Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. This is a special New Year’s edition with my guest, Damien Echols. Damien Echols is a ceremonial magician, an artist, and a death row survivor, author of the New York Times bestseller Life after Death and a new book from Sounds True called High Magick.
The story of his wrongful murder conviction has been the subject of the HBO documentary, Paradise Lost, and a documentary produced by Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh called West of Memphis. Damien spent 18 years and 76 days on death row, including 10 years in solitary confinement. He credits his practice of ceremonial magick with saving his life; and now that he’s been freed from prison, being a teacher of magick is his purpose.
In this conversation with Damien Echols, we talk about what it means in magick to build a light body. He shares with us one of the central practices that he teaches—a fundamental practice in the tradition of high magick. Here’s my conversation with Damien Echols.
Damien, I wanted to begin our New Year here with you because I experienced you as having a contagious, bright inner light that I want to share with the Sounds True audience as we launch into the New Year. First of all, welcome.
Damien Echols: Thank you for that.
TS: Yes.
DE: Thank you. Thank you for having me back again, too.
TS: You’ve said that the point of magick—and you’ve written a new book, High Magick, that’s magick with a k to distinguish it from parlor tricks—that the point of magick is to constantly ingest more of divinity. Tell me what you mean by that?
DE: I heard a quote one time, something that Beethoven said and I thought it was . . . “He said the purpose of life is to approach divinity as closely as we possibly can, gather its rays, and disseminate them out to mankind.” And I thought yes, that is absolutely the purpose of life. But a spiritual practice should be that in almost a condensed form.
Think about it this way. People say you are what you eat. Well, our diet doesn’t only consist of things that we put into our mouths. It consists of every single thing that we consume. Whether it’s with our ears, the music we hear, the conversations that we listen to. Whether it’s with our eyes, whether we choose to take in beautiful, life-affirming things that are going to increase the vibrational frequency of our consciousness, or whether we choose to dwell in things that are less savory, take those in—everything that we take in is part of our diet. And just like they say, you are what you eat.
What we’re trying to do is grow spiritually at all times. When we do magick, there are kind of two reasons to do it. One is the reason that most people are familiar with, which is manifesting things, and that could be anything from a relationship or a job or to quit smoking or lose weight. Manifestation is anything that you’re wanting to make part of your material plane reality.
The other reason that we do magick is for what I call spiritual sustenance, where we’re constantly taking in energy: divine energy, purified energy, high vibrational frequency energy. The reason that we want to do that is—the analogy that I give to people to describe what magick does, how magick works is to say imagine if we had a glass of water and you just leave that water sitting there until it stagnates and debris forms in it and it’s got a film on top of it. Before you know it, it looks like a fish aquarium that hasn’t been changed in way too long. Well, if you turn the faucet on in the sink and hold that glass up under the facet and just let it overflow and overflow and overflow, eventually, what happens is you end up with a clean glass of water again. This is the same thing that we’re doing when we’re doing magick. The way we flush ourselves out is by absorbing more and more divine energy.
The place where we start with that is through the two basic practices: the Middle Pillar and the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. You can build on these things. For me personally, I tell people that if you’re only going to do one practice that’s in high magick or one practice known in the realm of ceremonial magick in general, use the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. What you’re doing whenever you do that is not only pushing energy out of the area where you’re doing it, but you’re also, after you finish pushing energy out, making the area sterile. You then invoke energy back into that area, replacing everything you pushed out with something more pure.
We do it usually in high magick by picturing these things as archangels. Archangels are the intelligences that govern certain kinds of energy or that preside within that energy. For example, we start with Raphael the archangel of east who is air, Gabriel the archangel of the west who is water, Michael the archangel of the south who is fire, and Uriel the archangel of the north who is earth. We absorb. We call that energy into our circle, which is then absorbed by our aura.
Have you ever noticed how around Christmas time there’s always a certain feel in the air that you don’t feel at any other time? And it builds up as we approach the solstice. You can feel something different in the atmosphere, something special. Then the day after Christmas, it’s just gone, it’s back to life as usual. That’s because we’ve absorbed that energy. We put it out there in the form of songs and decorations and trees and giving gifts. We’re creating this energy and it’s also set in motion. There’s a particular kind of energy that combines with it due to the fact that we’re at the solstice itself.
We and the rotation of the Earth are creating a giant current of energy which we then all, as humanity, absorb. That’s why we have all of these traditions. We absorb energy from every single person, place, and thing—and sometimes even concept—that we come in contact with, which is why it’s so important to be very, very mindful of what you’re absorbing.
TS: OK, there’s a lot here, Damien, and I’m going to slow us down a little bit. As part of our conversation, I want to talk about the manifesting part of magick, but we’re going to do that later. The other part you talked about is spiritual sustenance, and I want to begin with that part of magick.
You talked about how there are these two central practices in high magic. One is the Middle Pillar, and the last time you and I had a conversation, you taught the Middle Pillar practice and I was tremendously amazed by it. It reminded me of practices that I’ve learned from qigong and also somatic meditation and other traditions as well, really working with what’s known as the central channel of the body.
DE: Right, right.
TS: OK, now you’re introducing another practice, central to the practice of magick, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I have to say this sounds pretty weird to me. We’re banishing something or other and we’re using a pentagram and it uses archangels—and I’m imagining some of our listeners being like, “OK, this is clearly too weird for me.” So tell me a little bit more about what I am banishing with the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram?
DE: What you’re doing, whenever you do the Lesser Banishing, you are basically sterilizing. It has two effects. One, it energetically sort of sterilizes the environment that you’re doing. You can do it in two forms, the Lesser Banishing Ritual and the Lesser Invoking Ritual.
Whenever you’re doing this, you are clearing all … Say, for example, we had energy everywhere, and it may not be energy that is particularly conducive to either of our aims, whether it be spiritual sustenance or whether it be manifesting something. Say, for example, you live in a space where you can’t have a little temple area set up or you have to use a room that you use for other things, like your living room. And you had a party there the night before and you had 10 people in there and they were all drinking and talking and having a good time, but you may not realize that someone in there was really, really angry because of something that happened to them at work that day. They are releasing small bits of that into your temple environment. Someone else may be really depressed. They’re going through a really hard time at home. Someone else just may not be on the path toward awakening yet. They may just exist in a really dense state of egoic consciousness. All of those energies . . . Remember when I said every thing, person, and place that we come in contact with, we exchange energy with? Well, they leave traces of their energy in their environment, just like we do. Everywhere we go, we leave little traces of ourselves almost like, as unattractive as it sounds, like dead skin cells.
Whenever we do the Lesser Banishing, we are pushing all of that energy out of the environment and essentially creating a temple. When you do the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, you are erecting a temple to divinity wherever you do it—making sure that there are no low-vibrational frequencies in that area. So that’s one aspect of it.
Another aspect of what it does—and this one I can’t emphasize enough because it is the most vital to energetic and spiritual development—it’s almost like doing calisthenics for our aura. Whenever you do this long enough—remember I’ve said invoking this energy into you— whenever you’re bringing this energy into you, old energy is getting pushed out, just like in the glass of water that you hold under the faucet. Once you take enough of that energy in, whether you’re focusing on energy centers in your body or not, the way you are with the Middle Pillar or the chakra system, you’re still flushing them out with pure hot vibrational energy. The more they get cleared out, the more you start to use more ethereal aspects of your energetic anatomy. You become—and I hate this word because I always think it leaves people the wrong impression—but it’s what we think of when we think of becoming psychic.
The more you do these things, the more you are able to pay attention to what other senses in your anatomy are relaying to you. We’re receiving and paying attention to information you’re deriving from more subtle senses. That’s what I mean by saying it’s almost like doing calisthenics for your aura.
You can also get to a phase . . . This is one of the things that I understand probably would sound weird to people whenever you’re describing something like this to them. It was doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and mild variations on it that I started to develop while I was in prison. I had a lot of time on my hands and I started to experiment in a lot of ways and I started to add more elements to the Lesser Banishing, which is a really, really simple practice just by itself. You could do it in five to ten minutes. I kept working with it until I developed forms that would sometimes take two to two-and-a-half hours. What happened once I reached a certain state is it allowed me to begin perceiving intelligences that exist on other levels or other layers of reality.
What I mean by that—it sounds crazy, but you start off just envisioning these angels. Trying to breathe chi into them, breathe life into them, to make them as solid and real as you possibly can. It’s like in Alcoholics Anonymous when they say, “Fake it until you make it.” You’re visualizing as strongly as you can an angel. Well, what happens is eventually, for me at least, there came a day when I saw an angel for the first time. I didn’t register it as anything that we normally think of as angels. It’s not a blonde-haired, blue-eyed person with wings on their back. The only way I can articulate what I was perceiving is to say that it looked like two black triangles. There were no facial features, no appendages, nothing. And I’m not perceiving it with my eyes on the physical level of reality. I am perceiving it with whatever the energetic equivalent of that sense is. But I still knew to the core of my being that this intelligence was just as sentient and aware of me as I was of it. It scared me so bad.
It’s one thing to say you believe in something—I believe in Jesus or I believe in angels or I believe in God or I believe in karma, whatever it is. Believing in something is one thing, but actually seeing it, knowing to the core of your being that it’s no longer about believing. I have seen the reality of this. That’s an entirely different thing. Even if you have believed in it your entire life, once you know that it’s real, the alienness . . . I mean it is such an alien intelligence compared to ours. It’s such an alien—what’s the word?—experience. It’s not something you experience every day.
TS: What was the context? What was happening? You were in prison at the time when these two black triangles appeared to you and you knew it was a representation of an angelic being, an angelic energy. What was the context? What was going on in prison for you at that time?
DE: You know, I honestly can’t remember, appeals-wise, what was happening or environment-wise—like what the guards were doing or the inmates were doing or anything else—just because I honestly paid very, very little attention to anything going on in the prison. There were times when I would not even think about the fact that I was in prison for weeks at a time just because I was doing what I love doing, which was magick.
There are talks where I’ve tried to describe to people the concept that we have in magick called “will” and your will is similar to dharma in Buddhism. Dharma can have many meanings. One is just the teachings of the Buddha. Another meaning is more like aligning yourself with the current that flows through the universe, finding your place, what you’re here to do. That’s what our will is. My will was to do magick.
There were times when I would be so consumed by my spiritual practice that I didn’t even register the prison. I can tell you that what I was doing when it happened was . . . OK, for example, when we started doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, we’re using the four angels or archangels that correspond with the four elements. I eventually started adding the seven angels that preside over the energies of the planets. When we’re talking about things in astrology like Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus, and things like that, I started to add those.
After I got familiar with that—and I could tell a huge difference just adding those energies. After I finished with that, then I started adding the archangels that preside over the different spheres on the Tree of Life in the Qabalah. That was whenever it happened. I was invoking the angel that we call Tzaphkiel. She represents the darker aspect of the divine mother, like the banishing, binding aspect—anything that deals with time—if you want to push things out of your life that don’t serve your purposes. You could, say, invoke prosperity or banish poverty. She would be the intelligence that you called on to banish poverty or to banish loneliness or anything that no longer serves your growth. She was the first one that I saw. She was the two black triangles.
Interestingly enough, her color, her corresponding color on the Tree of Life is black, which was probably why I saw these black triangles. But the other thing, I came across some mystic—and I can’t remember who it was—I came across their writings about angels a few years later and they said that if we could truly perceive these intelligences as they really are, the closest things that our minds could comprehend them as would be geometric patterns, which was what I saw: black triangles.
TS: Now, you mentioned that it was terrifying. What was terrifying?
DE: Yes. I think it’s just the fact of how alien it is to our existence. There’s a difference in believing and knowing. You can believe something is true but when you’re confronted with the fact [that] angels exist—these things are real, and they are an integral part of our reality, they are part of the very weave and structure of what we perceive as reality—when you confront that, when you see that firsthand, not someone telling you, not reading in a book, it changes you in a very, very dramatic way.
I think everyone involved in any religion whatsoever always experiences times of doubt. Say you’re a Christian and you go to church and something really bad happens in your life and you start to question, “Well, if there were a God, why would he allow this thing to happen to me?” Something in that vein—everyone experiences that until you see it.
If you see an angel, there’s no more doubt. You may not understand all of it, but you at least know that we are not alone. These aren’t just myths, these aren’t just fairy tales passed down from generation to generation. These things are real. Whenever you’re confronted with something like that, it changes the way you experience reality. It caused every hair on my body to stand straight up, just from how alien this experience is from anything you’ve ever known before. If I were not locked in that cell, I would have probably run. Not because there was anything malevolent or anything of that nature, just because of the alien quality of it.
It made me realize why . . . I always tell people that I believe the Bible is the greatest book of magick ever written, once you know how to read it. That’s the key, you have to learn how to read it first. But in the Bible, every single time that an angel appears to someone, the first thing it always says to them is, “Be not afraid.” That’s because it was having the same effect on them that it was having on me. Their understanding of the universe, their understanding of reality is being completely restructured in that moment, and it can be a psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually overwhelming experience.
TS: Now, I’m going to take a moment here, Damien, and I’m going to testify. And it’s not about having seen or met an angel—as much as I wish I could testify to such a thing. Although I do want us to do a short version together here, in this conversation, of the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I want us to do that.
DE: Very good.
TS: But first to testify for a moment, when I saw you recently on your book tour for High Magick, we were together at the Boulder Book Store and you were doing a book launch event, and we spent a little time together in a room, just the two of us. I felt from you a quality of light and presence that is pretty rare. I don’t feel that very often from people, and part of the reason I wanted to have this follow-up conversation with you and have you as a guest on Insights at the Edge to kick off the New Year was I thought, something’s going on with Damien and the practices he’s doing. They’re really working. He is becoming a source of living light as a human being, I can feel it.
Just before we do the practice, I wonder if you can comment on that because I think you’re also aware of the fact that the practices you’re doing are changing you in some pretty profound ways.
DE: They absolutely are in ways that . . . in some ways, I’m even still uncomfortable talking about, just because we’re talking about things right now that will seem really far-out there to some people, like witnessing an angel. I went on to have other experiences after that and that’s the whole point of magick is to … I think different traditions are designed to do different things. I think magick does some things that other traditions may not do and other traditions do some things that magick may not do.
But when you continue this process, what happens is we think of magick as a current of energy that is passed from master to student, master to student, just like in certain lineages of Buddhism where you receive a transmission. What they are literally doing is passing you a current of energy. You become what is magically called a current bearer. Well, this current of energy goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, to Sumeria. This was something that I didn’t even realize when I started doing these practices. It’s very, very hard to put these things into words, much less words that don’t sound insane. But just as I saw the angel, I had an experience several months ago.
Like I said, I had to gradually build back up to doing magick. When I walked out of prison, I was doing magick for eight hours a day. The day I walked out, I couldn’t even do it for eight minutes. It was like something in me was shattered, broken in a way that I thought was beyond repair. I thought I would never be whole again. I had to start working my way up again doing magick for five minutes, 15 minutes, half an hour, an hour. I gradually built back up to being able to do seven hours a day, which is what I was doing out here—invoking all of that energy into my aura for hours and hours a day—flushing myself out, firing up energy centers, coming online.
The first step in the process was I started to experience the disintegration of what we think of as ego. Most people, I think, don’t really understand yet what ego really is. When we hear that word, we think of it as someone . . . meaning they’re full of themselves or something like that. That is not what it is at all. Ego, in a spiritual context, in a Buddhist context or ceremonial magick context, what we’re talking about when we say ego is anything within your consciousness, anything within your psyche that leads you to live in this illusion that we are separate from divinity, that we are separate from everything else that exists on Earth.
Everything that exists is almost like one organism that we are a part of. One person is a toe, one person is a finger, one person is an ear—but we are all part of one thing. It is ego that prevents us from being able to perceive that. Once again, there’s a difference in believing that that’s true and perceiving that that’s true, experiencing firsthand the truth of that. Once I built back up to these practices, doing them for seven hours a day, I experienced that phenomenon firsthand.
TS: Tell me what that was like. What happened? I mean I get the idea but what were you experiencing? Tell me what it felt like, what you saw.
DE: Keep in mind that for a period of about six months I was basically doing a retreat. I would go to bed at 10:00 at night, get back up at 2:00 a.m. At 2:00 a.m. I started doing magick every day and I would do it all the way around the clock, back until 10:00. Sleep for four hours, get up, start again. I was doing this every single day.
What happened was—and once again, this is something that’s really, really hard to put into words—the only way I can articulate it is I experienced myself as almost like a handful of sand that someone threw in a tornado. I just came apart, just completely disintegrated, like sand in a windstorm. It was absolutely terrifying.
Not only do I experience my ego—part of my psyche, part of my consciousness—disintegrate, but at the same time I started to get really ill. For a period of about a month, I was so sick that I could barely do anything. I thought I was dying. I thought that I was very, very close to saying goodbye to this world physically and emotionally and psychologically and every other way.
I thought, you can’t disintegrate like this and survive. This is what people are talking about whenever they’re talking about experiencing the second death. Well, eventually—it didn’t stop, it went on for about a week straight—eventually I realized or it hit me, wait a minute, if I’m disintegrating, then who is observing the disintegration process? Obviously, it can’t be me that is ceasing to exist because I am observing the phenomenon. Therefore, I am not what I thought I was my entire life. I am the intelligence that has existed slightly behind what I thought I was—what we call the ego.
Once that happened, it was like all terror was gone. I just accepted everything. And the more I grew to accept things, like even my own what I perceived as coming mortality, the more I started to heal on every level. I started to heal physically. I started to heal emotionally after 20 . . . finally, after 20 years of prison, I finally started to heal from the trauma that I have suffered in there due to this experience and the acceptance of it.
As that began to happen, something else took place. And this is one of those things also that sounds kind of odd, but just as I saw the angel, I experienced what we would call God—but not in a generic way like that, not just this vague generic concept of God. For me, for whatever reason—I think any time we are interpreting things like this, they have to pass through lenses within our psyche, things we’re familiar with, contexts that we’re raised by—so for me, it was in a particularly Western form, a form that I had never yet heard of, but still a Western form.
Once the terror subsided of thinking that I was going to die, I saw as plain as day, a word spelled out. I’m not talking about with my eyes. I’m not talking about on the material level of reality, [but] on whatever level of reality we are perceiving when we’re looking at things like angels, I saw the letters: E, N, L, I, L. I had no idea what that was, not the slightest clue. A few days passed before it even occurrs to me, well, why don’t you Google it? See what comes up from it on the internet.
TS: I love it, I love it. Deep, mystical experience meets Google.
DE: Exactly. When I looked up this name, it was like—I can’t even describe the impact it had on me. This name is the very first way that mankind in the Western world perceived divinity. It goes all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, to Sumeria, what would be present-day Iraq, to a city called Nippur. In Nippur, there were no kings at all. All that existed in Nippur was a temple to Enlil, which is what they called the source of creation. Even though there’s no kings, kings from all other lands have to come to Nippur to receive this current to be initiated by the priest of Enlil. If they don’t receive this current, if they don’t undergo this initiation process, then they’re not really seen as true kings. They’re seen as just some guy sitting on the throne, taking up space until the real king arrives. The Sumerians said only Enlil decides who will be king.
All these kings, these pharaohs, these rulers from other places come, they receive this current. Just as it happened to me, it gets translated through different lenses—cultural lenses, within their psyches, it takes on different names. They take it back to their countries to pass this current on to other people. This is the birth of ceremonial magick. It dates all the way back to ancient Sumeria. It has ties that go all the way back to the very first perception of divinity by Western man.
TS: So Damien, now, as we promised our listeners, I want to have us actually do together the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I’d like to play this from the audio series that you created with Sounds True, A Course in High Magick. Let’s go ahead and play that now. And Damien, you and I can do the practice together as we listen to this teaching from A Course in High Magick.
DE: So now, we’re actually going to begin doing the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram together, sometimes also known as the LBRP.
Keep in mind that whenever you perform this ritual, you are a creating a sacred space. You are erecting a temple in which to do your magick. Magicians from past generations used to call this “standing between the worlds.” You are literally, physically standing in the midst of a circle that you’ve created that is neither completely of the material world nor completely of the spiritual world. Instead, you’re somewhere in between, standing with a foot in both places. Always keep that in mind whenever you start so that you can go about this with an attitude of reverence or gratitude. Never let it fade or become jaded to it until it seems like just another exercise. The amazement of the fact that you’re actually doing magick—always keep that alive, always keep that in the back of your mind so that you bring that sense of awe into what you’re doing.
Stand in the center of the room where you’re about to perform the Lesser Banishing. First, we’re going to begin by doing the Qabalistic Cross. Close your eyes and see yourself standing at the center of the universe. All around you in every direction as far as you can see are stars. Direct your attention up to the very top of the universe, where you see a brilliant blinding white light. This light is the source of all creation, the energy from which everything came and to which everything, including us, will one day return.
As you inhale, see a shaft of light descend from that source all the way down through the universe, until it reaches the top of your head. With your right hand, reach up to your forehead and touch your forehead with the first two fingers of your right hand as if you’re getting ready to make the sign of the cross and we’re going to vibrate Ateh.
Now lower that right hand down to your chest and as those two fingers are touching the center of your chest, see that shaft of light continue down through your head, down through your neck, down through your chest, your pelvis, your legs until it continues on all the way down to the very bottom of the universe, so that you have this shaft of light that descends all the way through your body and all the way through the universe rooting you in place, holding your consciousness steady. As you’re touching the center of your chest we’re going to vibrate Malkuth.
Move that right hand over to your right shoulder and touch your right shoulder with those same two fingers and see that shaft of light continue out through your right shoulder and all the way through the universe, all the way to the very end of the universe on your right side, anchoring you there. And as you see it, and as you’re touching your shoulder, we’re going to vibrate Vegeburah.
Now move that right hand over to your left shoulder and see that light continue out through your left shoulder, out through the entire universe, until it connects with the very far end of the universe on your left-hand side, so that now you have a cross of light running through the center of your body, anchoring you in place, keeping your consciousness rock solid no matter what comes against you in life. While we’re touching our left shoulder, we’re going to vibrate Vegehdula.
Now cross your arms: cross your hands across your chest, whichever way you feel comfortable, left on top of right or right on top of left. But as you’re holding your hands in the center of your chest, over your heart, see that cross make a brilliant, blinding white light through your body. You’re now rooted to the top, the bottom and both sides of the universe. You are at the very center of all creation. See that cross glowing as brightly within you as you can make it glow. Inhale and see it glow even brighter, hold it, and we’re going to vibrate Le Olam, Amen.
Now let your arms drop to your sides and step forward to the easternmost wall of your temple, of the room where you’re going to perform your magick. Inhale and see the light of the universe go through your body, out through your feet, until it fills up the earth itself. The entire earth is full of the chi, full of the energy that you’ve inhaled. Hold it to the count of four and reach out in front of you with your right hand, extend your right arm in front of you, extend the two fingers on that right hand. As you see the light flood up from the earth, out through your feet, out through your hand, you’re going to use it to trace a pentagram in front of you of blue flame.
Go from your left hip to your forehead, down to your right hip, over to your left shoulder, over to your right shoulder, back down to your left hip, and visualize in front of you a flaming blue pentagram that you’ve just drawn. Inhale again and see the chi rush through your body, out through your feet until it fills the entire earth up beneath you. Hold it. Thrust your right hand through the center of the pentagram you’ve just drawn, letting all of that energy rush back up through you and into the pentagram, and we’re going to vibrate Yehowah.
Now stomp your foot lightly, just to seal it in. Just so the energy is sealed inside and does its job. Inhale again. See yourself absorbing chi from the universe all around you. It rushes through your body, out through your feet, until it fills the center of the earth itself.
And now as that energy rushes back up through your body, out through your hand, you’re going to draw a line of white light from the center of that pentagram we’ve just created, all the way around the room, until we reach the southern wall of our temple. Again, we’re going to repeat the process. Inhale. Fill the earth up with light. Hold it and draw the pentagram on the southern wall of your temple from your left hip to your forehead, down to your right hip, over to your left shoulder. Your right shoulder, back down to your left hip. We’ve drawn another flaming blue pentagram. Inhale and fill the earth up with chi beneath us. Hold it and thrust your hand through the center of the pentagram you’ve drawn and vibrate the name, Adonai.”
Stomp your foot lightly so that you seal the energy inside that pentagram. Again, inhale, see the light go through you and fill the earth beneath your feet, hold it and continue drawing the white line from the center of this pentagram on the southern wall all the way around the room until you reach the western wall of your temple. Now, again, repeat the process, inhale and fill the earth up with light, hold it and as you exhale and the light rushes back up through you, draw another flaming blue pentagram with your right hand beginning at your left hip, up to your forehead, down to your right hip, across to the left shoulder, across to the right shoulder and back down to the left hip. Inhale and fill the earth with chi. Hold it, thrust your hand through the center of the pentagram you’ve just drawn, letting all of that chi, all of that energy rush through you and into the pentagram and vibrate the divine name Eheieh.
Stomp your foot and seal the energy within that pentagram. Inhale and draw the light through you down into the center of the earth. Hold it and continue drawing the white line from the center of the pentagram on your western wall all the way around to the northern wall of your temple. Now at the northern wall of our temple, again, inhale and fill the earth with light beneath your feet. Hold it, and then again draw the pentagram, beginning at the left hip, up to the forehead, down to your right hip, across to your left shoulder, across to your right shoulder, back down to your left hip. Again, inhale and fill the earth with light beneath your feet. Hold it and thrust your finger through the center of the pentagram while vibrating the name AGLA.
Stomp your foot to seal in the light, to seal in the energy, and now inhale and fill the earth with light beneath your feet, hold it. Now as you exhale, finish drawing the white line from the center of the pentagram on the northern wall of your temple all the way back around to the eastern wall of your temple and join it in the center of the pentagram on the eastern wall so that you have a circle of white light going around the room and you have a flaming blue pentagram in each of the four directions.
Go back and stand at the center of your room, right in the middle of that circle. Keep your eyes closed and just for a moment try to visualize all of these things around you simultaneously. See the flaming blue stars. See the brilliant white circle and now we’re going to inhale and see those things glow even brighter than they are already glowing. Inhale, hold it, just see everything flaming brightly around you and exhale. Let the air out but all the energy still stays in.
Now hold your arms out to your sides in the shape of a cross and focus your attention on the flaming blue pentagram before you and we’re going to say, “Before me, Raphael.” We’re going to, as we inhale, we’re going to see the figure of Raphael expand out of the pentagram before us, standing guard over our temple.
He’s wearing brilliant yellow robes. You can feel the warm, wet air of an early spring day flood into your sacred space. Inhale and see Raphael before you as bright as you can make him glow, and then vibrate his name, Raphael. As you do it, try to see the angel himself vibrate with the power of your voice.
Now without turning around, still facing forward, direct your attention back behind you to the flaming blue pentagram behind your back and again, as we inhale, we’re going to see the Archangel Gabriel expand from the center of this blue pentagram.
She’s wearing ocean blue robes and you can feel autumn, the feel of autumn, what autumn means to you, the energy of autumn flood into your temple. It’s cool. It’s damp. It’s slightly earthy. It floods into your temple and combines with the energy of spring that was already present. Now focus on Gabriel as she stands behind you. We’re going to inhale and see her glow even more brightly. Hold it and then vibrate her name, Gabriel.
Now direct your attention without moving to your right-hand side. See the flaming blue pentagram at the southern wall of your temple and as we inhale we’re going to see the Archangel Michael expand out from the center of that pentagram, blocking and protecting the southern wall of our temple. He’s wearing flaming red robes and as you envision him, as you see him doing this, you’re going to feel the energy of summer come into your temple, into your sacred space. It’s very hot, very dry air. Try to feel the feel of summer against your skin as you see Michael standing there. Inhale and see him glow as brightly as you can make him glow and then we’re going to vibrate his name, Michael.
Now without moving, direct your attention to the northern wall of your temple and as we inhale we’re going to see the Archangel Uriel expand out of this pentagram. Remember Uriel is wearing earth green robes and as you envision him, try to feel the feeling of winter in your temple, the cold, dry air. Everything you associate with winter, feel it flood into your sacred space and mingle and combine with the other elements, the other seasons, the other energy, lending his blessing and his favor to the magic that you’re about to perform. Focus on him and as we inhale, see him glow as brightly as you can make him glow. Hold it and then we’re going to vibrate his name, Uriel.
Now direct your attention without moving up above your head and there, you’re going to evoke the Archangel Metatron. You’re going to see him dressed in blindingly white brilliant robes, completely protecting and sheltering our temple from above so that nothing that we don’t invite into the sacred space can enter. Inhale and see him expand there, hold it, and then we’re going to vibrate his name, Metatron.
Now direct your attention beneath your feet into the earth itself and there, as we inhale, we’re going to see the figure of the Archangel Sandalphon form beneath our feet completely protecting and enclosing our temple from below so that no unwanted energies can enter the space. She’s wearing a very pale brown robe shining brightly. Inhale and see her beneath your feet. Hold it and then we’re going to vibrate her name, Sandalphon.
Take a moment to see all the angels around you. See the pentagrams surrounding you and see the circle of white light that goes around the room. Say, “For around me flame the pentagrams,” and inhale and see them glow even brighter blue than they already are. Hold it, exhale, and now we say, “Within me, shines the six-rayed star” and as we inhale, see a star, a six-pointed star right in the center of your chest made of two interlocking triangles. The upward pointing triangle is red. The downward pointing triangle is blue. It represents the complete balance of all the elements within our temple. Focus on the hexagram, that six-pointed star in your chest, and we’re going to inhale and see it glow even brighter. Inhale, hold it, and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in.
Focus on the line of white light, the circle of white light surrounding the room. Inhale and see it glow even brighter light. Know that you’re putting even more energy into it. Inhale, hold it. Now with your arms still extended, turn your palms facing upwards and envision yourself hooking your hands into that white circle around you. Almost as if you’re doing a jumping jack, bring your hands together, palms together above your head and envisioning yourself pull that circle of white light with you so that it closes like a dome above your head and completely seals the top section of the room.
Now stretch your arms out to your sides and do the same thing. Hook your fingers psychically back into the circle surrounding the room and close your hands, bring them down to your waist envisioning that you’re closing the dome beneath your feet, so that now, not only have you drawn a circle of white light around the room, but you’re inside a sphere, a sphere of white light completely encases the temple you’ve created. You truly are now between the worlds.
We’re going to inhale and see the sphere of light glow as bright white as we can possibly make it glow. Inhale, hold it, and exhale. The air goes out but the energy stays in. You’re now standing between the worlds in a sacred space that you have created. Even after you’ve done your magick within the space and you’ve left and moved on to the rest of your day, this energy will still linger. It will still leave traces behind. You have blessed the space that you’re in. You’ve cleared it of negativity. You’ve created a temple to magick right where you stand.
After we had done whatever practical magick we were going to do in this space, we would then slowly begin to come back to a normal state of consciousness. Do it gently. Take as much time as you need. There’s no need to rush or push. Just be happy that you’re alive. Let the thrill, the excitement, the amazement of the fact that you are now a magician—let that flood through you. Savor it. Know that you now have the power to shape your life to be whatever you want it to be.
TS: Alright, Damien, a couple of things. First of all, I can certainly understand that if you were doing practices like this for seven or eight hours a day, month after month, how you would have the experience you shared with us of feeling like sand in the wind. I get it.
Now, for that person who says to themselves, you know, look, I don’t have seven to eight hours a day to do spiritual practice. I have a family, I have a job, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think the impact will be of practices like this?
DE: Practices like this, even if you don’t do it for seven or eight hours a day will still have a profound impact on your psyche and on your consciousness. Before I worked my way up to even doing that much, I started doing exactly what we just went through. Only took a few minutes, doesn’t even take an hour. I started doing that.
Everybody’s got time to do that. You’ll hear people say sometimes, “I don’t believe in magick.” What they actually mean is they’ve never done it. Magick works whether you believe it or not. If you do these practices the way they’re meant to be done, they will have a very specific effect on our psyche. I spent years with Zen Buddhism, struggling to do these practices that I had read in other accounts, read in books, saw people talking about on TV shows. They say that it would allow them to experience the present moment, to fully reside within the present, within the now, without their mind going constantly to the future or to the past or making up what-if scenarios or whatever.
We normally do not exist in reality. No matter how much we think we do, we don’t. We exist within our conceptions of reality. We are experiencing something within our own heads most of the time. When I started doing practice exactly like we just described—takes only a few minutes—at one point I can remember this was another one of the two biggest defining moments for me. One was when I saw an angel for the first time and it removed all doubt for me forever. The other time, and this doesn’t sound as dramatic, but I’d been doing this practice for probably about four months, just a few minutes a day, and I sat on the side of my bed in this prison cell and I reached down to put my shoes on and it hit me like an atomic bomb. I had an epiphany. I realized, “Oh my god, I am actually experiencing the present moment.”
Of course, once you think that, it’s shattered and you’re back into this conceptualization. But for a split second at least, I had finally experienced what I had been trying to experience for so long. And it was like a side effect—it’s not even the main point of this practice. Like I said, the main point of this is number one, to flush our energy out, to stimulate our energy centers. It’s like calisthenics for the aura, all these different things, you’re not even thinking along Buddhist lines anymore of experiencing the present moment. It happened almost as a side effect when I was least expecting it.
One of the things that someone can expect, even if you don’t have seven hours a day, even if you don’t have an hour a day, if you just do what we did for 10, 15 minutes, however long it takes, you will finally experience reality for the very first time in your life.
TS: I mentioned, Damien, that when I spent time with you in November that I felt this quality of presence about you and also light. I know that in ceremonial magick, there’s a cultivation of a light body and I can see in the practice you just taught us why that’s so. I mean, we’re bringing all of this light into our form. Just tell me about that and how you experience, if you will, the light body.
DE: OK, the point of magick . . . What we’re going for is not even what we think of as enlightenment. It’s almost as if spirituality or what we’re supposed to be doing here . . . We are a species with amnesia. We don’t even remember the reason we’re here. People think that the reason we’re here is to become one with divinity, however you want to phrase it conceptually: to be enlightened, to exist in unity with God, whatever it is. That is not the only reason we’re here. If it were, we would have never been born, because you are all those things before you incarnate into the physical realm.
We incarnate for a reason. Part of that reason is a practice that goes beyond what we think of as enlightenment. Enlightenment is just the ability to dissolve back into the void from which we came at will, to eradicate ego at will. Just by concentrating on it for a second, you dissolve back into the unity with all of creation. That’s what we think of as enlightenment.
What magick strives to do beyond that is something very similar to what in Tibetan Buddhism they call Dzogchen. If you’ve ever researched stuff like this, you can look at pictures of this online. It’s a really well-documented phenomenon.
Lamas who practiced the Dzogchen tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, when they die, for a period of seven days after they die, the body is not supposed to be moved. It’s left right where it is and for seven days, all the other lamas, all the other monks, will continue to practice near the body. Over the seven-day period, the body begins to shrink. It doesn’t decompose, it doesn’t give off an odor of decay. As a matter of fact, there are eye-witness accounts of people saying they actually could smell stuff like flowers and incense and that they saw light coming from the body. But over a period of about seven days it gradually shrinks until you have something at the end of that week that looks like a very tiny mummy, which they will then take and put on a shrine and this lama’s remains then serve as a holy artifact, a holy relic within this temple.
They say, especially in magick, they say that if you completely and absolutely master this process, the only thing that will be left after a period of seven days is hair, fingernails, and toenails. The reason those things are left behind is because they’re not connected to our nervous system. Everything that’s connected to our nervous system is affected by this process. What you’re doing is building a vehicle to allow you to survive what we call the “second death.” The first death is when the physical body dies. The second death is when the next level begins to disintegrate—what we think of as our astral body or our etheric body.
Eventually, after all of these different layers of our energetic anatomy unravel, you’re left with just a pure core of energy. There’s no personality, there’s no anything left to it. It’s basically been put through a cosmic washing machine, returned to just pure energy, which is then recycled and put into other things, other forms. When you hear people talk about past lives, you’ll hear people say, “Well, I went through hypnotherapy and I saw in the past life that I was Cleopatra.” Or, “I did this kind of meditation and I saw in a past life that I was Aleister Crowley.” Whatever it is, whoever it is, you’ll hear a hundred different people say they were the same person.
You know, you never hear anyone saying, “Oh, I was just this housekeeper out in the middle of nowhere who never did anything of real historical significance. There’s always a big reason for it. That’s because these people are not actually seeing past lives. What they are doing is tapping into the part of consciousness that the psychologists Jung called the collective unconscious. They are sort of … The only equivalent I can give is almost like someone who’s watching television and gets confused and starts to think they are the characters in the TV show. They are tapping into a very deep and very real part of the collective human consciousness but that does not mean they were that person.
Like I say, we go through this cosmic washing machine process. Unless you have developed what the Tibetans called the “rainbow body” or what in magick, in alchemy, they call the “solar body,” in gnostic Christianity and ceremonial magick, we call the “light body,” you are literally constructing a vehicle of light that at the moment of death, you project your consciousness into so that it never undergoes the second death.
The reason we want to do that is number one, that’s how you completely and absolutely liberate yourself from this wheel of incarnation—coming back over and over and never being able to remember anything and having to start from scratch every time—so you completely free yourself of that chain. But also, you are from that point on for all intents and purposes, something very similar to what the Tibetans would call a bodhisattva. You are an unbroken consciousness that can then help other people complete the process. Not only in the way we think of, but once you’ve reached that stage of development, you have transcended all limitations. Limitations that we have like space and time, you no longer are even bound by those.
So say, for example, you had a holy man wandering through the desert to the Middle East somewhere in the year 1200 and he has no food and he has no water and he’s going through this desert probably facing certain death, but he has faith. He loves God with his whole heart and he believes that God is going to take care of him. God is going to provide for him. He may not know how, he can’t see a way, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a way. He has faith in God. You can then go back to that year, to that time period, and become the seed that will turn into an oasis that will provide that holy man with water and sanctuary so that he can continue his practices and complete this process.
We want everyone to be able to do this because the more people who wake up, the faster everyone else is going to start to wake up. Then once everyone is awake, then we start to wake up something even bigger.
TS: Is it fair to say that a goal of magick with a k is this discovering of the light body, discovering of oneself as a light body?
DE: Building it, you have to construct it and you can … That’s the reason for the body shrinking after death. It’s because most people, when they incarnate into the physical realm, we are literally ingesting divine substance through our bodies, through inhaling, through eating, through drinking water, through interacting with each other, we are taking on energy. That energy is in our body. It is encoded in our DNA, it becomes part of us.
Whenever we’re building the solar body or building the rainbow body or the light body, whichever term you prefer, we are removing that divine substance from our physical form and sort of building a new form with it.
It sounds really complicated in the beginning. It sounds like you’re … A lot of people will probably hear this and say, “Oh, that’s just too hard. I’m never going to get this. I’m never going to figure this out.” It will lead you step by step. In magick, you reach a stage called developing the knowledge and conversation of your holy guardian angel. We call it the HGA ritual for short. What this means is you are coming into contact with some people, say, it’s your higher self, some people say it’s a completely and absolutely independent entity, independent intelligence.
Whatever it is, from that moment on, once you develop this connection to this intelligence or to this higher self, that becomes your teacher. From that moment on, it will lead you step by step through this process. As long as you keep trying, as long as you keep putting one foot in front of the other, divinity will take another step toward you to meet you.
TS: Now, you were talking about how when we build the light body individually that something comes from that afterwards that has to do with some type of collective evolution that you were pointing to. What was that? I didn’t quite get it.
DE: Well, think of what it really comes down to, and this is really hard to articulate, but it’s size. Every single thing in our universe is made of consciousness, is made of vibration. Science used to think that we’ve lived in a solid world. We now know that we don’t live in a solid world. Our senses perceive it that way but it’s not. Everything around us is made of protons, neutrons, electrons, waves, and particles. Well, all that is, is sound waves. All it comes down to is vibration. Everything in the universe consists of vibration.
Remember a while ago, when I said that we are all part of one organism, like one person might be a finger, one person might be a toe—once we wake up, we realize that all together we are still combined, just another part of an even bigger organism, that all of this collectively may only be the thumb of this intelligence. The point—and this sort of goes back to, in Buddhism, when they talk about all sentient beings—we are not just going through this process. We’re not just laboring to awaken humanity. We are doing this for all sentient beings. That implies that there are sentient beings that are not like us.
Yes, we have the animals, we have the fish, we’ve got the birds, we’ve got things like that. But we also have things on other planes of reality, levels of existence that most people may not be even aware of—something like the elementals or things that, in the West, we’ve grown to lump everything into one of two categories due to the prevalence of Christianity.
We think of angels or demons and there’s nothing in between. Well, in actuality, there is an entire ecosystem that exists on the etheric, astral, mental, whatever levels of reality that are all around us that we can’t even perceive. We are almost blind and deaf when it comes to perceiving reality. We can’t even see the entirety of the light spectrum. We can’t even hear the entirety of the sound spectrum, like dog whistles. We can’t even hear when someone blows a dog whistle. We can’t see x-rays. We can’t see infrared. There is more of reality that we are incapable of perceiving than there is that we are able to perceive.
Other intelligences exist on every level of reality that we do, except perhaps the physical level of reality. This is the meaning in the Bible about how man was given dominion over the earth. That doesn’t mean you rule over things and they’re to be disposed of at your will. It means that you are responsible for the spiritual cultivation, the spiritual sustenance of doing everything you can to complete the Lord’s Prayer when it says “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
We’re put here as shepherds to bring as much light as we possibly can down into this realm of existence to free every sentient intelligence here. We are all part of something much, much bigger than we can conceive of.
TS: Now, Damien, this conversation is going long for an Insights at the Edge podcast conversation. However, I do want to circle back to one thing we talked about at the beginning that I promised our listeners we would touch on, which is you were talking about high magick addressing both spiritual sustenance, which we’ve been both practicing together and talking about, as well as manifesting. When you taught us this lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, at the end you said, and this would be a good precursor towards “manifesting something.”
I noticed part of me just feels like oh, come on. After all of this, after talking about finding ourselves, being part of a huge organism, we’re really going to talk about manifesting—like the person who’s listening to this who wants a new this or a new that. It just seems so petty and stupid and small to me. Tell me how to do you view manifesting in the light of this deep spiritual work that you’re describing.
DE: Well, for some reason—and I have no idea why—people have sort of gotten it into their heads that having things or even wanting things is somehow evil or bad or makes us less in some way, and it doesn’t. I mean, a while ago I was saying that we are all the children of divinity, the thing that for me that I call Enlil. We are the children of this thing.
Now when you have children, don’t you want the best for them? This thing wants the best for us. There is nothing wrong. I mean there’s obviously a difference between blatant materialism and greed versus manifesting a pleasant life. These practices, you may never get to the point where you can practice seven hours a day and be able to do all of this really long-ranging stuff if you can’t pay your bills. You’ve got to be able to pay your light bill. You’ve got to be able to have heat in the winter. You’ve got to be able to provide for your family.
There is nothing wrong with any of those things at all. I don’t really think of them as petty. I just think of them, for me, I am so focused on God, on Enlil, on divinity at all times that sometimes for me dealing with things like that just feel almost like a nuisance. Like OK, let me do whatever I’ve got to do so survive materially so I can get back to being focused on God. During those times I focus on material aspects of reality. Of bringing in more income or making myself feel safe, putting like a shield of protection around the building where I live, things of that nature.
Manifesting and elevating ourselves spiritually overlap. For example, I burn incense on my altar every day of frankincense, dragon’s blood, and white copal. I collect massive amounts of ashes from these things that have been blessed, that have been infused with divine energy. I don’t just throw this ash away. I take it out in my neighborhood and I sprinkle it around my entire neighborhood. Sometimes I’ll take train rides all around New York City just to sprinkle these ashes all over the place to sort of elevate the vibration of the consciousness.
That’s a form of manifesting. That’s a form of trying to make this place better, not just on the energetic level, but on the material level for everyone who lives here. I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with manifesting things, even if it’s just a parking spot in a crowded parking lot.
These are facts of life that we have to deal with. If magick did not help us deal with those things, then most people probably wouldn’t be drawn to it in the first place to be honest.
TS: Damien, in conclusion here for this special New Year’s broadcast of Insights at the Edge, I want to call this “Building the Light Body.” Any final thoughts for our listeners?
DE: I just want to say thank you guys so much for listening to me again. Thank you so much for wanting to read my book, for coming out to the talks. I really appreciate you guys. Keep me in your thoughts and prayers and I will do the same for you.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Damien Echols. He’s the author of the new book, High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row and with Sounds True, he’s also created an audio teaching series, A Course in High Magick.
Thank you everyone for listening. Soundstrue.com: waking up the world.
