Question About Cultural Appropriation in Magick

Papa Midnite: You are a magpie of magic. A thief of tradition. You steal from other people's cultures and beliefs to suit your own purposes.

John Constantine: Oh, yeah? Well, whatever works, eh?

- from the TV Show: Constantine

There is still some buzz going around about how cultural appropriation is somehow despicable, reprehensible and exploitative. It’s gotten so bad that a recent blog author stopped teaching Yoga and discussed her reasons in detail. While I agree that there are plenty of ignorant people out there who are unable or unwilling to respect the sources of those various spiritual methods and techniques that have been dispersed via cultural diffusion, this should not stop individuals from engaging in them to their own betterment. You can find that blog article here.

We live in a consumer oriented culture and if someone can make money from an idea then they will do so. However we judge that kind of social transaction it does continually happen. We just don’t have to be crass or selfish about our use of it and instead respect the sources from which various methods and techniques have their origin. A case in point is the wide-spread use and appeal of Mindfulness meditation and yogic techniques which have helped millions of people to literally shed stress and anxiety from their minds and bodies.

Should this work be halted because the original ideas and techniques come from India and Asia, and are therefore a form of cultural appropriation? Now it is true that a specific author (Jon Kabbit-Zinn - “Full Catastrophe Living”) has developed and published this technique, but he produced it while studying eastern methods of meditation and yoga. People are paying hundreds of dollar to individuals who are certified instructors to take an eight-week course in Mindfulness. Is this cultural appropriation? Should it be considered completely unethical and therefore stopped? I am attending an eight week course right now and I certainly won’t quit because someone is making money off of this technique. So far the results have been remarkable, but I, my classmates and the instructor (who is an initiated Zen meditation teacher) have approached this whole process in a respectful and serious manner.

I think that this issue has been adequately addressed by a couple of websites, the Yoga Abode and The Times of India (article by Yogi Ashwini). However, the argument continues, seemingly unabated. (Even my fellow work associates from India are puzzled by this issue and reject it out of hand.)

“Nothing is immune to modern influence - and indviduals' plentiful attempts to create so-called 'new' yoga styles is, in part, a reflection of the way yoga has succesfully [sic] changed to embrace modern expectations and lifestyles.”

“From the point of view of yoga (which is my subject) let me assure all human kind that yoga is not the domain of a region. Yoga means a union with yourself (divinity unrealised). Yoga does not and cannot belong to an individual. Yoga is for a yogi and a yogi is beyond the scope of a religion or country.”

I find this harsh judgement about cultural appropriation to be an extreme exaggeration aimed at somehow maintaining a higher ethic by being politically correct. There are situations where individuals and groups can be accused of actually stealing the techniques, practices and beliefs of a given culture or people without either permission or proper vetting. Yet these are very specific charges which shouldn’t be applied so loosely as to include practically everyone. This same charge couldn’t be applied to westerners who are using meditation systems devised in the East, in fact such a charge is completely erroneous. The diffusion of ideas is a process that goes back to paleolithic times and in antiquity there was an enormous traffic in ideas, beliefs and techniques that moved wherever goods and people happened to travel. This is no different today, in fact cultural diffusion has profoundly accelerated in the post-modern world.

The basis to this idea of wrongful expropriation, as it was explained to me, has its origin in the fact that appropriation (without citing the source) of ethnic artistic practices robs the indigenous artisans of money that they would otherwise gain if their work were promoted instead. This does make sense if the appropriation doesn’t cite the inspired source of that work, since it is often a situation where a white person who is culturally western can more readily be promoted than a (non-white) person who is from a different and non-western culture. However, my argument is that if the source is cited then wouldn’t that white western person be actually promoting an ethnic artistic technique which might otherwise remain obscure or unknown? And, if that technique became popular it might just enable those ethnic artisans to achieve a certain notoriety and popularity, and thereby a higher remuneration than they might have realized otherwise. A case in point is when rock music adapted Indian music and instruments to its songs in the late 1960's. No one in the West would have heard of Ravi Shankar (or for that matter, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi) had it not been for the Beetles publically promoting him.

This is a sticky issue in regards to all artistic endeavors since the production of cultural artifacts do indeed belong to the culture that produced them. The diffusion of ideas, on the other hand, is pretty tough to prove or enforce unless they are legally patented or can be legally proven to be owned. Yet even patents or ownership/authorship eventually run out or become part of the common domain. Ideas are readily swapped and exchanged between peoples, nations and cultures and it is likely that such diffusion will become ever more frequent and rapid as the information age matures. We live in an age of world music/media and an explosion of the appreciation of non-western and non-white cultures. I believe that it is a part of human nature to copy and appropriate things that we see and experience. However, some ideas and techniques have become part of our overall world cultural heritage. These are things that belong to no region or group, but do have an ultimate source that should be recognized and honored.

This brings me to the whole issue of appropriation in the area of the practice of magick. Yes, Papa Midnight is correct to accuse John Constantine (and therefore, indirectly, the rest of us western magicians) of being a “magpie of magic.” What isn’t stated and is also true is that the Voudon tradition was also a melange of African and European-Catholic beliefs and practices. The people of Western Africa could potentially accuse Voudon practitioners of expropriating their beliefs and practices, and in some way, so could the Catholic Church. That would make the character Papa Midnight into a magpie of magic himself, or a bit of a hypocrite. These various traditions are organic, which means that they are continuing to change, mutate and adapt to their environment. I believe that appropriation is part of that adaption process, and it affects all cultural systems to a lesser or greater degree.

In the practice of magick, we western magicians are the worst of all magpies of appropriation. However, I choose to call this process “adaptive diffusion” when it is ethical and esthetically elegant. Still, there are boundaries and limits to what can be freely appropriated.

Where do I draw the line? For me, the line is determined by a combination of esthetics and ethics. If I were to appropriate deities, beliefs, practices and techniques from a specific tradition or culture and not give them either the proper citation, vetting or respect then I could be considered unethical. If I were to combine different deities or cultural spiritual sources that were either inimical or incompatible then I would be creating something that is esthetically poor and inelegant. A poor combination of attributes or clashing cultural artifacts or a cumbersome structure will doom a ritual or ceremony. It could also cause some not-so-subtle repercussions as well. These are things that I believe we should avoid, of course, and everything else is just a matter of research and experimentation.

So why am I going on about this issue? Because I am a veritable magpie and a thief of other peoples’ magic. I have appropriated the Tridentine Mass rite for own my personal and magical use, and I have robbed the Golden Dawn and Crowley of much of their lore to act as the foundation for my own work. What I have now could be considered uniquely my own, but I know for a fact that I have used other people’s rituals and techniques to build it. I have also taken other methodologies and rites from various sources and have modified them to fit into the context of my own lore, such as the Abramelin and the Portae Lucis workings. I have shamelessly robbed and pilfered various evocations, sigils, characters and talismans from countless grimoires and original sources, and I have adapted my lore to the myriad authors’ books that I have read and studied. So, yes, I am a magpie and in fact I am proud of it.

It really means that my lore is dynamic, organic, constantly changing (and maturing, I hope) and also adapting to circumstances. I have truly made all of this lore my own, but the sources are from everyone else. Still, I did manage to invent some new things, and I am hoping that others will like these new ideas and shamelessly use them in their lore, too. 

As Constantine says, “Whatever works.” Yes, I am advocating that we magicians should behave like thieving magpies, it is only human to do so. Yet we should also be guided by some simple ethics and esthetics. Even thieves have principles and rules, at least the successful ones do.

Frater (Thieving Magpie) Barrabbas

As the Light Dimmed in Egypt - Linking the PGM, Nag Hammadi and Stele of Jeu

The Roman province of Egypt was remarkable in the great confluence of cultures and ideas that managed to mix and merge together to formulate whole new perspectives. Yet it was also a place where native Egyptians found themselves demoted to third class citizens who were egregiously exploited, subjugated and crushed into unforgiving poverty and despair. While Rome extracted a massive grain harvest every year to feed itself (and its privileged allies in Alexandria) bread, the Egyptians who toiled on the land were oppressed by ever increasing taxes and punitive laws meant to enslave them. It was not a good time to be an Egyptian without also being a privileged Roman citizen. Few managed to achieve that distinguished privilege and the rest faced a hopeless and dwindling future.

There were occasional revolts against this excessive exploitation and subjugation, but these were cruelly put down, and each one only made the plight the native fellaheen more pitiful. It was during this time that the belief and worship of the old Egyptian gods lost their appeal with the common folk and a new religion began to quickly take their place, and that religion was Christianity. Like many other parts of the old world, Egypt fostered many varieties of Christianity and Greco-Roman syncretism.

“Egypt had an ancient tradition of religious speculation, enabling a variety of controversial religious views to thrive there. Not only did Arianism flourish, but other doctrines, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, either native or imported, found many followers. Another religious development in Egypt was the monasticism of the Desert Fathers, who renounced the material world in order to live a life of poverty in devotion to the Church.

Egyptian Christians took up monasticism with such enthusiasm that the Emperor Valens had to restrict the number of men who could become monks. Egypt exported monasticism to the rest of the Christian world.”

Magic flourished in these lands at that time, and many Christians of different stripes practiced magic along with their liturgical rites. Perhaps the most interesting of all of the Egyptian stripes of Christianity were the Sethians, whose massive volume of books and mysterious initiatory teachings have come down to us in the present era as various selections of their peculiar writings and puzzling theological statements. We know something about them from their extent writings but not enough to fully understand their teachings and beliefs. Time has nearly ablated their memory, like the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert that have scoured the painted surfaces of statues and shrines leaving only traces of their past glories.

We know so little about the Egyptians living in the area around Thebes in the Greco-Roman period because the focus of the world at that time was on the city of Alexandria. However, from the period of around the 1st through the 4th century various scrolls and codices were buried in that location which were only discovered in the last two centuries. The largest collection of codices was discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945, a veritable library of forbidden books hidden in a sealed pot and buried next to a stone in an ancient monastic graveyard. However, other codices and scrolls were discovered in the same area around Thebes, such as the Bruce codex (containing the Books of Jeu) and the Greek Magical Papyri. All of these notable relics that have been intriguing scholars for decades as well as ordinary members of the reading public, and I might add, occultists and practitioners of magic, have been reconstructed, translated and published. All of these truly remarkable writings from antiquity were likely produced in this single location around Thebes during a period of three hundred years, and that is also quite remarkable.

Whether or not these writings represent the thoughts and beliefs of a single group of people, or the combined ideas and practices of an era participated by many individuals is unknown. We can speculate based on how they were written, in what language and the media (scroll or codex) of their presentation, and we can examine the content of the writings and notice the differences and similarities. Still, this is all speculation, but it is intriguing none-the-less.

We should also briefly examine the writing techniques of ancient Egypt and its history, since this will also assist us in assessing the historical context of these writings.

“As writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic (priestly) and demotic (popular) scripts. These variants were also more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental and other formal writing. The Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek.

Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule (intermittent in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE), and after Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Macedonian and Roman periods. It appears that the misleading quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part, as a response to the changed political situation. Some believe that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish 'true Egyptians' from some of the foreign conquerors. Another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally. Having learned that hieroglyphs were sacred writing, Greco-Roman authors imagined the complex but rational system as an allegorical, even magical, system transmitting secret, mystical knowledge.

By the 4th century, few Egyptians were capable of reading hieroglyphs, and the myth of allegorical hieroglyphs was ascendant. Monumental use of hieroglyphs ceased after the closing of all non-Christian temples in 391 CE by the Roman Emperor Theodosius I; the last known inscription is from Philae, known as The Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, from 394 CE.”

If we consider the Nag Hammadi library, the Bruce codex and the Greek Magical Papyri as having a common geographic location, we can also order these collections according to their content and writing styles, based on an understanding of the history of writing in that area.

The Greek Magical Papyri was likely written earlier than the other books because it was a large scroll written in Greek and Demotic. Since there are some parts of this book that were written in Demotic we can assume that the ancient Egyptian language was still being spoken and written at that time. So, perhaps the time period when it was written might have been in the 3rd century when the old pagan religions and the new were coexistent. The magical spells show a decided heterodoxy of religious beliefs with an emphasis on Pagan Greek and Egyptian gods, but with other religious elements, such as Judaism, included. There is only a hint of Christian theology to be found in these spells, so it represents the collective work of someone whose sympathies were not particularly Christian.

We know nothing about the owner of this scroll, other than he seemed to be collecting every notable magical spell that could be found or discovered in that time period. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of his collection, it is likely that he was privileged and well traveled, perhaps even having a residence in Alexandria. Magic is the focus of this work, so we can’t really deduce the owner’s religious beliefs other than to state that he was obviously open to all religions and didn’t discriminate between them. This large scroll was probably buried with the mummified body of the owner along with other artifacts at an unknown site somewhere outside of Thebes. If there were any other burial possessions in that tomb, none has ever been either recognized or recovered. 

Then, probably a century or so later, the various codices of the Nag Hammadi and the Bruce codex were written and kept by individuals in the same general area. These books were written in Coptic, representing a change in linguistic status. While it is likely that these books were originally written in Greek, they were translated into Coptic which was becoming the liturgical language of Egyptian Christianity. Hieroglyphic writing, including hieratic and demotic, had been abandoned as too complex, but Greek was replaced with an alphabetized writing modified to fit the phonetics of the Egyptian language.

The primary religious focus of these books was Christian, but a form of Christianity that is both strange and unusual by today’s standards. Within many of these works are to be found the specific theological speculations of the Gnostic group known as the Sethians. While it is likely that these books were part of a monastic library, probably the Pachomian monastery at Chenobokion (modern al Qasr), it represents that the Christian monks were likely tainted by the beliefs and perhaps even the practices of Sethian Gnosticism. The fact that these books were buried represents a kind of intellectual purge, due to the edict of the archbishop of Alexandria, Athanasius, who in 367 CE decreed that all Christians reject illegitimate and secret books. He produced a list of 27 books that were to be considered the accepted books of Christianity, and these books are what later became part of the New Testament. However, the monks from this monastery (so far from Alexandria) revered these books and rather than burn them, they decided to bury them instead. So they carefully sealed these codices into a storage pot and buried them in a nearby cemetery with a proper marker, as if they had hoped to someday return and recover them.

It would seem that the location around Thebes was a veritable hotbed of Sethian Gnosticism and also the practice of magic. Because the Sethians taught that one needed to undergo a five-fold initiation ordeal in order to be considered a proper Christian, or “one who knows,” they had quite a body of magical lore to aid them in this task. They also practiced forms of practical magic and likely infected the early Coptic Christian church with the practice of using magical spells that archeologists have recently discovered written or inscribed on various artifacts. The Sethians probably were in the area for at least three centuries before disappearing, and they may have melded their beliefs with those of the local pagan magical practitioners, since they believed that magic was the key to escape the material world ruled by the cruel and ruthless archons.

In many ways the Sethian’s theological ideas would have been very popular in the oppressed area of upper Egypt because it seemed to explain their world in a mythopoetic manner. No longer was life on the Nile one that was good and abundant, so there wasn’t much desire to perpetuate this material circumstance in the afterlife. In fact life was cruel, brutal, poor and apparently lacked the blessings of the gods for the average Egyptian. It was no wonder that a theology of escape, release from bondage and deliverance from one’s evil oppressors was quite intoxicating and attractive. I believe that this is the reason why Egypt embraced Christianity so ardently, and why a tradition of Sethian Gnosticism was popular amongst the literate elite.

Now this brings me to the main point of my article, which is to see these supposedly unrelated events and artifacts as representing a common thread that should be quite profound when we consider it as such. What I am proposing is that the magic in the Greek Magical Papyri and the magic practiced by the Christian Sethians and Coptic Christians was analogous. They are not the same, of course, because they are separated by time, but not by locality. The writer of the Greek Magical Papyri was aware of Sethian practices and beliefs even though he might not have shared them. The Sethians were likely aware of some of the magical spells written in the Greek Magical Papyri as well.

Previously, I have never really paid much attention to the rubric or title for the ritual of the Invocation of the Bornless One because it seemed to be not particularly important. The title of this spell is the “Stele of Jeu, the hieroglyphicist.” The name Jeu seemed to be familiar to me, but I had thought that it might be a reference to a real individual who still had the skill of being able to read Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. It was pointed out to me that the name Jeu was actually a Gnostic pseudepigraphic author name that was used to lend legitimacy to a writing or a spell. However, since there is indeed a series of Books of Jeu that were particularly sacred to the Sethians (Bruce Codex), attributing the Bornless One Invocation to Jeu was analogous to attributing it to the Sethians. Also, assigning a writing to a stele was a way of making it a highly important work, because an actual stele was writing and illustrations painted or carved on a stone tablet making it something of a permanent edifice. Three of the more important works in the Nag Hammadi library are the three Stele of Seth, so one could assume that the Stele of Jeu would also be a monumental work.

What does all of this speculation and background information really mean? It means that the ubiquitous Invocation of the Bornless or Headless One was possibly an important rite in the Sethian creed. The headless one then becomes analogous to the theological construct of the Gnostic concept of Autogenes, the self-begotten one. Autogenes was the principle intermediary between the One as the Father-Spirit, and the Father-Mother as Ennoia-Barbelo, and the rest of humanity. Autogenes was part of a trinity that was loosely based on the Neoplatonic Noetic triad of Being, Life and Mind that act as an intermediary between the One and the psychic domain. Summoning this entity to perform an exorcism would make sense, and it would be part of the Sethian initiation process to purge the self of all spiritual influences and pollution associated with the archons.

So, this might be the context for the Bornless Invocation rite, that it functioned as an important tool in the Sethian repertoire to purify the soul and make it ready for transport beyond spheres of the archon ruled material world, where it might unite once again with the One Source of All Spirit. That we use this rite today in a similar manner is quite interesting and also ironic. All of this is pure speculation on my part, of course, and it could easily be refuted as spurious and erroneous. However, my approach does seem to pull together a lot of interesting pieces of the puzzle, and the final resultant context is rather elegant - at least I think so.

Over seventeen hundred years separate our world from that of the Egyptian Sethians and magicians of the early centuries of the common era. But we seem to be connected by the thread of a common interest and a common need for a fusion of magic and religion as well as authentic visionary experiences. That common thread might be the vaunted Perennial Philosophy, or perhaps it is the just the convoluted evolution of society and the never ending spiritual search for authentic spiritual experiences.   

Frater Barrabbas

Age of Authenticity - Magical and Mystical Orders

Lately there has been some controversial discussions (led by Peregrin Wildoak) about whether or not the Golden Dawn is dead. That it actually died out in the late 40's and that current variations of this tradition are mere pretenders to the traditional heritage, which was established by the adepts who started and built up the order in the late 19th century. As I examined these articles and the associated comments I realized that what was really being discussed was the issue of legitimacy vs. authenticity.

Clearly, if one takes the position of legitimacy in regards to the Golden Dawn, none of the current adepts can claim to have a living charter dispensed to them from any of the previous legitimate GD orders. Peregrin is correct and accurate in his discussion about the present state of the Golden Dawn. Unless, of course, one of the chiefs can claim to have re-established a connection with the source adepts who apparently started this lineage, and I do believe that one of them can. However, that is besides the point, since such proof can’t be delivered to the public at large without profoundly violating one’s initiatory oaths of secrecy. We can at least recognize that Peregrin is correct in his assumptions overall. That is, if legitimacy is the only measure of an organization’s true value.

If someone or some group were to acquire all of the accouterments and lore of a specific religious, mystical, masonic or magical organization and then proclaim themselves to be a legitimate representative of that organization, the greater community would rightfully judge and declare them to be fraudulent. Taking this perspective to the absolute degree of validating legitimacy, the current and modern Golden Dawn can’t be confused with the Golden Dawn of the previous age. In fact it could be argued that the modern Golden Dawn has no real legitimacy and is therefore completely spurious. While they might share some lore and even objectives, they are not the same organization. It’s really that simple. It’s very much black and white! Or is it?

In the late 19th century, and into the middle of the 20th century, issues of spiritual and magical legitimacy were quite important. If you made claims about your magical or spiritual pedigrees then you better have something to back it up. Deceptive advertising and lying about legitimacy was grounds for a huge scandal and probably the complete dissolution of the said spurious organization. However, something started happening in the 20th century and it became a powerful force in the 1960's that changed the whole equation of spiritual and magical organizations. We entered a new age where legitimacy was trumped by authenticity. People wanted authentic spiritual and magical experiences. They weren’t concerned with valid pedigrees or vaunted legitimacy, they just wanted to experience the “real thing.”

There were some organizations still around by that time, but as Peregrin reported, many had gone dormant or were soon to do so. This didn’t stop people from forming new groups and organizations based on older and dormant institutions or even from crafting something entirely new. Despite being completely illegitimate and unable to claim any kind of historically valid lineage, these groups and organizations were and are successfully producing authentic experiences. If Peregrin was so correct that knock-offs and spurious groups couldn’t produce anything of any worth because they were illegitimate then these new organizations shouldn’t be able to do produce anything of value, but in fact they do. There must be something wrong with Peregrin’s logic and indeed, there is something wrong with it. We don’t live in an age where legitimacy is important any more. We live in an age of authenticity, and the rule of thumb is that if a group functions as it should and manages to produce authentic experiences then it is valid regardless of whether or not it is legitimate. Most if not nearly all Wiccan lineages are not legitimate because the tradition only goes back to the founder, and all founders were inveterate self-made eclectic seekers. Even so, there are many fine and excellent witches and exponents of witchcraft within these organizations. In fact, some of the best witches I know don’t come from any initiatory lineage whatsoever - they are fully self-made.

Perhaps one of the biggest self-made magicians of the 20th century was William Grey who didn’t belong to any organization, but still founded his own tradition of magic and occult spirituality. No one can dispute his contribution to Western Occultism, but he doesn’t belong to any specific tradition. He was not an initiate in the classic definition of the term, but he was clearly an adept at the end of his journey. How can we reconcile such a discrepancy? William Grey was authentic - he worked steadily at his craft for most of his lifetime. The end result was actually quite predictable. If anything else, this example is a simple matter of demonstrating how important authenticity has become over the last 50 years. Legitimacy is quaint and nice if you have it, but it is also highly irrelevant and unneeded in the present age. What is needed is more authenticity. Do you talk about magick (or seek to eliminate it by erroneously calling it “mysticism”) or do you practice it? Is it part of your heritage or is it part of your life as a living tradition? These are the relevant questions that we should focus on.

In the end it doesn’t really matter which group in the Golden Dawn represents a legitimate unbroken lineage or not. What matters is whether the lore, practices and operations actually succeed in generating real and lasting transformations in the adherents and practitioners. What matters most is what produces results - everything else is just superficial gloss.         

If you want to look at my previous articles on this issue, you can find them here, and here. I announced a few years back that we live in the Age of Authenticity and I still stand by that proclamation.

Frater Barrabbas

More Thoughts About the Bornless One and Other Stuff

It’s been nearly three months since I posted any kind of article to my blog, and some of you have probably been wondering what has happened to me. Well, I have been very busy doing other things and I haven’t had much opportunity to write. While I have successfully transitioned to my new role in my mundane job, it has also been very challenging and time consuming. I seem to have adopted the life-style of a shut-in person. I spend most of my day at the terminal, usually 8 to 10 hours straight with only a few breaks, spending all that time cooped up in my home office.

While I am working I occasionally notice the passing of the day outside my office window, but I have little time to go outside except to walk our dog. When I am done for the day my brain feels like Jell-O and my eyes are dry and I have problems focusing. About the only thing I am good for is to eat my dinner, mindlessly watch a bit of the Tube and then go to bed, exhausted. Weekends are typically for cleaning the house, shopping and spending some time with my wife. I don’t have a lot of time to visit with people and I usually forget to call or stay in touch with my friends. (I hope I still have some friends left when this cycle reaches its end.)

Right now there seems to be little time for writing or working magick, but I do try to read a bit before going to sleep. I have managed to read through a number of books, so at least I am continuing my research - that is unless I am indulging in some gratuitous fiction reading.  

This pattern of work and not much else has been going on for the last several months, but at least I can see that the pace will be slowing down in the near future - thankfully. My hope is that with the turning of the new year I will have more time for writing and working magick. At least I can boast that my wife and I have managed to put together a really great wedding ceremony and feast. We had some really important help from our friends, but it was our sole responsibility and it was quite a magical ordeal in its own right. I may have been unable to work any of my usual magical ordeals in the last couple of years, but the handfasting and feast were quite a magnificent magical working. We really needed to do nothing else than that to focus the transformative spiritual powers and bring them to bear on our lives. We feel quite bonded now and many of the issues that we had pondered about previously have now been swept aside. That alone should demonstrate to my readers that is was indeed a very magical and successful ordeal. It will be tough to top that for this year, but I’ll see what I can do.

My occult research and studies have been focusing on the writings of a very knowledgeable and brilliant German Professor of Egyptology by the name of Jan Assmann. His translated books on Egyptology and also, oddly, modern monotheism (and its price to the post-modern world) are all quite inspiring to me, although probably not in the way that Professor Assmann had in mind when he originally wrote these books. He is a contemporary scholar so I am not trying to read the writings of someone from the 19th or early 20th century whose scholarship is missing a century or more of archeological discoveries. Dr. Assmann’s writings are current and include a lot of the most up-to-date discoveries in the field of Egyptology. I will be discussing some of the things he has written in future articles since what he is saying about modern religious theology is also quite interesting and insightful.

While Dr. Assmann is a staunch Christian and has stated that the cost of monotheism was worth the benefits, his writings are helping me to determine what modern paganism should be like. Are we truly engaged in a primary earth-based religion or is our paganism a protest against Christianity and monotheism in general? Can we go back to the simpler times and mind-set of ancient paganism or do we have to come up with a completely different paradigm that takes 1,500 years of monotheistic religion into consideration? These are critical questions, and I am on the threshold of finally being able to answer some of them in a thorough and insightful manner.

Anyway, one of the points that caught my attention when I was reading the book “Of God and Gods: Egypt, Israel and the Rise of Monotheism” written by Jan Assmann (University of Wisconsin Press, 2008) was quite startling. Dr. Assmann compared the Egyptian mythological concept of “sep tepy” or “first time” to the first book in the Hebrew Bible, “berasheth” or Genesis. Seeing this comparison inspired me into thinking about the Bornless One all over again. Why would such a comparison bring that topic to mind? Because I had once written that I thought the famous ritual attributed to the Golden Dawn whose origin is a spell found in the Greek Magical Papyri in Translation (PGM V, lines 96 through 172 - Stele of Ieu the hieroglyphist) was correctly and aptly named. The Godhead that is invoked in that spell is called “Akephalos,” or the “Headless One” and somehow it got renamed to Bornless One.

The reason this happened was the simple fact that the word “headless” could also be considered a euphemism for a deity that had no origin, in other words, one that was bornless. Of course that could only be the case if the ancient Egyptian language used the same idiom as Hebrew, where the term “without a head” could be considered the same as “without a beginning.” The Hebrew word for head is “rosh,” and the first book in the Hebrew Bible about the creation of the world is called by the first word in that book, berasheth, or “in the beginning,” literally, “in the head.” Coincidently my thoughts about this term were similar to what Mathers in the Golden Dawn thought about the godhead named in this ritual, and that is how it got to be called the “Invocation of the Bornless One.” Others have pointed out the speciousness of this translation and its usage for this rite since there are indeed images of this god without a head on a number of Gnostic magical coins from verifiably ancient sources.

However, the comparison that Dr. Assmann made between “sep tepy” and “berasheth” intrigued me quite a bit. I managed to look up the Egyptian words for “sep tepy” and found that “tepy” does indeed mean “head.” It also means “chief” or “first,” but the hieroglyph is a man’s head. To the ancient Egyptians the term Sep Tepy represents the creation of the world from the watery abyss as performed by the creator god, who typically takes the form of Ra, Ptah or Atum. The God that creates the world would have to exist before the world was created in order to perform that feat. The First Time is a very hallowed event, and the age that immediately followed it was one where the gods, mankind and all of the flora and fauna lived together in peace. It was the golden age before the time of troubles when mankind rebelled against the gods and caused the world to be permanently separated into the sphere of humanity and the domain of the gods. The pharaonic king was the intermediary for the gods, and his court was the mechanism through which the gods ruled the earth and maintained contact (through their cultic centers) with humanity. One could say obliquely that the creator god was in fact without a beginning, bornless, or headless.

The invisible and unknowable headless deity called Akephalos that is summoned in the PGM exorcism rite has certain qualities that make this being an unmistakable amalgamation, similar to the contemporary Gnostic god Abraxas (the solar godhead whose name adds up to 365). He is said to be called “Osoronnophris” (Ausar un-nepher - Osiris the Blessed), but also compares him to “Iabes” and “Iapos” (probably corruptions of Bes and Apep). Only an amalgamation godhead would be able to reconcile opposed Egyptian deities such as Bes (the guardian) and the giant serpent Apep (personification of chaos and evil), not to mention also being associated with Osiris (fertility and resurrection) and the creative trinity of Ra, Ptah and Atum. The analogy to Apep might be an allusion to the Greek daimon Agathodaimon who was depicted as a giant serpent.

Akephalos is also associated with the primal creator godhead, and as such, represents the absolute spiritual master of everything in the material and spiritual worlds. This godhead would be the celebrated God who inaugurated the Sep Tepy or First Time according to the Egyptians, and he would also be the ultimate source of all being, perfectly representing the One of the Platonists without name or features. It would make sense that the erstwhile sorcerer of antiquity would call on this being to assist him in performing a grand exorcism. If you wish to eject an evil spirit from some person then it would make sense to summon the most powerful godhead available.

The odd epithet of this godhead which states that he has eyes in his feet seems to be a puzzle, but when you consider that the Headless God can be depicted as a serpent biting its tail then the mystery is revealed as a symbolic analogue. A serpent biting its tail would metaphorically have its eyes in its feet (tail). This symbol, called Ouroboros Ophis in Greek, represents the eternal cycle of self-creation and also primordial union, which would be a perfect emblem of the Headless or Bornless Godhead. This is also true of the phrase “my name is a heart encircled by a serpent,” which could symbolize the Sun in its eternal cycle, or that the core of one’s being is forever regenerated.

While the original spell in the PGM was a basic operation of summoning the absolute deity to perform an extremely powerful exorcism, the layered symbology of this being has taken on other qualities since that time. At around the same time that Europe and the Middle East was in the midst of a profound collapse and the beginning of the dark ages (7th Century CE), India was fashioning a new philosophy, beginning with the Mahayana Buddhists (the two truths doctrine) and continuing with the Hindu Vendantaists. Both groups postulated that the ultimate reality was non-dual, and in order to rectify the obvious duality of God (absolute) and immortal human spirit (relative) without completely negating one or the other, they simply stated that there was no duality. The ultimate Cosmic One was synonymous with the inherent union within all human beings. In Vendanta this concept was stated succinctly as there is no difference between Brahman and Atman, in other words, there is no difference between the absolute Godhead and the individual Godhead - they were one and the same. This new philosophical perspective took the Neoplatonist creed to its highest and ultimate level and resolved the inherent dualism found within it. If we consider then that the highest aspect of deity is the same as the deity within each and everyone of us then the Headless or Bornless deity becomes an analogue for our own internal godhead. We therefore invoke the Bornless One (or Headless One) that is within us in order to realize the highest expression of our beings - the non-dual godhead within us.

Magicians throughout the ages have always taken the liturgies and magical rites of the past and crafted new rites and magical lore from them. It seems to be almost the rule rather than the exception. We are shameless plagiarists and appropriators, and what we use as modern lore is often a mishmash of ancient and modern practices and beliefs. This also seems to be the case for the spells of the PGM that incorporated religious sources from a wide variety of religious cultures that were alive and accessible in late antiquity. We are no different today in regards to using all kinds of diverse sources for our magical rites and lore than the magicians and sorcerers in antiquity, and perhaps this is what unites us with them. Thus the ancient exorcism rite of the Stele of Ieu the hieroglyphist has become the epitome of one of the most powerful rituals in the arsenal of Western Magick used to realize and manifest the Bornless One or Higher Self within oneself.

Frater Barrabbas

BTW - I would like to thank Jake Stratton-Kent for writing his book “The Headless One” which I found very informative and helpful, and also my friend Jack Flash Von Faustus for his blog writings and the document that he pointed me towards, written from a lecture given by Morton Smith on PGM: Demons of Magick. You can find that lecture write-up here. I might add that Morton’s take on the Headless Godhead was quite interesting, stating that it was a possible personification of the flat “headless” land of Egypt itself and this would also lend it to being compared to the Egyptian fertility god Osiris. Although I must also state that the land mass of Egypt has been carved by the Nile for untold ages, making it anything but flat or for that matter, headless. You can also look over my previous article about the Bornless One that I wrote back in 2009.