convocation part three
So we were going to the Masquerade Ball. I went and changed into my masquerade clothes, and while waiting for Sara to appear in the lobby, I ran into a Christian witch who all but demanded I ask him questions about his practice. I got away from him and then found Sara and Arica, who were primping and looking completely adorable.
The DJ who spins at the parties I usually go to was doing the Masquerade Ball. I really wasn't in the mood to dance, though. I got introduced to some of Sara's old friends, and then tried to dance but it really wasn't working for me. So I went to the drum circle...Holy crap. 30 or 40 people just sitting around in a circle with drums, just banging away on percussion instruments. It was like chaos theory applied to music--every time someone changed their beat, the circle sounded just a little bit different and it made everyone else beat just a little bit different. I ended up dragging Sara to it, and she sat and did tree meditation while I banged on a drum so hard that my hands felt like they were burning. It was amazing. When the beat was really good, I felt like it was squeezing my heart and making it beat along with it, sending jolts of something into my body, like that one thing in "A Wrinkle In Time."
And then...I went to the UNDERGROUND CHAOS MAGICK CLASS.
It was about fifteen people stuffed into a room, several of whom were very drunk already. Mark Mandrake arrived about 5-10 minutes after midnight with some materials and told us that we could drink as much as we wanted because it was an adult class. He gave us a brief overview of chaos magick and then we jumped RIGHT into the fun stuff. "This is Chaos Club," he told us, and then he told us an extremely funny story about being kicked out of the IOT because of a seriously hilarious prank he played on the entire group involving a ritual where he channeled "Gay Mr. T" and told everyone to make fart noises.
While he was lecturing, the drunk girls kept flirting with each other and with him. He suggested everyone take a break before we got into the hands-on portion of the workshop, and proceeded to flirt with the girls. One of the girls got on him and started to tease him, saying, "Oooh, maybe you're really a sub." He said, VERY fucking slick, "Oh, I'm submissive to my own base natures." Some of the stuff he was saying about neuro-linguistic programming and mirror neurons are legit scientific theories that I've seen used in pick-up artist guides, so I am guessing he's one of the few people in the world who got something out of those guides without getting "Just act like a huge socially retarded douchebag misogynist" out of them. Anyway, the man is fucking slick. I was impressed.
So we got settled in and did a basic meditation, which didn't work very well for me. And then we talked about sigils and egregores. He said that we were going to make a sigil and an egregore to ensure all of us a safe journey home and good sex afterwards, so we worked on creating a mantra and a sigil while more people got booze. He had someone make a triangle on the floor with duct tape, and then he drew the sigil on a piece of paper and set it in the middle of the sigil, and had us yell the mantra at it. The paper fluttered a bit, and then he got a friend of his to destroy it. Then a girl asked him to take off the triangle, because she said that she was really freaked out by something that was in it. He said that it was all in her perception, and that her perception filter was "bad things happen in triangles" and that was why she was seeing the thing as bad. She disagreed, and then he climbed into the triangle and told her it was totally safe and then she felt better.
Then we took another break, and one dude told me that my aura was bluish-green and that he felt he could trust me. Cool. I was thinking, "I am a nice person and I won't screw you over, but I am intending to fake everyone out tonight."
Because we were doing possession. Here is how you get possessed: You spin around in a circle until you are dizzy (go into a trance state) while people chant the name of the thing they want to possess you. Mandrake got possessed by Dionysius first, rocking back and forth while everyone chanted something I can't remember. He eventually got out of it and looked around haughtily, stalking around with a wine bottle in his hand and going, "Well, this isn't much of an orgy, I'm disappointed." Then he "came back" and went, "Huh, what'd I do?" and asked everyone if he'd seemed "different" when he got possessed.
Other people got possessed. One guy said he wanted to be "one of my own inner demons" and ended up growling and going "I WANT TO BE FREE OF THIS BODY." One girl said she wanted to be "The Red Spider of the Internet" and bade everyone "LINK ME. MAKE ME FLESH." I was like, "Yeah, I am not doing that."
I felt that everyone was getting way too serious and announced that I wanted to be possessed by the Doctor. Everyone thought this was a great idea. Pagans LOVE Doctor Who. So I spun around while people chanted "DOCTOR! DOCTOR!" and eventually I felt a bit sick and went, "All right, all right, I'm here! You can stop chanting!" Secret: BEING POSSESSED IS ABOUT METHOD ACTING. I ended up bouncing around being a spaz, babbling about regenerating and my companion, and finally telling everyone that "Look, I think some of you want to be a bit more than human. Well, you're human! Humans are the most interesting thing I have come across ever! You should be very glad to be human! This world and what you've come from is really all you need." Then I bullshitted my way through a question about Article 15 of the Shadow Declaration, how to time travel ("Don't do it unless you're already suited to it, really") and TARDIS energy, which bummed Doctor Me out because it reminded me that GALLIFREY IS NO MORE. Then I was like, "OK, I want to go back," and I pretended I was regenerating.
Then Mandrake talked about possession. He said that if you weren't very much possessed, "like maybe an eighth possessed," then you would only be able to access information that your host body knew, "like if your host body doesn't know how to time travel, then the thing that's possessing you won't be able to tell you." Yeeeeah. I did think at first that he was subtly calling me out for faking it (he'd told a story earlier about having to deal with some douchebag who kept pretending to be possessed by demons), but later I told him that I'd been method acting, and was like, "Yeah, that's very shallow possession." So...okay. I dunno what to make of that.
Anyway, then we had a "Chaos mass" where we summoned Baphomet into Mandrake. He said to chant IO BAPHOMET and imagine an eight-pointed Chaos Star descending from the heavens into his head. Then he rocked back and forth, threw the \m/ horns, and flailed around like he was having a seizure. He crawled into someone's lap and hissed at them, then grabbed some wine, then fell on the floor and went, "What'd I do?" and then said that he'd blessed the wine and we passed it around and drank it. It was good wine.
I left before the orgy started.
*
The rest of the night was kind of tense. I went out for dinner with some friends and Sara and didn't have a place to stay, and I was feeling really down and strung out, and her friends offered me a place in their truck, and when I went back into the hotel to get my shit a dude from the chaos party found me and went "Oh no you are staying in my room tonight" and then I walked around outside with him for a bit while I tried to figure out a way to get rid of him. He said that I had a mind that was too much like a machine and that I had to "let go" and embrace oh I dunno whatever, mystical thinking or whatever. I got annoyed and ended up telling him that I thought having critical thinking skills was to my benefit, and then turned down his offer of sleeping in his room, which he was fairly nice about.
The convention was just about over for me at that point. I snoozed a bit, got up, felt like crap, got some free coffee, talked to Mark Mandrake and got some decent advice, went to a class that turned out to be a nice sober discussion of thresholds and boundaries, had someone tell me I looked like a Time Lord (which made Mark Mandrake LOL very hard), snoozed through a Lovecraft class I really wanted to pay attention to, and then went out for nachos with Ben and some of his friends. I also got to talk to the Priestess of Artemis, who was really nice.
I met a lot of really cool new people there and I'm happy I did. Next time, I think I will try to prepare better for the possibility that I will get no sleep and be invited to a crazy underground chaos magick class party that ends up with people being possessed.
The DJ who spins at the parties I usually go to was doing the Masquerade Ball. I really wasn't in the mood to dance, though. I got introduced to some of Sara's old friends, and then tried to dance but it really wasn't working for me. So I went to the drum circle...Holy crap. 30 or 40 people just sitting around in a circle with drums, just banging away on percussion instruments. It was like chaos theory applied to music--every time someone changed their beat, the circle sounded just a little bit different and it made everyone else beat just a little bit different. I ended up dragging Sara to it, and she sat and did tree meditation while I banged on a drum so hard that my hands felt like they were burning. It was amazing. When the beat was really good, I felt like it was squeezing my heart and making it beat along with it, sending jolts of something into my body, like that one thing in "A Wrinkle In Time."
And then...I went to the UNDERGROUND CHAOS MAGICK CLASS.
It was about fifteen people stuffed into a room, several of whom were very drunk already. Mark Mandrake arrived about 5-10 minutes after midnight with some materials and told us that we could drink as much as we wanted because it was an adult class. He gave us a brief overview of chaos magick and then we jumped RIGHT into the fun stuff. "This is Chaos Club," he told us, and then he told us an extremely funny story about being kicked out of the IOT because of a seriously hilarious prank he played on the entire group involving a ritual where he channeled "Gay Mr. T" and told everyone to make fart noises.
While he was lecturing, the drunk girls kept flirting with each other and with him. He suggested everyone take a break before we got into the hands-on portion of the workshop, and proceeded to flirt with the girls. One of the girls got on him and started to tease him, saying, "Oooh, maybe you're really a sub." He said, VERY fucking slick, "Oh, I'm submissive to my own base natures." Some of the stuff he was saying about neuro-linguistic programming and mirror neurons are legit scientific theories that I've seen used in pick-up artist guides, so I am guessing he's one of the few people in the world who got something out of those guides without getting "Just act like a huge socially retarded douchebag misogynist" out of them. Anyway, the man is fucking slick. I was impressed.
So we got settled in and did a basic meditation, which didn't work very well for me. And then we talked about sigils and egregores. He said that we were going to make a sigil and an egregore to ensure all of us a safe journey home and good sex afterwards, so we worked on creating a mantra and a sigil while more people got booze. He had someone make a triangle on the floor with duct tape, and then he drew the sigil on a piece of paper and set it in the middle of the sigil, and had us yell the mantra at it. The paper fluttered a bit, and then he got a friend of his to destroy it. Then a girl asked him to take off the triangle, because she said that she was really freaked out by something that was in it. He said that it was all in her perception, and that her perception filter was "bad things happen in triangles" and that was why she was seeing the thing as bad. She disagreed, and then he climbed into the triangle and told her it was totally safe and then she felt better.
Then we took another break, and one dude told me that my aura was bluish-green and that he felt he could trust me. Cool. I was thinking, "I am a nice person and I won't screw you over, but I am intending to fake everyone out tonight."
Because we were doing possession. Here is how you get possessed: You spin around in a circle until you are dizzy (go into a trance state) while people chant the name of the thing they want to possess you. Mandrake got possessed by Dionysius first, rocking back and forth while everyone chanted something I can't remember. He eventually got out of it and looked around haughtily, stalking around with a wine bottle in his hand and going, "Well, this isn't much of an orgy, I'm disappointed." Then he "came back" and went, "Huh, what'd I do?" and asked everyone if he'd seemed "different" when he got possessed.
Other people got possessed. One guy said he wanted to be "one of my own inner demons" and ended up growling and going "I WANT TO BE FREE OF THIS BODY." One girl said she wanted to be "The Red Spider of the Internet" and bade everyone "LINK ME. MAKE ME FLESH." I was like, "Yeah, I am not doing that."
I felt that everyone was getting way too serious and announced that I wanted to be possessed by the Doctor. Everyone thought this was a great idea. Pagans LOVE Doctor Who. So I spun around while people chanted "DOCTOR! DOCTOR!" and eventually I felt a bit sick and went, "All right, all right, I'm here! You can stop chanting!" Secret: BEING POSSESSED IS ABOUT METHOD ACTING. I ended up bouncing around being a spaz, babbling about regenerating and my companion, and finally telling everyone that "Look, I think some of you want to be a bit more than human. Well, you're human! Humans are the most interesting thing I have come across ever! You should be very glad to be human! This world and what you've come from is really all you need." Then I bullshitted my way through a question about Article 15 of the Shadow Declaration, how to time travel ("Don't do it unless you're already suited to it, really") and TARDIS energy, which bummed Doctor Me out because it reminded me that GALLIFREY IS NO MORE. Then I was like, "OK, I want to go back," and I pretended I was regenerating.
Then Mandrake talked about possession. He said that if you weren't very much possessed, "like maybe an eighth possessed," then you would only be able to access information that your host body knew, "like if your host body doesn't know how to time travel, then the thing that's possessing you won't be able to tell you." Yeeeeah. I did think at first that he was subtly calling me out for faking it (he'd told a story earlier about having to deal with some douchebag who kept pretending to be possessed by demons), but later I told him that I'd been method acting, and was like, "Yeah, that's very shallow possession." So...okay. I dunno what to make of that.
Anyway, then we had a "Chaos mass" where we summoned Baphomet into Mandrake. He said to chant IO BAPHOMET and imagine an eight-pointed Chaos Star descending from the heavens into his head. Then he rocked back and forth, threw the \m/ horns, and flailed around like he was having a seizure. He crawled into someone's lap and hissed at them, then grabbed some wine, then fell on the floor and went, "What'd I do?" and then said that he'd blessed the wine and we passed it around and drank it. It was good wine.
I left before the orgy started.
*
The rest of the night was kind of tense. I went out for dinner with some friends and Sara and didn't have a place to stay, and I was feeling really down and strung out, and her friends offered me a place in their truck, and when I went back into the hotel to get my shit a dude from the chaos party found me and went "Oh no you are staying in my room tonight" and then I walked around outside with him for a bit while I tried to figure out a way to get rid of him. He said that I had a mind that was too much like a machine and that I had to "let go" and embrace oh I dunno whatever, mystical thinking or whatever. I got annoyed and ended up telling him that I thought having critical thinking skills was to my benefit, and then turned down his offer of sleeping in his room, which he was fairly nice about.
The convention was just about over for me at that point. I snoozed a bit, got up, felt like crap, got some free coffee, talked to Mark Mandrake and got some decent advice, went to a class that turned out to be a nice sober discussion of thresholds and boundaries, had someone tell me I looked like a Time Lord (which made Mark Mandrake LOL very hard), snoozed through a Lovecraft class I really wanted to pay attention to, and then went out for nachos with Ben and some of his friends. I also got to talk to the Priestess of Artemis, who was really nice.
I met a lot of really cool new people there and I'm happy I did. Next time, I think I will try to prepare better for the possibility that I will get no sleep and be invited to a crazy underground chaos magick class party that ends up with people being possessed.