Ritual Tech

An Interview with Sam Webster

This January, the writer and publisher Sam Webster will be teaching a four-week course at Alembic entitled “Calling the Gods.” Introducing the theory and practice of ancient theurgy, especially the work of the Neoplatonic philosopher Iamblichus, Sam will then provide the basic tools for rituals and devotional practices devoted to conjuring “the gods”—a phenomenon Sam approaches in a pragmatic and experimental spirit at once reverent and irreverent. The course is a rare opportunity to study magical “tech” with a deeply experienced ceremonial magician and Pagan practitioner who not only possesses a scholarly knowledge of magical theory and history, but who directly engages Buddhist and Vajrayana practices and ideas in his work.  

— Erik Davis

Sam Webster

ED: When I approached you with the idea of doing something at Alembic, you immediately thought of “Calling the Gods,” a class on ritual theory and praxis drawn from late Antiquity. You wanted to base the class on the work of Iamblichus, a Neoplatonic philosopher and practitioner who lived in the third and fourth centuries. But you also have tons of experience with twentieth-century Wiccan ritual and more modern forms of ceremonial magic. So why focus on the theurgy of Antiquity?

SW: This is what my doctorate is in, so I know it very deeply. And because I'm an actual practitioner, not just a scholar, my approach to the material is really different. There's a common complaint about Iamblichus and his famous book On the Mysteries, which is that he talks about ritual practice but never really tells us what to do. That's just not true. People think that way because the people reading it have no idea what to do.

So what I did was, I took his advanced rules for sacrifice, and then I took the canon of Greek sacrifice, I merged the two together and showed what that would produce. And everyone went, Oh, right, that makes sense.

When I presented my research to the International Society of Neoplatonic Studies, I was able to show them things that, for modern magical practitioners, would be like, that's kind of obvious, dude. For example, Iamblichus has this concept of sunthemata, which are the bits of the gods that dwell within objects. In magic, we just call them correspondences. And we know that if you stack up a bunch of them in useful ways, that works really well in ritual. Well, the ancients knew this.

ED:  How does Iamblichus stand out from the broader milieu of Neoplatonic philosophy?

A: It's actually the other way around. The Neoplatonists that scholars mostly study today are mostly a minority sect in the ancient world, because they weren’t that into ritual and worship. Iamblichus is one of the few Neoplatonists whose writings remain who is part of the much larger sect of practicing theurgists.

ED: What was the name of your thesis?

SW: “Theurgy from Iamblichus to the Golden Dawn.” I show that the Iamblichan style of theurgy made it all the way to the Golden Dawn practitioners around 1900 and therefore up to us.

ED: The Golden Dawn was one of the most famous and influential modern magical orders. You started a branch of the Golden Dawn called the Open Source Order of the Golden Dawn. What made your group “open source”?

A: We felt we had the right to change the rituals. If you understand the code—as in procedural code, like computer code—it's really not that unintelligible. And once you've learned the code, you can compose something new.

Not being Christians, we saw that a lot of the Golden Dawn symbolism is weirdly and uncomfortably Christian. We also had the advantage of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema. A number of years after he was in the Golden Dawn, Crowley writes the Book of the Law, the founding text of Thelema. But to really understand the Book of the Law, you have to have a firm grounding in the Golden Dawn because it's specifically written in the slight distortions of Egyptian thought that are present in the Golden Dawn.

ED: What changes did you make to the core Golden Dawn ritual?

SW: The Golden Dawn associated initiation with death. And so they made their ritual Hierophant a god form, Osiris, and the scene the Hall of the Weighing of the Heart. You have that wonderful image from Egyptian religion of the heart in balance with the feather. Did your life match your name or your truth? That's nice.

That's when you're dead though. It's not that helpful when you're still alive. Frankly, being dead is easy. Being alive is a tough, tough job. I know that everyday when I get up and go to work.

So we wanted to reformulate things under Horus instead of Osiris. We are told in the Book of the Law that Ra-Hoor-Khuit is the name of the initiator in this eon. So what would that amount to? Well, by studying Egyptian stuff, we discovered that he is the pilot of the Bark of Ra every night. And so we made the entire story about becoming a member of the crew of the Bark of Ra. You are joining the company of the gods, learning the ropes, becoming a worthy member of the crew. It's all about life. It's all about working with others and living the way. It's not about some secret hidden virtue revealed at death.

ED: Given all your experience in the wilder and more improvised Pagan community, what was it like to return to the old school ritual forms of the Golden Dawn?

SW: Well, Joe Maxx, one of our founding members, said it best: it was like going back to conservatory after playing in a punk band for a decade.

ED: The Book of the Law also led you to study tantra and Vajrayana. What does the Western tradition, which is more fragmented, hold for people who are drawn to those kinds of Eastern practice?

SW: One way of understanding theurgy is that it is about the simplification and essentialization of extremely large and complex sacrificial and deity-invoking rituals. Why not just get rid of some of that hardware? You don't need to kill the cow every time you want to speak to God. Just learn to pray and use the more subtle methods that are available.

Well, if you go over into India, they figured out the same thing. Actually, they were about a century ahead of the Mediterranean. Then the West gets stopped, but the East continues, and Tantra is what it develops into. They start building these incredible visualizations that do the whole job. And when you start working with a non-dualistic framework, when you start not making this bad and this good, which is how the development goes in the Eastern traditions, then you start realizing that everything that you've got around you is useful. I am a passionate being and I should bring my passions onto the path. Holding God forms with intensity, plus adding sexual energy, and all of that visualization and power—it's tremendously transformative, to put it mildly. It burns out all the gunk and then we just become the deity.

In terms of the Western theurgy, all the methods are there. To use computer language, this stuff is interoperable. It's not alien to us because it's human and probably ontological. So we can reverse-engineer our way to stuff that we can use today, which is kind of what we're going to be doing in this class. It’s like, yes kids, you can do this at home.

ED: You wrote the book Tantric Thelema, which uses a Vajrayana engine to invoke Thelemic god forms. The text and practice is a very unusual and provocative blend of Eastern and Western approaches. What sort of responses did you get?

A: The responses have been a complete range from you're insane and you should never touch these things to, oh my God, that makes so much sense, why didn't we figure this out sooner?

The method is the genie in the bottle, literally, except you're the bottle and you're invoking in the genius, the spirit of the god to inhabit the god form that you've built up to wield the energies in you and to illuminate your mind.

That is the essence of Tantra right there, particularly in the Vajrayana framework. So once you recognize the parity between those magical traditions, you realize, wait a minute, that's not alien to us. We can absorb those methodologies along with some of the non-dual view. In my approach to ritual magic, we recognize that these practices deal in both illusion and reality—you know, that weird framing that the Buddhists do on this kind of stuff. The gods are both transcendent and non-existent.

The occasional lamas that I deal with, they don't know quite what to do with it. Mostly they get like, you invented a practice? People cannot invent practices. Only Buddhas can invent practices. Buddhas, I don't know about, but I made a practice that kicks ass.

ED: Speaking of kicking ass, what skills can people expect to come away from your course with?  

SW: In short, the ability to invoke the gods to such a degree that you know that they are. As I said in my class description, you shouldn't believe in the gods. You should take them as a working hypothesis and then find a method whereby you can actually meet them, whatever that amounts to, and get a sense that they are. What they are is a much bigger, much tougher question, which resides in ineffability and mystery, but also presence and immediacy.

That’s why you don't need any medium between you and them. That's why I use the language of immediacy. You can have an experience that's like, okay, I don't know what this is, but it's real. And then you can cultivate that relationship, using tools that we will explore, and that can also help the practice become something useful in your life.

ED: I've often heard you refer to ritual forms and tools as “the tech”. What is the value of seeing things in that aggressively contemporary way?

A: The value lies in demystification, agency, and empowerment. The point is, if the tech isn't working, change it or do something different. What should I do I to make it work right for me? The Buddha said there are 84,000 methods of achieving enlightenment. My gloss on that is: we've got one for you.

For instance, I run into people who are doing similar practices and it makes them more bitchy, more difficult, less compassionate. Those are all markers that it's not really working! If your practices don't make you more kind, more compassionate, then what’s the point? I am not necessarily saying more gentle, because wrath is appropriate when it's delivered compassionately. I'm not saying be all nicey-nicey. But real compassion is profoundly transformative and helpful.

Without bodhicitta, we can really destroy ourselves doing these kinds of practices. But with bodhicitta, almost any practice can get you an enormous distance.

ED: One of the things I have found satisfying about your work is that you encourage practitioners to close their rituals and invocations with a good old Buddhist dedication of merit. I still add the Wiccan “so mote it be” to my recitation of the dedication, something I learned from you. And you also make the point that this dedication isn’t just a sweet gesture, but actually prevents some serious problems.

SW: Indeed. Many times at the end of a circle, people start getting giddy or bitchy or really distracted and cranky. That's because they're holding onto the energy and it's inflating their ego. We haven't returned to our normal state and our normal recognition of each other. So we're in this other, somewhat exalted space, which is now starting to get distorted.

But if we give it all away, then all of that energy comes down. If we give it all away into the very same stream that we're drawing from, the evolutionary stream, the stream that uplifts us all into enlightenment, then all we're doing is adding to that. And since we're in the stream, we're really just adding it to ourselves. So the giving away is a giving away to all, including ourselves. So we lose nothing, but all of that bad stuff just doesn't happen because we've let go of it.

Transmutations is a biweekly publication from the Berkeley Alembic, a post-denominational spiritual center that offers classes, workshops, retreats, and warm cups of tea.

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