In Liber Null and Psychonaut is the ‘Mass of Chaos B’ and in its invocation of Baphomet it is asserted that (S)he lives in the First and Highest Aethyr, which is LIL. This gave me the idea to share a technique that our coven developed and refined over 5 years with which to explore the Enochian Aethyrs with a temple gathering.
Some time ago I set myself the task of learning of by heart the Call of the 30 Aethyrs. This took me a number of weeks as I have a memory like a sieve. I then set about constructing a complete Enochian ritual with which to accomplish my mission. My first attempts at opening the Aethyrs and exploring them were of mixed success. It felt that I managed to open the doors a little bit and peek-in. Part of the problem is my lack of clairvoyance. However, there was some success; I did get some good visions and I began to have some kind of a map forming in my mind.
To delve deeper I learned the Call in English and would then say the Key first in English and then in Enochian. This did actually open a whole new dimension to this work as getting to know what the Call says puts a great deal of context into this magic and helps set the tone. It is well known that the Call has a very apocalyptic feel to it and within it there are layers of meaning and a complex dialogue between several entities.
My second mission into the Aethyrs did bring back more information. There can be quite a dogmatic perspective on what you are supposed to experience in each Aethyr and magicians of a particular school can get quite irritated if your experience does not accurately tally with that found in The Vision and the Voice. My view on this is that you are really exploring your own arcana and not that of Therion. I found a certain commonality but a huge and interesting divergence. My most stunning and for me interesting departure was finding St Peter in the Abyss and not Choronzon as the Guardian.
By far my greatest success with working the Aethyrs has always been within a temple setting with other magicians. Our coven had spectacular success opening the Aires. Our first attempt culminated in us exploring an extremely vivid cyclopean underwater city complete with buildings and a temple at its centre. Another time we explored Spare’s ‘atavistic resurgence’ via the Enochian Aethyrs and travelled down the evolutionary ladder with the aim of reaching an all embracing simplicity or a primal ancestor. We saw some hooded figures unveiling themselves in a cave-chamber deep underground to reveal what I would describe as caricatures of ourselves: I woke up with these words in Enochian the next morning and I had to look them up in my dictionary: ‘behold the face of your God’!
The method that I came to call ‘spontaneous pathworking’ is really very simple and is as follows:
After creating a sacred space using preferably an Enochian Watchtowers ritual and some cleansing of the participants and a strong invocation, the Call of the 30 Aethyrs is intoned in English and then in Enochian.
At a temple gathering I truncated the ritual a bit as I was a bit nervous about presenting it but it worked perfectly well. I used my strong Enochian Circle ritual and my Enochian ‘Bornless Ritual.’ I made sure to include a cleansing ceremony which ‘Dr Chaos’ from our coven accomplished by using a rattle to clear the aura of each participant in turn.
I placed my rather large obsidian ball on the altar with us forming a circle around it and kept it veiled until everyone was ‘cleansed’ and waiting with a little bit of anticipation and curiosity.
I explained to everyone the method: I would intone the key and then we would pass round a narrative with a squeeze of the hand to the person to one’s left: simple. I would start with for example: ‘I see an entrance to a cave in front of us, we enter and we can now see torch-lit steps leading steeply downwards in a spiral’ etc. When done I would then squeeze the hand of the person to my left and they would continue and quite often a very rich narrative would unfold with several complete circuits round all of the participants.
The result was really very good! I think that we came up with a vision of LIL: ‘The First and Highest’ Aethyr which was rich and vibrant and could easily rival anything within The Vision and the Voice. I could tell that some people were much more clairvoyant than others and could sense a rising and falling of quality which was fine as long as the narrative kept on being passed round. When we finally opened our eyes I was pleased and proud to see that people had a similar expression on their faces as if they had just got off a rollercoaster.
Frater Ananael 252
