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What made me decide to shed?
i was basically becoming, in highly technical magical language, an absolute cunt. I was, to quote Phil Hine, 'addicted to the powerful memes of BEING RIGHT and GETTING EVEN'. And in the end it just ran me down and fucked me off and I got sick of it. So I decided it was time to git right and repent!, and spend some time working in a paradigm which would allow me to be nicer to people...
Not, I hasten to add, that santeria isn't a very nice paradigm, because obviously lots of people can and do use it for healing, community, and all kinds of niceness, but for me on a purely personal basis it was always going to be associated with getting good and riled, allowing Oggun, Chango or Yemaya to posess me, and laying the magickal smackdown on all who annoyed me.
What was nice about the last couple of...I assume you're referring to the last two years and, ah...Well, there was a lot that was nice, and I did have a lot of fun being a vengeance-seeking nastymage. I learned how to bully and intimidate people, I got to do all kinds of cool and scary stuff, and I explored my own capacity for evil to the full in a way which was, ultimately, creative, rather than destructive. I learned a lot about a foreign magickal culture and at the same time deepened and broadened my appreciation of western psychology and ethics. I got to wear lots of black and develop my arm-wrestling and staring match skills, and I got laid with some nice chicks into the bargain. I got a pretty neat book and some rather cool gigs out of the whole process, and I even managed to develop something of a guru-tastic reputation among the local writing community. I've had ace conversations with the strangest of people, I've learned how to drink, and I've came up with some cool and innovative magickal techniques. But, y'know, sooner or later you get bored with being the bad guy and you fancy being more Gandalf than Saruman, y'know?
I have actually been giving some thought to all this lately, and I'm in the process of adopting a new (and perhaps somewhat surprising) paradigm. Basically I've decided that, after so many years faffing about with foreign belief systems, it's time I returned home, metaphorically speaking, and did some magickal work with the extremely powerful systems of the culture I was raised in.
You'll find out what I mean soon enough... |
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