Or, when your Satanism just isn’t dark enough

It’s dawn and I stumble downstairs. A little gentle stretching to wake up, tea and toast. Before I get on the cute little train which runs from North Devon to Exeter, I decide to check Facebook. I’ll start by saying that I really like Facebook. It provides an excellent method of communicating. Much less direct than an email, much more targeted than a blog, all those lovely links. A channel programmed by my friends. Now my Facebook list is fairly extensive and, since I publish and speak publicly, I’ve got a fair few people on my ‘friends’ list that I don’t know personally. Some of these are folk that I suspect would identify as Satanists (some tell me so in their info details). So, as dawn comes and I dip into my Facebook feed, I get to see lots of death metal, Satanic injunctions featuring the emoticon \m/ ,and posts with an eldritch or antinomian flavour. These are predominantly from people on the western side of the Atlantic.

This morning I was also presented with a delightful Shiva spiritual which I elected to listen to. This was a perfect morning tune, uplifting, powerful, comforting and, ironically, posted to me by one of the biggest metal fans I know.

Listening to this tune as I scroll through the dark Satanic links I’m reminded of a Facebook interaction a few weeks ago with a female Satanist from North America.

She wrote:

“No matter where you are in the world- India, Canada, United States, Iran, Europe, Africa, etc… Satan can hear you. No matter what language you speak… Satan can understand you. Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to have certain qualifications in order to approach him or worship him… just be yourself. Satan knows who you are already…”

So I commented:

“Hey that’s great! Satan sounds just like Jesus :)”

I have to say that my response may not be word for word accurate since, when I looked back, my comment had been disabled along with my ability to comment on any future posts. Alas my jocular remark had upset my Satanic chum.

Satanic wallpaper

Beyond Good and Evil

I’ve met lots of people over the years who are Satanists; from the theistic sort (rather like the lady above who, as far as I can tell, has simply replaced a Big Beard In the Sky with a Dark Lord Under The Earth), to those who see Satan as an exemplar of the process of individual realisation (like those who have accepted the doctrine of Michael Aquino and his interpretation of the Sethian mythos promulgated by groups like the Temple of Set). Now it’s probably also true that plenty of people go through a Satanic ‘phase’, traditionally around their teenage years when one is ‘supposed’ to rebel. I certainly did things like burning a copy of the Bible given to me by my Uncle (who ironically I now realise as one of the few people in my family with whom I share a common interest in matters spiritual) and painting my bedroom black. I’d already got into all that Satanic culture; inverted pentagram with goats head, wearing black, listening to music which my parents couldn’t understand etc etc. That’s all good (or bad) in it’s own way and I’d certainly never try to dissuade someone from engaging with the shadow side of spirituality. But what I think can happen is that some people become so enamoured with the superficial symbolism of Satanism that it actually gets in the way of their gaining a wider spiritual (and indeed in some some sense more deeply Satanic) world-view. And this isn’t just about leaving Satan behind, no indeed, it’s, “less of the ‘get thee behind me’, and more of the ‘come in my old mate and have a cup of tea’”. It’s about breaking through the real underlying conventions; the childish observation that the world is composed of goodies and baddies, and the subsequent juvenile rebellion about how cool it would be to be on the side of the baddies.

One of my best friends studied for years at theological college and is now a chaos magician. He explains that part of his ‘conversion’ (or ‘loss of faith’ depending on where you stand) was to realise that he loved Jesus and he loved Satan too. Of course this is a reasonable, if theologically and historically dangerous, view. There are have been, and indeed are, interpretations of the monotheist creeds where Satan is given back his role as the agent provocateur of God. He’s the bit of God that tests Jesus in the wilderness rather than some (again often theologically tricky) anti-God. Although his interpretation of Satan is one that finds favour in some Gnostic Christian, Sufi and Yezidi spiritualities it’s always been a minority sport. Although not very well thought out (eg ‘if God is all powerful, and God is love, how come shitty things happen to good people?’) it’s easier in the short term to have a baddie to point the finger at. Satan is the cause of our ills not God, the father of lies, the tempter etc. This kind of white vs black hat theology might make sense if you’re five years old but, once you’ve grown and have a slightly more nuanced view of the world, it’s time to look for other richer interpretations of the world.

I was gently, and I felt humorously, making this criticism on my friend’s Facebook post. The simplistic swapping out of Satan for Jehovah gets us precisely nowhere in terms of either the ‘Satanic’ project of finding our own antinomian way in the world, or radically departing from the well-worn grove of didactic monotheism. If we’re after the ‘black flame’ of Xepher-ication and Luciferian liberation then we need to have a much more radical project.

But individuals who are caught up in the uncritical glamour of Satanism (ie don’t find my jokes funny) fall into a cultural loop which, especially in the internet age, is self-perpetuating.

Black metal on your ipod, demonic sigils on your desktop wallpaper, some really spooky looking volumes, bound in toad skin, on your bookshelf (purchased for the current crop of publishers providing those perfect-bound-grimoire-as fashion-accessory items). Then there are the clothes, the piercings, the tattoos, the list goes on. A whole Satanic lifestyle can be obtained right there, off the shelf (which, one might argue, is pretty Satanic in some senses…). Sprinkle it with something like Voudou (that being the dark-side spiritual path du jour), and serve with politically libertarianism. Add an insistent but actually fairly vaguely defined elitism, and season with apocalyptic observations about the world. Before you can say ‘Anton LaVey’ you’ve got a McSatan belief system ready to go.

And all this is quite fine. These things can be part of a balanced spiritual fare and personal program of magickal exploration., and I think the same rules apply as those for one’s culinary diet. A diversity of nutriments are needed, quality generally trumps bland quantity, and don’t get too specialised (remember the Panda).

But what happens if you find yourself locked in the (pseudo) Satanic media spiral? Take for example the potential fear of glitter and kittens…

There you are, the über dark metal Satanist. You know that everyone except you and your mates are without the Dark Flame of Our Lord Satan. You curse the slaves and celebrate your black majesty with, er, listening to Slipknot VERY LOUDLY. But lo, what is this? Here come some kittens, covered in glitter, rolling and leaping, wide-eyed and full of love! See them playing with balls of wool. Now behold! There are rainbows and spring flowers! The smiling faces of new-born babies! Then snuggling up with hot chocolate, a lover to cuddle you under the patchwork blanket that your grannie made for you when you were just seven….aaaghh! The horror! Back you (evil?) glitter and kittens! Back with your gentle, funny lol cat ways! Quick put something really dark on, let’s listen to Tool! Back, back I say! No mummy! I DO NOT WANT a cuddle! \m/ 😛

Glitter and Kittens

Nightside of Eden

Last year I visited a friend’s land out in the Devon countryside. At the bottom of a slope, planted with a huge variety of trees both native and exotic, there was a pond. I stood beside the pond as the light began to fade and watched. Insects were pulling themselves airborne, fighting their way through the meniscus to fuck in the air. Skating across the surface tension predatory spiders made snatch and grab raids on beetles and tiny fleas, sucking their blood and leaving their hollow bodies scattered on the glistening water. Beneath the surface who knows what horrors were going on; things eating and fornicating and dying and being born into the agony of brief, bloody lives.

For me, as expressed by my friend & Brother, ‘to love Satan and Jesus’ means to be able to see both aspects of the pond. To rejoice in the blessing of water, the scent of the flowers, the panoply of colour and form, the delight of life. To watch the birds playing at the waters edge. To see the funny snails lazily rasping their way over leaves. To hear the song of the wind in the trees and to celebrate life. This is also true as well as the dark-side perception that the pond is a battle ground and scene of un-ending violence.

As a chaos magician I aim for the fluidity that allows me to apprehend both these (and more) models of reality. And, to return to my amusing Facebook interaction. The key to this flexibility is often humour. As Ramsey Dukes puts it, there is the good, the bad and the funny. By seeking humour (be it of the Black, White or Yellow Schools) we can destabilise what we hold to be true and instead get a new perspective on things. We can stop being locked into a blinkered world-view and step outside those well-worn scripts (whether that script be the love of Jesus or the worship of Lucifer) and into a broader and often more inclusive perception of the world. If the cultivation of ‘the black flame’ means anything it means this. And that emphatically includes not bowing down to the idea of a ‘black flame’.

So I really enjoy it when my Satanist mates send me the latest pro-gun, death metal, demonic-artwork posts on Facebook. I just hope they understand were I’m coming from when I respond with the awesome power of glitter and kittens.

JV

The zombie is one of the most pervasive images in modern culture at the dawn of the second decade of the 21st century. They are, quite literally everywhere. Shambling down the street, slack jawed and drooling. Their cry of ‘BRAINS! BRAINS!’ echoes from the walls of the urban space. Sometimes as part of a protest, sometimes a part of a surrealistic flash mob. Typically the virus (zombism is closely associated with contagion) is most virulent in the young. Spreading like a necrotising infection through teenagers and, remarkably, able to spread via electronic systems. Facebook seems to be a major vector for the infection, watch those status updates change to the moaned cry ‘BRAINS! BRAINS!’ See as the profile pictures of smiling teens as they are replaced with livid green skinned, sunken eyed horrors of defiled humanity.

Then there is the blood. Whether smeared on a lab-coat or spotting a wedding dress, zombies leak fluid. This is part of the clear evidence not only of living death but of the decay which they exemplify. Whereas the rest of us usually try to keep our body fluids locked away the zombie will, without any shame (hey, they’re dead after all!), gush and drip and besmirch everything in their vicinity. Spittle and nasal mucus are often in evidence, but it’s the blood that gets star billing.

University departments and even local authorities draw up slightly tongue-in-cheek plans for what to do in the event of zombie attack. Certain times of the year see more outbreaks than others. Summer in Britain brings various zombie parades and gatherings to many urban areas. But of course the infection is at its worst as the weather changes, autumn comes, and the season of Halloween begins.

Zombies over the Rainbow
One of the most fascinating stories about zombies is told by the Canadian anthropologist, ethnobotanist, author and photographer Wade Davis. Author of a number of excellent books his 1985 best seller ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’ recounts his explorations of the Haitian zombie phenomena. Davis suggests that zombies are created in part by the use of tetrodotoxin, the pharmacologically active agent found in the body of the puffer fish. Tetrodotoxin or TTX can produces sialorrhea (excessive production of saliva), sweating, headache, weakness, lethargy, incoordination, tremor, paralysis, cyanosis (skin turning blue), aphonia (inability to speak), seizures, dyspnea (shortness of breath), coughing, and dizziness. A dramatic drop in respiratory rate may occur, in some cases leading to coma and death. There is no known antidote.

Although tetrodotoxin is found in several aquatic animals is most famously present in puffer fish used to produce fugu, the potentially deadly Japanese delicacy. The toxin is actually produced by a
symbiotic bacteria which lives in these animals. Of course when fugu is prepared the skill of the chef is to remove those areas in which the level of TTX is dangerous but not to remove it all. It is the buzz, which very low levels of TTX induce, that makes this dangerous cuisine so appealing. In fact it’s debatable whether one should consider fugu as an exotic fried fish supper or a powerful
psychoactive drug.

Another potentially terrifying effect of TTX is that it does not cross the blood–brain barrier, leaving the victim fully conscious while paralysing the muscles. According to Wade Davis it is this effect that is used to make people appear to be dead. After being buried, immobilised but still fully conscious, the victim is dug up from their grave by the Haitian sorcerer. The psychological trauma of the event, perpetuated by putting the hapless victim on a madness-maintaining regular dose of datura, continues this living death. Occasionally zombies turn up again in villages, sometimes months or even years after they have been buried. Some people of course escape their pharmacological prison, but those who are glimpsed while still in the full thrall of their new master would certainly appear ‘undead’.

Why the outbreak of zombies now in the second decade of the 21^st century? Perhaps it is an acting out of our fear of epidemics, of diseases which these days can get on-board aircraft and be half way round the world before you can say ‘historically-overdue-mass-influenza epidemic’. Then there is the fear of the brainless mass of humanity. All those people you see but don’t know who crowd onto trains and buses and, it would seem, mindlessly pilot their automobiles around the city, day in, day out. Are they really sentient humans or Matrix-like illusions? Derridan zombies, like people, only not really people. As the population on earth breaches 7,000,000,000 these shambling hunks of meat seem to swarm everywhere.

Our cultural estrangement from the physical fact of death could be some of it. Most of us hardly get to see dead bodies these days, even the animal bodies for our food come surgically sliced and transmogrified into ‘nuggets’ and ‘mince’. Dead loved ones are spirited away in the night in thick impenetrable body bags and the next time we ‘see’ them it’s usually shut inside a box. As the celebrant pushes the big green button the opaque casket glides out of the room and those little curtains shut. No sign of bodies burning, no sound from the whirring cremulator, no metallic clanking as the metal of replacement hips is recovered from the still warm ash.

Rather than desiccated, disinfected ashes the zombies remind us of the visceral nature of death. All that discharge and goo, the moaning and the pain, not just of death itself but of the gradual debilitation that we imagine from ageing and illness. Zombies are sickness writ large. Finally we could consider the fact that those people who are now in the ‘teens and twenties are children of a generation many of whom may have encountered rave, and more generally modern drug culture. Perhaps in the minds of those zombified kids are half-remembered images of Mum battered out of her head on pills, arriving back from the club while they were sitting with the babysitter watching TV? Or could it have been that time you saw Dad, when he was the worse for a night on the tiles and a morning on the special K?

Zombies Attack

It was bonfire night and we’re meeting in a fabulous esoteric art gallery not far from the white and red springs in Glastonbury. Given our location it was inevitable that we’d have to perform a ritual that required climbing the Tor and so the Zombie Apocalypse was created. Once again the technique being used was that of embodying that which one wishes to change, and undergoing a ritualised transformation towards what one hopes to achieve. The methodology was intended to work at both a personal and collective level. Devised by Soror Res and myself this would be a ritual to encourage critical thinking within the New Age movement. And, speaking as magicians meeting in Glastonbury, this enchantment of critical thinking should apply equally to us as to what I might consider the laughable mystical woo-woo pedalled the some of the magic shops on Glastonbury’s High Street.

So the rubric for the ceremony was simple. We’d dress up as zombies and walk into the heart of the New Age, Glastonbury Tor which, as I’m sure you know, is considered by many people to be the heart charkra of Gaia. Searching in our crippled zombie fashion for ‘BRAINS!’, we would ascend the Tor and, at the top, destroy a copy of an influential contemporary new age book. Once this was completed we magickally find our brains and would return, down the Tor, having erudite and intellectually rigorous conversations. We’d transform the mindless new age zombie into an actively intelligent human.

The text that we planned to destroy was one that Soror Res had, manfully, read from cover to cover. It was one of those books that ranged across shamanism, psychedelic experience, UFO abductions and the like and, while it had many good points, had fallen in her view at the final hurdle. Rather than see the phenomena it documented as being perhaps many manifestations arising from a shared human physiology of altered states of consciousness, the author had been marshalling their evidence to provide the evidential glue to stick together an otherwise insubstantial theory. This theory was that millennia ago aliens had arrived on earth and engineered our DNA, leaving a method for getting in touch with them, outside space and time, encoded in our biology.

Now there are several problems with this theory. I’m sure that you, gentle reader, are quite aware of many of them without the need for me to disentangle the story, or cut things up with Occam’s razor on your behalf. But beyond the view that the theory simply doesn’t hold together is a broader point about the new age movement. We must be able to entertain ideas in our lives to ask ‘what if…?’ and to play with possibilities, even ones that may seem far-fetched. The history of human innovation demonstrates that, if we become blinkered into one way of thinking, we may miss out on many wonderful things. But, as they say, if you open your mind too much your brain will fall out. We need our critical abilities, our ability to dissect arguments and when we present theories we need to honestly engage with ideas like proof, truth, evidence and falsifiability. If, for instance, you want to ‘literally’ suggest that physical aliens came to earth thousands of years ago to hide their brand name in the genetic sequence of early humans, you better have some pretty good positive evidence (rather than circumstantial stuff which is open to a range of much more probable explanations). There is nothing wrong with this reading of events as metaphor. Certainly one might convincingly argue (as Terence McKenna does in Food of the Gods) that psychedelic experience accelerated the development of culture in the human species. But literal space ships coming through space, while logically possible, is more likely to be the result of a series of a priori assumptions than a sound assessment of the data. Erich von Daniken’s suggestion that the Nazca lines were landing markers for alien visitors, because of their apparent similarity modern landing strips for aircraft, comes to mind. Apart from anything else when did you last see a flying saucer than needed a runway?

This kind of literalism, in my view, demonstrates a lack of intellectual subtly and a failure to see beyond the surface of things. Sure when you take a hit of DMT you might meet aliens who seem utterly real and tell you they have been doing a mash-up edit of your DNA code since way before Lascaux. However just because something as impressive as a DMT elf tells you this doesn’t make it true. By all means explore the idea but please leave it open to question, reinterpretation and indeed abandonment. I’m reminded an account by Michael Harner of what happened after one his first ayahuasca visions:

“I was now eager to solicit a professional opinion from the most supernaturally knowledgeable of the Indians, a blind shaman who had made many excursions into the spirit world with the aid of the ayahuasca drink. lt seemed only proper that a blind man might be able to be my guide to the world of darkness. I went to his hut, taking my notebook with me, and described my visions to him segment by segment. At first I told him only the highlights; thus, when I came to the dragon-like creatures, I skipped their arrival from space and only said, “There were these giant black animals, something like great bats, longer than the length of this house, who said that they were the true masters of the world.” There is no word for dragon in Conibo, so “giant bat” was the closest I could come to describe what I had seen.

He stared up toward me with his sightless eyes, and said with a grin, “Oh, they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness.”

The moral of this story is that, of course, the spirits can and do lie!

The Hills are Undead with the sound of Zombies

Shambling through the bonfire night air there is a motley crocodile of zombies. Careering into lamp-posts, drooling, moaning again and again ‘BRAINS!’ We are led by a Brother who is wearing a high viability jacket of florescent yellow and bearing in large letters the word ‘Wizard’. He leads the procession and, with video camera in hand, is our guide, alibi (we’re doing a film for YouTube), and ritual recorder or scribe. He also clutches a copy of the book which is destined for destruction and this is the strange zombie-attractor that leads us up the hill.

We ascend, some faster than others. There is much falling over and dragging of limbs. The sacramental nature of the ritual also makes the climb a formidable challenge for some of our party.

After the steep initial ascent we arrive at the gradually inclining path, sloping gently up towards St.Michaels tower which crowns the summit of the Tor. There are sheep grazing on the grass slopes but our cries of ‘BRAINS!’ are only mildly disturbing to them. After all these are Glastonbury sheep and have probably seem a fair number of odd goings on in their time.

Arriving at the top zombies begin to bounce off the walls, getting stuck and flailing like failing automata in the doorways to the tower. As more of us arrive the flickering torches reveal a space full of what appear to be horribly injured, profoundly disabled people. Limbs twitch, mouths gape and eyes roll empty and vacant upwards.

The book is produced and crying ‘BRAINS! BRAINS! BRAINS!’ We fall upon it, ripping it and screwing up the pages. (These fragments are scrupulously collected for responsible disposal after the ritual.)

Soror Res picks up a ripped page and begins to read. It’s an observation on the analysis of the ayahuasca experience by a noted researcher in the field. She reads it and begins to contradict what it says. I chime in the fact that I’ve met the researcher in question and that the book is clearly misrepresenting his views. All around drooling idiots have been replaced by brains that are razor sharp engines of analysis and questioning.

Fireworks are lit and the Tor bursts into multi-coloured light. Our cohort are standing normally again, chatting and talking to the small number of locals that are sat on the slopes of the Tor that evening.The mindless zombies are banished.

Epilogue

It was about three months later I chanced on a Youtube video showing the author of the volume we’d destroyed in conversation with some aficionados from the current psychedelic scene. From what he said it seem to suggest that our ritual had been a success since he’d developed a more critical (or perhaps open) position on the meaning of the DMT experience. I’d also been attacking my own a priori assumption that magick works by reading The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths by Michael Shermer. As a result I’ve made a few significant re-considerations of my thoughts about the meaning, social role and effectiveness of magick. Which, in a paradoxical way, demonstrates to me that magick does indeed, sometimes, work.

JV