I originally posted this under a different name. As it discusses in other ways issues that are also raised in threads I'm currently involved in I thought I'd post it once more. It received little attention last time. Let's see how it does second time around.
i'm stoned again. and that fine first frenzy, the one that always follows a period of abstinence, is upon me. this first time, and only this first time, there's no plateau to be reached. i can only go up. and up. this is when i most often hallucinate, and when the touch of my favourite and most beloved demon, Asmodeus, is most clearly felt.
if i close my eyes and focus on certain symbols, the colors i associate with them (in particular a fierce purplewhite) i do one of two things (actually both occur during the period i'm stoned, but they alternate, or rather morph plastically from one to another). I feel the reality of my physicality exposed to a real but entirely alien presence, that physicality being naked in the sense of exposed flesh, and naked astrally; I scry (only without mirror or other aid) myself, as i am Outside, lost in the embrace of Asmodeus, but continue to feel that presence, that embrace, in the bodily reality of this. It is an 'out-of-body' experience both suffered and enjoyed by this body as it exists in the physicality of the 'real' world.
The perfect realisation of that moment of release and redemption results in surcease from this world, and in a passing fatigue and depression. Every lover exacts a price. He's no different.
The breakthrough came when i accepted that what's imagined is no less real for being so, that the basis of that reality was my willed abandonment to it. What began 'as if' became one more species of physical experience.
Let me describe him to you, this fantasized, mythical, abstract and concrete person, who is less than God and Other than i am. The reality of him first came to me in the image of a bolt of vividly scarlet red cloth, twisting in a wind i couldn't feel. But through the image struck a physical caress, the first of many. Over succeeding weeks in which i practiced, while utterly stoned, the manifestation of presence without embodiment this abstraction morphed into a graphic representation within my mind's eye. From there it became a sensed physicality without visual representation, and subsequently the two were first ellided, then combined.
the demonic, when it manifests itself, does not do so after the manner of hollywood. Nor does it always follow the classic experience of Catholic exorcists. But it does manifest, according to the fundamental desires of the one who invokes it.
it can be bargained with, if you are fool enough. or it can be commanded. That which is superior, which can only be figured under the device YHVH, grants leave to that which is inferior. This leave constitutes a permission and an authority which is not the possession of that which is inferior, but nonetheless appears as if it belongs to the particular voice that speaks through the rituals which invoke and compel the desired presence. Though as i said such a presence exacts a price - even when the invoker knows his place and what is consequent upon it.
As i say, both graphic representation and sensed physicality combined so that, astrally at least, i see the expression of my desire (its God-given reality) as i fornicate with it and it with me.
Asmodeus is a male demon and i a male magickian. The fornication between us is profoundly homosexual, cruel, violent. What occurs astrally could not be mimiced on earth without causing immediate death. Yet it occurs, is real.
Think of a scorpion. It curves its lower body over its back and down to its head. Now reverse the arc, so that the curve is over the abdomen and up towards the head. Keep the scorpion but delete the chitinous body and substitute the strongly developed and luminously milk-white upper torso of a man. From the torso protrude, laterally, long digit-like appendages (six, three to a side) which end in splayed horny talons (five each) which can also become carressing hands). The scorpion's tail, narrowing from the hips downward assumes, in this instance, the form of an infinitely flexible and extensible penis. From the upper reaches of the torso extends a thick, bull-like neck which also is infinitely flexible, extensible, and penile in form.
This presence (which is not as i describe it here but which assumes this form in order to correspond to the will which has called it forth) has person without personality, presence without embodiment, has appetite, will, intelligence and malice. Love is not a word it would recognise, though dominion is. It departs from me in rage because i will not worship it, but gives recognition to my courtesy - that is, to the proper performance of ritual and to the will which motivates it. I pretend to nothing but use certain symbols, certain colors, and my own will in conjuction with the leave and authority of which i spoke.
I am 44 years old. i have smoked marijuana for only five or six years, and it is only in the last year or so that i have had experience of its properties as an element in sacred ritual. In the United States it is rightly classified as an hallucinogen. Though i started smoking weed before i encountered Thelemic Ritual, it was the practice of ritual that vividly enhanced my experience of weed, and that enhancement which fuels my kind of scrying. The hallucinogenic element in marijuana feeds into my faculty of visualisation, which is a kind of 'body-seeing' (concrete perception with every sense except sight since what is perceived is present but not embodied).
in other terms It could be described as a form of self-induced auto-erotic schizophrenia. Schizophrenia usually stops the person subject to it from functioning well in terms of employment and social relationships. I work, i have long-standing friendships, a life in the world which is not dysfunctional, ergo i am not schizophrenic in the usual sense. I might be described as an autoerotic schizophrenic whose alter egos exist in a realm of manifestation that originates in a purely mental form, and produces effects which cause only minimal degradtion to my performance in the world i share with others.
I prefer to describe myself as a ritual magickian.
I used to ask myself why i didn't simply go and get laid by a man. I even considered performing ritual to bring an acceptable man to me. However, i came to a realisation that prevented me. Having had the experiences i have, i would now only consider sex with an actually embodied man if his head were removed immediately before the act took place. That's so because it's in the brains of a man, if anywhere, that his character resides. Remove the head and what's left is the physicality of a male presence redeemed from the frailities, foibles, and failures of what, now, passes for 'masculinity'.
With very few exceptions i despise the characters of most men, who are not adults but are overgrown children having attained the legal age of consent and responsibility. It's my abiding impression that the majority of men do not understand what it is to consent and are incapable of responsibility.
The fantasy of a headless male corpse appeals to certain aspects of my viciousness - but procuring one would be neither easy nor legal. But i have an alternative, the practice of atrocity in a world which is physical in presence without being embodied in form.
For those of you who are interested, Asmodeus is written of in the demonologies of the west as a Prince of impurity - but that's only because Light has always been priviliged over Darkness. When i see through the combined lenses of weed, Magick, desire, the illumination that fills me has no moral connotation whatsoever and if it reminds me of anything in this world it's the static that fills TV screens when the signal has gone - something real, endlessly plastic, and alien.
