Staying sane in the Chapel Perilous
The very real need for mental health support in occult studies
One of the first things I was taught when I learned how to read tarot was how each suit in the deck tells a story of something that goes from an idea to its fullest manifestation. The ten card in each suit stands a 50/50 chance of being something really great or being a real pain in the ass. In the suit of Swords, the pain in the ass is literal. The dude has several swords stabbing him in the butt, among other places. The idea here is that the sword cuts both ways and if you follow the sword to its logical conclusion, it eventually cuts you. The journey of the suit is pretty God damn dark and I cringe harder when I see swords land on the table than I do when I see The Tower but, thatās kind of the point. The Ten of Swords is a cautionary tale about your own devices leading to your undoing.
I usually donāt do this, but I feel obligated to offer a content warning for the rest of this article. Iām going to be talking about my own psychosis and drug addiction. It has a happy ending, though. I promise.
Compartmentalizing the Madness
Using myself as an example, Iāve spoken about this at some length in the past and even steered my own writing away from it, but this whole Codex Astarte project was originally positioned as a way for me to have a magical journal that I could write to on demand, without having to bang it out on paper. I never intended it to draw an audience but the internet being what it is, it was only a matter of time. I was facing personal demons of an extremely nasty nature and I came to magic to heed the call of a force which was beckoning me to it.
My life began to spiral out of control following the suicide of an old friend of mine some time back. For two years the spiral got bigger and faster until I crashed and burned. I was addicted to benzodiazepines and opiates. I was a pill head with a bottomless supply of dope available on the deep web and I was living a double life at home, desperately trying to keep a mask of sanity in place while eating all the Xanax bars in the world and snorting Oxycontin off the counter by night and the way those pills cost, I was starting to look at alternatives that would save me money. Alternatives like heroin. I was drinking entire bottles of vodka several times a week and would occasionally wake up in the morning hours finding myself asleep on the bathroom floor, not knowing how I got there. I did all of this to self-medicate psychotic symptoms that manifested as inescapable hallucinations of hornets crawling all around me and the sound of my own voice taunting me, needling at my various paranoias, and keeping a dark flame alive in me that reinforced the notion that I was a horrible monster to be feared. Insanity has a terrible gravity to it and itās safe to say that in pretty much all cases, it doesnāt get better with time. It snowballs and mine reached a point where I put into motion a suicide plan Iād had in mind for quite some time and ended surrounded by cops as one of them nervously relieved me of a loaded 9mm.
I describe this in detail because I firmly believe in dragging this kicking and screaming out into the open where it can be seen for what it is. We hide our sickness because weāve been conditioned to see it as a shame and because of this when we suffer, we suffer alone. Every one of us is struggling every day and far more of us than we are led to believe are struggling in dire ways. When I came out of the hospital, having kicked dope and received a diagnosis and medication, I started attending 12-step meetings. I didnāt particularly care for AA but I liked NA a lot. My home group was amazing. Addicts shit on NA because it has a success rate percentage in the low teens and I understand why that is, but itās beyond the scope of this article. Our group was a success story. Our regulars got clean and stayed clean. I saw people reach heights where they landed good jobs and kept them. Mothers stripped of custody got their kids back. Habitual offenders stopped having to go to drug court. We had some relapses. Every group does. Some of our friends would disappear for months and show up again looking worse for wear. Some of our friends disappeared and later turned up dead because fentanyl be like that. But we succeeded because we struggled together. We put all our shit on the table and sorted through it as a group of addicts. And we were a variety of people: young, old, homeless dope fiends, professional-class jabronis like me, but we were united in our common struggle. When we lost someone, we felt the loss as a group. When someone put together the clean time for a new tag (basically the NA equivalent of the AA chip) we celebrated together in a way that is a rare sort of authentic.
Support works. Healing is possible for everyone. NA is what eventually helped me come to a place where I could narrow the focus I put on occult studies because of its reliance on handing over control to a higher power. Prior to that I was an obnoxious chaos magician trying to find the signal in the noise and getting more noise on me than signal. Iām here today, writing about gnosticism and Hermetic philosophy because of that program. But I donāt want to pretend that the madness went away. I saw a therapist, I attended regular meetings. I found ways to silence the voice and make the hornets disappear and a large part of it was having something irrational and strange to sink my crazy into: magic. The attention I put into bitcoin exchanges and which darknet market had the best prices and most reliable records for honest sales was redirected into ruthlessly devouring books about angels, demons, kabbalah, etc. Magic was a nice, convenient place for me to take the crazy and and put it to constructive use.
Butā¦
If I hadnāt kept one foot in the real and sought out counseling and in-person NA meetings I might not have managed as well I feel I ended up. Iām constantly talking about the Middle Pillar. Itās the place we want to be. Either side of the Tree is an extreme and you experience only the passive or the aggressive. Our goal is to be fluid.
We want to combine the pillars and funnel their qualities into a single, cohesive experience. Weāre beings of flesh and spirit and we have to inhabit both of worlds. You lose if you forsake one for the other. Anyway, Crowley made adequate demonstrations of what fun can be had when you celebrate the spirit and flesh. Had I hewn entirely to the real, I would never have found the spirituality that I feel has set me free. Iāve written before about the nightmarish ordeal of initiation and there are qualities of my dark night of the soul that I omitted because my articles are already long enough but my awakening was no accident. Had I slipped to the other pillar, entirely, and put all my energy into magic I would likely have lost my grip on the material and ended up like one of those #starseed dorks online who think that Donald Trump is the avatar of Christ, sent to Earth to herald the arrival of our space brothers from Sirius.
If youāve spent any time online dealing with strangers in the occult scene then you know what Iām talking about here. There is a tremendous number of people who mistake The Great Work for the only work and it invariably leads them down strange passages. I was a customer of a local reiki master who I quite liked. Her vibe was nice and very reassuring but over time her social media presence was a huge disappointment. She turned out to be just another one of these extremely online new agers in the age of the Kali Yuga: Anti-Vaccine, āPlandemicā, #savethechildren. There are other varieties and they will likely end up in a Magic Stereotypes Bingo article on Codex A sooner or later but you know the types and theyāre the reason that those of us who have a solid grasp on our spiritual practice and our sanity end up lumped in with the maniacs. You get people who canāt shut up about all the important people they were in former lives or how theyāre the blood-ancestor of Crowley in this life or you end up with nerds like that dickweed on Youtube, Styxhexenhammer who trims his mustache into one of those Hitler toothbrush āstaches and drapes a cheap leather jacket over his slight, bare torso becauseā¦ I donāt know. It looks cool to him, I guess? Dude posts something like fifteen hour-long videos a day on his channel about the occult and how fascism is good, actually.
Side note: If youāre shopping for new occult books and you find those silver-text on black covers books bearing the credit āedited by Tarl Warwickā pass on them. That Styxās real name and there are far better volumes out there than his. Donāt give that asshole your money.
The revelations that come to us about ourselves in these studies are absolutely vital. The gnosis is important but itās worthless if you canāt navigate the physical world. I got lucky in that my therapist found my esoteric adventures very exciting and encouraged me to explore. Not everyone is going to have someone like that in their lives and thatās fine. You just need to find someone who isnāt going to listen to you talk and check off the DSM criteria for all the crazy shit you do by night in your pursuit of ascension. It is vitally important that we talk to someone rooted in the real world, however. These currents we wade in have strange energies about them that erode sanity with time. Routinely exposing yourself to them will unmoor you from the reality that youāre unfortunately forced to live in.
The occult is supposed to be an empowering path toward truth. Itās supposed to make you a better person but it doesnāt take much to start seeing significance in even the most mundane shit. Thatās schizophrenia and you can be the most powerful wizard in your head, but youāre powerless if youāre on the wrong side of the doors on a locked psychiatric unit. Going back to my original point: Magic is a sword and the sword cuts both ways. Donāt let magic be your ten of swords.