Angels of Wrath: Wield the Magick of Darkness with the Power of Light
by Gordon Winterfield
As promised in my previous post, here is my review of the second of two books from the Gallery of Magick which I have read recently. Angels of Wrath by Gordon Winterfield may be said to tackle the subject of what certain occultists on social media refer to as “Baneful Magick,” that is, the magick of cursing people, with death, injury, illness, or just unpleasant life circumstances.
But first I would like to digress – and address the subject of the Dark Fluff phenomenon.
Apparently this term was coined by Jake Stratton-Kent to refer to a trend in modern occultism which deals with dark themes such as demons, qlippoth, Satanism, Luciferianism, “the Adversarial Path,” etc etc etc, but which when subjected to critical analysis is found to be just as superficial as so-many badly written books by fluffy-bunny neo-pagans. Actually I wonder whether this is a generational thing? With the cooler, more serious – and older – occultists being cast in the role of Boomers, and the Dark Fluffsters playing the role of the Millenials?
But to return from my sub-digression to my digression. Whilst Jake Stratton-Kent was undoubtedly correct on the one hand, it would be a mistake to assume that it is a modern phenomenon. That is, if you go back through history, you will find “it was ever thus” – that Dark Fluffiness has always existed, not under that name, but as the idiot younger brother to serious occultism. Indeed, one of the worst perpetrators of Dark Fluffiness in modern times was in fact this man:
J’accuse Arthur Edward Waite: perpetrator of Dark Fluff!
The evidence…
Yes indeed. Whilst to many Waite is responsible for pompous, ponderous texts which piously advocate mysticism whilst decrying magick, and which are so verbose one would think he was being paid by the line to write (I’ve seen some of his rituals which he had privately printed, so I can confirm he wrote that way for free!), yet he shamelessly and deliberately exploited the Dark Fluff phenomenon when he wrote The Book of Black Magic, in that he deliberately focused on the most lurid and notorious of the black magic grimoires. In so doing he managed to reinforce popular prejudice against ceremonial magick – and retard intelligent scholarship on it for almost a century!
Take for example the subject of making Pacts with spirits. In this book, Waite focusses on grimoires, such as the Grimoirum Verum, which imply that making Pacts necessarily involves selling your soul to a demon. Aleister Crowley, even though he never missed an opportunity to excoriate Waite on any other occasion, in writing himself about black magic unwittingly followed this trope without question – as did many other occultists of the twentieth century – because they knew no better.
We now know, however, thanks mainly to the research of people like Stephen Skinner and David Rankine, that there are and have been other grimoires which paint a much different picture – that a Pact is simply where you get an evoked spirit to agree that it recognizes the authority by which you have summoned it, and that it agrees to perform your instructions. The MSS for these grimoires were no more nor less accessible than those of which A E Waite made use when writing his Book of Black Magic, so why did he not refer to them at the time – to provide a more balanced view of the subject?
The answer can only be that lurid, sensational tales of Faustian pacts, satanic rites, and diabolical sorcery sell books, whilst works which are balanced and scholarly are, quite frankly, boring. Far from being the man of integrity as which Waite wanted to portray himself, he deliberately pandered to the salacious fascination of his readers, because he wanted to make money from his book. This is exactly the aesthetic for which Serious Occultists criticize the Dark Fluff movement!
There is a quite separate criticism of Dark Fluff, in that Supposedly Serious Occultists (to whom I shall refer as “SSOs” henceforth) claim that most of it is just made up. To which I would have to disagree. Some of Dark Fluff is not made up, but based on bona fide sources – it’s just presented in a manner which horrifies the SSO. So for example, people like E A Koetting – say what you will about his egregious marketing technique (e.g. like the fact that it’s egregious), but he does base much of his material on actual historical magick.
A large part of Dark Fluff is admittedly invented, but this is justified by the authors on the basis that is based on Chaos Magick, or their own magickal workings (and hence, UPG). The Simon Necronomicon is, of course, outright fiction, but is nevertheless defended by its supporters who claim that it works notwithstanding.
So for instance, “Angels of Wrath” – which was the original point of this blog post. It is a book intended for popular consumption, and it contains the influence of the author’s own methods of working which have little to do with the methods of the traditional SSO, instead aiming to get the reader able to practice the magick contained in the book as quickly and easily as possible. It is, however, based on some old kabbalistic sources, at least one of which, the Sepher Ha Razim, is reckoned to date to the fourth century AD, or almost contemporary with the Sepher Yetzirah. However, when looking at the Sepher Ha Razim, one quickly realizes that despite its kabbalistic background, it itself is a lurid sensationalist grimoire in its own right – in other words, it is a 1700 year old Dark Fluff book! However: one could just as easily take the view that it’s no more lurid or sensationalist as, say, the Greek Magical Papyri, or almost any other grimoire from any period in history.
One may therefore claim that Dark Fluff is not a new phenomenon, but may be defined as any (dark) magical practice which is literally Antithetical to the SSOs’ conventional wisdom at the time it is propagated. However, every good Hegelian ought to know what tends to happen “antitheses” eventually…
Incidentally, the Sepher Ha Razim demonstrates that in ancient times Angels were not looked upon as light fluffy beings at all. Kabbalistic Magicians did not have truck with Goetic spirits per se because actual Angels performed all the tasks of the Goetic spirits themselves! I have heard other Jewish sources speak ominously about Angels before (e.g. Z’ev Ben Shimon Halevi) so I wonder if the Angels-good/Demons-bad dichotomy is not a Judaeo-Christian idea at all but merely a Christian one: in other words, it’s not that one is good, the other bad, it’s that they’re all bad.
As to the book “Angels of Wrath” itself: I found that the preparatory exercise which the author proposes, “The Stillness,” to be an excellent meditation in its own right, very effective at inducing an altered state of consciousness, and possibly worth the price of the book by itself. However when it comes to the “baneful magick,” I run up against a problem. To my mind, the only way to ever get good at magick is to practice it repeatedly, and the kind of magick that is described in this book is not the kind that I want to practice even once. Hence this book would only be useful to a magician who is in constant fear for his or her life – e.g. because they live in a war-zone – or is a complete psychopath. Either that or they live in a third world country where the government positively encourages its citizens to defend themselves with deadly force – I suppose that with such a casual attitude to fire-arms, baneful magick must not seem so outrageous.
Angels of Wrath: Wield the Magick of Darkness with the Power of Light by Gordon Winterfield – available as a paperback on on Kindle from Amazon.
The Golden Dawn was my entry into occultism generally, and consequently the Tarot as well. Hence Robert Wang’s 
was the first deck I ever bought: it was the one on which I learnt. The trumps struck me as the most impressive, although I confess I thought the art-work was a bit ordinary. Nevertheless this is still my default deck today, the one which I most use for doing readings. I have to admit though that if I were buying a Golden Dawn deck for the first time today, I would probably get 
instead, mainly because the art-work is livelier.
Aleister Crowley’s 
).
This is not really a Tarot deck per se, more a Cartomancy deck. It is not based upon the traditional Tarot format at all: instead, each card represents a portion of the Enochian Watchtowers and the Tablet of Union. Meanwhile, the reverse of each card instead of having a uniform backing has elemental symbolism (corresponding to the Enochian associations on the obverse side) which can be used in skrying. The meanings of the individual cards take a bit of getting used to, although there is a logic to the general scheme which is based on GD teachings.
Given that the 
I decided to get hold of this after seeing a fellow Tarot reader use this. What I find most appealing is that the creators of this deck have based the artwork on Greek mythology. Hence: the suit of Cups is the story of Cupid and Psyche; Wands is the story of Jason and the Argonauts; whilst the characters in the Major Arcana are identified as Greek gods and goddesses. This is a visually appealing deck because, like the Rider Waite one, all 78 cards are fully illustrated. Also it is refreshing to see a deck which goes with an original idea for a change which comes off successfully.
Of all the Tarot decks which are available, the ones that particularly interest me are those created by Occultists – as opposed to the many which appear to be novelty decks, or created by people with only a superficial understanding of the subject. Hence my reason for being drawn to not only the Golden Dawn, but also the Crowley Thoth, Rider Waite, etc decks. I suppose it was thus inevitable that I would seek out the Builders of the Adytum, given that it was designed by not only an occultist but by an actual Tarot scholar, Paul Foster Case. The thing about the BOTA deck is that it comes uncoloured: the point being that as a student learns about the Tarot, they use their own knowledge of the esoteric associations of colour to colour it in themselves. Unfortunately I discovered that the BOTA deck is very hard to come by on Amazon – with one going for over £100.
This is something of a curiosity which came into my possession, and of which I have not made use since acquiring it. The trumps feature a lot of lurid artwork – dragons, monsters, scantily-clad buxom women, etc – which only vaguely references traditional tarot imagery. Meanwhile the accompanying booklet puts a Vama-marga Tantric spin on interpretation of the cards.
: fortunately though, I have seen a copy dating from a Stella Matutina temple circa 1916, so I have been able to compare. Now this is a proper ritual. It has drama, it has beautiful ritualistic speeches, but most importantly it introduces in the course of the ritual several key qabalistic concepts which provide much food for thought. The ritual should be read in conjunction with the account of W B Yeats’ own experience of this ceremony, which is printed in George Mills Harper’s 
, which gives details of the astral work that went on invisibly as the ceremony took place.
. It catches Waite as he was beginning to embrace mysticism, yet had not completely thrown off all of the trappings of the original GD. Now here is a curious thing: despite superficial differences, much of the underlying structure of the first Waite ritual is identical to that of the Stella Matutina version. E.g. the aspirant remains in silence until released in the final part of the ceremony, he or she goes into the Vault for a period of meditation, before encountering the Shekinah, who leads the aspirant out. Intriguingly, Waite identifies the Shekinah as Nuit, and the newly advanced aspirant as Horus. Could this in fact mean that Waite was a secret Thelemite (extremely ironic given the caning he received from Crowley in the Equinox)? Or perhaps when Crowley received the Book of the Law, the Gods were telling him not to become the prophet of a new aeon, but that he was now ready to become an Adeptus Major?
Sol Ascendans - The Website of Alex Sumner 
David Bowie: Closet Occultist!
It being 2021, this year will inevitably see many five year anniversaries marked, none more keenly felt than that of the great David Bowie, who together with the passing of Lemmy marked the start of the second worst year of recent memory, to wit – the dreaded 2016. The tragedy was so great that it had the effect of drawing the Occult community, which is normally riven by fractious arguments, together to an unprecedented degree. Ironically, this post which I wrote at the time became the most read article ever on my blog.
So the news this week has been dominated by the passing of David Bowie, and when I consider how much attention was paid to the untimely death of Freddie Mercury – the last pop star of comparable status to leave us – it is almost certain that this event will remain in public consciousness for years to come. Anywho: amongst the magical community, it has been widely noted that Bowie was interested in the occult, as witness his interview with NME quoted at the top of this page, and the back cover over the Station to Station LP, below left:
Photo used for the back cover of Station To Station (1976)
Video for Lazarus (2015)
NB: given the amount of Charlie he was packing away at the time, his precise allegiance might well be pinned to the Holy Order of the Sun! Interestingly, Bowie resurrected the costume covered with, ahem, “white lines,” for his almost-certainly-not final music video “Lazarus” (above right). Might not this video be suggesting that David Bowie did not just keep this costume but this persona hanging up in the closet all this time?
But I digress.
There is an image in the Lazarus video on which a number of bloggers have already commented: where Bowie sits frantically writing at a desk, on which rests a skull. Now the obvious interpretation is that it was a reference to Bowie’s own impending mortality, but when I saw it, it stirred the Sumner Family Brain Cell to life, and got me thinking, where have I seen that before?
See: 3minutes 38seconds.
The answer is: it comes from the first degree (Apprentice) ritual of the Ancient & Primitive Rite of Memphis and Misraim – a particularly esoteric form of Freemasonry. Assuming the candidate for initiation passes the ballot, just before the ceremony of his initiation,
The “Philosophical Testament” consists of the candidate’s reflections on his duties to God, the World, and himself: but more especially, like its name suggests, how the candidate would answer these questions if his words were the final legacy which he leaves on Earth. However, the code-word “philosophical” indicates that one is meant to interpret it alchemically. In other words, Death is not the end for the candidate – i.e. for David Bowie – but is the first step on the path to spiritual transmutation.
So, there you have it – Bowie indulging in esoteric symbolism right up until the last!
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