steve dee | The Blog of Baphomet

Making generalizations about magic is always perilous.

To speak about magic is to speak of the almost the entirety of humanity’s attempts to understand and explore both science and religion. What are these things? Why are they like this? Can I influence these things (including myself) so that they might behave differently? To do magic is to set sail on an adventure of exploration and understanding regarding the nature of things and the (possible) means of causation.

When we reflect on the broad categories of theurgy and thaumaturgy, we can see that magic seeks to provide us both with creative ways of wrestling with the questions of theological meaning and also our human attempts to exert some control over our experience of material existence. When I view my own journey as a magician I can see a variety of stages in which I have used creative ritual and occult technologies (trance, evocation, divination etc.) to engage with a number of these dilemmas.

While I have spent significant amounts of time working with the type of theological preoccupations shared by many forms of contemporary Neo-Paganism, if I was trying to locate any common thread between the techniques and traditions that I have explored, I have largely been preoccupied by the psychological alchemy that magic can exert when we attempt to use it to engage with the unknown, the mysterious and what Freud called “the crushing superiority of nature”.

It’s fair to say that I take my magic with a fair dose of existentialism, and for me the sense of agency created by occult work provides me with a degree of leverage when seeking to create meaning in the world. Whether via the drama of ritual or the creative mind-set of the initiatory imagination, magic helps me both embrace the strength of my passions and also the possibility of managing chaos so that the likelihood of being overwhelmed is reduced.

Orthodox believers are often perplexed or horrified by the ways of the magician. We not only consciously revel in the pursuit of power and agency, but we often engage with personifications of death, impermanence and misrule. The magician is often the one who while valuing the light and the conscious, recognizes that the brutality of life also demands an engagement with the dark, the hidden and the potentially destructive. We see these forces both within ourselves and at work in the world. These are dangerous forces that threaten to overwhelm us and yet for the initiate, we respond to a deep hunch that we need to engage with this material. What matters in such work is the dose we take.

“The dose makes the poison” (sola dosis facit venenum) is an axiom credited to the 16th century scientist/alchemist Paracelsus and alludes to his idea that the amount of something is the critical factor in determining its risk to us. Basically this means that a substance can only produce the harmful effect associated with its toxic properties if it reaches a high enough level within a given body or system. Therefore risk is influenced by a whole range of variable factors such as our personal constitutions and our experience with a given substance.

Paracelsus – Awesome alchemist, great taste in hats

When I reflect upon my spiritual and magical practice, I can see direct parallels between this perspective and the way in which I use my explorations of ritual, ecstatic states and divination as a way of more effectively managing my own struggle to engage with the uncertainty and anxiety of being alive.

Life throws all sorts of crazy shit at us: the reliable fails, we get ill, people die, politicians make hugely unwise decisions; you get the idea, this list could go on for a very long time. As we try to create a semblance of order and stability in our lives, the variable and the unknown encroach upon our efforts and then things fall apart. As much as we try to live peaceful lives, the shock of the new and the unexpected induces a whole flood of fight, flight and freeze responses as we try to make sense of the traumas that blind-side us.

While my own pursuit of the “Great Work” of magic is inevitably focused on creating an increased sense of agency in the face of such challenges, for me this is rarely about beseeching prayer and attempts to defy the laws of science. For me, it is more likely to be about a confrontation of my fears within the (relatively) contained setting of the ritual chamber or circle. This is the work of the initiate as we consciously seek to work with a potentially toxic aspect of reality so as to build a degree of resilience or even immunity.

Such work can be profoundly alchemical, in that in working with our fears and wrathful aspects of reality, we can consciously create tension and induce a profitable form of psycho-spiritual resistance. There are some parallels between this work and Hegel’s dialectical process. To introduce a challenging concept (e.g. our fear of death) also asks that we acknowledge its apparent opposite (the joy of experiencing life’s pleasures) and then via the tension between these polar extremes we can begin to synthesize our own unique resolution. The great mystic Jacob Bohme saw this dialectical tension within the very Godhead itself and the value that bitterness (Grimmigkeit) had in generating creativity and change.

Working with tensions

Overdose is always possible and part of maturity on the path is knowing when to reduce our intake and ground ourselves via friends, food and more everyday concerns. Magic can be both upsetting and disturbing; the holism that it advocates usually demands the confrontation of aspects of self that we would often prefer to ignore. Most magical paths are designed to give the unconscious an almighty stir so that we are forced to wake from our sleep-states. There are easier hobbies out there if all we are seeking is distraction, but for those of us touched by this initiatory need-fire, this is a work not easily relinquished.

Steve Dee

We all want things yesterday; quicker service, faster broadband, shorter travel times. If something is good surely it will be even better if we can get it in half the time? In the busyness of our day-to-day lives wouldn’t it better if we could apply the aesthetics of our drive-through, take-away culture to our spiritual aspirations as well? Being a Shaman sounds so cool! Surely a couple of weekend workshops should do it or even better could I do it via Skype?

Most of us know deep down that this isn’t going to get it done. In a disposable age of quick fixes, fast food and bodge jobs, something at the root of our souls wants substance, and in our hunger for something truly nutritious we have a hunch that the thing that we seek will require real effort.

I have previously written on the blog about the influence of the Slow Movement and the way that it may help contemporary magicians cultivate maturity. Rather than increased mindfulness being limited to a set of internal practices, the Slow Movement challenges us to wonder what would happen if such a mindful perspective was brought to bear on the whole of our lives. What would our eating habits look like, our transport arrangements, our approach to child-care?

In my own pursuit of initiatory work I was reminded of this perspective once again as I reached an apparent impasse. After an investment of over 20 years of working with the type of non-linear, improvised form of sorcery know as Chaos Magic, was it time to call it a day and move on or was I able to find another gear, a deeper level from which I could continue to practice with a sense of integrity and personal congruence?

When something becomes as all-consuming as the pursuit of awakening, it can be hard to pause and take stock. When our internal fires are ignited, the pursuit of gnosis can expand to fill both our waking hours and dreamscapes. The gift of consciousness pushes us to expand and transcend the parameters of nature, and yet to do so without respecting both our physical and psychological health leads us vulnerable to burn out. As much as we may lust to the see the fruition of our own Great Work, wisdom seems to ask that we seek times when we surrender the work back to the earth and its cycles.

This concept of a necessary pause and rest first came to my attention via the work of Edred Thorsson. In his Nine Doors of Midgard he provides the seeker of mystery with a magical syllabus that can easily involve between 3-5 years of sustained engagement. In the course of pursuing such a heroic undertaking, it becomes critical to step back from the work; to bury it so that it might re-emerge invigorated. The depth of work set out in the Nine Doors is both awe inspiring and daunting. Looking back, my own failure to complete it in a sustained burst initially felt like an affront to my success driven ego, but now I realize I had something important to learn.

When we get to the point where we feel burnt-out or our practice feels stale or broken, it can be a profound opportunity to tune in to our deepest motivation. As a Chaos Magician, it would be all too easy to fill this unease with the pursuit of a different paradigm or the shiny baubles of new techniques, but for me I knew that this would have been missing the point. For me I was faced with the far more daunting task of reconnecting to initiatory “need-fire” i.e. when life circumstances strip us back, what remains as our vital drives and motivations? What is it that I have to do?

Working with Slow Change

In pursuit of my own initiatory work I recently took a trip to Prague to meet with a group of magicians from around the world. Prague is an amazing city that feels like a heady meeting place of East and West, the modern and ancient and it was a fitting context for my own attempts to slow down and reconnect to the deep motivation for my own work.

Prague has its own wealth of occult history and lore; the legend of the Golem, the adventures of Dee and Kelly being but two. As you walk among its streets, its baroque and gothic buildings feel fully in keeping with the pursuit of the hidden and the nightside. Via Rudolph II’s obsession, Prague has long been associated with the art of alchemy and this alongside its love of absinthe’s green fairy created for me an enjoyable sense of romantic seediness.

These rich references to alchemy seemed to mirror the slow change and transformation that I am seeking. The Spagyric processes of drawing out and bringing together via fermentation and distillation require time, space and attention. Recently this process of Solve et Coagula (“To dissolve and concentrate”) has felt especially present at both the level of self via initiation and within the macrocosm of the natural world through the loss of beloved family members. This is a slow-burn process that has required patience and an awareness that artificially rushing things is likely spoil the intended goal.

In the spiralling gyre of my own initiatory work, it feels as though I am continually seeking to refine this process of stripping back and slowing down. Definitely not easy, but in doing so I allow the possibility of tuning in to the essential fires of my work and an acknowledgement of what my head, heart and body need to make this journey sustainable.