The Face of an Angel and a Tour of Hell
Unlike most of my accounts of experiences related to astral travel and ceremonial magick, I’m making this public. This is the story of what took place when I met my Holy Guardian Angel face to face and we took a little trip together, covering day ninety and ninety one of the working. I don’t know what I expected really, but whatever I expected was not what happened. What happened was, if nothing else, an interesting story. I self-initiated into the A:.A:. and began the Great Work in February, 2004. Now, almost exactly six years later, I’m finally achieving what I set out to do.
I don’t normally offer such in-depth descriptions of astral phenomena. I try to avoid storytelling of that kind, but this particular experience stands alone.
Day 90
This was the day I had been dreading. This was the day that I was supposed to have a vision of my angel. To see his face for the first time and enjoy his knowledge and conversation. The reason I had been dreading it was, obviously, fear of failure. If it didn’t come off, what then? How much time had I wasted? My whole life had been about the pursuit of this. I had everything pretty much organized around doing the Work with as little distraction as possible. What if I just wound up sitting there looking into an empty mirror? My dick was truly in the wind. I’m not ashamed to admit that it made me nervous.
I did the ritual and set up my table of practice, carefully designed by my angel for just this purpose (I’m sure I’ll post all about that later, it’s pretty neat). What I first saw in the mirror was very clearly the back of my own head. The image I was being presented with was myself in a black robe, speaking over my shoulder back at me, so I could not possibly confuse it with my reflection.
“This is how I will appear to you,” he said. “I am to be your guide, and so obviously, I resemble you.”
“That’s not really obvious to me,” I replied. I was confused. I could see the image visually, so clearly that it was stunning. But I didn’t buy it. It didn’t make sense. Why would my angel have the same face as me? I repeated the keyword some more, and he raised his hand.
“Slow down,” he said. “Look, it makes sense that I should look like you, because I need to see with your eyes. So when you see me, you see your own face. Make sense?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
But I began to doubt. There had been a few times throughout the working that I had been communicating with my angel and become intensely stubborn and difficult. There were some things he could tell me directly, but more complicated ideas were indicated through a series of numbers. He had been using a few numbers consistently as markers for different concepts or revelations. Four or five times, in the ninety days I had spent building up to this event, I had flatly denied the validity of everything he was showing me, only to wake up the next morning, check my notebook, and discover that the numbers were totally right. For whatever reason, imperfect concentration being the most likely culprit, I seemed to completely forget certain associations and completely overlook very obvious patterns. These experiences cast a shadow of doubt over my denials. I was not sure of myself any more. What made it a hundred times worse was the fact that I could literally SEE this face in the mirror. It wasn’t an astral vision. It had the harsh glare of reality, appealing to the physical senses. But this wasn’t a misinterpretation of abstract numbers. This was direct contact.
“Look,” the angel said, “I just look like you. Get over it. This is how it works for you.”
But in spite of my doubts, I could not accept this. It didn’t feel right. So I said, “no way, man.”
And then, after I denied him three times, I saw his real face.
Not with my physical senses, but to my astral eyes he appeared, which actually makes more sense when you think about it. He was clearly of central Asian descent. A large man, with wide, flat hands and feet, and broad shoulders like a wrestler. He had a big belly, bulging muscles, and little indecipherable tattoos all over his torso. His face was divided. His mouth was a tiny, hardened slit that looked angry, but his eyes were crinkled with laugh lines of joy. I found that, when I looked at his face, I couldn’t focus on both at once. If I looked at his mouth, he seemed full of rage. If I looked at his eyes, he seemed very happy. He never moved his lips when he spoke, but seemed to communicate with me through intention and intent. His head was shaved, except for a very long braid gathered into a knot at the back.
I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but that really wasn’t it. For some reason his gut bothered me, maybe because of my own slender vanity. “We’re not the same person,” he told me offhandedly, “I just know things that you need to know. And I like to eat! You don’t.”
He explained the method for the next day’s operation. I was to take the Hebrew names of the Seven Hells in Liber 777 and trace them on the Rosy Cross. After anointing these seven sigils, I was to astrally visit the Seven Hells with him as my guide and perform the signs that he showed me on each one. In response, the plane would cough up a glyph, a symbol of itself, which I was to draw on the back of the paper sigils that I had traced on the Rosy Cross. After completing this task and returning to my body, I was to burn all seven, beginning with Sheol, in my little candle explaining WHAT it was that I was destroying by fire based on my experiences there. I should make note that I went to every possible effort to forget every preconceived notion about Hell I had from my studies. With the exception of Bar Shacath, which I had visited before, I wanted to be totally fresh in my mind for this experience. Because my knowledge of Bar Shacath came from actually having traveled there with the help of the archangel Raphael, I wasn’t worried about those ideas coloring my experience of that place.
Day 91
Layer Seven
This place was just disgusting. It was all flesh without skin, raw nerves and open wounds. My angel told me that the word for this place was INFECTION. “These are the maggots feeding and breeding in the putrefying wound of creation,” he explained. “This is the surface of Hell. Practically in contact with your world, but just out of reach of your natural senses.” I would find it difficult to describe the entities I saw there, but it was pretty crowded. It was a circus of ugliness. This was the garbage of the astral, the outcast and unfit, but everyone seemed to be having fun. It was like watching a semi-lobotomized person playing with their own shit. It sort of turns your stomach, but he’s clearly having a good time. The strange sense of glee there was, my angel told me, the madness of a fever dream.
I made myself invisible to avoid having to deal with the grinning organ-creatures that wanted to distract me with various feats of gross, but there wasn’t really much to see there. But they all wanted my attention. They seemed excited to have a visitor. “This is an open sore,” my angel said. “Once you understand that, there isn’t much else to get out of this place.”
I made the signs, obtained the symbol, and prepared for the next layer.
Layer Six
What I didn’t notice about this place right away was the noise. I saw dark, strangely beautiful caves of ice. I could tell that there was no surface above us, just infinite frozen rock. My angel told me later that, because I saw beauty and darkness, I imagined silence as well. In reality, the caves shrieked with raging winds. My own mind had shouted down my astral senses, he said, by associating those ideas with silence. After I had spent some time exploring and got used to the place, I became very sharply aware of the cacophony.
As I looked more closely, I could see images of human suffering. Pain, despair, horror, and so on, all trapped in the ice. They were really quite disturbing at times. As we traveled deeper, we saw little demons mining with picks and shovels. They brought up the images and carried them away. I turned to my angel and said, with great unintentional comedy, “this place is creepy as hell.” He gave me a look. “Don’t say it,” I tried not to laugh. The corny joke did, however, lighten my mood a bit. The atmosphere of this place was totally different from the seventh layer. It was terribly solemn.
My angel explained, “all human suffering, from the beginning of time to the end, is in this mine. The miners are the demons that rule certain hours of the day and days of the week. They are in charge of manifesting that suffering, so when they’re not on duty, they labor here to bring up the images that they have to make real. They’re not bad exactly, because all of this suffering is beautiful and necessary. This is the place where it’s stored for use in time and space.”
As the demons became aware of us, my angel began to get nervous. “We can’t stay long,” he said, “it isn’t safe for you here. You’re too emotional and they’re bound to find something to distract you.” Even as he said those words, I saw one demon approaching me triumphantly with an image of myself. I recognized it immediately. It had already happened, but the demon was taunting me, saying that he was now going to MAKE it happen. “It’s the past,” my angel warned me. “You can’t change it.”
This was good sense. But even so, I was torn. I had been, as my angel feared, emotionally affected. I remembered how miserable I had been on that day, and some part of me felt like it would be worth anything to stop it from happening. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I should get out of there, but I hesitated. In the end I made the right choice. I made the signs, obtained the glyph, and we left.
The place has potential, though. If I ever want to know something about someone who was suffering, or who had suffered, or who was going to suffer, I now know where to look for that information.
Layer Five
This place was like a kick in the nuts that lasted forever. It was at once a shrieking, sour note of angry music, a blasting flame, a physical blow, and pure relentless panic. There wasn’t as much to say about it, simply because it was so simple and complete. You know how you feel in the moment that you realize something truly awful has happened? The two or three seconds of pure helplessness before your mind starts working again and you begin to figure things out and think rationally? This place stretched those two or three seconds out into eternity.
“This is the absolute opposite of union with God,” my angel explained. “It’s a total rejection. It blasphemes Nietzsche. It is a great NO to all things.”
In spite of the fact that there was really nothing to see, we stayed there for a long time. It was so hard to concentrate that I had great difficulty making the signs to obtain the glyph. Even once I had, finding the way back was almost impossible. It was very difficult, even with all of the work I’ve done to this end, to focus under those conditions. I was frustrated. I had already spent longer in my astral body than I am accustomed to. I tend to approach astral travel like Christmas shopping at the mall. That is, I know what I want when I go in, I get it, and I get out as fast as humanly possible. I don’t like to spend too much time in such places, especially when they are enjoyable and the temptation to linger is strong. This place certainly wasn’t that, but I had a long way to go yet. I needed my energy. At one point I was so frustrated that I, again with great unintentional comedy, blurted out, “JESUS CHRIST,” and the whole place went quiet for a moment.
My angel was not happy. “Don’t throw that name around here,” he warned me. “We’re just tourists. Let’s not upset the locals too much.” He had a point. I remembered my mantra (why I wasn’t using it before escapes me, I was pretty disoriented) and we got out.
Layer Four
This was just terrible.
The layer started to reveal itself slowly. Little blue lights zigzagged in absolute darkness. I saw faces in anguish, but they were pure white like photographs in negative. It was some time of wandering around blind in the dark before the full force of the vision revealed itself.
First, let’s make one thing clear. I got into Thelema because I was practicing ceremonial magick, not the other way around. I loved Crowley for his dynamic personality, his poetry, and the charm and wit that came off so well in his writing, but I usually skipped over the “boring Thelema stuff” in his books. I don’t understand people that just “like” Thelema and get into it because of that. They seem crazy to me. I didn’t care about Aleister Crowley’s “stupid little cult,” as I saw it in the early days. At the time I was young, angry, and had an interest in ceremonial magick, so obviously I wanted to know how to summon demons. This was my initial experience with ceremonial magick. Later on I would discover the importance of balancing those kinds of workings with angelic magick, and became quite proficient at that as well, but if you were going to say that I was an “expert” at anything, demonology, and the conjuring and controlling of demonic entities would be, like, IT. That’s my major, so to speak. I sort of focus more on angelic magick now, but that’s just because the other part of it comes so naturally. I started working with the A:.A:. system because it had become abundantly clear that I was not in control anymore, and I could see that working with this system could help me get control back.
So I know that Demons tell stories. Demons LOVE to tell stories. You can ask three different demons the same question and get three totally different, extraordinarily long-winded, answers. They’ll talk nonsense for hours if you let them. In all my years of dealing with these entities, there was only ONE consistent thing that they all seemed to agree on. This was what made the vision of the fourth layer so absolutely chilling. They all claimed that they liked to lead the souls of the recently dead astray. Reincarnation was the ideal next step, but they tried to mess with that when they could. They would brag to me that atheists and fundamentalists, of whatever stripe, were the easiest to bully into coming with them. Atheists because they were absolutely confused by the experience of awareness after death, and fundamentalists because all they had to do was to show them whatever they expected, and they would follow unquestioningly. Those “lost souls,” as my angel called them, wound up here. Not as some punishment for the life that they lead, but because of bad choices that they made in the very short time between death and reincarnation. Nice, eh? Life’s not fair. We all know that. And I guess if you believe these guys and what I saw next, death’s not fair either.
As the vision began to become clearer, I could see people. They were all totally covered with the blackest pitch and had their eyes torn out. My angel said, “they can feel nothing through the blackness, and see nothing without eyes. They have only ears, that they might hear lies, and tongues, that they might tell lies.” Then, with the terrible off-key note of a rusty trumpet, the Four Great Devils were revealed.
At first they seemed to be part of one mound that had with four faces pointing in different directions. After that I encountered them individually, one by one, but knowing that they were all part of the same thing. They were perversions. Letter instead of spirit, laws without meaning, truth used to spread terrible lies.
First came Leviathan, in the guise of Allah. His followers consorted in the most reprehensible uninhibited orgy of sex and violence. They moved with frantic energy, rapid and forceful, but when they spoke they droned like wasps exhausted by autumn. I don’t want to describe what they were doing because it seems offensive and wrong, but each was lost in a mock paradise, unaware of their surroundings. “They all think that they’re concealed,” my angel said, “they don’t know they’re in the same mass of humanity, and they can’t feel their bodies, so they don’t know what the others are doing to them.”
Then came Leviathan himself. A thousand serpent heads writhed around a cloud of insects that formed a central mass which you might call a body, but which was disconnected in all ways except that all the little beetles of the swarm flew in a constant roiling motion. “GOD IS ONE AND WE ARE GOD,” the thousand heads shrieked in unison. “GOD IS ONE AND THEY ARE GOD,” the lost souls cried in response.
Next I saw Satan. He was surrounded by masses of worshippers all vying for his attention. They sought to prove themselves worthy of love through various acts of self-abuse. “We are shamed! We are sinners,” they cried in their efforts to gain his favor, as they cut, burned, and beat themselves before him. He was smiling with pure delight. He knew that these were little images of God under his power. By inspiring them to torture and deny themselves, he mocks God. Our eyes met. He said nothing, but we were thinking the same thing. There was a time that I would have laughed at this. There was a time that I would have found this image to be absolutely hilarious. I used to be a Satanist, after all. Not just that, but to blaspheme against the Church of Satan I actually worshipped the Devil. But that was a game, and a childish one at that. When I actually saw it, and I could see the awful poetry of its pure repulsiveness, and I felt sick to my stomach. My body shook for a long time. I wanted to leave, but my angel would not let me.
Then, Lucifer appeared. He was a shadow wreathed in light, always turning, but never really facing me. He was too bright to look at directly for more than a few seconds, but there was a core of darkness to that light, like the warm center of a candle. But this light was electric blue and cold. His worshippers all seemed lost in their own little worlds. He was perfectly smug as he explained this to me. “They think that they have reincarnated as Gods,” he explained. “They chose the wrong guides. Now I keep them here. I don’t care about the shadows. Only the stars are good enough for me. I keep them here so they cannot take their places for The End. I have no interest in going to some lake of fire.”
“How many do you have?” I asked. In a very strange way he seemed more evil than the other two. He had a goal, which was to prevent creation from realizing its purpose, which is very much in tune with the idea of “evil as error.” Leviathan and Satan just seemed to want to be adored and to mock the religions they had chosen as the basis for their cults.
“Ten thousand of the hundred and forty four,” he answered, casually. “It’s enough. It’s not like anybody’s coming to rescue them.” I was about to ask him a question, but my angel gave me a “we’ll talk later,” look, and I passed over that part of the vision.
Next came Belial. He was slow, and impossibly fat. He the most chatty of the four. We made small talk for some time. I noticed that all of his worshippers were lying; stretched out, face down, on the ground. I asked him about this and his face burst into a greasy leer.
“They wanted nothingness. Nirvana,” he said. “They asked me for it. They practically begged to be destroyed. But I don’t like to be told what to do. So I make them wait.” He laughed and laughed, “so many of them spent so much time sitting around doing nothing for their whole lives, and calling THAT ‘holy,’” he slapped his belly with glee. “It seems only fitting that I should make them sit around and do nothing for all time. They all think that in just ONE MORE SECOND, they’ll be out. They’ll be done. They’ll be nothing. Any of them could just stand up and walk away,” he chortles, “but because of their training and discipline, they never do. They just missed the point. Completely missed the point. This is a pure jest, is it not?”
I took that as a rhetorical question.
After the next part of the vision, we left. My angel told me, “this is the end of excrement. The rest is the source.”
Layer Three
I knew this place well. I had come here for my confrontation with the archangel Samael in December of 2004, as I’ve written about elsewhere on this LJ (if you’re not in the locked group, feel free to ask your way in). The main area of the plane was a gigantic palace, surrounded by a fantastic material that was at the same time water, fire, and stone. My angel flew me over it to the castle. The guards recognized me, and I went inside to greet Samael.
I was kind of nervous. “I thought you were friends,” my angel said. “What’s the problem? Let’s go say hi.”
“This guy is trouble,” I replied. “Friend or not.”
“You worry too much,” he said.
I know Samael pretty well. We talk frequently. We started off as adversaries, but that got sorted out. Whenever I do a ritual to contact him I have terrible sweat-soaked nightmares for days afterwards, but I always get what I asked for, almost immediately, so it works out. He’s been showing me how to reinterpret the Garden of Eden myth, which is something that I’ll write about sometime. The point is that we’re familiar with each other. When I entered the throne room, I noticed that Purson was there as well, opening a bottle of wine. They seemed to be expecting me.
“So you’ve seen the filth,” Samael said. “You have to understand, the Four Great Devils are not personalities or people. They’re phenomena. That’s all. They seem to have personalities, but they’re the personalities of ideas, not microcosms. We, the initiated Kings of Hell who inhabit this plane, cause them to exist by our work.”
“I know,” I said. “Because you’re the blinding venom, right? Because you cause people to see the truth in little parts, so they don’t grasp its completeness, and then they go all crazy with little irrelevant details.”
“The brightest light,” he said, echoing the first words he ever spoke to me with a cruel smile, “casts the deepest shadow.” He accepts a glass of wine from Purson. “Below us is the realm of lies,” he explained, “here it is the truth that drives you mad. There is no lying here. We do God’s work. Doubt it not. Without the challenges that we create the power of truth would be meaningless. Without concealment and misdirection, no Revelation is possible. Hell’s aristocracy dwells here.”
“You should visit us more often,” Purson said, with a glint in his eye. “We haven’t talked for so long. Sit down. Stay a while.”
“I don’t think we can,” I said, but my angel broke in.
“We have time,” he said, and poured himself a glass of wine.
“I see you’ve moved to Toronto, as I told you would have to,” Purson observed. “Why didn’t you go when I told you to go?”
“I would have missed too many opportunities,” I said. “I learned a lot in the last year and a half I spent at the Rogue.”
“Even so,” Purson said, but does not finish his sentence.
“He’s right,” said Samael. “You should visit us more often. From here you can hold the reins of the lie itself! Who knows? You might like it so much that you’ll never want to leave.” The cruel smile remained.
My angel looked at me, and I looked at him. “You know,” he said, “I think I was wrong. We should probably be going.”
“You guys are creepy!” I added, trying to keep a cheery note in my voice. Mr. Church always told me to try to find entities like this cute if they become intimidating. This is sometimes difficult, and I would never want to mistake “find them cute,” with “be condescending,” but I find that, in any situation, a little joke can lighten the tension. “You guys are creepy,” isn’t much of a joke (you would have to hear it, because I said it as though it was only just now occurring to me, when in reality it had been the only thing I was thinking of as we approached the palace) but under the circumstances it sufficed to allow me to keep my calm. “Creepy as hell,” I echoed my formally unintentional joke with purpose. My angel smirked.
“We do come through for you though,” Purson reminded me. “Never forget that.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “In fact, I know a lot of nice, likeable, fun people in my life who never do what they say they will.”
“Exactly,” Purson said. “Creepy or not, we have follow through.”
When I did the signs to get the glyph for that plane, they both did them with me.
On the way back across the ocean/flames/rocky plain, I said to my angel, “what was that back there?”
“You keep expecting me to be omniscient,” he complained. “I’ve never met those guys before. They seemed all right until we sat down and they started getting all, ‘children of the corn’ on you.” I thought it was strange that he was referencing a movie that I’d never seen.
“I knew that would happen,” I said. “Is it just that Samael is an angel too, and he makes more sense to you than me?”
“Maybe,” my angel said. “But I doubt it. I’ve just never met them before so I didn’t know what to expect.”
“I knew that would happen,” I repeated.
“You worry too much,” he said once again.
Layer Two
Abbadon. Lierally, “destruction.” I never could have guessed how it would show itself to me.
First it was dark. Just dark. Infinite blackness. In the distance I saw a light, and began moving towards it. It was a single, slender, white candle. In its light there sat a girl, about two years old, totally naked. Throughout the vision I saw her in a dress, but my angel assured me that she was naked. “You’re afraid of sexualizing a child,” he told me, “so you imagine the dress. Trust me, she’s naked.”
The girl reached into thin air and pulled out little paper images. Some were of people, some of mountains, some of animals, some of cities, some of buildings, some of objects, and so on. She lit them, one by one, in the fire, and squealed with delight as they smoked away into nothingness.
“A child forever playing with fire who never burns herself,” my angel whispered in my ear. “This is pure destruction. It is pure, because she is innocent. The joy she experiences is absolutely perfect joy, unmarred by any malice, hatred, or spite.
I felt strangely moved by watching her. She was so happy. When I did the signs to obtain the glyph, she looked up at me, smiled brightly, and said, “Io! Pan!”
“We have to go back to the tower so that we can talk,” my angel said. “We have to get out of here.”
“Why?” I asked. “She seems fine.” She smiled at us.
“Do you think she can’t pull little paper images of us out of there as well?” My angel asked, with a note of incredulity in his voice. “She’s noticed us. It’s not fine. We have to leave. Like… now.”
So we left.
I was exhausted. I had been doing this for almost four hours. That’s… like… a REALLY long time for me. I try to keep sessions below an hour, twenty to forty minutes being ideal. But I pressed on. We came to the deepest pit of Hell.
Layer One
This was the most impersonal personal Hell I could imagine. Visually, it could have been out of a cartoon, with the deep hole carved in rock, the fire everywhere, endless stairways, except for one thing. I was the only one there. Hell is usually depicted as a pretty crowded place. But I was totally alone.
“Come on,” my angel said. “We have to get to the bottom.”
And so we did. And what was there? Satan trapped in ice? A great puppet master devil? A lake of fire?
Nothing. Just a pit. Almost, but not quite, bottomless. At the bottom there was nothing but bare ground and a circular rock wall.
“Everyone who comes here is here alone,” my angel explained. “This Hell cannot be shared. It is death. The grave. It is a pit in which to await the lake of fire. This is where Ariel brought the angels who taught men magick and gave rise to the Nephlim. They’re all here, although we can’t see them. There is no ruler of Hell beyond the aristocracy of Bar Shacath. It is pure silent loneliness, without even the sensation of pain or the companionship of a torturer to break the monotony.”
This was, indeed, the deepest pit.
I wanted to write my initials on the wall. I don’t know why. I guess I’m really, deeply stupid, but my inner tourist was like, “dude, this is the bottom of the world! Make your mark!”
“You really, seriously, don’t want to do that,” my angel said. “You don’t want to leave any trace of yourself here. Especially not your name.”
I half-heartedly argued with him for a bit, but I sort of knew how idiotic I was being. Still, part of me just couldn’t let it go, so we had it out for a while. This was THE BOTTOM, man! This was… like… IT. The lowest of the low. And I was there!
Yeah, I know, I’m shaking my head too.
OH WHATEVER. After the miserable assault on my self-esteem, the kick in the nuts, the four great jerks, the children of the corn, and the creepiest little girl ever (whose vagina my mind concealed from my natural senses) I was feeling pretty giddy. And now I had made it to the end. But it was… what? A hole? Just… an empty hole? I got the glyph and left. And that’s when Hell made sense to me.
And then I came back to my body. And I finished the ritual, but it wasn’t over.
So what does it all mean?
I have my own theories. I just hope this story somehow adds something to the lives of the people who read it.
I don’t normally offer such in-depth descriptions of astral phenomena. I try to avoid storytelling of that kind, but this particular experience stands alone.
Day 90
This was the day I had been dreading. This was the day that I was supposed to have a vision of my angel. To see his face for the first time and enjoy his knowledge and conversation. The reason I had been dreading it was, obviously, fear of failure. If it didn’t come off, what then? How much time had I wasted? My whole life had been about the pursuit of this. I had everything pretty much organized around doing the Work with as little distraction as possible. What if I just wound up sitting there looking into an empty mirror? My dick was truly in the wind. I’m not ashamed to admit that it made me nervous.
I did the ritual and set up my table of practice, carefully designed by my angel for just this purpose (I’m sure I’ll post all about that later, it’s pretty neat). What I first saw in the mirror was very clearly the back of my own head. The image I was being presented with was myself in a black robe, speaking over my shoulder back at me, so I could not possibly confuse it with my reflection.
“This is how I will appear to you,” he said. “I am to be your guide, and so obviously, I resemble you.”
“That’s not really obvious to me,” I replied. I was confused. I could see the image visually, so clearly that it was stunning. But I didn’t buy it. It didn’t make sense. Why would my angel have the same face as me? I repeated the keyword some more, and he raised his hand.
“Slow down,” he said. “Look, it makes sense that I should look like you, because I need to see with your eyes. So when you see me, you see your own face. Make sense?”
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
But I began to doubt. There had been a few times throughout the working that I had been communicating with my angel and become intensely stubborn and difficult. There were some things he could tell me directly, but more complicated ideas were indicated through a series of numbers. He had been using a few numbers consistently as markers for different concepts or revelations. Four or five times, in the ninety days I had spent building up to this event, I had flatly denied the validity of everything he was showing me, only to wake up the next morning, check my notebook, and discover that the numbers were totally right. For whatever reason, imperfect concentration being the most likely culprit, I seemed to completely forget certain associations and completely overlook very obvious patterns. These experiences cast a shadow of doubt over my denials. I was not sure of myself any more. What made it a hundred times worse was the fact that I could literally SEE this face in the mirror. It wasn’t an astral vision. It had the harsh glare of reality, appealing to the physical senses. But this wasn’t a misinterpretation of abstract numbers. This was direct contact.
“Look,” the angel said, “I just look like you. Get over it. This is how it works for you.”
But in spite of my doubts, I could not accept this. It didn’t feel right. So I said, “no way, man.”
And then, after I denied him three times, I saw his real face.
Not with my physical senses, but to my astral eyes he appeared, which actually makes more sense when you think about it. He was clearly of central Asian descent. A large man, with wide, flat hands and feet, and broad shoulders like a wrestler. He had a big belly, bulging muscles, and little indecipherable tattoos all over his torso. His face was divided. His mouth was a tiny, hardened slit that looked angry, but his eyes were crinkled with laugh lines of joy. I found that, when I looked at his face, I couldn’t focus on both at once. If I looked at his mouth, he seemed full of rage. If I looked at his eyes, he seemed very happy. He never moved his lips when he spoke, but seemed to communicate with me through intention and intent. His head was shaved, except for a very long braid gathered into a knot at the back.
I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, but that really wasn’t it. For some reason his gut bothered me, maybe because of my own slender vanity. “We’re not the same person,” he told me offhandedly, “I just know things that you need to know. And I like to eat! You don’t.”
He explained the method for the next day’s operation. I was to take the Hebrew names of the Seven Hells in Liber 777 and trace them on the Rosy Cross. After anointing these seven sigils, I was to astrally visit the Seven Hells with him as my guide and perform the signs that he showed me on each one. In response, the plane would cough up a glyph, a symbol of itself, which I was to draw on the back of the paper sigils that I had traced on the Rosy Cross. After completing this task and returning to my body, I was to burn all seven, beginning with Sheol, in my little candle explaining WHAT it was that I was destroying by fire based on my experiences there. I should make note that I went to every possible effort to forget every preconceived notion about Hell I had from my studies. With the exception of Bar Shacath, which I had visited before, I wanted to be totally fresh in my mind for this experience. Because my knowledge of Bar Shacath came from actually having traveled there with the help of the archangel Raphael, I wasn’t worried about those ideas coloring my experience of that place.
Day 91
Layer Seven
This place was just disgusting. It was all flesh without skin, raw nerves and open wounds. My angel told me that the word for this place was INFECTION. “These are the maggots feeding and breeding in the putrefying wound of creation,” he explained. “This is the surface of Hell. Practically in contact with your world, but just out of reach of your natural senses.” I would find it difficult to describe the entities I saw there, but it was pretty crowded. It was a circus of ugliness. This was the garbage of the astral, the outcast and unfit, but everyone seemed to be having fun. It was like watching a semi-lobotomized person playing with their own shit. It sort of turns your stomach, but he’s clearly having a good time. The strange sense of glee there was, my angel told me, the madness of a fever dream.
I made myself invisible to avoid having to deal with the grinning organ-creatures that wanted to distract me with various feats of gross, but there wasn’t really much to see there. But they all wanted my attention. They seemed excited to have a visitor. “This is an open sore,” my angel said. “Once you understand that, there isn’t much else to get out of this place.”
I made the signs, obtained the symbol, and prepared for the next layer.
Layer Six
What I didn’t notice about this place right away was the noise. I saw dark, strangely beautiful caves of ice. I could tell that there was no surface above us, just infinite frozen rock. My angel told me later that, because I saw beauty and darkness, I imagined silence as well. In reality, the caves shrieked with raging winds. My own mind had shouted down my astral senses, he said, by associating those ideas with silence. After I had spent some time exploring and got used to the place, I became very sharply aware of the cacophony.
As I looked more closely, I could see images of human suffering. Pain, despair, horror, and so on, all trapped in the ice. They were really quite disturbing at times. As we traveled deeper, we saw little demons mining with picks and shovels. They brought up the images and carried them away. I turned to my angel and said, with great unintentional comedy, “this place is creepy as hell.” He gave me a look. “Don’t say it,” I tried not to laugh. The corny joke did, however, lighten my mood a bit. The atmosphere of this place was totally different from the seventh layer. It was terribly solemn.
My angel explained, “all human suffering, from the beginning of time to the end, is in this mine. The miners are the demons that rule certain hours of the day and days of the week. They are in charge of manifesting that suffering, so when they’re not on duty, they labor here to bring up the images that they have to make real. They’re not bad exactly, because all of this suffering is beautiful and necessary. This is the place where it’s stored for use in time and space.”
As the demons became aware of us, my angel began to get nervous. “We can’t stay long,” he said, “it isn’t safe for you here. You’re too emotional and they’re bound to find something to distract you.” Even as he said those words, I saw one demon approaching me triumphantly with an image of myself. I recognized it immediately. It had already happened, but the demon was taunting me, saying that he was now going to MAKE it happen. “It’s the past,” my angel warned me. “You can’t change it.”
This was good sense. But even so, I was torn. I had been, as my angel feared, emotionally affected. I remembered how miserable I had been on that day, and some part of me felt like it would be worth anything to stop it from happening. I knew it was ridiculous, and that I should get out of there, but I hesitated. In the end I made the right choice. I made the signs, obtained the glyph, and we left.
The place has potential, though. If I ever want to know something about someone who was suffering, or who had suffered, or who was going to suffer, I now know where to look for that information.
Layer Five
This place was like a kick in the nuts that lasted forever. It was at once a shrieking, sour note of angry music, a blasting flame, a physical blow, and pure relentless panic. There wasn’t as much to say about it, simply because it was so simple and complete. You know how you feel in the moment that you realize something truly awful has happened? The two or three seconds of pure helplessness before your mind starts working again and you begin to figure things out and think rationally? This place stretched those two or three seconds out into eternity.
“This is the absolute opposite of union with God,” my angel explained. “It’s a total rejection. It blasphemes Nietzsche. It is a great NO to all things.”
In spite of the fact that there was really nothing to see, we stayed there for a long time. It was so hard to concentrate that I had great difficulty making the signs to obtain the glyph. Even once I had, finding the way back was almost impossible. It was very difficult, even with all of the work I’ve done to this end, to focus under those conditions. I was frustrated. I had already spent longer in my astral body than I am accustomed to. I tend to approach astral travel like Christmas shopping at the mall. That is, I know what I want when I go in, I get it, and I get out as fast as humanly possible. I don’t like to spend too much time in such places, especially when they are enjoyable and the temptation to linger is strong. This place certainly wasn’t that, but I had a long way to go yet. I needed my energy. At one point I was so frustrated that I, again with great unintentional comedy, blurted out, “JESUS CHRIST,” and the whole place went quiet for a moment.
My angel was not happy. “Don’t throw that name around here,” he warned me. “We’re just tourists. Let’s not upset the locals too much.” He had a point. I remembered my mantra (why I wasn’t using it before escapes me, I was pretty disoriented) and we got out.
Layer Four
This was just terrible.
The layer started to reveal itself slowly. Little blue lights zigzagged in absolute darkness. I saw faces in anguish, but they were pure white like photographs in negative. It was some time of wandering around blind in the dark before the full force of the vision revealed itself.
First, let’s make one thing clear. I got into Thelema because I was practicing ceremonial magick, not the other way around. I loved Crowley for his dynamic personality, his poetry, and the charm and wit that came off so well in his writing, but I usually skipped over the “boring Thelema stuff” in his books. I don’t understand people that just “like” Thelema and get into it because of that. They seem crazy to me. I didn’t care about Aleister Crowley’s “stupid little cult,” as I saw it in the early days. At the time I was young, angry, and had an interest in ceremonial magick, so obviously I wanted to know how to summon demons. This was my initial experience with ceremonial magick. Later on I would discover the importance of balancing those kinds of workings with angelic magick, and became quite proficient at that as well, but if you were going to say that I was an “expert” at anything, demonology, and the conjuring and controlling of demonic entities would be, like, IT. That’s my major, so to speak. I sort of focus more on angelic magick now, but that’s just because the other part of it comes so naturally. I started working with the A:.A:. system because it had become abundantly clear that I was not in control anymore, and I could see that working with this system could help me get control back.
So I know that Demons tell stories. Demons LOVE to tell stories. You can ask three different demons the same question and get three totally different, extraordinarily long-winded, answers. They’ll talk nonsense for hours if you let them. In all my years of dealing with these entities, there was only ONE consistent thing that they all seemed to agree on. This was what made the vision of the fourth layer so absolutely chilling. They all claimed that they liked to lead the souls of the recently dead astray. Reincarnation was the ideal next step, but they tried to mess with that when they could. They would brag to me that atheists and fundamentalists, of whatever stripe, were the easiest to bully into coming with them. Atheists because they were absolutely confused by the experience of awareness after death, and fundamentalists because all they had to do was to show them whatever they expected, and they would follow unquestioningly. Those “lost souls,” as my angel called them, wound up here. Not as some punishment for the life that they lead, but because of bad choices that they made in the very short time between death and reincarnation. Nice, eh? Life’s not fair. We all know that. And I guess if you believe these guys and what I saw next, death’s not fair either.
As the vision began to become clearer, I could see people. They were all totally covered with the blackest pitch and had their eyes torn out. My angel said, “they can feel nothing through the blackness, and see nothing without eyes. They have only ears, that they might hear lies, and tongues, that they might tell lies.” Then, with the terrible off-key note of a rusty trumpet, the Four Great Devils were revealed.
At first they seemed to be part of one mound that had with four faces pointing in different directions. After that I encountered them individually, one by one, but knowing that they were all part of the same thing. They were perversions. Letter instead of spirit, laws without meaning, truth used to spread terrible lies.
First came Leviathan, in the guise of Allah. His followers consorted in the most reprehensible uninhibited orgy of sex and violence. They moved with frantic energy, rapid and forceful, but when they spoke they droned like wasps exhausted by autumn. I don’t want to describe what they were doing because it seems offensive and wrong, but each was lost in a mock paradise, unaware of their surroundings. “They all think that they’re concealed,” my angel said, “they don’t know they’re in the same mass of humanity, and they can’t feel their bodies, so they don’t know what the others are doing to them.”
Then came Leviathan himself. A thousand serpent heads writhed around a cloud of insects that formed a central mass which you might call a body, but which was disconnected in all ways except that all the little beetles of the swarm flew in a constant roiling motion. “GOD IS ONE AND WE ARE GOD,” the thousand heads shrieked in unison. “GOD IS ONE AND THEY ARE GOD,” the lost souls cried in response.
Next I saw Satan. He was surrounded by masses of worshippers all vying for his attention. They sought to prove themselves worthy of love through various acts of self-abuse. “We are shamed! We are sinners,” they cried in their efforts to gain his favor, as they cut, burned, and beat themselves before him. He was smiling with pure delight. He knew that these were little images of God under his power. By inspiring them to torture and deny themselves, he mocks God. Our eyes met. He said nothing, but we were thinking the same thing. There was a time that I would have laughed at this. There was a time that I would have found this image to be absolutely hilarious. I used to be a Satanist, after all. Not just that, but to blaspheme against the Church of Satan I actually worshipped the Devil. But that was a game, and a childish one at that. When I actually saw it, and I could see the awful poetry of its pure repulsiveness, and I felt sick to my stomach. My body shook for a long time. I wanted to leave, but my angel would not let me.
Then, Lucifer appeared. He was a shadow wreathed in light, always turning, but never really facing me. He was too bright to look at directly for more than a few seconds, but there was a core of darkness to that light, like the warm center of a candle. But this light was electric blue and cold. His worshippers all seemed lost in their own little worlds. He was perfectly smug as he explained this to me. “They think that they have reincarnated as Gods,” he explained. “They chose the wrong guides. Now I keep them here. I don’t care about the shadows. Only the stars are good enough for me. I keep them here so they cannot take their places for The End. I have no interest in going to some lake of fire.”
“How many do you have?” I asked. In a very strange way he seemed more evil than the other two. He had a goal, which was to prevent creation from realizing its purpose, which is very much in tune with the idea of “evil as error.” Leviathan and Satan just seemed to want to be adored and to mock the religions they had chosen as the basis for their cults.
“Ten thousand of the hundred and forty four,” he answered, casually. “It’s enough. It’s not like anybody’s coming to rescue them.” I was about to ask him a question, but my angel gave me a “we’ll talk later,” look, and I passed over that part of the vision.
Next came Belial. He was slow, and impossibly fat. He the most chatty of the four. We made small talk for some time. I noticed that all of his worshippers were lying; stretched out, face down, on the ground. I asked him about this and his face burst into a greasy leer.
“They wanted nothingness. Nirvana,” he said. “They asked me for it. They practically begged to be destroyed. But I don’t like to be told what to do. So I make them wait.” He laughed and laughed, “so many of them spent so much time sitting around doing nothing for their whole lives, and calling THAT ‘holy,’” he slapped his belly with glee. “It seems only fitting that I should make them sit around and do nothing for all time. They all think that in just ONE MORE SECOND, they’ll be out. They’ll be done. They’ll be nothing. Any of them could just stand up and walk away,” he chortles, “but because of their training and discipline, they never do. They just missed the point. Completely missed the point. This is a pure jest, is it not?”
I took that as a rhetorical question.
After the next part of the vision, we left. My angel told me, “this is the end of excrement. The rest is the source.”
Layer Three
I knew this place well. I had come here for my confrontation with the archangel Samael in December of 2004, as I’ve written about elsewhere on this LJ (if you’re not in the locked group, feel free to ask your way in). The main area of the plane was a gigantic palace, surrounded by a fantastic material that was at the same time water, fire, and stone. My angel flew me over it to the castle. The guards recognized me, and I went inside to greet Samael.
I was kind of nervous. “I thought you were friends,” my angel said. “What’s the problem? Let’s go say hi.”
“This guy is trouble,” I replied. “Friend or not.”
“You worry too much,” he said.
I know Samael pretty well. We talk frequently. We started off as adversaries, but that got sorted out. Whenever I do a ritual to contact him I have terrible sweat-soaked nightmares for days afterwards, but I always get what I asked for, almost immediately, so it works out. He’s been showing me how to reinterpret the Garden of Eden myth, which is something that I’ll write about sometime. The point is that we’re familiar with each other. When I entered the throne room, I noticed that Purson was there as well, opening a bottle of wine. They seemed to be expecting me.
“So you’ve seen the filth,” Samael said. “You have to understand, the Four Great Devils are not personalities or people. They’re phenomena. That’s all. They seem to have personalities, but they’re the personalities of ideas, not microcosms. We, the initiated Kings of Hell who inhabit this plane, cause them to exist by our work.”
“I know,” I said. “Because you’re the blinding venom, right? Because you cause people to see the truth in little parts, so they don’t grasp its completeness, and then they go all crazy with little irrelevant details.”
“The brightest light,” he said, echoing the first words he ever spoke to me with a cruel smile, “casts the deepest shadow.” He accepts a glass of wine from Purson. “Below us is the realm of lies,” he explained, “here it is the truth that drives you mad. There is no lying here. We do God’s work. Doubt it not. Without the challenges that we create the power of truth would be meaningless. Without concealment and misdirection, no Revelation is possible. Hell’s aristocracy dwells here.”
“You should visit us more often,” Purson said, with a glint in his eye. “We haven’t talked for so long. Sit down. Stay a while.”
“I don’t think we can,” I said, but my angel broke in.
“We have time,” he said, and poured himself a glass of wine.
“I see you’ve moved to Toronto, as I told you would have to,” Purson observed. “Why didn’t you go when I told you to go?”
“I would have missed too many opportunities,” I said. “I learned a lot in the last year and a half I spent at the Rogue.”
“Even so,” Purson said, but does not finish his sentence.
“He’s right,” said Samael. “You should visit us more often. From here you can hold the reins of the lie itself! Who knows? You might like it so much that you’ll never want to leave.” The cruel smile remained.
My angel looked at me, and I looked at him. “You know,” he said, “I think I was wrong. We should probably be going.”
“You guys are creepy!” I added, trying to keep a cheery note in my voice. Mr. Church always told me to try to find entities like this cute if they become intimidating. This is sometimes difficult, and I would never want to mistake “find them cute,” with “be condescending,” but I find that, in any situation, a little joke can lighten the tension. “You guys are creepy,” isn’t much of a joke (you would have to hear it, because I said it as though it was only just now occurring to me, when in reality it had been the only thing I was thinking of as we approached the palace) but under the circumstances it sufficed to allow me to keep my calm. “Creepy as hell,” I echoed my formally unintentional joke with purpose. My angel smirked.
“We do come through for you though,” Purson reminded me. “Never forget that.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “In fact, I know a lot of nice, likeable, fun people in my life who never do what they say they will.”
“Exactly,” Purson said. “Creepy or not, we have follow through.”
When I did the signs to get the glyph for that plane, they both did them with me.
On the way back across the ocean/flames/rocky plain, I said to my angel, “what was that back there?”
“You keep expecting me to be omniscient,” he complained. “I’ve never met those guys before. They seemed all right until we sat down and they started getting all, ‘children of the corn’ on you.” I thought it was strange that he was referencing a movie that I’d never seen.
“I knew that would happen,” I said. “Is it just that Samael is an angel too, and he makes more sense to you than me?”
“Maybe,” my angel said. “But I doubt it. I’ve just never met them before so I didn’t know what to expect.”
“I knew that would happen,” I repeated.
“You worry too much,” he said once again.
Layer Two
Abbadon. Lierally, “destruction.” I never could have guessed how it would show itself to me.
First it was dark. Just dark. Infinite blackness. In the distance I saw a light, and began moving towards it. It was a single, slender, white candle. In its light there sat a girl, about two years old, totally naked. Throughout the vision I saw her in a dress, but my angel assured me that she was naked. “You’re afraid of sexualizing a child,” he told me, “so you imagine the dress. Trust me, she’s naked.”
The girl reached into thin air and pulled out little paper images. Some were of people, some of mountains, some of animals, some of cities, some of buildings, some of objects, and so on. She lit them, one by one, in the fire, and squealed with delight as they smoked away into nothingness.
“A child forever playing with fire who never burns herself,” my angel whispered in my ear. “This is pure destruction. It is pure, because she is innocent. The joy she experiences is absolutely perfect joy, unmarred by any malice, hatred, or spite.
I felt strangely moved by watching her. She was so happy. When I did the signs to obtain the glyph, she looked up at me, smiled brightly, and said, “Io! Pan!”
“We have to go back to the tower so that we can talk,” my angel said. “We have to get out of here.”
“Why?” I asked. “She seems fine.” She smiled at us.
“Do you think she can’t pull little paper images of us out of there as well?” My angel asked, with a note of incredulity in his voice. “She’s noticed us. It’s not fine. We have to leave. Like… now.”
So we left.
I was exhausted. I had been doing this for almost four hours. That’s… like… a REALLY long time for me. I try to keep sessions below an hour, twenty to forty minutes being ideal. But I pressed on. We came to the deepest pit of Hell.
Layer One
This was the most impersonal personal Hell I could imagine. Visually, it could have been out of a cartoon, with the deep hole carved in rock, the fire everywhere, endless stairways, except for one thing. I was the only one there. Hell is usually depicted as a pretty crowded place. But I was totally alone.
“Come on,” my angel said. “We have to get to the bottom.”
And so we did. And what was there? Satan trapped in ice? A great puppet master devil? A lake of fire?
Nothing. Just a pit. Almost, but not quite, bottomless. At the bottom there was nothing but bare ground and a circular rock wall.
“Everyone who comes here is here alone,” my angel explained. “This Hell cannot be shared. It is death. The grave. It is a pit in which to await the lake of fire. This is where Ariel brought the angels who taught men magick and gave rise to the Nephlim. They’re all here, although we can’t see them. There is no ruler of Hell beyond the aristocracy of Bar Shacath. It is pure silent loneliness, without even the sensation of pain or the companionship of a torturer to break the monotony.”
This was, indeed, the deepest pit.
I wanted to write my initials on the wall. I don’t know why. I guess I’m really, deeply stupid, but my inner tourist was like, “dude, this is the bottom of the world! Make your mark!”
“You really, seriously, don’t want to do that,” my angel said. “You don’t want to leave any trace of yourself here. Especially not your name.”
I half-heartedly argued with him for a bit, but I sort of knew how idiotic I was being. Still, part of me just couldn’t let it go, so we had it out for a while. This was THE BOTTOM, man! This was… like… IT. The lowest of the low. And I was there!
Yeah, I know, I’m shaking my head too.
OH WHATEVER. After the miserable assault on my self-esteem, the kick in the nuts, the four great jerks, the children of the corn, and the creepiest little girl ever (whose vagina my mind concealed from my natural senses) I was feeling pretty giddy. And now I had made it to the end. But it was… what? A hole? Just… an empty hole? I got the glyph and left. And that’s when Hell made sense to me.
And then I came back to my body. And I finished the ritual, but it wasn’t over.
So what does it all mean?
I have my own theories. I just hope this story somehow adds something to the lives of the people who read it.