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.
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.