Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

The heart of the Spheres of Chaos model is the Anthrosphere, also knows as the Opusphere (the world of the works of humanity) or the Technosphere. Here we recognise the peculiar way in which we, Homo sapiens, influence the Geosphere and Biosphere. With our amazing ability to make and control fire we have literally changed every part of the planet. One example of this is the way in which archaeologists, when using radio carbon dating techniques, give dates as ‘BP’ meaning Before Present. And when is the present exactly? The answer is January 1st 1950; following our detonation of the first atomic bombs we’ve spread radioactive isotopes across the whole world. After 1950 the carbon dating system is screwed, no dates established using that technique after that year can be trusted (and this will apply for a very, very long time).

This is the reason why, in geological terms, the era we’re living in is the Anthropocene – a period that many scientists consider begins with the industrial revolution. In the Anthrosphere we appreciate ourselves as deeply technological entities, throwing off tools, structures, wastes and behaviours into the world. Our technology circles the planet, looking back with unblinking satellite eye on the Geopshere and Biosphere. Techniques including animal domestication, farming, vaccination and written language have allowed us to proliferate in great numbers. Our biology itself is profoundly influenced by our technology; humans are coctivores, our gut’s structure reflects our millennia long love of cooked food. We change our bodies with piercing, tattooing, pharmaceuticals, artificial limbs and Google glasses.

The god of this centre (in our Left Hand Path analysis of the Spheres) is Set. Here is the god who is an exemplar of our deviation and division from other life-forms in the Biosphere. Set’s symbols include the knife and the scissors, those implements we use to cut the cord between the mother and child. Set is typically imagined as a bit kinky, a bit weird (in Norse culture we might say he is a bit ergi). He is god of the exotic, of metals, and of oil. He is associated with the colour red. The colour of hot, glowing iron from which we forge our tools and our machines.

Brave new world

Our work with Set and the Anthrosphere consisted of a freestyle shamanic opening up, to allow communication with this power. To do this we pulled out all the techno-esoteric stops; strobe lights, smoke machine, and Die Elektischen Vorspiele (an excellent track used in the rituals of The Temple of Set).

http://music.bniipotd.com/track/die-elektrischen-vorspiele

How do we acknowledge the ‘Gift of Set’ our individuating Self while at the same time appreciating that we are nourished by, and depend on others (other people, the Biosphere and Geosphere)? This is the great challenge of our species.

Cities of the future

The second realm in our sequence of The Spheres of Chaos is the Biosphere; the seething, fornicating, birthing and dying world of life. As the raw material of the Geosphere held the emergent complexity of life embedded as an implicate (and perhaps inevitable) force within it, so the Biosphere is the space within which our bodies are formed. It is in the next sphere, the Anthrosphere, that the centrality of humans and the products of our behaviours is described. But, as it says in The Book of Baphomet; ‘The Anthrosphere emerges from the Biosphere and remains critically dependent on it’. When we consider all life (using the model of the Five Spheres) we simultaneously acknowledge that we are part of this life, we are biological beings, and also (and here comes that Setian LHP vibe folks) that in some respects humans are radically different from the rest of Nature.

Within the Biosphere the twin serpents of DNA spin and twist, coding out millions of forms in continuously changing, morphing, adapting profusion. The constraints of the physical world anchor this wild multiplicity through adaptation to the environment. The sea of the late Triassic looked much like the sea of today and so the phenotype of ichthyosaurus reminds us of modern dolphins. Flesh adapts to the world in which it finds itself. One wave of gigantic reptilian life dies off (perhaps destroyed by a meteoric hammer blow) and new creatures flood in to the fill the evolutionary gaps. Ice-ages cover the Geosphere; life responds by getting all big and hairy. But this relationship goes both ways.Through the subduction and cycling of the earth’s mantle the products of biology are folded within our planet. Coal and oil, the sleeping shadows of ancient life, rest deep in the earth. Flint, made from the bodies of archaic creatures, chalk sifted from the shells of innumerable prehistoric snails. And not only echos of life, there’s plenty of living things a long, long way down. Meanwhile high up in the atmosphere (itself a mix of gases produced by biological activity) tiny critters throng the skies. Our whole planet is touched by life.

The symbol connected with this sphere is the two-point up pentagram, sigil of Baphomet and of The Devil. Given the biological focus of this sphere we decided to work with this spirit as Pan, all-devourer and all-begetter. A God appearing in the sylvan landscape of childhood’s dream as The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and also as the insane sexual frenzy of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan.

With hoofs of steel I race on the rocks

The recording below is of Aleister Crowley’s wonderful Hymn to Pan, one of the finest ritual poems of the 20^th century. This was used as part of our ceremony.

Drumming, scourging, drinking and general wildness are perfect methods for connecting to this sphere. The Biosphere witnesses our lust for life!

Enjoy!