Basic Elements of Hermekate: Part One
A review of early attempts to express and give form to Hermekate
With context firmly established—first via many posts exploring various aspects of my magic(k)al path, then through the work I’ve done thus far in the series (and magic(k)al working) Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution, then my examination of the evolving culture of Aeonic magic(k) in more recent posts—I am finally ready to condense and develop the meaning of the Word of Hermekate. I will spend 3 posts doing this, each with a different focus:
This post will review some of the earlier ideas I had surrounding Hermekate. I first “heard" the Word in my mind in 2016, then spent a few years studying the Left Hand Path as well as the book Overthrowing The Old Gods: Aleister Crowley and The Book of the Law. This was mainly due to its chapter on The Grade of Magus, but the entire book was indispensable in helping me to develop my understanding of the context (and the spiritual reality, as well as the cultural reality, and how to differentiate the two) necessary to understand my Word. It wasn’t until 2020 that Hermekate began to crystallize into something I was actually able to “define” and begin expressing.
The next post will review some ground I already covered in the post Cornerstones, except in the light of new information and much additional reflection; since I wrote that post, I’ve come a long way in being able to integrate this aspect of Hermekate with its other aspects. This will cover elements not included in this post, with a focus on topics such as Personal Myth development and digital initiation (which I have begun to explore in my posts tagged World of Ruin—stay tuned for more posts in that category soon!).
Finally, I will spend another post reviewing and updating the concept of the “Song” as first expressed in Song of Hermekate, again, in light of continued reflection. In this post, I will more substantively connect the concept of the Song to the other concepts covered in the previous two posts.
After this series of posts will come a post focusing on the relationship of the Word of Hermekate to the Aeons. In this post, I will name the Aeon from which I think Hermekate emanates and discuss my thoughts about how it relates to other Aeons.
There is a lot to cover, and for a very long time, I have felt that the entire body of ideas and concepts I’ve brought together is somewhat “scattered” and “disjointed.” The connections between them all are not necessarily apparent at a quick glance. It has taken me years to understand how it all connects and why it’s justifiable to identify them all as growing from the common “root” that is Hermekate. However, after reading Energy Magick of the Vampyre a few times and learning about other Words, I’ve learned that some of them are similarly “wide-reaching” in their scope. That doesn’t excuse messy and inchoate thinking; rather, this means that working very hard to develop one’s complete understanding of one’s Word at a level deep enough to actually convey it all to others is one of the core challenges inherent in the work of a Magus.
The process of uttering the Word is similar to archaeological excavation. The Word is like a higher-dimensional object, a distinct one—think of it metaphorically as a buried temple ruin—and at first, perhaps only the top of its highest column protrudes from the “soil” of its noumenal covering. In my case (and apparently, in the case of the Word of Runa), it just so happens that the first part revealed was the Word itself. Then, one digs deeper in order to reveal more, and perhaps a few more columns reveal themselves, but from the perspective on the surface, they arise in different places and still appear separate. These are analogous to the various different concepts that relate to the Word as a whole. We might suspect they are part of a single structure, but we can’t be certain or see how they are connected until we have dug deep enough to reveal the structure in its entirety. Only then can we understand the Word from a holistic perspective. I have gotten ahead of myself over the years and “jumped the gun,” but it is really only at this end point that it’s very sensible at all to try teaching the Word to others.
Nonetheless, I did try back in 2020. I’ve said I have no interest in starting a new magic(k)al school, but that’s because I gave that a stab, too. Back in 2020, I began circulating a few typed documents to some of my friends regarding Hermekate and I even did have a Facebook group at one time; but everything was still very messy at the time and I was largely a dog chasing its own tail. In the end, I wound up dissolving it. Nothing much ever came of it. However, one of the documents I circulated was a 3-page list of topics that I felt were connected to Hermekate at the time. As I look back on it now, I chuckle, because I can strike a bunch of it off of the list. I can’t even figure out what I was thinking with regard to some of them.
There is a lot of sorting to do, and some of this shows that the process cannot be wholly driven by the rational mind alone. In Overthrowing the Old Gods, Webb repeatedly stresses that the very autobiography of the Magus does figure into the Word:
The second aspect is what I call the egg-on-the-face moment. The Magus discovers that all understandable aspects of his or her life have always reflected the principle revealed to him or her. Magi can find their Word in the first ritual they ever wrote or in ten articles they have done over the years. Various thoughts will occur to him or her: “Does every single person in the Temple but me know this?” and “God, why am I so slow?” But it gets worse—much worse. Other things begin to come to light. A poem from the second grade that his or her mother saved, lines from a favorite movie from junior high, a college friend who reminisces about the night you all got stoned and ate that raw cookie dough and then asks, “And you kept talking about X-idea; are you still into that?” This aspect of the Magus’ experience can be quantified and demonstrated. I assure you all, Set is a high school teacher, and we are in the remedial class.
p. 142
One of the main reasons I spent so much time here at Dark Twins combing over my life story was to capture and document an example of what Webb meant when he wrote that this aspect of the Magus’ experience can be quantified and demonstrated. I figured a good way to thank him for writing that book would be to generate some material that illustrated his theory in practice.
Regarding such autobiographical material: The reason the Magus can look back on their life and see their Word permeating it is something I wrote about in Week 25 of Inner Tarot Revolution: the fact that the Magus, the Word, and the Aeon form a continuum, that the Word is an emanation of the Aeon, and in turn, the Magus is a physical emanation of the Word. This is what Jesus meant when he said that he was “the Word made flesh.” That is what a Magus is, and this is why I think it’s so important for a Magus to work from and to understand the transcendent perspective. The Word and the Aeon exist in the divine realm, that is, in eternity, outside of time and space; and for this reason, the Magus can look back and see their Word all throughout their past, to times long before the Magus had ever heard of magic(k) or begun to know their Word consciously. A Magus is one who walks in two worlds, the divine and the earthly, and the actual, formal utterance of the Word represents the culmination of the entire reason for the Magus’ very Being. This is why, as Webb said, one may compare the drive of the Magus to the search for water in the desert.
It is for these reasons that the Magus has no real hope of finishing the job without first going through the mysterious (and harrowing) experience of the Theater of the Word; this is the phase in which the Magus beholds a definite vision of the world around them as a physical expression of something far beyond the physical world, and can directly perceive the activity of the divine realm upon the world around them. This essential process also forces the Magus to confront their Shadow, clearing away non-essential “debris” from their personality and their memory of their lives, leaving behind a more ordered perspective of how the events of their life have all been connected; it is only once one can “hear the music of the spheres” and perceive this aspect of their life as it unfolds in the present moment that they can then look back and clearly see their past memories in that same light, revealing how their past has reflected their Word. Before this experience occurs, the Magus may be able to see this to some extent, but the view will be distorted by personal baggage and limited, petty viewpoints.
The Theater of the Word is an Underworld journey. I have compared it to Masonic ceremonies, and both the Masonic ceremonies and the actual experience of the Theater of the Word also have similarities in pattern to the myth of Inanna’s descent into the Underworld, complete with her passing through seven gates, giving up a different symbol of her (personal) power at each one before arriving naked at the end of her journey.
The rest of this post will run through some of the various items on that 3-page list that I once circulated.
Actual Deity
I’ve said before that the idea of working with Hermekate as a compound deity was something I never really felt compelled to do, but that gives a false impression of what went down. That direct, most straightforward interpretation of the Word was all I had for a long time beyond the word itself, and I did make some attempts to work with it as one would a godform or an entity. However, this never panned out quite the way I thought it might. In the end, I view such workings as part of a “process of elimination;” while doing them, I never did let go of the theory that Hermekate was better understood as an Aeonic Word, and in fact I hoped that perhaps I could at least use the godform work as a “stepping stone” from such concrete forms of magic(k)al work up to the more abstract realm of Aeonic work. Maybe, I figured, if I treated it like a godform, I could at least build an astral thoughtform that could serve as a “bridge” to the more rarefied Aeonic essence to crystallize in my mind. An excerpt from another document, a “Hermekate Primer,” that I circulated along with the list:
April 3rd, 2020: I make my first official offering to Hermekate, consisting of a dressed red votive candle placed on a wooden “icon” I created to serve as a physical anchor for Hermekate along the same lines as a devotional sculpture. During the invocation as I light the candle, I ask Hermekate to give me a sign. I notice the candle is just a little bit taller than the glass holder I’m using with it; I speculate that some of the wax might fall onto the icon, but decide this is okay, because I sense that the icon is “thirsty.” It craves the wax as it craved the blood (mine) that I also offered. The next morning, votive candle burned out, I discover that the glass shattered; I know there are physical causes for such things, but it had never occurred before in this apartment as the temperature is pretty stable here. Notably, the explosion results in some of the wax spattering onto the wooden icon.
Some notes about the above working: For starters, the blood offering is important, but not for the reasons that might be most apparent. Typically, I don’t consider blood magic(k) to be necessary or all that fruitful, and I don’t think it’s ever needed to “power” a working. I felt compelled to do it, though (I used a diabetic testing lancet on my fingertip, so it wasn’t anything all that dramatic). The reason I think this is important, in retrospect, is that it so deeply links Hermekate to me, and that reflects what I wrote above about how the Magus is a living embodiment of their Word, which was something I had no real conscious understanding of when I did this. The fact that I felt compelled to break away from the norms surrounding my typical magic(k)al practice to do this suggests that I did have an unconscious understanding of this, deep down inside—that even though I was going through the motions of working with Hermekate as a godform, I really knew better on the inside.
Some of this is also reflected in the form I ended up using for Hermekate—it’s not a humanoid form, but rather a symbolic form. To me, this further suggests that in my heart, I knew Hermekate was something more like an abstract principle than a “deity.” Again, I was going through these steps in a largely experimental spirit, to see what came of them.
Not much ever did.
Symbolic Construct
I will simply list this section as I included it in the original outline, but will add comments or strikethroughs as appropriate to clarify my current, more developed understanding.
a. Symbol of occult synthesis and dialectics (see devoted section below?): This ended up remaining fairly valid in the end, but only in the sense that this would apply to the Word of any Magus. On one level, the teaching that ends up being disseminated by a Magus reflects just that: A synthesis of their lifetime (and ongoing) study with their understanding of their Word. If you study the teachings of various Magi, there is a great deal of overlap that you’ll perceive wherein any given Magus, in addition to teaching the unique aspects of their own particular Word, also teaches their understanding of magic(k)al philosophy as a whole. Since, in this regard, we are all largely describing the same thing in our own words, there is much that is repeated by virtually all Magi.
b. Relationship between Points and Lines: I ended up explaining this in greater depth in the other document, the “Hermekate Primer,” so I will add that here. This was something that was related to a more concrete understanding of Hermekate, drawn from my understandings of Hermes and Hekate as separate entities. Insofar as the Word ended up being “Hermekate” for a reason, there is likely still some insight to be gained into the Word itself by reflecting on it, but I don’t know that I consider it to be a “core concept” anymore.
This relates to a sigil of Hermekate that I spontaneously came up with during one of “The Hermekate Workings.”
Something that came through to me in gnosis with Hermekate was the idea that in their union, there is significance to the idea that Hermes and Hekate are each liminal figures. I used to second-guess all this Hermekate stuff, thinking I was "reaching" or "trying too hard," because neither Hermes nor Hekate really need one another—they basically share all the same symbolic meaning, but each emphasizes different aspects. Now I think each one typifies liminality, but in specialized ways.
Hekate - Saturn - The Point
The type of liminality embodied by Hekate is concentrated. It is the point where roads meet; the chakras; in the Tree of Life, the Sephiroth. The "destination," or at least the "waypoint." Even "longer" boundaries like fences and thresholds still have this quality of "concentration" in space, like the edge of a knife's blade (Hekate's dagger), in the sense of the way in which they separate one space from another; they may exist in extension, but the separation they effect is a razor-thin symbol that is not extended along the dimension of their activity. Thus, I include them here as well even though they also embody extension. As such, Her essence is symbolized by the three points.
Hermes - Mercury - The Line
By contrast, when I think of the kind of liminality embodied by Hermes, I think of "liminality in extension." I think of roads. Telephone lines and internet cables. Not the chakras, but the meridians. Not the sephiroth, but the paths. The "journey." Thus, he is represented by the solid triangle.
c. Commonality / solidarity among magic(k)al practitioners: This is still something that is important to the understanding of Hermekate as a Word, and it is an idea I will develop further in the upcoming post I have planned to examine the relationship between Hermekate and the Aeons.
d. Symbol for gender fluidity / queer positivity - reimagining gender norms in magic(k): This, too, relates to the reasons for point c above and to the Aeonic aspect of Hermekate. Both of these points also relate to the concept of the Song, because the concept of the Song is itself drawn from the Aeonic aspect of the Word.
e. Union of Psyche and Physis (related sub-points below; essentially, society and the power structures that govern it have yet to sufficiently synthesize psyche and physis to meet the needs of an emerging world): This is still something important to Hermekate, although I have grown much more sympathetic to a dualist worldview since I wrote this outline. In this sense, I think it’s the social aspects I alluded to that are more relevant to the Word, for reasons that again recall the Aeonic aspect of the Word.
f. Angelos as shared symbol of illumination / initiation
g. Model for kundalini ascension
Historic Echo
This aspect of Hermekate is even more important as a “core concept” to the Word of Hermekate than I suspected back in 2020 when I first wrote this outline. In Fifth Grade Book Report, I told a story about how the Netflix series Bodies reflected Hermekate, and this is the aspect to which I was referring, although it also simultaneously reflects the concept of the Song. For those who haven’t seen it, that series involves time travel and a time loop, with a plot spanning several different time periods (I think there are 4 separate time periods involved). What the time periods each have in common is that the same dead body appears mysteriously in the same London alley in all 4 time periods, and so that body is a “historic echo.” It also reflects the concept of the “Song” in that the body travels back in time from the final timeline that the story covers, but due to the “harmonics” of time physics in this story’s universe, it appears in several different time periods in a way that has many parallels with the notes in a musical chord, or which conveys the sense of “temporal octaves.” When the concept of the Song emerged, I had been in a really uncomfortable, sore state for several days, puzzling through various aspects of my Word and trying to understand their connections. It was a bit like “spiritual constipation,” or maybe a bit like being in “noetic labor,” trying to give birth to something far larger than the channel through which such things normally emerge. Then, all of a sudden, the concept of the Song burst forth into my consciousness in whole form as Veronica and I enjoyed a meal at an Olive Garden located just feet away from where Frank Nitto committed suicide (see My Cousin Vine to explore that tangent in full). The location matters because it, too, reflects the concept of a “historic echo:” Frank Nitto killed himself in that spot, then many years later, a garden center called “Frank’s Nursery” was built right near the same spot, across the parking lot from where V and I were eating when the concept of the Song emerged for me; I’d had a very vicious fight there with my mother when I was a small child, the first of many throughout my life that escalated to police intervention. All of this ends up “merging” into the concept I described above of the way in which a Magus’ Word is reflected all throughout one’s life—which, in a way, is also an aspect of the “Historic Echo” concept. See? It’s all related, albeit in a fairly convoluted way.
In terms of other Aeonic Words, this aspect of the “historic echo” ties the Word of Hermekate to the Setian Word of Remanifest. In fact, for quite a while, I felt really down because I decided maybe I was grasping at straws, that Hermekate wasn’t a real Word, and that I was just “copying” Remanifest. This is yet another example that reflects the above passage I quoted about the “egg-on-the-face moment.”
a. Origins in Antiquity: There is one single historical appearance of the name/word “Hermekate,” and it’s in a spell in the Greek Magical Papyri meant to influence a chariot race to go in favor of the magician. As such, when it appeared suddenly in my mind despite the fact that I had never read it, that, in and of itself, was an example of the word “echoing” historically.
b. General comparison of Antiquity to the world of today: The wider relevance of Hermekate’s “re-emergence” in the present day pertains to some of the commonalities between today’s world and the time period and cultural context of the original spell from the Greek Magical Papyri. Late Antiquity was a time of high levels of cultural exchange, a somewhat “cosmopolitan” time period where many disparate cultures were highly integrated. Cultural exchange was pronounced, especially in a magic(k)al sense. In addition, the practice of magic(k) at that time was done openly, and was commonplace and fairly ubiquitous in a way that has not always been true in the times between then and now. Basically, I see the modern world as reflecting Late Antiquity as a “historic echo,” only on a much wider (now entirely global) scale.
c. Magic(k)al syncretism: I alluded to this above already, but decided to give this concept its own bullet point. In a world with such high levels of cultural exchange and where magic(k) is once again practiced fairly openly and widely, magic(k)al syncretism is once more the order of the day. Many people do still favor traditional magic(k) and go to great lengths to adhere “purely” to specific traditions (reconstructionists in particular), but the state of modern magic(k) embraces syncretism and this is yet another aspect of the Word that relates to its Aeonic overtones.
d. Bridging of East and West - Alexander the Great, Darius, Genghis Khan, Shogun: In a sense, this is just a more specialized and focused aspect of the wider theme of cultural exchange mentioned above, but there is more to it than that. This is also an aspect that I appreciate much better now than I did in 2020, thanks in large part to having read a book recommended to me recently by Don Webb. The basic idea here was that the way we juxtapose “Eastern” and “Western” cultures in the modern world is more a consequence of Orientalism and the individualistic “blind spots” of the modern Western mindset that thinks of itself as special and distinct. I have mentioned in some recent posts that my work with phurbas holds a fairly central place in all of my work (which would necessarily include my Word), and this is where it becomes most apparent. Put simply, as I studied phurbas, I learned that they can likely be traced back to an origin in ritual items used in Mesopotamia, and much of what we consider to be “Western” culture also stems from there. Practices and ritual items related to this origin then spread eventually into Asia, which is more fitting with a modern understanding of phurbas as being related to “Eastern” magic(k)al traditions originating in Asia. I think it’s very likely that the “Western” ritual tool of the athame can ultimately be traced to this same origin, as well. Back in 2020, I had a very strong feeling there were even more recent and palpable connections between “Eastern” and “Western” culture, that the exchange was much more robust in Ancient Greece than we currently tend to realize. I began to see the phurba as the “needle” passing back and forth between the fabric of “Eastern” and “Western” history, “stitching” them together with the threads trailing behind it. I was sure there was a connection in that basic era that I would find eventually in my research to support this idea. The book Don Webb recommended to me is called A Story Waiting to Pierce You: Mongolia, Tibet and the Destiny of the Western World, and it is literally the exact missing link I had been looking for. If what it claims is true, then a great deal of what we consider “Western” philosophy and esotericism was very strongly influenced by “Eastern” traditions. It posits that a shaman traveled from Mongolia, carrying a phurba, and ended up becoming one of Pythagoras’ most intimate confidants. I highly recommend giving it a read, especially as it is short enough to finish in an afternoon. Notably, it even connects to the Song concept, as the person who wrote the preface describes the story as a “song.” That single book is one of the best pieces of evidence reflecting the Word of Hermekate that I’ve seen yet.
e. Fall of civilization – cyclical apocalypse vs. linear apocalypse: This aspect of Hermekate is best described in the post The Weighing of the Heart. It also relates to the Aeonic aspects of the Word and to the concept of the Song, in ways I describe in that post. There was some awesome synchronicity surrounding this all. In short, however, the Word of Hermekate addresses imbalances in the Aeons and in the global situation that many smart thinkers consider to be existential threats to the continuation of modern civilization as we know it. These imbalances need to be addressed, and Hermekate expresses this need in a specific way not addressed by any other Words that I know of.
Related Esoteric Concepts and How Hermekate Alters Them
a. Introduction and overview of Words - Hermekate is a song: This is something I have already addressed extensively here at Dark Twins, especially in my most recent handful of posts.
b. Introduction and overview of Thelemic/Setian Aeonics—leveling of the pyramid: This is also something I have addressed in recent posts, and is also something I will be addressing in the upcoming post dealing with the Aeonic aspects of the Word of Hermekate. To give a bit of a “sneak peek,” the idea of “leveling of the pyramid” is drawn from some of Michael Aquino’s words, which I quoted in a recent post—when I wrote this list in 2020, a part of me resented those words and found his statement to be “cocky.” My view is much more…”sophisticated,” now:
Accordingly, while aeons are “pyramidal” in sophistication, after the fashion of Plato’s “pyramid of thought”, there is no reason to consider them time-sequential, with each new one superseding and obliterating the one before it.
In an LBM sense, therefore, the population of the world continues overwhelmingly in the grip of the Aeon of Osiris, the best intentions of Aiwass notwithstanding. The Aeon of Isis is the next influential, followed by that of Horus. The Aeon of Set, highest on the pyramid and most difficult to comprehend and indwell, is the “smallest” and most exclusive of all.The Temple of Set Vol. I by Michael Aquino
p. 201
c. Theosophy: The Masters
d. Theosophy: Rounds, races, globes, manvantaras, all that jazz (TONS of issues related here, including: Cultural exchange vs. appropriation vs. misappropriation, power dynamics, sociological ramifications, cults and abuse)
e. Theosophy: Pralaya
f. Theosophy: Paranormal studies
g. Egregores: I decided not to cross this one out, but it’s also not really a core concept related to the Word, either. It’s a concept that has connections with all Words and even with the entire phenomenon of Words, but for that reason is not really a concept that pertains especially to Hermekate.
h. Drugs / chemognosis and magickal practice
i. Magick: Inherently “religious?” How do we define “religious?”
j. Angels/demon/daimon/devas/asuras okay stop, please
k. Aeons: Yes, the Word of Hermekate has deep implications regarding Aeons, and it brings wide-ranging adjustments to the “Aeonic landscape” as currently understood throughout occulture. As mentioned already, this is something I will cover more in an upcoming post.
l. “Shamanism” or whatever we’re going to agree to call it respectfully in a given context: I see this largely as relating to the point above about East/West integration, so it doesn’t necessarily need its own point here, but I’ll leave it as an active one regardless.
m. UFOlogy
n. Everything eventually: All true Words have consequences that eventually reverberate to all things, and this is one reason this list is so long and I have crossed so many items out from it. In short, a person can consider anything in terms of its relationship to a Word, since a Word is a noumenon that emanates from the divine side of reality.
Synthesis In Its Many Forms
I’m not sure how important this section is; on the one hand, these concepts are all pretty directly symbolized and reflected by the very form of the Word itself, but nowadays I tend to think all of this is simply a consequence of the Aeonic aspects of the Word, which I plan to address in an upcoming post. Also, this list tends to cover items that very often arise in the course of one’s esoteric studies no matter what. This is all yet another set of examples of how the very grade of Magus is so much the culmination of one person’s synthesized understanding of the world. The kinds of syntheses I list out here are things that all get cleaned up and polished off in the Theater of the Word, as I described above. However, I will show this list anyway, just to give an idea of where my thinking went at the time:
a. Masculine / feminine and Inner Alchemy
b. Eastern / Western synthesis
c. Inner / Outer synthesis or “Western Yabyum”
d. Right brain / left brain integration - Seymour Epstein’s CEST vs. Freud’s model of psyche
e. RHP / LHP synthesis
f. Magickal synthesis (uniting magick practitioners by recognizing commonalities)
g. Dialectics
Hermekatean Work
Lastly, I came up with a list of specific areas in which the Word of Hermekate can be put into practice and expressed outwardly:
a. Basic devotional concepts (Hermekate glyph and forming a relationship)
b. Study of Graeco-Buddhism
c. All kinds of healing work
d. All kinds of Initiatory work
e. Civil rights, equality, and human dignity work
f. Ethical and holistic addressing of mental health, addiction, and crime as social problems deserving of fair input from all parties and humane treatment of all wherever possible
g. Diversity work
h. Sex magic(k)
i. Diversifying sex magick (blend of e & h) - This refers to engaging in experimentation and normalization of sex magic(k) outside the boundaries of traditional heteronormativity.