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this is an online altar for my secular magickal practice, demonolatry & satanism. it is a collection of essays and writings which are vaguely related to my personal spirituality. i may not speak in great detail about what specifically i do - that feels more private. many pages will probably be edited and added to over time, and are definitely not the finished version of my thoughts on these matters. this part of the site is a lot messier and a lot more text heavy than the rest.

warning: contains frank discussions of my mental illnesses and self-destructive impulses.

secular magick?

secular magic/magick is a deeply personal practice, so i can’t say what it means for anyone else. but for me, secular magick is an acknowledgement that supernatural forces don’t “really” exist, but that pretending that they do can be helpful as a psychological exercise. it carries a deep respect for mythology, narrative, symbols and associations, and a belief in their capacity to change one’s life for the better. it is an earnest and autobiographical form of performance art, poetry and play.

i feel it is possible to achieve close-to-‘supernatural’ experiences through trance states and very elaborate performance and method acting. i have found a lot of success in accessing things i don’t want to admit to myself through spiritual practice. it creates a barrier where i can examine myself in a more balanced way from afar, by embodying the spirits of particular demons and giving myself ‘advice’ from them. i find it a lot easier to practice self-kindness through pretending that i have millennia-old demons who are looking out for me.

if i ever speak pithily about my practice being pretend, LARP or fake, this is not a disparagement. my last twenty years in fandom makes it clear to me that “fake” things are actually lifeblood. i just sometimes get overwhelmed by the fact that the practice works, regardless!

if you are interested in exploring this type of spirituality yourself, i would recommend:

demonolatry?

i have crafted a personal pantheon and mythology from demons. each demon corresponds to a different area of my life and has different wisdoms to show me. i sometimes switch out which demons i work with or work with demons temporarily to tackle specific problems. as a result i do not have a specific list of demons with whom i work.

i resonate with the demonic capacity to exist outside social order. i think that demons work well as metaphors in terms of undoing societal conditioning, championing knowledge and giving permission for pleasure despite the deeply unpleasant state of affairs of late-stage capitalism. my pantheon can be seen as my armour against the horrors of day-to-day existence, which allow me to go on regardless and act compassionately towards those i encounter. in this regard my practices are not super different from any religion with a component of worship, it’s just the aesthetics and trappings have been modified for my personal tastes.

the centre of my personal mythology is baphomet, who has always been incredibly evocative to me of balance, and shattering binaries and black-and-white thinking. as a nonbinary person, i think of myself as a child of baphomet.

satanism?

satanism is really the earliest point of my spiritual interests and the thing that got me at all interested in exploring spirituality. i continue to consider myself a satanist because of my affinity with the demonic, and my identification with both baphomet and lucifer/satan. lucifer/satan represents the social within my practice, and the desire to fight and rebel for a common good. it’s in this sense that i try to engage with the satanist community, even if only on the periphery.

i am a casual and very ‘poor’ satanist in terms of engagement with satanic ‘tradition’, but i hope by those tokens that i am actually a very good satanist if we are talking shedding doctrine and order. if we are talking denominations i personally most resonate with the global order of satan, but i am not a member of any satanic church because frankly i do not believe that satan would want one organised religion to be replaced with another!

this is a good article about the ongoing problems of satanism.