Writing of Ordeal XV

On June 13, I completed writing my latest book Ordeal XV. All that remains is to edit the manuscript, add citations, build a bibliography and an index list. The greater work of developing and revising the rituals has been completed, and it was quite an extensive amount of work. What I have written is now vastly more cogent, focused and directed towards achieving a specific end, which is the union of the magician’s shadow with their egoic persona. It is part of the preparatory work to becoming a master magician. I have already shared some of the introductory chapters as articles in my blog over the past several months, but I wanted to tell the tale of how I came to write this book. It is also a tale of how workings evolve over time, from highly personalized workings that are focusing only on a specific set of issues experienced at the time to become fundamental ordeals that cannot in some form be avoided by the evolving magician. This is one of those tales.

A basic premise in these kinds of workings is that a magician can fuse spiritual personalities or entities into a combined and unified being. This premise is based on how I perceive spirits, that they are very protean in formulation and that they can be merged with other entities. If a spirit can overlay itself when possessing a human being, then they can merge with other spirits to form a hybrid entity. This process of merging diverse entities into a single spiritual form has a long history, and it can be found particularly with pagan pantheons where a single master deity is shown to be a composite of many deities. 

There is a philosophic name for this process, and it is called Macranthropy. It is the creation of a meta-deity from a pantheon of many deities, allowing for the paradox of both focusing on a single unified deity as well as focusing on the individual deities within the pantheon. If this is a phenomenon associated within the pagan pantheons of earlier ages, then it is definitely something that can be developed in the practice of spirit conjuring in the present world. What I have discovered is that I can combine spirits into a single entity, and I have been doing this for decades. Yet I did not consult any authority to see if this could be done. Instead, I just approached it in an instinctive manner, and just assumed that it would work. And it did indeed work.

My first attempt at this type of merging spirits happened long ago in early 1981, and it was resounding success. My former High Priestess had put a death curse on me, and due to my sense of guilt at what I had done in that cult-like coven, I was not able to completely overturn it. When consulting my personal Goddess about this malady, she told me to evoke the Devil and turn my guilt, the curse and its associations over to him. As a precocious young magician, I developed evocations for three Demon Princess, who were Lucifer, Satan and Aiwaz, and performed them consecutively in a borrowed temple space of a close friend. I topped it off with another hybrid, and that was Sothis-Set. I was astonished at how successful this working was, and it became the model for an ordeal later on. So, I had three evocations, and I combined them into a single entity that I celebrated and implored to aid me in my plight, and celebrated it in my Tabernacle of Sothis-Set ritual and the corresponding Black rite. It was to this unified Devil that I sought deliverance from my guilt and retribution against my prosecutors.

What I didn’t realize is that combining these entities forged in that moment the nameless but fully empowered Shadow of myself, and it was that entity that purged me of my guilt and reversed the curse against the leaders of my former coven. It was so successful that my former leaders left the craft and became instead fundamentalist Christians, and I am certain that fear was one of the main drivers for their hasty conversion. They also moved away from southeastern Wisconsin back to their old home town of Dubuque, Iowa, where they set up their own church to dupe and indoctrinate another group of unknowing people. As for me, I was washed clean of my supposed sins and was able to move forward with my life, both in terms of my magic and my career. 

So, these rituals became the beginning part of my lore for Ordeal XV, and I continued to develop it for a time, even after performing it. I added another Demon Prince to the ordeal working, and that was Beelzebub, and I included the four different mass rites of Thelema, Thanatos, Agape, and Eros as the spiritual foundation for this ordeal. I wrote it up into a hardcover blank book, but it remained a personal ordeal and not part of the cannon of the later Order of the Gnostic Star. I had ironically relegated it to a lesser level of importance and so the rituals and lore were not further developed. I did perform the evocation of Beelzebub, but I found that he preferred to be called Ba’al Zebul or the Lord of the House of Heavens, as he had been named by the ancient Canaanites. 

All of the lore of that ordeal went into the book and there it remained, including the built out four variations of the Tabernacle of Sothis Set and the companion Black Rites. Because this ordeal was so controversial, especially for a ritual magician who was also a Witch (and therefore, denied that the Devil existed), this ordeal remained in my collection as an obscure system. I did type up these rituals so that they would be resident in my computer folder of rituals, and I even made an attempt to write a document to explain the necessity for this ordeal. However, I never promoted it and it remained one of the obscure and forgotten lesser ordeals in my collection. I didn’t really do anything further with this lore until only recently. So they sat there, on my computer, for some 30 years without even being examined except as a form of research. I did use a version of the evocation of Satan in my Liber Nephilim, or at least the planetary attributes, and I also used the methodology of joining spirits together (the four Seraphim and four Cherubim) in my ordeal, the Abramelin Lunar Ordeal, which also became a published book.

Then, when I was recently talking to some folks at a pagan convention, I found out that the hot topic at the time was shadow work. It was a form of therapy where individuals, acting alone or in a group, or guided by a therapist, would engage with the dark half of themselves. This is because we are all coerced by society to behave within expected norms and to curb any other urges or behaviors that would be unacceptable. We are, therefore, all of us, repressed by our own sense of decorum and constrained to think and behave in a certain accepted manner. 

While we may leave behind beastly urges and unwanted primitive passions, we also typically repress our imagination and stifle our talents and unique abilities for the sake of conformity. There is a treasure house of powerful virtues and devilish impulses and desires within us, and as a collective archetype, it is an unnamed suppressed entity that C. G. Jung identified as the Shadow. To engage with this internal shadow is to relieve the egoic persona of various social and internal psychological pressures, and to gain abilities and insights that we had believed were not a part of ourselves. Thus, it is the path that ultimately leads to an internal, psychological wholeness, where shadow and ego merge together to forge an alliance. This is called shadow work, and it has become a very popular fad in today’s self-help literature.

When conducting research on the process of psychological shadow work and reading several books on the subject, I realized that our overall cultural shadow was the Devil, whether we believed in that entity in its various forms or not. I also understood that we all have our own internal devils and demons that we must somehow grapple and integrate into our egoic persona in order to be truly whole. However, most of the literature that was available did not address the obvious cultural shadow as the Devil, and they seemed to downplay the struggle and the danger of approaching one’s shadow, especially if it has been powerfully suppressed. While a few online authors discussed the importance of engaging with shadow work while under the care of a qualified therapist, others made it into a kind of New Age fad that practically anyone could engage in without any harm. I found this viewpoint specious, especially since Jung himself discussed how difficult and potentially dangerous such work might be to someone unprepared and inflexible to withstand the ordeal.

What I discovered when taking all this information into consideration is that I already had a magical ordeal that could be used for shadow work. This is because I had focused on the cultural Shadow known as the Devil, and believed that such an archetype would be the perfect emblem for any kind of magical based shadow work. I had equated the inner shadow to be analogous to the outer cultural shadow, and so it symbolized to me that our internal shadow is our very own personal devil. Using the approach that I had developed years ago as the forgotten Ordeal XV, I began to explore that idea, and the idea of the four churches or Gnostic Ecclesiae of the tetrasacramentary as the foundation for this work, I fully realized that redeveloping this ordeal would produce an intense and very successful ordeal of magical shadow work. 

That is when I began to develop the rituals for inclusion into a book, and revised the tone, perspective and approach so that the ordeal working would produce psychological transformative outcome of a powerful, integrative, joining between one’s internal shadow and the ego-based persona. Since I had undergone this ordeal so many years ago, and had added and developed it to a point, I felt that the final product would undoubtably do what I intended it to do. I used the theme of catabasis in the rituals describing ritualized descent into Hell, and I now feel quite good about the state of the manuscript, its revised rituals, and its controversial impact on my readers and the occult literary world.

I will sign a contract with Cross Crow Books to publish this manuscript, and before the end of August this year, I will submit the final version to my publishers. Since it takes at least a year or more for a book to go through the production process of editing, developing and printing a book, I suspect that it will not be released until early 2028. Until then, enjoy the articles I have written lately on this topic, and I look forward to final release of this amazing book.

Frater Barrabbas
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Door into Summer

 

The Summer Solstice brings to my all of the wonderful and magical things that I have experienced during the summer months from my earliest recollections to now that I am an old geezer. This is interesting because summer magic is so different than what I have experienced as autumn and winter magic. I am a decidedly an autumn and winter kind of person, or at least late autumn and early winter. The dregs of winter before spring is a time where the magic of winter has completely disappeared and is just something that must be endured until rebirth of spring.

For me the start of summer was a release from the drudgery of school and the ability to be active outdoors without any kind of boundary or restraint. It was a time for vacations with my family, although that was a mixed bag of both good and bad, depending on the mood of my parents and how obnoxious we three kids were to each other. 

One of my earliest memories was when I was four and I was sitting in the kitchen with my mother when my father and older siblings had gone off to work and school. It was early June, before school let out. My mother did not work at that time, and so she was in her summer dressing robe and I was in my jammies, and the sun was brilliantly shining into the kitchen because it faced the east. Because the shades were down, the kitchen was cast in warm and beautiful golden light. A little later, I went outside to play while my mother began her daily chores. 

Summer time was idyllic, with the kids on the block playing games all day, going to the park and doing artwork or playing board games in the park building,  riding bikes, and being fully outside from morning to late afternoon, when we had to return home for supper at exactly 5 pm or receive punishment. After supper, we went out again and did not return until after the sun had set. Twilight was the perfect time to play hide and go seek or kick the can. It was all very magical, in a childish but wondrous way.

Despite those magical times when I was a child, as an adult ritual magician I have typically worked my greatest magic during the autumn and winter. In fact, after Summer Solstice, the magical order and temple that I helped to found closed because the members saw summer as a kind of recess from magical workings. The temple would close for the periods of July and August and not reconvene until September. However, summer is a magical time all unto itself, and I would be disingenuous if ignored what it has to offer. It is not a time to be cooped up in a temple, of course, and it is a time where magic and pagan liturgy would be shifted to the outdoors. In a grove, whether a part of my home, or at a pagan retreat, I have had many amazing experiences being fully immersed in nature. Yet nighttime is preferred by me over daytime, which is just my preference, since the magic of living and thriving occurs every single day during the summer months. This is because global warming has turned summers into periods of deadly heat, and only the shade and the evenings give folks a refuge or respite from the untenable and blazing sunlight.

From a mythic and pagan liturgical perspective, the boundary between spring and summer occurs when the light of the sun has reached its apotheosis. In the northern latitudes, vegetative life has fully awakened and the growing season has commenced. In northern Virginia where I live, summer weather actually occurs in May, so that Beltane is more like summer with leaves and plants resplendent and fully matured, and the flowers of spring have already faded away.  Still, the moment of the apotheosis of light that is the solstice, points to a mystical fact that darkness, death, and the wasting tides of winter are not permanent. The light shines through the gloom and illuminates the hearts and minds of the people of whatever religious stripe or creed, since it does not discriminate. Trees, plants and animals seem to rejoice, simply because there is the beginning of an abundance of food in various forms, whether warm sunlight and gentle rain, edible plants, and the fullness of life to prey upon for those who are predators. Summer is also light-hearted, adventurous, outgoing, flirty, downright sexual, and a paean to all things of the flesh and blood. It is also a sign post for transformative ascension, illumination, and conscious enlightenment. To occult neopagans, such as myself, the Summer Solstice is the beginning and the end, the moment of the highest spiritual and magical accomplishment, and the completion of all the work that occurred from autumn through winter and spring.

One of the ordeals that I developed, based on the writings of Jean Dubuis, was the Talismanic Portae Lucis, or Gateway of Light. A central magical operation within Mr. Dubuis’ occult system was a process whereby a person could achieve a direct connection and rapport with the powers and intelligences of the Supernal Triad. He called this the Experience of Eternity, and it was a necessary step for a magician to achieve the proper connection and linkage with their higher self. 

While Dubuis focused on the generation of talismans via the passive and auspicious method, and integrated spagyric alchemical medicine into the working, I found another way. What I did was develop a comparable methodology that used only talismanic magic to achieve a similar sort of powerful ascension and alignment. I generated metallic talismans for the Moon, Sun, and Saturn as the pathway from Yesod, to Tiphareth, and then to Binah on the Tree of Life. I used a metallic talisman for Mercury to represent myself as the theurgist. These talismans contained all four elements for each planet, representing a condensed magical artifact of four talismanic elementals fully active within it. These four artifacts were highly charged, consecrated, and then had four consecutive talismanic elements projected into them. They generated a powerful magical machine, and I used these talismans in a ritualized variation of the Portae Lucis on the exact moment of the Summer Solstice in the year 2012. Five years later I repeated that exercise, and both times were absolutely mind blowing.

I have annotated this entire journey through developing the Portae Lucis in my blog, and I think that you might find it interesting. I did this working back in 2012, which was 14 years ago, but I believe that it is worth sharing. I posted ten articles about my adventure, and you can find them in the following links.

Link 1 - beginning.
Link 2 - First working - Talisman of the Sun.
Link 3 - Second working - Talisman of the Moon.
Link 4 - Third working - Talisman of Saturn
Link 5 - Fourth working - Talisman of Mercury
Link 6 - Ordeal Preparations
Link 7 - Portae Lucis - part 1
Link 8 - Portae Lucis - part 2
Link 9 - Additional workings
Link 10 - Fifth Year Anniversary
 

I believe that the ordeal of the Talismanic Portae Lucis is where I truly opened the door into summer in a manner most becoming to an adept ritual magician. These experiences should be incorporated into a book, and someday they will. Right now, they are buried amongst nearly 500 blog articles, but they can be found just by using the index search for Portae Lucis. I decide on this Summer Solstice of 2026 to resurrect them here for you to read and examine.

Frater Barrabbas

Chaos Magick - As defined by Peter J. Carrol

Here is part two of my series on Peter J. Carrol and Chaos Magick. In this article I will give an overview of the system of chaos magic and the ideas that it espoused early on in its inception. This is, of course, an outsiders perspective on chaos magic as I understood it from my studies and readings starting decades ago. Since I was never a practitioner, my ideas may lack some of the greater details and depth associated with this anti-tradition.

I have never been a follower of Chaos magic, but I did read a lot of books and materials that this new traditional developed, but while I did admire many elements that it proposed about magic, I already had a fully developed system of magic that a lot of differences with Chaos magic. I also had personal and powerful connections to the Deities and Demigods associated with my Witchcraft magic. I could never just drop all that and just assume that they were just delusions trying to control me. However, I feel that I can share some of my observations about Chaos magic as it was presented in the early years when Peter was promoting it as an alternative to traditional magical practices, even though it has dramatically changed over the decades. I apologize in advance if I have gotten anything wrong or omitted anything important.

The basic premise of Chaos magic is that every social system is merely a game, but it is one that is typically stacked against the individual who hasn’t mastered or seen through it. Therefore, we are manipulated by government and commercial propaganda and we are forced into following a myriad of protocols and social dictates in order to achieve what amounts to a losing proposition within the status quo that is already closed to us. It is, in a word, a “suckers paradise,” and to have any degree of awareness of what is actually going on can be both humiliating and depressing. The only way to escape this trap is to break the rules and use a chaotic and creative way of thinking and acting in order to truly see the world for what it is, a system of lies passed off for truth. This is, of course, a very antinomian way of perceiving the world, and it has distant echos in the subversive religious beliefs and practices of the Gnostics of antiquity. 

This kind of direct approach to all aspects of life is also, and particularly, applied to the occult arts and magic in general, since it is believed that through forms of subversive and rule-breaking magic that the probabilities can be bent and distorted so that a single individual can triumph over the terrible autonomous and soul-less social oligarchy. Cherished traditions, icons, cultural themes and belief systems are inverted or ripped out of their context to serve the purpose of individualistic magic and self-empowerment. The only loyalty is to one’s self and to one’s social family, and the rest of world is subject to cynicism and disassociation. In such a manner, the tangled individual is freed from the traps and foils of economic classes, responsibilities, social obligations and peer group expectations. 

As a chaote (chaos magician)  you get to unapologizingly pick and choose what is important and meaningful to you, and therefore have the power and vision to find your way through all of the quagmire of a post-modern existence. Chaos magic might be nothing more than a system of magical tools and techniques, but there is a purpose to their use and an ultimate goal. That goal is freedom from the social-economic game and to be self-empowered enough to be able to acquire an edge over everyone else. Enlightenment to chaotes is to be free and footloose, to be able to write your own rules and live outside and beyond the social-economic grid. Magic, particularly a subversive magic that breaks all of the rules, is the key to achieving this type of enlightenment.

Other sources that have been included in Chaos magic are the writings of Austin Osman Spare, Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, and for the very high minded, William S. Burroughs. Added to this selected lore is the complete pop cultural media of the 1980's and 1990's. I am sure that this ever growing list of sources will continue unabated because the basic premise of Chaos magic is to appropriate whatever lore is practical and serves to produce a useful and effective system of magic. Media culture is the boiling matrix from which Chaos Magick was brewed, and in order for it to exist, it must therefore continue appropriating and borrowing from whatever is the latest craze or fad, since such things are the most relevant at present and represent a rich vein of potential magical lore. 

Implicitly, Chaos magic is the occult science and magic of the itinerant IT professional who grew up playing video games, reading science fiction books (such as “Neuromancer” by William Gibson), watching sci-fi and fantasy videos, and listening to Punk Rock and Heavy Metal. In other words, Chaos magic was the prefect venue for occult geeks. There may be other types of professions that chaotes could occupy in their mundane lives, but the IT profession is probably one of the biggest, and it’s one that is the most adaptive and conducive to their life-style and philosophy.  

One of the first tenets in Chaos Magick is that belief is just an impersonal tool, it has no intrinsic value. A chaos magician should be so completely flexible that any belief whatsoever can be adopted in order to achieve some end. Some might call this kind of approach blatantly cynical, but it serves the individual to elect those beliefs which are the most advantageous to them at a given moment. Since nothing is really true and everything is relative, it is only a fool (or a tool of the game masters) who actually invest their passions and order themselves according to their beliefs. This is particularly true since most belief systems were developed to coerce and control the masses. According to the writings of Austin Spare, belief is the end product of the will impacting desire, so whatever one wills through desire becomes a convenient belief that can aid one in achieving a goal.

Our lives reside and persist in a world that is stochastic in nature and constantly changing. Nothing lasts forever, so nothing really has any intrinsic value. We are buffeted by forces that are greater than ourselves and we seem to have little or no control over what happens to us. Yet this chaos that affects all of the dynamic social systems, groups and even institutions can be harnessed and used by chaos magicians so that they become liberated and achieve self-mastery. Knowing the game and seeing through the lies and deceptions allows one to also perceive the most direct way to achieving goals and stepping out of the social trap. To fully escape from the rigid world of rules and protocols requires one to harness the very powers that can destroy that world. 

While most people see reality as a seamless stream running from the past to the future, a chaote sees reality for what it truly is - a nonlinear stochastic process that is destroyed and recreated every moment (what they called “immanentize of the eschaton”). While this had more meaning in philosophy or the social sciences, it is an attempt to foster a utopian society in the current world. In Chaos magic, it means learning to be aware of the discontinuity of reality, that endings are immanent and occur with frequent regularity. The end of everything is found in the beginning, and visa versa. Continuity is an illusion, and in fact, it is a shared delusion. If one knows this to be a fact then the continual re-creation process can be manipulated and changed through the agency of the will. 

Another important tenet is that individuality and the perceived values associated with the egoic term “I am” is an illusion. The self is broken into many parts and not all of them are unified in effect or purpose. The unified self is an illusion, and in fact, it is lie that we all perpetuate. Therefore, one can assume any persona or social mask to achieve a specific end, since the concept of selfhood is actually a pernicious fiction. A better term for the multiform personal self would be “we,” and in fact one can see this aspect of the self in multiples of significant numbers (three selves being one of the most common). However, being too much attached to a specific identity is very limiting, particularly if others can define you and thereby manage and control you. 

We therefore have a persona for work, social situations, intimacy, and magic. In fact we have multiple personas. Yet one who is empowered is able to selectively choose and build their persona for any given situation, and they are deliberately not attached to any of them. The most powerful of all personas is one that is completely neutral and not-attached, where they just quietly observe and display no overt sympathy or engagement with any faction. This is the foundational mind-state upon which chaotes would establish their concept of the self, because it can give them the greatest flexibility. 

The base-line mental state for inducing chaos and bending probabilities is called the Gnostic State, but it is actually a form of self-induced ecstasy. Austin Spare talked about this technique, linking sexual orgasm with death, and he called the method the Death Posture. According to his writings, the Death Posture used a technique of physically exhausting the body by assuming a highly stressful physical posture and maintaining it until one is completely spent and unable to continue. The resultant mind state and physical euphoria that follows such a release assists one to be cleansed and purified so as to be able to see with different eyes and more perfectly project one’s willful desire. Of course, this is a form of self-induced ecstasy, so any technique of inducing ecstasy will work, including masturbation and taking mind-altering drugs. Chaos Magick has embraced variations on this technique to aid the practitioner in breaking through the embedded structures of reality and being released into a domain outside of the socio-cultural matrix. These variations can be classified as inhibitory (meditation or trance), excitatory (orgasm or induced ecstasy), and indifference (sensory isolation). 

Chaos magick also uses the model of the unconsciousness to explain the mechanism for shaping or bending reality. I suspect that this idea was also taken from Austin Spare’s writings, since he was also very wedded to the idea and used it in a similar manner. The basic premise is that to be effective in promoting a magical objectives, one needs to acquire a mental state where that objective is the sole and single point focused within the mind. The magician should bind that objective with their passion, merging all of their emotions and desires into it, and allow themselves to achieve a climax, using one of the techniques of ecstasy. Then, they should completely disengage with that objective and immediately block it from the conscious mind, simultaneously forgetting and releasing it. Using this technique, the desire will pass from the conscious mind as an empowered thought-form and enter into the subconscious mind where it becomes a powerful magical complex. 

Chaos magicians appear to believe that the unconscious mind is the reservoir of all magical power and potential, and that once an empowered desire is released fully into that mental domain it will manifest in the material world. What is also implied in this method is that the unconscious mind of an individual is connected to all of the rest of the minds of humanity which are part of that collective domain. This is the only way to explain how releasing and forgetting an empowered desire could emerge into the material world. Through the media of the unconscious mind can a magical act can affect things and individuals not directly connected to the one performing the operation. In my many years of practicing magic using various techniques, I have found this idea to be correct and quite useful. Drawing something (or someone) to you is better done by empowering a desire for that thing (or person)  and then quickly forgetting it. This does indeed push the desire below mental awareness into a kind of collective where it can better operate without conscious interference.

The mental flexibility espoused by Chaos Magick is exemplified by the concept of paradigm shifting. What this typically means is nothing more or less than being able to change one’s perspective or viewpoint, even arbitrarily. As a practical technique, paradigm shifting breaks down social conditioning so that the chaote can realize the truth without attachments, underlying alliances or personal biases. It helps the chaos magician to always think outside of the matrix and not to become wedded to any specific idea or belief system. This fits with the rest of the overall perspectives and beliefs that embody Chaos Magick, starting with the self and proceeding with the world-view. If everything is relative and nothing is true then even one’s cherished perspectives must be subjected to constant change and innovative insights. It is, in a word, the nature of the chaotic beast. 

This brings me to one of the most effective magical tools in the arsenal of the chaos magician, and that is sigil magick. Austin Spare perfected this art, but authors such as Carol and Frater U. D. have brought this technique out of obscurity and into general practice. I have found this technique to be extremely useful in my own practices and use it quite regularly. There are a number of specific techniques used, some which are based on graphically condensed representations of the common letters used in a phrase representing a specific desire, others on verbalizations or word creation, and still others on pure iconographic representations. The basic premise is to take a word or a phrase, or ideogram and convert it into a condensed symbolized form or graphic character. Then the magician uses this as the focus for projecting an empowered desire into the unconscious mind where it can become a powerful complex. 

Once one becomes adept at creating sigils then the various symbolic glyphs can be selectively organized into a veritable “alphabet of desire” representing all of the dualistic emotions that one could possibly experience in the psychic world. These emotions would represent foundational pairs, such as life and death, desire and fear, love and hate, power and weakness, etc. Breaking out these pairs into more specific qualities, such as terror, fright, paranoia, or evasion for fear, and then qualifying these emotional qualities with character based glyphs, one could use them in magic, singly or together in phrases, to more effectively symbolize a desired goal or mental state.

Sigil magick is by far one of the more powerful tools at the disposal of the chaos magician, and Chaos Magick has borrowed heavily from the obscure ideas and techniques espoused by Austin Spare. In many ways, Chaos Magick is Austin Spare’s step child, and in some ways, I think that he would have approved of it (in theory). However, he would have considered the middle class status of most Chaos practitioners as the idle fancies of the pampered privileged elite, and that few if any have actually connected with the primitive, horrific proto-human atavisms that he considered to be the core of his system of magic. Austin Spare despised the ceremonial magicians of his time (especially Crowley), so it is doubtful that he would have been very sympathetic to the resurgence of the study and practice of ceremonial magic today, even for those who have abolished all of the rules and protocols normally associated with it. (In fact, I think that Austin Spare would have looked more favorably on the Old Craft Tradition of Witchcraft.)  

Chaos magicians use a combination of the techniques of mental liberation, self-induced ecstasy, pop symbology and social icons, and the heavy promotion of sigil magic, to achieve magical results in the material world. Chaos Magick is preeminently a system of mental discipline that requires a constant and consistent effort in order to achieve self-mastery. Theurgy is given some redefined tropes within the chaos dialectic, similar to religious based liturgy (the mass, exorcism, initiation, etc.), but it is not something that chaotes find comfortable or in line with their overall perspectives. This is also true for any kind of work with spirits, since in Chaos Magick spirits are defined as a greater mental phenomenon. Spirit servitors are crafted thought-forms that are mental projections empowered and imprinted with the magician’s desires, and it is questionable whether or not that they would have any kind of existential reality apart from the consciousness of the magician. 

This is also true in regards to classical spirits, such as angels or demons, demigods or various deities. All these entities are nothing more than hallowed out masks that can be used, discarded, or switched out with other entities at the whim of the magician. However, greater relevance is given to egregores, group-mind thought-forms, the synergetic mass-beliefs of large groups of people, and the power invested in pop icons and cultural/media based themes. It would seem that Chaos Magick focuses particularly on the psychology of the magician, and that the operant effects of its magic are particularly thaumaturgic rather than theurgistic. This has to do with the basic models of magic that underlie the systems of Chaos Magick.

Regarding models of magic, Chaos Magick has created one that is a hallmark of its practices, and that is the stochastic model of magic. I understand that the chaos model of is where magic is mediated by shifting chaos dynamics. The chaos theory of magic attempts to understand the experiences of the magical and to describe the practice of magic in terms of random, chaotic, or fractal processes typically found in nature. The chaos theory of magic describes all aspects of magic and magical experiences in terms of these dynamics and the mathematical models that define them. The physical universe is stochastic, or random, in nature. While the random processes of nature sometimes combine to form the appearance of stable laws of causality, this is viewed as an exceptional or unusual circumstance. Reality is arbitrary and is defined only as a function of one’s own beliefs. There is a correspondence in chaos magic between the methods of magical action and the theories of Quantum Mechanics.

Many Chaos practitioners consider the Chaos theory to be a meta-theory, using whatever model works at the moment while not being attached to any specific method or model. In my opinion, this ideal has not really been effectively followed, and Chaos magick appears to have succumbed to becoming a theory or model itself.

The other model is the Information Model of Magic. The Information Model is based on the communication of information, which could include nearly everything that humans do to communicate. Everything in magic, from the symbols, correspondences, the regalia to the ritual actions can be seen as a stream of information, and that things with an inherent quanta of information are the very ‘packets’ or ‘kernels’ of information that are pulled or woven together to fashion a special kind of media called magic. 

Magic is therefore a linguistic event, and what drives the whole process is the precision of the stated intention and weight of the other supporting communications that are grouped around it. This is basically how the Chaos magicians of the 1990’s defined their model of magic, and the belief was that it abrogated all other models, making it the one and only true model. Of course, the folly of such a belief is that the spirit, energy and psychological models of magic still stand – there are spirits, there is energy, and there is the mind itself. However, the Information Model of magic is still quite useful and informative. This is because as a model it fully embodies and explains the efficacy of sigil magic.

As I have said previously, Chaos magic has evolved considerably over the last four decades, and in many ways as a tradition, it no longer adhered to tenets as established by Peter Carol. While Peter continued to publish books and his organization, Arcanorium College, continued to promote his ideas, his singular approach has been added to by a plethora of writers and practitioners. To get an idea of just how expansive Chaos magic has become, I leave with a webpage, and you can find it here.

Still, Peter J. Carrol was a brilliant occultist and magician. We owe him a great debt of gratitude for all his contributions to the practice of magic as a post-modern phenomenon. He came on the occult scene and really shook things up, and in many ways, it needed that kind event to bring magic into the post-modern world shorn of its attachments to the previous age. 

Frater Barrabbas 

 

Passing of Two Giants of Chaos Magic

This is a two part article on the recent passing of Peter J. Carrol, the godfather of Chaos Magick. In the first part, I will give an eulogy and list his accomplishments. In the second I will discuss Chaos Magick and its contributions to the practice of magic.

In April, 2026, Peter J. Carrol passed away. The very next month, another author of repute, Gordon White, of Rune Soup fame, also passed away. Peter was only two years older than me, and I believe that Gordon was a lot younger. Both of these individuals contributed considerably to the development and maturing of Chaos magic as a viable tradition, and they will be greatly missed. 

I corresponded for a time with Gordon and grew to appreciate his perspectives and ideas, and he also supported and encouraged my early writings. We lost touch some years back, and I had always intended to get back in touch but never managed to do so. However, his blog, Rune Soup, was the place where Gordon shared his ideas with one and all. While Gordon, as I understand it, migrated away from Chaos magic and had been focusing on a kind of native shamanism, and he passed away in Cusco, Peru of natural causes. He had written a eulogy for Peter in late April, likely before he began his trip to South America. You can find his blog, Rune Soup, here, and also his substack version, where he had recently moved his blog, here. If you are interested in Gordon, then looking over his blog and substack writings will better inform you.

I never knew Peter, but I highly respected what he developed as a whole new way of approaching magic. I found that I agreed with some of his ideas, since I was also a magical system builder who relied on experimentation and research to develop what I believed was the best approach to magic for myself. Peter continued to write books and promote his ideas over the years. One could say that Peter was one of the main founders of Chaos magic, and the ideas and perspectives that he promoted became the foundation for Chaos magic, although over time, it has evolved from those ideas into a more traditional system of magic. When talking with Chaos magicians and reading some of their writings online, I have found that they appear to have moved away from some of Peter’s more extreme ideas. Even so, Chaos magic still appears to carry many of Peter’s ideas about magic. 

Peter J. Carrol’s main contributions to the evolution of the practice of magic was the loosening of the framework of what was likely a stodgy discipline, perhaps too wedded to Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn, Regradie and William Grey, and the proliferation of medieval and renaissance grimoires and their adherents. What he did was completely upend the traditional approach to magic, and replaced preexisting lore with a more flexible, creative, and direct approach. I would like to briefly discuss what Chaos magic was when it first came out, keeping in mind that it has become much more complex and less doctrinaire. 

A short and brief history of Chaos Magick goes back to around 1978 when two fellows named Peter J. Carrol and Ray Sherwin had a meeting of minds and techniques, and formed the group the Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT) and began to develop a new system of magic that was later called Chaos Magick. According to scant biographical materials, Peter and Ray met and became friends through the social connections of an occult bookstore on the east end of London called the Phoenix. They initially published a periodical called “The New Equinox” and it later when they formed the group IOT. Occult book stores are typically the place where occultists and magicians congregate, and I can imagine that a lot of ideas passed back and forth between a lot of occultists of various perspectives. Peter and Ray were disappointed with the state of the literature and the practice of magic as they found it and decided to develop their own system based on ideas that were being shared with probably a number of people. That year, Peter published his first book “Liber Null,” and then in 1982, he published a second book, “Psychonaut.” These two books were joined and republished in 1987. 

Peter Carrol wrote a total of eight books on the subject of Chaos Magick to promote his magical and occult philosophies, while Ray Sherwin has more or less disappeared from the literary world. Phil Hine is another writer about Chaos Magick, and I would recommend his books as well, since they are written concisely and are easily accessible to the newbie. Peter also founded an organization later on called the Arcanorium College.

Here is the list of eight books that Peter Carrol has published over the years. His most recent books were published in 2022 and 2025.

• Carroll, Peter J. (1987). Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic. 
• Carroll, Peter J. (1992). Liber Kaos.
• Carroll, Peter J. (1996). Psybermagick: Advanced Ideas in Chaos Magick.
• Carroll, Peter J. (2008). The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm.
• Carroll, Peter J. (2010). The Octavo: A Sorcerer-Scientist's Grimoire.
• Carroll, Peter J. (2014). Epoch: The Esotericon & Portals of Chaos.
• Carroll, Peter J. (2022). Interview with a Wizard. Interviewed by Ian Blumberg-Enge.
• Carroll, Peter J. (2025). This Is Chaos: Embracing the Future of Magic.

Peter also had a blog where he wrote about his various ideas, and there is now a memorial located on the initial page that eulogizes him and discusses his life’s work. You can find it here.

Frater Barrabbas 

Right Tool for the Right Job?

Since I have Frater Ashen Chassan as a Facebook friend, I have seen quite a number of photos of his magical tools, and I must say that they are magnificent artifacts, cleverly and beautifully crafted and quite opulent. If I were more inclined towards traditional ceremonial magic I might be quite envious of his magical tools. They are incredibly awesome indeed. But the main question that I am sure many people ask themselves, and some undoubtably believe is true, do such perfect ritual tools make for a more potent magical outcome? That is to say, is an interesting branch or stick found in a special woods or forest, and used as a wand, unadorned by any clever craft a lesser tool than a beautifully crafted golden wand with ancient symbols inscribed upon it? That is the question which I am asking, and it would seem that there are two automatic opinions on such a question.

Opinion 1: This is the most obvious opinion, and it states that a beautifully crafted wand has far greater power than an unadorned stick. The greater the esthetics associated with a tool will naturally grant a greater power. If the tool is beautiful and also an antique, or even a relic from some past magician’s collection, then it would be even more powerful. Such an opinion would presuppose that the serious ceremonial magician should use whatever resources they have available to acquire the best tool, or the one that is the most beautiful, and even one that is an antique magical weapon. Ceremonial magicians have been known through history for their expensive looking and rare single-purpose tools. In fact, the best tools would be owned and used by the greatest magical practitioners, and the quality of the tools that a magician uses would represent their prestige and importance in the art of magic. Of course, if magicians happen to also be master craftsmen then they could manufacture such tools themselves, and those not so inclined would have to either seek out someone to make these tools for them, or find some rare artifacts or already-made and then adapted tools. 

Opinion 2: Since the lower class itinerant magician or witch in the previous age would have to make do with whatever they could find for magical tools, they were often common tools made magical through use. A knife, stick, walking cane, and maybe cast off priestly garb, plain dark cloths or even nudity would suffice for their working tools and vestments. They might have a pentacle engraved on a wax disc, and bits of parchment for making witch marks, bits of tin for the same, and maybe a plain wooden offering cup to top off their collection. If they were literate, they might have a couple of cheaply bound note books with spells and recipes written in them. With such a lower class accumulation of junk to work magic, would the magic be pathetically weak as well? If we look at our history and folklore, we will find that the cunning folk did quite well, and were reputed to be the most consistent and reliable producers of magical effects. As poor as they were, they got results, and their price was quite accessible to their poor neighbors.

Now, because I am a witch, and in fact my use of tools was extremely rudimentary in the beginning of my magical career, I have carried with me the idea that the actual material tool was nothing more than a simulacrum for the ideal magical symbolic tool, and that the intention far outweighed the esthetics of the actual material or configuration of the tool. Since I am not inclined to forging, crafting and artistically embellishing my magical tools, and that I found what I use today in various stores and online markets, what I have accumulated over the years was more than sufficient to perform magic. In fact, being the packrat that I am, I have a number of nice and also junky items in my collection - but very little of high quality. Does this mean that I am a lousy magician because my rites and ceremonies lack any kind of esthetic glamor, making them weak and barely effective? Because my tools are not awesome and therefore seemingly powerful, then I must be a fake magician, or just a pretentious fool. Really!

Yes, that was pretty funny. Since I have decades of practicing magic, the quality of my magical tools for me is quite irrelevant. I could go into the forest and find a stick, a nice straight branch, use my utility knife as both an athamé and a tool to prep the stick as a wand and the branch as a staff, and a use a plastic cup and plate for a chalice and paten and I am ready to work magic. What transforms those rudimentary tools into powerful magical weapons is my magical intention and my imagination, not to mention years of practice. Garbed in my ordinary clothes and coat without any jewelry or any rings other than my wedding band, and I am fully vested for the magical work. It may not be as amazing as turning a pumpkin and field mice into a horse drawn carriage, but it has some of the transformative aspects, except functioning in a much more mundane manner.

So, because I am just a humble Witch who selects various odds and ends as my magical tools, and I have always practiced my magic in this manner, having magical tools that are works of art or museum pieces of the same quality is not important to me. What is important in my magical workings is my mental state, my depth of knowledge and experience, and my powerful imagination. Armed with these capabilities, whatever I use to direct the lines of force, point at the various nodes of my temple or grove, and following my internal magical script or extemporizing a series of cantrips and spells in my mind’s eye, I should arrive at the same place as if I had the most esthetically amazing tools and temple at my disposal. Thus, the outer tools, vestments, temple furnishings, and various other accouterments do not make the magic happen. What makes it happen is my internal mental conditioning, years of practice, and my magical discipline. If I loose everything in a fire or a disaster but remain alive and well, then I can still work my magic.

You could take someone who had a model’s beauty, vest them in sumptuous and expensive robes and vestments, wearing magnificent jewelry, and armed with priceless magical tools and equipment, and place them centrally in a perfectly lit and furnished temple, with expensive incense wafting around them, and have them adroitly pronounce a powerfully intoned invocation using antique barbarous words, and would it really be magical? It would very visually esthetic, and perhaps could be caught on video, but still, unless the actor or actress had the proper mental state and years of practice, it would be empty of magical effect and probably meaningless. All the eye-candy of a Hollywood production would not be able to produce any magical effects or generate meaningfulness unless the cental practitioner had such a capability in them to begin with. Such a trained magician would be able to produce powerful transformative effects or make things happen in the material world with only a small percentage of the accouterments that I have described here. 

It is said that the most accomplished magical practitioner would not need any tools to perform magic, and I have done that as well, since my magical imagination can override any material deficiencies. That means that magic, for me, is part of my person, which we should expect after years of practice. I could jokingly say: “Magical tools? Magical tools! I don’t need no stinking tools!!” All these considerations show that magic is a mental state developed over a long period of practice and experiences. We start this path with humble examples of what Hollywood dreams about when depicting ritual magicians, and depending on our nature, we may stay that way until we master our art and ourselves. Then beyond that mastery is just the magic without any material representation. That is a true practitioner of the art of magic.

While I deeply respect and appreciate what Frater Ashen Chassan has crafted with his own hands, and I also find inspiration in the work that others have done to build up their tools, vestments, furnishings and other esthetically pleasing attributes to make their temples quite awesome, I know that real magic that is materially effective and transformative doesn’t require such things. Therefore, I urge my fellow practitioners to love what they do regardless of their tools and trappings, and if they have the money, time and expertise, they can create amazing temples and groves to work their magic. However, snobbery of any kind is meaningless, and it only shows how much someone really knows about magic when or if they declare that expensive and artful tools and vestments are the only way to perfecting the art of magic.

Frater Barrabbas

Thoughts About Good and Evil

As a Witch, I see the world infused with the ever-changing power and wisdom of light and darkness, where the changing seasons are represented as the cyclic balance of these qualities that is ever changing. They take turns being dominant, ascending and then diminishing. Through impermanence, resilience, fulfillment and interdependence, nature teaches us its greatest mysteries. It is a perfectly harmonious blending of natural phenomenon that is always tending towards balance. I use that idealistic perception to examine and judge the world around me, noting to myself that this balance has a powerful effect on the various elements of the natural world as well as the spirit world. 

Being out of balance is characterized as sickness and the diminishment of life for individual living creatures and the totality of life in the world, including and especially for humans. When the natural world itself is out of balance in a given geographic domain, then that situation produces an extinction event purging such a place of unadaptable life forms. Nature can change drastically by itself, such as the occurrence of ice ages and warming or cooling trends or by cataclysmic collisions with comets and asteroids. It can also be changed by the activities of human beings, such as the careless introduction of toxic pollution or greenhouse gas emissions. Ecological balance is the key to a living in a sustainable and habitable world.

“The balance of nature is not a static state; it is a dynamic equilibrium.” - John Muir

I have equated the occurrence of the transcendental cycle of light and darkness with the cycle of life and death, but where I stop short is to equate light and darkness to the qualities of good and evil. This is because they do not seem to be attributes associated with terrestrial life in general, and they are more concerned with the moral beliefs and values of both individual and collective human beings. There is no good and evil in nature, so these attributes are concerned with the sentience and the spirituality of human beings living in the world. Good and evil cannot, therefore, be considered transcendental attributes. By taking this naturalistic perspective about good and evil and making it a part of my religious practice, I have declared myself as a moral relativist. That, by itself, introduces the whole topic of the nature of good and evil, and whether or not it transcends human religious moral tenets and socially based laws. Certainly, there are rules against certain practices, and some of them are obvious and completely agreeable, and others are debatable. The human arbitrated laws of the land are the final determiner of what is legal and lawful in our socialized world, but bending or even abrogating those laws is the unfortunate practice of criminals, ruthless politicians and oligarchs.

Followers of moral relativism or cultural constructivism, as it is called, declare that all laws and moral values are simply relative to the cultures to which they apply, thereby making them more like social constructs. I believe that this perspective ignores that there are indeed some universal moral laws despite the different cultures in different geographic locations and times. The distinction of good from evil may be just an evolutionary adaptation to assist human survival and social cohesion, but there are boundaries that define civilized behavior. It is only when these human-determined moral values are grounded in transcendent precepts that they are taken out of the human sphere. 

Many philosophers have argued about the issue of whether these laws are based on transcendental precepts, such as how religion typically sees them, or whether they are merely human values determined by politics and established for the benefit of the elite and then cloaked in religious theology to give them a more absolute quality. This certainly seems to be the case for the mundane idiosyncrasies of religious laws and practices. Avoiding pork may have been an expedient law to protect individuals from harmful diseases, but coercing women to wear head scarves to protect them from inciting lustful thoughts in men seem to be more about controlling and sequestering women from the body politic than maintaining the purity of intent between genders. 

Outside of religious law and moral prescriptions, there is a body of thought that good and evil transcend human values, and these would be those philosophers influenced by the teachings and dialogs of Plato. Plato believed that good was an archetype and had a transcendent form, which he proposed was part of the highest reality, and that human beings perceived this archetypal ideation with intuitive approximations, since humanity cannot see the ultimate reality. Plato believed that if the Deity decreed the nature of good without good being a universal value, then it would be arbitrary and not truly good. From this perspective, Aristotle declared that good and evil are grounded in the nature of being itself, and defined it as that which either fulfills or damages the essential nature of a person, thus,  making it above and beyond the basis for determining cultural laws and moral sentiments. 

Good and evil, therefore, were archetypal qualities that were a natural part of the world as perceived by humanity. Christian theology, through Thomas Aquinas, incorporated Aristotle’s ideals into its natural theology, making good and evil a core essence of the manifestation of the world through the power and wisdom of the Deity. Of course, raising the idea of good and evil to the level of a godhead brought all sorts of difficulties to a monotheistic creed, such as the nature and origin of evil, and whether God was the source of both good and evil, which this certainly implied. 

Making good and evil transcendent also introduced into the framework of religions and mystical speculation the idea of duality, since if God is good, merciful, compassionate and loving, then evil has its origins in either an opposing supernatural being, such as the devil and various demons, or it becomes a mistake or aberration in the formulation of the world itself. Early adherents to Judaism had no problem in seeing a Deity that did both good and evil to individuals and nations, and to a lesser extent, Islam held this view as well. Seeing the Deity as the source of both good and evil had an ancient precedent, which was believed by most early pagan civilizations. Yet Mesopotamian religious adherents had long developed the idea of demons, and this was picked up by other religions in the Middle East, especially the Persians. However, Judaism and Islam both adopted the concept of demons and devils later on in their development, likely due to the influence of Persian Zoroastrianism, which was a true dualistic religious creed. 

Abrahamic faiths declared that their Deity was singular and had no competition, so theologians attributed the incidence of evil and the phenomenon of demons to the fact that human beings had the power of choice, to choose to do either good or evil, and they were tempted to do evil by demons. Followers of Luriannic Kabbalah believed that evil was the result of the shattering of the first emanation of the Sephiroth because they could not hold the absolute glory of the supernal Godhead, and therefore allowed the sparks of divine glory to fall into the underworld of non-being, which became the Qliphoth. This event allowed a contrary force to manifest that opposed the will-to-create that drove the Deity. Only within the Ain Soph was there the absence of good or evil, but from the emanations proceeding from Kether, there were tensions between a duality of severity and compassion resolved in the middle pillar, yet ultimately formulating in the distinction of good and evil in Malkuth. The Gnostic bishop, Valentinus, also promoted the idea that evil was introduced as an error of material creation, and not the fault or flaw of human nature.

Christianity developed the idea of the devil, or Satan, and legions of demons and their overlords as the principal source of evil, and that God gave them the kingdom of Hell from which to tempt humanity into committing sins. The rationale was that those who were destined to be bad and had led sinful lives were culled from the collected and departed souls from those who were good. 

While the authors of Christian theology proposed that their religion was nominally a monotheistic creed (as inherited from Judaism), they also pushed it to deviate from that base over time so that they could  more powerfully build up the role of devils and demons. They declared that those who were not forgiven for their sins or had not atoned for them in some pious manner, their immortal souls would be delivered to the powers of evil once they died, to be tortured forever in the underworld of Hell. It was a simple binary approach and explained why evil was allowed to exist, but only active in the material world. This belief functioned as a means of testing the faithful, who were given the dispensation of choice and wherever it might lead them. Thus, Christianity, while pretending to be a monotheistic religion of the Abrahamic faiths, was actually a dualistic religion that sequestered good and evil and made them morally transcendent. This Christian sentiment about good and evil, has, over time, influenced popular Islamic beliefs, but not so much Judaism.

More modern philosophers, like Emmanuel Kant taught that moral law, regarding good and evil, is considered a categorical imperative that is derived from pure reason and is independent of cultural determinants. That means good and evil are universal tenets which are binding whether individuals or societies adhere to them or not. Another perspective is the modern philosophical idea of moral horror that stipulates certain actions, such as mass murder or genocide,  are genuinely wrong, and it is referred to by scholars as Moral Realism. Either of these approaches specifies that certain actions can be considered universally evil, and by inversion other actions could be considered universally good, and neither of these categories can be reasonably refuted. 

Thus, Nazi officials who assisted in the killing of millions of Jews, or Japanese military officers who murdered prisoners of war, raped, injured or executed innocent civilians cannot hide behind the excuse that they were not responsible for their crimes. It is because the crimes they committed were against humanity as a whole, and judged independently of any national laws or directives, which  allowed or compelled  such actions. The excuse of just following orders was not enough to mitigate adjudicated war criminals from being sentenced to death. I, for one. would not want to argue against or disagree with such agreed upon international laws, and I would expect the politicians and combatants of any branch of the military in my country to adhere to these conventions as if they were sacred writ.

It would seem, then, that some laws that humanity has determined as a whole could be considered universal and applicable to everyone, such as crimes against humanity. Other laws and moral tenets could be considered to be relative to the place and time. Some of them approach universal laws and others would be socially or culturally determined. While universally accepted laws ordained by the conventions of nations could be considered candidates for transcendental qualifiers for the definition of evil, qualifying good is not as direct. 

I think that on the transcendental level there is something more like what I originally discussed in the beginning of this article as the archetypes of harmony and disintegration, life and death, creation and dissolution, or expansion and contraction as symbolic qualities of light and darkness. These attributes are above the domain of the human mind and the social milieu of the human race, and so they are only dimly recognized in the human definitions of good and evil. From this perspective, good and evil are mostly relatively defined, but there are conventions and definitions of evil, and laws adjudicating them, that amount to universal tenets in the human domain.

In the occult and spiritual sciences, one can deduce a concept of good and evil as the overall polarity of creation and dissolution as found in the concept of balance and its product, harmony, or imbalance and its product, disintegration. I would propose that love produces harmony, and hatred, disintegration, and that these could qualify as representations of good and evil in our world of consciousness and unconsciousness. These qualities are the light and darkness within our minds. We all have the ability to love and hate within us regardless of whether our personal affectation is to identify with good or evil. 

We have the freedom and power to chose good over evil, evil over good, or to even avoid making a choice. Externally featured is our outer persona and its associated values, and within us, hidden from view, is our shadow, which contains those things suppressed or deemed valueless. Therefore, the duality of good and evil reside in our very being and they may be in a constant state of conflict if our internal balance leans too far to one pole or the other. Our goal in becoming spiritually evolved and enlightened is where we can unite the light and the darkness within us, so that the polarity of good and evil are neutralized, and thus become whole and complete in emulation of the One.

A person who has mastered the light and the darkness within their own soul and has become completely unified so that there is no internal conflict, only unity, has finally become a whole person. You might ask me what a person who has gained this state would be like, and I would reply: “Harmony, love, compassion, mindfulness, imperturbability, and total submission to the One and the ever present Now; this is their ultimate state.” This does not mean that they are blind to the suffering of others, nor are they immune to the vicissitudes of human existence and its fragile mortality. They are, in fact, more human than what is typical of humanity. This is the goal that we should seek, but there are any number of different ways to achieve it. For a ritual magician, magical shadow work is the key to achieving wholeness and completeness, such as what I have proposed in the workings of Ordeal XV.

Frater Barrabbas

Equinox - Balance Between Light and Darkness

View of Loughcrew Cairin during the equinox

 

Archaic humanity did not specifically acknowledge the spring and autumn equinox as much as they engaged with the solstices for summer and winter. We know this because the orientations of the various stone circles, passage tombs, and megalithic monuments built by our ancient ancestors are accurately aligned toward the southern and northern extreme latitudes depicting the advent of the solstices. The equinoxes were just the points in between the summer and winter solstices. There were exceptions, such as Loughcrew Cairns in Ireland, where the passage tomb is aligned to the rising sun of the equinoxes instead of the solstices. Additionally, the Mnajdra Temple in Malta has a temple doorway that is precisely aligned to the equinoxes, and the Crucuno Rectangle in Brittany is a megalith that is aligned to the equinoxes; They represent a different approach to antique solar observances. Were they an exception or a variation? We don’t know.

Prehistoric societies would obviously note that the sun was either incrementally moving to the south or the north, and at a certain point the duration of day and night would be equal. Whether they marked the equinoxes as an important occasion is unknown, but it is very likely in some cases. All this, of course, is just conjecture on the part of archaeologists, but the fact that there are alignments shown in these edifices to the solstices and in some cases to the equinoxes lends itself to this theory. We just don’t know how archaic humans in the Neolithic age perceived these occasions in their solar calendar, and what they did to commemorate them.

Most of the calendars in early historical times in Europe and the Middle East were lunar based simply because it was easier to measure a month based on the interval between the reoccurring lunar phases. Ancient Greece had a number of variations to their calendars, but they were tied to the agricultural events of planting and harvesting than to the specific equinoxes and solstices. Hipparchus, in the second century B.C.E., accurately determined the equinoxes mathematically, and he also discovered the precession of the equinoxes over time. Yet this didn’t seem to have much impact on the calendars of antiquity.

Ancient Rome had a calendar that was slightly more solar oriented because it began around the vernal equinox, but it only had ten months of 30 days (March through December) and the rest were considered intercalated days of winter. However, the month was typically divided into three nine-day weeks, with three days in between for religious observations and market days. This early pre-Julian calendar was more strongly influenced by the lunar phases of the month and by the agricultural annual cycle than by the actual positions of the sun. The reforms established by Julius Caesar brought the early Roman calendar into alignment with the solar year, with twelve months and observations that included the equinoxes and solstices, but the liturgical year remained pretty much the same as it was before the Julian reforms.

Celtic and Germanic people approached their calendars in a completely different manner.  Instead of hosting religious observances and celebrations on the solstices and equinoxes, Celts chose the midpoints between them. They celebrated four fire festivals that likely represented the vegetative cycle rather than the solar cycle. Whether or not they had astronomically pinpointed the exact midpoints for their religious festivals or selected them based on certain natural observations is unknown. Germanic peoples orientated their religious calendar on the summer and winter solstice, and the winter solstice was particularly emphasized. Slavic people who lived to the east of the Celts and Germans, appeared to observe and celebrate the spring equinox with fertility rites and specialized deities, and observed the autumn equinox as a time of harvest, feasting, and homage to their departed ancestors.

Christianity cleverly absorbed these various pagan calendric systems into their liturgical calendar of feasts, fasting, atonement, commemoration and celebration. They combined both the late Roman calendar and the Celtic and Germanic calendars into their liturgical cycle based on the occurrences of the life and death of Jesus Christ, and the events commemorating the apostles, the various saints and martyrs. 

However, the observance of Easter, which was supposed to commemorate the birth of Jesus, occurs on the first Sunday after the full moon following the vernal equinox. Thus, Easter, and the start of the Easter calendar and the end of Lent, is a lunar based event ensconced within a solar based calendar. The Easter liturgical cycle begins with Easter, culminates with the Pentecost, and ends with the celebration of Corpus Christi. I have stated in my books and writings that this cycle also mirrors the cycle of the Grail myth, along with the pagan chthonic antecedents that would be associated with that mythic cycle.

Modern Witches and Pagans have combined both the Celtic cross-quarter observances with the solstices and equinoxes to produce the eight spokes of the wheel of the year. However, I have shown in my writings and books that this singular wheel actually contains two cycles, which are the solar and the vegetative seasonal cycles. Joining these two cycles together illustrates the mysteries of the cycle of light and darkness, and the cycle of life and death. These are endless cycles, because the ascension of light is followed by its descent, and the ascension of darkness is followed by its own diminishment. Every year this cycle is repeated, seemingly endlessly. 

Therefore, it can presumed that life follows the same cycle. That the event of birth is followed, over an unknown period of time, to death, and that death is nothing more than the transition from one life to another. However, the beginning of each vegetative cycle begins with new growth and not the resurrected life of the previous cycle. A tree might remain the same, but the leaves that appear each year are different. There is a lesson and a mystery to this observation which would qualify the belief in reincarnation as to what is actually reborn and what is lost forever in death, but I digress.

The endless cycle of light and darkness found in the ever changing solar year represents a natural balance where neither the light nor the darkness can ultimately dominate the year. As the light and darkness are in eternal transition, this cycle contains no moral or ethical constraints or judgements because it is purely a part of nature. It is model for all to follow, so that individuals, groups and nations seek to maintain a state of harmony between the light and darkness within themselves. From that balance within they can approach other individuals, groups or nations without prejudice or judgement. In this manner, they are at peace with themselves, and exist in a state of balance throughout their daily lives and social intercourse with others. 

Adherence to the light over darkness, or darkness over light, is a mistake in the eyes of those who seek a balance between the two so they might discover the very core of its mystery. That mystery is the changeless state of the eternal present, which contains all darkness and light, and is the source of life and the repository of the dead. I count modern Witches and Pagans as individuals and groups who can and probably should follow the example of the endless and ever balanced cycle of light and darkness, having rejected the idea of choosing one over the other as a premise for their religious and spiritual beliefs and practices. 

Knowing the balance of light and darkness within one’s self is the key to finding that singular source that resides in the center of all beingness, which is the point of unity and oneness. Beyond that singularity is the enfolding non-being of emptiness, the source of all that is and is not. I define a modern form of pagan enlightenment as the point where an individual becomes fully aware of this mystery and finds themselves within this state of union, thus, permanently changing the world that they see and operate through. It is also the path to obtaining the vision of eternity and timeless unity. Such a vision changes a person most profoundly, and reverberates in their consciousness even beyond the death of their body.

Happy Vernal Equinox to one and all!

Frater Barrabbas