Ethnographies of Dark Magic

chapter 4 Ethnographies of Dark Magic

In the following chapter I will share some of my first-hand experiences with Dragon Rouge, and thus provide a more vivid insight into the actual practice of the magicians of the order. I will detail and analyze a course on ceremonial magic in 2001, the opening of lodge Sinistra in Malmö, Sweden, also in 2001, and my own initiation into the second initiatory degree of the order in 2004. Finally, I will discuss prominent trends in Dragon Rouge ritual practice, outlin- ing a more generalized framework in which to situate the ethnographies pre- sented here.

Course on Ceremonial Magic

I was full of anticipation, and a fair amount of anxiety, when I awoke on the morning of Saturday August 5, 2001. This was the day when a rather unique two-day course on ceremonial magic was to be arranged in the regime of Dragon Rouge, and one I would be expected to take a fairly active role in. I was in no way unfamiliar with the order and its ritual practice, having started my fieldwork in February of the same year, but I still felt that my relatively short time as a participant-observer had not really prepared me for what lay ahead. It was just about five pm when I arrived at the metro station close to the Dragon Rouge temple in Stockholm, and two of the order’s members were already waiting there. The dark-clad male and the equally dark-clad female, both in their mid twenties, were familiar to me so I walked up to them and stroke up a conversation. My anxiety must have been apparent, because they both reas- sured me that I had nothing to worry about. Soon, we started to make our way to the Dragon Rouge temple, just a five-minute walk from the station. We were among the first to arrive, but it did not take long before other members started to drop in. In total we were six men and three women, all of whom had at least some experience in magic and the order. Sitting down at various seats in the temple, some at the two tables and others on the sofa, the aroma of incense and the sound of casual conversation filled the room. At about five-thirty pm, Thomas Karlsson started the course by handing out magic correspondence tables. Most responded by picking up notebooks and pens, but it took a while for the conversations to fully die down. ‘Occultist magic in the tradition of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn often relies

Ethnographies Of Dark Magic 101 on complex and complicated ritual work, with equally complicated symbolism, ritual attire, and architecture’, Thomas started. ‘The meaning of these ritu- als can be difficult to penetrate, and it can sometimes feel a bit weird to do them’, he continued. To shed light on the perplexities, he went on to discuss the symbolism of Western magic, soon focusing on King Solomon and the temple of Jerusalem allegedly commissioned by him. In white magic, Thomas said, ‘we see how the notion of the temple is connected to the idea that there exists an ulterior perfect geometry, the image of which all of creation was originally intended to be shaped in’. ‘With the fall of man’, he continued, ‘that perfect geometry was disturbed, an element of Chaos that destroyed this perfect geometry entered and the material world was a fact’. White magic, Thomas said, is an attempt to ‘find one’s way back to this divine geometry, and to create the soul of the human being in accordance with it, building a temple that is a mirror image of the soul of the human being’. He pointed out what he regarded to be the main problem with the temple-building of white ritual magic: ‘one restores the old form, where we ourselves as individuals perhaps won’t fit’. Black ritual magic, which Thomas distinguished from ritual black magic, ‘is a sort of counterweight to this idea of the perfect temple, a form of kliphotic ritual magic that is mythologically connected to the forces that destroyed the temple in Jerusalem, which broke the circle to the Garden of Eden’. He further explained: ‘Magic that strives for a sort of rebirth, where one goes from being inside the circle to perhaps becoming a co-creator, first needs to break these mental barriers and structures’. In order to avoid misunderstandings he quickly continued: ‘It’s not about letting the forces of Chaos chew one up, which could happen. One creates a new order with the help of the forces of Chaos’. Summarizing his views on the difference between white and black magic Thomas concluded: ‘One has the ambition to make the circle whole, the other has the ambition to break the circle’. By this time Thomas had picked up a large lecture pad and placed it on a stand in front of us to further illustrate the points of his lecture. Drawing stylized pic- tures of ‘typical’ white and black magic temples, Thomas elaborated on the main differences between the two. As white magic strives to re-establish the divine circle of creation and achieve union with the divine, the altar usually stands at the centre of the ritual sphere and is surrounded by the magicians. In dark magic, in contrast, where the goal is to break free from the boundaries of creation, the altar is typically placed in front of the participants, as a portal out. Where the former strives for perfection and has clear shapes, Thomas said, the latter ‘connects to an idea of diabolical architecture, that which is not perfect’, which then ‘confuses the consciousness rather than stabilizes it’ and ‘opens portals to the unknown whereas white ceremonial magic instead closes them’.