Ethros Demon:
I am Ethros.
I corrupted the spirits of men before
they had speech to name me.
The child was but the last
among tens of thousands.
One more pure heart to corrupt,
one more soul to suck dry.
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce:
Well chalk up one exciting failure.
You didn't get that boy's soul.
Ethros Demon:
Hmph. What soul?
Do you know what the most
frightening thing
in The World is?
Nothing.
That's what I found in the boy.
No conscience, no fear, no humanity.
Just a black void.
I couldn't control him.
I couldn't get out.
I never even manifested until
you brought me forth.
I just sat there and watched as he
destroyed everything around him,
not for a belief in evil,
not for any reason at all.
That boy's mind was
the blackest hell
I've ever known.
Angel:
The marbles. That was you.
Ethros Demon:
When he slept, I could whisper in him.
I tried to get him to end his life, even if
it meant ending mine.
Angel:
You sleepwalked him
in front of the car.
Ethros Demon:
I had given up... Hope.
I know you bring Death,
I do not fear it.
The only thing I've ever feared —
is in that house.
“On my 40th Birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by
having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis, I decided it might be
more interesting to terrify them, by going completely mad, and declaring
myself as a magician. This had been something that had been coming for a
while.
It seemed to be a logical end step in my career as a writer, and
the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a science of
language, you have to be very careful of what you say.
Because if you
suddenly declare yourself to be A Magician, without any knowledge of
what that entails, then one day you are likely to wake up and to
discover that is exactly what you are.
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this
can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of
magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I
believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic IS art, and
that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form, IS
literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating
symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness.
The very
language of magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art, as
it about supernatural events. A “Grimoire” for example, “the book of
spells”, is simply a fancy way of saying “grammar”. Indeed, to cast a
spell, is simply “to spell”, to manipulate words, to change people’s
consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or a writer is
the closest thing, in the contemporary world, you are likely to see to a
shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally,
all of the facets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or the
sciences, were the providence of the shaman. The fact that in present
times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap
entertainment and manipulation is, I think, a tragedy. At the moment,
the people who are using shamanism and magic to shape our culture are
advertisers. Rather than trying to wake people up, THEIR shamanism is
used as an opiate, to tranquilize people, to make people more
manipulable Their “magic box” of television, and by their “magic words”,
their jingles, can cause everybody in the country to be thinking the
same words, and have the same banal thoughts, all at exactly the same
moment…
In all of magic, there is an incredibly large linguistic component.
The “Bardic” tradition of magic would place a Bard as being much higher
and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you, That
might make your hands lay funny, or you might have a child born with a
clubbed food. If a bard were to place, not a curse upon you, but a
satire, that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not
just destroy you in the eyes of your associates, it would destroy you in
the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if
it was a (extremely) finely worded and clever satire, that might survive
and be remembered for decades, even centuries, then years after you
were dead, people still might be reading it, and laughing… at you, your
wretchedness, and absurdity.
Writers, and people who had command of
words were respected and feared, (just) as people who manipulated magic.
In latter times, I think the artists and writers have allowed
themselves to be ‘sold down the river’ :-They have ACCEPTED the
prevailing belief that art, that writing, are merely forms of
entertainment.
They’re not seen as transformative forces…
that can
change a human being,
that can change A Society.
They are seen as simple
entertainment Things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour,
while we’re waiting to die…
It is not the job of The Artist
to give The Audience
what The Audience WANTS.
If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience.
They would be The artist.
It is the job of artists to give the audience what they NEED.
My career as a magician continues to evolve. Since I, to a certain
degree, believe art and magic to be interchangeable, it has seemed only
natural that art should be the means by which I express magical ideas.
This has found its way into my prose writing, in works such as “Voice of
the Fire”, and probably most visibly has found its way into the
performance pieces that i’ve done in various locations over the past 8
years. Beautiful little psychedelic artifacts in their own right, which
actually capture the kind of narrative journey that we’ve tried to take
the readers on as part of these performances; to overwhelm the
sensibilities of the audience; to tip them over into a kind of
psychedelic state where we can hopefully actually change their
consciousness and direct it to different places, different levels,
hopefully into new and magical spaces.
When we are doing the will of our True Self, we are inevitably doing
the Will of the Universe.
In Magick these are seen as indistinguishable;
that Every human soul is in fact One human soul.
It is the soul of the
Universe itself, and as long as you are doing the Will of the Universe,
then it is impossible to do anything wrong.
The one place in which Gods and Demons inarguably exist is in the
human mind, where they are real in all their grandeur and monstrosity.
Much of magick, as I understand it in the Western occult tradition, is a
search for the Self, with a capital ‘S’. This is understood as being The
‘Great Work’, as being the Gold the Alchemists sought, as being the
Will, the Soul, the thing that we have inside us that is behind the
intellect, the body, the dreams. The “inner dynamo of us” if you like.
Now this is the Single. Most. Important. Thing. that we can ever
attain, the knowledge of our own Self. And yet, there are a frightening
amount of people who seem to have the urge to, not just IGNORE the self,
but actually seem to have the urge to OBLITERATE themselves. This is
horrific… but you can almost understand the desire to simply “wipe out”
that awareness, because it’s too much of a responsibility to actually
POSSESS such a thing as a “soul”. Such a precious thing. ‘What if you
break it? What if you lose it?’ Mightn’t it be best to anaesthetize it,
to deaden it, to destroy it, to not have to live with the pain of
struggling towards it and trying to keep it pure. I think that the way
that people immerse themselves in alcohol, in drugs, in television, in
any of the addictions that our culture throws up, can be seen as a
deliberate attempt to destroy any connection between themselves and the
responsibility of accepting and owning a higher Self, and then having to
maintain it.
I’ve been looking at the history of magical thinking, and where it
starts to go wrong. And, for my money, where it starts to go wrong is
“monotheism”. I mean, if you look at the history of magic, you’ve got
its origins in the caves, you’ve got its origins in shamanism, in
animism, in a belief that everything around you (every tree, every rock,
every animal) was inhabited by some sort of ‘essence’, some sort of
spirit, that could perhaps be communicated with. You would have had some
central shaman or visionary who would have been responsible for
channeling ideas that were useful for survival. By the time you have
reached the classical civilizations, you can see that this has
formalized to a degree. 
The shaman was acting purely as an intermediary
between the spirits and the people.
He was, in his position in the
village or community,
I should imagine very much like
a spiritual
plumber.
The people in the group would have had their own roles.. The
person who was best at hunting would’ve been a hunter. The person who
was best at talking to the spirits, perhaps because he or she was a bit
crazy, a bit detached from our normal, material World, then they would
have been The Shaman.
They would not have been the masters of a ‘sacred
craft’.
They would have simply been dispensing their information
throughout the community because it was believed
to be helpful to the
community.
When you get the actual classical cultures emerging, this has been
formalized so that you’ve now got pantheons of gods, and each of those
gods have a priest caste, that will act (to a certain degree) as
intermediaries, who will instruct you in the worship of that god. So the
relationship between ‘humans and their gods’, which could be seen a
relationship between ‘humans & their highest Selves’, that was still
a very direct one… When Christianity & monotheism comes in, then
all of a sudden you’ve got a priest caste moving between the worshipper
and the object of worship. You’ve got a priest caste becoming a kind of
‘spiritual middle management’ between humanity and the divine within
itself that it is seeking. You no longer have a direct relationship with
the godhead. The Priests don’t really necessarily have a direct
relationship with the godhead.
They’ve just got a book that tells you
about some people who lived a long time ago who DID have a direct
relationship with the godhead… and that’s alright.
“You don’t need to
have miraculous visions. You don’t need to have gods talking to you. In
fact if you do have any of that stuff, you’re probably insane.”
In the
modern world, that stuff doesn’t happen.
The only people who are allowed
to talk to gods, and in a very kind of one-sided way, are priests…
Monotheism, to me, is a great simplification. I mean, the Kabbalah
has a great mulitiplicity of gods, but at the very top of the
Kabbalistic diagram —the tree of life—who have this one sphere that is
absolute God. The Monad. Something that is indivisible, you know? And
all of the other gods, and indeed everything else in the Universe, is a
kind of emanation of that God. Now that’s fine, but it’s when you
suggest that there is ‘only that one God’, at this kind of unreachable
height above humanity, and there is nothing in between, you’re limiting
and simplifying the thing… I mean I tend to think of Paganism as a kind
of alphabet, as a language. It’s like all of the Gods are letters in
this alphabet. They express nuances, shades of meaning, or certain
subtleties of ideas. Whereas monotheism tends to be just one vowel, and
it’s just something like “ooooh”. It’s like this monkey sound.
You can
almost imagine the Gods becoming frustrated, contemptuous.. that with
all this richness of spiritual concepts that are available, why reduce
it to one plaintive single note that the utterer does not even
understand?
The alchemists had two components to their philosophy. These were the
principles of “solve” and “coagula”.
Solve was basically the equivalent
of ‘analysis’. It was taking things apart to see how they worked. [Breaking].
Coagula was basically ‘synthesis’. It was trying to put the disassembled
pieces back together so that they worked more efficiently.
These are two very important principles which can be applied to
almost anything in culture. Recently in literature, for example, there
has been a wave of post-modernism, deconstructionism. This is Solve.
Perhaps it’s time, in the arts, for a little more Coagula. Having
deconstructed everything, perhaps we really should be starting to think
about putting everything back together.
Spiritualism was the natural state of human thinking up until the
Renaissance and the subsequent age of reason that grew out of it. Our
original way of seeing the world, was as a place entirely inhabited by
spirits, where everything had its indwelling essence, where everything
was, in some sense, sacred, including ourselves. The age of reason
changed all that. While it’s inarguable that Reason brought many great
benefits, and was a necessary stage of our development, unfortunately
this lead to materialism, where the physical material world was seen as
the be-all and end-all of existence, where inevitably, we are seen as
creatures that have no spiritual dimensions, that have no souls, in a
soulless Universe of dead matter…”
