PART 2 of 2
The next thing I had to do is to try marijuana, as everything I had ever been told about it was allegedly a lie. He insisted it was holy, and the reason our protestant tradition was so empty was the lack of connection to a true sacrament. This insistence went on for months. After much badgering, on a winter walk through the forest, I finally took the pipe just to get him to shut up. I sucked on the glass as he lit it and watched it glow and glow until it was burnt down to the ash. After I exhaled that huge milky cloud of harsh pungent smoke, I haven’t been the same since.
I never expected anything to happen, I had no idea about drugs beyond that they make you end up writhing and jabbering on a piss-scented mattresses, picking at your skin for bugs, stealing from convenience and liquor stores. I was assured no piss-scented mattresses would entail but otherwise had no expectation. With marijuana in particular, I figured if it did anything, it made you sleepy and chill and maybe hungry, and it had a yellowish ambiance. I didn’t think drugs did anything other than that- but in the aspen forest in mid December just before Christmas, when I took that first toke, I felt my teeth sinking into sand. I heard the crunches of snow under my feet reverberate in the deafening silence, and felt every sound tickle my ear like gold foil. I felt like the snowy forest floor I was standing on was a white jagged N64 polygon, one pixel thick, the only object in infinite blackness. The effect on memory and space, and my vision being chopped into frames, made me feel like I was skipping between parallel dimensions a couple times a second. It freaked me out. He finally brought me back inside and I huddled under a blanket, he put on some music and told me to relax. “Marijuana can’t kill you, you’re just high. This is what being high is.”
When I was huddling under the afghan, I closed my eyes, and I was enveloped in tiny spinning robin’s egg blue and lavender pinwheels of minute and extremely detailed two-dimensional geometry. In the center of a mandala, I saw a tiny naked pink impish-looking girl with a mushroom for a head- she was seriously naught two centimeters tall, and she noticed me noticing her and made contact wordlessly. Her personality was bubbly, playful and amorous, and I could detect her lilting voice without literally hearing it. She told me she was my hyperspatial girlfriend- what I later hypothesize as some Freudian manifestation of a subconscious sexual structure- and she said the equivalent of “I’d do anything for you, senpai; I can be whatever you want me to be.” She proved this by transforming her appearance; contorting her pink flesh in all sorts of extremely abstract psychosexual ways. My cat jumped on me as this was happening and brought me back into the room. This encounter with the she-devil lasted less than 30 seconds. I was ringing like a gong with the implications for months. The devil pulled out all the stops when he made marijuana- it scared me bad enough that I didn’t smoke it again until college.
I discretely asked Thomas to tell me more about daemons and succubi following this experience. He told me that a daemon is an entity that makes a contract with a human being- they offer something, and they deliver in spades, but there is always a price that is inherently inseparable from the reward. Technological prowess, fossil fuels, fame, or drugs- these are the material manifestations of a daemon: a succubus is a devil in the same regard. If someone chooses, they can form a relationship with a particular succubus (archetype) by repeatedly invoking her. Collectively, we are making or invoking her, like an egregore- when trends in sexual expressions appear. She can "possess" a real sexual partner through the projections we put on that person, or the way that a person presents themselves.
A week or so before Christmas I was lying awake in bed in pitch darkness, considering all of this. I really really really wanted a girlfriend. The concept of a real sexual partner was foreign to me as I had no real world experience with women– they terrified me. In lieu of talking to a real girl, I had tried to pray to God to help me get a girlfriend but he never delivered. With what I wanted, I knew the Lord would never approve. If what my brother was saying was true, and so far all evidence proved that it was, then I might be able to use these esoteric teachings to my benefit. I was lonely enough that I figured I’d give it anything a try. It was a Saturday night. Under the full moon, I crept out of bed and opened a drawer in my desk to get out a pad of sticky notes, a lighter, and a pencil.
Here’s another myth for you. In the beginning of time, God created the earth, and the animals and Adam with his chiseled body and prickly face. God created Eve as a foil with softer smoother features. In his divine humility, God endowed Eve with a distribution of lipids that we call secondary sexual characteristics with a tasteful moderation. Men and women were given God’s blessing to enjoy respectable romantic partnerships- He saw that it was good.
Satan created marijuana, drop tuned distorted guitars, and chocolate, but he wasn’t finished. Somehow a she-devil was brought into existence, some call her Lilith, but the stories are varied. It’s almost like Satan was . . . not exactly permitted. . . but somehow ended up with the brushes and the chisel to decorate an archetypal woman of his own. This project was his Cystine Chapel- and he had an overindulged taste for the gothic and baroque - like a baker with a piping bag who didn’t know when to quit. In a dark tower he concocted a triple decker cake with pudding between each layer. Fondant, modeling chocolate, Maraschino cherries, a reduction of kirschwasser, gobs of whipping cream, chocolate ganache, caramel drizzle, crushed walnut, slivered almonds, ladyfingers- ornate in lavish excess. He wanted to see what Estrogen could really do. He decided to make fat girls. And once they were unleashed into the world, I never had a fool's chance of making it into the book of life.
This was the reason that the devil was cast out of heaven- for causing God himself to feel shown up; or at the very least– to blush.
I crept as quietly as I could to the bathroom at midnight and closed the door, keeping the light off. With my trusty red bic, I lit a few candles and began the incantation. I bent down onto my knees and traced an invisible pentagram on the bathroom floor with my finger. “Dear Satan,” I put the pad of sticky notes onto the closed toilet seat and whispered to myself as I furiously drew a figure; “send me a woman with thick thick thighs and big huge breasts. Send me a woman with more than enough to grab, a muffin top, and luscious red lips and wavy dark hair.” I drew really big ovals over the frame in a pin-up pose and linked them together with curvilinear lines. “A girl who really really loves me for who I really am.” I penciled in all the details and shaded her to emphasize the shapely form. I made a sigil: G. . . I. . . R . . . L. . . F . . . R. . . I . . . E . . . N . . . D. I took a pin and pricked the thick skin of my thumb, and as it started to bead, I spread blood onto the drawing. I was considering jotting down the emotions I would feel when this reality came to pass. At that particular instant I felt a little bit of dread creeping in, mixed into my almost maniacal chuckling and guilty pleasure. I scrawled under a capital E for emotions; “Grateful. Enamored. Seen. Horny. .. Uh… Fulfilled.” I wrote the fake postal code H0H 0H0 and held the paper to the flame, whispering the words “Fecund. Rotund. Nubile. Fertile.” The flames – yellow and green– slowly consumed the sticky note. I stared at the black curling glowing edge of the paper, reciting; “May it be so, may it be so, may it be so!” As the flames approached my fingers, I tried to drop the burning paper into the sink but realized I was holding it by the sticky end and I couldn’t drop it. I panicked and flailed my hand wildly to try and dislodge the burning paper, “fuck fuck fuck oh shit!” and the smoldering bits fell finally, leaving my fingers lightly singed. I went to bed and tried to sleep.
By the time Sunday morning came around, and I had combed my hair and sang in the choir, I felt profoundly alienated, but with a cynical smugness. Underneath all of this was the creeping feeling that I am certainly going to hell.