The L.A. Diaries, pt. I

[The LA Diaries are excerpts from the working journal I kept while living and working in Los Angeles a few years ago. The entries are raw, often unintelligible, with literally no regard for convention (neither literary or social) or mass appeal. I have decided to publish parts of this journal without regard for grammar or presentation for regular readers of this blog seeking a window into the destinationless spiritual wanderings of a practicing karcist.]

[Written after undertaking the consecration of a solid gold demonic seal of Baal. A demon-king of some renown featured in both the Old Testament and most of the old Grimoires with which I had little experience previous to the contracted work. While I realize some aspects of this text may seem disturbing it is a true relation of my experience of the spirit.]

Baal is the unformed stuff of magic. The black empty spirit of the witches’ Sabbath. Strong stuff, goes straight to the head. The arbitrary meting out of karma is what keeps it fair. Sometimes it’s the Internet going out, sometimes it’s falling off a roof. If it was all so transparent that you could anticipate its execution it would sort of invalidate the whole thing, wouldn’t it. To Baal we are just a bunch of hungry ghosts that got a body. For the most part I am inclined to agree …but what a body.

Baal is the naked mechanic of the magical exchange. A process which seems darkly joyous in its ambivalence toward human suffering. We embrace it as sorcerers or we are haunted by it, as we are haunted by so many of our revelations. He is there in that process too. Here among the fires of creation he is everywhere. Ellison’s Paingod. Stirring the pot of karma, Baal is some long dead God-king whose ghost outlasted his gods. They took a great deal of care preserving the old god-kings in death back in the day, they were total pros. Shax got his talon's on the gall bladders of some of those old Egyptian geezers back when they raided their tombs like they were 7-Elevens but I digress.

In his purest form he illustrates the manner in which you unknowingly generate conflict with your actions. The subtle undertone of ‘you’ beneath everything that you do, the very basic expression of your being. He is that pure hunger in the roots of desire. Baal is not headless, he is just deaf, blind and dumb. There is a difference.  You got to seal a body up to preserve it in death, you got to cover those holes, man. All the death will run out everywhere. He is still out there beneath the earth somewhere waiting for the world to end. The god-mans hunger turned all up on itself and gone M. C. Escher on your ass. 

On some level the sorcerer must concede that if he can manipulate the process, then the process is not sacred. Or conversely, that the actions of the sorcerer profane the process. Baal reveals sudden death by bus is an available karmic outcome to nearly every problem because you deserve it. Your human birth anchored you to death through the vehicle of karma. Baal reveals that all the sorcerer does is stir the pot.  That none of it actually matters to God, that suffering is a human concept which has never occurred in the mind of the Great Almighty. You can live your dreams or die a crack addled failure, Baal doesn’t care. He knows you started an ignorant moron, you can hardly be blamed for ending up one. The path was so clear.

When one man is raised above others, Baal is there. When a 3 year old chokes to death on it's blanket, Baal is there. In both cases, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Baal is always fair, it’s you that is being unreasonable, reading meaning into shit where there is none. Baal is there from the beginning to the end, for the lot of us.  He is the secret truth of our human body and its animation, the inexpressible dark hunger. It’s killing us. We hunger for suffering. 

That’s Baal, our collective hunger for suffering and death. Karma is a bitch. They say we fed him babies once. It’s possible I guess, at the most basic level that’s what we do, feed babies to karma.

That’s what Baal’s arrival meant for me. It’s all fucking arbitrary. If anyone is crazy enough to hire a witch-doctor then the path is laid, paved and lit with the corpses of dead Christians like the streets of old Roma.  Morality has no place in the mojo. Morality is meaningless, it’s the sorcerers sacrificial lamb. If Christ died on the cross for me then I killed him, I murdered God. It wasn’t hard, he was asking for it. Like the rest of us, his human birth made it karma. Nothing unfair about it, when he raised his eyes to heaven and asked why he had been forsaken he got the same answer we all do ..none. If that’s true for Old Glory himself then it is most assuredly the end to which you are destined. Baal don’t care, so why should I?

I won’t be haunted by it. Baal’s old ghost is just too ugly and self-important. There is no such thing as ‘bad karma’. There is only karma. I say, fuck that bitch. Baal can suffer with the rest of us, it’s what he gets for keeping his spleen in a jar. Baal may have been the dark sun once but now he is a pair of old shoes. Angry, malevolent old shoes. I’ll keep them handy for when I have to paint or traipse through the mud or some shit and old Baal will be grateful for it. The sister fucking, murderous tyrant loves the dirt, lives for it. Even now, all but forgotten Baal plays in the shit and loves it. It’s why the Egyptians saw him as a demon-pig. Dirty corpse-eating fucker can’t get enough of our morals. 

Them’s good eating.

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.