The Occult Conference 2018 “Death and the Lovers” – Day 2 of 2

On day two I took the time to sleep in, tour the beautiful Abbey and see some of the oldest man made structures I’ve been privileged to see (oldest we get here in the US is in the New England and it doesn’t date further than the 1600s), and then attend Janet Farrar and Gavin Bone’s talk. While this was the only lecture I managed to attend that day, it was so invaluable that dedicating my entire blog post to it will not leave people wanting for more.

Their lecture was entitled “Polarity Magic”, and I came in not sure what to expect and left not only having felt privileged to attend but also all the better for it. They covered a number of topics pertaining to energy work and its importance in the Craft plus did an exercise with everyone present in order to experience a bit of their teachings for ourselves.

Teaching how to do the thing vs either expecting people already know, will pick it up, or clearly don’t know how to teach how to do the thing is something I’ve ranted about for years. I’m a “natural”, which means that I learned how to do a lot of energy work and magic when I was little, all on my own and through mostly necessity vs simply curiosity. Part of that background, while fortunate, also means that trying to help others to learn how to do the thing and/or learn how to better my skills at doing the thing leaves me at something of a loss. Thankfully there are trads out there who readily instruct, and I wish that I had found them so much sooner.

Or to directly quote from Gavin Bone during the lecture: “People knew how to drive the magical car, but didn’t know how it worked.” A lot of us, self included, figured it out intuitively but not knowing the precision and technique. Which meant that not only can we not instruct others well, but we also will struggle in troubleshooting, fine tuning, and ultimately improving our own skills. He accurately identified a part of the struggle: much of what can be learned in regards to energy techniques which are useless come from eastern traditions, but racism both overt and institutionalized has prevented us from being able to access those teachings within groups.

Gavin Bone discussed how Regardie got around that whole “teach the chakras without actually teaching them” bit, which was to invent the Middle Pillar exercise and teach how to get that engine going. He also described a fantastic metaphor to understand the chakra system, asking us to visualize a bath tub shaped in the form of a human body, filled with water and with seven plugs at each of the chakra points. Water is ever flowing into the backs of these chakras–which goes into our own backs–and out the front, with every other one flowing counterclockwise, the rest clockwise.

After taking the time to describe this metaphor, he then had us do an exercise partnered up with another person in which we visualized energy flowing into the crowns of our heads into our hearts then out of our left arms into the other person, plus the reverse coming up from our root chakras at our feet upwards. Coupled with the symbolic Great Rite during the standard Wiccan ritual of the athame inserted into the chalice filled with wine, the energy flowing makes a figure eight/infinity symbol, powering the rite itself and blessing the wine.

The conference concluded with another chaos magic rite conducted by the Illuminates of Thanateros, which was both fun and connected us all joyfully as participants of this weekend’s events. The most important thing that I feel that I’ve digested out of everything is this: I want to attend again next year, and will do everything in my power to be able to do so.