One of the books that I keep coming back to over the years of exploration is Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous. Now anyone who has had a go at engaging with this book’s densely typed 400 pages knows that it is hardly easy reading. Not only do we have Ouspensky’s own vivid struggle to develop a relationship with his teacher/ anti-hero G.I. Gurdjieff, but we also have to wrestle with the detailed explanation/obscuration of their rather “out there” Gnostic cosmology.

Part of the reason that I keep returning both to this challenging tome and the “4^th Way” teachings that it describes, is the way in which they seek to grapple with the nature of what awakening might mean and also how we do this collectively. I have already written on this blog about my take on the 4^th way work’s depiction of how the “Sly Man” seeks to actualize body, mind and emotions HERE and thought it would be helpful to reflect on Gurdjieff’s perspective on the importance of collective endeavour.

As in most things Gurdjieff is refreshingly unapologetic in insisting on the importance of needing to have a “school” or group in order to make real progress in esoteric work:

“The point is that a “group” is the beginning of everything. One man can do nothing, can attain nothing. A group with a real leader can do more. A group of people can do what one man can never do.” Pg. 30

For Gurdjieff the School provided an essential reflective environment in which the spiritual progress of an individual could be plotted against a more impersonal/transpersonal measure. Whatever the benefits of close personal friendship and its value in enriching our lives, the concept of the school or Order ideally provides a context where the “work” of initiatory endeavour can be framed by principles and boundaries that hope to minimize the unpredictability of whimsy and clashes of ego.

For many this will sound like a pipedream and such idealisation raises real concerns about the potential misuses of hierarchy and authority. In recent decades many magical practitioners have wanted to challenge the received wisdom concerning the necessity and desirability of needing such pyramidal structures. Some argue that they play into our consumerist tendency to quantify advancement in terms of elaborate titles and the acquisition of magical bling. In trying to evolve different approaches, people have began to seek looser, more tribal arrangements that aim to encourage growth and  fraternity while avoiding the “stuckness” that can plague minority orthodoxies and magical hegemonies.

Recent discussions with friends regarding these dilemmas have considered the potential contrast between the qabalistically informed hierarchy of “Freemasonic” structures and the more “flattened” polyarchical dynamics of Rosicrucian fraternities. As someone who currently belongs to both a formal magical order and a number of more informal working collectives, I felt that I’d share some of what I consider to be the potential benefits and pitfalls of both models.

Personally speaking, being part of a more formal magical Order has provided me with an excellent opportunity to learn. While undertaking any deep spiritual work will inevitably lead to the forming of close relationships with others, one of the strengths of an order is that they usually have a solid corpus of techniques and perspectives to engage with. Even if I might not agree with some of what’s being proposed, the content and structure of such systems provide me with something solid to bash up against and thus refine my own initiatory understanding. The pursuit of grades and curricula may become yet another form of “spiritual materialism”, but at best they can fulfil our need for structure and a way of mapping our development especially in the early to intermediate stages of training.

Working with others can be tricky. In traditions that involve hermetic, magical or tantric perspectives there is a certain inevitability that we will need to challenge existing values and certainties. While they will never be perfect in their execution, many Orders out of necessity, have had to spend time reflecting on how they provide boundaries and guidance to ensure that ethical standards are understood and respected. Such learning often takes decades of shared work to develop maturity. Groups will always make mistakes in the doing of the great work, but what feels critical is that they have mechanisms for feedback and reflection so that the inevitable mistakes are learnt from.

The desire to evolve more informal groupings of practitioners working together is hardly a new impulse. Such sodalities are often the beginnings of many formal orders, and are also the primary modus operandi for many covens and hearths. These smaller “circles” of practitioners often rely on a fair degree of pre-existing magical competence and a shared focus on working with a specific theme or group of deities. My own experience is that they can provide a great arena for magical experimentation, but that they inevitably have to manage the issues of who sets the agenda and the necessary grounds for inclusion/exclusion. It’s probable that most groups evolve a basic leadership and initiatory structure in response to emergent dynamics within the life of such groups. Often issues of power and direction need to be brought “above ground” in order to reduce their disruptive potential should they remain at an unconscious or shadow level. We may wish to work hard in minimising the negative aspects of hierarchy, but equally most of us don’t enjoy sailing in a rudderless ship!

Each of us has different learning styles and political sensitivities that will shape the type of magical environment that will be most conducive to our development. We may stick with one style of group process or we may feel the need for necessary diversification or counter-balance. For some, the realities of geographical distance may mean that relationships are primarily reliant on cyber-interactions as a means of deepening engagement. What feels critical to me is that we retain the insight that the Great Work is an act of both doing and connection that can only be understood in attempting its undertaking and in receiving support and feedback from others. As necessary as our theologies and ideologies might be, their true value only becomes clear when we pressure test them in the forge of praxis and weigh them according to the extent to which they expand our humanity.

SD

Orange begins the data-download of the light half of the year. The weather swings wildly from brilliant sun, through glowering stratus to sparkling showers of rain, a cut-up climate. Eggs appear, laid by both Easter Bunnies and my hens. Orange magick is transmitted by the sephira of Hod, communicated by Thrice Great Hermes.

Our first work is the ‘Voodoo Coffee Morning’ a rite of celebration. We praise caffeine, that loquacious molecular messenger, decode its vever (the molecular diagram of C₈H₁₀N₄O₂) and sip strong black coffee. Fortified by this stimulating medicine, our next rite is presented by TP808 – the full ritual text of which is given here. Chaos magick, as a style of occultism, is sometimes characterised as being too often about silly rituals which lack depth. However the ritual below, although it uses non-standard esoteric iconography, is far from a superficial, unconsidered working. As well as the ritual itself TP808 describes the symbolic and metaphyiscal structures that this rite articulates:

Orange Magick – The Nina Murmuration. 13-04-13

“Music is freedom” – Nina Simone
“We always thought of music as psychic resistance.” Bobby Gillespie.

4 Nina Simone albums in the four quarters.

“This is a good time to introduce you to the heart beat of our organization, the pulse of everything that we do: it centers around the drums and of course if you think about that really seriously you know that your entire life is centered around your heart beat, and that’s rhythm is it not?

Recite Westwind lyrics.

STATEMENT OF INTENT – the aim of this ritual is to time travel using soundwaves. Working with the Deleuzian notion of the “fold”:

“The fold is the general topology of thought… ‘inside’ space is topologically in contact with the ‘outside’ space… and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present.” Deleuze,  – “Foucault. University of Minnesota Press, 2000 p. 118-19

The ritual space is;

“groundless depth from which irrupts something that creates its own space and time It is not the line that is between two points, but the point that is at the intersection of several lines.”

Deleuze, Gilles. Pourparlers Paris: Minuit, 1990 p. 219 – Quotes taken from “GILLES DELEUZE  the architecture of space and the fold” by Matthew Krissel at http://digitalprocess.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gillesdeleuze_fold.pdf

The ritual also considers Dogen’s concept of existence-time (Uji):

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.  See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time:

“Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.  The way-seeking mind arises in this moment.  A way-seeking moment arises in this mind.  It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.

Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself.  This is the understanding that the self is time.”

See Shobogenzo Chapter 11 discussed by Norman Fischer at http://sweepingzen.com/dogens-time-being-uji-1/ or Buddhist Pagan blog: http://buddhistpaganmagick.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/everything-is-ending-but-not-yet/

Finally, the ritual also draws upon the concept of quantum foam:

“a qualitative description of subatomic space time turbulence at extremely small distances …At such small scales of time and space, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles and then annihilate without violating physical conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, energy curves space time. This suggests that—at sufficiently small scales—the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth space time seen at larger scales, giving space time a “foamy” character.” WIKI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam see also MAGIC Telescopes – (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescopes – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGIC_%28telescope%29

PATHWAY – The ritual uses energy fluctuations generated by drumming and archival recordings of Nina Simone to fold in past and future to this moment now. As a group we drum along with the two pieces of music, the first using our bodies as instruments and the second using noise making machines (drums/rattles.) We become a machinic assemblage; the murmuration is the sound of sound being simultaneous and multiple in the same moment.

“The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

Nina Simone – Nina (From “It Is Finished” 1974)

Body percussion.

#ends

(Improv – glosolalia Nina-nina-nina, murmuration, murmur, murmur murmuration, communication in this place and space Nina-nina-nina  Unify us, don’t divide us, etc.)

We also draw upon Starhawk’s description of immanence as a walk on a beach (in Dreaming the Dark Chapter 3 – “Thought-Forms; Magic as Language p-15-16 to “even God…”) accompanied by hammered African thumb piano to induce trance.  Then expand upon this with a visualization of the same beach at night time, the experience of merging with an orange gelatinous sphere and the visual stimulus of a fire giving off orange embers spiraling into the night sky;

“And then kerjillions of stars start to shine
And Icy comets go whizzing by
And everything’s shaking with a strange delight
And this is it: the enormous night” ~ Laurie Anderson – My Eyes- from Strange Angels – 1989)

Beach visualization orange sphere, bonfire, covered in orange membrane. Sea, stars, warmth.

Nina Simone – Westwind (From ‘Black Gold’ 1970 written by Miriam Makeba)

Westwind blow ye gentle
Over the shores of yesterday
My sun is brown and over
Here within my heart they lay they lay

Westwind with your wisdom
Gather all the young for me
Black cloud hanging over
Nest your bosom strong and free

Got each gallon water is plane
Got each gallon water is plane
Cos I am the soil from which they came
I am the soil from which they came

So Westwind with your splendor
Take my people by the hand
Spread your glory sunshine off
And unify my promised land

The pieces of music are based on African traditional drum patterns and are filtered through Nina Simone’s political commitment to civil rights, anti-racism, Black power and the struggle for justice for people of colour and other oppressed groups. An apposite theme on this day when people are processing the death of Margaret Thatcher.  As a group we bring Pagan drum patterns to the mix; we are forced to find a space in the music that accommodates our rhythms and also to listen to each other so that we create a horizontal (with each other) and vertical (with the music) matrix of sound that speaks to a)each other now and b) the past simultaneously in a sound driftwork.

LINK TO SYMBOLIC CARRIER –  eating the orange segment to create a virtual and psychick circuit –  prior to the start of drumming, the circle is established by the  group taking a segment each and placing it into someone else’s mouth. We bite into the fruit at the same time synchronising time, place, space and taste buds. The introduction to the ritual echoes the intro speech given by Nina Simone in Windward – echoic time shift. This is only revealed to other participants once they hear the music. Noise making machines also symbolically link all elements of the ritual.

The tantric outer/inner/secret structure of the ritual –

Outer – time travel as explained above

Inner – Strange Angel themes of Robert Mapplethorpe/AIDS/bereavement/Right Wing Censorship of Art/Walter Benjamin’s critique of modernity- “History is an angel, being blown backwards into the future. History is a pile of debris and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken but there is a storm blowing from Paradise and the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future, and this storm is called progress…”)

Secret – another (unstated) purpose of this ritual is for me to connect with my drum and find out what its relationship to my magick is…

INTENSE GNOSIS – trance brought about through drumming, listening and visualisation.

FIRE – out into the kerjillions of stars spiralling to infinity, devisualisation moving out of liminal space back to the here-now. Back to the beach – the return of the orange membrane to the ground – to be called upon again when needed.  Eating a Jaffa cake, drinking orange Tango

FORGET

The Alan Partridge Banishing

AHA!
Rooarrrrrrr!!

An orange meditation on non-attachment and love comes next. For this each participant takes an orange and mindfully appreciates this fruit (an unscripted similarity with the previous ceremony creating a recursive feedback loop in the ritual arc). The fruit reminds us of the saffron coloured robes of Buddhist monks or the orange garb of the Shivite sadhu, peeling we consider non-attachment. We see that we are all flow and that any ‘being’ is temporary, illusionary. But in understanding non-attachment we do not fall into a solipsistic or disconnected state. Instead with our attachments gone we can peel back apparent reality and enjoy the fruit of experience. More than this we can know love, the bliss of the world and the joy of communion. This comes as we each take a segment and place it on our mouths, biting down together we share the common experience of orange magic, of the bounty and love of the world, of sweetness and nourishment.

Brother Pelagius provides another ritual:

Three Mages Alchemy Rite.

This working was connected to Orange magick via my own relationship with Mercury as the patron of both communication and alchemy. The purpose of the working was to visualise a situation that we wished to transform in our lives and to use the potency of our anxiety/fears about the situation to fuel willed change.

The schema used was inspired by the work of Michael Kelly found in his books “Apophis” and “Dragonscales” in which we find the figures of the Black, White and Red mages. For me these correspond to the alchemical stages of nigredo, blanco and reubedo, and our rite sought to use these three states to integrate our unconscious, super-conscious and conscious minds.

After imbibing the dark sacrament of Guinness, we imagined our current situation at night, coated with the fluid tar of our fears. These nightside emissions were not to be rejected, but used to fuel our desires.

Next we opened our eyes to the bright flame of the superconscious. The White Mage greets us and shows us our idealised goal and the changes in ourselves that are necessary in bringing forth such transformations. We cannot dwell here long, for if our work is to become more than a pipedream, it must be born of blood.

So we return to the realm of Midgard and the Red Mage. The flame is now transformed through potent alchemical filters so that the world is seen through a blood soaked hue (okay so we’re now looking at the candle through bits of red cellophane). The idealised state needs to be earthed in reality as we channel the dark energy of our fears so they can be put to more skilful ends.

Many rituals are for sharing. The non-attachment and love ritual with the oranges I was able to share at another two meetings. The first of these was at the far end of Cornwall with friends from a South American shamanic path. The third time was at the request of a Priestess (who had been present at the second performance) to share the technique in a circle cast on the north Cornish coast. In that third circle stood a Native American Woman who, later that night, shared song and skill (and delightfully strident opinion) with the company. We traded chants, some from the British Isles, some from the States. I offered a song which the Grandmother medicine had taught me, sung to the insistent rhythm of the Grandfather medicine’s water drum.

That simple rite, as easy as you like, peeling an orange (and I know it’s been done before, there is, as they say, nothing is new under the sun) has popped up in three circles and crossed the paths of native British, South American and North American cultures. Techniques are shared, the world is enchanted, communication magick unites us.

So (as the caffeine kicks in) what next? Well that orange magick vibe reminds me of cut-ups and the excellent experiments of Thee Temple of Psychick Youth and their descendants. Reading THIS I’m inspired to revisit some of those methods. Now where did I put my old dream machine..?

JV, TP808, SD and members of The Western Watchtower