Ritual technology | The Blog of Baphomet

Have you ever felt haunted? Haunted by an idea or a person who, despite all your best efforts, seems to be lurking at the edges of your vision and prodding your unconscious to give them a bit more space. These phantoms of our history often point towards past explorations and adventures that were left unresolved; untidy longings that may seem embarrassing when viewed from a more urbane present.

In all my recent writing about the Gnostics and other Christian heretics, the figure haunting me from the shadows is that old trickster Yeshua Ben Joseph (Jesus to his Greek speaking friends). It may well be a projection on my part, but in my mind Jesus and I are trying to negotiate a different kind of relationship. Those dusty half-truths from fan-boys of old simply don’t fit any more. Rather than taking shape within a dogma that does violence to either kindness or thinking, I keep getting glimpses of this Jesus in the dreamtime and the strangest of places. This is a decidedly Surreal Christology.

It is hardly surprising that Surrealism’s emphasis on the unconscious and the realm of dreams coincided historically with the birth of psychotherapy and fin de siècle occultism. For me, the sense of mystery and strange juxtaposition that are synonymous with Surrealism have helped me to explore aspects of my spiritual history that I had previously felt unable to reconcile.

In the “Art and Science” definition of magic according to Crowley, I will definitely acknowledge my own personal bias towards the art end of this equation. Surrealism as an artistic movement manages to capture the creativity and willed engagement with the unconscious that was later embodied so potently in the work of occult artists as diverse as Austin Osman Spare and Thee Temple of Psychick Youth. Such art revels in the conscious distortion of the familiar as we push up against the fuzzy edges of the known and the knowable (think melting clocks and fish on bicycles). Such an approach is radically subjective and relational, but uses images in a way that connects to shared meaning so as to provoke new ways of perceiving and understanding:

“Artist, you are a priest: Art is the great mystery and, when your effort leads to a masterpiece, a ray of the divine shines down as on an altar… Artist, you are a magus. Art is the great miracle and proves our own immortality.”

– Joséphin Péladan

Surrealist artists such as the fabulous Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) took this emphasis on the magical and alchemical a step further than most of her male forebears, and her work remains a potent example of the surreal genius engaging with the spiritual realm.

Leonora Carrington Ab Eo Quod 1956

Whichever occult tools we think we may have mastered as we enter the faery realm of sleep, we soon realise that we are riding on waves of unconscious that are ultimately beyond our control. The esoteric skills of automatic writing and dream interpretation (both of which the Surrealists employed) may be effective vehicles for entering these waters, but we must still realise the limited control that we finally have over what creatures emerge from its depths!

I would highly recommend the use of Surrealist art (especially Carrington’s and Max Ernst’s) as an aid to meditation and reflection. The Surreal landscapes encountered via dreams and our art can be challenging and uncomfortable, but their jarring and vivid images can trigger awakenings more potent than if we were relying on words or reason alone.

Max Ernst The Robing of the Bride 1940

For me, my own departure from Christianity came following a profound psychological crisis in which I was no longer able to tolerate the exclusivity of that religion’s claims. My book A Gnostic’s Progress looks at this experience in greater detail, but it would be fair to summarise the direction of this journey as being inwards in search of greater, more authentic depth, a move away from faith based belief, and towards an acceptance of responsibility for insights gained.

This journey inwards was greatly aided by the works of Jung, and it was via his work that I encountered the richness of the Gnostics for the first time. Jung was also a person who was haunted. His desire for personal authenticity and integration drove him to break with Freud and he emerged from this crisis with insights that are truly profound. At points Jung’s haunting was quite literal, and his reception of the Seven Sermons to the Dead was accompanied by etheric and poltergeist activity: “The dead came back from Jerusalem, where they found not what they sought. They prayed me let them in and besought my word, and thus I began my teaching.” Sermon 1, 1913. For more insight on this critical chapter of modern Gnostic history, you may want to check out Stephan Hoeller’s excellent The Gnostic Jung.

In many ways my fairly persistent preoccupation with the Gnostics and heretical Christians is also evidence of my own ongoing struggle with the ghost of Jesus past. For me this is a relationship that feels markedly different to previous attempts at belief and certainty, for now my haunting is about the discovery of what the sacred flame of my own Christhood might mean for my liberation.

Salvador Dali The Madonna of Port Lligat 1949

The City of London is a magical place. Surrounded by a ring of treasure hoarding dragon sentinels, the glass and steel buildings that are the statements of financial power tower over the landscape.

This is a place protected by the iconic London Stone which is usually housed within the City limits. However at the moment this monolithic guardian is outside the formal boundary of the financial district, having been temporarily moved to the Museum of London. The absence of this famous symbol from the place it protects just happened to coincide with an action proposed by C.J.Stone; a spot of situationist magic, aimed at transforming the way that money operates in our culture. On the 7th of November, a group of activists, Druids, occultists, artists and others made their way into the heart of the City to perform a series of rituals at locations such as the Monument (to the Great Fire of London), the Bank of England, St. Paul’s Cathedral and finally The Royal Court of Justice.

Defensive City Dragon

Trying to articulate what comes after capitalism is probably a bit like asking someone from the Middle Ages what would come after monotheism. While many people have a profound sense that something is deeply wrong with our culture of environmental over-exploitation, social inequality and frustration at the status quo, exactly what we should do about this is far from clear. The recent votes on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s membership of the European Union, and the United States of America’s election of President Donald Trump, are perhaps expressions (albeit maybe misguided ones) of this desire for change from the way things are.

The details of the actions we performed are recorded by C.J.Stone on his blog. You can read what we got up to here and here (with more material to follow soon). If you want to join in this action, one that seeks to question the role that money plays in our lives and strives to discover more equitable economic social relations, you may want to use the sigil that we deployed as part of our process.

Sign of the times

This sigil, known as ‘The Equaliser’, is formed from the signs for greater than >, less than < and equal to = (the equals sign of course appears as part of a number of currency symbols such as some versions of the Euro, Dollar, Pounds Sterling and Yen signs). The sigil also includes some runic associations, as well as the link to the Chinese character for ‘well’ which C.J.Stone spotted after it was created (see his blog post). There’s a chant too, to help power-up the sigil; “Greater Than, Less Than, Equal To”. Simply write this sign on the paper money you have and use it, sending the sigil into the currency in circulation. As C.J. records on this blog we were able to send £100 in old-style £5 notes into the heart of the City by the simple expedient of swapping these for new polymer fivers at the Bank of England. The statement on British banknotes,’I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ‘, means that you can go to the Bank of England and swap it for another note of the same value.

Folks who are familiar with sigil magic will know that the classic way of deploying a sigil is to burn it once it is charged, the theory being that as the image is destroyed physically it goes to work in the unconscious ‘deep mind’ of reality. It’s rather nice to realise that the sigilised five pound notes that C.J. handed into the Bank of England will be destroyed by them in their incinerators in Slough. Slough is a town in Berkshire outside London. Its name derives from the use of the word to mean a depression, or ‘mire/swamp’. A ‘slough’ is a time or place of a falling away of non-vital things. It’s the word we use when a serpent throws off a layer of skin, a symbol of transformation indeed!