Polygnosticism of Madness

The Waking Dead

Mania whispered in clipped speech that I was destined; a prophet getting downloads from the divine. Paranoia proposed I was persecuted; in danger of being crucified. 

Materialism implied I was merely the product of a causal chain traceable to the trajectory of particles a half-second after the big bang. That I was the output of an upbringing by the ambitious and loving, but traumatized and anxious, who were, to quote Philip Larkin, “fucked up in their turn by fools in old-style hats and coats.” Materialism summed me up as a biological machine—an addict compelled to numb the pain of unfulfilled potential and unmet expectations.

See me—this polygnostic worshipper simultaneously convinced of multiple truths; enrapt by Mania, transfixed by Paranoia, and informed by Materialism—a somnambulant groaning and shuffling to the bathroom for a morning piss. A hand flat on the wall. Shoulders slumped. Head hanging limp. 

A desiccated tongue sanding off the putrid coating of phlegm from throat and mouth. Thick spit that comes out tinged with pink gum blood and plops loudly into the bowl. A half-minute of wet coughing and a glob of lung butter that dangles, yellowish and ropey. Another loud plop, like shitting from your face. 

Head and diaphragm webbed with icy prickles that are either the anxious interest on loaned happiness borrowed during yesterday’s binge of hard seltzer, or that residue of terrified preoccupation liquor can never really rinse off.

When I bought High Magick by Damien Echols, I was a mess.

This Shit Works

But that was a half-dozen moons ago. Significant because I have been taking every new moon as a prod onto the next Magickal exercise in that book.

Over that half-year, I continually felt compelled to explain each step in my magickal journey using the etiology of my three gods. 

Sitting with my eyes closed, brushing my hands rapidly against each other—like people do when they’re cold—and then holding them six inches apart, I felt something undeniably tactile ping-ponging rhythmically between them. Echols calls this practice “raising energy.”

Mania told me I was tapping into the poorly-understood metaphysical. 

Paranoia blamed me for my new puppy’s aggression. With narrative force, it warned me the powerful poisoned her as my punishment for meddling with forces that are their exclusive purview. 

Materialism just rolled It’s eyes and muttered something about a psychosomatic placebo, but congratulated me on finally finding a meditation technique that was interesting enough to prop up a practice.

All of my forays into the occult went that way until finally, on the most recent lunar cycle, I started an exercise many practitioners consider table stakes: the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram (LBRP).

Mythologically, the LBRP purports to balance your life-force. To center you in Air, Fire, Water, and Earth energies and enable the balanced expression of intellect, willpower, emotion, and physical health respectively. 

From a materialist perspective, I felt silly. 

The ritual involves drawing pentagrams in the air, and “vibrating” the names of Archangels—a sound sort of like Tibetan throat singing that my seven-year-old finds endlessly funny.

But any practitioner who has spent the time to test it out will tell you: This Shit Works. 

Balanced intellectually, I’m finally pinning down ten-year-old ideas with words.

Balancing my application of will, I persevere through the blackholes on the other side of every literary publication’s submit button.

Emotionally, I’m keeping up with prescribed medication instead of relying on alcohol and, without that cling-wrap of inebriation, I connect better with my family.

I even found life-hacks for physical health like keeping a toothbrush in the shower and taping heartburn medication to the front door.

I got results. Results that, however, rode in on the coattails of an intense disruption best described as primal terror. 

To paraphrase Jason Louv’s warning in his class on Banishing Rituals: That’s good. You want disruption. But there is disruption you grow from—disruption you can handle—and then there’s disruption that you “either have to handle or die.”

Prompted by a Haunting

I snapped awake to my daughter’s horrified, drawn out scream of “DADDYYYYY!”

It was still dark out, but the glowing hallway night light illuminated her standing in her bedroom doorway, the door open just about the width of her tear streaked face.

Her voice a sobbing tremble, she told me there was someone in the house. That she saw and heard her door open from her bed.

I paced back and forth in front of her room for a few steps, trying to dig our emergency plan out from under an avalanche of panic.

After a moment that dilated into an astronomical epoch, I remembered the first step: get the whole family in one room.

Behind a locked door, while I resumed pacing and my wife sat cross-legged on our bed, we listened to our daughter—who was wide-eyed and visibly shaking—elucidate for us what woke her. She was atypically articulate as she enunciated each word with unusual precision, a reflex that kids seem to have for situations that demand seriousness.

I put on a thick jacket and jeans as a sort of armor and the dog and I investigated the house.

There was nothing there. 

Applied Polygnosticism

Mania reminded me of the particularly potent LBRP I had practiced the previous day—the first one accompanied by a visual hallucination I ascribed to etheric energy. Wide eyed and shouting, it spoke to me: “You summoned something incorporeal to spur action!”

Paranoia painted the danger differently: “It had to have been a home invader working for the shadowy powerful who ‘suicide’ true rebels…”

Though even It was shaken, Materialism observed: “The backyard gate and front door are still locked—it would be pointless, if not impossible, for anyone breaking and entering to bother securing the doors as they left. Your daughter must have had a hypnagogic hallucination or a night terror.”

I believed all of them because it doesn’t serve me to agonize over objective truth.

Douglass Rushkoff once described the famous Discordian, Robert Anton Wilson, as “believing in nothing.” RAW took a friendly sort of unbridge with that, proclaiming instead that he believes everything simultaneously.

I share RAW’s philosophy: a sort of polygnosticism best defended by Ralph Waldo Emerson’s assertion that “consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” I believe everything at once, then choose to hold in mind the explanation that serves me most effectively.

Sometimes it gets me closest to my objectives or values to act on Paranoia’s story. Maybe I need to slow myself down to not burn out and the paranoid narrative woven from moments of anxiety is a sign I should shrink the sphere of my concern to my family, to myself, or—after a dire overreach—to which prone position isn’t painful I’m in while stuck, strung-out, in bed.

Other times, Materialism’s placating, measured explanations serve me—if either grandiosity or terror captivate me, I tend to neglect the basic maintenance that comes with adult life, like car care, bills and work.

This time, I leaned into Mania. I spent the extra hours of wakefulness writing, submitting work and, with a nod to Materialism, buying a home security system. 

Like that troublesome puppy, sometimes I need a higher power to snap a leash and get me to behave. 

I want to, but frequently stumble into consumerist autopilot, ferried mindlessly from cause to effect because it’s easier.

I want to, but find myself paralyzed and doomscrolling as if some amount of horrible information will be enough to finance careful decisions that will keep me safe.

I want to, but grandiose ideas about saving the world obstruct the crawl toward my goals. They make it hard to appreciate the little victories won with hard work.

I want to. I really do. But sometimes my true will needs a nudge from a haunting.