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Personally I would find it well nigh impossible to work a ritual (or ritual type thing, I'm not a stickler for rules) on pills but there is one reason I would reccomend them in a magic sense. Pills make you notice the little details that perhaps go over your head on a sober night's clubbing/pubbing.
I had some interesting experiences taking really good E’s during the mid-nineties that were really…profound, for want of a better term. I relate them to Reich’s theories about muscular tension and character armour. Very good MDMA seems to temporarily dissolve this Reichian character armour in one fell swoop. It’s just gone. For about six to eight hours you seem to have no physical experience of the chronic muscular tensions that Reich says are symptomatic of unhealthy mental or emotional complexes. You genuinely feel free, open and unafraid in every sense of these terms – and that, for me, is the most magically significant aspect of the various drug experiences that I’ve had.
There’s a bit in Grant Morrison’s JLA run where the JLA of the year 1 million turn up. Somebody tries to read their minds and is shocked that there are no defences; their minds are all wide open and unafraid of anything – there’s absolutely nothing that they are ashamed of or trying to hide. Reich’s theories, as I understand them, would indicate that this is the natural healthy state of homo-sapiens, but in life we accrue these chronic mental, emotional and physical tensions that restrict the flow of ‘orgone’ and make us unhealthy, guilty, ashamed, envious, pathological, etc... Good E, in my experience, gets rid of all of this for a few hours and puts you right back in that natural state.
Several strange evenings at squat parties in the North of England were magically transformed, by way of a dodgy 10 quid sacrament, into these shamanic visions of what you could almost think of as something like the Biblical Eden. Everything is alive, open and unafraid. The music that’s playing, even if it’s the shittiest house music you’ve ever heard, is transformed into the divine music of the spheres. ‘Every man and woman is a star’ experienced as a living physical reality, no longer a hackneyed Thelemic platitude but right fucking there in front of you all the time. This mad utopia that is actually there in front of our eyes but were unable to grasp. All of us too locked into our tensions, complexes and obsessions to ever realise it or notice it, like a bunch of clueless gnostic demiurges fallen into matter.
That’s what I got out of E in relation to magic. I’ve never had one for years and years, and I’m not all that bothered about it now. The quality wouldn’t be quite as good, and I doubt I would be affected the same way that I was back then. I remember each subsequent pill I took being less effective. It’s possible I just started getting really bad E’s, but I do think that a qualitative change takes place the more regularly you take drugs and they become less powerful and less effective.
It’s not really important for me to re-create that experience through the use of synthesised drugs now. What is important is that I had those shamanic experiences at a formative age and was changed entirely because of them. I know instinctively that the vision of reality I caught a glimpse of in countless mad pilled-up moments is, at some level or another, an achievable state of human existence. And however ephemeral, impossible and utopian this may seem in the cold light of day, it can’t be discounted or ignored.
I’d say that these experiences were as valid a shamanic vision quest as any that may occur in an indigenous shamanic tradition. Through the mechanism of the whole early 90’s rave thing I was receiving these crazy shamanic visions on a weekly basis in my late teens. They effectively switched me on magically. I think I was always going to be a magician at one point or another, but the fact that these drugs were flying about, gave me some means of experiencing several initiatory visions that permanently changed my perceptions and understandings of the world.
It makes no logical sense that the worlds unlocked by E or acid are somehow contained inside and only accessible via these tiny capsules or blotting papers. If all that is changing is the chemicals that your brain produces, then surely the essential reality that you experience on psychedelics has no more or less validity than the world you experience day-to-day. How can you not become a magician after being given an instinctive understanding of something like that?
What I’m interested in doing at the moment is looking back over all of these drug inspired visions in as much detail as I can recall. Trying to recapitulate these experiences as important aspects of a shamanic initiation that may still hold all sorts of important information and training/conditioning for the future. I’m considering these visions as initiatory experiences that happen outside of time, and therefore it’s possible I may have been shown stuff I couldn’t possibly make sense of when I was 18, but is really important to recall and internalise in relation to a later stage of my life.
I dunno, food for thought concerning drugs and magic at any rate. Although bollocks to goth music and ‘tribal’ techno – it’s got to be Jamaican ska and dancehall all the way. 100% Dynamite in theory and practice, is the way to go. |
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