Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

A few weeks ago I was sitting by the sea on the beautiful Devon coast. The day was bright, the sky magnificent blue. Meditating in that classic liminal space (where land and sky and sea meet) I took a breath of the Magical Aire. The traditional short-duration but richly decorated visions followed. Returning to awareness of my Self upon the shore, I was shown (as I was digging the spirit paradigm at that moment, though of course I might equally say ‘made up in my head’) a simple technique which I’d like to share.

Thanks giving

Magical medicines are such that they are magical not only in themselves (as powerful molecules capable of radically changing consciousness) but also in that they are sacraments because they are deployed in a particular way and under particular circumstances. It’s what we as magicians bring to the party, as much as the substances themselves, that matters.

One of the most powerful allies when working with these spirits is the sense of gratitude. We recognise that we are blessed to be able to have these potentially moving, healing, insightful, sometimes difficult and often exquisite experiences. What is important to understand here is that this orientation of gratitude to what is going on is quite genuine. And it’s simultaneously true that this attitude is a tactic which we, take-no-prisoners chaos magicians, are quite happy to adopt because it gets us what we want (insight, healing, power etc etc).

So having come out of my trance I wanted to recognise the sacredness of this experience. To write back into my unconscious my gratitude for the insights granted to me and to pave the way for future experiences of liberation.

Acknowledging the Triple Sangha

After a powerful moment of ritual (with or without medicines)…

Hold the hands in prayer position on the crown of the head. Bring attention to the lineage of gurus who have allowed you to get to this moment in your own spiritual development. Depending on your style you can imagine the sandals of your guru on your head, and their guru on top of them. A great line of teachers stretching into the sky. You might instead choose to imagine this as a community of Stars above you. All those wise people, cunning folk, shamans, explorers and many others who, now, in the past and in the future, have been engaged with the philosophies and techniques of magick. There may be particular teachers, living or dead, that you want to bring your attention to in this moment. This act recognises that we are part of the sangha of these practitioners, in all their myriad forms and traditions.

Next, move the hands in prayer down so that the thumbs press on the Ajna chakra. With this movement bring attention to yourself. You may think of this as the unique and indivisible diamond Atman of your existence. Or you may imagine the self as being the confluence of many forces, acting in the past, present and future. You might wish to pay attention to yourself as a ‘conspiracy of selves’ or to recognise your own unique narrative (or a combination of all of these interpretations of the Self). In this moment we pay homage to us – our individuality and sense of identity.

Finally the hands are held in prayer at the heart. Bring attention to those beings that support you. Those who love and care for us, who feed and nurture us. This could include humans and other creatures we love, what we eat, the air we breath and even people and situations we find difficult. However the key focus here is on the sense of being loved and cared for. This a moment for appreciating those aspects of the universe that provide us with this sense of being valued.

For some rites this act of giving thanks does the same job as the traditional banishing ritual. The usual rules apply. Having spent as long as you need to with this practice go and do something else. Let your awareness of acknowledging these blessings fade into the background reality of your daily life.

The first iteration of our Chaos Craft Wheel of the Year ends with Lammas, the festival of the cutting of the corn. In my landscape this is around the time of the first grain harvest. Red fruits appear (in my garden that means cherries, raspberries and red currants). When I was a kid in Hertfordshire this was also the time of burning the fields. The sky would darken with the smoke of smouldering stubble and we would occasionally gather at the edges of the fields and race the flames as they ate their way across the blackened earth.

Lammas is the time for cutting, for breaking, for reaping and engaging with the necessary destructive elements of ourselves, our cultures and the cosmos. We prune back the summer growth, and burn what is no longer needed.

Burning down the house

For our Red Magick meeting to begin we acknowledged our groups’ inspiration from The Craft, passing around a chalice of red wine as our introduction. This wine had first been consecrated as the living witch-blood, an evocative idea that turns up in the Cultus Sabbati material and in that awesome grimoire Mastering Witchcraft by Paul Huson. We each hand the cup round the circle, drinking with the words ‘my blood’ and offering to the next participant with the words ‘your blood’. Bound symbolically by this blood pact we enter an evening of Red rites.

Curses are tricky beasts and worth considering before we rush in wands blazing. Who do we curse and why? Of course even to swear at someone is a curse. In that situation, by the visceral power of taboo words, we may attempt to harm, to upset. In more explicitly magickal contexts we may try all kinds of operations; against individuals, against organisations, against ideas. When we consider curses we need to think deeply about what we’re doing.

In a Chaos Magick group on Facebook I recently responded to someone who was asking if members thought it was cool to curse someone who’d pissed them off:

“When considering curses, of which of course there are many types, (and indeed any act of magick) I’d suggest that you contemplate what the ritual/approach will do to you. “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” like Nietzsche says. Consider how you can act to increase compassion, transformation and healing in the situation rather than the violence and distrust that has motivated your thoughts. This more subtle approach might help you not get trapped in a me vs them dichotomy and is likely to leave you more empowered rather than less. You’ll also undoubtedly win ;)”

So the curses we laid on our night of Red Magick were against not people but aimed at the transformation of certain situations. This is delicate magick. The injunction not to ‘Battle with Monsters” from Nietzsche doesn’t mean not to do anything where there is a problem we should address. Rather it points to the idea that if you demonise your opponent you run the risk of becoming like them or of losing your own humanity.

There are certainly situations that demand our opposition, but we as magicians must be intelligent in this, and use our Skilful Means when faced with these difficulties. Lots can be learnt from writers such as Sun Tzu and Miyamoto Musashi. (The quote of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.” has great relevance in terms of proposed military intervention in Syria but that, as they say, is another story.)

Look into the eyes of the Dragon…

Of course a curse against the project of fracking in the British Isles, for example, isn’t a curse necessarily against any particular person. It’s against a method for extracting energy from the earth that is supported by a series of very short-sighted values and intentions. Naturally this type of Work must also combine with supporting the various other levels of opposition to these projects. In that moment we summoned the dragon to rise up, through the land and the people, to oppose fracking. Of course the earthquake the next day could have been ‘just coincidence’, and the announcement by prospecting firm Cuadrilla, that they might be on unsafe ground legally to continue their work (pun intended), might simply be ‘one of those things’. We certainly did not ’cause’ these events, however our magick was part of the network of Wyrd (of actions by many people at many levels) that, for the moment, has resulted in this company withdrawing its application for more drilling.

A naive view is to imagine that Cuadrilla is ‘the enemy’ and that the enemy is bad, not ‘of us’, something we must destroy. Whereas in fact by acknowledging our connection (if nothing else as energy consumers) to what we oppose, we find our own power.

After an evening of several Red rituals where else can you go with the playlist but to a little Petro Voodoo? Asking for the presence of the Loa, dancing and chanting we enter the space of war, of violence, of conflict and again look for the transformative potential of these most difficult experiences.

Here in our underground temple we deploy a technique from the Feri Tradition of Craft. We bow before our enemies, for they remind us of what we hold dear. We acknowledge that they remind us that there are many views of the reality. We bow before them as they inspire us towards greater compassion and creativity. We bow before them and remind ourselves that we are fighting for them and their children, and in doing so became stronger in the Work that we do.

Final Red Magick spirit jar filled with ash from our rituals. Jai Ganesha!

Back from the underground, our final act of Red Magick isn’t a curse but is still about breaking stuff, this time obstacles. Ganesha’s favourite colour is red and, while he’s (mostly) a jolly god that likes sweets, he’s also a fierce ally. Making our 108 salutations to this gigantic, powerful deity we transform the Red of War into the living Red of healthy, circulating blood; our witch-blood, my blood, your blood. As we say in the Chaos Craft; “from the heights of the heavens, to the depths of the earth, we are one heart -connected. Blessed Be”.