The Vital Importance of a Magical Persona
Part 2: One Face, Many Masks
Camilla: You, sir, should unmask.
Stranger: Indeed?
Cassilda: Indeed, it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
Stranger: I wear no mask.
Camilla: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda) No mask? No mask!- Robert W. Chambers, Cassilda’s Song
This is a continuation of a series of articles. In case you missed part one, you can check it out here.
These masks we wear, the magical personas and magical mottos, they don’t necessarily need to be grand departures from your core personality. The persona rises out of you. It’s already a piece of you. This persona is simply a curated personality bearing the features of you that you’d like to accentuate in this person. There’s nothing schizophrenic in it, you’ve merely created a detailed portrait of a person that you already are. You contain a multitude, as well. Your personality is complex and even though you may look at this person that you’re creating and have that moment of mundane doubt that often poisons our magic, you must remember that even if this feels like wish fulfillment or make believe, the desire to be that person implies the pre-existence of these qualities, you simply needed an excuse to explore and embody them. Much of the process of magical becoming is a process of unlearning social behaviors which have been reinforced over and over again, across years of experience.
As children, we’re encouraged to explore these fantasy landscapes and play these games of shifting identity. It is our natural inclination to do so. Children do this without prompting. But for some reason, with the onset of late pre-adolescence, as we slouch toward puberty, these psychic walls go up and a cruel herd mentality of social brutality comes out in force to stomp on any divine spark that our childhood selves hold so precious. We lock that mercurial spirit of childhood away for any number of reasons. Some of us are driven to belong and you can’t belong if you’re still living in a world of make-believe, some of us just don’t want to end up in a mental hospital. But it’s there. All of it. It never goes away and you have the key to unlock the box you put it in.
You just have to spend some time exploring yourself to find it.
Ah! You found it! Good. What’s inside? Probably a lot of stuff to think about. With so many corners of your personality to explore, why stop at one magical persona?
I’m a busy guy. I stay as active as possible because sitting idle is generally very bad for me; idle hands, devil’s playground, etc. A direct result of this is a compulsive need to initiate and I’ve entered into numerous lodges. Not all of them do, but several require a magical name to go by and this gives me an opportunity to really dig deep and see what lives inside of me. In a recent initiation I chose a name that I’ll keep secret for the time being. For convenience’s sake we’ll call it Frater PVD. The name simply came to me when I was asked for one but the persona that he embodies had not yet presented itself. I thought about it a good deal and meditated on how the name related to the order’s current, a current much darker than I typically practice. About a month later I performed a series of rituals for that order and a part of it was a trio of invocations that had a profound effect on me and took me by surprise. With each repetition of each invocation a change came over me.
My voice changed.
My face twisted into a strange expression that I’m sure would have been quite frightening to someone who stumbled onto this operation by accident.
Even my posture changed.
In typical ritual work I tend to be quite theatrical with the spoken portions of the operations. My voice deepens, I do a bit of gesturing, and I tend to project as though I’m on a stage. It’s a quality of ceremonial magic that I quite enjoy, being given the free-reign to be as bombastic and outrageous as I feel in the moment. Magic is not for the timid. I decided this quite a long time ago. I’m operating on my own and on my own terms so why not just get crazy with it? I watched some of Poke Runyon’s ritual performances and decided immediately that if you’re going to be in the thick of it, intoning the barbarous names, you may as well do it with panache like he does! You should hear me do the Preliminary Invocation of the Bornless One. It’s a trip. But in this moment something was different. Frater Pera’s ceremonial magic Matt Berry was replaced by something… different. I barked the words of the invocations with a hoarse voice and with the close of the final invocation I was overcome with a primal urge to howl at the moon.
You know? Like a crazy person.
Instead of doing this, I simply raised my head to the sky and let out a long, powerful exhale and watched the frozen breath twist and writhe in the silver moonlight. All the while this is happening, I am clearly aware of myself and a conscious part of me is riding along, like a passenger in my own body, feeling a little uncomfortable with it all, constantly a little scared that the way the sleeves of my robe keep dipping into the collection of candle flames before me will cause the whole thing to catch and off I’ll go to the emergency room, a raving lunatic with forty percent third degree burns and the charred remains of a homemade wizard costume fused to my skin.
Gentle fraters and sorors, meet Frater PVD. He’s terrifying.
In one of my favorite manuals of the occult, Ma’at Magick, the book’s author, Nema, illustrates a method of introspection and self-discovery with a magical technique that she calls Dancing The Masks. In this process you meditate on the major arcana of the tarot and literally perform a sort of interpretive dance to express your understanding of the card and your relationship to it. In a way, for each card you conjure up a mask, a persona that reflects this card’s path on the Tree of Life. This dance and the resulting persona is an expression of the change from one sephira to the next and you can use this persona in magical operations that require a particular Qabalistic energy. Along with this magical performance, you’re encouraged to wear these masks while interacting with people and take note of the effect it has on people.
Not every persona will suit every situation. Some will be fun. Some will be dark and unsettling. Some you’ll want to wear out in public and make known. Others you’ll want to keep hidden and nameless, known only to you. Some may be consistent with the gender that you identify with, others may be the exact opposite, or even stranger and more nebulous expressions. Frater PVD is a persona for a very specific current. He’s not something I want out and running around without my permission. Frater Pera is fun, charismatic, and a side of myself that I love to share with people. As you explore and dance the masks, you’ll find new paradigms of you and you’ll come to give them names and know them well. How you get there is entirely up to you but there’s a catch. Like everything in the occult, the magic is in the details, and you have to know this persona inside and out. Your vision of them should be as well-known to you as your core mundane self.
In Part 3, I’ll explain the application of the theory, a method for going about creating these masks, and how to fully embody them.
Though I’ll never hold my content hostage behind the old Substack paywall, your support would be greatly appreciated and would help things out on my end enormously. I just threw some horror movie shirt designs up on Redbubble for yuks and there’s a tip jar over there on Ko-Fi. If you feel like my writing is worth crossing my palm with silver, then by all means, I urge you to take a look.
Fratres, sorores tho 🙃