Not all pyres burn like a flaming pillar or a raging wildfire. Some are just white hot points of focused sunlight on your skin, boring a hole through your core sunrise by sunrise. The Pyre I had foretold, thusly, snuck into my life without fanfare or immediate recognition, only becoming apparent when work on my shadow brought the damage I had been levying on myself into my consciousness. Now that I know I have been in a mild crisis for several months, I have the responsibility to use my will and magick to help reverse it.

Failure to Connect

This pandemic era has been difficult for everyone. We have isolated This pandemic era has been difficult for everyone. We have isolated ourselves and, no matter how introverted one may be, that isolation wears on us all. The political divides in the US are extreme and seemingly insurmountable; whichever side you fall on, the constant friction, attacks, animosity, and struggle to adapt to the other side wears us all down.

With isolation and this lack of tolerance, we witness attacks on our governmental and society institutions. We witness the dissembling of the events by elected officials and we must all struggle with the realities of what that means for the future of our shared society. We watch corruption of our government officials rise and the degradation of truth and facts on a daily basis. It seems impossible to stop and this kills our hope.

I have experienced everything I describe above and then also had to face the underlaying realities of my own life against this backdrop. My parents are conservatives, socially, religiously, and politically. As a gay man, I have doubts they accept my choices and lifestyle because of this, and, even if they do accept me as an individual, they still vote to put representatives of theirs in power who would strip me of my civil rights. It’s a double-image that I can’t synch up and the effort that I have expended to do so has become an unacceptable expenditure over the last several months.

My philosophical frisson with my parents worsened as I delved into my past and truly began to understand how different I have always been from their culture and how I never fit into it. It deepened when I realized my relationship with my father had started out flawed and terrible and that I had indelible imprints of his toxic masculinity stamped into my own behavior. While I have a slightly better relationship with my mother, I cannot overlook her capitulation in this history, only relegate her offenses to a more passive mode than my father’s outward rage. She’s not excused from them.

Coping

Anyone who understands addiction will tell you that it’s not the substances (alcohol, narcotics, etc.) or the activities (gambling, sex, etc.) that you’re addicted to as these things/activities are just the vehicles by which you cope with the stresses and problems that underlie them. Addictions start out as a means to cope with the stress of the underlying problems.

I do acknowledge the experience of physically being addicted to a substance and how withdrawal can be extreme. I mean that we only get physically addicted to substances when we use them to cope with other issues first and allow them to become their own problem.

Over several months, I experimented with inhalants in a sexual context, to bring a high to my sexual activity alone or with others. My use of inhalants started innocently enough during such encounters, but over time, has grown into a low-grade addiction.

For reference, the inhalant of choice I use is called Maximum Impact. It comes in a silver can and is theoretically used to clean video tape heads. You spray it into a rag and inhale or huff it, getting high in the process. There’s zero way it could be considered healthy for the body to absorb the substance, but it does produce in me a strong “no mind” experience…where I literally black-out from it for a period of time.

Over time, I sought out Max Impact more and more under the guise of using it in my magical practice to really get out of myself, but when I’m honest, I can see that totally blacking out only thwarts my magical practice rather than enhancing it. These were just excuses for the growing need to cope using the substance (or the “toxin” as Marbas calls it). As my Max Impact usage grew, my spiritual world actually began to dry up, power down, and I became disassociated from it.

As an aside, Marbas has communicated quite plainly that I will “never find him with the toxin,” so this disassociation cannot be a surprise.

When I invoked my Satan, thoughts and emotions in my subconscious were brought into the light of consciousness over time. One of these was that I had to admit I had a problem using Max Impact, after I basically did nine cans in a single day (which is biologically unsafe).

I knew pretty quickly that the underlaying issues I’ve described at length above are what I am REALLY serving by using the Max Impact, as these stresses are ever-present at a low boil and have just worn me down. It took weeks to broach the subject with my therapist, and she agreed that the inner child who felt abused by my father and who felt abandoned by my father’s culture contributed to the use of the toxin. I was running from that pain and instead, had to stop and face it. It took weeks further to bring the problem up with my husband, but he is supportive of my efforts to reduce or stop my use of inhalants.

It was only recently at FistFest, a gay fisting festival, where I did the 9 cans over the course of a day, that I realized my problem rose to the level of addiction. True, it wasn’t heroin and I wasn’t breaking into cars to steal radios to get money to buy my next fix, but an addiction it was and is. I ended up leaving the festival early because of the inhalant use and that I woke up to my overuse of it, leaving my Magus (who had flown in from the west coast to attend) somewhat in the lurch.

In hindsight, I can see how the cards from the Pyre Spread played out. The VII of Staves relates my inner self being totally at odds with the religious based (Roman Catholic) culture in which I had grown up. The Pyre itself was a the crisis of the addiction beginning to burn. The X of Blades represented my betrayal of my Magus, my husband, and my friends that lurked if the addiction expanded.

With this clarity in mind, I knew I had to do something. Being a demonolator, that meant doing some magick. So, I went to work creating a spell.

Because I have a lot to say about how I built the spell, I wanted to break this topic up into two posts. This is the first and the second, with details on the spell, will follow.