Tag: Baphomet

I Believe in Miracles

by Soror Brigantia

Coming out is always a difficult process, whatever it is that you’re coming out as. Going against the expectations of your society, against the pressure of your peers and all expectations that there may be. It’s difficult to admit that there is something about you that is different. It’s especially difficult if what you’re coming out as is not cool, not well thought of and seen mostly as a stupid piece of crap.

I have come out in all sorts of ways over the years and what has been difficult, the most challenging thing to admit to not just to the world and to myself that … my favourite magical paradigm is … disco. Yes, disco. Not heavy metal not black metal, not punk, not dance. Disco!! And I don’t know anyone who would admit to liking this form of art, but go to any night club and see what happens when a disco track is being played. I think I’m not the only not so secret lover of disco. And OK it ain’t Mozart; I see no complex equations within the sounds of the disco notes … but it is the most overwhelmingly optimistic sound I’ve heard and it fills my soul.

And I also like Titania’s Little Book of Spells by the way. Since I’m coming out I may as well say it- the books are furry and pink and purple and I love them and I see nothing wrong in that.

So where did my love of disco emerge? When I did I realise that this was the sound for me? It came about due to my deep love of magick, magick for its own sake, magick for the pure joy of doing it. There are always several layers of statements of intent within my rituals and more often than not hidden in the main statement of intent is a secondary statement of intent. While I call it secondary often it is the most important statement of intent which is “to experience Joy while doing this Ritual.” It’s through this experience of the joy of magick that the disco paradigm emerged and took hold of me.

How it came about is that a group of friends and I regularly meet up to practice magical rituals, to share and swap techniques and we chose to have a number of sessions around certain themes. We could not help but see the overwhelming similarity between the great God Baphomet and John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. From this we felt that we would do an evening of disco magick and would boogie – boogie – boogie with the gods in good ol’ disco style.

“As above, so below …”

I was working with the voodoo paradigm at the time so I undertook a great work which I called Disco Voodoo, calling upon the Lwa via song, selecting the disco tracks that I felt most summed up the qualities of the spirits. And it rocked!! The voodoo spirits loved the disco music and manifested more strongly than they ever had to me before and I knew I had found my crossroad, my gateway in to the spirits of voodoo.

But why disco? Why did the Lwa respond so effectively to this music? There are many reasons; one reason is that disco music is very much about being alive, and full of metaphors and symbols about the things that we do to create life. The highly sexualised lyrics and rhythm of the music combined with the love of life that only the dead can feel led to a merging of life and death and love and loss into a single paradigm that can be described as Thanateros.

During that temple meeting Disco Voodoo also known as Makossa Voodoo took form and is developing into a complex system of spirits some of African origin some of which are Welsh connected to my local area all of whom are called up by a number of sacred chants from the disco paradigm.

Enochian Aethyrs in the Temple

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

 

Calling in the Elements

by Soror Brigantia

One of the things I’ve always loved about a Hindu puja is the power generated by reciting a list of salutations to the Goddess or God that you are working with. As the puja goes this this recitation of names can raise the energy into a frenzy that can be very powerful for certain workings. Most commonly 108 salutations are used, but if you’re very devout and have more time on your hands you can go for the 1008.

Taking this methodology into other aspects of magical practice I undertook an Elemental calling at a pagan ritual which functioned as a calling for the God of All Things — Baphomet — as well as being an Elemental calling usually done at the start of a Wiccan rite. With a bit of passion and energy put into it I found this more effective than the traditional calling of Air, Fire, Water, Earth and Aethyr. Instead of turning to face the four directions, the ritual was done facing a central fire pit.

Hail to the Element of Hydrogen
Hail to the Element of Helium
Hail to the Element of Lithium
Hail to the Element of Beryllium
Hail to the Element of Boron
Hail to the Element of Carbon
Hail to the Element of Nitrogen
Hail to the Element of Oxygen
Hail to the Element of Fluorine
Hail to the Element of Neon
Hail to the Element of Sodium
Hail to the Element of Magnesium
Hail to the Element of Aluminium
Hail to the Element of Silicon
Hail to the Element of Phosphorus
Hail to the Element of Sulphur
Hail to the Element of Chlorine
Hail to the Element of Argon
Hail to the Element of Potassium
Hail to the Element of Calcium
Hail to the Element of Scandium
Hail to the Element of Titanium
Hail to the Element of Vanadium
Hail to the Element of Chromium
Hail to the Element of Manganese
Hail to the Element of Iron
Hail to the Element of Cobalt
Hail to the Element of Nickel
Hail to the Element of Copper
Hail to the Element of Zinc
Hail to the Element of Gallium
Hail to the Element of Germanium
Hail to the Element of Arsenic
Hail to the Element of Selenium
Hail to the Element of Bromine
Hail to the Element of Krypton
Hail to the Element of Rubidium
Hail to the Element of Strontium
Hail to the Element of Yttrium
Hail to the Element of Zirconium
Hail to the Element of Niobium
Hail to the Element of Molybdenum
Hail to the Element of Technetium
Hail to the Element of Ruthenium
Hail to the Element of Rhodium
Hail to the Element of Palladium
Hail to the Element of Silver
Hail to the Element of Cadmium
Hail to the Element of Indium
Hail to the Element of Tin
Hail to the Element of Antimony
Hail to the Element of Tellurium
Hail to the Element of Iodine
Hail to the Element of Xenon
Hail to the Element of Caesium
Hail to the Element of Barium
Hail to the Element of Lanthanum
Hail to the Element of Cerium
Hail to the Element of Praseodymium
Hail to the Element of Neodymium
Hail to the Element of Promethium
Hail to the Element of Samarium
Hail to the Element of Europium
Hail to the Element of Gadolinium
Hail to the Element of terbium
Hail to the Element of Dysprosium
Hail to the Element of Holmium
Hail to the Element of Erbium
Hail to the Element of Thulium
Hail to the Element of Ytterbium
Hail to the Element of Lutetium
Hail to the Element of Hafnium
Hail to the Element of tantalum
Hail to the Element of Tungsten
Hail to the Element of Rhenium
Hail to the Element of Osmium
Hail to the Element of Iridium
Hail to the Element of Platinum
Hail to the Element of Gold
Hail to the Element of Mercury
Hail to the Element of Thallium
Hail to the Element of lead
Hail to the Element of Bismuth
Hail to the Element of Polonium
Hail to the Element of Astatine
Hail to the Element of radon
Hail to the Element of Radium
Hail to the Element of Francium
Hail to the Element of Actinium
Hail to the Element of Thorium
Hail to the Element of Protactinium
Hail to the Element of Uranium
Hail to the Element of Neptunium
Hail to the Element of Plutonium
Hail to the Element of Americium
Hail to the Element of Curium
Hail to the Element of Berkelium
Hail to the Element of californium
Hail to the Element of Einsteinium
Hail to the Element of Fermium
Hail to the Element of Mendelevium
Hail to the Element of Nobelium
Hail to the Element of Lawrencium
Hail to the Element of Rutherfordium
Hail to the Element of Dubnium
Hail to the Element of Seaborgium
Hail to the Element of Bohrium
Hail to the Element of Hassium
Hail to the Element of Meitnerium
Hail to the Element of Darmstadtium
Hail to the Element of Roentgenium
Hail to the Element of Copernicium
Hail to the Element of Ununtrium
Hail to the Element of Flerovium
Hail to the Element of Ununpentium
Hail to the Element of Livermorium
Hail to the Element of Ununseptium
Hail to the Element of Ununoctium