Cyprian? Hekate? Padmasambhava? FOLLOW UP

Earlier this week I wrote a very short post answering how I could manage to pray to St Cyprian, Hekate, and Padmasambhava every day. My answer was simply that its two dead Sorcerer’s and a Goddess of Sorcery, so there is no conflict. I have no problem eating an Omlette, Vindaloo, and Shwarma all in the same day either. I got three follow up questions that I think are worthy of short answers as well:

QUESTION 1. “I think the challenge is one is a Goddess that Pagans worship, one is a Sorcerer who is Christian, and as a Christian identifies with a religion where there is only one God.” 

Yeah, so the deal here is that Sorcerer’s, Mystics, and Magicians have paid lip service to the religions in which they operate forever. Sometimes disregarding official doctrine, and sometimes even getting in trouble for it. St Cyprian was a Pagan Sorcerer who communed with the Devil and Pagan Gods before becoming a Bishop. Did he simply view Christianity as yet another cult or Diety to draw power from? Did he authentically convert but then express a dual handed faith after death? Is it simply that after death we have access to both the magician and the martyr? I say Yes to all of these without really pinning it down. The whole role of St Cyprian seems to be that he bridges divides, Pagan and Christian, God and the Devil, Living and the Dead.

In short, if you are worried about being “a good (insert religion here)” you are probably not a Sorcerer.

QUESTION 2. “Why? Why honor multiple powers which seem to share similar domains?” 

Shorest answer is: It’s who life put me in the room with.

Hekate approached me out of the blue while I was meditating on burning bodies in Nepal and told me to offer a supper to her when I got back. I am not one of those people that beings just reach out of spontaneously, so with some skepticism I did, and that kicked off 20 years of instruction in a very precise form of Sorcery. Cyprian I discovered through a gift from a friend, and since I grew up Christian and most of western magic has Christian elements I started following up. Padmasambhava happened because as a teenager I encountered Lama Vajranatha (John Myrdhin Reynolds) who took an interest in me, the seeds he planted in my mind during our time together in my teens eventually ripened (with the help of 3 different psychedelics, and input from Mishlen Linden) into a burning desire to further my Sorcery by studying Tibetan Magic under John’s direction, as well as many other Lamas.

So I honor who I have been placed in the room with. It is my belief that the gift of the age is the hyper-connectivity of communication and travel. In the modern world I almost can’t image how people DON’T get thrown into the room of different cultures and practices. The fact that we use the internet to throw up imaginary walls and barriers more than cross them both saddens me, and is an a slap in the face to every great seeker of knowlege of the past. Of course I am also troubled and saddened by those that take from other cultures without paying them rerspect, misappropriating titles and misrepresenting practices.

Apart from that, they each play a different role in my work. Cyprian really is this sort of networking bridge builder that allows demons to work like angels and vice versa. He opens the doors and greases wheels. Hekate is all about going beyond. She leads into the dark and illuminates new pathways that simultaneously are cosmic in scope, yet intimate in action. Padmasambhava is the gate to practices that expose the underlying reality of all this, through body, speech, and mind.

QUESTION 3. “I can see the connection between Hekate and Cyprian as the Western tradition, but not Padmasambhava. The eastern view of spirituality is just too different.”

This is utter hogwash rooted in the Victorian mindset that occultists just cannot seem to escape. They have gods, we have gods. They make offerings, we make offerings. They have elements and planets, we have elements and planets. Some paths try to enhance the here and now, others try to transcend it, in both the east and the west. Manicheanism, the religion that Augustine converted to Christianity FROM has its best preserved Temple in China. Buddhism found a significant foothold in Greece and Alexander attempted to create a Hellenic Buddhism.

Honestly, a Buddhist practice that has living lineages in the present but are from a country 7000 miles away has just as much top say to someone living in New York as a practice from a country 5000 miles away and which hasn’t had a strong living tradition in over 1000 years.

We live in a world with Webpages, Zoom Meetings, and Jet travel. The degree to which people bend over backwards to pretend that we don’t when studying magic sometimes astounds me.