scholarship – Page 4 – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

Project Null

Satyr Magos23/08/2012

Closing one project makes way to begin another. The next major project in my cue is a study of Chaos Magick. At Aradia’s suggestion, I have decided to call these experiments Project Null, and tag related blog posts accordingly. (The Squirrel has pointed out to me that this is somewhat grandios and rediculous, to which I could only respond, “Yes. And?”

One of the things I learned during the last experiment was that I needed to set more concrete goals. Here, then, are lists of the sources and resources I am planning to make use of so far. The reading list will grow longer, and I can only ask for your help with this dear readers: who/what else should I be reading? Is Frater U.D. worth my time? Who else was/is iconic and revolutionary in the Chaos Magick movement that I clearly haven’t heard of and simply shouldn’t ignore?

(RE)SOURCES

Carroll, Peter. Liber Null & Psychonaut.

–. Liber Chaos.

Hine, Phil. Condensed Chaos.

Mace, Stephen. Stealing the Fire From Heaven.

Miller, Jason. Strategic Sorcery. Blog.

–. Sorcerer’s Secrets.

Moore, Alan. Promethea.

Morrison, Grant. The Invisibles.

–. The Disinformation Speech.

White, Gordon. Rune Soup. Blog.

ROADMAP AND GOALS

1) Liber Null. I’ve gotta start somewhere, and given the contents of my library and Aradia’s, this seems like the best place. With a little bit of dedication, I should qualify for initiation into the IOT by the time I’m done.

1.1) Liber MMM. Particularly the meditation and the sigils. These experiments will continue throughout the project and hopefully beyond. The first weeks of Project Null will be devoted exclusively to developing a meditation practice—something I’ve never done—and reestablishing my daily banishing practice.

1.1.1) Mind Control. I will begin by setting aside 5 minutes a day for these mindfulness exercises. By the end of the year, I want to be capable of minutes of visualization and/or object concentration for 15 or 20 at a stretch three times a week. This may seem like a low bar. If it turns out to be, I’ll raise it.

1.1.2) Magic: Banishing and Sigils. In terms of banishing, I will continue experimenting with daily banishing rituals until I perfect one for my own purposes. As for sigils, I will begin by firing off at least one shoal of 3-5 sigils every week. I’m a greedy bastard: there’s at least that much I want in the world. (And if I run out of things I want, I can always start working for others.)

1.1.3) Dreaming. This art has eluded me for years. As such I will simply set pursuing it as a goal. In addition to Carroll, I intend to make use of Frater Acher’s recommendations on the subject.

1.2) Liber Lux, Liber Nox. Oh, yeah: y’all know I go both ways. The second and third books of Liber Null are as much theory as practice, and not all of the practice is relevant to me, but I will commit to studying each section and writing about them, and explaining my decisions for those exercises which I choose not to work through. I intend to have completed my first run through Liber Lux and Liber Nox by the end of October.

1.3) Liber AOM. This shit is just whak, and much of it irrelevant as someone working reasonably hard to not die any time in the near future. Still, I’ll spend some time in October and November (assuming I’m on track) exploring these concepts.

2) Psychonaut. As I work my way through Liber Null, it is my intention to simultaneously work through Psychonaut. I have already performed the Mass of Chaos, adapting it to dedicate my Chaos altar. I hope to incorporate the suggestions and contexts provided by Psychonaut to the work of Liber Null. As such, I intend to post musings on the subjects contained therein, as well as develop my own experiments based on them. I aim to complete this stage of the work by the end of November. As with Libri Lux, Nox, and AOM, I will discuss each section, weather it offers me a particular exercise or not.

3. Servitor Creation. The creation and maintenance of servitors is one of the most visible and iconic portions of Chaos Magick. I cannot claim to study the field without at least one experiment in that area. I intend to start with creating a protector-spirit to accompany my house-wards, and to have it “up and running” by the end of November.

4. Analysis and Check-In. By the end of November, I hope to have made it at least halfway through the above reading list, and added at least as many more to the cue. From that position of (relatively) greater knowledge, I intend to have a better idea of how to progress specifically.

5. Lovecraftian Magic. I’ve told you all before about how the first occult book I ever purchased was the “Simon” Necronomicon. For years I’ve been hearing about Chaos magicians performing invocations of Lovecraftian horrors … hell, once upon a time, it was one of the things that kept me from away from Chaos Magick. So … now I want to try it. I don’t know if I’m going to use the Simon or the Donald Tyson version, or play with some weird shit I dig up on the internet. But there will be Eldrich Horrors. And I plan to sick them on some senators.

6. Feminism as Chaos Magick. I first mentioned this project over on G+ and Tumblr. I want the initiatory essay completed by the end of the semester, and have the project in motion by the beginning of the next semester.

CAVEAT

I’m excited about this project. I’ve been looking forward to it since the idea first occurred to me. But I try to be vigilant, and to be wary of my own motivations. And after a certain amount of soul-searching, I have come to the conclusion that while the ceremonial magic project was good for me, it also gave me a rock-solid excuse to let my personal spiritual practice slide.

When was the last time I encountered Dionysus or his messengers in my journeys? I have seen Rhea once in the last year. Even Tsu and ZG don’t show up as often as I’d like. I’ve thought a lot about the potential implications of conjuring my Natal Genius and Demon, but I haven’t done any magic or divination to explore it.

Project Null has the potential to be the same. So to help keep myself honest, I’m going to try to post at least once about my personal practice for every two posts about Project Null, not including posts serving double duty.

INVITATION

Aradia and I intend to work through this project together, scheduling our reports to post simultaneously so as to avoid cross-contamination of our experiments. We cordially invite any interested parties to join in with the Project Null experiment. If any such parties have blogs of your own, we would love to share the #ProjectNull tag with you.

I can be reached through the comments section of this blog, the ask box at my Tumblr, or even my G+ account. Aradia can be reached through her blog.

Although I have already begun working with Liber MMM—banishings, motionlessness, and breathing concentration–the official kickoff for the project is Sunday.

Obviously, there must be some uniformity in order for it to really count as a group project: for this first section, that’s working through Liber Null and Psychonaut. Your own personal goals and interests within that sphere, however, will vary. Maybe you want to shoot for an hour a day of motionless, thoughtless meditation. Aradia has no personal interest in Lovecraftian magic. Some of you (though it breaks my heart to know this) will not care about the Feminism as Chaos Magick project. As we approach the end of November, we can plot our course for the second “half” of the project together.

This is short notice. Whatever. Anyone can joint the project at any time. If you can’t keep up with the pace we set, or if you think everyone else is moving too slow: go at your own speed.

In scholarship

The Ceremonial Experiment In Summation

Satyr Magos20/08/2012

I know that my year of studying ceremonial magic (particularly of the Golden Dawn and grimoire traditions) has been a whirlwind tour at best. How can one cover, in a year, the variations and culminations of two thousand (or more, depending on where you start counting) years of magical tradition and experimentation? At times I have felt like a child playing with forces I can barely comprehend.

Fuck: the fact of the matter is that I am such a child. We all are. I think that the best many of us—particularly those of us with families, jobs, and other “worldly” obligations—can ever dream of achieving is adolescence. Still, though, if I sit down and enumerate (as I did a bit in my previous posts on the subject) the things I’ve accomplished, it turns out that I’ve made respectable inroads.

In this final post on the subject I want to talk about the resources I accessed in order to make those inroads. It would have been impossible for me if I weren’t in college, for one: my access to top-notch internet; the moments of down time between classes that were too long to waste but too short to do any real homework; the intellectual ambiance (so radically different from the outside world) that treats spending weeks at a stretch with your nose in obscure data as healthy behavior rather than as dysfunctional. There’s also the thing about my relative economic privilege which has allowed me to amass (and hoard) my library over the last decade and a half.

Over the course of this project, in approximate chronological order (with some considerations for ease of citation [and comments]) I have read:

Du Quette, Lon Milo. Chicken Qabalah of Rabbi Lamed Ben Clifford: Dilettante’s Guie to What You Do and Do Not Need to Know to Become a Qabalist. San Francisco: Weiser, 2001. [Gave me the courage to really dig into this project.]

–. Low Magick. Woodburry, MN: Llwellen, 2011.

Penczak, Christopher. Temple of High Witchcraft. Woodburry, MN: Llwellen, 2007. [Solid at first glance, but structurally unsound: lessons begin and end but don’t middle.]

Crowley, Aleister. Moonchild.

–. Book of Thoth. (*)

–. Book Four. (*)

Fortune, Dion. Sea Priestess.

–. Moon Magick. York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1978.

Kraig, Donald Michael. Modern Magick. St. Paul, MN: Llwellyn, 1997. (*) [I see that there’s a new edition out, but it looks hardcore Llwellenized. Does anyone know if it’s been nerfed as bad as it appears, or if it’s actually still solid?)]

Turner, Robert. Trans. Arbatel of Magic

Frater Barrabbas. Mastering the Art of Ritual Magick Volume One: Foundation. Stafford England: Megalithica Books,2008 (*) [Explain to me again why people take this guy seriously?]

Agrippa, Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. (*)

Trithemius, Johannes. The Art of Drawing Spirits into Crystals. (*) [So … is he a cryptographer or a magician? Can someone more expert in these fields help me with this?]

Betz, Hans Deiter (ed.). The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation Including the Demotic Spells. (*) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. [I wish I had the brazen gonads needed to do half the magic in this book.]

Warnock, Christopher (trans.). Picatrix. (*) [Working with excerpts provided on his web page and via the Spiritus Mundi group.]

Greer, Mary K. Women of the Golden Dawn: Priestesses and Rebels. Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 1995. [Brilliant. You should read it.]

Books I didn’t make it all the way through are marked with an asterisk(*). Yes, there’s some novels on there. I apologize for those citations which are incomplete, especially to the owners of those works, I do not have the print volumes on hand for all the relevant publication data.

And, last but not least, I have been hip-deep in the blogosphere. Rufus Opus at Head for the Red and Polyphanes the Digital Ambler have provided me with a great deal of information on Hermeticism. The former operates in a decidedly Christian tradition, while the latter is somewhat more eclectic, and between the two I’ve really been able to get a better view of the mechanics behind the symbolism and ideologies. Also Aaron Leitch of Annael, who provided me a view of the (sane quarters of the) modern Golden Dawn, a recipe for Abramelin oil (and a process for extracting essential oils in general, which has been great fun), and a few other things. I should also point to Skyllaros of the Crossroads Companion, because he’s awesome and his work is more accessible to me than that of many other hermetic magicians, but I only discovered him late in the game.

Deserving of special attention and thanks is one mister Jack Faust, of Dionysian Atavism, who has helped me contextualize a lot of these ideas with his very post-modern thoughts on the subject, backed by wonderfully hard archaic sources. He also gave me a number of personal pointers over email and on G+, for which I am extremely grateful.

Thank you, all of you, for sharing your knowledge and experiences with me.

In scholarship, witchcraft

My “Year” of Ceremonial Study: The View From Month 11 of 12

Satyr Magos17/07/2012

It occurred to me this evening that the year I set aside to study the Western Ceremonial Tradition will come to an end in fewer than thirty days. I wrote the first post on my experiments a year ago yesterday.

Holy fuck.

It’s been a wild ride. What started as a vague (almost childish) intention to study “ceremonial magic” has wandered across Chaos Magick, the grimoire traditions, traditional astrology, the qabalah, the Golden Dawn, and quite a few things I don’t even know the proper names of. I’ve experimented with the Qabalistic Cross and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I’ve conjured my Natal Genius, and am planning to conjure my Natal Demon, as well. Although I have struggled with my maintaining my visionary practice, I’ve gone on visionary quests to the Temples of Malkuth and Yesod, striven and failed to reach Hod, and visited the Elemental Realms of Earth, Fire, and Water. I have made Planetary talismans of Jupiter, Venus, the Moon, and Mercury. I have discovered the Greek Magical Papyri and incorporated the Stele of Jeu into my Lunar devotions at both the Dark and Full moons. I have discovered the magical value of the Orphic Hymns. I As my studies progressed, they focused increasingly on Hermeticism and astrological magic, with a bit of grimoire magic on the side.

Shit has been intense. The rituals have been elaborate, effective, and exhausting. Although I’ve been fighting it, I’ve been falling into the trap of armchair magicianhood because, as much as I’ve enjoyed a lot of it, there are parts of my nature that I have to fight to do this sort of Work. And because I’ve been having so much fun getting caught up in the theory that I’ve been loosing track of the practice. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not done with the Western Ceremonial Tradition by any stretch of the imagination. But I think that, when my year is up, I’m going to switch streams.

This coming year is going to be dedicated to Chaos Magick. Stephen Mace and AO Spare. Phil Hine and Peter Carrol. Gordon White and Jason Miller. And probably lots of authors and bloggers that I haven’t even heard of yet. Hopefully some of them ladies.

Lots of things have been pointing me toward Chaos Magick over the last year, anyway. I mean: y’all have noticed that Gordon White is just too damn cool to ignore, right? There’s been this whole post-Chaos thing that Jason Miller’s been talking about, though I think Gordon and Skyllaros have the right of that in a lot of ways. And, even if Chaos Magic really isn’t what he seems to be doing anymore, I’ve picked up a serious torch for Phil Hine. So … I’ll come back to Agrippa, the Picatrix, and the Corpus Hermeticum sooner rather than later. Hell, I’m probably going to keep working on planetary talismans and my illustrations of the Picatrix images of the planets even as I change trajectories, because they’re pretty and they make me happy.

Any recommendations?

In scholarship, witchcraft

The Holy Guardian Angel?

Satyr Magos10/07/2012

Apparently, as someone clever once said, “it’s that time of year again.” People are arguing about the nature and merits of the Holy Guardian Angel. Beyond what I’ve learned by following the conversation and from Frater Acher’s study, however, it’s a subject I know next to nothing about. Which makes it fascinating to me.

This conversation seems to have been sparked by a post of Jason Miller’s. If I understand correctly, Rufus Opus sees the entire operation as a Solar initiation. Jow thinks it’s an awesome act of will, but will move at his own pace thank-you-very-much. Meanwhile, Skyllaros gets into some related issues which become relevant as the conversation continues, and the illustrious Frater Acher has shared his thoughts on the topic as well. Jason weighs in further, addressing his understanding of celestial powers and shiny-red-reset-button-style-initiation. The conversation (that I have seen so far, anyway), currently concludes with more thoughts by Rufus Opus.

The whole thing, as I said, is fascinating to me. Although I’ve done some very interesting Solar

work, none of it yet qualifies as an initiation[1]. I have, using rites derived (vaguely) from Agrippa, recently contacted my Natal Genius. Over the last several years, I have acquired a small cadre of spirit-helpers by other means, as well. The first is clearly not an HGA, and one of the the others laughed in my face when I asked her if she was. I’m familiar with existence of the Abramelin rite, of course. but I honestly know just enough about the details to I know that I’m never going to do it. Not my bag, as they say. I have read the Bornless Ritual. I’ve never performed it, or the Samekh variant, but I’ve been doing the ritual from which both are derived regularly for some months now. The association between Bornless and Abramelin, however, is purely the invention of Crowley[2]. Whatever its effect has been, though, it has not been the vaulted Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. It’s distinctly possible that, even if I have a Holy Guardian Angel in the original sense[3], I may never achieve “Knowledge and Conversation”.

Honestly, I’m not sure that I want or need K&CHGA. As RO points out, the explosive immolation which many have reported

undergoing with the Abramelin, Bornless, Samekh, and other such rites, is not universal:

For others, it’s not that bad at all. A couple students, a few fellow wise old magicians didn’t go through a ton of shit, just some minor shit, because they got the point quicker than I did. I bet Jow, with his appreciation of the important things in life, his honest gratitude, his humility, his kindness… I bet for people like him, it’s a walk down the beach, and the heat of the Sun is a pleasure, not a pain at all.

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing: I have been putting myself through a transformative slow-cooker for as long as I can remember. I think I was eleven or twelve years old when I first realized that the world was fucked, that all the rules I’d been taught served to put the needs of bullies before my own, and that authority could not be trusted. When I discovered magic at the age of thirteen, I was obsessed with gaining power, but when I started practicing magic for real between sixteen and eighteen, it didn’t take long for my magical practice to become a way of managing my moods and getting my shit sorted out. I came out publically as a Pagan about that same time, and figured out I was bisexual (with the accompanying coming out process) about the same time I moved out of my parents’ house at twenty. Between the move to St. Louis (what was explicitly to make me a better writer by taking me away from my home base), my experiments in visionary and shamanic work, the shift of my career path from I have been jamming the Shiny Red Reset Button on my life pretty constantly since 2006. Or, as RO put it:

[P]eople go through worse shit without ever conjuring their HGA. You know anyone over thirty who hasn’t had some shit to deal with, something traumatic, something huge that you think about and wonder if you’d be able to handle it? I’ve got magician friends with more experience and empowerment than me who I respect and love who are facing or have faced more terrible things than I can imagine being able to deal with. Shit that doesn’t just go away in a year or two.
Shit. Happens. Regardless.

And and then there’s the whole thing with the spirits who have sought me out since beginning of this process. So really, while I would welcome another supernal assistant, between the life and magic I’ve already got more on my plate than I can handle. Like Jow, I would rather continue to simmer off the excess and the unnecessary, rather than risk an unplanned series of detonations in a life which is already on the edge, with too few resources to be spread between the various people who love and depend on me.

There’s a part of me that wishes that I had even known about this kind of magic back in the day: high school and the early years of my apprenticeship would have been much more interesting. I might not have taken quite so long to pull my head out of my ass. Or, you know, I might be in a padded room wearing a straight jacket.

As things stand, though, I’ll have to content myself with listening to the stories that others tell about their explosive pursuits of the HGA and other Solar initiations. With reading the theory performing my own, smaller, experiments. And maybe in another twenty years, when I’m more magician than satyr, when my tenure is secure and my ambitions achieved, I’ll say “fuck it”, and go looking for the “Nuke” setting on my Shiny Red Reset Button.

1 – You see what I did there?

2 – See Hymanaeus Beta in his foreword and footnotes to the Illustrated Second Edition of The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Weiser: York Beach Main (1995). See also: The Bornless Ritual by Alex Sumner.

3 – Something I am not convinced of, as I reject the sort of top-down cosmology which is necessary in order to assume that everyone has the same arrangement of supernatural allies.

In scholarship

Research Survey: Loki and Sexuality/Gender Identity

Satyr Magos29/06/2012

A dear friend of mine is working on a research project with Norse Pagans—particularly Troth—and the interaction between their relationship with the Trickster and their own sexual and gender identities. In their own words:

This is a survey to try to determine if there is any correlation between queer identity and the worship/reverence/fulltrui relationship of/with Loki Laufeyjarson.

The link, again, is here. Please pass this on to anyone to whom you feel it is relevant.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Thoughts on the Stele of Jeu

Satyr Magos18/05/2012

As I mentioned in my previous post, the more I perform the Stele of Jeu rite, the more subtle the effects seem to be. Given some of the more extravagant warnings I’ve heard regarding this ritual, this interests me a great deal, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the last couple days.

One of the first sources to warn me about the Stele of Jeu was, of all things, Crowley’s Goetia[1], which refers to the rite as the London Papyrus. According to the editor, the rite (before Crowley made his changes that ultimately produced Liber Semekh) was passed around in Golden Dawn circles as a last-ditch banishing/exorcism rite, to be performed with utmost caution and formality lest one permanently haunt the place where it was performed. The next was from the gentleman who was kind enough to work me up to my first experiment with the ritual. His warning, in addition to the above should one go through with a clearly botched performance, related the possibility of one’s life getting broken apart in order to be put back together in a better shape.

My own experience with the ritual, while powerful and transformative, has never quite lived up to the earth-shattering hype. A commenter on my early experiments reported even less dramatic results.

After some rumination, I’ve come up with a theory. You see, I’ve actually heard very similar stories about other rituals: the Abramelin Operation, for example; most other methods of contacting one’s HGA/Supernal Assistant; the use of moldavite for the first time. The common theme in many (though not all) of these stories is that when people whose lives are already fucked do major-fix-magic, their lives get more fucked before they get better.

The GD source who provided the initial warning—with no disrespect intended to modern initiates of those orders—was clearly terrified of dealing with the spirit world in any situation where they did not have absolute control of the circumstances and proceedings. The source of the second warning tells stories about the Stele of Jeu in ways that sound a lot like it was a part of his formative experiences with magic—which is to say, probably before he got his life in order.

Meanwhile, my commenter complaining of insignificant results has (to the best of my ability to determine from the stories he tells; he may feel free to correct me if I’m mistaken) had his shit together for quite a while. College done, good job, college loans in order, sophisticated magical practice, already talks with his HGA so often that he complains about not having much to talk about. There’s nothing there for the Stele of Jeu to fix, let alone break.

When I first performed the Stele of Jeu the Hieroglyphist, my life was already largely in order. I’ve already been through my Saturn Return. I’ve already left the job I’d come to hate for higher education in order to pursue a new calling. I have a regular magical practice that was pretty much at the top if its game. My biggest problem is the psychic scars left over from all the shit I fucked up when I was a wee faun of a mage. And, boy howdy, has it ever fixed that shit—but that deserves a post all on its own.

Now, all this evidence is anecdotal. I’ve only been performing this ritual regularly for about four months now. I’ve also been having a really hard time doing more than a preliminary study of its history, interpretations, and various effects. I know that the Order of the Hollow Ones, Jason Miller, and probably countless other groups each have their own variations on the rite (to say nothing of Crowley’s, obviously). But Jack Faust is one of the very few people I’ve seen talk about the ritual and its effects publically at all; one of the few others can be found at practicaltheurgy.com, but s/he appears to be defunct[2]. The silence of the scholastic community is even more deafening: I’ve only found one or two books which even refer to the rite, outside the PGM itself, and I have not had the opportunity to read them.

Thoughts?

1 – As described by Hymanaeus Beta in his foreword and footnotes to the Illustrated Second Edition of The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. Weiser: York Beach Main (1995).

2 – Discounting, for my purposes, allusions to the ritual solely as it relates to the Bornless Rite and attainment of Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, which is clearly not what the PGM ritual is about.

In art, scholarship, witchcraft

Let’s Get to Work

Satyr Magos27/04/2012

I think many of you know that Beltane is also International Workers Day.

Here are a few links for your perusal with that in mind:

Gordon: Occupy as a Phased Enchantment … Too bad I wasn’t ready for this shit then.

Cut-out 3-D Occupy Mask

Cut-out 2-D Occupy Mask

Planetary forces aren’t the only streams out there: More Occupy Wall Street Art for May Day Talisman Action

Two months ago I planned to have a whole fancy post with sigils and glyphs so we could work together on this a little more closely. That didn’t happen.

In scholarship

Dionysus Miscellanea

Satyr Magos25/04/2012

Hey, folks, it’s the end of the semester. While I’m buy writing papers for the next few days, I may not get another chance to post. In the meantime, check out some of the fun facts I that my research turned up but which I couldn’t work into my paper on the cult of Dionysus in Hellenistic Greece and the Roman Republic:

* Although most often described as the son of the mortal princess Semele, Dionysos is also said to be the son of Persephone, a relationship which explains his cthonic attributes (Burkert 1985.294) Those familiar with Orphic mythology already know this.

* The thyrsos wand, associated with Bacchic worship, may—according to Burkert—draw its name from association “with a god attested in Ugarit, tirsu, intoxicating drink, or alternatively with the Late Hittite tuwarsa, vine…”, and that the very name Bacchus may be drawn from a Semitic word for wailing, drawing a parallel with the wailing over the death of the Mesopotamian god Tammuz. (Burkert 1985 p.163)

* Dionysus shares the thyrsos wand with Artemis—the only other deity to use the wand in their rites. (Burkert 1985 p.223)

* Dionysus may have been depicted on herms, either as himself or synchretised with Hermes (Burkert 1985 p.222)

* Prefiguring later synchretisms, the worship of Dionysus was influenced by the cult of Osiris as early as 660 BCE (Burkert 1985 p.163), an association later affirmed by both Herodotus and Plutarch, the latter of whom also equated Dionysus with Serapis. (Martin 1987.91)

——-

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Martin, Luther H. Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Shaman: My Uncomfortable Relationship With a Problematic Word

Satyr Magos20/04/2012

[This one gets a little rambly.]

These last weeks have seen a bit of traffic on a subject near and dear to my heart:the relationship between modern neo-Pagan animism and magic, cultural appropriation, and the word and figure of the “shaman”. It “began”—so to speak; I don’t know that any of the authors read one another—with Alison Leigh Lilly and an interesting vision of where a combination of steampunk aesthetic and neo-Pagan praxis might lead (and the follow-up). Next were Lupa Greenwolf’s posts (one and two) on her own discomfort with, first the word, and then the militant and un-self-critical reaction to her use of it. Finally, VVF weighs in heavily but thoughtfully on the other side of the issue.

This is an issue that I, too, struggle with. I since first being introduced to shamanic visionary techniques by a friend in St. Louis—fortunately, after I became at least tangentially aware of issues of cultural appropriation—I have always avoided the title “shaman”. I don’t come from a culture that awards that title. Actually, strictly speaking, no culture does: “shaman” is a bastardized Anglicization of the Siberian word “saman”. It was adopted in the late 19th Century as a catch-all term for indigenous religious healers and, over the course of the 20th Century, came to be associated with particular types of trance-induction and spiritual mediation. It was in that latter sense that I was first introduced to and familiarized with the word, and—because that was what my sources told me the word for the kinds of magic that came most naturally to me was—came to describe my visionary practice as “shamanic”, or “shamanic witchcraft”.

But there are anthropologists who don’t even think it’s a real thing (damn, why don’t I have my full library with me so I can fucking cite that? please forgive me and use your favorite search engine): that “shamanism” is a social construction created by Western scientists as a way of understanding and conflating certain kinds of indigenous religious and magical practice which have no Western analogue (well, unless VVF is right about fairies, or unless you count theurgy). This argument carries more weight the more research I do. Yes, it’s helpful to create categories of like things so that we can better understand similarities, but … At the very least, one must simultaneously acknowledge that the categorization is alien to the system being observed. Better practice would require a more proactive attempt to first understand the “shamanic” practices as the people to whom they are native understand them.

A number of my religious/spiritual/magical practices are rooted in what is known in some circles as “core shamanism”—that is, the use of drums, dance, rhythm, and/or drugs as techniques of achieving certain states of altered consciousness, stripped of their original cultural context and any elements or trappings that are most obviously cultural appropriation. This is the work advocated by, for example, Michael Harner and Roger Walsh.

I’m not called to work with remains and spirits of animals, as Lupa is; nor am I as well known either she or Allison. These two facts shelter me from an awful lot of the bullshit, allowing me to work my way through these issues in relative peace. But my magical talents seem much better suited to exploring the Otherworld than anything else, and when spirits appear to me as animals and refuse to give me names, calling them “totems” and referring to them as Wolf or Leopard are pretty much the best I’ve got in terms of precise language. And, though there are problems with it, as someone who identifies as a writer first and foremost, precise language is kind of a big deal to me. Hell, the pursuit of precise, accurate, and affirming language is a huge part of my feminism/anti-racism/social justice effort. When my need for precise language pushes me into dangerous territory, all I can say is “I’m sorry. I’m working on it.”

I’ve spoken before on how uncomfortable I am with the the parts of neo-Pagan practice that dance around and over the borders of cultural appropriation, and of my personal relationship with those elements of practice. Increasingly, I find myself referring to my magical practice as “visionary” rather than “shamanic”. “Visionary” has it’s own problems—there’s these pesky associations with leadership and hierarchy, for example—but at least it doesn’t reek of colonialism. At the same time, though, I—like Lupa—struggle with the idea of bowing down to people within my own community who seem more interested in being the morality police than in actually serving social justice.

The more research I do, the more I come to understand that, while many of the techniques have been lost, “shamanic” practices are not absent from the Western tradition. Witches with flying potions, fairy familiars like those VVF talked about, Hellenistic theurgy, astral projection and pathworking. I’m not a theurge. I may worship the gods of ancient Hellas, but I don’t buy the ideas of a fallen/impure world from which one MUST ascend to reach the gods. Some gods are Up There, sure; and some are Down. But there are plenty of them Right Here With Us, too. I don’t to much pathworking because it’s too structured: I don’t like having my conclusions fed to me the way much of the pathwork I’ve seen seems to do. And I’m just not very good at astral projection (yet). But the fact is, I have the raw materials from which to build a cultural context for my visionary work. Until some spirit teaches me better ones, though, I’m pretty much stuck with the “shamanic” techniques I learned from Harner.

And, as long as I’m stuck with Harner—and Wood, and Walsh, and all the others—I’m pretty much stuck with the word “shaman”, no matter how much I dance around it. No matter how uncomfortable it makes me. And I don’t really know how I feel about that … let alone how I should feel about it.

In scholarship, witchcraft

Sex, Gender, and Magic 1/n+1

Satyr Magos11/04/2012

Preface

I was already drafting this in my head as a response to a reddit thread—particularly this comment—when one of the bloggers I follow decided to wade into the subject. It’s something I’ve talked about before from time to time, but usually only in reference to Wicca. There is a great deal of gender essentialism and heterosexism in the occult community, and the privileged apologia that tends to accumulate when someone calls bullshit makes me fucking furious.

Now, let’s look at the two OPs, first: a woman asking for people to share their experiences of gender difference in different forms of occultism, and gay man exploring the possibility of a huge oversight in the (human understanding of) Hermetic Law. The first got a few genuinely thoughtful answers, but the response to both (overwhelming in the one case, so far singular in the other) amounts to “how dare you ask that fucking question?”

That response infuriates me. It drives home the fact that, just as the neo-Pagan community is rife with mainline American anti-intellectualism (a rant for another time, but just look at popular responses to Hutton’s Triumph of the Moon), the occult community as a whole is permeated by outdated and debunked ideologies of sex, gender, and sexuality.