julian vayne | The Blog of Baphomet

The Book of Baphomet ~ available from Mandrake of Oxford. Click here!

Something is pressing to come in, something big. That something appears beneath our history, shuddering, a great figure concealed under the fabric of reality. As it wakes, its motions send shockwaves across space-time. This thing is emerging, and human consciousness awakens to it, through it. We can see it lurking if we stride back through time, catch glimpses of its form and meaning. Some imagine it as a glittering object at the end of history. Some fear it as the incursion of abominable alien gods from the spaces between the stars. We welcome it, this force, this feeling, this enticingly ever-unveiling mystery.

Our name for this mystery is Baphomet.

Baphomet is a glyph, a word, a signal for something much larger. This glyph first appears with the persecution of The Order of the Knights Templar. It peers out at us, more than half a millennium later, horned and devilish from 19^th century French occultism. It appears again within The Order of the Eastern Templars or OTO. More recently this name inflamed the minds of the founders of the Magical Pact of the Illuminates of Thanateros or IOT. Now it has broken through, beyond the precincts of any one temple. This book, in part, traces the gradual emergence of this new deity. Other voices in this volume weave further strands of this entity’s rich tapestry, the tracery revealing this Spirit within the commonplace. They describe the evolution of life on our planet and the memes that swarm around the curious relationship between those counterpoints our culture has created; Humanity and Nature. It is this interwoven relationship of all that lives which we know as Baphomet.

NW & JV

PS – Don’t forget that occult geeks have a chance to win a copy HERE

What is magick? This is the central koan of occultism. There are numerous defintions and I’m sure you, gentle reader, are aware of a goodly number of them. Most of these centre around the creative power of magick – the magician as someone who acts in the world, imposing their Will on reality or extending their sphere of possible action. But depending on one’s esoteric school, and personal emphasis it’s also possible to see magic as a destructive process, or rather a revelatory one. Magick can be seen as a way to strip our awareness back, away from complexity and to regain what Taoists might call the ‘original simplicity’.

Such an approach doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re fallen, that humans are intrinsically wrong or that nasty grown-up society has robbed us of our inherently magical nature. Rather it’s about a dialogue between the experience of living and the need to return to basics – to the lived in existence of the now. For example, as we get older we grow in experience and one result of this process is that we become more aware of what could go wrong with our lives. We can also reflect on those regrets and mistakes we have made, and the impossibility of putting them right. Unlike the immortal feelings of the adolescent, the older individual carries the battle scars of living, a greater awareness of the fragility of life, health, family, and of course a more immediate appreciation of their own aging and inevitable death. For this process to be about gaining widsom rather than becoming paralysed by anxiety we need to strip back these accretions and discover the developing self (whether we imagine that as an unfolding narrative or a monadic point source) within us.

Humour is one way to make this change, being able to laugh at the things we might otherwise cling on to. Another is by relaxing into the passage of time – pulling back from our little ‘I’ focused realiy and seeing the bigger picture of death and rebirth, where our individuality is an essential but tiny element in a much grander process. Then there is the option of counting our blessings, of reflecting and looking back on how many amazing things have happened to, and through us. Then there are all those lovely processes which bring us head-to-head with the now; meditation, certain types of ritual work, powerful entheogenic experiences, accidentially walking into lamp posts – that kind of thing. All these acts help strip away the little knots of fear and bring us into direct communion with the world as it is. Persistance with these methods allows us to retain our wisdom but to step back from the grasping attachment of our lifetimes.

As Steve says in ‘Dark Matter’:

Dark Matter flows through gnostic machinery
Metaphysical truths
Now patent absurdities.
Strip it back
Strip it right back,
and Journey into Space
Remembering your true Self,
Seeing your original face