Thee I Invoke, The Bornless One!
Not pictured in this photo: Me.
Man. Walpurgisnacht was good to me.
I head home for lunch on most days. It's the benefit of working close to home. It's a quick jaunt and I can spend a little time unwinding from the morning stress of being an agency code monkey by playing a little Far Cry 5, which I'm presently obsessed with, or I can light a couple of candles and some incense and get down to some meditation or tarot. Yesterday I went home with the intention of firing up my XBox and raising hell in Hope County but the universe, apparently, had other plans for me as a 2.2gb game patch download was going to take longer than my lunch break, so I improvised instead, cleaned up the living room a bit and sat down for a quick meditation sesh with a twist.
Back when I was trying to get my feet wet in the occult and figure out where all this was going, I found myself drifting away from Chaos Magic as a dedicated practice and began experimenting with entry-level ritual in the Golden Dawn current. I began performing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram on the regular after reading the incredibly cool breakdown at the Studio Arcanis forum. I also began working The Middle Pillar ritual found in Israel Regardie's monstrous Golden Dawn tome. I was also reading Gordon White's book The Chaos Protocols, which had a section on a ritual called The Bornless Ritual.
White's book played a huge role in me bailing on Chaos Magic, I might add. You're practicing magic. You have the power of the universe at your command and you're going to -- what? -- use that power to get a job at Google? Tilt a few bucks in your direction? A lot of the modern Chaos Magic talking heads seem to be about nothing more than leveraging the subtle art in the service of raw, unprocessed capitalism and, I don't know. Fuck that. I'm being called by a higher power. That Assiah/material realm nonsense has no place in my magical model.
The Bornless Ritual really captivated me, though. I didn't quite understand it, at first. It seemed like one of those daily rituals you perform, like the LBRP, but it's long. The LBRP and the Kabbalistic Cross take somewhere around 2 minutes to perform at once. The Bornless Ritual is heavy on the wording and features a lot of Words of Power. White's book implies that a magician should make regular use of it but upon review, I'm not even sure that White understands what it's for. I did some further digging, though. It seemed extremely unwise after a time to be performing this ritual without a solid grasp on what it does. I came up with Jake Stratton Kent's bizarro (and strangely hard to find) pamphlet, The Headless One.
The Headless One is Aleister Crowley's Thelema-specific translation of this old-as-balls ritual and Kent's pamphlet really breaks it down as it applies to numerous magical systems. It really helped me get it together and understand what it was that I was performing. I suppose that it's completely fucking dumb to perform a ritual when you don't really understand what it's for so I was pleased to learn that it wasn't really harming me. As a matter of fact, it's a ritual meant as a preliminary invocation for dealing with the Goetia, or any wild spirit, really. You cast your circle and then invoke The Bornless One, assuming the mantle of the supreme power in order to send a message to the evoked spirits that you're the #1 dude in charge in your ritual space and not to try anything funny.
On Sunday I performed the ritual but I got the wording all messed up and sourced my script from a couple of different places. In the end, I felt a definite feeling of the power fizzling out. Almost as though it was rising but switching gears and scripts put a huge kink in the firehose of cosmic truth and whatever was supposed to come out of it slowed to a weak trickle before stopping altogether. But yesterday I let it rip. I began with my usual LBRP/Kabbalistic Cross routine and sat down for 10 minutes of fully focused Tratakam meditation in order to get myself in a fully focused mindset. Then I got up off the floor, faced the east and began reading from the The Headless One, as found in Kent's incredibly comprehensive pamphlet. I made one adjustment, though. In other translations of this ritual, you announce yourself to be Moses, or Mosheh, the Lord's chosen dude. But in Crowley's version, from Liber Samekh, you announce yourself as the prophet and I did so in the performance of this ritual. The outcome and the momentary surge of power that came from that gesture was wild and in the end, having raised my energy from a dramatic reading to practically shouting at the universe, I was left with a distinct feeling of power. In that moment I was larger than the room I occupied. It was like the aftermath of the pathworkings (1, 2, 3, 4). I needed time to silently contemplate what I had just done.
I returned to work to a couple pleasant surprises. I credit performing this ritual with this incredibly pleasant afternoon outcome.
An old friend contacted me, asking if I was cool with an old horror comic that I wrote and he illustrated be republished in a book for another publisher and that this time they have a budget so we might actually get paid for it.
Poke Runyon got in touch with me to tell me that I was eligible for first degree OTA initiation but to hold out and do the work toward second degree initiation because they were planning on a power weekend at either the Rivendell Lodge or the Lodge in Austin (Montsalvat Lodge, I think?).
The former is fun. It was the first time I'd written a comic and had it see print but only about 200 people ever actually saw the thing. I was real proud of it. The latter, however, that was the part I was most proud of. I'd been in another holding pattern for a little over a week since turning in my pathworking notes and wasn't sure what was on the horizon for me. The next phase of my training involves making actual ritual equipment. So, I'll finally have my own horned altar, my own magic circle as seen in the OTA training materials. I'm not the craftiest guy in the world but I do love making magical stuff.
The icing on the cake came when I got home after work and nearly tripped over a box containing two orders of Soylent that had been mistakenly shipped to me after a weird shipping mixup. So, I basically got two more orders for free on top of what I already paid for.
I'm taking all of this as a sign from The Universe that not only did I follow through and not put off spiritual growth in favor of video games but that following through and doing my part, and doing it right, was going to be rewarded.
My next order of business is to order a copy of Hermetic Yoga, which plays a big part in the path to the second degree. The reading list for the next degree also involves breaking out my copies of Regardie's Golden Dawn, Franz Bardon's Initiation into Hermetics, and find copies of Mansions of the Moon: A Lunar Zodiac for Astrology and Magic by Christopher Warnock and Mathers's The Key of Solomon the King. Expect photos of my ritual gear.