and so new meanings and connections are made. To me this dynamic process feels potentially unsettling and hugely creative and thus quite Queer:

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.” David Halperin Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography

The Queer self is one that has a profound connection to the constructed and performed. As an outsider position it has had to survive by being magpie-like in pulling together those jewels and glimmering half-truths that help make sense of what it means to live with a greater sense of magic and power. Others may dismiss its rag-tag approach for its lack of coherence, but like the trickster or the holy fool it holds up a mirror to those parts of culture whose attempts at control appear all too reliant on dusty outdated certainties.

For me the playful complexity of Queer identity is one that disrupts my attempts at locating my sense of self in fixed descriptors and concrete identities. Any attempt to side-step curiosity and open-handed questioning is unlikely to withstand Queer’s rainbow-laser side-eye. This type of awareness asks that we acquire and develop skills that allow us to more effectively tolerate process, journey and uncertainty.

Wild words

Similarly the process of the cut-up requires vulnerability as we step-back, allowing patterns and (potential) meanings to emerge. Techniques such as cut-ups and automatic writing/drawing are certainly more towards the artistic end of the “Art and Science” dialectic, but such creativity shouldn’t be mistaken for laxity. Ironically it often seems that as we seek to make use of approaches that are less linear and apparently chaotic, that we have to exercise a more focused sense of awareness in gaining benefit from them. It may be that those people who are drawn to more scripted workings do so because it provides them with a greater sense of security and control.

One of the primary reasons that I was drawn to the magical path was its sense of collaboration and play. World views and metaphysics that declared absolute certainty were no longer viable but I was still hungry to explore the mystery of consciousness and the glimpses of awakening that were coming in and out of view. Techniques like cut-ups and collage can provide us with potent and creative means for accessing new insights regarding the paths we are seeking to walk. They are rarely complete answers, more often they are snapshots of a work in progress that we may need to slow down and wait for, rather than rushing to a sensible, adult conclusion.

I’ve been spending some quality time with my children (August is the most delightful month in Britain if you’re a kid, because it coincides with school holidays) which is always an opportunity for insights. Working with children is something I do a lot in a professional capacity, where my role is to help them explore museums, galleries and other historic sites in a way that builds on their natural curiosity. As an educationalist I view time with children as an opportunity for me to learn as well as to teach. (I have written before how insights from parenting can cut through the sometimes overly complex jungle of narrative to help us come up with beautiful, simple answers.)

Two examples of learning with my own kids come to mind. One is from Number Two Son’s created (or in his words ‘discovered’) religion of Jimoanism. To conclude a Jimoanist ceremony, he taught me, we simply say ‘The End’. This is a delightfully direct way of ‘banishing’ or open/closing (depending on your tradition) your magic circle once a rite is finished, and is one I’m certainly going to use in non-Jimoanist contexts. Another example, this time flowing from me to Number Two Son: One night, while perhaps a little over-tired as I tucked him into bed, he was expressing his anxiety about the world. Of course this is perfectly normal. Once we realise that everyone we love will die and that all things change, we can easily find ourselves feeling sad. While I could pragmatically reassure my son that he is loved, that he and all his family are well, the fact remains that I can’t fundamentally take away the worries he (like any of us) can have about the future. But what I could do was share an insight that I’ve written about before. Namely that the human nervous system has developed to be risk-averse and to remind us very clearly about what we need to avoid. The negative consequence for complex cognition in humans is that we can find ourselves trapped in our woes and worries, however there is a magical technique to address this problem, namely Giving Thanks. I explained this to Number Two Son, once he had shared his worries and I’d attempted to put his mind at ease, by asking about his foot;

“How’s your foot feeling?” I enquired.

“Er…fine…” responds Number Two Son

“So you don’t notice your foot right now?”

“No, it’s fine.”

My point, I went on to explain, is that we generally only notice something when it’s wrong. If your foot is fine, busy doing foot stuff, we (that is our conscious awareness) ignores it. We notice when our foot hurts but not when all is well. So when we get, for whatever reason, trapped in real or imagined pain (like anxiety) remembering that our metaphorical foot is fine can be the first step towards addressing our distress. Religion in its various forms makes plenty of use of this technique but we can also think of it as an edgy ‘mind hack’ or simply an act of magical (ie the technology of the imagination) transformation. The trick is to give thanks for all those things that are right, are free of pain, are sources or comfort, delight and love. Prayers (or ‘acts of meta-programming’ or ‘spells’ if you prefer) to make us aware of that which is good help off-set and tune down our biologically rooted tendency to see the gloomy side of life. A particularly strong version of this technique is to direct our thanks towards an imagined (or ‘discovered’) personified entity. Since our nervous system is also geared up to interact with personified entities (ie other people) this technique is particularly effective when we give an identity to the imagined concept we choose to give thanks to.

Giving thanks for a good road

Having shared a somewhat simplified version of the above with my son he considered what I’d said. “So I could thank Jimoan?’ he asked. “That would be perfect! Good idea!” I agreed, and he settled down to sleep smiling.

Meanwhile Number One Son is at the dawn of adulthood, growing rangy and preparing to take formal exams. I had a fascinating conversation with him and a friend’s daughter the other day. They were talking about drugs and both were firmly of the opinion that cannabis in particular should be decriminalised. What was additionally interesting was that they claimed that all their peers thought the same way. We know that fundamental political and cultural changes take time, and while new prohibitionist laws and even murder in the service of the war on (some) drugs is happening today, the next generation want to see this change.

One of the things that fed into this conversation was my discover that Miracle Berry (aka Synsepalum dulcificum) cannot now be obtained via Amazon in Britain. This product is made from a west African plant the fruit of which contains a chemical called, rather wonderfully, Miraculin. Miraculin blocks the tongues receptor to sour, thus effectively sweetening foods that are eaten after it is consumed (for about an hour). Number One Son had, in previous times, found out about this stuff and so we purchased some (via Amazon.co.uk). Together we made the assay; after rolling the tablet round our mouths for the prescribed 20 minutes we both took slices of lime. Looking at each other we bit down on the citrus but, miraculously, it tasted sweet! I gazed at my Son and we shared a special moment of chemically mediated psychoactive transformation as I asked him, “can you feel it?”. Later at his birthday party a whole bunch of friends tried the stuff (two had already experimented with it previously). Together a set of pre-teens laughed and joked and tucked into raw gooseberries and lemons.

This harmless and enjoyable experience is now, of course, off limits. The New Psychoactives bill forbids such epicurean nervous-system manipulating chemicals and Amazon, being understandably risk averse, no longer sell this product in the UK (tho I am given to understand there is now, unsurprisingly, a thriving black market for this essential component of ‘flavour tripping’ parties).

Those who bemoan such kill-joy and positively dangerous laws as the British Psychoactives Substances Act and, more recently the attempts to criminalise the use of kratom in the USA should well know that they are not alone. While medical and other discourses are making great strides to liberalise access to psychoactives (and especially psychedelics), my view is that the principle of cognitive liberty is something that should underpin campaigns to change not just the law but the fundamental way our culture approaches both pleasure, and the issue of who ownes our minds and bodies. The fact that I can’t now use a major retailer to buy a perfectly safe substance that simply makes sour things taste sweet, because of the law and reasons, is both ludicrous and ironic in equal measure.

Computer says no to an attempted order for Miracle Berry and Kratom into the UK

Hanging with the kids also helps me get a new perspective on The Big Questions of life. I realise, as a parent, step parent and God/dess parent and teacher, how raising children is a process, like most things in life, about letting go. When they are infants children need our constant care but as they grow they want and should have more and more of their own space. We let go as our children go out into the world. As parents we need to show intelligence and care and to find strategies (like Giving Thanks) that help us deal with the natural anxieties we have for our children as they begin to fly the nest.

While spatial metaphors such as ‘letting go’ are somewhat unpopular within some Left-hand Path discourses (which, in some versions, privilege isolation, integrity and individualism) in my view these ‘actively passive’ abilities are just as important to the über-Setian or Odian as they are to the tantrika or transcendentalist. It’s interesting to note that, as mentioned in The Varieties of Magical Experience: Indigenous, Medieval, and Modern Magic by Lynne L. Hume PhD, and Nevill Drury there is a view of the LHP as being something quite distinct from, “…an ultimately passive quest for mystical transcendence – or as members of the Dragon Rouge express it, “melting into God”.” However, historically roots of the philosophical tradition of Transcendentalism are highly individualistic. The metaphors we favour, while apparently pointing to philosophical positions that are quite distinct – when considered in high level ontological terms or small scale practical terms (ie what techniques do we use) – tend to turn out to be different sides of the very same coin.

In the context of parenting this ‘letting go’, as our children mature and grow, can be seen in terms of acknowledging and celebrating their own ‘Gift of Set’, their unique individuality. The flip side of this is that it is also about ‘letting go’ as we acknowledge our age and that our children are here to replace us.

Getting a grip on letting go

A few months ago I did one of those ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions within the Facebook Chaos Magick Group. The ever perceptive Jo Sims (also I believe a parent) asked me what was the best advice I’d ever received. My answer was that when my first Son was born that a friend told me to ‘trust in the process’, and this sage advice I’ve since passed along to new parents. Letting Go implies a trust, a trust that when we let go all will be well (or at least a recognition that, fundamentally, there is no choice but to let go). This process isn’t about abjuring responsibility or denying our agency, but what it is about is actively facing the facts of the universe, and learning how best to meet the world in which we find ourselves. Letting go is also (as I wrote in The Book of Baphomet) the fundamental skill needed when it comes to navigating psychedelic drugs. While we actively take the medicine, once it is in us, if we are going to get the best from it, we must learn to let go. This is an ‘actively passive’ process; we are listening rather than talking (for a change). I ask my son, ‘can you feel it?’, we allow this ingested intentional change to happen to us, we let go into the experience of the miraculously sweet lemon.

So as the mornings become a little darker and colder, and we once more prepare to come inside from the summer holidays and go back to school, I give thanks for my children, for all the new humans that find themselves in this world. May they be nurtured with kindness and inspired to fully realise their potential as individuals and members of our future culture.