In The Quiet Crisis, Part 1, I detailed my issues with using inhalants and how their use has become a mild crisis in my life that needs to be addressed. As a professed Black Cleric of Lucifer, it’s up to me to drive myself toward higher levels of personal development, so I formulated how best to address the crisis at hand. By healing the inner child within me that had been perennially outcast from my home culture, I could begin to resolve the underlaying issues with the addiction and then dismantle the coping habits around those wounds, the inhalants. To heal the inner child, I conceived of a magical working.
Tarot Spells
This blog remains, in part, a grimoire. This means that I will record how I cast spells, how I develop magical workings, and how I create magical technology. When mulling over how I would address my damaged inner child and how I would go about healing the spiritual damage, the idea of a tarot spell came to me pretty quickly.
I use tarot as my primary form of divination, i.e., my reading the universe through card and symbols to try to understand it. This feels like a passive use of the cards — the magical technology — allowing the answers to come to me through randomizing the card choices and using intuition to interpret the meanings. Suppressing the will and allowing the universe to speak its answers should be the goal of the diviner, lest the answers be skewed.
Another use for the cards exists, that of actively casting spells. In this method, cards are specifically chosen by the magician to represent different aspects of the reality he attempts to evoke. The symbols are the same and they mean the same things as during a reading, but instead of being vehicles of meaning from the universe to the magician, they because vehicles of the magician’s will onto the universe.
Because of my familiarity with the tarot and it’s symbols, performing a tarot-based spell felt right. So, I researched some cards, separated them from the deck at large, and used them to form a narrative that I would use to focus my will. The idea for the narrative would be that I’d start at my current situation and navigate a way toward a better future, healing my inner child in the process.
As a means of recording the process, I’m going to go through the cards I chose, why I chose them, and how they lend themselves to the overall narrative.
The Only Way Out is Through
The starting point of the narrative feels obvious. What card should represent the crisis itself? The card that foretold its coming: The Pyre. The Pyre depicted on the card is a tumult that brings with it change and, while my crisis hasn’t been the rapid catastrophe depicted, the reality of the crisis can’t be denied.
In my Sabbath Tarot Deck, there are actually three cards (Satan, Lucifer, and Diabolus) that represent the traditional major arcana card, The Devil. The Devil traditionally stands for some kind of spiritual binding, sin, depravity, etc. In this case, I consider the addiction itself to be such a binding, a behavior somewhat out of my direct control that both expresses and causes deeply felt spiritual negativity. Given my recent experiences exploring my Shadow, I chose the Satan and the Lucifer card in equal measure.
The Satan card stands for my subconscious and how the darkness was peeled back to show me this principle issue: that, as a kid, I had never been accepted into my home culture (socially conservative, Roman Catholic, etc.) and that this constant rejection on a subconscious, even unconscious level, affected my self-esteem for decades and still does. The Lucifer card represents my consciousness and my will, here representing that, now that I know of the damage, I can focus my will and energy to heal the inner child and repair the damage.
The next card is the 8 of Blades, which shows a hostage situation. A man is bound to a pole and surrounded by eight menacing blades. To walk through the narrative: a crisis has occurred and my response to it was to use inhalants to the point of addiction as a coping mechanism for the painful process of bringing deep damage to conscious light, leaving me a hostage to….to what exactly? I need to do work on understanding the blades themselves, as symbols for shame, internalized homophobia, rejection, a flawed father figure, spiritual fascism (Catholicism), failure, self-destruction, and weakness.
Am I trapped? Yes, to a degree. Getting out of the hostage situation will require some kind of symbolic action to remove or disassemble this “perfect circle” of blades that keep me hostage. How will I accomplish this?
The next two cards I chose are related and, I hope, will tackle the problem on two fronts: The Witch King and the Witch Queen. As a card, the Witch King represents the patriarchal, male aspect of the psyche or similarly aligned external energies, entities, or people. The Witch King creates order, brings stability, and exercises the will. As a card, the Witch Queen represents that maternal, female aspect of the psych or similarly aligned external energies, entities, or people. The Witch Queen brings spirituality and intuition to the psyche. The Witch Queen generates emotion, brings understanding, and exercises acceptance.
Why both? Addressing my addiction behavior is just that, addressing a behavior. Habits have developed around my inhalant use and thus, I evoke the patriarchal control of the Witch King to interrupt and deconstruct those habits. Of course, the Witch King also represents the failed patriarchal energies from my past, those that were used to emotionally abuse me. Even with the literal habit interrupted, the underlaying trauma has to be addressed by the Witch Queen. I evoked the Witch Queen to find and heal my inner child, to accept his trauma for what it is, and to realize that those that damaged him are simply wrong.
I chose both cards to be positioned in the spread at the same time as I feel like both fronts need to be addressed in parallel for a real solution to take place. With the crisis defined, the immediate effects of the crisis explained, and the proper energies evoked toward a solution, the next card would begin to lay out the solution itself.
I chose the VI of Vessels (reversed) to represent the next step in the solution. This card represents nostalgia, positive childhood memories, and the like. I reversed it on purpose to represent that my “nostalgia” was in fact, not positive, and that instead of preserving those memories, I wanted to dissolve their hold on me. Much about my spiritual process in the last few years has been about accepting the facts of the past and letting go of the emotional charge that came with them. This crisis is the next step in that overall process and has become a crisis mainly because of the fundamental nature of the trauma itself. I assigned this as the goal for the Witch Queen, to lead my inner child to a place where he could accept his past and let go.
To cap off the narrative and provide an end-point, I chosen The Hierophant, a spiritually empowered priest who uses tradition and innovation hand-in-hand to wield the spiritual power he has been given or led to attain. I want the solution to the crisis to level me up, feeling that the release of the negativity around my fundamental cultural rejection will lead me deeper into my Luciferianism. Ultimately, I need to let go of how others have defined me and to choose for myself who I want to be.
Casting the Cards
The cards form a simple narrative. To cast them, I simply lay them out on a consecrated altar and speak the story out as I go, evoking the Witch King and the Witch Queen, naming the situations, and speaking the solution I want to evoke. Most time, I would discourage a magician from recasting the same spell over and over; there’s a magical doctrine that, the more you fixate on an outcome, the less you’re likely to get it. Magic is mercurial and needs space to work its will. Demons can see longer, and farther into reality than we can and demanding a specific outcome in a specific way tends to inhibit their choices.
But, with this particular casting, given that it is intended to disconstruct a habit, I think repetition of the casting only helps it reach fruition. There remain a prohibition against demanding a certain outcome in a certain way, for the above reasons, but requesting the greater outcome of being free from the negativity of the addiction and the healing of a long-standing trauma requires more than a single casting experience.
In this case, repetition once a week (or more often), can help produce the effect, especially regarding the action of the Witch King and the disassembly of the habits.
