by Martin Duffy
Many are the demands made upon those who walk the sorcerous path, and numerous the sacrifices needful in its pursuit. As the old saying goes, if you don’t make sacrifice for your desire, your desire becomes the sacrifice. Indeed, sacrifice is a constant necessity in magical practice, its pursuit requiring the practitioner, of their own volition, to devote their time, effort, abilities, and personal resources to the path, this being veiled in the arcana of the Pilgrimage.
More tangible in nature are the physical offerings made to gods, spirits, and sainted ones, such as flowers, herbs, incense, bread, blood, wine, milk, and coins. Offered at shrines and temples, the household altar, or sacred points in the landscape, these sacrifices may serve to demonstrate love for the god or spirit, to bribe or cajole them into providing help, or to ‘pay’ for numinous aid, the oblation’s value being ‘spent’ on ‘remunerating’ the spirit world rather than on material goods or services. Depending upon the practitioner’s intent, and the spirit the sacrifice is made to, the oblation varies; the needful offerings being determined by historical precedent and, more vitally, direct spirit revelation. Most valuable are those sacrifices that have personal value, are freely given, and owned by the votary, whether obtained by coin, received as gift from man or spirit, gathered by hand, or earnt through effort expended.
In truth, the sacrificial object is to some extent a token, a representation of all those things the votary has offered, is willing to offer, and has yet to offer, including their time, effort, love, and devotion. Accordingly, when the devotee stands before the spirits, their offering clasped between their hands, this token is imbued with the diverse array of things the heart truly offers, a seed which is sown into the very heart of the sacrifice by Will, Desire, and Belief. Loaded like the allegorical ‘beast of burden’, the sacrificial object accordingly serves as a vehicle conveying the diverse array of offerings from man unto spirit.
The word sacrifice derives etymologically from the Latin, sacrificus, meaning ‘to make sacred’, referring to the transferral of the offering from the mundane world to the hallowed precincts of god and spirit, a deed causing the offering to become imbued with power and sacred in and of itself.
There are many ways in which the oblation may be ‘passed over’ to spirit. In its simplest form, the offering is mindfully placed upon the chosen point, whether altar stone, tree stump, or earthen patch, being left there for the spirits to do with as they will. More commonly the offering is mutilated or destroyed, as exemplified by the tearing of the bread, the pouring out of libations, the slaying of the flesh, the submittal of herbs to the pyre, and the bending and breaking of weapons, coins, and jewellery. By this means the objects are ‘ritually killed’ and rendered unfit for ordinary use. These slain objects are then typically buried, cast into waters, lain on the altar, or left at apposite points in the land, such as liminal gateways congruent to the spirit, saint or god, thereby facilitating their transfer to the intended recipient. The dual formula of mutilation and deposition partakes of the chthonic – the ritualistic murder and committal of the offering having analogy with death and funerary rites – and serves a number of functions:
—Mutilation renders the object useless in the mundane world, removing it from temporal use and causing it to become a sacrament offered wholly to ‘other’, whether god, spirit, or sainted one. Cast into well, pool, or sea, the offering is also put beyond human reach, ensuring its perpetuity as a gift.
—The act of destruction transforms the state of the offering, liberating its essence that it might be transferred to the chosen spirit, or sublimated to the attainment of desire, this being represented in the aires released from sacrifices submitted to the flame.
—Through ‘ritual murder’, the dispatched oblation is delivered into the world beyond, an underworld journey facilitated by consigning the ‘corpse’ to the depths, or ‘feeding’ it to the earth through burial; bodies of water and openings into the earth both being as gates into the otherworld. Herein, death is revealed as the gate to the way beyond.
The custom of sacrifice through mutilation and deposition is evidenced in the plethora of treasured objects bent and cast into sacred waters since ‘pagan’ times, a practice which found its continuation in the Christian period through the bent, or ‘crooked’, coins and pins offered at holy wells. This tradition obtains to this day, as exemplified by the coins cast into wishing wells.
Within such customs, the waters become the agent of death and the gate beyond, for when the light of life indwelling the sacrifice gutters upon the waters, the ‘drowned’ offering is freed of its earthly shackles and delivered into the Otherworld. It is this spark of light at the heart of the offering that serves as ‘loaf’ to those who dwell in Other. Emblematic of the ‘light’ released through the waters of sacrifice is the Ignis Fatuus – the ‘corpse candle’ floating upon unholy waters – which folklore avers to be the spirit of those who have met their untimely end in haunted, cursed, or bedeviled waters.
Comparable to the offering of bent pins at holy wells is the custom of offering them to the belly of the witch bottle, their warding and punitive virtue being released when made ‘crooked.’ The making crooked of the straight pin evokes the association of the witchen power with things backward and oppositional, such as the widdershins dance, the twisted and tangled branches (‘witch-knots’) found in bewitched trees, and the tangled hairs and ‘backward’ feathers of bewitched beasts, all such ‘crooked’ arts being under the dominion of the Devil.
The act of defacing or mutilating a coin and casting it away also serves as a transgressive practice, demonstrating an individual’s opposition to, and denouncement of, all the coin represents in the mundane world, whether it be the head of state thereon emblazoned, societal law, the accepted order of things, or materialism in general. By turning away from these things of clay, and shunning the familiar, the practitioner breaks the fetters of attachment, becoming at liberty to embrace the unknown and wander where they will. Herein, the ‘murder’ of the coin becomes a ritual deed announcing one’s intent to sacrifice and forego the material, mundane, and familiar things that bring comfort, enabling them to seek what lies beyond the known horizon. In certain magical rites, this is represented by the offering of a single coin, which is cast from the circle’s edge to the fire burning at its heart.
Such is to evoke the exilic wisdom of the holy pauper, which is personified in the Sabbatic Craft as the Path of Cain. Herein, the bent or ‘crooked’ coin becomes emblematic of the Crooked Path, a concept emergent from the Cultus Sabbati, and described by Andrew Chumbley as, ‘the ever-deviating way which connects moment to moment in a continuum of initiatory consciousness’ (Schulke, Via Tortuosa, p. 9).Accordingly, the transgressive and oppositional act of bending a thing, or ‘making it crooked’, forges the path facilitating its transformation from one state to another; in the case of the offertory coin, from mundane object to transcendent votive, and in the case of the initiate, from the Clay of Abel to the Light of Seth by agency of Cain’s transmutative and refining Fire.
This ‘murder’ of the oblation, so as to ‘make it holy’, is cognate with the mystery of Cain, the ordeal of sacrifice being represented in the double-edged blade by which Abel was slain. Like the transmutative Fire of Cain, the blade has the power to liberate or destroy; Cain being the sorcerer who ‘serves with both hands alike’. With his left hand he slays the profane, and with his right he raises the sacred, these twain deeds of cursing and blessing occurring concurrently at the moment of sacrifice.
Existent between the fallen body of clay and the risen body of light, Cain is as the single point of the blade uniting and transcending duality; a state of betweenness. By point of his blade is power liberated, the tip becoming the transformative point at which congress is made between the profane and the sacred, these being as the mundane offering and its transubstantiated state. These oppositional states, and the way between, are also connoted in the opposing faces of the offertory coin, its intermediary edge bordering, partaking of, and commanding both sides.
In identifying themselves with Cain, the sorcerer becomes the dynamic force transforming and refining the nature of the habilic sacrifice. However, in the apotheosis of sacrifice, the aspirant instead turns the knife on themselves, slaying the profane within and submitting their corpse to the purgative fires of Cain’s forge. Through this act of self-overcoming, and with the blessing of the spirits, those of the wise-blood might pass through the fire to arise in a New Flesh, such being the Path of Self-Transcendence connoted in devotion unto Cain as ‘First Murderer of Man’.
‘The way of sacrifice maketh man whole.’
Andrew Chumbley
