On my blog’s
“About the Author” page, I note “I was an ordained priest in a fairly well-known
ceremonial magical / pagan organization (that I don't talk about on this blog
or on social media) for many years, but now I'm just a solitary witch.” This is absolutely true and will remain true
so that I can protect others and also write freely about my experiences.
A few curious readers on Tumblr have asked me privately about my former group, but I won’t name names. It’s not that I’m trying to be mysterious. It’s that not all cultures are the same and I don’t want to worry about certain former colleagues being identified through what I say publicly and possibly being dragged out of the “broom closet.”
Still, two decades as middle management in a large esoteric order provided some
interesting (and sometimes painful) stories to tell. The order is where I got the bulk of my technical
occult training and it served as the backdrop for my spiritual
development. I taught ceremonial magic there
to a fair number of people. I saw a lot
of them become powerful and effective individuals. I also saw some fall apart mentally and
physically. So I’m here primarily to
tell stories about my magical life—because I fundamentally need to, because
sometimes the weight of the past calls out for balance by words in the present,
and because I see a new generation of witches, mystics, and magicians hearing
the same call I heard.
With that in mind, let’s talk about the accidental creation of demons and how it could happen between two members of a magical order. I’m thinking about something I recently read in Storm Faerywolf’s Forbidden Mysteries of Faery Witchcraft: “Victor Anderson reportedly warned against the Practice [of conjuring personal demons in order to master them], specifically the assumption that we each already have demons in each of the five elements, and warned that a demon could be accidentally created in the process of summoning one.”
This is interesting. Without getting into the complexities of “intelligent magical energy” (aether / the stuff of the Aetheric Plane) and how recognizing something’s energy by giving it a name and a shape can bring it to life (for example, as in the ancient “Opening of the Mouth” ritual), consider that every action implies a reaction, every frame contains a picture, every question creates an answer, and every name creates a being. This is one of the strange idiosyncrasies of the magical world. Isaac Bonewits calls it the “Law of Personification” in Real Magic: “[A]ny phenomenon may be considered to be alive and to have a personality; in short, to be an entity.”
If you build it, they will come. If you shape it, it will take on certain characteristics. If you make a space for something, that space will fill up. Or, if you prefer, Matthew 7:7, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” You have created a vessel for aether. Thus, you have brought a magical child into the world. This is the fundamental magical principle articulated by Aleister Crowley in Book 4: “Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” You knocked (used magical science and art to bring something forth) and the door was opened (change occurred, something came forth).
Therefore, if you conjure a demon, a demon will appear—even if that particular demon didn’t exist before you named it and called it, even if what arrives seems unexpected or radically different from what you have been conditioned to think of as “a demon.” And, as Victor Anderson warned, this can be done accidentally.
Now for the personal anecdote. In the order, I was casual friends with a woman we’ll call Kathy. Kathy had worked through some emotional upheavals (like all of us engaged in self-work) and had come to terms with her lousy romantic choices in men and women, had made a degree of peace with her childhood traumas, and now relied on heavy psychotropic meds to keep everything calm and even. In my opinion, someone with severe psychological challenges should do magic very sparingly and judiciously, if at all. But it was none of my business. We carried on a friendly and polite acquaintance and saw each other in person about once every two years.
What I didn’t know was that Kathy had created a fantasy world in which we were in love; we were a couple and were going to move in together. I found out about this because she started talking to mutual friends about it, swearing them to secrecy because we both supposedly didn’t want to create gossip in the organization. There was no rule against people in the order getting together and everyone wanted to be a good friend. So this lie was circulating for over a year before someone asked when I was planning to move to her (Eastern European) country.
I was shocked. But here’s where it gets particularly strange. Kathy had changed her life (job, flat, new city, even wardrobe) with my arrival in mind. In fact, if someone had looked at what she was doing without asking too many questions, it would have seemed clear that she was making a space in her life for a very serious relationship. The problem was, it was all in her head. Telling someone something is so and wishing for it to be so doesn’t necessarily conjure that thing. But it does conjure something.
As soon as I discovered the extent of what she was doing and saying, I understood it in magical terms. She was “knocking on the door,” essentially trying to conjure me into her life. It took some time for me to straighten this out and clear my name (no, I had not seduced her and made promises I didn’t intend to keep / no, we were not in a relationship / no, I am not the one lying / no, I was not abusing my position in the organization). And it didn’t end well for her. What she conjured wasn’t me. It was something that looked like me. That demon with my face, living in her head, feeding off her unfulfilled longings for a relationship, eventually brought her to a dark place.
This may also apply to online parasocial relationships. Consider that everything is magical in this world, even technical, conceptual, and digital things. So-called parasocial relationships have aether, too. What spaces are we creating online, in ourselves, that beg to be filled? And what comes to fill them? And how are our lives forever changed as a result?