Run Viral

There will come a time in the future where the release of the Testament of Cyprian the Mage will be seen as a seminal point for western occult philosophy.  The final installment in Jake Stratton-Kent’s Encyclopedia Goetica, wherein a meaningful alternative to the masonic crosses the current rash of western occultists have crucified themselves on is revealed.  I say, ‘in the future’ because masonic initiation is as addictive as heroine and I say, ‘rash’ because it suggests a bunch of similarly aligned or focused practitioners as well as a distracting and ugly eruption upon the flesh of a thing.

With the Testament as his cypher Jake delves as far as our contemporary grasp of far history will allow, to trace the roots of the grimoire tradition, a tradition which is slowly taking a position of primacy in western occulture.  With Cyprian as his tour guide Jake visits each of the great centers of knowledge in the ancient world and like his guide discovers facets of the Arte which have been mastered there.  It is a powerful and thought-provoking journey which comes to highlight stellar lore and ancient healing paradigms as the root of what is now known as goetic magic.

It persuasively sheds the contemporary dualism's of grimoire work (good/bad, holy/evil) in favor of an ambiguous eschatology rooted in ancient correspondences between our planet and the life it sustains and the greater universe.  No small feat and one which calls into question a great deal of our current methodology and mythology regarding the daemon of the grimoires.

Though it is the conclusion of the Goetica series, it is more properly a point of departure.  It is the moment where your hand is let go.  Every historical revelation raises a myriad questions best negotiated by the individuals sympathy to the work.  I think that most veteran practitioners with a grounding in Goetia, Hellenistic Greek thought or plant-lore will have at least one ah ha moment and that those newer to the exploration have a profound leaping off point.  It will certainly have me returning to some of my earlier explorations with the daemon of the old books, in particular the old Goddess figures which didn’t fare so well in their Pauline interpretations.  So much good stuff. 

In a way that seems strangely fitting, this is my first purchase of a digital copy from the Scarlets. Though I intend to add a physical copy of the book to my collection I have been in a state of perpetual transit since last winter and it simply doesn't seem as though that is going to change in the near future.  So many strange syncronicities had arose that finally I simply broke down and got the ePub version.  Somehow even that liminal state of transit-induced limbo was fitting to the work.  It is a book whose value is found in between things, between nations, between the lines, between religious certainties, an exaltation of the liminal state.  I cannot simply consecrate it as a book in my usual manner because it is not a book in both the literal, physical sense as well as the more esoteric, it is a mythic cypher.

Fittingly, though I shall read and reread it, I shall never dirty it's pages.  Though I will carry it with me in all my travels, I shall never mar its cover.  It feels correct to me, untethered from the physical privilege of hard copy Cyprian is free to run viral through all my triumphs and evil deeds.

Find The Others: Audio Interview With Jake Stratton-Kent

A wonderful first entry in a casual and insightful interview series by Gordon over at Runesoup.  This interview has him riffing with Jake Stratton-Kent, a perennial favourite here at The Burn Victim.

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At the crossroads we meet others who no matter race, creed or philosophy are made brothers and sisters by necessity for they too are fellow travellers.  It is this essential truism that bonds us together in a way that transcends what came before.  Regardless of whether our paths diverge or not we travel together, we share the adoptive parent that is the road.

I am not sure how Peter, Alkistis and Jake captured the metaphysical truth of the crossroads but they did.  It is not truly a forking of the way, a diverging of paths, it is the singular point from which all our paths radiate.  It is the singular point which reveals that truly all our paths are just the one path.  That we travellers of that road, no matter the direction we chose are moving together, are becoming more alike.  The road itself recreates us and the longer we spend travelling it the more our stories sound alike.  Anyone who has wandered knows that this is true.

Circumstance and shared trials brought together those old disparate practitioners who gave form and spirit to the spiritual creoles of the west, new languages born of immediate necessity and new Gods born of fresh circumstance.  Time and circumstance change, the road goes ever on.  These days getting an old world Necromancer, a Kimbandist, an Espiritista, a handful of disparate ceremonialists, a Vodoun, a pair of Palo and a cranky barely literate hoodoo (*cough* .. that would be me) to agree on anything is harder than teaching a collection of stray cats to perform as a synchronized swimming team.  Lord knows I have argued with half the authors who contributed to the text already. 

In this sense the editors mentioned above have outshone us all, sitting as they are at this new crossroad of technology and media exposure, they laid a trick on the lot of us.  We didn’t have to agree on anything to agree on everything, they gave us no subject upon which to reach a consensus, no philosophy upon which to jointly pontificate.  Clever bastards.  They had us meet around their digital fire and tell our stories from the road knowing that those stories would each intertwine with the other effortlessly because the road had made us all alike.  Like it does to all who travel it long enough.  To my own surprise I found myself nodding in agreement as a student of Bertiaux talked of how the creoles were the faith of the future and cracking open Allen Kardec to see what I had missed in my easy dismissal of the spiritualists.  Though they fall from our hand, it is the spirit of the world that rolls the bones.

Clever bastards.

1000 Turns and a Broken Branch

or Hadean Press Chapbook Review #2

Frimost & Klepoth - the Strong Spirit & Lucifer's Harlot (HADEAN PRESS)

I grabbed this chapbook (hoodoo’s love chapbooks, yo!) because Frimost fascinates me and Vanessa and I owe this daemon a special debt.  For it was to Frimost we turned to empower our first sex ritual together many years ago.  Jake Stratton-Kent doesn’t disappoint.

I think perhaps most compelling is his argument for the conflation of Frimost to the chthonic Dionysus and of Klepoth as Frimost’s counterpart to the Lamia/Mania who accompanied Dionysus.  I find it difficult to get behind JSK’s assertion that we should not regard this permutation of the chthonic Dionysus as a procurer or pimp figure (a recent anthrolopogical study done in Canada has shown that ancient Greek pimps identified themselves with this very figure almost exclusively, and the working girls themselves to the Mania and Lamia who were his mythological companions), doubly so in light of Klepoth’s associations to harlotry.  Nonetheless, this difference in perspective by no means distracts from the value of the brief text itself which I found wonderfully educational.

Regardless of whether you approach your work from one of the more traditional western ceremonial angles or from the New World methodologies JSK provides you with literally everything you need to establish a functional communication with these engaging daemons.  Finally, the brief anecdote provided regarding the possession of a ritual participant (several actually) by Klepoth and the blanket necessity which arose to treat the spirit as one might honor and sacrifice to the Mysteries of the New World animist creoles was truly fascinating and again makes me wonder if the Old World karcist’s will ever examine the possibility that the grimoire tradition of Europe not only influenced the development of the New World creoles but was perhaps an attempt to understand or even control them on the part of the European clerical establishment.  Hermetic magical exchanges are rarely (if ever) one-dimensional.  Seriously, think about it.

To you N. Americans out there practicing demonaltry, seriously you could not go wrong with this text!  My singular recommendation is to grab yourselves a copy of JSK’s Grimoirum Verum as well for a more thorough comparative history and his collection of excellent amended conjurations.

Spring Devils and the Giving Hands

At roughly a third of the way through the text, on a Saturday the compulsion to honor the spirits of the book overtakes me.  I use cascarilla to lay out the veve’s of Danto and Mal.  I light three tall votives and a gold pillar; fire the charcoal in the brass vessel.  I crush up the resin of Dragonsblood and scatter it over the charcoal.  I open invisible doors and pour good whiskey over the smoking resin, already the heat is there.  I take a long pull on the whiskey and spray the candles, tongue against teeth, they laugh and sputter.  I take another long pull and swallow, that heat is everywhere now radiating out and up from my belly.  I start with Cobayende, the lyrical passage from the book, then the honored dead that haunt the author’s bones.  I close the Garden of Blood and Bones by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold, and place it on the smoking veve’s.

I crush more resin and scatter it over the coals, I take the Giving Hands that hold the solid gold seal of Baal and the polished copper of Gamori and put in my lap.  I uncork sandalwood oil and begin to mark the pages of Jake Stratton-Kent’s Rouge titles, I start with the Verum.  The book thoroughly perfumed I pass it through the incense smoke, let the heat rising out of the brass dry the oil and then place it on the veve’s.  More whiskey, this time I mist the coals and honor the Grand Duchies and Satanachia as is my custom when working with this text.  Continuing, I perfume both volumes of the Geosophia in the same manner, put them with the Verum and place the Giving Hands that cradle my devils upon them.  More whiskey, a long pull that makes me shiver, then the author’s honored dead are saluted and more whiskey poured out over the coals.  

If this seems like a lot of work to go to for a book, keep in mind that I only do this when I know that I am going to use it.  Stratton-Kent’s Verum is actually the third Verum that I have consecrated in the above fashion.  Love that book, hands down my favorite of the grimoires.  Stratton-Kent though is the man, he places his Verum firmly within the greater historical perspective of the grimoire tradition (something that few authors have attempted to do in their work on other texts of this era and tradition), and streamlines the practical ritual aspect with the organic practices developed among the Palo who have worked with this and related texts for hundreds of years including the names and ponto riscado of the corresponding Exu.  Simply spectacular. 

I don’t want to comment over much just yet on the Geosophia but the two portions I happened to turn randomly to dealt with the significance of the big dog to the infernal Hermes and Hecate (and its subsequent adoption by the karcists of the grimoire tradition) and the extreme efficacy of the Lots of Hellenistic astrology in elective sorcery and determining daemonic sympathies respectively.  So many curious synchronicities, for the last year I have used the Hellenistic Lots and their placements within the astrological decanates for just this purpose.  Austin Coppock and I nicknamed it the shadow clock, now the secret’s out of the bag.  Thanks Jake!  Needless to say, since Mr. Stratton-Kent knows the best astro-juju I have in my bag of tricks I am very much looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

At a third of the way through the Garden, with a few digressions into the Fundamento I just can’t speak highly enough of this book.  I already know what a ‘ndoki nganga’ is for instance, for those of you who have been following my recent blog round with Jack Faust.  It really isn’t the particulars though that makes me love it (though it is a veritable trove of information) but rather Frisvold’s unique ability to entrench the reader in the ambivalent worldview of the Palo, that swimming inter-mingling of the visible and the invisible, of the living and the not-living. 

Later, after I left the books smoking sweet and pungent I lay down on the couch and smoked a joint and watched Vanessa move through her yoga asanas.  A great swell of tension began in my solar plexus and continued to build into a rolling anxiety.  I laughed out loud for no reason, saluted Cobayende, put out my joint and crawled off the couch onto Vanessa and stripped her naked.  Lean death always leaves me hungry.  Needless to say, this is obviously not a book review.  I do not intend to review these books; I intend to use them, to submit to them, to learn from them. 

I apologize to the Scarlets in advance because your beautiful books will be smudged, perfumed, thumbed and anointed, they will lay upon the grass of old woods and upon the dark earth of old graveyards, I will crane red-eyed and stoned over my favorite passages marking them with sweat, the ashes of my joints and the perspiring bottles of hard liquors.  Dog-eared and sweet-smelling they will rarely find themselves in the relative safety of bookshelves and closed cupboards; one does not come to the house of the Valentines’ for relative safety.  Even now Vanessa Valentine, fresh from the shower, naked and reclining comfortably on the bed is leafing through pages of the Verum, near her feet volume two of the Geosophia is partially hidden under a pair of lacy underwear.

Everything is just as it should be.


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