The Revelation of Fear

Written by Equanimous Rex, A.A.O. 

There have been endless debates within the occult community regarding how magic functions, through what mediums, the extent to which magic can effect change, and honestly innumerable other topics. 

Indeed, these topics have always been in debate, except perhaps within specific homogenous ideologies, schools of thought, and cults that prohibit heterodoxy and heresy. Similarly, the conversation about Chaos Magic specifically and its influence on Post-Chaos occulture in the world of Internet 2.0 and a resurgence of "traditional" witchcraft and Left-Hand Path occultism (its validity, its reliability, its sensibility) has been skewered and propped up by various occult talking heads, online personalities, and authors. 

Regardless of how one personally feels about Chaos magic and its iterations, the most useful and pertinent idea that has continued to exist in Post-Chaos occulture is the idea of taxonomizing and categorizing various means of empowering oneself, one's magic, and one's life. 

Peter J Carroll attempted to find a perennialist link between all practicing magicians and schools of magical thought, specifically in the way that individual's magic was empowered. What made the magic work? What made it tick? What was the fuel, the catalyst, the common thread between disparate, radically different paradigms? 

Carroll called this reoccurring, empowering factor "gnosis", a word that comes to us from the Greek language, most often associated with the various branches of Gnosticism. Gnosis is often posited, from a Gnostic perspective, as first-hand phenomenological knowledge. Contrasted with second-hand interpretive knowledge, and with pistis (faith). Carroll's "gnosis" is defined differently, but still retains that nod to first-hand experience. 

His definition essentially boiled magic down to being empowered by "gnostic states", which appears to be Carroll's attempt to dress-up the topic of altered states of consciousness. His position was that at the core of all magical operations, the reoccurring perennialist link is that there is always an accompanying altered state.This of course ties into general psychonautism. 

Indeed, the book most often accompanying Liber Null, in which gnosis-as-altered-state and gnosis-as-magical-empowerment is explored, is the aptly titled Psychonaut. Both are written by Carroll and cover entheogenic practices, but this concept of gnosis should not be misunderstood as purely referring to the sorts of altered states one experiences via substance use. 

Included in conversations about entheogens and psychoactives are things like drumming, dancing, physical exhaustion, sex, rage, fasting, trance, sleep deprivation, hypnosis, lucid dreaming, joy, humor, daredevil acts, and so forth. A whole range of possible altered states are examined, and if the discerning occultist should look at most examples of magical operations, both historical and contemporary, they will find an altered state somewhere there. 

For the purposes of this essay, I will refer to the Carrollian gnostic state, altered-states, and other subtle psycho-emotional power sources simply as PEPS. 

Which brings me to the point of the essay. The examination of fear as a "gnostic state", as an altered-state, and as a source of power utilized by individuals both for personal experience in inducing preternatural phenomena, as well as a source through which occultists can gather power for their own rituals and aims. 

Every example of an extant PEPS (psycho-emotional power source) can be seen not only as a medium through which to empower or catalyze preternatural phenomena, but as a sort of gateway, for every example has a non-occultist —though it would be incorrect to say non-occult— example of some sort of subculture. 

Fear, pain, laughter, arousal, each is certainly an example of PEPS. Each also has a steady sort of mundane crust surrounding it, through which everyday people oftentimes will have a sort of transcendental experience, or which trigger a mystical state. Horror aficionados, ghost hunters, daredevils, each understand the place fear has as an altered-state, a PEPS. Pain is a PEPS known to both the hot pepper and BDSM enthusiast, as well as to the self-mortifying ascetic. Ritualized sex, either utilizing the extended exhaustion and arousal of prolonged sex acts, or through the focusing of the orgasm, make use of sexual arousal based PEPS. 

Humans flock to these sorts of phenomena because they are on the border between the mundane and the preternatural, where glimpses of transcendental insight, mystical euphoria, and strange occurrences can arise. This is a hallmark of the PEPS power, that even the non-occultist tends to be drawn to them like moths to a lamp. This is the intuitive understanding of the force for catalysis within these PEPS.

My point is that it is too often that individuals consider altered states only that which can be attained through the use of entheogens, psychoactives. But when taken clearly, we can see that there are a whole range of powerful PEPS that have no direct relation to the ecstatic tradition of entheogenic imbibement. 

What exactly happens when one is afraid? Heart rates and breathing rates increase, the blood vessels in your skin constrict, your organs are flooded with oxygen and nutrients, muscles prepared with ample blood for running, or for fighting. Glucose spikes in the blood, provided by the liver, nutrients for the chase, the fleeing, the combat. Goosebumps, an atavistic throwback to our perhaps more hairy ancestors, or more feathered, a failed attempt to make us appear larger and more frightening. 

Fight-or-flight. The so-called lizard brain —the amygdala— starts to work its magic. The nervous system triggers the hormonal system, and adrenocorticotropic hormones and cortisol are released, epinephrine is released. The mouth dries, the digestive tracts come to a near halt, pupils dilate. A clear case of endogenously produced PEPS. 

The rise of "ghost-hunting" television shows also the relationship between fear and the induction of altered states. The particles of dust so often mistaken for some kind of ghostly orb phenomena, the hearing words in audio static, sensations of cold and heat where there ought not to be any, the constant bait-and-switch of viewers being promised video of things only those who were there could see —because one sees with their mind, not their eyes, and as such video cameras stand no chance to properly record the preternatural phenomena encountered. 

It would be easy to say that all ghost-hunters are just con-artists, hucksters, and frauds, but I would warn against such flippant handwaving. It is just as likely that the whole theory of ghost-hunting is simply fundamentally flawed and clings too closely to attempt to "materialize the spiritual". 

The ghost-hunters are hunting the preternatural, but without being able to discern exactly what the preternatural is, and with a boatload of tacitly presupposed philosophical baggage. It is no wonder they make such little headway, and have never, and will never, be able to use material technology to capture preternatural phenomena. They may induce preternatural phenomena with this technology, but they will never capture it, or the objective evidence they seek. 

The talismans of ghost-hunting are often electronic devices, odds and ends of technological progress applied haphazardly to half-baked conceptions. These can clearly be seen to operate as both catalyzing talismans, as well as protective and apotropaic talismans. In the sense that these devices often produce informational noise, they function very similarly to how a divination tool would. 

When engaging with a fear based PEPS, the static and dust merely become another sort of omenic scrying tool. The reason it looks so silly to the skeptical, and so evidential to the presupposing ghost-hunter believers, has a lot more to do with what is between their ears than any objective preternatural phenomena in regards to ghosts. That is, when the mind is prepped to see, in this case from fear-based PEPS, the noise becomes signal. 

The other function of the materialist technological talismans is that of feeling safe. There is some amount of emotional clinging to the devices, as though they were actively protected from the preternatural by their lights and cameras. 

In a very real sense, they are. 

Darkness, you will note, is a common occurrence for fear-based PEPS. Why is that? Simply put, certain preternatural phenomena are more likely to manifest in the dark. There is a term called "eigengrau", a word from German, which means "brain-gray". 

When you are in total darkness, the color of that darkness is actually lighter than the darkest black you can see when such black is lit and contrasted to other colors. The darkness of pure darkness is the gray-darkness of the mind. While engaging with a PEPS, especially a fear-based one, this brain-gray canvas becomes a perfect, all-encompassing black mirror with which to manifest or experience preternatural phenomena. 

This is why lights are turned off, often enough, in pursuit of nighttime ghoulies and goblins. And the ghoulies and goblins sometimes show up, but not in the materialist-positivist-reductionist sense. In a very real sense, functionally, artificial lighting becomes an active ward against this brain-gray scrying canvas. 

One could think of well-lit, sensible sight not as "taking in" what is "really really there", as much as a projected neurological interpretation of what our mind thinks is there, which suppresses this brain-gray canvas. It is important to our physical survival to be able to see what is there, lest we trip and break our necks. But remove this ability, this projected modeling based on photon bouncing patterns, and the preternatural often finds it easier to slip through. 

If you survey occultism, you can see a penchant for the spooky. On the very surface level of occulture there is a celebration of the morbid as well as the shocking. While certainly not a universal aesthetic - the "love and light" crowd, and nature crowd tend to go different directions - the Left-Hand path (or the bastardizations of such) tend to make constant use of the spooky, scary, and morbid. 

People practicing alternative spiritual paths have often themselves been seen as fearful, and conspiracies surrounding their "diabolic" nature abound. Some take advantage of this in works against or for other people. In this sense fear-based PEPS not only catalyze the experience of preternatural phenomena and mystical states, but can also be harnessed from others as a power source to effect magical change. 

Of course, the risk of such is that if others fear an occultist too much, usually it is not too long before that occultist is accused of anything odd or violent that occurs in the general area, or is accused of things made up wholecloth, such as in the numerous cases of the Satanic Panic that swept through America in the 1980's, which led to the arrest of various innocent occultists. 

Likewise, in both the Salem Witch Trials and their precursor European Witchcraft trials, fear of witches and their diabolic powers was so overwhelming to the average person that many innocent people were sacrificed in a ritualized way, in an attempt to destroy the fear. As such, we can see the power fear-PEPS has on mass hysteria, moral panics, and atrocity. 

Like most PEPS, fear can be hazardous to the practitioner. Drawing from any single source over time tends to have unexpected, often long-lasting effects on the individual. Often, it is an accidental self-transmutation, an egodystonic metamorphoses of the self to align more closely with that source from which they draw their power. 

Anecdotally, two of the most common results I've seen of diving into fear-PEPS is that the individual has a penchant for becoming either a paranoiac anxiety case, who sees the fearful under every stone, or the desensitized shock-jock, who cannot understand why their neighbors look at them suspiciously, and are unable to modulate or conceal their own "aura" of morbidity. 

Fear can be used to shock and provoke, and is a perfectly valid avenue for iconoclastic occult work, but everything has its price. A lack of deviation, a lack of variety in the occultist's PEPS, an obsession with one form of PEPS over all others, is the most common cause for this sort of accidental self-alteration. 

But despite the hazards of fear-based PEPS for personal or transpersonal occult work —indeed all power sources have some chance of egodystonic effects— it remains an evocative catalyst. One example of how fearful experiences can actually aid the practitioner comes to us from Tibetan Buddhism, and their ritualized use of wrathful deities in yidam and other practices. 

The wrathful deities often are portrayed as fierce and terrifying. Many have several heads —one of Yamantaka's most common manifestations has six— and numerous arms. They carry ritual weapons, snarl with sharp fangs, and occasionally are depicted trampling deities or devas. 

The wrathful manifestations of these figures are, however, illustration of their power. They are protectors and guardians, and are often invoked or called on to destroy obstacles. Their often fiery natures belies a radiant compassion beneath, depictions of flames themselves being representative of their potency, of their forcefulness and strength. They are thought to protect against demons who would lead the practitioner astray. 

So as we can see, the fearful does not always play a single role. In the case of certain guardian deities, spirits, bodhisattvas, etc, they might be scary entities, but they're our scary entities. They're on our side. 

Additionally, fear is far from a purely negative or harmful experience. Though it can be hijacked and prompted by bad-faith sources - such as in the case of manufactured mass-hysteria and moral panics - it functions as a survival mechanism. Other times, fear serves as a gatekeeper to certain experiences; something for the individual to overcome. 

In some traditions the fearful - and by extension the morbid - is something to be confronted. Such is the case in the practice of "premeditatio malorum", which comes to us from the Greco-Roman practical-philosophic school of Stoicism, which has us imagining the various sorts of terrible things that can - and eventually will, in some cases - happen to ourselves and our loved ones. 

A similar yet distinct practice can be found in Buddhism, known as "maraṇasati", which is a sort of death-awareness meditation, in which the practitioner is urged to vividly visualize their own bodies in various states of death and decay - swollen and blue, being eaten by carrion birds, being reduced to a skeleton, to dust, etc. Such a practice was thought to help an individual become comfortable with their material transience, as well as to cultivate "saṃvega", or spiritual urgency.

Often, in experiences with apparitional phenomena interpreted as being the disembodied ego-soul of some particular human (i.e. ghosts, or as I call them eidolons) there is a powerful element of fear. While certainly not universal, it is an oft-noted feature of such experiences that the eidolon often appears quite horrible to individuals. Rotting flesh, uncanny valley faces, decrepit phantasms, all are just as often experienced by individuals as seeing beautiful, ethereal entities. Oftentimes the beatific mortifies, and the mortific beautifies. 

Each in turn carries a relative connotation to the individual that experiences, often with the so-called ethereal instilling as much fear as otherwise. In either regard, should fear be sought to be avoided at all costs by the practitioner, they would find it rather difficult to work with certain phenomena, such as necromancy, or certain kinds of evocation.

Similar to the wrathful deities mentioned previously, overcoming the fear - or rather, working through it - can transform roadblocks into byways. The inhibition against traveling to some specific local haunt, or spooky nocturnal graveyard, or shadow-infested forest grove outside one's comfort zone is strong. The endeavor can be terrifying. Nevertheless, the sacrifice of surety, of immediate feelings of safety, of comfort is a genuine and powerful sacrifice, liable to function perfectly well as far as ordeals go. 

Coupled with the penchant for such fears to become PEPS and induce altered-states of consciousness conducive to certain flavors of practical work, this makes fear more than mere gatekeeper, or power source, or survival mechanism. Fear, in its own way, is an entire aspect of our existence, almost its own realm, with its own rules and laws. 

We can't avoid fear, but we can avoid making use of it. Whether or not this avoidance would be beneficial to the individual, whether practitioner or not, is up for debate. I think not. I think that there is ample room in the occultist's toolkit for the fearful, the terrifying, the horrible. It is merely - and perhaps this is easier said than done - a matter of transmuting the fear into something workable, as opposed to allowing it to seize control of us and making us act as fools. 

There is a valid place in the occult tradition for fear, despite the attempts to clean-up the image of occultism, the attempted sanitization of occultism into commodifiable entertainment chunks. There are things that go bump in the night, and if you call for them, sometimes they do in fact answer.