Radical Alternatives

In a previous post, I described how I felt pushed out of all of the standard religious, spiritual templates I had attempted over the years, finding each antithetical for various reasons. But, fresh from my radical disappointment in things I once held in reverence, I had an empty space that ached to be filled. I had lived with this empty space for a while, but once the last shreds of things I revered were shattered, well, I moved to something else. 

Throughout my spiritual journey, other threads were being pursued in tandem. I had become active in BDSM sexual experiences, exploring a number of fetishes. One such was erotic hypnosis, which I had practiced for years. I became acquainted with Jack Drago, an erotic hypnotist in California whose hypnosis tracks resonated with me. We fell into contact and Jack introduced me to Satanism. 

My admiration of Jack’s unshakable faith in his belief system attracted me to the practices and he and I exchanged information to the point that Jack became a mentor for me into Satanist practices. Frankly, I wanted that kind of faith in something. 

Spirits in the Dark

These days, Satanism is “having a moment,” and is more mainstream and acceptable than perhaps it ever has been. As with any alternative religions or practices, especially one that places emphasis on personal experience as a defining characteristic, the term “Satanism” means many things to many people. It runs the gamut from a pure science-based atheism to a very Christian-based “anti-Catholicism.” 

Rather than attempt some kind of “dictionary” of Satanism, I’m going to describe what I believe in personal terms. For a long time, I referred to my spiritual beliefs as “energetic humanism,” which means that I believe our physical 3-dimensional bodies are not the entirety of what make us up. We have an energy to us, within our minds, within our bodies, and that this energy extends outward from our physical forms and encompasses a radius around us. 

Is this energy our souls? Our spirit? Our astral body? To label it as any of these things would be to accidentally endorse a lot of a backstory for the term that I don’t want to do endorse. I don’t know what exactly it is, I only know that I have felt it on a mental, emotional, and spiritual level many times throughout my life. 

I believe that magic or sorcery is the practice of intentionally directing and controlling this energy to bring about change in the world on any level. I believe that ritual or religious practices help focus the will to direct the energy. I also believe that any given ritual or religious practice is not objectively more or less sacred than any other. It’s all about what the practitioner believes at the time of the magical act. 

I believe that there are entities out there in the universe that are not bound by our 3-dimensional reality, but which can be contacted and treated with through the energy I describe above, through magic or sorcery. Hence, I believe in demonolatry, which is defined as the “worship of demons,” but which I choose to think of as a magical practice of contacting, communicating, negotiating, and allying with such entities. 

I believe that other spaces exist beyond our 3-dimensional world and I have traveled there through meditation and visualization to have direct contact with the entities I describe above. We’ve talked, things have happened to my energetic body, changes have been made. I have been empowered and altered through such contacts and bring that back with me to the mundane world as spiritual energy and a change in consciousness. 

I believe that the entities I have contacted and that most other demonolators have contacted are not dogmatically, morally evil. I believe that entities want what they want — sometimes these are positive things, sometimes negative — but that “angels,” “demons,” “elementals,” etc. are all basically the same kind of life form which take on certain symbolism and exhibit certain traits when dealing with us, the more limited intelligences. I believe that they are…well…demonized by the prevailing Jehovan religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) because those religions won the social war and thus, cast their adversaries in a negative light to keep them from favor. 

Given that I have been rejected from the Jehovan paths and other right-hand path (RHP) religions and spiritualities because of who I intrinsically am, I find no reason not to look into the lesser used corners of the universe and treat with the spirits and entities there for wisdom, understanding, change and power. 

When I talk of being “radicalized,” I’m referring to this newfound willingness to walk into the darkness. The darkness had always captured my attention but I had stood on the periphery, working toward making the “best” of it, always trying to transmute it into enlightenment and high-mindedness. Now, I no long know what the “best” I was trying to achieve actually was.

The only definition I had for it was to become “my best self.” This was a holdover from my pagan and Wiccan days where we all tried so hard to ascend our lives into something better, yet all the while denying the anchors we created for ourselves and refusing to look at own hubris. Now, I tend to acknowledge my faults and embrace them as valuable. I find that doing so gives me a strength I denied myself for a long time. I am flawed. I will be flawed. There’s no denying it any longer.