Us in Times of Tyranny #2
‘Death’ card from A.O.Spare’s personal training deck. Around 1906. Recently published by Strange Attractor Press, 2024.
As magicians, we don’t just flirt with darkness. We stray into it, set up camp, and strive to learn its language. We don’t shy away from the raw, the ugly, the beyond-human. When order and orientation collapse, maybe we have some hard-won wisdom to offer. But who do we turn to when our own long night closes in? Who teaches the teachers?
This is the second chapter in a short essay on that very question — a deep dive into the voices of those who camped out in the inferno long before us. Their words aren’t solace; they’re knives, wire, and cloth — tools we can use to equip ourselves for our own well-being, dignity, and resilience. It’s in this spirit of pragmatism and forward motion that I offer the following ripped-out pages from a handbook for magicians who don’t seek merely to endure adversity, but to turn it into life’s greatest adventure.
LVX,
Frater Acher
May the serpent bite its tail.
Preface
I. Introduction
II. Dignity is not bestowed but upheld
III. Words as Shields,
Words as Surrender
Not infrequently, senseless decisions emerge from the clash of two necessities where it would have been wiser to leave the dilemma to solve itself.[1]
One of the last things that can be taken from us is poetry. The beauty of language. And yet, we all live surrounded by the temptation to deprive ourselves of this very thing at the first blow: How liberating, how redeeming the harsh expletive, the raw swearword seems. Almost effortlessly, with a single hand, invectives seem to sever the gnarly, deep-rooted bonds of complexity. In a poor imitation of Alexander the Great — using a single strike of his sword to cut through the Gordian knot — so we endeavor to cut through the overwhelm of the world that surround us. Fuck, ass, piss, tits, balls — words we spit out rather than speak. And yet, they seem to possess a kind of magic, a sly ability to erect fortifications around the sanctity of our fragile and timid opinions, viewpoints, and identities, shielding them with crude yet undeniable force.
When I turn too lazy, too apathetic to admit the relativity of my own stance, when I demand firm ground under my feet right now - not because I have gained it through honest struggle, but simply because I am worn out from wavering — then instinctively I throw shit at you, then I piss on you. Then my tongue slips below my heart, downwards. What remains is a barking dog, a crowing rooster, a snarling wolf, a laughing goat — all of which remain so much more elegant and graceful in their sounds than man who has rid himself of poetry.
Primo Levi, in his memoirs of Auschwitz, walks the opposite way. He refuses to surrender to exhaustion by losing his language; instead, he honors its magical power to sustain us through the recollection of its most beautiful expressions. While he and another prisoner are on their extra-long detour through the camp to fetch food, Levi feverishly tries to explain to the other the beauty of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He quotes fragments of the epic to him in Italian, and together they try to translate them into French. They pass the power station, end up in the soup kitchen to collect a thin broth of cabbages and turnips. And yet for moments on their path they escape the horrific reality around them, they forget their place, their own skins, the weight of the scaffolding on their shoulders with which they transport the food around the camp. Instead, they behold again the open sea, the horizon, the waves. Dante’s verses do not entertain them, they enchant them. On the way through the death alleys of Auschwitz, the fragments of the Comedy become an act of resistance, a renunciation of humanity. For a moment, Dante’s poetry renews the dream, restores beauty, and replaces reality with vision.
As if I also was hearing it for the first time: like the blast of a trumpet, like the voice of God. For a moment I forget who I am and where I am. Pikolo begs me to repeat it. How good Pikolo is, he is aware that it is doing me good. Or perhaps it is something more: perhaps, despite the wan translation and the pedestrian, rushed commentary, he has received the message, he has felt that it has to do with him, that it has to do with all men who toil, and with us in particular; and that it has to do with us two, who dare to reason of these things with the poles for the soup on our shoulders.[2]
I would give today’s soup to know how to connect ‘the like on any day’ to the last lines. I try to reconstruct it through the rhymes, I close my eyes, I bite my fingers – but it is no use, the rest is silence.[3]
I keep Pikolo back, it is vitally necessary and urgent that he listen, that he understand this ‘as pleased Another’ before it is too late; tomorrow he or I might be dead, or we might never see each other again, I must tell him, I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today…[4]
If this man preserved their humanity by reciting verses of Dante in the corpse-strewn alleys of Auschwitz, who am I to lose mine over a dull kitchen knife, a dead car battery, or the folly of superiors? In what way does Levi’s account challenge me to reclaim the magic of words — not through complex rituals and decades of training, but through rhythm and rhyme? Simpler still — can I exchange my anger over what I believe I am owed for a hymn to the truth of Homer, Dante or Rumi? The poetic escape routes from daily toil are never wrapped in barbed wire, but always open to all of us… And yet, how tired, how slow my steps toward it. Most days, I am buried in the grave of my inertia. The weight of my tongue, struggling to shape the spell of rhyme. I bow before the sorcery of Primo Levi!
To name the world is to resist its unraveling. Amidst our suffering, our wrath, and grief, to affirm the presence of poetry is a promethean act of quiet defiance. Maybe not against outside forces, but against the ones within us that want to decimate our inner ability to experience awe and wonder — the most human gift of all.
The various techniques of magic since primordial times have been cultivated as methods of crisis intervention. In this sense, the free recitation, reading, listening to, and singing of poetry is not a mark of higher education but part of the dirt-streaked, well-worn, and time-tested tool belt of crisis magic. The knowledge of poetry thus turn into a pharmacy of antidotes. Of course, this is only true for the kind of poetry that never fails to lift you up and out of your lived experience — and manages to transcend it into the true and meaningful. Yet what kind of poetry sparks such transcendence shifts over a lifetime, just as the conditions of our existence do. It is wise, then, to keep our reservoir of poetic poisons and their cures as vast as possible at all times.
Now, we must not speak about the loss of language in Auschwitz, without recalling the most obvious act committed against each prisoner upon arrival.
And for many days, while the habits of freedom still led me to look for the time on my wristwatch, my new name ironically appeared instead, a number tattooed in bluish characters under the skin.[5]
For the Germans, the tattooed number had both a technical and a terrorist motivation. It was necessary to keep track of the chaos of prisoners arriving from all over Europe. Where the Jewish star was still publicly displayed on clothing, the number had to be engraved into the flesh. Clothes, papers, and passports were no longer reliable under the conditions of the Lager. Simultaneously, the number was intended to make it unmistakably clear to the inmates that they had arrived in a place from where there was no return. Their human personalities were forever to be eradicated. Not only were they stripped of their passports, they were denied any hope of ever carrying a human identity again. The only way out of their dehumanized existence was “through the chimney”.[6]
Häftling: I have learnt that I am Häftling. My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die. The operation was slightly painful and extraordinarily rapid: they placed us all in a row, and one by one, according to the alphabetical order of our names, we filed past a skilful official, armed with a sort of pointed tool with a very short needle. It seems that this is the real, true initiation: only by ‘showing one’s number’ can one get bread and soup. Several days passed, and not a few cuffs and punches, before we became used to showing our number promptly enough not to disorder the daily operation of food-distribution; weeks and months were needed to learn its sound in the German language.[7]
And it was in fact so. Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach. I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. ‘Warum?’ I asked him in my poor German. ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove.[8]
The hell of no-longer-being-human is, of course, miles away from the shores of grace and compassion — cast out into the ashen desert of solitude, where one is meant to feel utterly abandoned. To perfect this sense of absolute exposure, all familiar pathways of rule and order had to be erased. Nothing was to remain but ashes — no trails, no traces. It is the sheer arbitrariness of terror that severs the thread of hope and smothers the last flickering belief in one’s ability to help oneself.
Levi realizes this already at the end of his first day in Auschwitz, after an embrace from a boy who has already spent three years in hell. At that moment, he grasps: he has crossed the “threshold into the house of the dead”.[9]
Here we speak of the power of words — specifically, the loss of the most powerful word of all: our own name. Thrown into this inferno, Levi no longer existed as a man but as a walking materia prima mortis: an assemblage of raw material destined for death, an anonymous vessel of organic matter, bound to vanish in the mass grave of the ovens. From here onwards, his footsteps left no trace, his body cast no shadow. The fat beneath his skin had become kindling for the flames, his skin a hollow cocoon carrying nothing but the ashes of what once was a human.
Anyone who has set foot on the magical path knows that surrendering one’s name is a fundamental step in initiation. Often, the mundane name is replaced by a pseudonym or a motto — something that encapsulates the aspirant’s magical intent. Yet even these magical names are temporary by nature; they are assumed to serve a purpose and discarded once that purpose is fulfilled. Beneath them all, the advancing aspirant begins to recognize, over the years and through the changing of names, something profoundly nameless. He comes to see himself as the bench upon which an endless procession of names has taken a seat. Some remain, others vanish, a few carve themselves into the wood and are still forgotten. Yet, the bench itself has no name — or rather, it is too shapeless, too impermanent, too withdrawn to be bound by letters. And yet, this bench is the very thing that has borne all names and will bear them still.
To recognize oneself as something that holds a name but is not a name is a crucial step on our path. Levi speaks of the demonic baptism into namelessness — a stripping away that was inflicted upon him. In magical practice, we invert this process: what was once done to some of us, we now do to ourselves, deliberately and over the course of decades. The difference is that Levi’s baptism led him into the house of the dead. Our path, by contrast, leads to the opposite side — into the house of the living, into which we may not enter under the banner of a name.
Much darkness and many stars lie between Levi’s experience and the one I describe here. And yet, they share something in common: the loss of language. There, it was an act of coercion and terror; here, it is one of organic and calm surrender.
Still, there is one thing I want to emphasize here: both of these processes are profoundly carnal. Unfortunately, we still live in an intellectual culture that prioritizes the abstract over the concrete, thought over action, and scripture over flesh. But for the kind of magical work I am speaking of, we must reverse these preferences.
Some time ago, I worked with spirits I had discovered in a remote valley above a waterfall in the mountains. They showed me spheres, reminiscent of frogspawn, deep within the earth — imbued with consciousness. They called these the seeds of the future. I spoke with them about the importance of allowing me to tell these embryonic beings of the world as it exists today, so that, if they so chose, they might make themselves into an antidote. I also tried to show them how wondrous and healing humanity as a species could be—not just the careless, destructive force they had known in past and present encounters.
None of this was conveyed in words. Instead, it happened through touch, intention, and the calling forth of the appropriate spirits — such as my Holy Daimon. When it was done, the spirits of the valley lifted me from the depths back to the surface of the river that flowed through their land. Then they worked upon my visionary body, until I was entirely made of a transparent, glass-like substance. They opened a passage at the crown of my head and two more at the soles of my feet. Ice-cold mountain water began to pour through me — entering from above, flowing through, and exiting at my feet. The spirits sang of the past, present, and future, and of how I now stood within their blood.
Only hours later, on the way home, speaking with Harper, did I realize what had just happened: these spirits had baptized me. Only then did I understand the true meaning of that word — that one must fully erase oneself, become an empty vessel through which the spirit of communion can flow. This is not a single event, but an ongoing, relentless process. And as I participate in it, my sense of human identity begins to dissolve. The clearer I see the presence of the spirits, the less I see myself.
Their names now sit upon my bench — if only I knew them. But it would be more accurate to say: their melodies, their light, their blood now sit upon my bench. And this bench is not my soul, not an abstraction, nor something otherworldly. This bench is my flesh, which I now share with them.
Words are weapons. And when we lay them down, we open ourselves — to sense, to see, to share. We have spoken here of two baptisms: one at the gate of Auschwitz, where humans were transubstantiated into materia prima mortis, and another in a mountain valley, where I was filled with the blood of nameless land-spirits. Both baptisms stripped a person of their identity — one on the path into the house of the dead, the other a step closer to the house of the living. Yes, our own name is the sharpest weapon we wield. And just as there are times when we must clutch to it at all costs, there are others when we must surrender it completely. Leave it behind, like a skin well-worn.
All rules are temporary, my friend.
