Visions and Paths

When I first started working with the intrinsic energy that humankind possesses (magic), I did it through meditation and what I called “visionquesting.” I know that the term “visionquest” has a specific meaning to Native cultures, and I realize that what I was doing wasn’t truly going on a visionquest, but the term itself seemed to encompass the same idea, if not the practice. 

I meditated to trance music and imagined a narrative, moving through an environment and experiencing encounters with animals, guardians, etc. I quested into a mythic place and, through them, learned about aspects of myself. I also created a personal mythology around the narratives, with gods, goddesses, holy days, systems of worship, etc. 

At the time, these visionquests were “local,” in that I don’t think I was travelling anywhere in an astral sense. I was moving inside myself for answers to whatever my situations were at the time. From an early age, I expressed myself through narrative, creating comic strips as a child, studying poetry and creative writing in high school, and plotting out so many stories that I lost track of them in my journals. 

I am a writer. It’s important for me to assert this, as my therapist chides me from time to time, as a means to push back the inevitable doubt and self-judgment that comes with any creative endeavor. 

When my pagan-Wiccan social circle collapsed and I became disillusioned, the value of these narratives fell into ruin and I abandoned the personal mythology. Looking back at it now, it feels quaint and derivative in its themes, a personal imprint of existing mythologies that brought nothing new to the narratives. 

The Ordeal

While the practice itself dissolved, the need for experiencing this human energy did not. It moved from the religious realm to the secular one, but still held the flavor of primitive ordeals. The need evolved into BDSM practices, a fusion of spirituality and sexuality, and I began experimenting. 

Bondage, flogging, mummification, chastity, estim, milking machines…all kinds of practices to various levels of scenes. I would use the discomfort, the physical pain, and the psychological pressure of servitude to enter a spiritual mind-space, often referred to as sub-space by BDSM practitioners. I would get tastes of the energy, depending on the intensity of the scene. 

My experimentation was on and off for many years, becoming more frequent as time passed. The more I experienced the spiritual energy, the more I wanted it. I began looking for a Master, which meant, I began trying to become a slave. 

My research painted a very attractive picture of the Master-slave relationship, an intense love bond between two men with a deliberately uneven power exchange. The level of trust a slave must have for his Master and the level of regard a Master must have for his slave made the idea of relationship format desirable. 

Yet, the extreme nature of the bond made it rare. It’s difficult for any two people to enter into a love-relationship and unite their interests, secular goals, religious proclivities, and their emotional states in a standard relationship. The more extreme the format of the relationship, the more trust is required. In the best of times, dating is difficult. So, ultimately, my searches went unfulfilled. 

Several times, when I was “interviewed,” some Masters told me point blank that they could not detect any submissive qualities in me, despite that I worked to submit to them. My therapist agreed and counselled me to pick up my power and use it, rather than giving it to someone else. 

Yet, the act of voluntarily subjugating my power at the feet of a man I deemed worthy of receiving it felt like what gave my power meaning. I sought submission not as a denial of my worth, but as a fulfillment of it. 

Even so, I sought ways to master myself until or if I should find a Master to whom to give my power. While I plan to detail this in a post of its own, during this period I had begun to work on myself physically and psychologically, working to make myself a more valuable object or property to own for a potential master. 

Into the Darkness

A founding tenet of Satanism extols the worth of the individual over the crowd, the value of acting independently and thinking for oneself. This fit my need to work on self-mastery, so the ideas of Satanism hit me exactly right and stuck. 

As part of my self-mastery practices and as an expression of my BDSM, fetishistic bent, I delved into erotic hypnosis tracks, working to program myself in a number of ways. Some of the tracks worked to various degrees based on the hypnotist, the production value of the tracks, and how the ideas were expressed. Some didn’t work at all. 

The most success I had was with Jack Drago, whose tracks introduced me to the ideas of personifying my inner workings as spiritual entities, in this case as alternate personalities or demons. Talking with him directly led me to Satanism and to further refine my belief system. 

So, is Jack Drago my Master? Not officially and not in the way that traditional BDSM Master-slave relationships form, but he and I are spiritually and sexually connected in a profound way. I believe that we spur one another on our paths and that our paths are entwined not only in this lifetime, but in past and future lives as well (we have both had visions where this seems to be the case). 

But, for now, I control my own destiny and I own myself. I make the decisions for my own life.