XII: The Brilliant Darkness

Virginia was kind to me, at first, we found a condo to rent. I found a job as the resident psychic at an occult store called Ye Olde Mystique Shoppe. Everything seemed to be falling into place. I felt like I had found my nitch and dove even deeper into my spiritual practice.

My day was filled with study and practice. This would be the beginning of over a decade in which I invoked everyday. So I would invoke, meditate and then scrye on a sacred symbol every morning. I should explain here what I mean by invoke and scrye. An invocation is like a very focused prayer. In Magick it is a means in which to focus our minds on an idea or intention. In my practice I was focused on the Tree of Life from the Cabala and so would focus on a color, Deity or Holy Name by “Invoking” it. There are three parts to a good invocation. The first part is you calling out to god, the second part is god answering you, the third is you and god talking as one. So from this you can gather the idea is to become one with Deity.

Scrying is a little harder to explain, it is a bit like meditating on a specific focal point. The difference between meditation and scrying in my opinion lies in the intention. In meditation the idea is to tame to mind and have it rest on the object. In scrying the idea is to observe the object itself in a very focused way. To observe how it feels, what its “energy” is like and if it brings anything to our mind. So it is much more of watching the sky intently observing all its phenomena. In meditation we simply observe that the sky is happening and that is all. When I scryed in those days I would pick a sacred symbol to scrye. This was usually a Rune or a letter from the supposed sacred alphabet of Enochian. Because I was using what are called sacred archetypes, these sessions were very intense and opening up all kinds of things in me.

So needless to say my practice was very intense during this period. I would then go into the shop and study the rare books they had stashed in the back. Charles who started the shop 13 years before I came had been collecting books and had some real gems. In fact when I later started collecting rare books, that library was my model. Charles didn’t like a lot of people, but he did like me and so gave me full access to his books. I was exposed to things I didn’t even know existed in those old books.

My study seemed to be more and more toward the Cabala and western mysticism. I started reading Eliphas Levi, Aleister Crowley, Arthur Edward Waite, Israel Regardie, Dr. John Dee and so on. I started to read Crowley’s eleven volume Equinox set from start to finish. I began to learn Hebrew so I could translate parts of the ancient Jewish texts on Cabala. I felt a real kinship to these old occultists. Especial Crowley, I felt like I knew him personally. It was an odd feeling that never left. I have always felt like he was an old friend in a strange way.

All of my study grabbed the attention of a local group of occultists that hung around the store. They reached out to me and basically decided that I was one of them. So all of us began talking, hanging out and comparing notes. Not only did I now have a job that was perfect for my studies, I had fallen into a community as well. Things couldn’t have been better. All the hits my ego had taken through addiction and recovery were being healed. In fact I was beginning to feel smart, powerful and important. Feelings I was not accustomed to.

Soon Carol’s Son came to stay with us for a bit and I got to play the uncle again. It was the final piece in my puzzle. I felt complete. Then circumstances beyond our control, and he was gone, wisped away by his father. I was pretty certain I would never see him again. Our little patchwork family was devastated. I will never forget that day. The little guy sat in my lap crying when we told him his dad was coming to get him. He had wanted to stay and we tried, but the legalities made it impossible at that time. He was terrified of his dad, it was an awful feeling of powerlessness. As I wrapped my arms around him I could hear him crying and feel his tears burning my arms like lava as they fell. The naive hippy new-ager died that day. A darker force moved in to take its place. I would live as a shadow for years to come.

I had started teaching meditation and magick to kids somewhere around that point and so turned more to that as those events unfolded. I think I did that to both avoid my own pain and try to fulfill my desire to be a father. I refused to teach adults stating they were too hard to reteach. My ego having grown to an exaggerated size during the year, I felt like adults were a waste of my time. I must have been quite a joy to be around in those days. This arrogance and avoidance cost my friendship with Rod. He was trying to plan a “family” camping trip for the three of us. A way to heal from all the events, I basically told him that they were not as important as my “work”. Meaning my magickal work and teaching. It was a terrible slap in the face to him considering all that he had done for me.

He was hurt and angry and asked me to leave. I went to stay with one of my new magickal pals who lived next to the shop where I worked. To me it at that time, I seen it as a logical progression to my path. Not considering at all how I had hurt Rod. We later made up, but our friendship would never be the same after that. He would be one of many that would fall prey to those darker days. I am not proud of this time in my life. I was young, arrogant, intelligent and practicing a whole lot of what I would consider hard core occultism that was giving me a false sense of power. All this being said, it was a period of accelerated learning for me, so in a greater sense I see how it was all necessary to make me who I am.

When I went to go stay with my friend, he was getting ready to go on a navy cruise, so basically left me his apartment. I had decided that I would use the time to write thinking that I actually had something of importance to say at that stage in my life. It turns out that it was a completely perfect scenario. I started to pen a book entitled “The Development of Free Will” an anarchistic philosophy of sorts. This book was more important to me than anyone else. It was all about breaking “set” or the set of ideas that we were taught. It was a book about questioning everything and only believing what you have found to be true through your own experience. In essence it was a documentation of the process that I was going through. It was never published, hardly seen, but its influence was far reaching in the sense that it influenced the way that I think of reality and the way I teach others.

Soon after my buddy got off his cruise a group of us decided we should all rent a house together so we could study and practice with others that understood, a lodge of sorts. So we found a farm house in Chesapeake Virginia and that's when things got really crazy.

Under that roof were many great transformations. The first ideas of what would later become the Black Sun System were developed. I created my system of geometric magick then. I had my first experience with emptiness and that changed everything. Although our “lodge” was short lived, it gave me the freedom and encouragement I needed to break out of my mold and develop. Although what I developed into at first was a monster, that monster’s strength later got put to good use.

Our house was pretty cool, there were initially three of us. It was three bedroom house with an attic and screened in porch. I had a temple set up in the attic since access to it was in my room. There were working altars in every room and one in the living room. We had no tv, but eventually did have a stereo. So it was music, mystique and magick all the time. I had one visitor tell me that just the experience of coming to our house was transforming. I would believe that. We were all practicing on our own. I believe we were all taking on students as well, so the amount of activity in that house on a spiritual level was quite substantial. Then there were the conversations. All of us sitting in the kitchen around the table discussing, debating and concluding. It was truly a unique environment.

By this time my interest in western magick had me deeply swimming in Crowley’s work. This with my own manifesto of free will had caused me to embrace what would be now called “Shadow Work”. I was including in my daily invocations both angelic and demonic names. My thought was that true power came from balance and that we were either blinded by light or darkness by themselves. This practice was causing all my repressed aspects to surface. I was becoming what most people would consider “evil”. I was quite aware of this and allowed it to happen, in fact encouraged it. I would joke to people that I was Satanizing my life for their protection. This is when I developed my own style of working with occultism. I would immerse myself in an energy completely then observe the effects it had on me and my environment. In this way I would have direct experience and hence direct knowledge of it. I would not recommend this method for everyone. It was the basis for the Black Sun System however.

I went deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. I dyed all my clothes black, dyed my hair black. Painted everything black, the darkness that I was experiencing had a secret and I was determined to uncover it. Black became a symbol of the mysteries, of potential, it became and still is my uniform of priesthood. I would learn from the darkness by becoming the darkness.

It was around this time I started to experiment with different ways to work with the Tree of Life. Because of my fascination with this darkness within me, I wanted to touch the greater darkness.  What the Hebrew mystics called Ain or nothing. So I set out to do just that.