Opium, Euphoria, and the Magic of Faeries

A few years ago I saw an info graphic displaying brain scans which were intended to demonstrate the similarity between the brain's response to opium and the brain's response to orgasm. It was pretty cool and made a lot of sense on multiple levels. It was an easy way to describe several experiences and behaviors that crop up with people. But it wasn't something that seemed to have particular relevance in regards to magic. Until a few days ago.

I'm not a chemist or a biologist so I'm going to quote from a few websites to establish more about the connection between the two. Then I'll explain the magical relevance and give some quotes for that, followed by an explanation of the recent experience which caused this relationship between opium experiences and faery experiences to pop up in my head.

Significant more for character than for science:

“Another user, the English gentleman quoted in Jim Hogshire's Opium for the Masses (1994), enthused that opium felt akin to a gentle and constant orgasm.” - opiates.net

I think this quote generally implies the driving elements of what I want to get at with this. Euphoria occurs as part of sexual experience, as part of orgasm, because of the brain's release of various neurochemicals including endorphins and dopamine. Both opiates and orgasm can create an experience of detachment, like floating along a rolling sea of clouds, experience is elevated and extended but in a way in which the pain and attachment of stress and discomfort are temporarily mitigated. Curiously opiates impact how our lungs work, they can make our breathing more relaxed, or they can make it more shallow...less control over our breath in regular circumstances would usually create stress of fear, but again opiate experiences are characterized by an awareness which reduces that stress and fear.

So they feel kind of the same, but that might not make for a meaningful link...so...the science of their sameness..

“the human brain's neurons had specific receptor sites for opiate drugs: opium, heroin, codeine and morphine. But then there was the obvious question. Why would nature put in our brains a receptor for a plant? After all, humans beings didn't evolve over millions of years eating opium or shooting heroin.

...the active ingredient in all these opiates - morphine - had a chemical structure similar to endorphins, a class of chemicals present in the brain. Endorphins are feel-good chemicals naturally-manufactured in the brain when the body experiences pain or stress. They are called the natural opiates of the body.

...The rush is often described as a heightened sexual orgasm, and a great relief of tension, which pervades the abdomen. After the rush, the high lasts for four or five hours and is caused by the morphine diffusing from the bloodstream into the brain. It is described as a warm, drowsy, cozy state. Addicts report a profound sense of satisfaction, as though all needs were fulfilled. ” - Frontline, PBS

“One well-known opiate commonly used today for the treatment of severe pain, is morphine (after Morpheus the Greek god of dreams).

Distributed throughout the nervous system, the opioid receptors, OP1-OP4, are involved in all of the calming effects we might expect, such as pain relief and reduction in anxiety - but are taken to extremes by illegal drugs, such as heroin. The natural partners to the opioid receptors are the endorphins, released during certain activities, such as running (thought responsible for the 'runner's high'), pain and orgasm.” - Drugs and The Brain

The second quote even hints at the magical associations of opium. The use of opium can be traced back to 4000 BCE in Sumeria and in what is now Switzerland, some suggest it might go further back to the Neanderthals. It was prevalent throughout the classical world in Greece, the Near East, India, and Asia. It was almost always considered not simply medicinal but holy or magical, a gift from or a symbol of the Gods. The gods of sleep in Greece were shown with poppies in depictions, and Pharaohs were entombed with artifacts of opium use. It was significant in the ancient world as medicine and as a magical substance, as is evidenced by its names:

“Physicians commonly believed that the poppy plant was of divine origin; opium was variously called the Sacred Anchor Of Life, Milk Of Paradise, the Hand Of God, and Destroyer Of Grief.” - opiates.net

There are lots of drugs which help with pain, or which create altered experiences, and many of them have been associated with magic and with religious experience, but opium has a pervasiveness beyond many. Further it has had a strange position in history. While some intoxicants were made illegal in Islam, opium notably was not and remained popular in Arab countries. China made opium illegal and so the British Empire went to war, twice, to make sure they could still get it. Globally international legal provisions against opium have been made, but it is still prevalent in medicine internationally. According to Christian Rastch, who makes reference to opium several times in the book Witchcraft Medicine, it was the only reliable narcotic in the ancient world.

Ratsch also notes that the opium poppy is amongst the candidates for plants which may have been moly, the mythological plant referenced by the gods as the greatest. He links the plant to Demeter, the goddess at the center of the Mysteries of Eleusis. He includes it as a traditional common element in witches' flying ointments. This last association is probably the most interesting for our purposes.

Flying ointments don't actually make witches fly, they create a state in which the witch is altered both in terms of awareness and in terms of physical condition. The exposure to poisons, things which adjust how the witch breathes, and which create stimulation and a shift in awareness, put the witch in a state where the body no longer impedes awareness of the magical forces and spirits with which the witch comes into contact, or allows the body to relinquish the spirit temporarily for a spirit flight. Much of the lore of opium describes these same sort of elements, The strange parallel of something which detaches and relaxes but which also leaves the ability for mental clarity despite sensations being adjusted.

Some people historically have even linked opiates to mild visionary experiences.

“While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike any thing I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body, lulling to sleep the before-mentioned racking pain, producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration (if the phrase be intelligible to others as it is to me) similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality - for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute elysium - that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged...After I had been seated [at the play I was attending] a few minutes, the nature of the excitement changed, and a 'waking sleep' succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with galley above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of lost globe...I will not attempt farther to describe the magnificent vision which a little pill of 'brown gum' had conjured up from the realm of ideal being. No words that I can command would do justice to its Titanian splendour and immensity...” - William Blair 1842 (opiates.net)

This kind of visionary experience, the use of opium in flying ointments, these things connect us back to magic and to the faery folk. The witches' sabbat is based largely in the experience of ecstasy. The body writhes in pleasure at the touch of the Black Man of the Forest and the spirits he brings. Freedom from the stresses of common life is experienced. The witch is elevated while brought into a visionary state amid spirits.

In the explanations given by witch hunters the witch slept with the devil and his demons but even in those accounts the witches were also said to enter the faery world to dine with the Queen of the Faeries. At times she featured as the contact from whom witches derive their powers. Faeries familiars were also tied to the learning and experience of witchcraft. Even the demons given by the Devil sound more like faeries than like demons. Whether they were faeries or demons though there was a clear sexual component involved in this interaction.

According to Walter Stephens in his book Demon Lovers the Devil would first encounter potential witches when they were alone and discouraged and therefore susceptible to being seduced. Sexual congress with the devil and with demons was often believed to be the source of a witch's power. Curses and malefica were performed by way of the demon who was the witch's lover. When the witch flew to the Sabbat or from the Sabbat through the night across long distances the witch was being carried by a demon. The Church theories on the witch couldn't give them such an amazing power and so the power had to be facilitated by demons who were paid in sex.

Some have suggested that this fixation on sex with demons was a form of misogyny, but it occurs in all the accounts of male witches as well. Some have suggested it was another way to simply accuse witches of perversion and debase the idea of sex. But what if the sex was actually a part of the magic?

We have many accounts in faery tales of faeries who seek human spouses or lovers. Sometimes it's an ongoing arrangement, others it is a more sinister and deadly encounter, but in either case, we frequently see faeries desiring sex with humans. We also know faeries have a history of desiring to kidnap human women and to have children with humans, or to kidnap human children and raise them as faeries.

When we look at medieval magic we see accounts of magic specifically designed to have sex with faeries. Regarding this as a trend Fredericka Bain in her presentation of the “Four Spells to Bind the Faery Sisters” which appeared in Preternature says: “It is well understood that the traditions

out of which early modern fairy lore arises are complex: sexual binding or forced sexual congress in particular, of or by fairies or demons, is referenced in romances, ballads, and witchcraft trials, as well as throughout medieval demonology.”

Even the power of transvection, by which witches fly by the aid of demons, is something we see in demonologies, either spells in which demons convey someone across distances or grant instant travel, or even obtaining faery horses that allow the magician to fly on them from place to place or travel long distances. Some accounts of witches include them attributing their power to curse to elf shot, or arrows given to them by the faeries when they feast with them.

So the powers given by demons, the sex with spirits, both are things we see associated with faeries in sources on magic. Along with these when we look at tales of the faeries we see feasting, dancing, and music. We see fantastical creatures and magical places. The faeries exist in a magical other space which is like our own but somehow different.

Even in modern depictions of the faery world we see this same sort of imagery. Surreal magical landscapes like our own but slightly stranger, heightened colors, things just beyond the ordinary enough to draw us in to their glamor. A mild hallucination that could be real or maybe not. A place which creates euphoria to draw people in and allow them to forget whatever else was there before they were brought there. Most recently the faery world has been depicted in this manner in popular media in Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell in which the kingdom of Lost Hope is an on going ball, similar to one in a human castle but with various slightly bizarre elements and in which the object of the faery's affection is caused to forget the human world. We also see faeries in The Mortal Instruments depicted in the television adaptation Shadow Hunters in which faeries can't lie but they can manipulate the truth to entrap people, and they have a separate world whose glamor can trap people by keeping them lost, and in which one could believe they are in the natural world, but only made more magical, surreal, and brilliant.

This is in part where the connection to opium comes in. To me, the ability to create a feeling that is related to orgasm, and to take away worldly cares, to numb pain, to give us an otherworldly euphoria, these are traits which seem to be shared both by opiates and by faeries. It's a similarity I probably wouldn't have connected if it hadn't been for an experience that happened a few nights ago.

I had received a couple signs that suggested I needed to connect with some spirits on their turf rather than ritually doing so here. When I was younger magic that involved spirit flight was a big part of what I did, but I'm not generally as keen on it anymore. In this instance I also didn't have the time to fully invest into that kind of work. So I figured it was best to approach it as dream work. To that end I called upon a faery and asked that he take me in my dreams where I needed to go. I was fairly clear that I did not want to do trance-work, I just wanted to hitch a ride in my dreams.

The faery arrived, and as sometimes happens when you work with spirits, the magic did not go as planned.

I told him what I wanted, and he responded "your body still needs to be ready if your spirit is going to leave" and he reached out towards me and I felt euphoria, then my breathing dropped very low, I felt like I was floating as if rocking on a soft wave. As I was drifting away from normal awareness I thought "this feels like the euphoria opiates cause." As my breathing became more and more shallow, and my body heavier and heavier until I no longer felt most of it I realized he had put me into a super heavy meditation in like a matter of seconds. It was impressive. I had not really done trance-work for awhile so it was no longer a feeling I felt often so it was pretty curious. I continued my protest that this wasn't what I'd wanted but he insisted that it was necessary and that I should just go with him. He explained that if I wanted an experience that wasn't just within my mental space my body needed to be pushed to a point where it could let go of me. It felt really wonderful, and I had a flash of shimmering visionary experiences showing the way from myself to a wholly other place. Unfortunately I didn't get where I was going...partially because he took me by surprise.

So in the end, I had a cool experience for like a half hour. More than that I had an interesting conceptual connection. Was there a reason that a faery's touch should feel like taking opiates? In stories of faery and human interactions one of the most common elements is humans being “faery led.” This capability to force a trance state filled with euphoria and visionary awareness would explain some of the experience of being faery led. It would also explain some of the sexual elements of faery encounters. The author of the Four Spells to Bind the Faery Sisters describes the faery with whom he sleeps as having beauty to rival a queen or empress and implies that she has immense sexual prowess. Faeries often are described as being ugly and stealing human babies and seeking human lovers because humans are more beautiful. These could simply be conflicting elements of stories or they could be different types of faeries. Alternatively it could be part of their magic, the glamor of faeries could be the same potency which lets them manipulate the minds, bodies, and sensory experiences of humans. Perhaps the beauty and sexual prowess of the faery lover is driven by the euphoric otherworldly awareness created by her touch.

Magic occurs outside of our minds, but we still experience it through the lens of our mental faculties, just as is true of all other phenomena. I am not one for explaining magic through science or trying to make magic scientific. I don't believe faeries secrete some kind of other worldly spirit opium. I don't think we need this sort of mechanism for trying to create a way of viewing faery interactions scientifically. Magic is magic it isn't science, it doesn't need to be science. But recognizing that faeries may have the ability to impact our sensory experience, regardless of the mechanism, gives us insight to their powers and how we can interact with them. It lets us consider folklore and how we engage it. To me its a jumping off point as to how and why some things may relate and how some things may have been real that we thought weren't.

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Gifts of Dionysos: Reflecting on 6 months of Mid-Atlantic Dionysianism

Over the weekend I got to attend a really awesome camp out hosted by Azul Nox Encampment of the OTO along with significant participation and contribution from St. Eve's Parish of the AJC. In the past the camp out was a sort of Gnostic Solar adoration themed camp, as far as I understand it. I was never able to make it in the past, there were always schedule conflicts. But this year, the theme was Bacchanalia and my schedule was miraculously open. Clearly I needed to be there.

Dionysos has been a major part of my personal spiritual and magical work for the last several years. The relationship is pretty different from what I've been used to with gods. It's more intimate and pervasive and touches on various areas of interest. It's more directly informative and shaping than others have been, but also more detached in a way and less formal. For years the main visible expression of this, well, aside from several general areas of my life and behavior, has been a Dionysian ritual we celebrate at William Blake Lodge, OTO in Baltimore.

The ritual, which is the first of a three part series I call the Thelemic Rite of Dionysos, started out as a a celebration of the vital force understood as Hadit in Thelema. I was asked to put together a ritual for the second day of the Three Days of the Book of the Law, and decided I wanted to work with Dionysos. A few years earlier some friends and I had done a small impromptu invocation of Dionysos as part of a series of study group sessions we called “Crowley, You So Crazy.” We would spend part of the night discussing a Crowley text and part of the night engaging in some sort of practice related to magic or Thelema. So that night wrapped up with a pretty simple ritual to invoke Dionysos. Our host often complained that he had never in any magical work felt any energy or divine or spiritual presences but after we were done this ritual he excitedly expressed how much he felt Dionysos and his influence. A couple years before that ritual was when Dionysos began as a consistent presence on the periphery of my spiritual awareness, one that was consistently edging deeper in, and by the time I had to start planning our Hadit ritual, I was being drawn pretty deeply into his mysteries – which were touching all areas of my magical exploration; and I wanted the people who were going to be there to feel the truly visceral power of Dionysian ecstasy.

So I tried to write a ritual and pretty much got no where. Then one night, when I wasn't even working on it, I basically felt like I was being told by Dionysos what should happen in the ritual. So the next day I wrote it, and we did it that year at WBL. It went over really well. That was around April 2011. People asked to do it again, and we expanded it a little and did it again, and people liked it even better. So over the last six years it's been done several times and I've written a second ritual for the series and outlined a third. The more I've done it the more I've found Dionysos inspiring my understanding of various areas of magic and religion.

Last December we celebrated the ritual again at Blake as our Winter Solstice Celebration. It was epic. So many people were there. We had a ton of new visitors who hadn't been to anything at WBL before, members brought friends from other groups, old members we don't see often showed up. The previous summer Azul Nox's summer camp had a significantly more Dionysian presence than prior years, and many people involved in Dionysianism through that event made it to ours. Better than the great turn out, people had a great time. With an event like a Bacchanalia it's easy for their to be drama, for people to cross boundaries that they shouldn't cross, or to have people who show up and just didn't realize what they were getting into. We had pretty minimal negatives. We had one of the best post ritual parties I recall us having at a Bacchanal. At one point in the night I said to someone, “If I could create a world, this is what it would be like.” I was pretty satisfied.

One very obvious element was that we had the right people, and I was truly grateful to Pankakke, our Pan, and the organizer of things Dionysian at Azul Nox, who arranged so many of the wonderful participants who helped make that night great.

It was an important time for us to have something like that at WBL. We had just finished getting through an issue involving an officer and another member which had left some people hurt and upset, and resulted in a couple people leaving. Several people felt that the ritual was working right away to help clear out the negativity and welcome in new life and vitality, which, is very much in line with the intended effect. People have often talked about how Crowley's Rites of Eleusis seem to activate energies which help draw the right people to an OTO body. Several of our officers seemed to feel this was the case with this ritual, as we made new friends, some of whom had unrealized connections with several members. We saw a huge uptick in the community building and networking efforts our Body Master had been working on grow directly in conjunction with this event. We saw some members become more open and present, some of them opening up for the first time at this event. In general there wasn't just a feeling of positivity but an actual visible social fecundity.

The God Who Comes is also a god who gives to those willing to receive him into themselves. While my normal impulse would have been to celebrate the revelries and freedoms in which people were engaged by joining in, I ended up in a quiet corner getting to know someone special, who prior to then I hadn't had the opportunity to sit with. Normally that wouldn't be my thing, but I felt driven to do that beyond my innate desire to explore the various other enticements. (Admittedly, I engaged in some more classically Dionysian fun before retreating to said quiet corner...)

I also met a new friend, one who I'd previously only known on the internet, and discovered that not only is she pretty awesome, but we have several magical experiences and interests in common. Since the ritual we've gotten to continue discussing and exploring those, which has helped me with several ideas and given me someone who can relate to some of the less commonly discussed things one encounters in magic.

That new friend made introductions for William Blake Lodge with several groups, which included connecting us with a trance-possession group I've wanted us to work with for years, and who I think will help introduce us to a sort of spirit work which is not just useful, but is wholly necessary in engaging the mysteries of Dionysos...but also lacking in many with an interest in Dionysianism.

This new friend also made a new friend whom she seems to be very happy with, and it sounds like they're bringing good things into each others lives.

Our Lodge Master continued this burgeoning Dionysian force and its positive effects with a Lupercalia a few months later which was also well attended and was a great time. Plus, it fulfilled my dream of being one of the Luperci, which I've desired since high school. We had some amazing and joyous things happen at that event, including a proposal. The recipient of the proposal, a man brilliantly aflame with Dionysian fire, also announced that this year's Azul Nox Camp Out would be fully devoted to Dionysos and present another approach to a Bacchanalia.

Throughout the months since our last Dionysian rite at WBL several people have told me not just that they enjoyed it, or that they want to do it again, but about how much they feel it has benefited them. We've continued talk about next year's celebration on an ongoing basis, and I think joyously awaiting the summer Bacchanalia at Azul Nox has helped inspire that focus.

Several of us from Blake's Bacchic Crew were set to attend and I know I for one couldn't wait to see what was in store. Pankakke is the literal embodiment of everything which is Pan when he takes on the role at the WBL Dionysian ritual, so I was certain his fervor and mad fury would bring about something unquestionably amazing for the summer Bacchic festival, and he did not disappoint, it was amazing. His Dionysos had been crowned as Dionysos ritually the last year, and was in a year long obligation to the Office of the God Who Comes serving to embody Dionysos for the community. He was offered up to us as our alchemical sacrifice for the Winter Bacchanalia, creating a powerful link between what we were doing and what the Dionysians of Azul Nox were doing. Several of their drummers drummed for us in the Winter, and one of their main Maenads was also one of ours. We were ritually blending in a way which I believe helped cement Dionysos's influence and presence into our experiences, we were extending the rite from being a single ritual we performed occasionally to being a current, an agent of the Mysteries, which wasn't just a ritual but was rather a Dionysian community of which that ritual was now a part, and of which other rituals would also be a part. This was the question I was never able to answer before. “How do you have a mystery tradition that isn't just a couple rituals?” Pankakke showed me the answer this year, you have a community of devoted individuals, coming together and networking to create various expressions of the divine mystery; you create a culture.

I spent part of my time in anticipation of the Bacchic camp out anticipating new inspirations from engaging Dionysos in a new way. The third ritual for my mystery system is not yet written, and celebrating rituals one and two seemed the best way to stir the Dionysian presence to inspire me, but as I realized this camp out would occur, I realized it would also be able to inspire and teach me. And it did. I had so many amazing experiences of Dionysos during this camp out, in both ritual time and in more relaxed playful times. Since then I've seen more connections and had more inspiration for ways to continue this development. Not only have I had that benefit of being inspired by seeing what others were doing, and seeing what a large group of Dionysians Pankakke was able to call together, but I learned that our works have been somewhat symbiotic in that our Winter Celebration helped inspire and stir communication with Dionysos that impacted the development of the Summer Celebration, just as working with the previous years summer celebrants and anticipating this summer celebration has impacted the current at Blake.

Aside from mystical inspiration I gained some personal clarity this weekend, having spent a fair amount of it away from revelry and focused more quietly on that same person I was drawn to in the Winter, and in a wine soaked night finally gained the clarity we'd previously been missing. And, while I almost didn't post this post because that same clarity went away just after I wrote it, the time during the weekend is still something I'm thankful to Dionysos for, and I trust that in the end, things will be right, and if Dionysos wishes to give live to this he will continue to stir us with his presence, and if not, then we'll find music that guides our dances elsewhere.

And more importantly, I know it was a transformative weekend for others who were there, some finding happiness after struggles, some gaining needed breaks from difficulty and reconnecting to themselves and past happinesses, some reaping rewards for previous hard work, and some just being moved by mystical experiences they weren't otherwise expecting. I have seen so many Facebook posts praising the weekend.

So, Evohe!

I applaud and appreciate the work Pankakke has done, and I am super happy I got to attend this year's camp out and hope to attend future ones. I fully encourage any readers who are able to be in Baltimore when we engage in our Dionysian rites, or in PA for the summer camp out to make every effort to attend these if you're at all called to the transformative and vivifying power of Dionysos. I look forward to future work with the other Dionysians of our growing community.

If your experience of spirit work is in a primarily European context, and you maybe get a little Orphic with the Hymns, but not so rhapsodic as to fully get down with the Orphic mysteries inherent in Dionysos, then maybe exploring this as an entry to more visceral and intimate spirit work might be for you. But maybe not. There's definite power there.

Dionysos comes, and he brings with him force, motion, life itself. He draws us to the dance which is existence and inspires us to touch divinity unbridled as it courses its way through us, moving us, questioning us, and teaching us. He is a God of many gifts, and they manifest on many levels. Changes in the world around us, in our social connections, in our perceptions of ourselves and others, in our ability to bring mystery to the world, in our ability to experience ourselves and the divine. We can drink deeply of him, and intimately know him, but he is essentially the force behind the live wire. Be ready to move with that force, be ready to maybe get burned a bit by that force, but dance with it, and find what it offers you through the madness and freedom it brings.

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Also...I hear rumors about live leopards and NPH in the future of the Dionysian mysteries...?

Sex, Your Angel, and Starting the Ritual

A lot of my work lately has been focused on helping people who are maybe ready to look at reaching out to their Holy Guardian Angel and seeking Knowledge and Conversation bridge the gap between maybe being ready and going ahead and going for it. I try to make resources available and try to help answer questions. One question which has come up a couple times in the last month or so is “Do I really have to be chaste? I'm not sure my wife will like that.” It's something that's reasonably at the forefront of a lot of people's minds when they consider a big ritual like that, and is easily a bit of a turn off for people. Some people might say if someone isn't willing to go through that effort then they don't deserve the benefits. I don't think that's the right answer.

In general, to a lot of people, the Abramelin working looks big and daunting and inaccessible. In reality, Abraham of Worms talks about a whole lot of things in his long story of his journey and his exposition of his ideas, many of which magicians who have done the Abramelin don't carry into their work once they've done the ritual, even if they argue for kind of an Abramelin purism. But in terms of the ritual itself, at least in the German version, a lot of it is kind of left to your own devices.

Your angel should be guiding you on a lot of specifics of what to do and how to do it. This is true too on the question of chastity. But, a lot of people want some human advice as well, so let's look at the question and why I don't think it's a deal breaker.

In general there are benefits to ritual chastity even outside of the grimoires and the Abramelin. Making a choice to be chaste for a time presents a feeling of self sacrifice and a test of being able to focus and execute your will despite other drives and desires. This feeling can be useful in creating a sense of capability in a ritual setting. Fasting can create the same kind of mental benefit. Piggy backing off of that idea, many of us also tend to associate asceticism with spirituality, even if our own spiritual practices don't call for it, because it's just a common cultural association. So these purifications can help us feel more spiritual because of those associations.

They can do more than this though.

Ritual chastity and fasting change our biological states, and so they create alterations in our mood and, depending upon the extremity, our awareness. These changes can be positive or negative depending upon how they affect us as individuals.

Along with these biological changes, refusing a bodily impulse can create an added focus, desire, and increased drive, but not necessarily for the thing we are denying. We can eliminate indulgence in sex and in pleasurable foods and focus the need for satisfaction on our spiritual desires. The energy that we would focus on fulfilling our bodily desires becomes focused on our angel, the tension we experience from desiring becomes a tension surrounding the desire for our angel. We become one pointed by eliminating those things which could otherwise distract us from our one pointedness.

Or at least, maybe we do.

For some people it might create a preoccupation with fulfilling the denied desire. Or they might become fixated on their success at denying themselves to the point that the exercise becomes more about self-restriction and less about orientation towards the goal. Fulfilling healthy human needs can keep us on track when doing things that are difficult because we alleviate a natural biological distraction. Most people can probably think back to adolescence and how much easier homework was if you took a few minutes of “me time” when focusing became otherwise impossible.

So yeah, there is potential utility and potential detriment in both choices, depending largely upon you as an individual.

The big thing, regardless of whether you end up being chaste or not chaste, is to not let physical sexuality and other physical desires subvert your focus and commitment to the ritual. It goes a little beyond that though...and because it goes a little beyond that, yeah, some of you might need to be chaste.

The Abramelin doesn't tell you to give up things just because they might become distracting. A lot of the rules regarding abstinence are pretty clearly modeled on ritual purity rules that occurred in other forms of magic. There is a significant overlap in my view between the Abramelin and the early Jewish mystical traditions associated with the Merkavah.

In the Merkavah tradition we find descriptions of Rabbis being pulled from visions of heaven by having a rag which touched a menstruating woman being brought into contact with them, because even that indirect disruption of their ritual purity was enough to make them no longer pure enough for angelic contact. In the associated apocryphal scriptures angels refer to man as smelling like a “white drop” or semen, suggesting that the angelic hatred of mankind stems from the offensive nature of our physicality and how filthy they perceive it to be. Angels are presented as being pretty anti-human in a lot of cases and this perception seems to creep into some elements of medieval and renaissance magic.

But this isn't always the case. In Liber Juratus angels don't hate humans, humans can do magic with angels because they share in their love for the creator. In Hermetic and Neo-Platonic worldviews it is again the human ability to reconnect to the divine or to mirror the divine image that drives our work with spirits. Even in Jewish magic it can be argued that God is the God of magic, and as that is the case humans do magic based upon God desiring it to be so, and so angels aid in that magic because it is in harmony with the divine will that man experience magic. Taking any of these view points, the idea that spooge disgusts angels so much that they need us to be chaste for 6 to 18 months in order to talk with us makes a lot less sense. In fact, if that were the case, everyone who achieves knowledge and conversation would have to maintain that level of purity, and that certainly isn't the case.

So why would you need to, or not need to be chaste?

In my experience, angels don't hate humans the way they do in stories. Rather angels hate the stupid shit humans do that gets in the way of humans being awesome. They hate when we are lazy, they hate when greed or lust for things distracts us from what we are supposed to be doing.

It would stand to reason that the real problem is when we try to fill our God sized holes with sensory indulgences so we can ignore the beauty and harmony of the cosmos despite the fact that engaging the cosmos would fill the hole.

Angels want us to be awesome. When they're accused of being dicks it's because they force us to work on ourselves in ways that can be difficult. People like working with demons because when you want something they say "sure, easy" but if you sit and have a chat with an angel, even if they'll help you out, a lot of the time they want to lead you to improve yourself or work in some way that will be beneficial to you from a big picture perspective rather than just looking at the specific instance you want help with.

Angels want you to be awesome.

When they look at you they see their creator, and they love their creator. When you aren't embodying who you are and who you can be it obscures the reflection of God in you. When you think on your own life, if you care about someone and see potential in them and they aren't working towards that potential, you want to help them get there, you want to push them a little, give them advice, maybe even be hard on them if it will help them. You want to see their success and all the glorious sense of completion that that success conveys. Same thing here.

The Holy Guardian Angel operates in this way even more so than other angels. Its job is wholly to get you to that point of awesomeness.

So again, in my experience, the angel directs you to fix stuff that you need to fix. In my presentations on preparing for the Abramelin I talk about getting your life in order, something which apparently a lot of people don't address when talking about this ritual. If you don't have stuff together in your life you'll have a lot of trouble committing to the work you need to do once your angel begins guiding you more fully. The more distracted you are by random problems the less focused you are on the work at hand. So part of preparing is really exploring yourself and seeing what work you need to do on you, but also looking at your life and seeing what fires you should put out or things you should situate in a more stable and balanced fashion. As you're prepping for the ritual you may find the angel even helps you with this.

As you get closer to the ritual the angel will also make it clear what things you should be giving up or what things you might need to add to your life in order to help straighten yourself out for him to connect with you. Personally, I used chastity as I described it above, as a means of focus and reorienting my drive and desire, but I only used it in the penitent days at the beginning of the ritual, and when preparing for and during the final phases of it, the stuff I had to change had more to do with healthy living. I have one friend who did the ritual and their angel was very clear that they needed to be chaste. A reduce in interest in sex followed the ritual for this individual, and so I would guess the angel felt that was something particular to that individual's needs. Another friend had to reduce consumption of meat, but not fully eliminate it, and had to get rid of alcohol, and their angel took measures during the working when this person stepped outside of those instructions to reign them back in. Once the ritual was done this person recognized that while consuming meat and alcohol was again ok, there was probably a need for a change in behavior from what it was prior to the ritual. I know a handful of well known magicians who successfully used Liber Samekh or variations thereon in lieu of doing the retreat based on either the French or German manuals, I doubt that they were all chaste during it.

In the end, trust your angel. If sex is a problem for you, your angel might inspire you towards a period of chastity...but it will probably be good for you and help you not just with your working but with other elements of life. If sex isn't a problem your angel probably won't be pressed about it so long as it isn't disrupting the ritual, and you consider points in the ritual where either chastity or sexual activity might be beneficial from a magical perspective, you can go ahead and keep having sex. If your problem is junk food, or meat, or alcohol, or gambling, or shoe shopping, or whatever, your angel will let you know, and the need to be chaste regarding that problem will be pretty clear. But it's between you and your angel. So if your angel hasn't told you sex isn't ok, it's probably ok, but like all things, in moderation.

So, one thing that you can skip the moderation on, is this blog. We're going to be running a special series of posts starting this week. So like and follow us on Facebook, and please share with your friends, so everyone can enjoy the special series. And if you have questions about seeking your HGA feel free to leave a comment.