Real power? So you've done this and accomplished great things? Or been around people who have?
If the answer is NO to both, then I wonder how you know this?
Similar things, yes. Those rites in particular? No. Nor am I associated with anyone who has performed them.
I have the means to get what I want without magic, although magic may have lead me into having those personal means. Sex, money, power over others. It's all so simple. It just requires changing yourself and changing your perspective--your perspective of yourself and others. When you have almost died, when you are in real trouble, when you experience heartbreak or grief, you can learn to look beyond yourself. You see things that those who live comfortably cannot. Things they refuse to see, try to isolate from society. Suffering is the greatest teacher. But I would be stupid if I thought that made me invincible, elite. The body is so weak, the mind is so weak. So naturally, I look for things that let me experience things outside the pale. I find it hard to rouse desire for other things, they're boring. I want something more than this relative playground--or prison.
I'll share two stories from when I was younger and less disciplined, if that might help:
Sometimes I found myself in the right state of mind, doing things in a ritual manner. Intuitively. The world around you changes. Very subtly. Mostly in people, greatly in nature. I hesitate to continue at the risk of sounding LARPy, but there was one time a storm came in on a calm day. Very sudden, out of season. The sky turned dark, as I saw outside the window. The rain poured down, but it was still light out on account of the sun. Quite beautiful. The air smelled different, sharper. The smell of petrichor was positively electric. It was almost all you could smell. Shapes revealed themselves in the clouds--more than simple pareidolia. All those are very basic signs, I know, but I wasn't even conjuring anything. Just putting energy towards something I had felt once, focused towards an intent. Whatever I felt made itself present, perhaps it was at the heart of my intent. The intent being to work out some violent emotions I had towards someone and release them. I enacted that in a ritual manner while playing relevant music. The location was under renovation, with a suitably troubled history. I was barely conscious of all that at the time, like my emotions had possessed me and I just did what felt right.
Another time, around the same age, was in the dead of winter. That is a particular time of winter. When everything is not just cold and snowy, but full of some kind of starkness--the stars seemed closer. I had been researching the shamanistic underpinnings of lycanthropy, how they relate to a supposed ancient vampire cult (one book in particular sticks out). Whereby these "shamans" could arise from their physical form to harass the living or take the shape of wolves or other creatures. I had been trying for a while to come into contact with a particular spirit, using their 'name'. I even dug a grave and laid in the cold earth, calling out to no result. So as a last ditch effort I opened a window to let the cold in and laid in bed, and with a sudden fear greater than I had ever known, I called out. Offered myself. A similar feeling would be walking unarmed into a forest host with wolves and howling with no regards to yourself. I closed my eyes and kept repeating it in my head. I heard footsteps in the snow, they drew closer. I felt the terror well up, and I shot up and closed the window. I retracted from whatever connection I had made, revolted. Come to find out, from someone other than myself, that the camera system had been triggered by something outside. But there was no one there. I went outside to investigate, and there were footsteps which lead to the window and stopped. There's many mundane explanations for that, though.
Anyway, what I read from them describes similar things to what I have observed. The Black Mass uses already existing energies (egregores as you have described them in a different thread) and distorts them, the ritual of death follows a deduction I made about the nature of curses. I have also directly observed that there are particular kinds of powerful forces which can create upheavel in the world around them by their very nature. Create apparent phenomena, but through the distortion of something. As if they are literally swimming through it. Or coming into it. For one kind: dishonorable things become revealed and people act against those who performed them, people engage in acts of liberation (although it may appear as rash violence or acts of terror), moments seem as if they have some dark purpose behind them, and so on. Dates and times line up in odd ways. The news rings with more chaotic events than usual, dripping with apocalyptic relevance. But for the person who accesses that
whatever it is before they are ready, and gives it a path into our world, they may appear to be undergoing some kind of psychosis. Altogether changed, fervent. Dissociated, willing to die. Visions of creating some grand future, of being chosen, ready to produce some group or assume some leadership that will change the world. But their psychosis is rooted in how the world changes around them. The hollow crust, our -isms and lifeless abstractions--they still afflict them if they have not dealt with them, if they have not wrangled with "Choronzon". Thus the delusions, and the perhaps unfortunate limitation of whatever it is that has drawn itself up inside of them. The effects are then chaotic, uncontrolled. Unfocused. It may cause them to seek out, or have something happen which causes, their death. Releasing that
whatever it is into the world, or feeding it. I believe it may be what they describe in their terminology as a "Dark God". Kenneth Grant describes similar things in his writings. I've heard people say there's some inspiration there.
Just imagine if you could direct something like that, use it to create change. Imagine what kind of person could be host to that without drawing up circles, or intellectualizing it away like I might. Would what most people do really compare? Perhaps what we see of people who say they're from that organization are the people who have experienced
whatever it is they're calling up. And not being of the right character, end up self-destructing or becoming mentally ill.
; Rebis) represent the harmonizing of the polar male/female opposites, the esoteric musical performance and chants are intended to invoke energies that relate to the influx of 'azoth'. A gate among the stars is visualized and 'opened' (the gates within the participants are perhaps thus opened). This seems to be a lesser variation of some of their other rituals, which themselves are variations of a single formula called the "Rite of the Nine Angles", intended to use a ritual form for the creation of a temporary or permanent gate, tunnel, or interface between our world and these other dimensions. The primary chant used to represent this ('Nythra Kthunae Atazoth') can be translated as something like, "From the Abyss, Azoth comes forth (increases) like a flaming dragon."
