---
title: "An Unconventional Path: Navigating the Depths of Magick"
url: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/post/an-unconventional-path-navigating-the-depths-of-magick/
date: 2024-07-15
modified: 2026-07-03
lang: en
author: "Perseus Arcane Academy"
description: "Introduction At Perseus, we often encounter practitioners who have followed traditional paths in their magical studies. However, today's interview offers a rare glimpse into a markedly different journey. Our guest..."
categories:
  - "Interviews"
  - "Western Traditions"
tags:
  - "Ceremonial Magic"
  - "Magic"
image: https://staging13.perseusarcaneacademy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/thewoods-1024x768.jpg
word_count: 7780
---

# An Unconventional Path: Navigating the Depths of Magick

## Introduction

At Perseus, we often encounter practitioners who have followed traditional paths in their magical studies. However, today's interview offers a rare glimpse into a markedly different journey. Our guest has walked an unconventional path, diving headfirst into the currents of magical practice from a young age, without the guardrails of formal training. This self-taught approach has led to some extraordinary experiences and insights, challenging our understanding of magical development. In this candid conversation, we explore the triumphs, pitfalls, and profound revelations that have shaped our interviewee's unique magical journey. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or simply curious about the occult, this interview promises to shed light on the raw, unfiltered nature of magical work and its potential for personal transformation. Please let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

##### Read Dans Substack Blog - Dark Twins

---

## Interview

**PAA: Welcome. Looking at your substack there is a huge amount of content, could you** **introduce yourself and what led you to the magical arts.**

Before I say anything else, the very first thing I should probably make clear is that my path and “practice” over the years has not followed a more typical standard *at all*. The main way in which my experiences stand out stems from this difference, and up to this point, my motive in sharing them has nothing to do with setting an example for others to follow. I’ll make this situation clearer as this interview unfolds, but the real value of my sharing at this point in my life has more to do with the *contrast* from what is more typically on offer. Things unfolded in a very peculiar way for me, in a way that has deep but sometimes subtle implications that help to illustrate just how profound some of the realities are which lay *behind* the study and practice of magick. Due to my experiences, I have often felt like an outsider even in the relative obscurity of occultism. To make an analogy, I often think of magickal practice as a “technology” or craft akin to shipbuilding, where the objective is for land-dwelling people to carefully build a vessel capable of enabling them to safely and smoothly navigate the “seas” of the psyche, and also learning to intentionally operate that vessel, navigate their journeys properly, etc.; by contrast, I feel more like a native creature of that same sea, who just dove right in with sheer abandon, always experiencing it all in a very direct way. 

To this day I maintain that it was only safe for me to take such an approach because I was quite literally born to do things this way. As such, I don’t necessarily advise anyone to take the same approach unless it’s every bit as natural for them to do so as it was for me. One other purpose of sharing my experiences is to lend some support and validation for anyone else who might be walking a similar path, because the gap between my experiences and what I see most other people doing has resulted in tremendous self-doubt. It has been my main obstacle. From more of a big-picture perspective, I do this because I think experiences like mine are becoming more and more common in the world, especially as information about magick has become so widely available. Traditional norms surrounding esoteric work are dissolving, and many more people are entering these waters in similarly unorthodox and sometimes even accidental ways. I am convinced that this reflects a shift that is in-process on a more collective level for humanity and may be an indicator of where we are all headed. I want to help people who find themselves in such situations to gain the confidence to simply *learn to swim*.

I’ve had an interest in the paranormal from a very young age. Probably the earliest exposure was as a toddler; there’s a series of black hardcover books about the paranormal published by Time-Life Books that was fairly popular at one point, and I remember those sitting on our bookshelves at home all my life. In 2nd grade, on a visit to the school library, a friend of mine ran up to me with a book called *Real Ghosts* by Daniel Cohen, which covered some of the more famous and well-known hauntings like the Bell Witch and also contained purported photographs of ghosts. Reading that book kicked off my early study of such matters and it wasn’t long before I’d read pretty much everything related to ghosts, the paranormal, and UFOs that was on offer at the school library and several nearby municipal libraries.

However, my first, more direct exposure to something more recognizable as “magick” came when I was about 13 years old and living in Davis, CA. I was hanging out with a friend from school who was himself only about a year older than me and we stopped at a drinking fountain near my house. It was a hot summer day in Northern California, easily over 100° outside, so the water coming out of the drinking fountain was also hot. It was one of those times when you had to run the water for a while to get rid of the hot water that had just been sitting in the pipes, but strangely, the water was staying hot for an inordinate amount of time. While I held my finger under the stream of water, my friend suddenly plucked a leaf from a nearby tree, held it up in front of himself, closed his eyes, whispered a quiet incantation, and touched it to the stream. The instant he did so, the water suddenly became ice-cold. From the fact that the water had stayed hot for so long to the speed and sharpness of the drop in temperature as it coincided with his actions, something struck me as out-of-place. I asked him how he did it, and he simply said, “Magic.” That afternoon, he taught me how to move and work with “energy” of different colors, which was the basis for the magick he went on to teach me. One of the closest comparisons I have for this is to something like Reiki, which I would not encounter for another 10 years at least.

This is part of what I mean when I talk about jumping right into the “sea” of magick and swimming in it; there were no rails, no rituals, just direct energy work. I didn’t start by learning a banishing ritual or a set of correspondences beyond the meanings of the different energy colors (which, in all seriousness, my friend had derived from the lore of the card game *Magic: The Gathering). *My teacher would use fantasy lore and even video games like *Final Fantasy VI* in his “lessons;” so later in life, when I first encountered chaos magick, I felt right at home because honestly, I was much more comfortable working with pop culture motifs from the very beginning than I was with more traditional cultural frameworks like ancient pantheons of gods and goddesses.

Much of my work is rooted in a firm conviction that this is indicative of where humanity is headed—that our very relationship with myth is undergoing a deep transformation to a state with less emphasis on establishing and maintaining stable traditions around myth and more emphasis on weaving our own personal mythic landscapes in real-time. I have a nascent theory about this called *The Personal Myth* which I am developing for inclusion in future writings. For those who are interested, there’s a post at *Dark Twins* laying out the basic structure of the theory and visitors can search for it there.

> I bear the proverbial 'burden of proof' in making such a claim

**PAA: What is your current main focus of practice?**

There is one very particular reason I think it’s worthwhile to share my experiences and it is this: Although I have mostly followed my own free-form path in a way that most “professional” or “formal” occultists would likely regard as “undisciplined,” I have nonetheless made enough progress on the path of initiation that I am now operating in the territory of what would elsewhere be regarded as the higher grades of initiation, above the Abyss. Because of the “wild” and unorthodox route I took to get here, my experiences lend a great deal of support to the notion that traditional systems of initiation are describing a very real territory—that human consciousness truly does unfold and develop along the lines indicated by initiates doing more formal work all throughout history. My experience more or less offers proof (insofar as anyone actually believes me) that initiation is more than just a strange hobby, some exotic form of “auto-hypnosis” that occultists merely convince themselves is real, that this stuff isn’t just made-up pomp and circumstance that people use to get together in groups to make themselves feel special (even though those are* also* things that do happen as well).* *In the sense of the term as it was used by Aleister Crowley in connection with the Western esoteric grade of Magus, I have a Word (Hermekate), and the main focus of my work at this time is developing it. Because I didn’t do this work “by the book,” I bear the proverbial “burden of proof” in making such a claim and will have to go to extraordinary means to establish its legitimacy; however, if I can succeed, it will stand as a powerful “proof-of-concept” that, perhaps, others can build upon in the future. It will help to wrest this kind of work from the stranglehold that has typically been maintained on it by formal esoteric orders, and that would certainly be worthwhile because every living person should have the chance to effect their personal initiatory development as they see fit.

In conjunction with this—perhaps ironically—I’m also going “back to basics” and constructing a practice from the ground up as a means of attempting to “rein in” my work, mainly so I can get a better sense of how it can be linked up with more formal esoteric systems. This would give me a wider set of tools to help others. I’m not a complete stranger to this; I had a stable and consistent practice for a while that was basically rooted in the earlier and more accessible Golden Dawn rituals, which worked well for me until I ended up designing and performing my own self-initiatory ritual that roughly corresponded with the work more traditionally associated with the Sephirah of Tiphareth (a formal invocation of my Holy Guardian Angel even though I had been “conversing” with it for many years by that point).

One of the really annoying consequences of my unique path is that it has been very difficult to find proper motivation to color “inside the lines,” mainly because of the way I essentially stumbled on my own into some of the territory that many people spend years striving for. In the example of the above experiences, what would be the benefit of joining an order like the A∴A∴? I would think my previous experience would not be validated and I would instead be treated as a complete beginner. What, then, would I do in the grade of Adeptus Minor if I already had the Knowledge and Conversation? How would I advance any farther? How would I convince my mentor to “graduate me?” What would I have to do—play “let’s pretend” and fabricate a legitimate-sounding experience so they would pass me? It just seemed ludicrous—hence my Catch-22: I know what I had experienced, but also didn’t have the kind of concrete practical expertise that would actually be helpful to others if, for example, I wanted to take up teaching. The only way I felt I could be helpful would be by sharing my experiences, but then that also just looks like a bunch of self-serving navel-gazing, talking about myself all day or making things up for attention. So I am working with various magickal systems from the beginning, including Nema’s *Maat Magick* and Michael Kelly’s *Apophis*.

All of that is to lay the groundwork for taking up Enochian magick, which I have always felt compelled to do. I have always felt or “known” in an inner sense that it will be important as a culmination to my work; my “guides” or “Holy Guardian Angel” have always advised me of that.

I’m also working on a manuscript for a book about the ethics of walking the Left Hand Path, which I hope will clear up many of the common misconceptions about the LHP because I think the LHP has a great deal of value to offer and I don’t think its bad reputation is deserved. I think many unscrupulous people have used it as an excuse and cover for their own toxic selfish impulses and that that is very unfortunate.

**PAA: At what point did you think to yourself ‘this stuff is real!’?**

I’ve actually had quite a few jarring “wake-up call” experiences that, for most people, would serve as undeniable proof that “this stuff is real,” but I’ve also always understood that the nature of the work associated with my “True Will” was of such a scope that, knowing from an early age where it was basically pointing and feeling unworthy of it all, denial has been a very tempting response for me. I have very often felt that “I can’t do what I’m supposed to do” and thus resorted to convincing myself that “this stuff isn’t real.” Usually, that’s when things would get *really* wild in ways that ended up dragging me back to my calling kicking and screaming.

However, the earliest and most incredible “turning point” was the house fire. It was a low point that I have never been very proud of.

I was 15 or 16. At that point, despite having studied quite a few books about magick, I still hadn’t done anything in the way of what I’d call real “ritual” work by that point. The thing that motivated me at that age to operationalize the theory I had been studying at the time in books by people like Peter J. Carroll and Phil Hine was the desire to curse someone. I designed my own custom alphabet for the work and developed an entire, ramshackle system of sorcery based on hand-drawn “seals” for targeting and encoding of intent, etc. It took me about a week to flesh it all out. Then the day came when I felt it was time to actually deploy it, so I spent most of the day at school drawing the actual seals I would use in the operation; the way I had developed the system, the “activation” of the glyph would involve burning a candle over it.

I was walking home from school with the seal drawn in a notebook in my book bag when one of my newer “spirit guides”—the same being I would later go on to identify as my Holy Guardian Angel (though this is a little more complicated than it seems)—came to me and began pleading with me not to go through with the operation. He implored me, *very* specifically, to dispose of the seal instead by burning it or else I would regret not following his instructions. He said it had to burn because it was otherwise “too dangerous to leave laying around.” I refused to listen to him. I also didn’t perform the candle operation that night as I had been planning to, telling him that I would think about it for a while, but I refused to go so far as to burn the seal up. Instead, I set my backpack down leaning up against my armchair in the living room and went to bed later that night.

I awoke in the morning to my mother pounding on my bedroom door, and when she opened it up, smoke poured in and she told me there was a fire. I got up and threw my clothes on, then came out of my room to find the armchair and my backpack on fire.

We had to evacuate the building and get the family downstairs out safely, but the fire destroyed our home and made it unlivable.

Conversation with my HGA and other spirits in the wake of the fire involved quite a lot of “I told you so” and “This is what happens when you don’t listen” sort of talk.

**PAA: Following this, is Evocation part of your practice? If so, are you able to share any** **experiences you have had and the method you used?**

I have never performed a formal ceremony of evocation, but I have worked with one Goetic demon in less traditional ways, which led to some strange experiences and some of the same, deeper, inner personal work that many people say evocation eventually turns into.

I think it only worked out the way it did for me because of all of the spirit work I had done when I was a teenager, where it really was always as simple as reaching out with my “inner senses” and just saying hello to the spirits I already knew who had spontaneously approached me. There was never any formal ritual required; it was just something I did naturally.

At any rate, instead of drawing out a magickal circle on the ground ringed with divine names and carefully placing the spirit’s sigil within a Triangle of Arte, I just took a birchwood disk and a pyrography pen and burned the sigil of Vine onto the disk. I also drew some of my own blood (using a diabetic testing lancet) and anointed the disk with it. Then I made a witch bottle using a mason jar, including all the typical personal bodily fluids associated with old-fashioned witch bottles, and drew another sigil of Vine onto paper with pen to include in the bottle.

I buried the bottle in my back yard, then went on a “walkabout” late at night to a “power spot” in some nearby woods, leaving the disk in the middle of a path that cut through them and walking away without looking back.

By way of theory, the witch bottle itself served roughly the same purpose as a traditional Triangle of Arte, but on a longer-term, more permanent basis: It was meant to constrain the spirit. The use of the various bodily fluids in the bottle and the blood on the disc served to more deeply connect the spirit to me in the interests of binding him to my will. Creating the disk with his sigil and leaving it in the woods served as material “anchors” by which the spirit might manifest more readily in the material plane, and specifically to bind him also to the local lands familiar to me as a “genius loci” of sorts.

Rather than to formally “summon” him into a carefully-controlled circle only on specific occasions, the idea was to more comprehensively open the doorway to invite him into my life in order to learn his lessons. Some of my reasoning for all of this had to do with my view of spirits, which I’ll address more directly in the follow-up question below.

I fully expected a drawn-out “power struggle,” and that’s what I got. It went on for an extended period of time—multiple years.

There were some spooky results. Somewhere in the middle of said power struggle, soon after first moving in with my current partner, we were laying in bed one night when she found a mark on my ankle shaped like a bite mark, though I hadn’t suffered any kind of associated injury and there was no pain. She asked who had bitten me and I just laughed and said, “I told you the demons would follow me here, silly” (referring to the “36 legions of devils” under King Vine’s command). At that same moment, the television in the living room turned on by itself, as if to confirm what I’d just said.

All of that being said, I would very much like to settle down and, just once, perform a more standard Goetic working just so I can say that I have it in me to “do it right.” Then again, with outcomes like the ones I’ve seen, I’m not sure how it would necessarily serve my personal development, either.

**PAA: In terms of spirits and evocation. People have very different views with some believing** **these spirits are independent entities existing separate from us, while others feel these are the** **contents of our own subconscious and all we are evoking is our own mind. What are your** **thoughts on this?**

In my experience, the answer to this conundrum is not so clear-cut. I think that when practitioners settle into and get comfortable with either viewpoint, it often has much more to do with a desire or need for keeping one’s framework consistent, which can be important if one is most interested in getting results and moving on. It can also be a great aid to communication; it’s much easier to put our experiences into words if we stick with one or the other theory and express ourselves accordingly even if our true understanding is more complicated in the back of our minds.

However, if our real interest is to develop a true comprehension, it can be liberating to step outside a dualistic view that sees this as an either-or matter because I think the deeper reality is likely that the two frameworks are two very different ways of looking at the same thing.

When I think about this question, I am reminded that the root word chosen for the word “psychology” is “psyche,” which means “soul;” the original spirit of psychology is thus just that: The study of the soul, not the mind. To this day there are many people who fiercely hold the opinion that even with its more contemporary understanding of things, psychology is not a real science.

Meanwhile, the very backbone of Austin Osman Spare’s theory of magick that bequeathed us the technique of sigil magick is that the sigil communicates the magician’s intention to “the subconscious mind,” which then works to manifest it in terms of real-world results. The inescapable conclusion is that if such a thing is possible, there is much more to “the subconscious mind” than something like the mere neurological processes in our physical brain of which we aren’t consciously aware. Spare attributed to our “subconscious mind” the power to shape reality itself in a concrete way.

I also remind myself that the common “psychological” framework for understanding magick was pioneered by Israel Regardie and that, in so doing, he drew very heavily from the work of Carl Jung. The thing about Carl Jung is that even though his ideas continue to command considerable respect in the field of psychology, his own interests in subjects like alchemy and astrology are heavily downplayed. *The Red Book*, consisting of his own personal journals that were held back from publication long after he passed away, contain some accounts of downright paranormal events including an actual haunting of his family’s home. With this understanding, even the “psychological” model of magick is very “spiritual” in essence itself.

Speaking of Jung, I began studying him soon after I came into contact with three spirits with whom I did the vast bulk of my spirit work when I was younger. As I became familiar with Jungian theory, it became very apparent to me how neatly the three of them corresponded with Jung’s concepts of the Anima, the Shadow, and the Self. At that time, one of those three spirits in particular was the one I eventually came to identify as my de facto “Holy Guardian Angel.” However, although I experienced them as three separate individual entities, as my inner work along Jungian lines developed, two of those spirits fell away entirely and my current understanding is that all three of them were various aspects of my Holy Guardian Angel. There was really only one being there, and in the most ultimate sense, that being was also “me”—although if you pay close attention to what people like Lon Milo DuQuette say about the Holy Guardian Angel, this, too is an oversimplification—in his view, the Holy Guardian Angel is, in some way that is essentially impossible to articulate in words, *both* an entity separate from us *and* a part of ourselves (or, more accurately, *we—*the entity we think of us “ourself”—are a part of *it*). I resonate with his perspectives on this because they align well with my own experiences and the things my spirits used to teach me themselves.

In the most succinct way I can conceive of putting it, I think we all live in a vast “sea” of psyche that can readily be taken up into isolated “pockets” and “molded” or “shaped” into separate “eddies” that come to act as their own discrete “units” of consciousness, and that’s what any individual “being” is. The entities that we work with may have an existence of their own that is relatively independent of us, but still have their own ultimate origins in that same larger “sea” just as we do; but however it happens, an “entity” is basically what happens when some kind of “bucket” is dipped into that sea, pulled out of it, and the “water” with it given a name and a shape.

I think we each use whatever words work best for our own understanding of how to work within that sea. As the length of this response likely illustrates very well, it is probably much simpler to pick one of the two and proceed with that understanding. However, it has been by grappling with and developing my own understanding beyond the two main models that I’ve built the understanding that I eventually ended up applying to the above example of my unorthodox “evocation” of Vine. I eventually came to understand him largely as an externalized representation of some of the contents of my very own Shadow. I wrote a post about this at *Dark Twins* called *My Cousin Vine*, where I concluded that, to me, Vine was the embodiment of some of the less becoming traits of my own masculinity that needed to be transmuted. It was when I fully accepted and owned them that his activities in my life finally ceased. In theory, he is now under my full control, though I have not done any further work to test that out.

**PAA: I discovered you in the Horus Maat group. I believe in a post about the book written** **by the founder. What influence has the Horus Maat group had on your practice?**

I only found my way to the group fairly recently myself and I think the bulk of its influence on my practice still dwells in the future, in the inchoate “yet-to-be” from which the Twin Current itself also emanates. However, there are some very interesting “coincidences” that suggest that the current is very real and has been an influence on my work even before I had ever consciously learned of it. For example, there is the very title of my Substack: “Dark Twins”—which I named before I had ever learned about the “Twin Current” as it is understood in HML. Nevertheless, by the time I did learn about HML, I had developed a newer version of my personal sigil (originally developed in the ceremony I alluded to above to formally invoke my Holy Guardian Angel) that takes the form of an inverted black triangle with a red border, which resonates in a strange way with HML’s logo of an inverted *red* triangle with a *black* border. The HML logo has a feather at the center of its triangle, while my personal sigil, stylized as a serpent, sits in the center of my design.

The theory I have developed as a result of these alignments is that my own work “reflects” the work of HML in ways I have yet to understand fully; while HML is attuned to the “Twin Current” combining the Aeons of Horus and Ma’at, I have come to believe my work is attuned to a “Dark Twin Current” that combines the Aeons of Ma’at and Set; this in turn connects to the work of Temple of Set, wherein Horus and Set are viewed as dual aspects of one being. Thus, I think that at an even higher level, the “Twin Current” and “Dark Twin” current are dual aspects of an even larger, “meta-current” that intertwines the three Aeons of Set, Horus and Ma’at.

Many of my own experiences that I have documented at *Dark Twins* also align very well with the concept of N’Aton that arose within HML—but again, I had experienced them independently before learning about N’Aton. Putting my own experiences together with the concept of N’Aton, I am now certain that the embryonic “hive mind” described as N’Aton in HML is a real thing and that all of humanity partakes of it whether or not we are conscious of the fact.

There is overlap here with my own theory of the “Song,” which is basically a collective version of the same thing described by Crowley and Nema as a “Word.” The idea is that as N’Aton emerges gradually, the paradigm of “Words” uttered by individual Magi is dissolving and giving way to a more collaborative paradigm where the “Words” of many separate Magi align so closely that they are essentially all part of a much greater whole, in the very same sense that individual human identities are organizing into the wider field of N’Aton even as we remain somehow essentially separate.

All of this has parallels with the way my Holy Guardian Angel first appeared to me as three seemingly separate entities that were nonetheless part of a greater whole, and as I look back and connect all of these dots, I think there is great purpose behind the way that unfolded which connects deeply with N’Aton.

I’d be interested in doing some deeper work with others, including HML members, to further investigate and develop these connections. I see all of this as being intrinsic to the flowering of the Aeon of Ma’at itself; even as we work separately, the work of the many partakes of a grand unified whole. Perhaps the Aeon of Ma’at represents a culmination point in the very Great Work itself.

> "I was drowning in experiences of absolutely constant and relentless synchronicity

**PAA: What was the inspiration for the Substack?**

That’s a bit difficult to articulate fully, and some of my responses in this interview have already been fairly verbose, but I can do my best to summarize it. The thing that makes it so difficult to express is that *Dark Twins* arose from a number of separate inspirations, a couple of which would take longer to explain than it’s really worth getting into. The most important element, however, is the fact that my Word of Hermekate flashed spontaneously into my mind way back in 2015, and I did not immediately recognize it as a Word in the sense that relates to the Grade of Magus; at the time, I didn’t even have a solid understanding of what such a Word was. As my understanding developed over time, I had made many efforts over the years to express the Word in 4 separate “incarnations” of a blog named “Hermekate.” I kept starting the blog, doing my best to express the Word, but failing and then deleting the blog. Each time, I tried my very best to lay low, abandon all esoteric work, and live something like a “normal” life, but for one: That never succeeded as I couldn’t ignore the Word no matter how hard I tried, and secondly: I kept getting subtle hints of encouragement from a source who will remain nameless (mainly in the interests of protecting their reputation)—who seemed, beyond all odds, to believe in what I was trying to do for some reason. Unless I imagined that part. If that sounds strange, it will make more sense in a moment.

More important than describing the various threads that came together in the Substack would be to explain the context in which it came to be.

When I first began writing *Dark Twins*, I had been stuck in a very confusing, often terrifying state of being that had gone on for a couple of years by that point. Most magicians are pretty familiar with synchronicity or *kairos—*striking coincidences that seem fully impregnated with meaning. They arise for anyone who does magickal work on any sort of consistent basis, sometimes even unfolding into some more extended stretches. I, however, was drowning in experiences of absolutely constant and relentless synchronicity that plagued me day and night. It was as if the “switch” that activates the principle of “As above, so below, as within, so without” was stuck in the “on” position. There was a dynamic and direct correlation between my every inner thought or feeling and some immediate outer circumstance. Once in a while when I could get myself stable enough to muster the required effort, I began to find that I could “steer” the phenomenon, at which point the experience developed into that of basically living in constant dialogue with the very universe itself—in Thelemic terms, with the body of Nuit.

Once more, because of just how unorthodox my path has been, I didn’t have the necessary esoteric knowledge to understand how such experiences might be described or contextualized by someone with more formal esoteric training. Largely because I had direct access to my own Holy Guardian Angel from such a young age, I never really invested a whole lot into making a deep study of systems like Thelema—but with some nudges from a friend of mine, I eventually came to understand this experience in terms of the Crossing of the Abyss. It is said that a Magister Templi, as one who has successfully crossed the Abyss, is one who lives in full communion with the entire universe, and the experiences I was having lined up completely with such an idea. That model was the only possible way of understanding what I was going through in a way that offered any hope that I might be able to bring the experience to an end without simply dissolving into pure insanity for the rest of my life. It was all I had.

So in one sense, *Dark Twins* was my own “last desperate gasp;” I began to try using my writing about the experiences themselves as a way of gaining some kind of foothold over them: If I just kept writing stuff down with the objective of making sense out of it all—if the onslaught of chaotic synchronistic events wouldn’t sit still—at the very least, my words *would* sit still and I could use my writings for some kind of leverage, as a “seed” around which to crystallize all of the madness into something more ordered and meaningful.

As a secondary purpose, I also recognized that if my theory about it all proved accurate, then the writings would also serve as extremely valuable documentation of the events, providing the kind of window into the phenomenon of Crossing the Abyss that had never quite been opened up before. The next-closest thing I could think of was Crowley’s *The Vision and The Voice—*except that was a whole different ballgame because Crowley was highly skilled and trained and knew exactly what he was trying to do, whereas I had basically sort of walked right into the experience on accident.

One of the other main reasons I took this ball and simply ran with it was because doing so fit very well with what my “guides” or Holy Guardian Angel had been telling me, since I was a teenager, would happen. I had always felt that sharing my personal experiences would be a big part of what I’m here to do, but never dared to suspect it would take such a robust and valuable form.

I think that for those who understand what they’re looking at it, the kind of documentation I produced over the course of writing the Substack is worth its weight in gold.

By the time I began the writings, I had long since abandoned the Word of Hermekate, declaring it a blind alley or a mistaken belief; the writing was solely about pulling myself out of the Abyss while capturing it for others to learn something from. However, all on its own, the Word came back into focus in the process and as my journey out of the Abyss drew to a close, the writings began to focus ever-more coherently on developing the Word. That is now its main focus—serving as a vehicle for the Word.

**PAA: You have multiple on going series on the substack, can you share more about them** **and where they are going and what you have covered so far?**

If you were to read through the entire Substack chronologically, my unstable (and admittedly, intoxicated) state of mind near the beginning would be immediately apparent. The quality and coherence of the writing back then vs. what it is now is like the difference between night and day (especially now that I’ve successfully maintained sobriety for over a year and counting). The main reason I was juggling so many different series was because sorting the sheer madness of my experiences in The Abyss into separate trains of thought was the first way I could come up with to begin wresting control over it all. At first, my main starting point was my biography: I figured I might as well just tell the story of my entire magickal journey from the very beginning to the edge of the Abyss itself, nailing everything down along the way so it would finally stay put.

So one series, *The Wind Rose, *focuses on the earliest days of my “training” with my original teacher and some of the earliest experiences surrounding that.

The series *World of Ruin* builds on that, but is also sort of its own entire tangent. In fact, when I first started *Dark Twins*, I had already been writing another blog entirely called *Gogo’s World of Ruin*, which was supposed to focus on the crossroads of pop culture and the occult with a special emphasis on the esoteric symbolism hidden in video games. The title comes from the game *Final Fantasy VI*, which my teacher and I both loved and which he would often use to teach me about magick. “The World of Ruin” is the name for the world in which the second half of the game takes place, and “Gogo” was the name of one of my favorite characters in the game. I had begun to write that blog under the pen name “Gogo Bordello,” which has several layers of meaning embodying the concept for the blog, including the ties to video games, with “Bordello” as a dual reference not only to Babalon but also to some personal traumas centering around sexual abuse, which I was also processing at the time. *Dark Twins* was supposed to be a separate blog entirely, but I eventually just ported the posts from *Gogo’s World of Ruin* over as a subcategory of *Dark Twins* because it was too confusing for me to try writing two blogs. I did keep writing under two separate pen names, however. That had some personal magickal meaning for me that I explain somewhere in my writings. One of the main focuses of the *World of Ruin* category includes the initiatory themes I uncovered in the game *The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild*. I had some very profound experiences in-game and it is also very clear from an esoteric point of view that the game’s designers are likely familiar with some fairly deep esoteric knowledge themselves. The best way to understand it would be to read the series, but in short, I ended up also using the game *Breath of the Wild* as my own little “self-initiation ceremony” that ended up playing a substantial role in helping me get myself through the real-world initiation of Crossing the Abyss. I still have a bunch of theory to develop that overlaps into the game’s sequel, *Tears of the Kingdom*. These games are pure magick and I fully believe such virtual worlds play an important role in some of the themes I’ve discussed above.

*Head Over Heels* was a series where I focused on processing the sexual abuse trauma that I mentioned above. For me, that was an important theme all its own for getting across the Abyss—confronting our deepest “demons” is a part of that experience for everyone, I think, and being completely honest in my accounting of the related events was one of my ways of “spilling every last drop of blood into the Cup of Babalon’s fornications.” There was some odd overlap because there were also some strange, borderline-paranormal events surrounding the abuse scenario itself.

*Founding Documents* isn’t really a coherent series, but more so a category I used to re-publish some of the better articles I had originally published across various incarnations of the former blog, *Hermekate*. Likewise, *Dark Twins Original* is a category covering all of my posts prior to July of 2023—because at one point, I also deleted *Dark Twins* until I was inspired to keep it going. I had to rebuild the entire site from backup files.

*Book Reviews* is for, well...book reviews. I’ve recently decided to focus mainly on books that are relevant to understanding the Word of Hermekate.

The category that I consider to be the very “backbone” of *Dark Twins* is called *Turning Things Around: The Inner Tarot Revolution*. This was much more than a mere series, but also a kind of magickal working. This was where I did the major work to get myself across the Abyss. The main concept was something I spontaneously came up with one morning in February of 2023. I took my *Thoth *tarot deck and shuffled it, then split it into two separate stacks: One called the “Sun Stack” and one called the “Shadow Stack.” Then I wrote a 39-chapter series of posts all based on that initial shuffle of the cards (39 chapters because the deck was divided in two, there are 78 cards in the deck, and 39 is 78 divided by 2). The working theory was that the Sun Stack held cards related to the more conscious aspects of my psyche, while the Shadow Stack held cards related to my Shadow, or the more unconscious aspects of my psyche. In each chapter, I worked with one card from each stack, writing about the cards themselves along with processing whatever themes those cards brought up for me. Then I would flip each card to the bottom of its respective stack, and in the next chapter, I would write about the next pair. The idea was that once I had worked my way through the entire deck, the conscious and unconscious aspects of my psyche would be better integrated. It worked pretty well, and there were a lot of really interesting surprises and synchronicities along the way. Since it was all based on a random shuffle of the cards (you’ll just have to take my word for it), another part of the working theory was that if synchronicities happened to coalesce around the turn of the cards, that would help contribute to the body of “proof” and documentation of the strange events surrounding a Crossing of the Abyss. I predicted that things would play out that way, and they did. Again, a big part of the goal here was to illustrate to readers that these initiatory phenomena are “the real deal” and nothing to toy around with the way I did. 

I will be developing this into a set of instructions which I plan to include in a future book so that others can try applying the same technique themselves.

*Word of Hermekate* is where most of my posts are currently going that aren’t book reviews; it’s the category where I focus on the Word of Hermekate and its meanings. I probably won’t be adding much more to it because it’s all developed enough now that the next step is to consolidate this material (along with continuing developments) into an actual book for publication. This will come after the book about Left Hand Path ethics that I’m currently working on.

**PAA: What have been some of your biggest challenges on the path of magick? How did** **you overcome these?**

As I alluded to near the beginning of this interview, by far, the biggest challenge has been self-doubt, mainly stemming from the extent to which I’ve basically carved my own path all the way through the work of initiation. It is definitely much easier to do this kind of work with more external support, even if you’re working on a solitary basis and that’s just the support of working closely with established writings and tried-and-true systems. I know there is a tendency in occulture for swindlers to lie about their level of initiation, to brag and boast either for attention or to sell something to the gullible. I have been *keenly *aware—my *entire* life—that if nothing else, one major reason people work so closely with established systems is that it’s usually one of the only ways to establish one’s authority on initiatory matters: If you do your work within an established structure, especially as part of a living and functioning esoteric group, then you can point to some fairly standard benchmarks to measure your progress and other people can vouch for you as well. It is a lot harder to make real and consistent progress without having those benchmarks and standards to fall back on. Self-delusion is an ever-present danger on the magickal path, so if nothing else, I have constantly questioned myself in case self-delusion was the *only* thing I was accomplishing.

That being said, the drawback of relying so heavily on such standards and on formal initiatory schools for authority is that this creates an opportunity for exploitation: Some entire schools are essentially fraudulent through and through, and even more reputable schools sometimes crystallize into stagnation and cease to be effective, but keep chugging along, serving little purpose but to prop up self-important people as “leaders.” We all know all about cults of personality and the like.

One of the main outcomes I would hope that my work will have is to show to other people that doing this on one’s own, in one’s own way, is definitely possible—while simultaneously offering what I think is pretty compelling documented evidence that all of this stuff is real...all *too* real.

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