For a while in the early 1990s I became quite obsessed with Baphomet. For several months a friend of mine and I did nightly rites and possessions. We would take it in turns who would become possessed by Baphomet and it turned into an excellent hobby/pastime and we did some amazing rituals. Both of us egged each other on and both of us were keen to continue these nightly rites as it was an exciting process with Baphomet narratives developing and unfolding. We invested a lot of time and magical ‘energy’ into these rituals, and I ended up feeling that I had a unique and intense connection to Baphomet that nobody else quite had access to.

My partner eventually kindly pointed out to me that I was getting obsessed with Baphomet, which was something that mightily pissed me off as obsession is a lot less glamorous than being the (or make that THE) High-priestess of Baphomet.

I ended up thinking that I KNEW Baphomet and when in a group situation/group ritual I started judging other people’s possessions, evaluating them on some internal scale where ‘real’ Baphometdom was at one end and what I conceived as other people’s own personal projections and perceptions (which in my eye made possession less valid, less real, less powerful) on the other end of the scale. In hindsight I believe that a lot of ego was involved here, a lot of ‘I know who Baphomet is and others don’t’ unless their possession somehow resonated with my perception of B.

It all blew up in my face with a Baphomet ritual in Berlin, part of a ‘cross-order’ meeting with people from various magical orders.

It was a South American member of the IOT who was ‘ridden’ by Baphomet, a very intense, very in your face, very animalistic Baphomet. He was foaming at the mouth, stomping around, reeking, sweating, screaming, proclaiming.

The entire congregation was naked and followed Baphomet in awe, and as I felt so very close to B. I put myself very close in his vicinity, following his moves, encouraging him, urging him on, revelling.

B. in the end ‘used’ me/ my vaginal fluids as a sacrament, dipping into me again and again to anoint the other celebrants in the room.

This quite took my breath away, but not in a good way. Everything had been building up intensely, it was a huge rush – yet I had not expected to be physically involved or invaded. I felt taken aback, caught unawares, shocked, wanted to retreat from the situation, wanted it to stop but at the same time thought, ‘I’m a chaos magician, I should be very much okay with this, and this after all is Baphomet!’ Simultaneously I felt quite powerless because how do you make known to a raving possessed deity that you don’t want to be touched in a certain way and that you might have personal limitations?

For some time afterwards I did not discuss this event with anybody. I did feel that my person had been invaded yet my expectations of myself stood in the way of voicing my unease. I felt conflicted – on one hand I thought I should be feeling honoured to ‘be the sacrament’ (and after all I did perceive myself as having this special relationship with Baphomet) yet emotionally I was not okay with this act of invasion which felt rough and raw and too close for comfort. I also felt quite embarrassed that I wasn’t okay with this event (and as a chaos magician I should be able to handle anything!)

And somehow I felt that I might have ‘encouraged’ Baphomet and brought the situation onto myself so I had no grounds for complaint, no reason to feel unhappy, there was an element of telling myself I had acted stupidly and put myself down along the lines of ‘if you can’t handle it you shouldn’t have urged him on, shouldn’t have stood so close!’

It probably would have been helpful if there had been people safe-guarding the space and the ritual to make sure that the participants (the possessed as well as the celebrants) were okay but that was not something that ever happened at rituals during that time.

Having said all this I don’t want readers to get the idea that I think of myself as a victim of ritual abuse.

The whole experience was not pleasant and it did leave me feeling raw and conflicted. But it was also something that started off a process of re-evaluating my obsession with Baphomet, my tendency to think that I KNEW this deity and had certain ‘rights’ in regards to judging other people’s possessions and knowledge re: B.’s definition/personality.

Whilst I was writing my previous post it struck me that the term “possession” (in the sense of “spirit possession”) is a rather strange word to designate this kind of experience – which runs counter to the modern notion of the bounded individual. Possession usually being associated with control, ownership, dominion. I started to think of possession in terms of an exchange – but in terms of a legal (or economic) exchange, which is implied by the Latin possessio. I mentioned this to Christina Oakley Harrington in passing, and she pointed me in the direction of the Christian notion of “selling your soul to the devil” – and by extension, the notion of Pact-making. The most well-known example of this is of course, Dr. Faustus, although earlier versions of the theme can be found, such as the 14th century work Mary of Nijmeghan in which a female protagonist sells her soul to the devil in return for knowledge of the “liberal sciences” (rhetoric and mathematics, for example) and the 12th century Monoddiae by Guibert of Nogent, which includes a tale in which a renegade monk acquires mastery of the black arts by selling his soul to the devil with the aid of a Jew. This notion of “selling the soul” as an economic transaction probably reflects anxieties relating to changes in medieval economies and the growth of mercantile power – I’m thinking here of the early medieval horror of usury, and the related “heresy” of Simony – and the debates over whether Christ owned a purse – and if he did, how much money did he have?

I ran this past Prudence Jones recently, and she very kindly pointed me me towards an alternative etymology of “possession” as being derived from seige warfare and relating to “obsession” – an action of “besieging” (Lat. obsessionem) which later came to signify the action of an “evil spirit” from outside – then acquired the sense of “that which engrosses the mind” in the 17th century and its modern psychological sense in the early 20th century. Possession, on the other hand, implies control from within – to take and hold something as property – or to “conquer” something and take it as one’s own. The siege warfare angle, if I remember Prudence’s explanation was that of getting inside the walls of a city and being “seated” therein. Here, possession derives from possidere, from potis – having the power + sedere to sit.

Obviously, the use of “possession” in relation to selfhood implies that one “possesses” a self in the first place – as well as a framework which allows for both “bodied” spirits and “unbodied” spirits – and the possibility of exchange between. One line of enquiry I did think about was to look at the historical development of the concept of the “individual” as it developed. I’m not going to go in that direction, other than to note in passing the influence of Stoic notions of self-possession as a form of self-responsibility, which had an influence on Roman and early Christian conceptions of identity. Again, thinking through the relationship between individual and possession (in the sense of ownership) highlight for me that modern notions of individuality are very much related to the capacity to own; to have a proprietal relationship to ones’ self as a bodily property. Exchange – as an analytic category has been highly influential in theorising practices, such as the exchange of commodities (Marx) or the exchange of gifts (Mauss) or capital (Bourdieu). What I’m suggesting here is that viewing possession as a form of exchange might allow rethinking possession in terms of the relationships and transactions that allow that particular exchange to occurr – and how power and value are distributed and understood within that exchange.

In some occult presentations of possession, a general pattern is that of two entirely distinct and seperate subjects – the individual human and the individual entity – meet temporarily within the (human) body. The entity (for example a deity) is often assumed to be “more powerful” yet at the same time the possession is enacted within a human-controlled space – the ritual event which is under the magician’s direction. Although there are accounts where the human element is said to be subject to the whim or desire of the deity with which a relationship has been entered into; these are rarer in “western” magic, probably, I think due the legacy of antipathy towards spiritualism which appears in European magic from the mid-19th century and the general horror of subservience to another being’s “will” perhaps in the same way that “traditional” forms of authority are often disparaged. After the event has taken place, there is an assumption that the incoming entity departs and the human participant “returns to normal” – i.e. that both elements return to their former state. I know I’m generalising hugely here (again, I’m just toying around with a line of thought) but I think this rather bare “model” opens up some lines of enquiry.

Firstly, there’s the question of agency. Do entities ever refuse to participate in possession, for example? I’ve participated in quite a few possession events where there is a fairly strict demarcation between “officiants” – the person or persons who (it is expected) will become possessed and “celebrants” (people who participate, but don’t usually become possessed). Occasionally, there seem to have been instances when the person who acting as the “horse” doesn’t become possessed strongly, but someone else in the “audience” does – although given that most of those present are focusing their attention on the “horse”, this isn’t usually noticed. The whole question of the agency that is granted to “entities” in general is a tricky question. I once asked a magician who had spoken at length about the “partnership” he had entered into with various spirits if they ever refused to cooperate with him, to which he had replied that, no, that never happened. It seems to me that there’s often an tacit assumption that entities want to cooperate with the magician and that if the rite “fails” in these terms, it is more often than not put down to a lack of individual skill or competancy, rather than the entity not “being in the mood”.

I’ve already highlighted the issue of power, but a few more thoughts are in order. Entities such as gods, goddesses, etc; are usually held to be sources of power, yet at the same time, it is the human participants who set the parameters of the rite and decide “”when to banish” as it were. Power flows from the entity to the magician, but not, seemingly, the other way round. There is also, I suspect, a power relationship in who gets to be possessed in the first place. From my Wiccan experience, the norm was that power was distributed from the High Priestess, so it was usually the High Priestess who was the focus for possession-events, rather than being evenly distributed throughout the coven. There is an obvious problem when individuals who are granted social authority get to speak “as gods” as this can (and in my experience sometimes does) get used for reinforcing authority-statements, so that it’s not merely High Priestess Mandy who’s telling you to stop doing something, it’s “the goddess” telling you.

The question of value is also problematic, because for me it begs the question of why one participates in such events in the first place. Value is slanted towards the human element – “what will I get out of this”. I’ve never actually heard anyone wondering what “value” the event has for the entity who is the focus of the event.

Finally (for now) there’s the issue of transformation. How much of an expectation do participants have that they will be significantly “changed” by the possession event? That the “self” that returns following the possession has changed? And does the “entity” change as a result of the possession? Are possessions transactional exchanges?

“A sexual being of no fixed gender, In constant flux: growing and changing shape like plants do. more like a habitat in bodily form; the embodiment of vegetal sensuality. In my representation, ………appears almost female but the features are ephemeral and transforming: the breasts are becoming phallic; the cleavage vulval and who knows what’s going on down below or behind? The humanesque appearance is for our benefit; a form we can identify with. being immortal, procreation (an intrinsically mortal function) is totally irrelevant to ……….. whose senso-sexuality is absolute……………. but …………is far from infertile, quite the opposite; however, this fertility is that of lush and mouldering, exuberant bounty.”
Z*qhyoegm, quoted in Lou Hart, Magic is a many-gendered thing

My on-off affair with Baphomet began in 1983, when I thought of myself more or less as a Wiccan, although that self-ascription was already slightly fuzzy at the edges. I’d bought a statuette of Baphomet at an occult bookshop and placed it on my altar without quite knowing why. I often used to meditate, aping the position of the statue. By that time I was giving myself strong doses of Kenneth Grant, backed up with whatever I could find in occult texts about Baphomet – Levi, Crowley – that kind of thing. But I didn’t really “know” Baphomet.

I was living in York when I first tried a ritual aimed towards Baphomet. Unfortunately, my diary entry for the event (9th June 1983) is fragmentary, but it would have been “wiccan” in structure, and my High Priestess (who was from Macclesfield) was present, as was one other woman. My diary records: “Baphomet appeared at the edge of the circle and wanted to come in. We denied him this and he began to mess about, first slowly peeling a large art poster (appropriately enough, a depiction of a witches’ sabbath) off the wall, then causing a stack of milk crates to rock back and forth.” The ritual was (hurriedly) closed and we left the room.” I didn’t actually see “Baphomet” standing in the room doing these things, note, it was more of a communal “psychic” apperception of events – we’d invoked the force of Baphomet – therefore these events were down to Baphomet – q.e.d. That was pretty much how I thought of things at that time.

By the early 1990s, I’d come back to Baphomet again, this time through a magical order called the IOT, for whom the “Mass of Chaos B” – a rather minimalist ritual which focused on one person becoming “possessed” by Baphomet was a favourite ritual. Throughout this period I saw many instances of Baphomet: fierce Baphomets who screamed abuse at those present; prophetic Baphomets who spoke in tongues and made absurd promises of future greatness; inspired Baphomets who poured their essence into a chalice for sharing. By then I was beginning to think of Baphomet as unfinished. Usually, with deities, one can get a sense of them with recourse to myth. If say, you are interested in Pan, you can, by trawling through the Greek myths or other texts in which Pan figures, get a “sense” of what he is, what he is “about” as it were. This was, by that time, very much the approach I had taken to working with deities for invocation or possession. But there was also another strand here – possession by “unknown” beings which I’d come at through experimental dance-drama & mask-work: entities who only came into existence during an event; who had “unformed personas” that only developed or “grew” over time and repeated performance. Unlike the “classical” deities of familiar mythologies, they had no role, no place in a pantheon, no easily-assigned “function”. This was how I began to think of Baphomet – something that lived beyond the boundaries and routes through which I normally thought of entities in terms of magical work. I became less interested in occult analyses of what Baphomet “symbolised”, rather to what Baphomet might “hint” towards. Less mask, more of a masque.

Having participated in a fair number of Baphomet possession-events – either as “horse” or celebrant, I began to think about how many different “Baphomets” presented themselves. It seemed to me that the Baphomet we “got” at any one event was very much a “product” of that event. By that time I’d moved away from a perspective that held deities to be singular and entirely seperate from the participants/events in which they “came through” to a much more interactive perspective – that these possession events shaped the way in which the focus of the ritual – the person(s) who were possessed by Baphomet – behaved. In the Chaos Mass B, Baphomet is portrayed as a kind of examplar spirit – the driving force – through the progression of Aeons:

“In the first Aeon, I was the Great Spirit,
In the second Aeon, men knew me as the Horned God, Pangenitor Panphage
In the third Aeon, I was the dark one, the Devil
In the fourth Aeon, men knew me not, for I am the hidden one
In this new Aeon, I stand before you as Baphomet, the God before all Gods who shall endure to the end of the earth.”

(The Baphomet in this litany is presented as predominantly masculine rather than poly-gendered.)

Possession is the dominant route through which I have engaged-fused-danced with Baphomet. Possession – with its long association with “the primitive”; with the popular representations of Voudun, Santeria and the like, as well as films such as The Exorcist with its excesses of bodily substances and forbidden sexualities – has something of a strange position within occulture. It’s a practice that moves diametrically away from the ordered ritual universe of the magus; towards play and performance, the blurring of boundaries and distinctions, and the surrender of control to a panoply of powers who have their own desires and agencies. When I first began to experiment with group possession in the late 1980s, I couldn’t get many of the magicians I knew interested; instead I hung out with a motley collection of improv performancers, and we played with masks and sheets instead, producing a series of peformances to “unformed gods” through mask-trance. Possession is often difficult to approach as, by its very nature, it collapses boundaries between the self-as-agent and that which has been “invited in”. In an essay giving my reflections on being fucked for the first time I likened the experience of being fucked to that of being possessed. Possession, in this sense, undermines self-possession. Possession is linked to queerness, in some people’s minds, it seems – as a form of demonic possession.

In 2004 I had my first queer experience of Baphomet, at a possession-event at Queer Pagan Camp. This brought me into a different perspective on Baphomet, and a rather different approach to possession. This was in the context of a ritual that was being facilitated by some friends, who asked me if I’d volunteer to “carry” Baphomet. I’d spent pretty much the whole day preparing for this ritual, invoking the preliminary deities (Pan and Eris) with whose power I inflame myself prior to offering myself to Baphomet, so by the time that the formal ritual proceedings opened, I was very much in a state of semi-possession anyway. This was, without a doubt, the most intense possession I’ve experienced so far. This was the first time I’d done a possession on grass rather than the floor of a room or concrete. This was one of the few times I’ve had someone act as an “anchor” – someone I trusted to pull me back, as it were – which allowed me to “go deeper” – to unresist the flood of alien presences. Also, there were “safekeepers” who managed the ritual space during the proceedings. It took nearly a day to “dive in” towards Baphomet; it took several days to come back to the surface.

Snatches of memory persist: I had a fairly clear post-ritual memory of being surrounded by trees. Gradually, this became clearer, and I recalled that at one point, a couple of the safekeepers had moved very close to me whilst “I/Baphomet” was crawling around on all fours. I also have ‘flashes’ of moving towards the altar at one point, but not of picking up a hot incense burner or of stroking my arm with a very sharp blade – both of which “I/Baphomet” did.

“Becoming Baphomet, Baphomet-becoming. It was a multitude which tried to speak in many voices, which could not walk or slither, but staggered and crawled across grass, which cried continuously, wailing to be unchained, stuttering grief and fear. Drawn towards the bright objects flickering in compound eyes; reeling with the impacts of eyes which wanted it to be a singular thing. Wonder at the bright blade that unfolds flesh and wells warm blood; terror of being confined, we felt, by trees; ancient and newly-born. None of us wanted to be seperated from each other; we all fought the leaving.”

“…the god of this world is not the monotheistic one; he is rather the Baphomet, the “prince of modifications.” As Klossowski explains, the Baphomet presides over an unstable and polycentric universe, an anarchy of metamorphosis and metempsychosis. William Burroughs maintains the regulative principle that we must regard every event as being willed by some agency, as being the expression of an intention. Klossowski proposes a complementary principle: he suggests that every intention is an external event, a modification of my being, and hence a sort of demonic possession. Each thought or desire is an alteration of my previous state; it is an intrusion of the outside, a whispering in my ear, a breath that I inhale and exhale, an alien spirit prompting me from offstage or insinuating itself within me. Of course, not all intentions are carried through to their conclusions; but any intention is already in itself a kind of action, a tribute paid to the Baphomet…” Steven Shaviro, Doom Patrols

How then, to Queer Baphomet?

“Queer theory might better remind us that we are inhabited always by states of desire that exceed our capacity to name them. Every name only gives those desires – conflictual, contradictory, inconsistent, undefined – a fictive border.” Lee Edelman, Queer Theory: Unstating Desire

I return to my earlier thought – that Baphomet is “unfinished” a becoming in Deleuzian terms: Baphomet is a monstrous body; an assemblage with no real-world referent (images of carnival monsters); an excess of signs – goat-breasted-horned-fire-winged-phallus; a surface from which multiple abjects – woman-satan-sabbat – bubble and froth. Between goat-horns blazes a fire; not the managed alchemical fire of science, more the fecund moist heat of the compost heap. Snake-entwined cock, hidden cunt. Implosion of possibilities; surfaces; sufferances. Baphomet pulses – is a pulsation of life unbound; the mystery at the heart of the sabbat; a blurred image at the edge of the firelight; an offering to the unspeakable. The heresies of the templars made momentarily manifest. The “spectre” of sodomy and all unmentionable acts; witch-trial given form. Not hermaphrodite; most definitely not the accepted ephebe-androgyne of the western imagination; a multiplicity of shifting planes and horizons: Baphomet as animal-elemental-fusion. Baphomet does not mean anything; cannot be chained by regimes of symbolic order. Baphomet calls to free-roaming desire as excess; polymorphous perversion without goal, purpose, product. Baphomet wears human bodies as a drag act; lingers on in fading trails of glitter and snail-tracks of secretions. In amorphous longings and moanings. Out there in the darkness, something emerges….

Update: visit Kris Littlesun’s The Bent Pentacle Blog for two accounts of a Baphomet ritual performed at Queer Pagan Camp 2011.