Ambivalent Allies: Triggering Sync
The believer’s mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the
stimulus. The skeptic’s mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus
altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd.
jacques vallee, challenge to science
In July of the year 1085, some shepherds on a mountain in the Spanish region of Navarra witnessed something very unusual in the night sky, something we might have categorised slightly differently today. The Blessed Virgin and “a great star” descended upon them. The area quickly became a site of pilgrimage. The king of Aragon and Navarre, Sancho Ramirez, paid to have a shrine built on the spot. A sign on the chapel reads:
This is the Star
That came down from the Sky
To Estella
To observe it.
Creepy, right? Creepy and suggestive of the unavoidable reality that whatever the phenomena we call gods or angels actually are, they demonstrate tremendous fluidity in their chosen manifestations … fluidity to the point of deception. Philosophers including Patrick Harpur refer to these experiences as “daimonic phenomena,” that is, phenomena that sit in the overlapping space between mythology, real physical manifestations, and psychic or paranormal experiences. Faeries, angels, and the Blessed Virgin Mary are probably the best western examples of the daimonic. Consider this observation from Dr. Roney-Dougal in The Faery Faith:
The Daimonic is linked to our world, but not of this world. This is illustrated by the curious link between a person’s experience with [faeries] and the progress of human technology, the daimonic always being different in their technology from us. They are either more advanced than us in some way, as in their ability to appear and disappear, or less advanced, as in their medical technology. For example, the fair folk always seem to dress and have a culture from a time earlier than ours, and their “superiority” lies solely in their magical abilities.50
For what I can only assume are personal reasons, a lot of occultists shy away from observing their gods in the much wider context of global paranormal, psi, and UFO phenomena. But we are required to look at the dataset as an overlay on both the probabilistic nature of the universe and indeed the changed probabilities of manifesting wealth and success in our current regime. We are looking for areas that can be pushed or optimised.
The most common answer you will hear to the question of which spirits or gods have the best affinity with wealth accumulation in the west are often the same beings associated with laws and royalty. Imagine that. We went to some length explaining how wealth gets harvested upward through the machinations of lawmakers, tax collectors, monarchs, and so on. Jupiter may well be the god of wealth, but he is not the god of you—he is a king’s god, and his inherent conflict of interest did not go unnoticed amongst the Romans, either. As they moved from a monarchy to a republic, the consuls would still swear an oath to Jupiter; the ancient god of kingship and highborn families. It is an ancient version of “the more things change, the more they stay the same” and it presents some operational challenges. Modern magic has also mistaken the much, much later astrological Platonic system—a long-defunct explanatory model of the universe—for an eternal conception of Jupiter (or Hermes, et cetera). This is akin to thinking the gun totin’ cowboy Jesus of twentieth-century America is the same Jesus the Christian apologists were trying to embed into European philosophy.
Do these political complications mean we should avoid such beings? Perish the thought. What is required, however, is a little discernment.
If you choose to go full conspiracy on your geopolitics, the world is controlled by a tiny, kingly elite that is not running the place for your benefit. If you choose not to go full conspiracy, the world is a chaotic morass of unbalanced and competing agendas fighting over dwindling resources and vanishing jobs. However you slice it, an orderly, lawful, presiding deity of wealth accumulation is not the best ally and may even be asleep at the wheel. You need an ally who is wilier, who is ambivalent. You need someone who can trick. From The Trickster and the Paranormal:
Trickster figures have particular appeal to marginal (low status) groups. In ancient Greece, aristocrats viewed merchants and craftsmen with suspicion and disdain. Norman Brown notes in his Hermes the Thief (1947) that “Hermes symbolized the aspirations of the non-aristocratic classes”; in fact Hermes was the patron of merchants. A similar situation was seen in the Middle Ages. As feudalism began to crumble, some of the nobility no longer enjoyed the privileges they once did. The merchants’ plight improved, but their social position was unsettled, because their status was not bound to the class of their birth. The feudal and church authorities distrusted them, and fittingly, Reynard the Fox, a trickster, was their symbol. All this illustrates the nexus of merchants, liminality, unsettled status, and the trickster.51
In a probabilistic universe, an ambivalent ally accompanying you on the climb is much more useful than a lawful, cosmic throne before which you are expected to beg. Shoot for luck, not power; shoot for tricks, not clout. Too often we pray for the proverbial miracle, the very low probability outcome, when instead we should be nudging and swapping for smaller goals with nearby spirits.
The advent of affordable computing over the last forty years has uncovered some fascinating insights into how we really go about achieving objectives. The most important of these insights has to do with the limitation of top-down control. From Obliquity by economist John Kay:
In general, oblique approaches recognise that complex objectives tend to be imprecisely defined and contain many components that are not necessarily or obviously compatible with each other, and that we learn about the nature of the objectives and the means of achieving them during a process of experiment and discovery. Oblique approaches often step backwards to move forwards.52
In your own lives you will know that the big goals never go even slightly according to plan. Just think back to what you thought your career would look like before it even began. Oblique approaches not only accommodate such inevitable chaos into your journey, they often draw strength from them. We require nimble feet. Winged, even. Where have we heard that before? Oh yes, the classical pantheon (and to a lesser extent the logo of a large flower-delivery company). The name Hermes derives from the ancient Greek term for the small piles of stones used to mark out the borders between properties. He stands on the boundary and can move freely between them, between the worlds, so to speak. This is a common characteristic of the Trickster; his or her unpredictable location as well as what he or she brings back from that other Place. Hermes has his own power of prophecy, but unlike some of the more upstanding denizens of Olympus, his manifests through games of chance rather than profound statements from on high. This is the quintessence of High Strangeness, of the paranormal, of mostly beneficial coincidences.
Tricksters are often possessed of the knowledge of the whole earth as well as the means to subvert the rules that keep the magician away from what he or she wants. Stories of Brer Rabbit in the folklore of the southern United States and his regular triumphs over much more powerful animals come to mind. Wakdjunkaga, the Winnebago trickster, refers to every object and animal on earth as “younger brother.” He predates them and is thus possessed of the full knowledge of everything in creation. A similar belief is attached to the devil in Iberian magic. According to José Leitão, the devil’s capacity to intervene in people’s lives comes not from some inherent evil power, but from his great age.
Tricksters rule the liminal space, the territory of the shaman. Between the manifest and the unmanifest, night and day, male and female. Just as the shaman does, the trickster crosses boundaries for us and if it so chooses, returns with something we need or want. Tricksters represent a high degree of uncertainty, unpredictability, and obliquity. A skilled magician can ride a trickster to his or her life goals without having to spell out the hundreds of dreary steps in between (which will be wrong anyway). Pete Carroll puts this obliquity quite succinctly in The Octavo.
Conjure then, for needs if must, but preferably for opportunity and quality of experience, but never merely for more of the same.
Conjure not for wealth, but for the experiences that you would spend the wealth on if you had it. Any necessary wealth will then materialise as a side effect.53
Practical enchantment manifests most often as beneficial synchronicities rather than bombastic, miraculous appearances of gold bars falling from the sky. So your objective should always be to increase the total volume of positive synchronicities in your life. These are both simultaneously the signals of and opportunities offered by our ambivalent allies. They may not bring you wealth, but they will trigger sync.
What is important to remember is that these entities are not really your friends. Jesus may be your homeboy and mommy Gaia may love you no matter what, but the beings of the crossroads are ambivalent; they are capricious. The combination of modern service culture and the Judaeo-Christian idea of a personal creator have given rise to some fairly alarming errors in magical thinking. Many of us have some unthinking expectation that the entire spiritual world exists to help you get that new iPad or 2 percent pay rise. The balance of evidence and the last fifty thousand years of human history suggests this is probably not the case.
The Trickster and Your Cosmology
If there is not a trickster in your personal cosmology, it is of limited psychological use to you and probably a bit unbalanced for the purposes of practical enchantment.
Typically these beings are found at the crossroads, so look there first. Even some aspects of Hekate fulfil this function, for instance. She is associated with crossroads, as well as Hermes. The fact that she predates the rest of the Olympian pantheon means she is not bound by the diktats of Zeus. (Recall the same notion of predating exists among the Winnebago and Iberian folk magicians.)
Religion in general does not overly interest the jobbing sorcerer. Indeed, the historical evidence suggests that they largely fitted into whatever dominant belief system was knocking around at the time, focusing more on acquiring and using practical techniques. Modern magic has confused classical relationships with the gods based on available archaeological evidence … which necessarily favours “high church” relationships because such evidence is much more likely to survive. We look at Delphi or the Pantheon and discern either priestly or royal approaches to the divine, but they tell us little about how the wider populace behaved. The scant pieces of the common approach to the gods suggest an entirely different, low-tech, more transactional relationship. A similar ethos informs this book. We are not here to found a sci-fi religion or roleplaying circle. Pick an ambivalent ally and move on.
Here are some suggestions to get you started.
The Devil at the Crossroads
For centuries, the devil has fulfilled the role of trickster in the western tradition. Our expectation that he is some terrifying monster determined to destroy or rule the earth is a recent, cinematic creation. In early modern Europe he was certainly unpredictable but still entirely under the control of God—just as everything else was. He was bothersome rather than evil, like a friend who drinks too much or that neighbourhood cat who keeps getting into the house somehow.
The core “sin” that arose from association with the devil was idolatry, not soul loss or recruitment into the armies of hell. Thus, throwing votive objects in an old holy well became associating with the devil because of the inherent idolatry in believing that the well had capacities God could or would not fulfil.
In the New World in particular, the phrase “deal with the devil” became a sort of catch-all for any agreement undertaken between a human and the spirit world. Perhaps the most famous example of this is early blues singer-songwriter Robert Johnson, who took his guitar to the crossroads and played several evenings in a row. Eventually a “large, black man” showed up, tuned his guitar, and handed it back. For the rest of his short life, Johnson was an undisputed musical master. He spoke quite openly about his deal with the devil, but the consensus opinion appears to be that his actual agreement was with the loa … probably Legba in particular.
If that is your road, you do not need me to show it to you. For the rest of us, it strikes me as about time we reopened this route. The crossroad ritual below calls on Lucifer rather than “the devil.” There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, the “devil” is something of a semantic moving target. Sometimes it is Lucifer, often it is a lot more. Lucifer’s pre-Christian origins associate him with the planet Venus, the morning star (and/or evening star); thus he presides over liminal, crepuscular times—dawn or dusk. There is also his later Promethean associations in bringing light to earth; he brings things from the unmanifest to the manifest. (If you are still a little uncomfortable, recall that Jesus is also called “Morning Star.” Figure that one out!)
Step 1
The first step is obviously finding a quiet crossroad where you can be alone for several evenings. It is easier said than done if you live in West London, as I do. (The first time I performed a variant of this rite was in some tidal bushland on Sydney’s Parramatta River. Much quieter.) You will need to return several nights in a row, so factor that in.
Step 2
On the first evening, write the following square on a piece of reasonably robust card. Remember, it can rain!
L U C I F E R
U N A N I M E
C A T O N I F
I N O N O N I
F I N O T A C
E M I N A N U
R E F I C U L
Go to the crossroads, conceal this square somewhere it will not be found or otherwise disturbed, clap your hands three times, and call out to Lucifer and say you wish to speak with him. Then walk away WITHOUT LOOKING BACK.
Step 3
The next part is quite variable. On successive nights, go to the crossroads and feel. There is no need to repeat the invocation (unless you determine that there is), merely hold the intention of contact in your head. Eventually there will be a sensation of awareness or expectation. If it is not there, come back again the next night. I appreciate this may be nonstandard procedure for those of you with some magical experience, but the goal here is to calibrate the crossroads for your reality … and his.
Step 4
One night, the presence will be unmistakable. Then, rub your hands with some of the dirt from the crossroads and say the following. (Have it written down beforehand.)
Lucifer, Ouyar, Chameron, Aliseon, Mandousin, Premy, Oriet, Naydru, Esmony, Eparinesont, Estiot, Dumosson, Danochar, Casmiel, Hayras, Fabelleonthu, Sodirno, Peatham, Venite, Venite, Lucifer, Amen.54
At this point, speak aloud about why you are here, what you intend to get out of this arrangement and what you are willing to offer in return. Offerings include food, alcohol, praise, artwork dedicated to the spirit, and so on. You certainly do not need to offer your soul. (The fact that you are reading a magic book suggests its resale value is a lot lower than you probably think, anyway.)
When you have completed your exchange, thank the spirit for attendance and once again walk away without turning back.
Final Note
If you are more comfortable with “the devil” as a specific being rather than Lucifer, omit the magic square and the invocation. Clap and summon each night until you experience a change in the feel of the crossroads.
It is also worth noting that you now have yourself a power place for the regular leaving of offerings, quiet celebrations, or discussions with a spirit of the crossroads. These relationships build over time. You will get nowhere in magic or in life without a robust relationship with the Lord of the Crossroads in one form or another. Do not be a stranger; remember what I said about “ambivalence.”
Hermes and Hermanubis
In terms of liminal, transgressive trickster allies, do not forget there are some reasonably extensive techniques for reaching Hermanubis in the previous chapter. He can certainly fulfill this role, too. I tend to call Hermanubis exclusively for necromancy but only because it is how my personal practice has evolved; the rule is far from universal.
As for Hermes/Mercury, there are any number of resources out there for achieving contact. Begin with classical sources and hymns. In either case, a small statue of Saint Christopher provides a subtle, suitable home for these beings (and will not alarm house guests quite so much as a statue of the devil!).
Other Allies
There is something quite crude about trying to fit overviews of gods into one or two chapters of occult books. If divine concepts could so easily be apprehended then there would be no need for occult books in the first place. It becomes even more difficult when attempting to convey some notion of Trickster beings or those that preside over High Strangeness and synchronicity.
As such, the following beings are representative. Much can be gained from further study of any or all of them. Not everything you read about needs to end up on your altar.
Families Are Always Rising and Falling in America
The single biggest cause of bankruptcy in the United States is a bad health diagnosis. Our cognitive error in mistaking the postwar decades for “normal” means we have largely forgotten that Fortune, as a force or a goddess, brings both the good and the bad. The historical record is filled with hymns and spells to propitiate this being, to ensure that she brings good fortune rather than ill. In fact, the early church found this practice among the most difficult to erase. She was treated as a separate being—you could almost say worshipped——right through until the early modern period. Our ancestors were evidently prepared to tolerate a change of religious regime, but they were not stupid enough to leave Fortune unappeased for long. Words to live by.
There is much equanimity, wisdom, and insight to be gained through meditating on this personification of probability. Always, always have a go-to propitiation for Fortune/Isis Fortuna/Tyche, etc. I use a comparatively simple Orphic hymn to Tyche performed with the use of a chaplet; a kind of mini rosary blessed by the Pope, no less. (Long story.) Because every enchantment in this book has been personally, thoroughly road-tested over a number of years, I have to tell you that the ritual as it stands requires the Johns Hopkins University Press translation of the Orphic Hymns.55 As other writers have found, this publisher is somewhat challenging to get quote clearances out of, so you will have to seek out the full version yourselves. (I suggest from a library.) In the interim, there are some excellent classical mentions and invocations found on the extensive theoi.com that may provide a stand-in. But a ritual is more than a random assortment of words and funny smells, so I will not do you the disservice of simply making up a hymn while carrying on with a different one in my personal practice.
Once you have sourced a satisfactory invocation or hymn to Tyche, simply light some frankincense incense, and if performing this outside, dig a small hole in the ground and pour in milk, honey, and wine. Repeat for each bead of the chaplet.
Like so much magic, you can really only tell if it is working when it is working. Expect curious synchronicities and chance encounters on the way to your goals. The general idea is to position yourself somewhere where there are greater probabilistic ranges of outcomes and find an ally who will help more than hinder you. Call it the portfolio strategy of religion: you just need to win slightly more often than you lose.
As for identifying potential losses, that is the subject of the next chapter.
50 Serena Roney-Dougal. The Fairy Faith. Green Magic, 2003.
51 George P. Hansen. The Trickster and the Paranormal. Xlibris, 2001.
52 John Kay. Obliquity: Why Our Goals are Best Achieved Indirectly. Profile Books, 2011.
53 Carroll, The Octavo.
54 Jake Stratton-Kent. The True Grimoire. Scarlet Imprint, 2009.
55 Apostolos N. Athanassakis and Benjamin J. Wolkow, translators. The Orphic Hymns. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013.