For the past couple years, my personal circle and I have been doing escalating experiments in trance possession. We started with a year of Drawing Down the Moon, each of us taking a turn as vessel for the Moon at our full moon esbats. The following year, a handful of us stepped out to do some academic study and then continue the experiment with different divinities. We each took a turn as vessel for Hekate – a goddess that we had all worked with fairly intensely, by that point – and then chose a patron deity to invoke in order to deepen our practice. This past weekend was my turn for round two, and I was possessed by Baphomet.
Circumstances were less than ideal. I have only just begun to feel fully recovered from my round with covid. Between lingering exhaustion and brain fog, and the wholesale order of doom (have i talked about that? I have a big order on my bench that is taking me three times as long as it should have), and my struggle to add anything to my existing schedule of practice (a struggle which deserves, and will get, its own post), I was not able to prepare myself as thoroughly as I would have liked. That morning’s daily divination was far from auspicious.
Nonetheless, I prepared myself as best as I could. Mostly, I rested. I did manage to complete the headdress that I had felt called to make. I gathered the bits and pieces of accoutrement that had come to me in various morning prayers, and went out and got a new bottle of absinthe when I discovered that I had run out at home. At our friends house where the ritual was to be performed, I sequestered myself for about half an hour, anointing myself with flying oil and taking a libation of absinthe, and readying myself psychologically to be filled by the god.
For the sake of science, we have a format: a ritual with minor variations for each god and vessel, but I think that I could have walked out possessed without any need for that. The god was there, ready and waiting, before I was even called from my sequestration. To invoke the god, we used a prayer based on PJ Carrol’s Mass of Chaos (Liber Null and Psychonaut, 1989, pp.130-132). To induce me as vessel, we used a guided meditation based on Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone’s Lifting the Veil (published 2016, reads like 1993). Our ritual complete, I donned the headdress and let the god move through me.
I am … ambivalent about the experience. The ritual was a success. Baphomet appeared and spoke through me. In preparation and as oracle, I believe that I had legitimate insights into the nature of the god. I believe that the answers I gave, which I can no longer remember, were divinely inspired. But I was too present, too conscious. In particular, my inner critic was too present: providing constant commentary on my own performance as oracle. I know that there were messages that I could have conveyed if I had just been able to step a little further out of the way.
I do remember some of what I said, some of what I learned. I have spoken before about my visions of Baphomet as a tripartite divinity: Divine Androgyne, White Lady, Man in Black. This weekend’s experience revealed each of those parts as tripartite in its own right, though the nature of those divisions is yet unclear to me. The vision emphasized Baphomet’s infinite and ever-changing nature: chaos in both the creative and destructive senses; simultaneously not-yet-made and complete/perfected. The light by which truth is revealed.
They experience left me tired and somewhat foggy. Despite that, I wasn’t able to sleep until late that night. If I had any significant dreams, I did not remember them on waking.