Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

One of the three treasures of Buddhism is the Sangha. This is the community of practice. Those people around us who support us in what, in western magick, we might call The Great Work or perhaps the process of Illumination. As someone who thrives on close collaboration (the majority of the books on which my name appears are co-authored texts) and communal activity (since the age of fifteen much of my esoteric work has happened in groups) the Sanhga is essential to me. Of course it’s not like that for everyone; some folks really thrive on working alone, or perhaps with just one other person. More accurately, most of us (even gregarious me) will have periods in which we need solitary practice and other times when we want to come together with others.

I’ve been fortunate to work within many organisations over the years; ranging from The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, Wiccan covens, native shamanic settings, AMOOKOS and, for the last ten years (though not to the exclusion of those other groups) with The Illuminates of Thanateros. While the style and focus (though perhaps not the ultimate project) of these groups is pretty diverse, there is a shared commonality of function in that they are all designed to support and nurture the people within them. And as part of this support there also has to be a compassionately critical process at work too; where we help each other to unpick our difficulties and to transcend our own (often self-created) problems.

A wrathful deity this morning…

All these groups necessarily share culture; signs, stories and in-jokes. This is part of what makes a community. There is the need not only to build up the group mind or egregore, but also to figure out how people are admitted to and indeed excluded from the group.

Policing of the boundary of a group is something that different communities deal with in different ways. What becomes apparent to anyone who spends time in any human society (esoteric or otherwise) is that exclusion is often a painful process. Human beings are (mostly) highly socialised creatures so kicking someone out of a group isn’t usually an easy thing. But in these situations, remembering a few Buddhist insights can be helpful. Even if those people we exclude have done harm to our community, or indeed are likely to still cause trouble when removed from our immediate orbit, it is compassion which we should deploy when presented with these situations.

‘Compassion is the vice of kings…’, writes Crowley in his Book of the Law. One interpretation of this is that ‘kings’ (ie people engaged with the discovery and pursuit of their True Will, the heroes or vira of tantrism) can afford to have genuine compassion. When we take a decision, even a hard and difficult one, a king will do so in a way that is free from vindictive malice and is instead predicted on a desire to see all parties liberated (or illuminated or whatever).

Compassion is something that, possibly more than any other behaviour in my view, marks out the successful and engaged magician. Not some wishy-washy sympathy for others but a genuine lived concern for the well-being of those around us, even, and sometimes especially, for those difficult people. One of the top techniques I know for this is Tonglen practice. Cultivating compassion plugs us into bodhichitta, explained nicely in Sam Webster’s book HERE, empowering our magick in part by making us viscerally cognisant of the Hermetic view that all things are, in essence, one. A lack of compassionate capacity, and the subsequent sense of the world as full of ‘the (evil) Other’, as well as that hoary old chestnut ‘lust of result’ goes a long way to explaining why angry and malicious people are rubbish at magick, spending their time flinging curses at the world that simply don’t work.

The esoteric traditions of the Himalayas are pretty hardcore when it comes to expressing compassion (showing us that being compassionate certainly doesn’t look like being an interpersonal doormat!). There are all kinds of fearsome forms of the Buddha that are about destroying the obstacles which stand between us and Enlightenment, and acting swiftly to liberate us from suffering. This liberation can be a hard and painful process. If we are ill we may need the poison drained from us and that’s best done fast, fully and with care. The insight of Buddhism (the drive towards compassion), is balanced what one might describe as a Tantric view; that we should aim to accept the world as it is, recognising the divine in all things, without falling into aversion. The poison may need to come out but both it, and the pain that attends its removal, it is also part of the sacred totality.

The blending of these elements is especially important in group contexts. We aim to interact with each other in a compassionate way, and also we realise that the world is as it is, and even in those things we find difficult we should aim to find the sacred, and through those things opportunities for Illumination. These two pillars of practice mean that as we enter challenging situations our compassion is fed by our recognition of the sacred moment of the Now just as it is (warts and all).

Smile, and remember Buddha loves you!

This recognition, of presence of the sacred in every moment, allows compassion to arise even for those people who we find difficult. It allows us to act (albeit sometimes to painfully prick the poison boil) without feelings of hatred or the need to take refuge in a (suffering-tastic) de-humanising attitude. Our orientation to events changes, so while we may still feel that something is a bad situation we don’t so much rise above it but engage with it in a way that betokens a caring motivation, a stance that nourishes rather than depletes our psychic reserves. This allows groups to flourish and develop a culture of mutual respect and empowerment (both internally and in their relations with others). It also helps them successfully adapt to inclusion and exclusions, to develop what has been called collective wisdom, which in magic-speak is the empowerment the communities egregore.

In the face of the slings and arrows of fortune, and the vicissitudes of human nature, working magick in communities can be a huge challenge (as well as being, for folks like me, greatly rewarding). So let us have compassion for ourselves too, and practice the wry grin of the bodhisattva. After all nobody said The Great Work, or indeed our refuge in the Sangha, was going to be easy!

The late, great pagan author Isaac Bonewitz once mused that he thought that Druids would be the chaplains on the U.S. Enterprise. This always appealed to my inner geek as I visualised a heady mash-up of ancient priests and warp-drive technology; the myths of the ancestors forced to throw new shapes as their archetypal force meets new realities.

As Pagans, Gnostics and other magical types we have some interesting conundrums to engage with as we seek to locate sources of authority and inspiration. On one hand many of us struggle with mythic sources being given some sort of scriptural authority (the Edda, Parzival, the first Star Wars trilogy), and yet many of us want to anchor our spirituality in something more substantial than new age whim or consumerism.

In search of space…

The Romanticism that seems to be key to our current perception of the past arguably runs throughout the majority of contemporary religious traditions. Everything from “the early church did it like this….” to the imagined sabbatic activities of the Witch cult rely to some extent on the projections and agendas of those engaging with the material. Personally I don’t feel that this is a bad thing, merely something that needs to be acknowledged. As a good Jungian and Process theologian I thrive on the idea that religious expression is an emergent manifestation of humanity’s engagement with nature and consciousness – such engagement will inevitably contain our fears and foibles as well as our highest aspirations.

Most mythologies hold within them the unfolding dance of a culture’s evolution: chaos versus order, transcendent versus imminent, the corporate need versus the individual’s awakening. As we look back to the ancestors so as to understand how we have arrived at where we are now, we need to realise that this is a process in which the dynamics of conflict and resolution continue still. Some may wish to idealise the past as some static wholegrain utopia, but the types of conflict present within much mythology represent the dialectical process of evolution where new realities are forged and then in turn challenged themselves.

Myth is important because its reinterpretation represents a subtle re-imagining of how we in the present engage with shared dilemmas that are endlessly repeated. In blending the historian’s observation with the artist’s flare, myth provides us with a less linear gateway for discovering truth, what Joseph Campbell called “metaphors of spiritual potentiality”. In contrast to dogma or isolated philosophical ascent, the dream-like impressionism that myth often evokes allows us to access something deep and mysterious within ourselves. The fuzzy edges of mythic thinking allow us to burst the bubble of perfectionism and rigid certainty as we revel in their multiple perspectives and imprecision.

Whatever aeonic schema or eschatological end-game we choose to buy into, the unfolding evolution of a mythic narrative often reflects the subtle shifts and changing needs of a culture. Whether we are sitting ring-side watching Set and Osiris slug it out or viewing the smoke rise from an ever repeating Ragnarok, the interface between these deep myths and our daily experience inevitably forces our gods to remanifest.

It is of course critical that we engage thoroughly with the best source material available so that the “heart-wood” of our spirituality allows us to be both strong and flexible, but equally we must be wary of concretizing our perception of lore in some sort of pagan fundamentalism. The sustainability of these subtle mutations will probably be best served by adopting a “Slow” model of development. We will need to be awake to our contexts and also the sense of “fit” as we explore new ways of working with mythic realities. We will need a relationship with the spirits of this material so as to ensure a true depth of evolution rather than a short sighted wish-fulfillment.

In pondering the future of myth and how our deep stories will change in the future, it is my view that we as Gnostics and magicians with be at the experimental front-edge of this process. Those myths with a fuller history may rightly be slower to evolve; the degree of consciousness directed toward them giving them a greater archetypal density. Other stories however may be more flexible!

In The Book of Baphomet, Nikki and Julian put forward the idea that part of Baphomet’s suitability as a god of our age is primarily due to hir being a glyph or image in search of a mythology. This is part of hir appeal as a deity for those of us who choose to work with hir-we sort through the scattered fragments of back-story trying to make sense of our experience viewed through the lenses of Levi’s infamous depiction and our own ritual experimentation. This sense of mythic fluidity and shape-shifting is arguably why ze proves to be such a vital patron for those of us undertaking magickal exploration. The chaotes are not alone in this endeavour, other brave imaginings are also at work within occulture; be it the re-birth of Lucifer via the twisting paths of traditional witchcrafts, or the re-visioned role of Beelzebub as awakened cosmonaut seeking out bold, new transmissions. While such experiments may be at risk of faddishness, these more recent embodiments of the collective unconscious are often strange attractors for the aspirations of culture.

For the druid on the Enterprise, Cernunnos may be the Lord of the inter-dimensional space travel and their Ogham may also include extra-terrestrial flora. Our gods are alive and in living they change – how could it be otherwise?!