Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

Greg Humphries is one of my closest friends. I met him over 15 years ago in the Watershed Arts Centre in Bristol. Our meeting was set-up by the wonderful and wise Ronald Hutton who said we simply had to get to know each other. I remember carrying a copy of Crowley’s Magick (the Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, affectionately known as ‘The Big Pink Stiff One’ back in the day) to identify myself. We got on like a temple on fire, soon agreeing that an acid test of a good magician was their ability to interact successfully with spirits. And since the most frequently encountered spirits are other humans the measure of a mage is often nothing to do with their ‘occult powers’ or dark-n-spooky look, but rather their social intelligence, thoughtfulness, and standing in their community. We started doing magick together very soon after that meeting (with a big set of rituals on the run up to the major solar eclipse of 1999, but that, as they say, is another story). We’ve continued to do magick together ever since.

Many years later we wrote Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick, Volumes I & II. I wrote volume I and Greg the second part of the book (although it was many years before someone pointed out to me that nowhere in the book do we say who wrote which bits). This book detailed our differing but complimentary approaches to the process know as Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

Greg in his natural environment

At the time Greg was already a practising artist (an early digital artwork of his is on the cover of Now…). I’m lucky enough to own several of his paintings. Artworks where the paint is often mixed with pigments and materials from the landscape they are inspired by. But then Greg’s art underwent a transformation. Away from visual art, and into what for him is a deeper practice. These days he makes artists’ charcoal, coppices trees, fashions powerful bows with hand-made arrows fletched in the traditional manner. He carves, builds, makes fire with a bow drill and works with the land. More than this, as an artist, as a magician, he passes these skills on to others. You can find out more about his work and the courses he offers at www.futuretracks.co.uk and via his page on facebook.

This interview was conducted as we sat by the wood burner in my cottage (if you listen carefully you might be able to hear my Guinea pigs rumblestrutting in the background). The music used at the beginning and end of the interview is by Munacuyki Sumaqta.

Enjoy!

In addition to the eight Sabbats of Chaos Craft another motif we’ve continued to use in our work has been that of the Five Spheres. This conceptual device, developed by Pete Carroll in consultation with Nikki Wyrd, links to the vowel sounds (I,E,A,O,U) that are incorporated in the ‘middle pillar’ part of the Gnostic Banishing rituals. In these practices attention is given to the crown of the head (the Chaosphere), the throat (the Noosphere), the heart (the Anthrosphere), the belly (the Biosphere) and the base (the Geosphere). The whole system is described in detail towards the end of The Book of Baphomet.

We’ve started a series of rituals to explore each sphere. The first in the sequence is the Geosphere; the world of the rocks, the stones and the crystals (as the old Pagan chant puts it). This is place of the Elder Gods, and of our sense of hunger.

His snorting throws out flashes of light; his eyes are like the rays of dawn.

Each ceremony itself (so far we’ve done three rites) has included simple shamanic style techniques; the use of poetic text, drumming and silent meditation. Our aim; to commune with these different interpretations or layers of reality, while bringing a distinctly Left Hand Path and Setian mindset to this work. I plan to post some of the material used in these rituals on this blog.

The Geosphere, imagined in terms of the life of a person, is our intrauterine and infantile existence. Looked at in cosmological terms, it is that great dyad of space and time. It another sense it is the realm of raw physics;

Hydrogen begat Helium,

Helium begat Carbon,

Carbon begat Oxygen

In terrestrial terms the symbol of this sphere is the equal armed cross + representing the physical earth upon which we stand. From the magnetosphere that shields us from the solar wind, down through the depths of the ocean, riding upon the backs of tectonic plates, and deeper, to the core of our planet (which glows at the same temperature as the surface of the sun). For our lived experience, as dwellers on the surface, it is the four directions, the crossroads.

The spirit of this sphere (in a Typhonian stylee) is the monster Leviathan and the poem we used is taken from The Book of Job. It is also the place of Apep or Apophis, the great dragon-serpent whom Set keeps at bay, protecting the sun in its nightly journey through the underworld. I sometimes imagine Apophis as entropy, that mighty stooping dragon who, within the narrative of the cosmological Standard Model, seeks to drag down complexity into a vast uniform heat death of elementary particles and radiations. Space and time gives birth to all things, and in the end (it seems) will destroy everything too. The all potential womb is also the all embracing tomb.

But for all this, biology and mind rises up (like Set) against (and within) this inky black darkness. We are mud that sat up and became sensate.

(In a perhaps less Setian style one might also point out that the universe, for all its faults, seems peculiarly adapted to the needs of the kind of physics and chemistry that allows for life. Our cosmos seems perfectly set up not only to permit but to encourage life. Were the weak force (or the others in that great fundamental quadruplicity) just a little weaker, and it could all have gone horribly wrong.)

If you fancy doing your own meditations on the Geosphere you could use the poem and soundtrack below. The recording was made during the ritual. Part of the background is a NASA production of the song of the earth in space. There’s also the sound of stones being ground together in the temple, resting upon the bones of a mighty whale.

Go Deep & Enjoy!