Sitting in the Tall Grass with Daimones.
A brief outlook
on what comes next.
I find myself going in a new direction. Or maybe it is the same direction I have been walking towards for some time, but with a new awareness. Over the last three years in particular, I have gone deeper into my goêtic spirit work than ever before. Together with Harper, we are beginning to sit on a growing archive of spirit recordings, that, as I review their notes in retrospect, challenge me to think differently about the work.
The spirit reality we encounter in these workings has radically little to do with anything I have read in the manuals of Western magic. Part of the difference is the obvious shift in agenda, from a human operator’s coercion to co-creating micro-cultures with daimones. The deeper difference lies in the phenomenology itself: who these spirits are, how they seem to live, how they interact with the world and, quite frankly, how they function in creation.
A few notes from reading through this archive recently: I was shown spherical eggs deep underneath a river that the spirits called the seeds of the future. I saw telluric dragons waiting for humans to open a shaft of flesh so they could see the sky. I saw mountains waiting to breathe stories and songs back into the world. I saw an entire scriptorium of winged and hoofed creatures, on the top plateau of a mountain, writing into the stone with spittle and fingers. I encountered spirits that wanted to pass on the love of life, for riding in my body temporarily as fungi; and on and on…
I know next to nothing about how reality looks through the eyes of these beings. What I do know is that my presence changes theirs. Most spirits are more aware of, and more attuned to, their environment than we are. The moment we approach them, and often long before, they spot us. Like all species, they change their behavior when they sense an intruder, friendly or otherwise. They adapt to changes in their surroundings, and to them we are part of those surroundings: the operating background of their own agency and agendas.
I keep thinking of how long Dian Fossey sat in the Virunga mountains of Rwanda, from 1967 onwards. She waited for the gorillas to slowly habituate to her presence, her smell and her imitating gestures before genuine contact could happen.[1]
I find myself increasingly exhausted, or is it bored, by conversations about what we humans feel, need and desire more of. Mainly because I am drawn to the very same questions, applied to the richly diverse world of non-humans all around us: I want to plant myself, with deep roots, among these others. That means straying further from the beaten paths of how magic is studied, prepared and practiced. And the turn this takes may surprise others as much as it surprised myself… In the end, it points not (only) outward, towards the spirits, but back at ourselves.
The grimoires knew that the operator alters the spirit’s presence. And they weren’t shy to weaponize that knowledge. They compelled spirits to appear “in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity”.[2] They drew spirits out of their subtle habitat into visible appearance, and confined them in the triangle of art. Read this way, the grimoires are primers in how to forcibly change a spirit’s behavior on human contact.
If we want to reverse this, even partially, and create a more mutual surface of experience and exchange, our main obstacle is not deciphering ancient texts. Nor is it inventing new technologies of spirit contact. Rather, it’s the field of human presence itself. We are the obstacle. The human self becomes the hindrance.
We can bring as many human skulls to a ritual as we like. We will learn nothing about the beings who’d like to inhabit these after their original tenants have left the bone buildings. For as long as our own skulls cannot hold anything but human truth.
How, then, do we meet this formidable challenge?
Let me share three lessons from the last twenty-five years of my mundane working life. I now see that they bear directly on the future of my goêtic practice, or at least on how I would introduce others to it… For I can see now, that cutting through the web of our own cultural habits is a precondition to creating new weaves with the non-humans.
In a communication training years ago, I learned that in most forms of contact we want three things above all: to be right, to look good and to be liked. How sweet, vibrant and alive we feel when an encounter meets one of these needs, let alone all three at once! Yet these three filters are the greatest hindrance to genuine contact. They make our exchange with the world essentially about ourselves and our own gratification, rather than about truly being in touch with our surroundings. Unless we satisfy the needs behind these filters proactively, we risk turning every being we meet into a prop on the stage of our own theatre of self-fulfillment.
Even earlier in my education, I learned about an entire field of practitioners who, in the late 1980s, lost faith in their core tools. These were culture-specific trainings designed to prepare future expatriates for life abroad: courses on “the” Japanese, “the” Chinese, “the” Germans. Always wary of stereotyping, they tried to raise awareness of the patterns, preferences and plain customs that would surprise, disorient or confuse a newcomer, or simply get lost in translation.
Much of it came to nothing. Participants learned to think in formulas, applying ready-made behavioral recipes to a reality far more dynamic and particular than any curriculum or list of dos and don'ts could capture.
Disappointment with these results led the field to change course entirely. Instead of teaching Americans (or expats from elsewhere) what to expect here or there, we began teaching them what made them American in the first place.[3] Culture-specific training gave way to general culture-sensitivity training.[4]
The new approach asked more of participants, though. There were no more formulas, recipes or scripted behaviors. Instead, they had to hold far greater complexity and adapt in the moment. That meant more listening, more observing, and more willingness to reveal themselves and be vulnerable, all in pursuit of genuine contact across cultures.
Finally, there is the work of the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan and the research it inspired.[5] It distinguishes two axes of personal growth among adults.
The familiar one, now called horizontal development, is the acquisition of new skills: a language, a dance routine, the technical skills of a field. The person behind the skills stays essentially the same while their repertoire grows. It is like pouring more wine into an existing vessel.
The other axis, vertical development, leaves the wine largely as it is and enlarges the vessel.[6] Researchers mapped a sequence of stages: five in Kegan’s model, seven in the related “action logics” of Susanne Cook-Greuter and William Torbert.[7] These stages trace how, under rare circumstances, people move from a mind that needs a great deal of external structure, markers and guidance to one that can stand fully exposed to complexity and contradictory truths and still function.
For all its promise, vertical development has struggled to take hold in corporate practice. Imagine the lead balloon of a team session reporting back to executives how low they had scored on the vertical axis. Unfortunately, progress along it is statistically rare. It often comes only in crisis, when people with their backs against the wall must accept the loss of their former worldview in exchange for a new horizon of choice.
We could continue this list of examples, each coloring the notion of the traveling self being the actual hindrance to genuine contact with the world around us. If these deeply infused, inherent behaviors and conditions already undermine human-to-human contact, can you imagine the force of disruption they bring to our attempts of inter-species contact?
Again, think of Diane Fossey sitting in the wet Rwanda mountains in the morning mist. Not knowing whether her patience would lead to anything. Being the first, to try not to fully blend in with the gorillas, but to find common ground that worked and was afforded by both species voluntarily.
How should we begin to translate these ideas into our own goêtic practice? This is what I have been exploring since late last year. The first fruits of this pursuit Harper and I will be sharing this month at the OCCULTURE Retreat as well as at the Bridging the Invisible Conference. I am excited to see where these conversations might take us, as a field of practitioners, as a community of people sitting in the tall grass, all through the night, with daimones.
Footnotes
[1] Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983.
[2] S. L. MacGregor Mathers (trans.) and Aleister Crowley (ed.), The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, Foyers, Inverness: Society for the Propagation of Religious Truth, 1904.
[3] Edward C. Stewart and Milton J. Bennett, American Cultural Patterns: A Cross-Cultural Perspective, rev. ed., Yarmouth, ME: Intercultural Press, 1991.
[4] Milton J. Bennett, "A Developmental Approach to Training for Intercultural Sensitivity," in: International Journal of Intercultural Relations 10, no. 2, Oxford: Pergamon, 1986, pp. 179–196.
[5] Robert Kegan, The Evolving Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, Immunity to Change, Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009.
[6] Nick Petrie, Future Trends in Leadership Development, Greensboro, NC: Center for Creative Leadership, 2011.
[7] David Rooke and William R. Torbert, "Seven Transformations of Leadership," in: Harvard Business Review 83, no. 4, Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing, April 2005, pp. 66–76.
