My Life with the Gods

 

Klee - Diana in the Autumn Wind

I can say with little doubt that I was born a Witch, but it took me until my mid teens to actually realize what that was. What kind of child I was could be summed up with the words, overly imaginative, romantic, creative, dreamy, a loner, disconnected from reality, and somewhat hyper active. I was obviously suffering from some degree of ADHD, and that was exacerbated by living under a father who was temperamental and physically and abusive. When other kids in my class thought about who would be successful in life, I would likely have been considered nearly at the bottom of the list. What I lacked was the ability to be focused and disciplined, and I lived in my father’s fearful shadow, since getting any attention from him had highly negative consequences, both physically and mentally. I grew up believing that I was not particularly smart, but was gifted with some creative abilities, even though I took them for granted and really didn’t develop them as I should have.

As a youth, I didn’t fit in with any group and felt too different and apart from my peers. I had lucid dreams that powerfully moved me, and a yearning to find some kind of spiritual meaning to my life. I felt that religion was an internal experience that was personal and deeply significant, but I seemed to lack the ability to find out what that experience was or how to develop it. I dreamed about having unique powers, like the ability to fly, read minds or heal the sick, and I met with strange individuals who I thought were angels without wings, and skulked around locations that seemed so real to me that I felt heartbroken when I woke up to face reality. My waking world, at that time, was devoid of color, lasting happiness or joy, and growing up was so difficult, because adults seemed to live in world where dreams died and reality imposed itself in harsh and limiting ways. I didn’t seem to feel attracted to their world, but then, suddenly, the mod era dawned, to be followed by hippies and the raging counter culture. It is in that tumult that I finally saw my place in the world, or at least the direction I needed to follow. The counter culture brought wonder, joy and vibrant color into my life.

Rock music, psychedelic artwork, drugs, free love and open sexuality were highly attractive to me and my peers, not to mention a kind of renaissance culture that allowed for the exploration of nearly anything, especially old fashioned beliefs, superstitions and debunked ideas of the supernatural, which were resurrected and wrapped up with modern science, science fiction, and fantasy and made available to a spiritually starving middle class youth culture. I was part of that movement, and I was able to find an identity and develop a belief system based on whatever I was able to find that was in print and useful. I did not choose an institution or an organized religious or spiritual group. I chose some kind of imaginative Witchcraft before I really had any kind of material to help me develop my beliefs. In my dreams, I met remarkable people and what I later determined, were actually Deities. They talked to me, and I had lengthy conversations with them, although the content of those conversations were difficult to recall not long after waking, and being functionally illiterate, I didn’t write any of it down.

Revelations came to me in the form of books that helped me define what it was that I had discovered within myself. Earlier, I had scoured the public libraries and aside from historical accounts of the infamous Witch Trials and Scott’s book “Discoverie of Witchcraft” I found very little of use. That also includes the pulp books by Louise Huebner, which according to her, I couldn’t be a Witch because I was a young man. I read Gardner’s book “Witchcraft Today”, but there was very little in the book that I found useful on a practical level. It was when I acquired Lady Sheba’s “Book of Shadows” and Paul Huson’s “Mastering Witchcraft” books that I found what I was looking for, and on top of that, I was given a copy of June Johns book “King of the Witches” that helped to define myself as a Witch, and to understand what that entailed. I also collected the book “You Forever” by T. Lobsang Rampa, that was a text book for gaining psychic abilities. These books became the backbone of my nascent spiritual and magical practice.

Another thing that happened around this time was that I took a large dose of LSD-25 that literally opened the doors of the world of the psychic and visions to me in way that nothing else had previously. I also started to smoke pot and that also helped bring me into the domain of dreams and make that world fully available to me while conscious and fully awake. In the background was the music of the Beatles, Beethoven  and the Moody Blues, and an overworked and overly romantic imagination that gave birth to my magical undertakings and gave names and identities to the Deities that I had been dreaming about and talking with since I was quite young.

Because I had such a powerful imagination (and I still do to this day), I never had any issues about talking to entities and individuals that appeared in my dreams or seemed at the edge of conscious awareness. It was a gift that I later found that few others actually have, but it was born out of an extended childhood, where I retreated into my fantasies to escape the harshness and the fear produced by living in the same house as my abusive father. My father could, and often did, transform a joyous occasion into one of fear, darkness and hurt. I saw my father as a dangerous force in my life that was unpredictable and often even mentally cruel when kindly disposed towards me. In his eyes, I was a disappointing idiot, not to be given much consideration except as a subject of ridicule or a target for the threat of violence. (He did change and mellow over time, but my feelings toward never really changed, and he was hard to be around for any length of time.)

Because my father was a steadfast atheist, and made his opinions about religion quite well known, he persecuted me for my beliefs, and took pleasure in ridiculing them. That only made me more of a steadfast adherent and a rebel against what I saw as his callous and insensitive nature. I did feel deeply, and emotions were my bedrock, and I also sensed other spiritual beings than myself, and I felt the “energies” of churches, people of faith and their congregations, and I knew that my father was dead wrong. Religion was a real and living experience; I knew this because I had experienced it directly. However, to fulfill my rebelliousness and to keep in synch with nature of the times, I chose the religion and faith of Witchcraft, which I believed was the oldest surviving religion in the Western world.

So, when I was sixteen, I unwittingly began my true path within Witchcraft. As I pointed out, I had been talking to dream-based beings who were spirits and Deities for many years prior, but I took it all for granted, and because I was on an ego trip (as all young people are until the beginning of adulthood and its responsibilities), I felt that I only needed to be true to myself. I wanted god-like magical powers, but I felt that they were my due, and I was overly shy about getting religious and bowing down to any of those dream-based Deities, because I had been talking with them for years without having to assume any obligations. I knew that as a true Witch, I would need to bond with one or more of these Deities in my imaginative mind, but I put it off. Developing my psychic powers and experimenting with magic was too much fun to be spoiled by the supposed limitations imposed by some God.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that the one factor in my life that made dealing with my abusive father possible was the unconditional love that I received from my mother. My father mentally abused her, and ridiculed her, but she was a real power that kept the family together and tried to heal the damage that my father had wrought on his children. I saw her as weak because she didn’t stand up to my father unless he threatened to do more than abuse us. I had dismissed her in my mind, because my father had shown her to be weak and ineffectual. However, my mother had more of an impact on me than I realized, and when it came time to directly face one of the Deities of Witchcraft in a kind of spiritual reckoning, I chose the Goddess of Witchcraft in her guise a moon godhead and mistress of magic.

I atoned for my unwillingness to subscribe to any Deity through her, and ever after, I was powerfully bonded to her in body and soul. I would enter into a simple meditative state, bow down with my head to the floor, and call her to come to me, and she always would. I felt a creeping coldness, then a warmth, and she would talk in my mind and her voice had a whispering quality that I compared to the sound of the wind blowing leaves in the street. She taught the basic framework for working a simple kind of magic, and guided me for a few years until I found a coven of Alexandrian Witches who I begged to initiate me into their practice, and they happily obliged me.

What started out as many dream-based personages and identities became a single Goddess, but from there I rediscovered a plethora of spirits, angels, demons, Gods, Goddesses, Demigods and various imaginative entities. They were always there, but I had to learn to recognize them from my dreams as a child. Once in a while I would meet something that was quite frightening in my dreams, but mostly, the conscious reality of living with my father was more than enough fearful, painful and humiliating. My dreams seemed to offer a refuge from that harsh reality, so I never really had any encounter with entities that were terrorizing or frightening. Some of them were odd, and others quite strange and even alien to me, but I always felt at home and protected in my inner world, and it is likely that my internalized impressions of my mother had something to do with this experience.

So, how do I help others to directly experience spirits and deities? First by letting them know that such experiences are not the mark of someone suffering from mental illness. That it is a real phenomenon and not one that should stigmatize someone. Then helping and guiding them to learn and then master the arts of meditation and trance. Entering into that controlled and peaceful mental world is the first step to engaging spiritual entities. Learning to sense and see magical energies (what are called etheric energy fields), and fine tune one’s sensitivity is a never ending process, which can produce astonishing results in some but not all people. I used to promote the ingesting or smoking hallucinogens, and I would still be in favor of this approach so long as it is the means to an end and not the end in itself. Opening the doors of perception can require a sledge hammer approach for some people, but others are sensitive enough not to need such an approach.

Additionally, working within sacred space and adopting a liturgical practice to one of more Deities is also important, and these beings can be engaged with divination tools so they can, in a fashion, communicate with humans. Thus, Tarot cards, I-Ching coins, runes, Geomancy sticks, pendulum, and dice or knucklebones work quite well, and ultimately, godhead assumption and communion will bring the targeted Deity into the framework of one’s conscious mind, making direct communication possible. Once that direct communication occurs, it makes it quite easy to hear and talk with other entities, as if a veil has been lifted, and so it has.

I have worked with many individuals, and they all, through persistent effort, find a way to visualize and communicate with Gods, Goddesses, Demigods, angels, demons and earth-based spirits, faeries, elementals and any other kind of bodiless entities. The key is to be open minded, and open hearted, and the rest will naturally follow.

Frater Barrabbas

Thoughts About Magick and the Science of the Impossible

Introduction

I have recently read Michio Kaku’s wonderful book “Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation and Time Travel.” While this book takes a hard scientific look at the fantasies and entertaining hypothesis of science fiction, it also has some very interesting relevance to the practice of magick and occult spirituality.

The topical areas that Michio discusses, which have to do with occultism and magick, are the subjects of invisibility, teleportation, telepathy, psychokinesis, time travel and precognition. Out of all of these topics, it appears that invisibility is probably the most feasible and precognition is the most improbable. I found this perspective very interesting, since I believe that it’s important for magick and occultism to be able to live in the physical world defined and empirically established by science. If magick is to be considered something other than just a delusion, then it must have some kind of scientific basis, or at the very least, not attempt to contradict scientific laws. 

I am not a scientist, nor do I pretend to understand science as well as others do. A number of occultists and magicians have been examining magick from a scientific basis and I am by no means the first to examine it in that light. However, if a phenomenon occurs and is defined by our culture in a certain way, then science may or may not have an answer as to why, since some things will remain mysteries until such a time as science is able to develop the mathematics and the physics to penetrate them. Of course this concept deals almost exclusively with levels of technological development and does not address ontology, or how we as individuals and as cultural groups perceive reality. There must be a certain amount of congruence between science and human psychology. However, not everything that human beings experience is within the provenance of science.


Classes of Impossibility

Michio divides his book into three basic parts and groups these potentially impossible phenomena into three classes. The first class doesn’t violate the known laws of physics but can’t be completely demonstrated with our current level of technology. The second class is characterized by potentially impossible phenomena that lie on the very edge of our understanding of the laws of physics. The third class is characterized by phenomena that clearly violate the known laws of physics. What this means is that in order for any of the phenomena of the third class to be demonstrated as possible, what we know about the physical universe and its laws would have to profoundly change. What Michio states in his book is that nothing is really completely impossible, but many reputed phenomena are either beyond our technology to replicate or represent a knowledge of the universe vastly superior to what we possess today. In other words, some things are improbable, others are highly improbable, and still others are likely, but not completely, impossible. That being said, we can look at the specific phenomena that Michio highlights in his book that has a direct bearing on occultism and magick.

The four phenomena that are the most likely to be replicated by technology in the not too distant future are invisibility, teleportation, telepathy and psychokinesis. These are so-called psychic phenomena that have long been a part of the miracles that legendary magicians have wielded. However, instead of using magick, Michio talks about scientific based technology, which would be quite magickal or miraculous to those who are ignorant of it. A simple lighter would be quite an amazing magickal gadget to a primitive bushman who had never before seen one, or for that matter, anything else like it. Even something as common as a video screen or a cell phone could be seen as quite miraculous to the unjaded eye of one who constantly makes use of them.

Invisibility is already being developed in the laboratory for possible future applications, perhaps in the next decade or two. One promising area is the use of meta-materials that can bend light, which could render an object invisible to the naked eye. Meta-materials use nano-technology to create microscopic grid patterns that can trap or bend certain wavelengths of light. Another approach is using 3-D hologram projections, which would project a rear image in front of an object or person hiding behind a screen. Of course these technologies are just in their infancy, but they are already showing promise of producing a future application or product. Magicians use a form of invisibility that renders them indistinct and unremarkable, allowing them to blend in with their environments, such as a crowd of people in a market place. They don’t actually disappear, and if pointed out, can still be seen. Technological invisibility would render someone completely invisible.

Teleportation is a phenomenon that is being studied in the laboratories as well, but at the current level of technology we are talking about transmitting photons or small groups of atoms short distances. The process involved is either a form of quantum entaglement and coherence, or the use of BEC beams (Bose-Einstein condensate deployed in a form of atomic beams or lasers, using temperatures at very near absolute zero). What is actually being transmitted faster than light is information between one set of atoms to another, since the original form is destroyed and then replicated at a distance. This means that to teleport living things, such as animals or humans, they would have to be transformed into information and undergo a kind of physical death in order to be transmitted somewhere else. While the technology to perform teleportation is many decades or even centuries away, the fact that the object teleported must be destroyed and recreated would make using it on humans an even greater leap of faith, for certainly we would have to change our perception of life and death. The destruction would presumably be instantaneous, so no pain would be involved, just the nerve to volunteer to be teleported in the first place.

Magickal teleportation is probably much more the stuff of stories and fantasy, since even the technical accomplishment of this phenomenon would require a great deal of energy and a computational level that would be staggering when compared to today’s available technology. So we can probably conclude that a magician performing teleportation is probably the stuff of legends and myths.

Telepathy, or mind reading, is also something that is beginning to be developed in the laboratory. However, it’s presently limited to making very general observations about computer generated images from a device called an MRI, which uses magnetic resonance imaging to determine the occurrence of oxygenated blood and neuron activity inside the physical brain. In order to really read someone’s mind using this technology, it would have to be developed to the point of being able to pinpoint the activity of individual neurons, and that is vastly beyond our technological capabilities at this time. MRI devices are also quite large, and one would assume that a practical device that facilitated telepathy would be small enough to fit in one’s hand. If one has the technology to precisely read thoughts, then one would also have the ability to project thoughts as well, through artificially stimulating individual and small groups of neurons. If identical sets of neurons in one brain are stimulated exactly like the same neurons in another brain, then one could assume that they would be able to share thoughts and feelings, especially if this process went both ways. We are a very long way from being able to develop the technology to perform two way mental communication. However, is there any science to humans having a natural capability for telepathy?

Scientists have been attempting to prove the existence of paranormal or psychic abilities, most notably the ability to perform telepathy and psychokinesis, for many decades. So far there doesn’t appear to be any scientific proof that human beings have the ability to perform either feat in a controlled laboratory environment. Psychokinesis is of course the ability to move objects with the mind. While there seems to be something occurring that could be labeled as being paranormal, it has not been proven under rigorous scientific analysis to be either consistent or even objectively measurable. There does seem to be something going on that could be examined in a psychological context, but not anything that is either measurable, predictable or reproducible.

Psychokinesis has the added difficulty that there are no real physical forces that could explain how it works. Gravity is too weak and only attracts, electromagnetic forces can’t “push” something that is electrically neutral and nuclear forces would only work on the subatomic level. Then there is the problem of generating the energy, since even if one of the physical forces could be harnessed, sufficient amounts of it would have to be projected in order to seemingly “move” objects. What this means is that in order to manipulate matter with the human mind, a very massive amount of energy and computational power would have to harnessed as an aid. It is probably physically impossible for a human being to move a heavy material object with the power of the mind and body alone.

So teleportation, telepathy and psychokinesis are considered, purely from a technological perspective, class one impossibilities. We may eventually develop the technology to do these miraculous things someday in the distant future, but in regards to today’s technology, they are highly improbable, and therefore, nearly impossible.

Michio says that time travel is a class two impossibility, stating that while the laws of physics clearly show that such a feat is possible, from a practical standpoint, it is nearly impossible. Plausible methods of time travel include generating worm holes in the space time fabric (transversable wormholes), traveling across the event horizon of a black hole, circulating rapidly around a “spinning” universe, or transversing two massive super strings that have collided. These are conjectural plausibilities that are pushing the very threshold of what is known of the laws of physics. They are theoretically possible, but implementing them through an advanced technology would be far beyond our capabilities or comprehension.

Time travel today would seem to be much more of a fantastic capability than invisibility, teleportation, telepathy or even psychokinesis. Yet time, according to Einstein, is relative and not absolute. We rely on our perception of celestial phenomena and our assumptions of duration in order to determine the passage of time, and we have invented many devices to consistently measure it. Often when comparing one’s perception of the passage of time with devices such as clocks, noticeable discrepancies are observed. We are not “time loose”, which would give us the ability to go back and forth, or slower or faster in time. The variance that occurs is with our perception of time, but that perception is important in the examination of magickal phenomena. We will come back to this discussion, since it is pivotal to understanding paranormal phenomena as it occurs in magickal and mystical experiences.

The final item on our list of impossible phenomena is, at least to me, quite surprising. Of course, I am referring to the fact that precognition is considered by Michio and most scientists to be a class three impossibility. Precognition is the power to predict a future event, it includes forms of clairvoyance and clairaudience. What that means is that in order for precognition to occur there would have to be a complete collapse of causality. According to Michio, one of the many sets of physical laws determined by Newton that appear to be inviolable is the law of cause and effect. In order for precognition to exist, the law of cause and effect would have to be altered, allowing effects to occur before their causes. One would assume that a person could only sense a future event if it were perceptible, and that perception in itself would violate causality, since it would predetermine effects. If such a phenomenon were possible, then causality itself would be nullified, causing the world to be physically inconsistent to an absurd degree.

Causality has been shown to be powerfully maintained even at the quantum level of physical phenomena. While there appear to be phenomena such as Quantum electrodymanics, which proposes an advanced electron wave that travels back and forth through time (as a form of antimater), or Tachyons, particles that move faster than the speed of light and move backwards in time, both of these phenomena in fact do not violate causality, they actually reinforce it. Scientists believe that Tachyons are the theoretical particles that caused inflation and triggered the cosmic “Big Bang”, since there have been no such particles detected after that event. So Tachyons can’t even exist in the domain of our physical universe anyway.


Is Prognostication Really Impossible?

So what does this do to the massive collection of anecdotal claims, legends, myths, the sizable amount of written material and the numerous divination practices that humans have been engaged in since before historical times? Are all of these beliefs and practices delusional, mythical and based on what science considers completely impossible? This is quite a profound revelation, but not a new one. As occultists we have just ignored it, but then so has most of the population of the planet. Occultists and practitioners of magick rely on a number of different systems of divination, from the Tarot, to Astrology, I-Ching, Runes, Geomancy, crystal scrying, and a host of other methods of augury and prognostication. Are these just superstitions or is there something to them that science is missing? They all have one thing in common, they all rely on producing a “reading” based on a form of random selection. In the case of astrology, the birth date, transit date or hoary target date are the random factors.

Perhaps if we examine the ‘best practices” approach of one of them, then we might find the answer. Let’s try the Tarot and see what we can determine. One could assume that what is true with one of them should probably be true for the rest as well.

When I use the Tarot cards to perform divination, I never approach the reading with any kind of absolute determinism. In other words, I examine the cards, determine what they are communicating to me, but I don’t believe that what they’re saying is fixed, absolute and unalterable. I don’t believe in predestination or that the future is somehow already determined. This means that I use the Tarot in a very flexible manner, seeking to stimulate my intuition and open me to seeing possible paths in the future. I also tend to cherry pick the results, discarding readings that don’t seem to answer the question that I am asking. Erroneous or incorrect readings are also discarded, since I never believe the results to be infallible, so only correct readings have any real value. Statistically speaking, because I ignore and discard readings that don’t make sense or are shown to be false, I can’t really make any claims of being more accurate than chance.

There is also the issue of the reader perceiving cues, whether consciously or unconsciously, from the person that they are performing a reading on. Card players call these cues “tells”, since they can tell a perceptive card player whether their opponent has a good hand or a bad one. A client based reading also can be limited by the obvious range of mundane concerns, which is typically involving money, career, love life, health concerns and the opinions that others have of them.  While some may deny that cues do shape a reading, as an experienced Tarot reader, I have to admit that I am powerfully influenced by the personality, looks and the questions that a client presents. I have never met anyone who managed to portray themselves as a complete cipher.

Tarot readings are subject to interpretation, which can varying the meaning from reading to reading, so the derived meanings of the cards are “bent” to build a coherent reading. It certainly isn’t a science, in fact it would seem to be more an art form. Often the Tarot is used to derive meaning from the present that can aid the reader in projecting those possibilities into the future. When I perform a reading, I am not looking for an absolute and concrete definitive answer, I am looking for possible paths of action to take instead. Also, the further that I look into the future, the more I find the results to be nebulous and variable. Perhaps this represents that the future is determined by many chains of choices, and the further that one goes, the more potential pathways are revealed.

For instance, if we are looking at the possible outcome of a strategic decision to be made by a client in the very near future, there might be several possible outcomes. Yet how many more branches would there be in that same probable time line if one were to project it a few years or even a decade later? It’s my opinion that we could predict the behavior and future of someone consistently only if they were in a static and completely isolated environment, yet even then it would be nearly impossible to predict the exact date and time of their death. Such a person or situation doesn’t exist in the real world anyway, so divination is quite limited when attempting to predict the labyrinthine pathways of an entire lifetime. There are just too many decisions that would have to be guessed or known in order to predict the future with any degree of accuracy.

Long distant predictions and prophecies tend to be nebulous, imprecise, overly generalized or couched in symbolic language that can generate many interpretations. These same “long-shot” predictions are often shown to be accurate only after the fact. The nature of divination and its limitations would also seem to agree with and reinforce Newton’s law of causality. It would seem to be impossible to accurately and consistently predict an effect before the cause, but that doesn’t mean that divination is useless or that it can’t produce powerful and meaningful results. It just means that the future is not something that we can know completely, only something that we can conjecture, intuit, project and at times seem to know, but only in a fragmentary manner. What really happens in the future must remain a mystery, since all of the causes that would determine it have not yet been realized. When they are realized, then we are talking about the present or the past.

The experience of time centered phenomena in magick, where the effect appears to precede the cause and where one experiences time in a slower or accelerated manner are all things that are perceived by humans engaged in a subjective perception of reality. It doesn’t mean that the physical laws of the universe have been altered, it’s just a matter of how we are perceiving the world. For the practicing ritual magician, that perception is highly important, since it represents the impact and effects of higher states of consciousness, paranormal activity and even the occurrence of seemingly miraculous phenomena. However, from a scientific point of view, nothing that a magician experiences is beyond the probability of the physical laws of the universe.

Mental perceptions of the world and its evaluation represent a kind of powerful reality as well, one that shapes cultures and generates values and meaning. These kinds of phenomena can’t be measured in a scientific lab or consistently reproduced, but they are quite real, significant and meaningful to those who experience them. While science can determine the boundaries of the possible, it can’t measure human sentiment or place boundaries on the imagination. It can measure and quantify the physical world both on the macro and microscopic levels, but it can’t measure the qualitative world of individual or collective human experience.

So magick and science exist in two separate domains where neither one can contradict the other, but where they meet is where human perception and sentiment lives and thrives. 

Frater Barrabbas