The Divinity of Death. What is it? How is it? We can break it down to its parts. What is divinity? What is death? My answer to these questions is, I do not know. No one really knows the answers to any of these questions. Yet here I sit writing about it. Poems have been written, religions founded, and songs sung about the apparent answers to them.
Humanity is more fearful of death than anything else. In fact, most fears can be traced to this one fear. Someone who is afraid of heights is not afraid of the fall. No, they are afraid of that sudden impact and the possibility of death that follows.
I believe that much of what we call religion is founded on this same fear, the unknown. The fact that death is unknown and what happens after death is the source of this fear. Religion gives its followers hope that death is a transition to something else. To many it is the gateway to Heaven or some other afterlife. To others it is a gateway to another lifetime. Still others believe it is a step into another dimension which sounds like a combination of another world and reincarnation.
So you might be asking yourself, why am I writing about the Divinity of Death? I do say I really don’t know, can’t know, anything about it. The answer is that I feel the Divinity of Death. Thought is just another tool of spirit. No one can know whether God exists or not, and also no one can know what comes after death. I can feel the presence and power of both God and Death. I also am not alone. Many philosophers, priests, and sages, not to mention magicians, witches, and shamans, have had these very same feelings.
So why should I not just direct people to the volumes of truth and opinion that cover thousands of miles of bookshelves all over the world? The short answer is that my own Divinity of Death, Gede, Voodoo God/ Loa of Death, has signaled to me to write. What I am attempting to do is bring to you, the reader, my own experiences with the Divinity of Death. Many of these experiences are with Gede. Some are with Azrael, archangel of death. I have encountered many death spirits on my spiritual journey.
Is it my goal to teach? No, not really. Do I want to start or add to some established religion? No, I have no need or want to have followers. I find that those who want to teach or start an order or religion spend most of their time trying to keep up appearances, or fight off criticism. They do not have much time to actually do the work of speaking with or getting to know the truths taught by the multitude of spirits that are all around us. I want to share and honor those spirits that have enriched my life with this writing.
To those of any tradition who may find my writings insulting, wrong, or disrespectful, I respect your tradition and I am not a part of it. My ways will not be your ways. I may use names that are also in your tradition, and again, I do not intend any disrespect. The spirits I have spoken with have given me these names to identify them by, so that obviously is how I will refer to them. Your Gede may not be the same as mine. That is fine, I know several Matts, and I might not know your friend Matt, but I will still refer to my friend as Matt.
How do I have the experience to write about these topics? Well, I am not an expert about anything. I’ll go ahead and get that out of the way. I have studied religion and magick for over twenty years. Even more than that, I have actually practiced magick for the same amount of time.
I was born to Christian parents, but began questioning the teachings of that religion at an early age. When I was sixteen I discovered Wicca. Eventually when I was eighteen I began to practice it. I am currently 42. Shortly after beginning to practice Wicca I found an Alexandrian coven and was initiated through the third degree. This gave me the title of High Priest.
After a couple of years of involvement in Wicca, I began looking into Ceremonial Magick. I wanted to find a group of ceremonial magicians to learn from. Doing this powerful kind of magick alone scared me. Everyone I had read or spoke with either said it was dangerous or satanic. I looked for a group called The Golden Dawn, I found the O.T.O.
The Ordo Templi Orientis is a respected and large group of magicians practicing the philosophy of Aleister Crowley called Thelema. My time within that order was helpful. If you are looking to find their secrets in my writings, good luck. I was influenced greatly by my time within the O.T.O., but I am unsure of what I actually learned from them about magick.
What I received from them was the courage to delve deeply into the kinds of magick that Crowley, if not the O.T.O., practiced. I jumped off the cliff into Hermeticism, particularly Kabala, a mystical teaching of the Jewish religion. I also began working with Enochian magick, an angelic system of spirits. These practices would lead me to do evocation.
Evocation is the magickal calling of spirits with the intention to either learn from those spirits or have them perform a task. This practice was what I began to focus my magickal, spiritual, and religious energies and time on.
I used Kabala primarily as the basis of getting myself acquainted with the archangels. Over several years I called and conversed with many of the archangels you may have heard of. I called Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel. I also called many archangels you may be less familiar with. I called Raziel, Hanael, Sandalphon, and many others. I also called lesser spirits like Paralda and Ghob, who are the Elemental Kings for air and earth.
I called lots of spirits and talked with them. Yes, I talked with them and also learned from them. Many people might by this point either accuse me of lying or being crazy. So be it. If I am crazy, fine, I’d rather be crazy and my life be full of the love of these spirits. I prefer madness to boring, loveless sanity. As for lying, try doing evocation and make your own choice.
The next challenge I set myself to was the exploration of Enochian magick. Enochian magick is a complicated system of angels which was discovered by a magician named John Dee and his seer Edward Kelly. My experience with these angels also added to my life.
Along the way I had the great pleasure of working magick with lots of people. As you can see, I was busy. When I say I “practice magick,” I do. I do not sit about it, or surround myself with old books. I do have several books and I have read my share, but purpose of my reading about magick is to know enough about magick to do it successfully. I have learned many basics from books, but I have found that the direct teachings of the spirits are more profound.
As I was working these kinds of magick, a woman named Rose came into my magickal acquaintance. She was a black woman from New Orleans who was studying Creole and practicing Wicca. That’s right, Wicca. This is not a typo. She practiced Wicca and was interested in the evocations I was doing. One night she and I were talking and I asked her, “Why haven’t you looked into Voodoo?” She said she did not know but maybe she should. She did. After reading a few books on Voodoo she asked if we might try to do some Voodoo. I felt like if calling up angels did not scare me, then why should calling Voodoo Gods (who are called the Loa)?
In my wall-to-wall black temple with a protective Goetic circle, to protect against demons, on the floor and Enochian tablets on the walls, we set out to call on the Loa. She had drawn symbols, called Veves, for the Loa on colored paper. These she placed on the floor and began the ritual. Much of the ritual was in Creole and I was completely unaware of what was said, but Rose changed. This was new to me. I had never experienced possession before. She wasn’t completely possessed, but she also was certainly not herself. Through her the Loa told me they had something they wanted me to do. They also did not tell me what that was.
I decided to read some things about Voodoo. I read several books and set up a small altar in the corner of my temple. A year or so passed and nothing further came from the Loa. I met another person who practiced Santeria, Voodoo’s sister religion. During a ritual, again through possession, the Loa, Chango, the Orisha (Loa) of Kings, told me that they had something for me to do. Yet again nothing came of it.
Years passed and I continued to do evocations. My involvement with the O.T.O. ended, but I continue to find others to do magick with. If you were to ask any of those people how they would describe my workings at this point, you likely would get many different answers. You would get martial, solar, masculine, hermetic, knowledge centered, or something along those lines. What you would not get would be anything related to death. You would not get Saturnine or anything particularly “dark.” Up until this point in my magickal life, my spirituality was particularly bright. Death and divine Death had not entered my life in any obvious way. Even my halfhearted attempts at investigating Voodoo had little to do with death. I was more interested in Chango and his bright beacon of light.
My process of finding my true path and the involvement with the spirits of death would emerge later. This path definitely began with Voodoo, although Voodoo itself is not solely about death, as Hollywood would have you believe. Gede, Loa of Death, would be the guide that has taken me where I am and Azrael, Archangel of Death, would be my teacher. This account gives one part of how I came to be on the path of the Divinity of Death. It is not the whole story, but it is the spiritual side. I will describe how I came from this stage of my spirituality to my delving into the graveyard in my search for God within the chapters on Gede and Azrael.
To give a little more of my credentials to those who need to see titles to invest trust, I will give you a bit more of my accomplishments in death. A few years ago I found myself unemployed. I have struggled most of my adult life trying to find some mundane comfort. I work hard but money has never come easily. Yet again I was struggling to pay the bills. I had a family that relied on me to pay the bills and I was sick of the instability, so I decided to attempt college.
The obvious choices would be to study religion or philosophy. I wanted to come out of school with more capability of bringing fiscal stability to my family. No offence to those who either have a degree in those pursuits or is currently in college to study them, but there are a lot of you and very few jobs in those fields. Gede at this time had fully infused himself into my life, and death was a huge part of my spirituality. I decided to become a funeral director.
On top of my interest in all things death, funeral directors make a good living, pardon the pun. I did well in my studies, go figure. After a couple of grueling years I earned a degree. I also passed the National Board Exam. Over those years I learned many things about death. I loved it because I wanted to study death. One example is that I was able to write a term paper for my Funeral History class on Sumerian death and burial practices. Needless to say, my teachers loved having an enthusiastic student.
I went on to intern in a small funeral home. The rest is history. I don’t want to bore you with more details of my professional life, but all of this should show how death has become a huge part of my life. This should suffice to show my whole existence pulling me towards those divine spirits of death.
