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by Christopher Penczak, edited by Tina Whittle
“All times are the same time. The initiation of a Sorcerer reveals this. That is why they say a True Initiation never ends. How can it end when it takes place outside of Time? The Moment of your initiation is a ripple in the bubble of time. You’ll see well enough. You have already seen. The Mystery will open up to you and you must reach out of time, grasp its heart and make your bargain with it.”
This is one of my favorite quotes by the esteemed comic writer and chaos magician Grant Morrison, from his series The Invisibles. Both the author and the series have been a tremendous influence upon me, as have other chaos magicians such as Peter Carrol, Phil Hine, and Antero Alli as well, even though I identify as a Witch and not a chaos magician. Despite many popular misunderstandings about it, Chaos Magick has helped me as a modern practitioner understand paradigm and avoid getting trapped in dogma, even when I decide to follow old traditions or create new ones. When I do, I do so with conscious awareness. We have so much philosophy, myth, symbol, and technique and can’t get trapped in thinking that only one is valid, but we need a way to hold all these ideas in a greater meta-paradigm. The Invisibles comic did that for me. The cast of characters is international, each with their own magickal paradigms and traditions, old and new, working together in common cause.
I love the idea that initiation, like consciousness, is eternal, never ending. We might have a moment of ritual or life experience we consider a catalytic entry point—a paradigm shift of awareness or entry into a new group—but when we understand initiation as a process occurring within our consciousness, we can realize we are continually being initiated in one lifelong (and beyond) ritual. In fact, we are being initiated even before our initiation, before the so-called probationary periods of a seeker or really any formal inquiry. Once formally or informally initiated, we might see the process really started at birth and before. Our whole life is one long ritual process to our true will, heart, and mind. Nothing is mundane. All of life is a magickal teacher, from deities and spirits to the server waiting on us in the restaurant. Of course parents, spouses, and co-workers are teachers. Every moment is an opportunity to deepen your initiatory gnosis.
Recently I was asked about someone who left our magickal community on bad terms. I hadn’t thought of them in a long time. Poor communication and failed opportunities to take responsibility on their part led to separation, at least from my perspective. They’d done nothing so egregious that they were considered dangerous and banned from the community, but they were dissatisfied in not getting the attention or status they wanted and uncomfortable having errors that affected others, as well as themselves, pointed out. They made a slow and quiet unvoiced withdrawal while then voicing their disgruntlement to others quite loudly. It is not an uncommon pattern in larger group dynamics.
I was asked about how I felt about it. Whenever there is conflict and ending, particularly between teacher and student, initiator and initiate, we do a big dive reflecting on the arc of the entire relationship and parse out the failings on each side and what could have been done better. In this case I had several heartfelt face-to-face sessions that revealed a schism between what was said and what was done. This ended with a mutual agreement to talk later in the week to try to resolve the last issue with clarity and compassion, but no follow-up was made until almost a year later and the follow-up ignored all the direct communication from before. The lack of acknowledgement of their failure to connect dumbfounded me, as I was approached with a “we haven’t talked in a long time” instead of taking responsibility. This indicated to me that the initiate could not go on in their studies as there was no responsibility on their part. For many months I gave it a lot of thought, as I do most conflicts. I’m sentimental and sensitive and can dwell on my mistakes, even when nothing could really be done.
My feelings only really matter to me, but when I look at many similar situations—because when you teach magick and healing for almost thirty years you will naturally have a few; ask any coven or lodge leader—what does matter is recognizing this too is a part of the initiatory process that never ends, for the student and for you.
People stopping a magickal practice and entering fully into “ordinary” life is initiatory. People quitting their career to devote themselves to magick full time is initiatory. People falling away from their magickal practice due to life crisis, illness, family, and relationships is initiatory. People seeking social media fame via Witchcraft is initiatory. People renouncing magick and returning to Christianity or moving towards Buddhism, Islam, or Baha’i is initiatory. People anonymously reaching illumination in their basement temple is initiatory. When you are the enemy, villain, hero, savior, or background character in someone’s story, it’s their story, but it’s also their initiatory myth. It has little to do with you, but it’s part of their process.
So it’s easy to take it personally when someone leaves for whatever reason, but it could be part of their journey to the Underworld, their death and rebirth. A huge lesson of deeper initiation is to separate from your teacher, school, tradition, or community in the quest for your own gnosis and identity. An even deeper step is when attachment to any identity, group, or individual is released. Labels become functional when needed, but not core identity.
Ideally one leaves to return again in spiritual adulthood as a peer. Some people find themselves in the context of community and support of past mentors. They transition to the next stage gently. Others find distance from their teacher and get support from other teachers and peers in the community. Others need a solid break and separation and can do it with maturity and clear communication, avoiding any miscommunication or hurt feelings on anyone’s part. Some need a big drama to make that separation; otherwise they will never take that step. The drama gives them courage, or an excuse to perceive themselves to be courageous in that moment of their story. And some people in the moment might convince themselves it is mythic heroism by taking a dramatic stand when they are instead justifying bad behavior. But even bad behavior and its consequences are part of the initiation process and will ultimately serve. Often the bad behavior comes when the ego is bruised rather than transmuted, and the desire to separate and find one’s uniqueness occurs just before a big breakthrough in consciousness, not after. Part of the self is sabotaging the breakthrough by playing to the ego. Change is hard. There are lessons in that too, but it’s a longer route to deeper gnosis. A mystery wisdom is that everything serves the Goddess, eventually. We may take the short way or the long way, have a skillful or unskillful, pleasant or unpleasant route to service, but everything serves the greater design in its manifestation.
It is important to distinguish initiations of life from specific initiations conferring membership or recognition of levels of progress within an order. I’m not saying that simply by living life you are an initiate of anything you desire to join. I am talking about the inner mystery of initiation that should certainly be a part of formal outer forms of initiation if they are to be successful. I am talking about the initiation of the traditions behind all traditions, not any one terrestrial human group.
When the process is successful, one will return: to the specific community group/tradition, to the greater spiritual community/denomination, or to the greater global community with something new to share—a new insight, gnosis, or teaching that revivifies the whole by adding to the body of tradition. It works in the same context but furthers the ideas, philosophies, and techniques as the tradition and community grows. In some cases the new gnosis declares a new branch or separate tradition. Some don’t get to the return stage in this lifetime, and that too is part of initiation, for the saga continues onward in non-linear ways through time and space.
When the process is not successful—or rather, not yet successful, as I always hold hope that there can be reconciliation and reunion with all things for I believe wholeheartedly in an interdependent and interconnected worldview on all levels—it is not only okay but necessary to draw boundaries and not repeat unhealthy patterns or enable bad, or even worse, harmful behaviors. To be successful there must be transformation. While we might not always be able to determine someone’s level of transformation or growth (for it is always possible they are lying to us and often also to themselves) if we keep an open heart and mind, we will hopefully know the growth when we see it. Sometimes those we think of as charlatans or pretenders—who were perhaps not being actively deceptive, but self-deceptive—become the very thing they pretended to be, as if invoking it repeatedly made it their reality. It can be both hard to witness but also helpful to know there is hope for change, even if the change is unacknowledged.
This is why it can be rare, at least for me, to remove one from the group consciousness of a tradition or sever the initiatory current ritually. The process is ongoing and might be working on a timetable that you can’t perceive or agree with, but it’s working nonetheless. Some would say rituals to do so are meaningless. You can’t remove initiation any more than you can re-virgin someone after sex. Once it’s done, it’s done. It’s an experience, not a possession you can take back. While you can rescind membership and personal connection, publicly disavowing, if something was catalyzed, then it’s in process. The process might continue, change, or end, but you can’t control it for yourself or another. We often think of initiation as planting a seed in a neophyte, as the word “neophyte” refers to the “newly planted.” Some seeds need tending, or they will wither. Some seeds are dormant and sprout years or lifetimes later. Some seeds need fire to burst forth, the fire of passion or the fire of drama. And some seeds grow regardless of what you do or do not do. They survive.
The process of return to community after separation mirrors the greater process of return to source. It is the dissolution and coagulation of the alchemists that occurs internally and in the greater body of humanity and then with the cosmos. The basic occult concept or emanation into manifestation is that all that has formed eventually returns. All forms upon the Earth will eventually decay back into the Earth. Even as the Sun is the source of life upon the planet, with its eventual expansion, our planet will return to the stars. In our modern astrophysical models, one theory says the expanding universe will eventually stop and begin to contract, a Big Crunch leading to a new Big Bang. This model is a clear one of return, though other scientific theories end the physical universe in a big freeze or eternal expansion. Personally, we humans see it in a desire for union, for source, for the divine. It is the yearning for something out of reach, the divine in us seeking the divine in each other, in nature, and beyond. And this desire, this eventual return to union, is also part of initiation, for as long as we experience some dimension or space and time, we experience initiation.
Initiation never ends, for it is our connection to the part of us that is outside of space and time. You “must reach out of time, grasp its heart and make your bargain with it.”