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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.

The Devil's Days

The book is anointed with rum, blood and the ashes of my cigar, mixed together and smudged onto the cover page next to my signature.  Passed repeatedly over the smoking resins, a prayer is said for the honored souls of the authors blood.  Each candle is lit with a whispered name and a weapon is laid out around the book.  The fire in them fills the room.  The Holy Ghost languishing almost sensual in the incense smoke.  The Virgin wet with the spirit as the Word made flesh gets nailed on the cross.  Glory, glory, glory. Deo Duce Comite Ferro.

We got Michael Cecchetelli’s ‘Crossed Keys’ recently and can confidently claim to have read the book cover to cover several times now.  Like the Verum (see, Spring Devils and the Giving Hands) the Black Dragon is what a renaissance handbook of black magic is supposed to be.  Big devils, magic guns and naked dancing girls.  Traditionally, the Black Dragon has been presented as a sort of demons of the qlippot handbook or an example of what happens when a Golden Dawn initiate goes totally rogue.

Crossed Keys however is obviously a used book.  Supremely functional and perhaps the best working example of a text assembled by the clerical necromancers that I have read.  Penitential Psalms, man.  It was like I got to peek into the history of hoodoo.  Crossed Keys is my first introduction to the Enchiridion but the association of Penitential Sacrifice to magical effect is a long one, especially among the hoodoo.  (Really everywhere, the Buddhist Confessions are another excellent example of penitence equated to magic.)  A lot of Prayer Books circulated in Europe and a number of them took on occult proportions.  The juxtaposition of the Seven Penitential Psalms of the Enchiridion to the Black Dragon’s ‘Devil of the Day’ approach is a bit of effortless genius (it literally instructs you to do so in the Black Dragon).  In short, Cecchetelli is hoodoo boss.

Without a doubt, the hoodoo love magical prayers.  Throw in the Novena’s and the Latin Pater Noster, Ave Maria and the Veni Creator and a way to enchant your heater and you have got yourself an instant classic.

Squished between the two texts and in a portion of the text altogether too brief, Cecchetelli illuminates the great primary pitfall of the text as it was communicated to him in his encounter with Frimost, namely that the language of the conjurations of the spirits of the Black Dragon should be amended to better reflect his actual relationship to the religious eschatology of the text (we will assume that Michael Cecchetelli is not ordained by the Vatican) and a second admonition by Surgat regarding the significance of the order in which the spirits are presented in the book.  This portion is taken directly from his working journal so I shall interpret the absence of the amended conjurations as a sign that Michael is some sort of secret magical arms dealer and is getting some mileage out of those.  Admirably, if the instructions are followed in the text then everyone should have a collection of uniquely amended conjurations to work from which is really as it should be.

But then, you all were sold at ‘big devils, magic guns and naked dancing girls’ which really just proves that the lot of us are better served by a little penitence than yet another qaballic hierarchy.  If that doesn’t seem devilish enough for you then you my friend need a good spanking.