Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

For me psychogeography (or less formally, ‘going for a walk’) is a key practice. By moving through the landscape in a suitably mindful way one can use the journey to literally explore both the inner and outer landscape. I made a journey recently, walking beside the great river that forms the valley in which I live.

At the outset I’m impressed by the weather. On this occasion this is the unusual stillness of the early spring, the river forms a silver mirror to the high grey sky above. A few wading birds explore the shallows, dipping for their food and silent gulls row through the motionless air.

Turbulent river made still

As I walk my mind picks over recent events, as in a dream, processing and probing experience in order to put it in place. These events included an opportunity to explore ways in which visitors to historic sites engage with the objects in those collections. The National Trust had invited me to speak at their conference and I was pleased to find that a rather lovely sign had been produced to direct delegates to my presentation.

sign of the times

A few days later I was in the Ashmolean Museum with my Sister. This is a world class collection which contains all manner of wonderful things. As I’ve written before visiting a museum is literally a chance to enter a Shrine to the Muses. Mindful of the ethical difficulties that museum collections frequently represent (in Britain our major museums are often free, though it is often through our colonial imperialism that the objects we see found their way into those display cases), these are places in which to be inspired.

Jai Ganesha!

Walking on. Catkins stand watch as the spring rises, and gorse glows yellow gold at the edge of the wood (and tastes sweet and alive). Having walked through the outskirts of my home town, I took a turn off the path and into some woodland. Here memory gives way to the immediacy of the surroundings. A stand of pine trees rise up, creating a soft woodland floor of needles. This yielding leaf litter is punctuated by the first furled forms of Lords and Ladies.

Here I spend some time with the pine spirits. Often overlooked as being not so cool as broadleaf trees, I am captivated by their repeated fractal forms. I am deeply aware that these are living beings. Alive just as I am and, in their own tree-ish way, aware of the world just as I am.

As well as our commonality I wonder about our differences. While it’s clearly not about better or worse it does seem that my awareness is different from that of the tree. I wonder about the common religious suggestion that humans are somehow specifically created in the image of God and reflect that (aside of the obvious anthropocentrism) this is because we are deeply self-aware. The development of this egoic boundary is both our connection to the divine, as the embodiment of God, and the cause of our Fall (at least according to some paradigms).

I run my hands over the bark and collect some of the resin exuded by the trees. This locally, and freely gathered incense is perfect for the ritual of purification I’m planning to do (that is, Spring Cleaning my home).

Later, on my return, I stop to gaze at the river and my memory drifts back to the death of my Dad that happened in December of last year. At a good age, and after a brief illness, I was able to be by his side in his last days. I was blessed with a kindly, caring father and in my own way I hope that I can honour his memory by being a good parent myself and in the work that I do (much of my professional work is about teaching and supporting people to realise their own aspirations).

At the end my Dad had the best of medical care. Care that would have been beyond my means in many other nations. This puts me in mind of a conversation with a Brother who works within the National Health Service. Though the NHS isn’t some perfect panacea, it does represent a tremendous investment of care by the State and the people who provide those services, to the people of Britain. The fact that I can summon, with no cost at the point of provision, an ambulance to help someone taken ill creates a deep unconscious sense of being cherished by the people and organisations I share my island with. As an election begins to loom here in the UK I can fully understand why the NHS is seen as one of the critical services that politicians must convince us that they will support.

Once a close loved one dies something very interesting and deeply powerful may happen. As their individual narrative ends so the relationship that one still has with that person becomes a relationship with The Ancestors. My Dad has become part of that archetype of The Father and luckily for me the fact that we had a good relationship when he was alive allows me to find healthy and beautiful ways to now connect with that psychic structure. Wrathful Jehovah and his kin may be part of The Father archetype too, but my pathway to this force is now guided by the psychopomp of the kindly man whose large hand I held as the warmth evaporated from it. While there is certainly a sense of loss and of sadness, I also know his body was tired out. The spirit of the man I knew is now liberated from its outworn shell and is become part of that Great Spirit.

Turning back to home I can’t resist the temptation to again cut away from the path and ascend several hundred feet to the crest of a rolling Devonian hill. Great beech trees stand sentinel over the rising green earth, and gnarled oaks ride like Hagazussa on the dry stone walls marking the boundaries of grazing lands.

Smack my beech up

This exertion galvanises me, and I return home to work, more and better, refreshed by my walk, inspired and enthused. For me this walk is an act of magic, an everyday magic, where we use skilful means to process those things that have been rattling around in our minds. The walk, be it the pilgrimage or the situationist drift, gives us a literal new perspective, it shakes up and smooths out our psychic selves, as well as exercising our physical bodies.

It reminds us, away from our books, and screens, and other people, of all those other beings in the world; sky, birds, river, pine, gorse and more, and gives time for us to hear their teachings.

Throughout this series of posts I have been grappling with the dilemma of how we might reconcile the radical dualism of some gnostic groups (e.g. the Sethians), with an experience of the material world that acknowledges its rich complexity and the sensual pleasures associated with it. In my own explorations I have found something of a mediating position via the ‘soft’ dualism contained in the Corpus Hermeticum, which sought to incorporate a more emanation-based model. In keeping with the insights of much Neo-Platonic thinking, the light of the Godhead still permeates the lower realms of matter, even if in a more dilute fashion. The crafted realm of the demiurge contains a messy diversity that our ordered minds sometimes struggle with. For our Universe to exist at all, it seems that it must operate with a rich complexity that we may find bewildering.

As a chaos magician I am thankfully spared the dilemma of whether such speculations are ultimately true (apparently “nothing/everything is true”), but my desire to explore this territory continues to be far more that mere hipster paradigm shifting. Perhaps as evidence of my human curiosity these mythic riddles act like Zen koans in breaking apart my all too linear attempts to comprehend. Perhaps the genius of much Gnostic mythology is that in contemplating its paradoxical nature, so it triggers new, more lateral insights. The bearing of such tensions is far from the path of the armchair magician; in seeking wisdom this alchemical process forces us to confront the limits of what we know. Like Socrates we proclaim:

“The only true wisdom is in knowing that you know nothing.”

If the path of the Gnostic is primarily concerned with the incoming of knowledge and startling new insight, it might lead us to conclude that it is a somewhat dry path when contrasted with the orthodoxy of a believer’s faith. To some extent such a contrast is fitting, in that the Gnostics seemed to have been dissatisfied with relying on the revelations of others rather than seeking them for themselves. Such advancement seems more reliant on personal effort rather than appealing to the sentimentality of a loving God.

In my view the full implication of any gnostic insight can only be fully comprehended if we able to integrate it at both a physical and emotional level. While we might contrast the Gnostic path with the more faith and emotion focused emphasis of the believer, we must remain awake to the central importance of the heart in seeking to cultivate wisdom.

When we seek to comprehend the tension that is central to so much of the Gnostic schema, it is the figure of Sophia or Divine Wisdom that provides some reconciliation between apparent duality. She acts as the mediatrix between the lofty aspiration of the Pleroma and the embodiment of the demiurge. In the ritual poem that we use at our monthly Zen Hearth meetings, we declare:

“We come seeking Gnosis
And the Wisdom to apply it”

The path of Sophia seeks to integrate any insights gained via gnosis and make them manifest through right attitude and action. As with Hegel’s conception of thesis, antithesis and the reconciling synthesis, so the Pleroma and Demiurge represent a polarity that Sophia balances and contains.

To make a wise old owl you start with fresh clay

To make a wise old owl, first take some fresh clay

In my own endeavours to work with the heart from a Gnostic perspective I have sought to engage both artistic creativity, and, less goal focused magical practices. The setting up of an altar space to Sophia allows me a form of shy invocation – an engagement with the senses, a gentle simmering of devotion that seeks to avoid some brash cut-and-paste results magic. In these reflections I’m drawn to past memories of Ruach, Shekinah and the image of Wisdom calling out on the street corners:

“Hear how Wisdom calls
and understanding lifts her voice.
She takes her stand at the crossroads,
By the wayside at the top of the hill…
She cries aloud:
“It is to you I call,
To all humanity I appeal”
Proverbs 8: 1-4

Whatever text one chooses, be it ancient or new, the act of Lectio Divina (conscious meditation and incubation of a verse) allows the Gnostic explorer the possibility for new insights and wisdom to grow. We need to create space for this process to mature and to take the brave step in admitting that we don’t know or understand something, or even that our previous knowledge needs to be unlearnt.

Seeking the Muse

To seek gnosis via creative means often allows the intrepid explorer access to the unconscious, and a manifestation of wisdom that can potentially hold apparent polarities in dynamic tension. Whether via visual art, music, dance or other means, to create is to channel the incoming genius through the body and to infuse it with impulses that express soul. One great example of such exploration is my friend Lloyd Keane, who has been using art to explore the concept of Runa or mystery. For those truly brave souls out there, here is a link to some of my own recent musical experimentation that has sought inspiration from the depths of Space.

To create means taking risk and moving from the imagined ideal (the Pleroma) to the messy, dynamic reality of what we can deliver (the Demiurge). Rarely are our first results our best, but in seeking to master any craft we can learn much about ourselves. To bear the tension of such polarities is a path to Wisdom and emulates Sophia herself:

“It is I who am restraint and unrestraint.
It is I who am joining: and dissolution:
It is I who am persistence:
And it is I who am weakening.
It is I who am descent:
And it is to me that people ascend.”
The Thunder, Perfect Mind