- Joined
- Jul 3, 2023
- Messages
- 100
- Reaction score
- 211
- Awards
- 3
Stance is like a cobra. It does not argue. It does not prevaricate. It shows up and the room re-arranges itself, just like magick, though it does not concern itself overly much with either theory or praxis, these being the prettily woven chiasm of twin serpents to the right and to the left of the winged staff of Mercury, creating by their crossing over the gates through which power flows like a Uraeus. And if the staff be that of a king, stance will see fit to envenomate and to devour them, even as Moses cast his staff before Pharaoh. So it is best to approach the subject with obliquity, for it is in the angle that the secret of the art is concealed.
Now, stance might instantiate spontaneously if the witch comes from an established lineage, such as the Judaic or the Neoplatonic, but only then if it has become so deeply embedded that it verges on proprioception. In other words, if it becomes the medium through which you move; if it becomes the eyes of the world you look through and not something of which you are consciously aware then it can be said that stance has devoured the twin serpents of theory and praxis. And don't get me wrong here. The eye through which you see, the medium through which you move is the in-forming of a living spiritual tradition, stance arising out of that as an emergent condition. To turn this around is to invoke the dark angel. You cannot practice stance. You cannot bring it about. You cannot imitate it, nor can you inherit it like your family jewels, for stance is sovereignty, and sovereignty is nothing special.
In the good old days of plague, decapitations and other sundry pleasures stance simply meant knowing your allotted place within the great chain of being. It was knowing where you stood. In fact, it gave you a place to stand. Your own place, vouchsafed by the divine, and from which nothing, be it in heaven, on earth or below it could move you. To come from stance, then, is in modern parlance to place the inertia of the entire creation behind your Will, by divine fiat. Everything else is optional because when you stand within the inviolate integrity of your own being magick is no longer something that you do. It becomes something that you inhabit. This, anyway is how I read all of those endless orisons in our beloved grims....as orientation, as positioning. But, well, most of us don't live in that world anymore, a world where reality itself was ensouled, and where spirits walked with us, but we can ground ourselves to the vertical axis without collapsing the one into the other, and that is where belief comes in. I will leave it at that for now.
Now, stance might instantiate spontaneously if the witch comes from an established lineage, such as the Judaic or the Neoplatonic, but only then if it has become so deeply embedded that it verges on proprioception. In other words, if it becomes the medium through which you move; if it becomes the eyes of the world you look through and not something of which you are consciously aware then it can be said that stance has devoured the twin serpents of theory and praxis. And don't get me wrong here. The eye through which you see, the medium through which you move is the in-forming of a living spiritual tradition, stance arising out of that as an emergent condition. To turn this around is to invoke the dark angel. You cannot practice stance. You cannot bring it about. You cannot imitate it, nor can you inherit it like your family jewels, for stance is sovereignty, and sovereignty is nothing special.
In the good old days of plague, decapitations and other sundry pleasures stance simply meant knowing your allotted place within the great chain of being. It was knowing where you stood. In fact, it gave you a place to stand. Your own place, vouchsafed by the divine, and from which nothing, be it in heaven, on earth or below it could move you. To come from stance, then, is in modern parlance to place the inertia of the entire creation behind your Will, by divine fiat. Everything else is optional because when you stand within the inviolate integrity of your own being magick is no longer something that you do. It becomes something that you inhabit. This, anyway is how I read all of those endless orisons in our beloved grims....as orientation, as positioning. But, well, most of us don't live in that world anymore, a world where reality itself was ensouled, and where spirits walked with us, but we can ground ourselves to the vertical axis without collapsing the one into the other, and that is where belief comes in. I will leave it at that for now.
