When They Talk Back

An Account of Spiritual "First Contact"

This post was previously published on 4/19/2020 on a former blog, “Hermekate.”

In The Wind Rose: Chapter One, I told the story of my introduction to magic(k) via my first teacher. I only knew him for a few years, from the tail end of Elementary school until about halfway through 8^th grade. We only spent the first year or so focusing heavily on magic(k) before drifting apart in middle school. There was a core of friends that he and I both hung out with who were the “D&D nerds” at school, and I started hanging out with the skaters and punks instead. There was a New Age shop called Aquarius in Davis, and I’d buy crystals, prisms, pendants, and the occasional book there (the method of energy magic(k) I learned involved not just moving and directing energy using the body, but also focusing it through and storing it in crystals). The first overtly occult book I remember reading was Earth Magic: A Dianic Book of Shadows by Marion Weinstein. If only I’d had context for that Tradition, I would probably not have been reading that book as an adolescent boy, but anyway…that was where I first came across the name “Hecate” as well, though there wasn’t much in that book about Her, and I didn’t feel compelled to go looking into the myths at that age. I was more or less on my own. Sometimes I rapped with my teacher about magic(k) and life, but these conversations grew fewer and farther between as time went on.

This was one of the most formative periods of my life and I look back on just about everything from that time with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia—the music and movies, the people, the news stories, and the sea of ideas in which I was swimming—the world to which I was waking up. This was a time when my life took its first set of hard U-turns even beyond my burgeoning magic(k)al journey. At the center of it was my mother’s decision to leave my father and I, to return to Chicago, the city from which my parents both came. My father was a busy man, very often away on business throughout my childhood. My mother and I grew close since it was often just she and I in the house, and suddenly she was leaving. My father’s relationship with work didn’t change, and nature abhors a vacuum; alas, other things soon arrived to fill in the gap left by my mother’s departure.

I stopped going to school halfway through 8^th grade, opting instead to spend the day on the streets with a little group of friends that today remind me of Nelson, Jimbo, and Kearney from The Simpsons. We’d wander around town smoking cigarettes (Bugler roll-your-owns, the easiest to shoplift) and weed all day. I’d sneak out at night, and before long, I simply wasn’t going home at all on some nights. My magic(k) took somewhat of a back seat, but it was always there.  I was in trouble and a lot of my memories of that time are hazy. The way I was living at the time was typical teenage rebellion, but on a grand scale that spoke to the turmoil I just couldn’t handle. I made a suicide attempt one afternoon on the school yard, disguised as my following through on a dare. I drank an entire bottle of Chloraseptic and was rushed to the Emergency Room after passing out in the office.

My father was not equipped to deal with a son like me. Things got pretty bad between us, and he eventually sent me to live with my mother in Chicago, where I more or less cleaned up my act and finished 8^th grade before moving back in with my father to begin high school in Santa Rosa. I never saw my first teacher again after that.

Magic(k)ally, throughout this entire time, I still carried a velvet pouch around in my pocket with select crystals and gemstones that I took to using for different applications. So far, I had mostly explored the “energy work” aspects of the magic(k) my teacher had taught me; despite some exercises with a “summoner” he once consecrated for me, spirit contact wasn’t really part of my world. I felt the presence of spirits at times, but it hadn’t gone farther than that. Some time after I moved to Santa Rosa, that changed.

I’d made some attempts at spirit work; I owned and worked with Ted Andrews’ How to Meet and Work With Spirit Guides, with results that weren’t too promising, though I don’t necessarily blame Ted Andrews for that. For me, the central issue was that of letting go: Would I really make contact with spirits, or would I be talking to myself the whole time? I couldn’t ease into the practices while preoccupied with the ontological implications of it all.

Then one day, two “spirits” emerged rather spontaneously, and I just kind of rolled with it. As I perceived them, each of them “welled up” from within a different stone in my pouch: One from a tumbled rose quartz, and one from a tumbled bloodstone. They did not seem to be on the same wavelength; they were aware of one another, but each had different reasons for being there.

Rose

The spirit that came out of the rose quartz “seemed” (I did not physically see or hear these entities, but rather perceived them with my inner senses) like a pinkish, radiant, sprite-like pixie. There was something puckish about her despite her diminutive size and generally bright, almost “cutesy” sensibility, and she claimed she was there not just to teach me things, but also to aid and protect me. I asked her, “From what?” and she told me that there would be certain spiritual beings and forces that worked against me during my life. I would need her help and protection until I was able to fend for myself. I asked why this would be happening, and she told me that I was living on the planet right now for a reason, I had a purpose in life, and certain beings would not want me to succeed. I’d often ask about this “purpose,” but there was very little concrete information that any reliable spirit would ever tell me about the nature of this “work” I supposedly came here to do. Anything that came through was vague or even opaque at the time. There were clues, not instructions. To do this work was a process of discovery or inner excavation, not of dictation. This line of inquiry gets deep and complicated, and it goes on for the many years for which I’ve worked with Rose and other entities. In practice, I ultimately decided, this compares to Crowley’s “True Will;” I’ve related this concept to dharma in the past, as well. This started happening to me before I read about those things, though.

As far as her own nature—“who” or “what” she was—her answers were cryptic, made very little sense at the time, but carried hints that would bear fruit decades later. She described herself as somewhere between the “angelic” and “fae” kingdoms, once saying the term “sylph” was suitable. This association with the element of Air, along with her capacity to be pugnacious and pretty forceful when she wanted, led me to associate the word “dakini” with her when I first came across it in the book Alien Impact by Michael Craft. The description pertained to wild sky spirits and that just “felt” like Rose in her more potent aspects. However, she also had a very wise, compassionate and nurturing side. In many ways, she was the voice of emotional intelligence in my life. I never once regretted following her advice. I was, in fact, always glad when I did. Nonetheless, it was fairly rare for me to listen in advance. I often found myself listening to “I told you so!” after-the-fact, instead. I argued with her a lot.

Minora

Standing in stark contrast with Rose was Minora. It’s interesting to me that they arose together, because in many ways, they were polar opposites. The timeworn trope of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other applies to their relationship.

Emanating from my Bloodstone, Minora took the form of a wraithlike entity in a red, hooded robe with gold filigree trim around the edges. Under the hood was nothing but darkness and two glowing red eyes. His hands were gnarled and so pale as to be almost purple. In my post, The Personal Myth, I discuss my connection with the Myth of Vader. I think it is no accident that Minora resembled Palpatine; in fact, over the years as I "worked" with him, his robes turned black instead. He had shown his hand not as a "red mage," but a black mage.

As I mentioned in The Wind Rose, my teacher taught me “green magic(k).” We drew our energy from nature, especially plants and trees and our relationship with them. By contrast, according to him, “red magic(k)” represented destruction, drawing its energies from the element of fire. In practice, this included one’s own anger—a kind of inner fire (albeit a toxic one) that could be kindled and cultivated. My teacher warned me away from red magic(k). He said it would inevitably lead to black magic(k) (my current understanding of “black magic(k)” is very different from his at the time).

Given the direction my life was taking—looking back, I know it was from the sense of powerlessness and helplessness I felt when my mother left—red magic(k) started to appeal to me. I got in touch with my anger and soon embraced it. It became my refuge from everything going to hell in my life (nevermind that it fed on things continuing to go to hell). As I understand now, anger was just easier than the pain underneath that fueled it. Anger was what worked for me, for a long time. It got me where I thought I wanted to go.

For a voice in my head, Minora taught me to refine my practice of red magic(k) to a very high degree. In practice, this meant cultivating anger, adrenaline, and the energy that flowed therefrom almost the same way a martial arts practitioner would cultivate chi—I’d store it up and bottle it in, knowing it would sit under explosive pressure, and I’d pull the pin whenever I wanted. It also meant manipulating other people into conflicts just for the sparring practice. I kept myself at a slow burn at most times and used that feeling to drive myself. I learned “The Evil Eye” and was really good at staring the kinds of daggers into people that would make them turn around in their chairs and look behind them to see where it was coming from.

I thought all of this was pretty impressive, too—not that I really had anyone to impress. Minora encouraged vengeance, blood for blood, and the hatred of anyone I felt had wronged me. There was a long list of people at the time. The beginnings of this coincided with a violent spell at school (I was constantly getting suspended for fighting—9 times total between 5th and 6th grades) until I learned how to better contain myself. When a burst of rage served my purposes, the energy was there just beneath the surface, waiting for me to unleash it on some unsuspecting foe. When I am truly angry, more than one person has said that I seem possessed, and some of those people didn’t believe in such things or say them lightly. It’s not something I’m proud of anymore, but my rage was inhuman.

When Rose said she was there to “protect me from certain spirits,” I am pretty sure Minora was the chief threat she was referring to. He represented everything she counseled me against. She always told me that what he offered me was hollow and terrible, and there were times when my choosing to listen to Minora instead of her would actually make her seem quite hurt or disheartened because it was one more step for me in the entirely wrong direction. No matter how often I sat on the cusp of making bad decisions, though, Rose was there to plead with me, almost to the point of absurdity.

There were times when Rose’s guidance won out, especially as time wore on and I learned there were good reasons to pay attention. Still, the tug-of-war between she and Minora continued unabated for several years. She couldn’t handle everything by herself—but she wouldn’t have to. Soon, she would have help.

Ilyas

I don’t really remember how or when Ilyas first showed up on the scene. It was a long time before I even knew his name. I was living in Berwyn (a suburb of Chicago) at the time with my mother, attending High School at Morton West. If you’ve seen Wayne’s World, you may recognize the needle with several cars impaled on it that Wayne and company drove past in the opening scene (it was called Spindle); that was at Cermak Plaza, about a mile from our apartment. I wasn’t doing any better there than I had been in Davis. By many measures, I was even worse off. I made it to school more often, but I was known for leaving in the back of an ambulance more than once after swallowing a box of Coricidin on my way to school. Though often treated as such by Emergency Room staff, these were not suicide attempts, but calculated drug doses to get good and gone (anyone familiar with serious DXM abuse knows “recreational use” is a joke when you’re talking about this stuff). I ignored most of my schoolwork, but paid attention in class when I was lucid. Typical me: After fucking around and self-destructing all semester, including the last few weeks leading up to my 10-page final paper in World History, I got down to brass tacks and wrote the paper about the Vikings by hand in a notebook the night before it was due. I was the only person in the class to get a perfect grade, I took my D- for the class, and called it a Summer.

My state of being during those years is a whole ball of wax all its own, but things were bad when Ilyas showed up (one of the reasons I have always tried to be as rigorous as possible about questioning my sanity, and checking my spirit work against reality on a regular basis).

Ilyas took the form of a large red dragon. His demeanor was serious, but he could show a sense of humor. It was a sophisticated one. “Stern” is a good word for his personality. Stern but wise. In terms of experiencing him and interacting with him, he was most active at night in the beginning. He would sit “at the foot of my bed” (a spirit’s relationship in the Subjective Universe with one’s physical surroundings is an interesting thing to ponder/play around with).

According to both he and Rose, my activities and interests were arousing even more attention from “nasty astral shit.” I remember times walking home at night from a friend’s house, head full of DXM, seeing fuzzy black ball-shaped creatures leaping from tree branch to tree branch as I hurried along, and thinking them hallucinations; then, Ilyas telling me later on, “No, you were seeing those because you were fucked up, but they need to be kept away from you, jackass, and taking substances that lower your defenses makes them salivate.” Ilyas was “righteous”—a fearsome force, yes, but restrained at most times, and really only dangerous if you were on some bullshit (towards me). His very aura was of such an intensity that the “negs” he protected me from wouldn’t even approach him. Energetically, he was essentially living fire. In addition to protecting me, he said he would also serve as my “magic(k) teacher.” He said he would teach me skills and techniques as I readied myself to handle them responsibly (LOL). His teachings were limited to more of a philosophical and general metaphysical nature at the time he first arrived, because frankly, he didn’t trust me with some of the things he could teach me.

I accepted his presence, tentatively, though he would leave if I wanted him to. I was still establishing trust with him when one of the biggest magic(k)al misadventures of my life unfolded. It was traumatic and it changed the course of my entire life. It is why I am writing this post.

I think I was 15 or 16. I’d been making a study of Peter Carroll’s Liber Null and Psychonaut and probably way more engrossed in its darker aspects than was healthy for me, but there was nobody around save Rose and Ilyas to steer me in the right direction, and at the end of the day, there was nothing they could do. I’d take their guidance under advisement, then I’d be reading and get some fucked up idea, and Minora would be there to talk shop with.

I had someone on my shit list, big time—to the point that I figured I would try my hand at my first full-on curse using magic(k)al means other than raw intent and this nebulous thing I called “energy.”

[I didn’t admit to any of this in previous versions of the post, but it’s important for me to mention who I was cursing, how, and why: A girl at school had been flirting with me and kissing me on my stairs, and then I heard a rumor that she was pregnant. Hurt by this, I had decided to try killing her unborn child via magic(k)al means. This will be an important detail for later writings.]

I knew about sigils, and they were cool, but not enough for what I was up for trying. I have qualms about writing this, but to be fully honest, I wanted a life taken and I actually went for it. I incorporated sigils, but first I designed my own entire alphabet just for this curse, along with an improvised magic(k)al system involving “seals” that I conceived, again, just to make this whole thing pop. I wanted to be good and sure, and I wanted this to come from the absolute depths of my magic(k)al nature. If that was my goal, that’s indubitably what I got, and those depths turned out to be far more cavernous than I ever suspected.

As I’d designed the system, the seal was to be “activated” by burning a candle over it. I spent the better part of a day at school pulling the elements together for the seal—making a few sigils, deciding how to arrange them within the seal system along with various “targeting” sigils of an astrological nature. I sketched it first, then meticulously inked it with a Pilot pen (Precise V5, or take a hike) while my teachers did their thing in class. As I did all of this, I charged every line and curve of the seal with red energy. I packed the seal away in my book bag when I was done, and at the end of the day, I walked home.

On my way home, Ilyas shows up suddenly, and he’s pleading with me not to go through with this spell. He’s telling me he promises that I will regret the results if I go through with it. He says I will live with it for the rest of my life and it will stain everything. He urges me to burn the paper with the seal, destroying it, rather than light the candle on it to activate it.

He was fairly insistent on the point of burning the seal, because he said it was too dangerous to leave laying around. The farthest I would budge was to agree to hold off, and not to activate the seal that night, as I had been planning. I arrived home, set my book bag on the floor up against the side of “my” chair in the living room, and didn’t touch it again. There it sat, the seal inside, as I spent the evening going about my business and thinking about what I should do. I went to bed like I always did.

The next morning, I am awakened by frantic pounding and yelling on the door to my bedroom. A wooden accordioned track door, it slides open and smoke begins pouring into my room. My mother yells at me that the house is on fire. I bolt out of bed, throw on some pants and a shirt, and run out to the dining room. Ironically, the t-shirt I threw on was for Bad Religion’s album, Stranger Than Fiction. Yeah…tell me about it.

My chair in the living room—the one with my backpack containing the seal Ilyas begged me to burn leaning up against it—is on fire.

I grab the phone, dial 911, get an operator, tell her there’s a fire, she reads my address at me from her screen, I confirm, the line goes dead. I turn to my mother, who’s trying to swat out the fire with a bath towel, and tell her, “It’s time to go, ma.” I grab her arm and lead her out the back, down the back stairway, barefoot through 3 feet of snow. We bang on the door and ring the doorbell of the neighbors on the first floor to get them up and safely out. They answer the door as our living room windows burst from their frames and crash onto the ground two stories down. The fire trucks just roll up as we all move away from the building and toward the sidewalk.

The apartment was pretty much totaled, but since it was an old brick building, it was structurally intact. Notably, there was a big hole in the floor between the first and second floors, just above the spot where, right by the front door downstairs, a light fixture in the ceiling would often flicker. Most likely, the fire was electrical and had been spreading quietly in the space between the floors for some time before finally getting a “breath” of air allowing it to flare to life.

It all happened right. Underneath. My backpack.

Me and Scooter (canine companion of a family friend), in the evening after the house fire.

Ilyas never claimed credit for the fire, per se. I don’t know that the credit was his to claim, per se. We didn’t really talk about specifics, but essentially, the elephant in the room was that it was tied to my would-be curse. Ilyas told me I was lucky, and it happened the best way it possibly could since I wouldn’t listen to him. I have reflected on this often throughout my life, and I find it interesting how the fire basically involved a latent, sleeping flame getting a breath of fresh air, about how Ilyas was fiery and Rose was some kind of…”wind devi.” They were both so dire about how I had pushed things too far and paid for it. They would say shit like, “It had to be that way, given the options available.” It was some kind of “last resort” outcome. By the sounds of things, in ways I still don’t fully comprehend, this was sort of brought about by my “magic(k)al immune system.” Also, something similar to a strike of lightning comes to mind—stored energy seeking the path of least resistance in order to go to ground. I guess that works as a metaphor.

I didn’t fuck around with magic(k) again for years. I would read about it, but not practice it. I had my guides, I did my spirit work, when feeling particularly spiritual or Theistic. I underwent periods of atheism, which for me, always correlated with periods of depression and nihilism. I considered the obvious: “Maybe magic(k) is too much for a person like you, Dan. Maybe you should just live a quiet, normal life and lay low from now on.” Usually, something eerie or synchronistic would happen that I couldn’t ignore, and I’d open myself back up to Rose and Ilyas for answers.

“This is real, huh?”

“Afraid so, kiddo.” (I mean, if I’m bothering to entertain asking, what the hell did I think they would say?)

It was some time after the fire, after my mother and I moved to a different apartment a few blocks away from the old one, that Ilyas finally told me his name. I couldn’t tell you where it came from other than from him. It was not (consciously) familiar to me, which is one of the pieces of evidence that I file into the “I’m not [just] imagining this shit” drawer. Cryptomnesia is a possibility I've considered, but honestly, I have no idea where a name like that would have shown up in my life for me to forget in the first place. I cannot identify any likely source.

Upon looking into it, I found that the name “Ilyas” is the Arabic form of the name “Elias” or “Elijah,” an Old Testament prophet who…well…called…down…fire from heaven…*ahem*. Given my background, “Elijah” was what I would be more familiar with—but an invisible red dragon gave me the Arabic form, “Ilyas,” as his name.

This singular puzzle has sometimes been the sole hook upon which my entire life path has hung. It’s served as somewhat of a “koan” ever since. I’d wager that 20 years later, I still barely understand what it points to, although there have been some exciting leads and I will be writing about them. That motivates me and keeps me going.

Ilyas also had important elements to add to my story—I suppose, my Personal Myth—that Rose had only hinted at. Ilyas was more forthcoming about why I was here, why I even had he and Rose in my life, why any of this was happening, and why the house fire just proved how important it was that I start moving in a more positive direction.

Nature of the Triad

So what was going on? Believe me, I know how this all sounds—I think. It’s hard to tell, when you live something like this from such a young age, how anybody will respond to it. I think it sounds pretty cray. As a psychology student leaning towards therapeutic practice, mind you, I always use that term with at least a pinch of love and compassion, but usually a big dose.

The simplest way I can put it is that I always took these voices with a grain of salt. Dealing with their presence in my life is probably where my philosophical and psychological bent comes from; I needed philosophical inquiry to make any sense of it all beyond, “take meds and hope it goes away.” I needed psychological inquiry to learn a vocabulary for reckoning with it. I’m also not kidding when I say that eventually, this came down to a life-or-death matter for me. It was either figure this shit out, or most likely succeed in an early death. I don’t want anyone reading my story and thinking any of this is something I think should ever be emulated. I was too young for magic(k) if you ask me, but I made do. It honestly did a lot to complicate and disrupt my life, and I had no ability to wisely choose to take that risk. Speaking of risk, I had all sorts of extremely alarming risk factors going on in my life, and everyone who knows me well knows how amazing it is that I’m even sitting here today. That said, I did what I did. Here I am.

Now that that’s clear: In occultism, debates have gone on and on about the ontological status of the spirits we deal with in some work. It’s a seriously nuanced subject if you want to pick it apart, and there are endless models describing the phenomenon in all sorts of ways. Broadly speaking, however, things seem to fall into either the “psychological school”—by which I am referring to a reductionistic attempt to explain these phenomena on physical terms—or some form of “spirits are real” school.

I have always felt, in my bones, and I will take this to my grave, that no matter what your outlook, if you’re going to practice occultism, you need to take the “psychological school” seriously. Spirits may or may not be real. Magic(k) may or may not be real, or may be real to a greater or lesser extent. Your mind, however, is as real as it gets (nothing will prove that like a bit o’ magic(k)), and even if spirits do turn out to be real, magic(k) is still at least a psychological endeavor. If there’s a reality to all of this, the psyche is where we meet it first and foremost. In fact, one thing that Ilyas taught me over and over was that his form as a “red dragon” was supplied entirely by my unconscious mind, and that the same held true with any spirit I talked to. Of course, he insisted that they were real, but maintained that, all the same, I was essentially “dreaming” a great deal of those interactions into being. Make of that what you will. I’ve been chewing on it for most of my life.

From high school on, I favored a Jungian approach to these entities while maintaining an evolving metaphysical framework that could accommodate their being real. Because my actual coverage of Jung's material at the time was minimal, I did not realize how much credit he gave the reality of the psyche in his later life. I found that the beings could be understood in terms of aspects of the personal psyche named by Carl Jung:

Rose: Rose could definitely be viewed as a manifestation of or interface with my Anima. She has always been a counterpart to me in many ways. As a psychic voice, she speaks for my emotions, my well-being and balance, and my heart. Paying attention to her helped me to develop my intuitive faculties. In terms of “appearance,” she fits the criteria described by Jung in outlining what it is that makes up one’s Anima or Animus. My relationship with her has many parallels with my other primary female relationships in life. My mother and I were always close, but we also fought like cats and dogs, and that’s been a pattern I’ve had to work with when it comes to both Rose and to other primary relationships. Ironically, you only really see my combative side if I love and trust you with all my heart. My relationship with Rose, while once a relationship between an injured boy and his “imaginary friend,” is now a relationship between a mending man and his Inner Feminine.

Update 12/23/2020: As I write in more recent posts, I have only just begun to dig into Carl Jung's Red Book. In the introduction, we are shown a conversation between Jung and his Anima. I was chilled at how much it resembled conversations I have with Rose (yes, she is back):

[I:] I feel that I must speak to you. Why do you not let me sleep, as I am tired? I feel that the disturbance comes from you. What induces you to keep me awake?

[Soul:] Now is no time to sleep, but you should be awake and prepare important matters in nocturnal work. The great work begins.

[I:] What great work?

[Soul:] The work that should now be undertaken. It is a great and difficult work. There is no time to sleep, if you find no time during the day to remain in the work.

[I:] But I had no idea that something of this kind was taking place. [Soul:] But you could have told by the fact that I have been disturbing your sleep for a long time. You have been too unconscious for a long time. Now you must go to a higher level of consciousness.

[I:] I am ready. What is it? Speak! [Soul:] You should listen: to no longer be a Christian is easy. But what next? For more is yet to come. Everything is waiting for you. And you? You remain silent and have nothing to say. But you should speak. Why have you received the revelation? You should not hide it. You concern yourself with the form? Is the form important, when it is a matter of revelation?

[I:] But you are not thinking that I should publish what I have written? That would be a misfortune. And who would understand it?

[Soul:] No, listen! You should not break up a marriage, namely the marriage with me, no person should supplant me...I want to rule alone.

[I:] So you want to rule? From whence do you take the right for such a presumption?

[Soul:] This right comes to me because I serve you and your calling. I could just as well say, you came first, but above all your calling comes first.

[I:] But what is my calling?

[Soul:] The new religion and its proclamation.

[I:] Oh God, how should I do this?

[Soul:] Do not be of such little faith. No one knows it as you do. There is no one who could say it as well as you could.

[I:] But who knows, if you are not lying?

[Soul:] Ask yourself if I am lying. I speak the truth.

Liber Novus by Carl Jung, p. 61

Minora: If Rose was my Anima, Minora was, without a doubt, a manifestation of my Shadow. My temper is legendary and I was out of control with it when I was younger, but when not whipped into a frenzy and when living a healthy life, I’m actually a pretty sensitive and kind person. Minora’s vindictiveness, capacity for cruelty and brutality, and the fear at the core of the very way he existed all point to frightening potentials within me that I had to learn to own. Until then, my Shadow owned me. Decades of my magic(k)al work, despite a variety of forms and phases, basically revolved around dealing with the Shadow. I’m still not done, but there is now no “Minora” as I once knew him. I haven’t heard from a hooded wraith in years, but I meet him every day when I look in the mirror.

Ilyas: If Rose was my Anima and Minora was my Shadow, then what’s Ilyas? I’ve puzzled over this for far longer than I needed to. Ilyas is the Self—the sum total of everything I can (will) become after reaching Individuation, if you want to put it in Jungian terms. Why did I struggle with this? Mainly, it was due to the magic(k)al implications.

If Ilyas represents the Self in a Jungian sense, the esoteric corollary of that would be something along the lines of “Atman,” the “Holy Guardian Angel” or “Higher Self.” Thus, making the association between Ilyas and the Self looks a lot like a claim to having attained to “the Knowledge and Conversation.” For this reason, owing to my young age, the way I was living, and my obvious lack of qualities like discipline and wisdom, I denied for years that this could be the case. My current view is a little more complicated.

As Ilyas would describe it, one’s Higher Self dwells outside of space and time, above and beyond both. Incorporating this into a Vedic model of reincarnation (which I believed in for many years and has since been replaced with “Let’s find out!”), for example, the Atman is simultaneously aware of all incarnations at once instead of experiencing them in a linear way. This would make Ilyas the “Inner Guru.” If some model akin to this were to be held as true, then “Ilyas” as I experience him could be a projection of the Higher Self, to help steer me where I need to go. That’s a qualitatively less substantial connection from my understanding of “Knowledge and Conversation,” but I think it’s potentially headed in that direction.

Let me just say that the ambiguity surrounding Crowley’s changing understanding of Aiwass over time makes a great deal of sense to me, from personal experience.

“Is the Higher Self ‘me’ or a separate entity?”
“Yes.”

……

I think aside from the fact that my “spirit crew” fits so well into Jung’s model of the psyche, the fact that Jung had voices of his own guiding him resonated with me. I jive with Socrates for similar reasons. Not everyone who “hears voices” is delusional or schizophrenic. I’ve had a few therapists that I’ve talked to about these voices, and after a few obligatory probing questions, not one of them was concerned, even in light of my psychiatric history. In fact, given my biographical details, it would be really easy to wrap this all up in terms of coping mechanisms built around a broken childhood—and my mental health and Initiatory progress both depend on keeping in mind that that aspect of this situation is indeed an important element at the core of it all no matter what else is true.

None of this, however, means there is not also something “spiritual” or “magic(k)al” going on.

I’ve had contact with other spirits—a few of which will be the subjects of my next few posts—but there are some I will never write about because they don’t really matter. I’ve always “tested” potential spirit contacts and if there’s no deeper meaning or growth that I can feel in the tone, no inroad to my own unfolding story, the connection doesn’t last very long. That which resonates with my Personal Myth stays firmly nailed down.

I’ve taken stabs at committing this all to writing more than once, and I always end up backtracking. There are so many reasons—there is so much room for misunderstanding. Most of the fears I have, however, are ones I ultimately need to face anyway. Rose always told me that some day, I would tell my story openly. She was a “muse” of sorts during my poetry phase in high school, and hinted often that my writing would one day be honed into an instrument for doing the thing I’m here to do—for making it happen, whatever “it” turned out to be. When I started hearing it from actual people around me, I started listening (sorry, Rose). Why does it matter, in the end, how I came to that path? Why tell the story?

Because stories exist to be told. That, in and of itself, is a good enough reason. Really, though, it’s because in order for anyone else to understand Hermekate as I do, this personal odyssey is important. In order to understand my take on occultism—on this or that practice, this or that deity, this or that famous magician and his or her ideas—you need to understand that while I began my study of the likes of Crowley, Carroll, Levi and Dee, I was dealing with this kind of shit. I studied Crowley, Carroll, Levi, and Dee because I was dealing with this kind of shit. One way or another, I managed to fall into a magic(k)al rabbit hole only to land ass-first on Pandora’s Box and bust it open, and I had things right in front of me to reckon with that only made sense in light of occult studies. It would certainly be presumptuous of me to seriously compare myself with people like the authors I just listed as fellow magicians—but in many ways, I find myself walking a path parallel to theirs. I’m seeing similar sights. I don’t think I’m anything special…

...but I do think I’d be a jerk to let insecurity keep me from sharing some of the things I’ve seen. I might be short-changing you. I’d definitely be short-changing myself.

Anyone up for a win-win scenario?