Looking ahead to 2020
It seems like the only time I write in this journal anymore is when my own practice has either been stagnant or I just haven't done anything in a while and it looks like I'm in that spot again.
I know that I have to do this. Magic, that is. It was an imperative handed down to me from something much higher in the cosmic order of things. Something that was forced to take over and drive for me when it looked like I wasn't going to make it out of 2016 alive. Since then, I've stumbled and groped my way through spacetime, trying to find some kind of path to the divine but nothing is sticking. Chaos magic experiments without a higher power safety net resulted in disastrous consequences. Studies in Solomonic magic and joining a mail correspondence course taught me some pretty solid lessons in fundamentals and outfitted me with some ritual equipment that I'm quite proud of but left me wanting. Poke Runyon's OTA had some really important stepping stones but the Feraferia qualities of the order, Renaissance Fair neopagan tropes, bored me to death.
Then I tangled with a working group on the internet as we studied a force that we came to call The Angels of Omnipotence. There was definitely something there but my default state when working with the unseen seems to be paranoia. My associates dove in head first. They chased something in a context similar to the findings of Dee and Kelly, but where the Enochian system of magic is extremely specific and quite complex, The AoO insisted on threadbare simplicity, which I became suspicious of. So if you emailed me asking about my work with the angels and I blew you off,
I'm sorry.
I'm not convinced that they were what they said they were.
I closed that door and don't plan on opening it again.
My associates didn't have proper ritual spaces. They cast circles in their bedrooms with the Operant Field method but still lacked the formal warding symbols of a magic circle like the sort you'd use to work with the Goetia or like the one I have. They were also foregoing invocation rituals like The Preliminary Invocation of the Bornless One and seemed to be rewarded handsomely for omitting these safety precautions. I took care to protect myself and my house and the results were tepid, which led me to think that these spirits weren't happy about being contained in the way that I was containing them and if that were the case, there was probably some ulterior motive going on if their most amazing feats were performed in a ritual setting where the rules were laissez-faire at best. So, no thank you. Not today, Satan.
I'm looking forward to 2020, though. I put some pieces on the board and the wheels are in motion. All that a year of fun exploration and serious spiritual expansion will require is that I find the Will to follow through.
A new order
A little ways back, I received an email out of the blue from Allen Greenfield about that Initiation piece I wrote for Gods and Radicals. We went back and forth for a few days and it resulted in a nice little conversation that turned me on to some occult practice that I didn't know existed. If you're in the dark, Allen has written a few books on the occult that I discovered back when I was piecing together this space ritual intended to manifest a wave of UFO abductions.
Secret Rituals of the Men In Black
The Roots of Modern Magick: Glimpses of the Authentic Tradition from 1700-2000, An Anthology
Allen introduced me to Free Illuminism which echoed my thoughts on arbitrary hierarchy in initiation orders. It seems very much to be like a Montessori school for students of the occult, if you catch my meaning. And what luck! There's a lodge right near me! There's still initiation but it all seems to coincide with Michael Bertiaux's Points Chauds system. I don't really understand it yet, but it seems to have a lot in common with Enochian Aethyrs or the Golden Dawn's Pathworking. I followed the group on Facebook, which I was doing great not using until now. I also reached out to the head of the local lodge and put things in motion. We're having our first lodge meeting in January 2020.
A week later I discovered the documentary series, Hellier.
Hellier is great. It's one of those conspiracy and paranormal grand unification theories that manages to find harmony with some of my favorite paranormal shit. Right off the bat, the show drops a reference to Allen's book Secret Cypher of the UFOnauts, which I found strange because it's a pretty obscure little book and here I was talking to the dude a week before. Weird synchronicity, right? Turns out that synchronicity is at the heart of Hellier.
I hardly ever binge TV shows. Watching them all at once doesn't do much for me, but I binged Hellier and finished season 1 just in time for season 2 to drop. And who should make an appearance in season 2? Allen.
New adventures
Hellier lit a fire in me. It helps that the cast is very likable and interesting and reminds me of some of my fellow weirdo friends, but watching the Newkirk's initiation and broadcasting the broader ideas from Jacques Vallee's Passport to Magonia and Patrick Harpur's rad book Daimonic Reality got me pretty excited. And being as I am in an area where the high-weirdness has been dormant for some time, I figured it was time to poke the sleeping bear and embark on my own journey into mystery. So I've been ordering books and sending emails as I make the first overtures to research some local New England weirdness that will ultimately take me into the heart of The Bridgewater Triangle and hopefully find the origins of a White Mountains ghost story that has been scaring people around Mount Moosilauke since the 1800's.
New tech
I got a new job this year, which was nice. Things feel stable for once and I've been able to actually apply all the new programming techniques that I picked up last year while trying to be more valuable to my last employer. I ended up laid off (again) so fat load of good that did me. But it all worked out in the end and I'm writing some of the best code I've ever written. Once again, Hellier inspires me, and it all connects. At one point, while parked in one of the TNT domes made famous by the Mothman case, Dana Newkirk is outfitted with a piece of tech called The God Helmet. Back in the day, when this thing was invented, it was cynically built by scientists to electromagnetically stimulate the human limbic system, that inner part of the brain which controls our most primitive mental functions. The experiments were meant to induce altered states of consciousness similar to those reported by people in the throes of religious ecstasy and the reported results from these experiments are pretty nuts. People have reported out-of-body experiences, heightened psychic awareness, and full on visions of God. It's as though materialist scientists were trying to prove that the religious experience is nothing but a manipulation of electrical and chemical activity in the brain but those of us operating out here in cloud cuckoo land know better. The pineal gland is located right in the middle of the god damn limbic system. Most of the time, this gland seems to be doing what it does, trundling along, secreting melatonin, but bombard that little guy with electrical current and it's like giving a can of Monster Energy to a toddler.
Depending on whether or not I can get through to the Newkirks, I'd like to see about making my own helmet. I could easily hack together the pieces and write the software with a Raspberry Pi and Arduino to run the current and record biometrics. I'm just lacking in the specifics of the current and all that. But then Greg dropped this tweet.
Greg might be riffing or maybe there is a project but since my own attempts at starting an esoteric research group locally were met with interest but sudden disengagement when it meant members had to actually leave their homes and be social for a couple hours at a time, the whole thing crashed and burned. It's criminal. I have so much to offer. I'm good with tech, I can write code, I've spent my life cultivating a reputation for being a really weird dude, and I'm a magician! Surely there's use for me in the paranormal research world. But I guess after Hellier S2 dropped, Greg's inbox has been stuffed and I'm almost 100% positive that I'll never manage to grab the dude's attention. One way or the other, though, I'm going to start making up the plans for how to piece together such a device.
Greg, I can help. Hit me up.
Religion?
Oof. This is a tough one but it does seem to be a thing that's happening in my life. Me and The Lord are on good terms these days. Me and The Church, though. Man, fuck that shit. I was raised Catholic. I'm confirmed, even. But the religion never managed to get its hooks in me like it did some of my friends who are believers and attend mass on the regular since they were kids. For a time, I was a grouchy atheist. Christianity as an organized religion comes with a lot of baggage and has a lot of really heinous shit to answer for. Conservative political ideology poisoned the well and The Roman Catholic Church is complicit in sex crimes. It's a whole lot of filth that I feel gets all over you if you choose to participate. And so I don't. Or, well, didn't.
No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to shake my fascination with High Church. I'm a fan of the cartoonishly grimdark game and fiction series, Warhammer 40,000, which envisions an horrific future of endless war and crusades to support a hyper-fascist human empire that is very clearly designed to look like medieval Catholicism. Most of the human units in the game wear bulky armor, studded with blessings on tattered parchment and carry all sorts of icons into battle that represent the human emperor. Everyone's a zealot and man alive, God help you if you happen to have some kind of psychic ability. There are zealots armed with flame throwers out there and they're looking for you.
I'm also a devotee of the Dark Souls video game series, a punishing series of "hard video games" that feature, again, an hilariously cartoonish grimdark vision of medieval Catholicism. It's not quite as in-your-face as Blasphemous, which I also quite enjoy, but there's plenty of vaulted high cathedral ceilings, stained glass, and misery to go around. All this morbid fantasy dovetails nicely with my fascination with The Knights Templar, The Cathars, and Grail Myth. And what's more, there seems to be a nice puzzle-piece shaped gap in the grotesque aesthetic of crusades-era Europe where all of the melodramatic divinations I've received should fit. I've pulled cards, I've spoken to spirits, it all comes back to me in a way that I have to stay skeptical of because I'm forced to keep one foot in madness at all times. When the great beyond talks back to you and tells you that there's a great imbalance and that black lodge forces have the advantage right now, things can sound a little crazy. Like I'm one tarot reading away from stomping around the town square with a sandwich board that says THE END IS NIGH! But things get even worse when emissaries of God speak to you and tell you that you're the hand which wields the sword because I'm sure that there have been mass shootings that start that way.
Getting back to Allen Greenfield, who seems to be a force of initiation these days between my personal experience with him and the way that he's been received as a result of the popularity of Hellier. Allen put me in touch with the head of a local Free Illuminism lodge who is also an ordained priest in the Apostolic Johannite Church, a gnostic sect which checks a lot of boxes for me. I haven't formally joined but it's not far down the road. Gnosticism is revealing itself to me as a thick vein of discovery and research to be done. I've stumbled for so long, trying to find my true path and I think I may have found it in esoteric christianity, a place I never saw myself. But here I am, looking to seriously pursue combat magic, self-defense and exorcism to help bring balance, healing, and peace to people but in a paradigm that I fully connect with. The Johannites stem from Catholicism but seem to carry none of the ugly political baggage. It's an inclusive order of spirituality that I can fully get down with. I can embrace the Christianity that I was born into but remain free of the dogmatic expectation of extra-curricular Catholicism which states that I have to hate on people because they're gay or got an abortion.
In spite of all the grotesque aesthetic that I can't seem to get enough of, I can work within the framework of High Church, still practice magic, still seek gnosis, and put my occult knowledge to work to cultivate the spark of the divine in all people.
As long as I stay focused, I can make all of this happen. I just need to stay on top of my own shit and not get lazy.