Fencing Damocles

or How I Learned to Love the Bomb

Paranoia is one of our great teachers.  It stands beside Reason and Poetry with unfailing confidence.  Paranoia has taught me a great many wonderful things, has brought some truly fierce and magical experiences into my life. 

It was my belief in my early twenties that the onset of acute paranoia was a sign that you were getting close to truth of the thing, the roots of it.  That you were peeling back the layers and wards, striking down the guardians placed to watch over the great and terrible secrets and feeling it.  Back then I was fairly certain that Michael and Lilith Aquino (Temple of Set) were trying to kill me.

I have never felt a real strong desire to join an Order or Coven.  Not my style, I began life as a cult-baby and have had only a critical eye for cults, gurus and their like ever since.  At the age of 23 I swore an Oath to Lilith (the god-form not the old lady) that I would not be owned by anyone or anything and that pretty much clinched it.  I would have to feed my thirst for the juju the old fashioned way.  On my own.  

Now ten years later, I see things a little differently.  I have since traded the Aquinos’ up for newer and more enjoyable delusions several times over and come to identify the source of my paranoia.  It, I was to discover, had nothing to do whatsoever with what I knew or was on the verge of discovering and everything to do with what I didn’t know.  The big gaping holes, that’s where you will find the paranoia.

In the beginning I would turn a model or paradigm on at full blast.  Open the first aethyr?  Fuck that, we gonna open ‘em all!  At once!  Sex and drugs and never-ending ritual, heady mixtures.  I came to realize that the paranoia would only strike at the beginning of these exercises and then would gradually fade as I worked deeper into the models.  It was the intake of the information in a totally uncontrolled and arbitrary manner that predicated the paranoid response.  Having no reference on the model, having no mnemonic by which to sort and access the information, it runs unrestrained through the sub-conscious seeding wet dreams and nightmares.

All cogent and complete magical models have the darkness in them.  It’s the nature of the juju to encompass the polarities that rational humankind reinforce daily.  When you have no frame of reference for that it will find a face of its own.  It will impose itself on your awareness somehow.  Most often this seems to take the form of the cat that formulated the model, not a problem when the individual is dead.  You just talk to the shade, get the inside scoop.  They have been writing about how to talk to the dead since the beginning of time.  Eddie Talbot (Enochian) and Charlie Jones (Thelema and Golden Dawn) remain as close to personal friends as dead guys can get.

When the model is the product of a living individual however, things get tricky.  Most likely you’re not going to be haunted by some dead guy/girl, in that case it’s going to come through like an assault.  And who knows really, maybe to a certain extent you really are dealing with wards and shit.  People make a living off of their cults at the most basic level and in the case of loftier intentions have done what they can to create a safe and nurturing environment for their adherents.  It seems pretty reasonable that you would feel that shit when you’re digging around in their collective memory.  I mean, that’s why those wards and oaths are there.  That being said, in the case of very nearly every paranoid delusion I have found myself in the throes of, the individuals that starred in them didn’t even know I existed and could most likely have cared less whether I lived, died or ate hot-dogs on Sunday.   Actually, some of them were totally cool cats that I have come to like very much.

So these days, when I throw it all at a new paradigm and get the paranoia I take it as a good sign, breathe deep and press on into the paradigm.  It means that there is a deep well of knowledge within it and that I have yet to truly scratch the surface of it.  Also, after ten years I am running out of imaginary nemesis to worry myself over.  I was liking the look of William Keisel (Ourosboros Press) there for a while, devilish fellow that one but he remains steadfastly admirable.  I am thinking that perhaps Jake Stratton-Kent might be a better match for me.  All that hoodoo and deviltry and being infamous and shit.  Plus, it’s a reason to go to England (my last English nemesis was Mr. VI and that guy is like a brother now.)

Nothing pushes a practitioner like the paranoia.  Most people will learn more about the juju, do more of the juju in the depths of the paranoia than under any other circumstances.  So go hard children, give it everything you got and remember that the thing you feel the most assaulted by is almost without a doubt, your own fucking ignorance.  

Paranoia taught me that.

the Prayer for a Righteous Death

[To be read three times successively]

O, Bon Lwa and the souls of the Gede, surrounding the hearts of the living, knowing compassion and the seats of wisdom, possessing perfected vision and perfected love, come to this place in this time and accept this offering of spirit!

O, Kindly Ones, founts of pristine cognition, origins of immediate and powerful action, come to this place and this time and grant me comfort in this my moment of death!

O, Gran Petro, I (say name) am leaving this world and journeying to other shores. I am cast off from this world and approaching the great transition of death. Suffering deeply, I am without friend, without refuge, a protector or companion. My perception of this life is quickly fading away. I am moving to another world, dark and unfathomable. Entering this forest of doubt I shall be driven by the potency of my sin. I will enter the great wilderness, be borne away upon the great ocean, be driven on by the vital winds of my past actions. Beneath my feet there is no longer firm earth, I have entered a great battlefield, been seized by the malevolent forces of fear and terror upon meeting the executors of your unfailing justice. In accord with the actions of this life I am made powerless to resist a foolish rebirth. The time has come and I have no choice but to move on, alone, leaving dear friends behind.

O, Kindly Ones, grant refuge to me, (say name), who is now without refuge! Protect me! Be my companion! Defend me from the great darkness of death! Turn back the whirlwind of my sin and ignorance! Protect me from my fear and terror of your unfailing justice! Rescue me from the long and terrible roads into perdition!

O, Bon Lwa, be unsparing in your compassion! Grant me strength! Do not permit me another foolish or base rebirth! Without sparing justice, swiftly release the power of your embrace!

O, Gran Petro and the souls of the Gede, be unsparing towards me, (say name), with your empathy, skillful means and ability! Obsess and possess me with your compassionate embrace! Do not permit me to fall under the power of my ignorance and sin!

O, you three First Souls, protect us from the sufferings of our living death!

Circus Burlesque, pt. I

or An Attempt to Idenitfy Saturn in her Decans

Saturn in her decans? I hear you saying. Her decans. We know that there was hidden formula in the goetic and grimoire texts. We know because there is holes in the information they have left. This does not in any sense come as a surprise to the critical thinker, those mysterious karcists who penned these works were mysterious out of necessity. One of the most infamous periods of activity of the necromancers of European sorcery were the Poisoners of the Court of the Sun King.

It is often suggested that the alchemical texts from the renaissance and later periods were also encrypted with false or misleading information so that the true student would have to truly grasp the work to perceive the hidden (occult) meanings of the texts. It is possible that a similar motivation underlay the motivations of the authors of the grimoires but it feels unlikely that is the whole of it in a deeply intuitive sense.

While the scholars quibble over the correct structure of Abra-melins acrostic squares and the spelling of phonetic mantra's one can't help but despair. Worthy tasks for certain but the alchemists weren't making spelling errors to throw you off your game, these were smart men being crafty. Great and elaborate cyphers became necessary to decode the alchemical texts. One was compelled to actually participate in the Great Work to truly decipher the hidden secrets of the alchemists. I have come, over many years of active experimentation with the grimoires to regard them in a similar light. Though the object of these works differ from those of the alchemical magics and the motivations of their protagonists are often strikingly mercenary, they were also written by smart men being clever.

Two great and hideous weaknesses became apparent over those years. An almost complete inability to access the daemons of the feminine currents of western necromancy (which is a curious thing since they are right there in the history of it but not the handbooks of those who engaged said history,) and another almost completely synchronous absence of formula by which one might engage the daemons of astrology's grand malefic saturn (which is also curious since the texts of the grimoire traditions are heavily influenced by the astrological models). These are, if I don't say so myself, pretty marked and notable absences. To the astrologers of the same era, saturn is the grand malefic and the source of the dark and material magics as well as the much observed marker for trouble and illness. Whats more, the feminine current in the European traditions has always been notoriously potent and its daemon are well recorded in the histories and folklore. Pretty strange that the mercenary necromancers of this same era almost completely neglected this in the majority of what remains of their texts.

Interestingly, upon further investigations it is made apparent that it is to saturn that the darkly sexual current of the primal feminine is associated in much of the mystical literature of the era. "Gregorius held that the negatively polarized manifestations of Saturnian and Lunar forces were, on Earth, incarnated in the forms of women, who are the vicars of the Luciferian Principle. The sometimes ambivalent attitude toward this principle leads to an ambivalent stance toward women as a phenomenon. It is even stated at one point that the esotericist should seek to free himself of the feminine daimonium by means of sexual magic. In contrast, men are esoterically the manifestation of the Solar and Jupiterian forces. For sex-magical work, of course, women are seen to correspond to the planet Venus, and men to the planet Mars." (Fire and Ice, Edred Thorsson.) We see this perspective not just in the adepts of the Fraternus Saturni but in many of the sorcerous models of the gnostic greeks, hebrew, egyptian and assyrian/babylonian. Our study is then simplified as we come to realize that the resolution of the absences in the grimoires is really in actuality a singular event.

Much of the earliest of the eastern european necromantic texts (such as the CLM 849) were in fact clerical adaptations of indigenous witchcraft which has always embraced this current for obvious reasons. This relationship is nonetheless reinforced in such texts as Solomons Keys wherein the saturnalian decans are given primarily to venus and the moon which as has already been established are notable feminine aspects of the current. As well, in the cases of the more definitively astrological models like Francis Barrets 'The Magus' saturn is treated among the rest of the planetary signatures as it is in most of the grimoires. Providing one with at least a circuitous route to their object. It is conceivable that it was this information that the crusades of the Inquisition sought to erase, this is hinted at in a very direct manner in the journals of John Dee regarding his work with Kelley. Dee and Kelley like any contemporary practitioner to this day making use of the grimoires, began with the daemons of venus. In their case the spirit Madimi but she led them ultimately to Lilith or at least a very dark feminine manifestation. It gets better, since in classical european witchcraft it is these very figures which serve to initiate one into the magical disciplines.

Tantalizing, no?