The Blog of Baphomet

I recently attended a meeting of the Council of All Beings, a Deep Ecology practice which aims to embody the emotional awareness of our current environmental situation. A dozen of us took part, and spent the afternoon making masks and tuning in to the particular organisms which had chosen to appear through us, before meeting deep in the woods at the twilight hour to talk to some humans:-

I am a tree. An Acacia tree, of the African savannah. I speak for all my kind, and for trees in general.

acacia

I stand and life comes to me. Big cats rest in my branches, birds perch, dropping food for other plants and creatures who nestle beneath and around me. Giraffes eat leaves from between my long thorns, with tongues specially long and twisty to reach between them. Fierce ants help protect me; they live in specially adapted thorns, which swell to accommodate them, making their houses in my defences.

Sun falls, so hot. Some of my family are chopped up to make fires, by humans; why the need to create more heat when all is so hot already? I do not understand this.

Some acacias provide food for humans. Our seeds in particular are highly nutritious. Our bodies give medicines, perfumes, gums, our bark is rich in tannins; we make timber for furniture, tools, musical instruments. So much matter, so many wondrous ways to transform!

We give so much to human people, as well as to the other peoples of this vast landscape, and they bring so much to us.

This relationship, this interweaving, is the heart of our existence. We make a flat plain extend into another dimension, give height and shade. I love to grow into shapes which flow around the broken parts of me, when an animal knocks or claws a small part away. This is my art. To grow in response to my history, my life story. This twist in my branch, is a lion jumping after a leopard’s catch 23 years ago. The asymmetric shape of my crown is an elephant visit, six years past. The circular bulge in my trunk is from a snapped branch in my youth, when weaver bird nests were so heavy it broke. These shapes are my memories. My joy is to adapt, to grow strong around these times. My memories only exist as these physical remains. I have no other way of recalling past events. I have no imagined future. Only Now, an eternal moment, sensing shifting light and shade, of wind moving me, of water filling me, of roots pulling in minerals. Carbon enters through my leaves, and I make wood from thin air.

So many of my ideas I cannot put into words. You must remember, words are not present for any other creatures. Yet, we think and reason with chemicals just like you, who are our relations; our sense of total presence in the here & now can be shared by you if used wisely.

I never move from this spot I took root in. I touch the trees near me, through under the ground networks, and by catching airborne messages.

Our way of living has worked since before the continents separated. Acacia trees have co-evolved with many other organisms, each shaping the other, flowing behaviours, functionality, and materials between us. Some say we may have shaped your people, giving you words and ideas with our medicines; I do not know. I am just a tree, growing.

My gift to you, humans, is an example of how to flourish in a potentially harsh world.

The above text was written after I went to a weekend moot of chaos magicians, where amongst other things a Council of All Beings was held. Thanks to all those present, especially the facilitators of this powerful ritual.

A_Gnostics_Progress_Cover_for_Kindle

The word ‘gnosis’ was adopted by early explorers of what became known as ‘chaos magic’; essentially as a synonym for ‘altered (or ‘extraordinary’) states of consciousness’. Gnosis is imagined as the engine of magic; a radical awareness where the relationships between self and other are destabilised and a visceral, direct and unmediated knowledge can be encountered. Within A Gnostic’s Progress Steve Dee provides a reflection of this understanding and asks instead what insights chaos magic can bring to the tradition of Gnosticism?

The usual Gnostic universe consists of a top-down, hierarchically framed series of relationships between principles such as the Pleroma (the spiritual universe as the abode of God and of the totality of the divine powers and emanations), the Demiurge (the creator of the world, sometimes imaged as a power antithetical to the purely divine), and Sophia (the spirit of wisdom and allegedly the reason we’re trapped in material reality). Such models come with plenty of value judgements about good and evil, spiritual versus material but how, asks Steve Dee, can we make sense of the relationships between these concepts if we use in its place the relativist and questioning approach of contemporary chaos magic?

Steve

As a professional therapist Steve Dee leads the reader into the territory of Father Gods, Divine Feminines, Archons, Aeons and all the rest and, rather than repeating patriarchal conclusions, instead approaches these divine players as members of a family. How, asks Steve, can we re-imagine these relationships in a way that acknowledges the differing perspectives and insights of these forces?

Looking into the relationships between the actors in the gnostic universe isn’t just a cerebral practice and Gnosticism ritual doesn’t need to look like a pseudo-High Church ceremonialism. Rather our author provides a range of practical methods for gnostic/chaos magic unapologetically postmodern exploration including stripped back ritual technology, contemplative and meditational methods, along with tales of gnostic practice from other practitioners (the book features an interview with and art work from Jung scholar and Temple of Set initiate Lloyd Keane).

Written from the perspective of contemporary magical practice and informed by depth psychology and artistic process, this is gnosticism, but not as you’ve ever seen it before…

A Gnostic’s Progress can be found on Amazon. British sales here, US here; other countries please search on the appropriate Amazon site for your location. A Kindle edition is also available, with some illustrations in colour.

Icon of Sophia

Path #2

From the Foreword:

Steve, on the other hand, is demonstrably eager to do something with Gnosticism. Anyone who feels the same way will find plenty of examples of devotional and magical approaches to the legacy of the Gnostics here.

These essays may be delivered in bite-sized chunks but these are nourishing savouries not quick-fix sugar bombs. He is very aware of being a modern or postmodern spiritual explorer: “We make no claims to lineage or secrets shared on Grandma’s knee, rather this is a Witchcraft born of a connection to a raw coastline, the beating of drums and a desire to awaken.”

So enter a world filled with speedo-clad yogis and surfer fundamentalists, in which the ancient Nag Hammadi text Thunder Perfect Mind is declaimed to a backdrop of trance drumming. Steve’s writings do not merely reflect a lowest common denominator of the above influences, a Venn diagram intersection of three or four contemporary spiritual trends. His tastes are more eclectic than that, perhaps, but more importantly I sense that he is always bringing his experience to bear and is always trying things out. As the reader will discover, Steve even encourages us to try things out too.

Andrew Phillip Smith

Editor of The Gnostic: A Journal of Gnosticism, Western Esotericism and Spirituality.