One from the vaults: The Psychomanteum Working
This account of ritual experimentation from the archives of the Nyarlathotep Coven was originally intended for inclusion in a sequel to my short book, The Pseudonomicon, but by the late 90s I’d more-or-less abandoned lovecraftian experiments in magic, so it never came to pass.
The ancient Greeks created special places – often underground – where visitors could commune with the spirits of the dead. These places were called psychomanteums. The following is a description of the Nyarlathotep Coven’s experiments in recreating a psychomanteum for the purpose of two-way traffic with Lovecraftian liminal spaces and their denizens.
Gazing into mirrors is an ancient and enduring method of communicating with spirits. Mirror-gazing has been used for divination, finding lost objects, time travel, and communicating with the dead. In some shamanic cultures, mirrors and reflective surfaces are used to contact spirits. A Nkomi initiation rite requires the apprentice shaman to correctly identify the shade of a long-dead man whose bones are placed in the initiation chamber. Tungus shamans converse with the souls of the dead using polished copper mirrors. It is said that the eighteenth-century mage Count Cagliostro conversed with spirits who appeared to him in crystals and glass bells.
Mirrors are said to symbolically represent reflection and the desire for self-knowledge. The magical power of mirrors to act as a vessel for spirits or as a gateway to some ‘other’ world recurs again and again in fiction, urban myth, and folklore. In the North of England, there is a folk tradition that if a young girl spends too long looking into a mirror (a sign of vanity) then she will see the devil looking back at her, having come to carry her off. Magical mirrors feature in popular stories such as Alice Through the Looking Glass, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, and the film Candyman, in which a malevolent spirit can be evoked by standing in front of a mirror and reciting his name five times. C.S. Lewis’ book Voyage of the Dawn Treader begins with a similar theme of a painting that opens out into a gateway, drawing those who are viewing it into its world. The television as a ‘gateway of ingress & egress between dimensions is used in Ringu, Poltergeist, and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome.
The mirror-vision has an eidetic nature: the vision unfolds and is experienced as being externally located to the seer. Scenes and dramas unfold; the seer may recognize friends & relatives in the mirror-world, see forgotten incidents from her or his life, or interact with unknown humans or bizarre entities. Scenes may be hazy, but often seers report experiencing incredible, preternatural, detail in their visions. It is not unknown for seers to experience the phenomena of being drawn into the mirror-world, and to report feeling themselves being ‘sucked into’ the mirror. Sometimes seers report having ‘familiars’ who assist them in moving their vision around the scenes displayed, aiding them in seeking out specific items of information.
In Lovecraft’s fiction, mirrors, crystals, and windows are both points of ingress into other dimensions and points of egress. Through these gateways, the seeker can experience visions across space and time, but equally, the denizens of these outer dimensions can enter human space through the mirror or glass. Once again, this concept is not unknown to occultists. The sixteenth-century Magus Doctor John Dee reported that a spirit who took the form of a young girl named ‘Madini’ would, on occasion, emerge from his scrying crystal and dance around his study. In the last century, the parapsychologist Raymond A. Moody recounted the story of a woman who saw a vision of a bird whilst gazing into a crystal. The bird flew out of the crystal and landed on a nearby table, where it appeared to be eating seeds.
This concept – of the gateway that swings both ways – into which we might go but other things might come out – became a core focus of interest for the Nyarlathotep Coven, particularly following the events of the Yuggoth Rite. Whilst we had considered scrying as a method of furthering astral and dream contacts on an individual basis, it was only after Frater Telesis had circulated an outline for a mirror-rite (based he said, on a dream he had had) that we began to consider the wider possibilities of mirror-work.
Through a business acquaintance of Fra. Vorgis, we obtained the use of a large basement under an untenanted office building in the Docklands area of London. This had several advantages. The basement could be locked, enabling us to set up a permanent temple there, which could be left unattended. We could enter the basement via stairs or a lift, which could be used as points for ‘preparing’ celebrants prior to the enaction of the rites. Also, underground locations, particularly where there are few light sources, can very quickly build up an atmosphere of strangeness and disquiet that is very appropriate to ritual workings of this nature. We located the actual working area in the centre of this cavernous basement, so that we had an area of dim light surrounded by darkness and very quiet except for the dim noises of traffic and the sound of dripping water from a leaking pipe.
We decided to work with the minimum of equipment. The central piece was a full-length dressmaker’s mirror mounted on wheels. We also affixed smaller mirrors to concrete pillars. A variety of small lights were set up in the basement, including two strobe lights (we wanted to experiment with the effects of different light sources). We also collected an array of musical instruments (including drums, a didgeridoo, a flute, and several Iynxes) and a tape recorder for recording the mirror-gazing sessions and providing another source of music/effects.
Psychomenteum Psychodrama
Our initial approach was to attempt to create an atmosphere conducive to the mirror-gazing experience and to see what transpired. If these preliminary workings proved interesting, we would then move on to rituals with more specific themes. For our initial experiment, we decided to try and create a ritual event that was an initiatory psychodrama, with one Coven member (chosen randomly) as the seer, and the remainder of the group orchestrating the ritual. No set time was given for this event – the seer could go on for as long as she or he felt was required. No attempt was made to create a magical boundary by ‘casting a circle’ or similar. If something came out of the mirror we felt we could ‘play it by ear’ as it were. The idea of creating a ritual psychodramatic space was based on descriptions by Robert Graves and others of supplicants’ visits to the oracle at Delphi.
Soror Zirel was the first Coven member selected to act as the ‘seer’. To prepare herself she abstained from stimulants for forty-eight hours and performed an all-night vigil. On the evening of the ritual, she was collected by car and driven, blindfolded by heavy goggles, to the site. Her disorientation was heightened by the driver, Fra. Vorgis, who used a somewhat circuitous route to the ritual site. Once they had reached the site, Vorgis led her to the stairway going down into the basement. At the head of the stairs, she was challenged by a muffled voice asking her why she had come to this place, and asking if she was prepared for what she might find. After answering satisfactorily, she was instructed to stretch her arms out before her. Her arms were gripped by two unknown persons who seemed to have very rough hands (gardening gloves with pieces of sandpaper affixed to them) and slowly guided down the stairs, still blindfolded. On reaching the basement floor, she was slowly guided in such a way as though she were walking a labyrinth. This was accompanied by the sound of a flute and by whispering noises that faded as she moved towards them. She was stopped, spun around three times, and then her blindfold was removed. Before her, in the dim light, stood a robed and masked figure. The figure silently led her towards the mirror, where a box seat had been set up. She could glimpse shadowy figures moving on the edge of the light and could hear a sibilant hissing. As she sat down on the seat, there was a subdued clash of gongs and drums, fading into silence.
Zirel later said that she felt very light-headed and dizzy from the preparation and had begun to think that she would not be able to enter a trance state easily. After gazing into the mirror for some minutes, she suddenly found herself looking at a single-decker bus:
“I saw this bus. There were people on it. It drew up next to a pavement and the door opened. I distinctly heard the door hissing. I somehow moved through the door. I felt myself moving, but I couldn’t see anything around me. I was moving through a city. Bits of it looked and felt familiar. A bit like when you take a taxi ride somewhere and the driver uses an unfamiliar route to get there. I saw signposts but I couldn’t read them. It wasn’t English – possibly Arabic or Greek. The bus drew up to a large building. It was black. A bit like a pyramid. Huge. There was something inside it. Something that knew I was looking at it.”
At this point, Zirel experienced a strong jerking sensation – a myoclonic twitch perhaps, and indicated that she had broken off her trance. The mirror was covered with a black cloth and the lights brought slowly up. Zirel was given a drink, and a short banishing ritual was performed to close the working.
This first experiment was judged a success. Zirel stated that she had been surprised at the intensity of her vision and what she experienced. We discussed the bus as a symbol or metaphor for travel, similar to what a horse, canoe, or carriage would have been for our forebears. The familiar-yet-unfamiliar city was interesting in the light of our earlier work in the woods, and we thought it likely that, just as Charles de Lint observed that all forests are linked at a primal level, this is also the case for cities – that all cities are linked to an ur-city through which one might find oneself in Kadath, R’Lyeh or Yuggoth. Frater Hali later pointed out that Zirel’s vision was reminiscent of Stephen King’s short Mythos story, Crouch End.
During the limited time that we had access to this working space, we decided to allow everyone a turn at acting as the seer in a rite, with no particular guidelines as to what they might be trying to experience. We altered the content of the initiatory psychodrama slightly each time, according to what seemed to work best and so as not to fall into a rote sequence.
Space precludes a full discussion of all of these initial sessions in mirror-gazing. Not all of us had successful visions, though. Frater Hali, having overtired himself with fasting, sleep deprivation etc., prior to his first session, actually dozed off whilst gazing into the mirror. He awoke with some anxiety that his astral form might have entered the mirror and not returned wholly, but on returning to a more grounded state of consciousness, rejected this notion.
Phase 2
For the next phase of the Psychomanteum Working, we decided to experiment with attempting to focus on achieving some commonality of experience of vision-scenes. From our first phase of experiments, we had discovered that the seer could, to some extent, influence the vista that unfolded during periods of vision. The sensation is not dissimilar to that experienced during a lucid dream when one is able to consciously change the focus of the dream. For this phase, we decided to try and combine this mirror-vision work with our earlier experiments in locating ourselves at the astral sabbat. For each session, the chosen seer would, assuming they achieved a vision, would try and go further into the vision until they reached some kind of meeting-place: a wood, or Zirel’s black pyramid, for instance. Once a description of this place had been obtained, the rest of the Coven would try and ‘dream’ themselves and each other to that place.
This did not go according to plan. To begin with, we used Soror Zirel’s vision of the ur-city, and successive seers attempted to steer their visions into an experience of that place. On the fourth session of this new series of workings, Fra. Vorgis reported that his vision took him to the top of a flight of stone stairs, which stretched downwards as far as he could see, when he became aware of a shape standing next to him. He initially thought that one of us had come very close, in order to observe him. He then said he felt a very tangible and solid touch on his shoulder – something that wasn’t a hand! The shape passed in front of him and clearly, he said, went into the mirror. The mirror became totally black and dull for a moment, and then he was ‘out’ of trance and rather agitated. None of us who were acting as ritual officers had seen this phenomena. Vorgis felt sure somehow, that the shape he encountered had been Nyarlathotep – particularly given Nyarlathotep’s association with the notion of the ‘psychopomp’ or similar ‘guide’ entities.
This occurrence led to a discussion as to whether or not we should attempt an impromptu invocation of Nyarlathotep. Frater Vorgis said that he felt ‘shook up’ by his experience and did not feel up to continuing. Fra. Hali suggested that invoking Nyarlathotep ‘out of the mirror’, either into a celebrant or via a mask could be a possibility for a future working. The current working was terminated with a formal closing of the temple.
The Pseudonomicon, my short book on lovecraftian magic, is available direct from Original Falcon Press in print or digital formats.
