Greetings, my friends!
After three posts focusing on Final Fantasy VI, it’s time for me to “shift gears” back to Hyrule in this post which will officially kick off a new World of Ruin subcategory that I’ll be calling Nightside of Hyrule. Organizing subcategories of World of Ruin by specific game seems like the way to go.
First things first: I’ve made some updates and edits to The Hylian Banishing Ritual since publishing it, so those who were interested in that ritual should check it out. To be more specific:
There is a whole section I accidentally omitted dealing with the heart/center point of the ritual, so I included that.
I had suggested newcomers work with the Blue Flame to remain in keeping with both Golden Dawn and Feri traditions, as well as the in-game symbolism of the Blue Flame in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I then went on to provide wording for the closing recitation covering rituals employing the Black or Red flames, and neglected to include the original wording that goes with the Blue Flame. That has been updated, and with good reason—as I will discuss in this post.
Various edits for better readability.
In The Hylian Banishing Ritual, I wrote:
…this ritual contains all of the most important details, and I have reason to believe that if practicing the LBRP can stir things up in one’s life and serve as a genuine Initiatory catalyst, there’s no good reason that this ritual cannot do the same.
All I can say after putting the ritual to practice for about a month and then moving from Texas back to Chicago is that I’ll go ahead and stand by that statement. Of course, the question becomes: Did I perhaps know, or at least suspect, that I might be moving soon when I first wrote that post and began practicing the ritual? Yes, it’s possible. Past overtures had already been made, in fact.
Nonetheless, by the end of this post (provided the reader takes the author at their word), you may find yourself erring on the side of trusting in the power of the Hylian Banishing Ritual (HBR).
Hylian Magic(k)al Theory
There are other things from the Hylian Banishing Ritual post that need cleaning up, particularly by way of explanation and/or expansion. Things have taken on a developmental turn far beyond what I expected when I first published the post about the ritual and then “turned on the lights,” so-to-speak, by putting the ritual into practice. Not only do I have interesting results to report, but they’re far more relevant to the bigger picture unfolding at Dark Twins than was expected.
In the prior post, I had presented the ritual more or less without comment as to usage, except to describe it as fulfilling the purposes of a frame rite (which it does) as well as to suggest that it may be suitable for purposes similar to those of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram originally taught by The Golden Dawn. All of this was despite the fact that the ritual deals with an entirely different—perhaps “alien” is an appropriate word—set of elements from the traditional four elements of Western Ceremonial Magic(k).
I’m going to have to take that back and say that instead, I think practitioners should probably steer clear of this ritual unless they’ve had plenty of experience working with the traditional Western elements—and probably the planets, too. I won’t set other limits because other limits are much less quantifiable in concrete terms (read: Levels of Initiatory development), but please do be careful.
One proviso would be that I think it would probably be okay to work with a Blue Flame and the original wording of the closing recitation; I have never used the Blue Flame with this ritual, so to my knowledge, it has never been done at all. I have used the Red and Black Flames with this ritual, as well as my own ritual work. The further development of the meaning behind those two flame colors has been a part of my recent surge in gnosis surrounding the HBR, which is one reason I made it a point to go back and add specific wording so that people can safeguard themselves from potential blowback.
I never thought I would see this day: Not only am I developing a magic(k)al system, I’m building in safeguards so people don’t get hurt. It’s a far cry from burning houses down, isn’t it?
To continue, however: I no longer think the HBR is a mere substitute frame rite. Instead, it’s an advanced ceremony that has the potential to open up certain gateways and puts one in tune with potentially hazardous forces. You have been warned.
Another statement I need to correct, or at least modify slightly: I said I have no desire to draft a direct one-to-one replacement for The Golden Dawn Initiatory system, and that is true. However, it does look like I am beginning to birth an entire current here…
…so I’m gonna go ahead and name it:
The Hermekatean Magic(k)al current.
I have hinted that I will be developing techniques drawn from Final Fantasy VI, and although it’s a different game, those techniques will be designed to work together with the HBR and the Triforce Ritual (TR) in a cohesive system that includes the mythic elements of both games. Other games still will be gradually woven into the developing gnosis over time.
So far, I have written about the esoteric aspects of The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy VI; what is the point of connection?
The three primary elements of Fire, Thunder, and Ice. I’m planning an entire future post covering this topic, but the primacy of those three elements in both games is what will end up serving as the “bridge” between the respective mythic universes of Zelda and Final Fantasy. By being such a prominent feature in those two universes, it’s also a convention that has been adopted by many other games and worlds.
The inclusion of “Thunder” or lightning as a primary element is something that seems to be a staple of video game lore, and that is sensible considering video games are an electronic hobby. I have hinted at there being deeper esoteric significance to this persistent pattern, and in The Hylian Banishing Ritual, I explained how, from the perspective of a denizen of the video game world, their reality could be thought of as being composed of electricity because they live in a digital device and the data in which their world is encoded physically only resembled 3D objects and structures once the console is switched on.
I went to a lot of trouble to reason out some correspondences to show that, from the viewpoint of the magician, the operator of the ritual should be holding principles related to the element of Earth in mind if using this ritual as a normal frame rite. I maintain this, but need to deepen the picture here, as well.
Making this compensation matters less than I thought it did because of the other purposes of this ritual aside from that of a typical frame rite.
As I mentioned in The Hylian Banishing Ritual, most frame rites involving the cardinal directions are meant to orient the magician or witch to their current geographic location, whereas the HBR is meant to orient the magician to Hyrule. This turns out to be much more true, except by “Hyrule,” I have realized that this ritual opens the magician up to…a different world. Not just “the spirit world,” it’s something even more “other” than that. I’m still not completely positive about this, but my current working theory is that the world opened up to the magician by the HBR is a liminal, “intermediary” realm somewhere between the physical world and The Abyss, or perhaps to the “other side” of the Tree of Life. It may also be thought of as putting the magician in touch with “the mirror universe.” I’m not positive yet what the best terminology would be. I’ll come back later to touch on this point, and what prompts this revision in theory.
At any rate, the term I will use for the “special zone” to which this ritual opens the magician may make my readers smile:
“The World of Ruin.” Obvs.
Regarding the removal of the element of Earth and its replacement with Thunder:
As noted in previous works, one of the reasons I urged the reader to mentally substitute the qualities of the real-world element of Earth while working with the North/Vah Rudania/Fire/Magnesis is because of the similarities between “Thunder” (or electricity) and Fire as elements.
In Western esoteric systems, Fire is the element associated with consciousness; when Prometheus was punished for stealing fire from the gods, the symbolic meaning of this is that he stole the gift of divine consciousness, or the special qualities of consciousness exhibited by human beings.
Similarly, electricity could be thought of as representing consciousness in the sense that consciousness has been correlated in animal brains with electrical activity.
We once used fire to power our technology, such as in the steam engine; now, we use various processes symbolized by the element of fire (including actual combustion) to generate the electricity which makes things go.
There’s so much overlap between the two that from a human perspective, there’d be no sense establishing separate elemental principles for the two, all the while “kicking out” an element like Earth, with qualities that seem so much more important and fundamental to our everyday experience of the world.
After practicing this ritual for a while, I soon realized that forcing the elements here to play by the rules of our material world was a fool’s errand; the elements of whatever plane this ritual is contacting are simply different in nature from ours. Perhaps forcing them into a fourfold scheme at all is somewhat “unnatural” for them?
Nonetheless, here is the relationship I came up with between those two elements, human beings, and denizens of The World of Ruin:
To us embodied beings, Fire is the element signifying the light of consciousness. It is, to us, the highest of all elements; but The The World of Ruin is above and beyond our realm!
The World of Ruin is so exalted that Fire, our highest element, is like unto our own Earth; it is their solid principle.
While Fire symbolizes consciousness to us, so, too, does the place of the North often hold similar meaning in various esoteric systems, and that matches with the placement of Fire in the North in the HBR.
Meanwhile, to the dweller in The World of Ruin, it is instead the South that is the place of consciousness and individuation, represented by the element of Thunder, which behaves by its own strange rules unique to The World of Ruin.
An addition to a post about the Three Primary Elements, an entire post devoted to exploring the element of Thunder is forthcoming.
This reversal of the polarity of the North/South axis between the physical world and The World of Ruin becomes the deepest esoteric meaning behind the phrase, “turning things around.” It is also the basis for my current speculation that The World of Ruin as conceived of in The Hermekatean Current is at the very least a subset or “pocket” of the world known as “Universe B” by Kenneth Grant; perhaps it could be thought of as an “interface” between Universe B and this world.
Speaking of Kenneth Grant…
Don’t Take My Work For Granted
It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room.
Back in June, the post The Wordless Aeon made the admission that at the very least, I had read a few paragraphs about the concept of the same name (“the wordless aeon,” that is) in Michael Kelly’s The Sevenfold Mystery, and that what I read there may have influenced the development of the concept of the Song of Hermekate—a new paradigm of “collective” or “transpersonal” form of the Word of the Magus.
In short, as Kelly acknowledges in his work, the Draconian current to which his own work is connected has ties to (and even roots in) the Typhonian current of Kenneth Grant. As I wrote, my own personal path even prior to being exposed to any such reading material has Typhonian symbolism written all over it—my primary spirit guide, my “Aiwass,” took the form of a red dragon—to such a degree that reading about it in Kelly’s book after everything I’ve written here is downright embarrassing. That’s because I have stumbled headfirst through territory for which I would have been prepared had my studies been more thorough and my practice more careful. In the sense that there is an ethos for many “put together” magicians to be deliberate and fully in control of their work, that was a point of shame, although I could just as well look at it another way and say: “I faced some major ordeals on my own and made it through with my own resources, which makes me kind of a badass.”
And I would rather be a badass than a flunkie, so badass it is.
Kenneth Grant’s work has been on my literary “bucket list” for a number of years, but I have known for just as long that a person like me (an occultist with a long history of psych admissions for mental illness) should probably set it aside until I was really ready for it.
Back when I was with my ex-wife—to whom I refer as “The Priestess,” which is pretty funny considering my own connection as a magic(k)al persona to The High Priestess card—we would see hard copies of quite a few titles from Grant’s Typhonian Trilogies at Alchemy Arts in Chicago, but as many know, those books are expensive on top of being hard to find, especially because it’s only recently that new print runs have begun, with affordable soft copies now being made available. But that wasn’t so at the time; this is going back maybe 8 years (lol) now, but Grant books were definitely “behind-the-counter,” rare titles.
My first Grant book was the copy of The Magical Revival I got there for a steal (the price written on the inside cover was something like half of what the shopkeep had intended to sell the book for, but he had to give it to me). To this day, I have only read about 50 pages of it.
I distinctly remember digging into it in the car on the way home. I found Grant’s meandering, serpentine writing style difficult to apprehend rationally, and also noted the peculiar “charge” behind the strings of symbols his prose tended to invoke; this book dealt with some deep, dark, profound, and very old ideas that I had not encountered for a long time. Their very odor was dangerous to me at the time, as The Priestess, being so very extreme in her devotion to her deities, had already found similarly heretical magic(k)al concepts to be as irresistible as lightning rods for her vitriol. I put the book away, and had yet to bring it back off the shelf again despite numerous indications that his work might appeal to a body like me.
More recently, after discussions about the sorts of events I have documented in my writing here, a friend sent me a copy of Nightside of Eden; although it was out-of-sequence, I knew he had sent it for a reason. Still, it has been awaiting my attention ever since, going on several months now.
Then I wrote The Hylian Banishing Ritual, and things started happening for me. And then things started happening for the world. And now, as of two or three days ago, I have breached Nightside of Eden.
There is so much egg on my face now.
My experiences since 2021 would have made so much more sense if I had been familiar with this material at the time, and as I mentioned above, that could be cause for some embarrassment…
…but instead, I feel vindicated, and this is a great boon not only for me, but for the esoteric community at large. Why?
Because, by encountering this territory without having been primed for it first through exposure to Grant’s work, my writings here comprise a fairly “clean read” on these deep, dark, transpersonal realms. I generally felt this to be true when I first began my writings here, but of course, there was always the chance that I was just crazy, and I was just stable enough to be constantly aware of that.
Now I have seen all I need to see in order to conclude a great deal about what has been going on, with considerable certitude.
Even the very purposes of my writing thus far have been vindicated in advance by Grant, an apparent kindred spirit in so many ways I hadn’t anticipated, when he wrote in the opening lines of Nightside to Eden:
In view of the foregoing it may well be asked why one should go to the trouble of expounding Mysteries on one level when their full comprehension is possible only on another which is not generally available. The answer is that there exists a large body of individuals—a body which is growing more rapidly than at any other time in human history—that needs a pointer, a mere hint, to increase its sensitivity to inner plane influences.
pp. xi-xii
Bingo! I’ve said it myself, in so many different ways.
The best part is that even more than contributing a compelling and well-written account of very real esoteric encounters, I am developing something tangibly practical out of it all.
I turn the reader’s attention to one last detail in need of elucidation from the prior material:
The flames.
As I wrote briefly in The Hylian Banishing Ritual, loosely speaking, I use The Black Flame for workings of a “self-initiatory” nature, while the Red Flame is for practical sorcery meant to have tangible results in the physical world.
These were very loose generalizations because honestly, at the time, I hadn’t really applied those principles beyond experimenting with different ways of performing banishing rituals; that is, I had practiced the “Black Flame” version of my personal banishing ritual to see how it felt, but had not used in in-context for any particular workings.
Now I have, and this practical application has yielded two main insights and even some protocol guidelines:
I have written a lot about how “Self-Initiatory” work can be done in certain video games and even documented a few of my own experiences, but further practice has shown that we can get much more specific about how these things can be applied. However, to make one example, Invoking Inverted Triangles can be visualized in the Black Flame in a ritual prior to playing a certain part of a game for Initiatory purposes; then, after the in-game work is complete, Banishing Inverted Triangles can be used to banish the Black Flame. This worked well for me today.
As regards The Red Flame, I realized during my in-game ritual work today that its attribution to real-world, result-oriented sorcery connects well with the notion, in the performance of the HBR, that the “Fire” element of the North is indeed associated with “Earthen” principles of solidity. These two things seem related and seem to reinforce one another.
Of course, as those who have read The Typhonian Trilogies know, the colors red and black hold special significance in The Typhonian Gnosis. It is for this reason, in tandem with my personal practical results, that I say the Red and Black Flames should be used as I have indicated by experienced magicians, while all others should stick with the Blue Flame version of the ritual.
It may sound superstitious to magicians with a more postmodern sensibility, but consider the source here and my usual proclivities, and trust me on this. F.A.F.O.!
Lastly:
Given the above updates and adjustments to the nature of the HBR, it may go without saying that the nature of all of the elements needs to be reviewed; if the very purpose of the HBR is now said to be one of opening very deep Initiatory waters for magic(k)al interfacing, then the symbolism of the elements is no longer composed solely of simple analogy with the classical Western elements.
Instead, they hold much deeper Initiatory significance. In other words, Water (in the HBR) is not the same as Water (in the real world), nor is Wind the same as Air.
The elements in The World of Ruin are Something Else.
My first indicator that this is the case was when I set out to begin daily practice of the HBR: I had some practical questions to answer. Namely:
Which direction should I begin facing—North or East?
Which direction should I rotate—deosil or widdershins?
As I had mentioned, I had been practicing a private banishing ritual using red and black flames, and I had also played around with lots of different attributions and details. While the LBRP begins facing East and many of the major traditions forming the bulk of Western magic(k)al work considers East to be the most sacred direction because it is the direction of the sun’s rising, I had been starting in the North and holding it as sacred for many years. This has been primarily due to my Left Hand Path orientation. For similar reasons, I had also often practiced my ritual using a widdershins direction of rotation instead of deosil.
Yet, strangely, I found myself gravitating toward beginning in the East and rotating deosil; in other words, typical RHP correspondences. It was an oddly conservative move for a volatile mage like myself and I was curious about it. The reasons weren’t immediately apparent, but it really did feel important. I wanted to know why.
Without any desire for delay, I set about practicing the ritual according to those initial hunches even without full understanding of the reasons, figuring that perhaps those reasons might best be revealed in the results. I was not disappointed.
Of course, I knew of various actions other than ritual work that suggested themselves; since all of this had started with specially-consecrated playthroughs of the game, perhaps yet another playthrough of the two Zelda games was in order? It seemed to be an integral part of the greater process: My first two Initiatory playthroughs had yielded a hoard of experiences and insights that had gone on to inform the rest of magic(k)al work; now the resulting adaptations to my ritual routine would in turn develop their own results, which would further augment my magic(k)al work, and so on.
I set a new User Profile in my Nintendo Switch so that this playthrough would occur on its own separate save file, isolated from the file where the rest of this took place. I named the Profile “Gogo Bordello.” According to the prevailing symbol-logic, I could expect particularly pronounced and profound results on this playthrough since it was being done on a brand new file connected specifically with the egregore of Gogo Bordello.
I started a new game, and in the course of an afternoon, played through The Great Plateau. I then began practicing the HBR on a daily basis. Because East came first, I began mentally preparing myself for Divine Beast Vah Ruta, its pilot, Princess Mipha, and the element of Water.
Ever since the first time I played this game, in the midst of my Crossing of the Abyss, I have associated Vah Ruta and Princess Mipha with my former partner, Veronica.
There are many reasons and I won’t list all of them here, but among them: I have previously discussed the many “Jupiterian” correspondences surrounding Vah Ruta (including its very name); I recall that Veronica’s handle on the site where we met was “GoddessFortuna.” Vah Ruta is an elephant, and Veronica has a wallet (prosperity=Jupiter) with an elephant on the front. All sorts of things like that.
I remember the afternoon after I began practicing the ritual, I was taking a bath in our master bathroom. I was facing North, and it occurred to me to practice my HBR; I used to do that when first learning the LBRP or when working with new configurations of my banishing ritual: Occasionally do quick run-throughs wherever I happened to be, in part to help get oriented to the cardinal directions in various locations and in part to just get it down by rote.
I turned to my right, glancing up at the eastern window, which looked out onto the vast field behind our house; East. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, first raising my arms up and performing a quick Triforce Rite where I sat in the tub.
Then I took three deep inhalations.
Then I lifted my left finger, pointed it East, and drew my Inverted Invoking Red Triangle…
…and as I was tracing its first line, the bedroom door opened and Veronica walked in the door.
I knew then—because of other associations I have with both V and Princess Mipha—that it wasn’t run-of-the-mill, elemental Water I was invoking. I also knew that there was deep Initiatory significance behind the order of the elements.
Based on these guidelines, the first element is Water in the East. This morning, I carried my current game through the defeat of Waterblight Ganon, sandwiched between Invoking and then Banishing versions of the Black Flame HBR.
The results have already been intriguing, but I will be more disciplined than I’d like, waiting for more results and insights to crystallize before I write a dedicated post about the element of Water in The World of Ruin. A bit more study (I still haven’t finished Nightside of Eden yet, and I have a couple of others to add as well) couldn’t hurt, either.
After all, I am Gogo Bordello, High Priestex of Hermekate, and as an Initiatrix, I owe my readers that much: Something a little more finished than the brash, impulsive fare typical of Dan de Lyons. Something you can use with purpose and intention.
This is just the beginning.
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