Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

I was sitting with the irrepressible Grim Rita on the night before The Occult Conference held recently in Glastonbury, and was privileged to be offered a sneaky peak at the manuscript of her memoirs. Aided by the truth-saying that naturally comes with consuming prodigious quantities of wine, Rita asserted the significance of the telling of personal stories. Her memoir, as one might expect, is an intense document. Even in my brief dip into the first 25,000 words I encountered some powerful, at times harrowing material. I congratulated the author on putting down on paper some deeply personal experience.

To paraphrase Rita herself, the fact that we’re people trying our best to figure out ‘what it’s all about’ is the important stuff. So rather than write a book about the god Set (the deity she is devoted to) she has instead been inspired to write a book where her devotion to Set can be understood as emerging out of, and informing, her life story. Personally I really like this approach which is why I like books like My Life With The Spirits by Lon Milo DuQuette.

Just because you like Set don't mean you can't like people

Esoteric writers may produce all kinds of exciting instructional texts about the seals of spirits X,Y & Z, the correct pronunciation of Enochian and all that but, when all said and done, these arcane powers only come to life when embedded in a human narrative. To find meaning in the world we need to take things personally, to absorb raw abstract instructions and to realise them through our own practice.

The perennial desire, to make sense out of our lives is certainly a great motivator for those of us who get hooked on magick. Even when our rituals may seem to be the simplest bits of results orientated sorcery they are also all opportunities to know ourselves. Magick is an autopoietic process, where (depending on your favourite description) we reveal, enact, or create our Selves. So it was with Rita’s observations in mind and, having been informed that there wasn’t a data projector in the house (so my audience would escape getting a PowerPoint presentation that afternoon) that I significantly amended my talk.

For The Occult Conference I was billed as a chaos magician speaking about Baphomet. The week before at the Devon and Cornwall Pagan Federation Conference) I’d spoken about Baphomet too. In that lecture I’d described this spirit entity (its Templar origins, its links with the Horned God of Wicca, its connection with Satanism etc), but I didn’t include much of my own story in the narrative. The lecture went fine (and I did manage to create a new catchphrase within the Pagan community) and lots of people gave me positive feedback. But somehow I felt that something was missing. So at Glastonbury I spent much more time talking about my own relationship with Baphomet and included much more personal material. Although I only had a few scant notes and no slides to show the lecture went very well indeed. Proof of Grim Rita’s point that it’s the human-scale experience that matters the most. Sharing personal stories of magic – its realisations and questions means that we meet others on the level playing field of our shared humanity (no matter what grand titles or mystical lineages we may claim). When I’m inspired, when I feel a connection with my audience that’s when my lectures go really well and I felt this was one of my best performances. So thanks to Grim Rita, Priestess of Set for reminding me that being human is the most amazing, magical thing of all.

Chatting to a close friend recently, he noted that in contrast to a New Age “flake” that he had encountered that day, at least I “knew it was all made-up.” I had to laugh! My humanist chum is well aware of my metaphysical experimentation, and his take on my belief system is that basically that I seem to believe in everything and nothing at all. Oh shit I thought if by “believe” he means “have faith”, he got the measure of me all right!

To be fair I have had a serious punt at believing something, in my case it was Christianity and frankly the psychic meltdown that eventually resulted was not pretty. Thankfully those naughty Gnostics came to my rescue. These spiritual adventurers opened my eyes to the psychological richness of metaphor and the joys of heretical rebellion. Their crazy wisdom was balm to a psyche cracking under the strain of faith and orthodoxy.

The gnostic impulse almost certainly pre-dates its predominantly Christocentric expression, and reflects an understanding of humanities’ struggle with belief, meaning and our experience of suffering. If you try reading the primary sources of classical Gnosticism (the Sethians, the Valentinians etc.) you can’t but be both impressed and frankly bewildered by the way they engage with myth, symbol and the goal of personal liberation. The Gnostics viewed their spiritual hero’s less as figures that needed to be believed in, and more as exemplars of a heightened consciousness that we should all seek to aspire to. These were gods that I actually liked rather than being required to “love”!

What drew me to them then and keeps me hooked, is the way in which revelation and insight are not the sole domain of a chosen prophet, rather it is something organic, emergent and mutating. Religious expression is seen as part of our human encounter with reality rather than something dropped out of the sky.

Avast Ye!

Even a cursory study of religious phenomena reveals both our greatest aspirations and depths of our prejudices. Humanities religious expression, be it tribal deities, anthropomorphized monotheisms or Lovecraftian terrors all mirror our collective journey through history. This is not to imply some bleeding out of mystery; rather it glories in religion as art. The gods are real precisely because we’ve made them so (see Pratchett’s “Small Gods” for a fantastic exposition on this concept).

Whether our inspiration is the Supernal Triad of the Kabbalah or a chthonic serpent deity all are filtered through our beautifully human struggle. People may be drawn to more historic faiths because of their romance or track record of effective transformation but these were also made-up, just by someone really old or dead.

While some purists may groan at my trendy preoccupation with Eris, sub-genii and other such oddities, I love the fact that the manufacturers label is so clearly on the tin. Unlike those faiths whose claims to certainty seem shaky at best, the path of the modern gnostic explorer recognises that the map and the territory are clearly not the same. You’ve made that up! Yep, you’ve got me! It’s both limited and absurd-and brilliant and a clearly heroic attempt to wrestle with the Mysteries.

Hail Eris! Pastafari!