For a handful of reasons I’ve decided the timing is right to start on the very first meditation from Works of Darkness, the ‘introduction to the darkness’ if you will. While I’m certainly not new to darkness magickal or otherwise, I have made a point of maintaining a certain distance to avoid what I saw in others as an unfortunate need to over-emphasize ‘Darkness’ just to prove something or other, where I felt (and more or less still feel) darkness to be, like light, a -tool- to be used for its purpose, but not allowed to upset my balance of ‘personal sovereignty’.
Meh, whatever, there’s a time for everything and I believe right now the time is right for me to do this thing, for my own reasons. One I will tell you, full of hubris though it might be (and what black magician doesn’t have rather Titanic sympathies?), is to test my own strength against another strength. Not to challenge ‘the darkness’ exactly, but to immerse myself in it and either emerge again or justifiably perish. Although the hoped-for continuation of directed personal change -does- imply both!
In this thread I’ll document anything of note that crops up during this working, for the benefit of anyone curious (and my own, writing is great for organizing the thoughts and I’m much faster at typing than handwriting these days). I will do my best to update this regularly while this is ongoing, although I have no idea how far ‘down the rabbit-hole’ I will be going, and thus how reliably I can expect to behave in the next few weeks. But I’ll do my best, for anyone who will want to read this!
The following is what sticks out to me about my meditation last night:
I decided to commit to performing this same beginning meditation every night for a week before I decided how I wanted to alter the pace and type of this work. I also consciously made the commitment to performing this nightly exercise at the midnight hour, and not to cheat by getting home from work, sleeping until midnight, waking up, meditating, and going back to sleep. This is a deliberate sacrifice (sacrum facere) when my sleep hours during the week are already at a premium, and even when doing other things the pre-ritual hours where the acts to come are building energy in the back of my mind have proved to add a lot of power to my works in the past. So any extra napping I squeeze in during the next few weeks will be during my lunch hour, and that seems very appropriate considering the nature of this operation. If I become very sleep-deprived, I feel like that can only add to what I get out of this - what’s a little danger, after all? And what does hubris even mean?
When the appointed hour came, I turned off every light in the house and made my way (carefully for the sake of my toes) to the little closet-sized room adjoining my bedroom that I use for certain ritual acts. The armless chair specified seemed like it would take up too much room and also not be ‘right’ in my particular instance this time, so I knelt on the cool floor instead. Facing south as the grimoire specified, this found me facing the lone window of the “room”. It was the kind with intentionally opaque, “rippled” glass that lets in light without allowing vision through to either side, and the faint glow of moonlight and the constantly moving shadows of bare branches in the wind completed my otherwise cold, bare little room.
I performed the initial relaxation meditation to clear out tension and negativity swiftly and efficiently (all that practice with the basics does pay off you know), then began the main thrust of the operation.
First I continued focussing on my breathing, and both awareness of and “oneness with” my surroundings. Through this I reached a natural point where I began seeking to become aware of the ‘Darkness’ written about.
Eyes closed (for concentration and still sporadic clairvoyance) I visualized it clinging to the surfaces around me, moving sinuously in place and then rushing against me and back again with every breath. This was just visualization, just active imagination, and I was prepared for it to take perhaps a few nights of repetition before it became anything else.
But when, focussing on my breath and the accompanying movement of the shadow-visualization, I felt the familiar “drop through the floor” sensation that EA has described excellently as like “falling through rings of reality”, I found my eyes opening - and there in the moonlight, deeper and much darker than the shadows of the trees dancing around the pane, were before my -physical- eyes the autonomously moving “waves” of Darkness much more solid and concrete than even in my own prior imagination!
Now with my eyes open I continued the operation, no longer visualizing but observing. It was…intimate. Not in terms of sexual energy, just that the darkness seemed to enmesh itself so close to me as to be pretty much a part of me. I had honestly expected this to be very disturbing, or claustrophobic, or terrifying. I had night terrors as a wee one and every once in awhile I still have epic nightmares in between my ‘crazy spells’. But I really did not feel any negativity in this, I was just completely immersed in the experience and did not feel threatened at all. From EA’s description I’m going to stay watchful for any signs of unease or fear but so far it’s been very surprising in that regard. I had to do a lot of steeling myself up for this, considering a few of my own demons whose mere existence had helped me decide to “walk through the fire” in this case. It’s possible that guardians of mine are shielding me from what they would view as negative consequences, which I’ll have to discuss with them; or it could be that the intensity of the darkness will pick up as this progresses; or maybe another reason entirely.
After some time of engaging in this ‘communion’ with the darkness, I ended the meditation and exited the chamber to immediately go to sleep.
I had a dream that I was on a wooden sailing ship, like a 16th-century Spanish or Portugese galleon. I was making haste to sail over the horizon to new lands that were callings, and crossing into a very dark patch of water I leaned over the railing and looked in, watching my dark reflection for a bit before leaving to go take care of something or other. “I” had left the scene by this point, but in the dream I was able to impartially observe outside my “character” that after “I” walked away, my reflection remained in that water - and then began to move on its own, changing to not be a black reflection but brightly coloured in intricate geometric patterns and very much a -seperate- and inhuman intelligence that had been given life by my observing it even when “I” didn’t immediately recognize it for what it was. Observing this in the dream I did find myself somewhat disturbed, not from danger but just from the extreme -strangeness- of how this was portrayed in the dream.
From there the dream shifted to me looking through old family heirlooms and mementoes at my great-grandparents’ old house with the anticipation of uncovering some very important secret, but I’m not -sure- that one was related to the meditation. Of the first one though, I’m just certain.
So waking up less than five hours later this morning, I actually didn’t feel all that tired. In fact, walking through the cold early morning under the same moon the memory of the closeness of that darkness was somehow -comforting-, of all possible things! I’m still stumped on that one. All through the morning my thoughts were on the peculiar way the darkness moved and trying to guess what made it move, and what it made move. My thoughts veered heavily toward considering ‘Fate’ and causality.
Through the day the ‘near’ feeling of the darkness faded, probably through a combination of daylight and becoming involved in the day-to-day at work, but this evening back at the house while slipping into a meditation to consecrate my food the darkness was there, like it was waiting for me. I still don’t feel threatened by this, so I’m going to see where it goes.
If you’ve already performed this working or have been thinking about it, don’t be shy about chiming in, and hopefully tomorrow I’ll be typing up something interesting about tonight!
Thanks for reading if you did,
Claidheam
EDIT - On that last note I will be sure to try another innocuous meditation some time at work tomorrow to see whether it is ‘following’ me, or just localized in my house
