My Vision For a Personal Temple and Lodge
I've been struggling lately. I'm at a point where my studies have landed at a standstill since they now require an actual temple space and in order to progress I need to build a few things. Up to this point, whenever I need to lay a few things out for ritual purposes, I just set them up on the coffee table in front of the couch in my living room and settle in to meditate but I'm now at a point where I need to open and close an actual temple and this requires a few things.
Icons of the four Archangels of the quarters
A horned altar
A magic circle
I also have need of the magical triangle of art whereupon I hang the black scrying mirror for Goetic evocation but I'm not really factoring it into my temple build since the Goetia aren't officially on my initiatory radar at the moment.
Right off the bat, I have a problem with the given Archangel icons in the official Ordo Templi Astarte training manuals. These are four illustrations made by Poke Runyon as, I can only assume, the angels appeared to him in visions. For instance, Michael, the Archangel of the south, representing the element of fire. This illustration has all the needed symbolism. Michael is often depicted in armor and he certainly bears the wand as his magical weapon because that's the tool associated the element of fire. But this is not the Michael that appears to me in visions. When I perform the LBRP and visualize the angels, he appears to me as a fierce looking Arabic man in red robes, a narrow white tunic hangs from his shoulders, bearing the elemental symbol of fire in red and his eyes burn like smoking coals in a furnace. In his right hand he wields a spear adorned with torn strips of red cloth. In my mind's eye, he is positively badass and, most importantly, he's my vision and since I'm building a temple that I intend to use as my personal ceremonial space, I really want it to reflect my values. I first petitioned a favorite artist and friend of mine, Tom Whalen, to give it a go but Tom is kind of a big deal these days and is way too busy to take on some nickel and dime commission. Then I hit up Randi Laing and chickened out because I didn't think I could swing her prices. A dude I work with is a hell of an artist but asking him to do some work for me would involve me revealing myself to be a total fucking weirdo and I'd kind of rather not. So I don't know what to do.
The thing that I love most so far about The OTA is how deliberately theatrical everything is. Invocations and evocations are delivered in mysterious tones and the ritual spaces that I've seen in the OTA training materials are set up to look like Hollywood depictions of fantasy alchemist laboratories. You take a look at the ritual spaces of Golden Dawn and OTO practitioners and the spaces tend to be rather spartan with their check-pattern floors, double cube altars and pillars. They're like dollar-store versions of Freemason ritual spaces. On the other hand, the favored mode of presentation for your average OTA ritual space is rooted deep down in any given Renaissance Fair and I just cannot get down with that. It makes sense, in context. Before Poke had established the OTA as a formal entity, he'd been rolling with Fred Adams and Feraferia, what is ostensibly America's oldest continuously operating western neopagan outfit. Because of that, the OTA seems to have a foot in that world with people dancing and singing gaily around Maypoles on Walpurgisnacth with flowers in their hair while men in carved wooden goat horns and kilts play grabass with giggling women dressed as wood nymphs and I just cannot abide that shit. It's just not for me.
The Edinburgh Beltane Festival is way more my speed. It looks like Mad Max meets Burning Man without all the fucking Silicon Valley CEO's barfing up Ayahuasca everywhere.
So I've been thinking. My goal is to incorporate my own OTA lodge here in New England. Once I've been initiated into the inner order and that sort of thing is an option, I'd like to tailor the lodge to my own aesthetic, which is the antithesis of these neopagan outfits. Out here where I am, there is no shortage of neopagan options for people dabbling in the esoteric. If you want Celtic knots and Goddess worship, New England, with it's proximity to old eldritch Salem has you covered. But if you're like me and that sort of thing really turns you off with its hordes of greasy long-haired men regaling you with a spoken essay on the virtues of AD&D 2.5 versus Pathfinder's popularity while drinking Bud Light out of a hollowed out horn, you're going to find yourself hard up for occult lodge options. I don't want to sound like I'm shitting on Wicca or any of that, either. I respect the shit out of that stuff. The Cabot Coven are the real deal and their moon rituals at the Enchanted shop are seriously beautiful and centering experiences. Christopher Penczak's Temple of Witchcraft does a great job, too. It''s just not my scene. There's so much "Merrie Olde England" in it and I don't connect with that stuff at all.
My aesthetic is way different, amigos.
I dream of table rappings and spirit cabinets; seances and ectoplasm. Doctor fuckin' Strange. Sure, I love a badass looking tau robe because nobody looks like an asshole when they're performing magic in one of those but there has to be a way to bridge the old Renaissance wizard robes with a more retrofuture mad scientist meets 1920's spiritualist meets Sorcerer Supreme vibe. I was reading the chapter which deals with building your temple equipment in Poke Runyon's Book of Solomon's Magick when I came across this thrilling footnote:
We started using u.v. lighting in our temple back in 1970. We use it only for the Holy Names around the Magick Circle and on our planetary septagram design. For this limited purpose it is very effective because it keeps the wards of power and the correspondences of the working always visually charged and constantly seen even out of the corner of the eye. The ultraviolet light also lends an otherworldly atmosphere to the temple. It is, in fact, very much like the electric blue of the astral plane. Of course, we have been criticized by magicians with far less operative experience who believe that only olive oil lamps and candle light are acceptable to their spirits -- but our spirits seem to enjoy the higher frequencies. We have also experimented with a Vandergraff static generator to charge our Almadel rock crystal ball. "The Orb" absorbs energy at such a rate that it actually doubles the usual spark gap, creating two foot long lightning. (Such experiments are more common in European lodges than in America.)
My mind reeled. Two foot long plasma arcs and black lights in the temple setting? We can do that? Guys. That's awesome.
I can't speak to the "electric blue of the astral plane", nor do I know anything about the differences between American and European magical lodges but this is exactly the kind of aesthetic that I'm pursuing in my occult studies. Call it vain, call it childish, call it whatever you want but even as my broader consciousness awakens and I shake off the earthly parts of me that don't serve me I still find myself chasing the entertainment in all of this. Sure, my ultimate goal is to perform the Abramelin Operation and finally meet up with the Holy Guardian Angel that saved me from oblivion and find out what my true purpose is on this stupid rock which hurtles through space, its inhabitants seemingly stuck at 2 minutes to midnight forever, but at the same time, I may as well have some fun with it and engage my profane senses at the same time. After all, isn't a union of the high and low at the core of all this?
So, I'm planting my flag now. In this moment, in the infancy of my occult awakening I declare the beginnings of my occult lodge. A lodge as real as any other, which aims to awaken any individual that may cross its threshold. A lodge with none of the medieval Ren Fair nonsense but all of the theatricality of a silent horror film or mystical super hero comic book. It'll be everything the OTA promotes and teaches, wrapped in a cloak of Dark Shadows, EC Comics, and the mad scientist antics of any given 1940's action serial. Wild, primal, shamanic but also fun and clothed in the Halloween hokum that most modern occult practice is missing.
Presenting: