This rite was the first group ritual involving my Black Doll. It was one of many performed by a group of Chaos Magicians from around the UK  who met in an old church building that had become an arts centre in Norwich, on the May day bank holiday weekend of 2001.  We dubbed the venue “St Baphomet’s church of Chaos”. }8)

The rite was designed by myself and Jaq D Hawkins, and its purpose was to cast a permanent enchantment which weakened the authoritarian structure and fed the anti-authoritarian underground.  We were playing a card game known as Magic the Gathering at the time, and were inspired by the Subversion card from that game…

There was a slightly vampiric theme to this, but that appealed to our sense of humour because we’d recently been accused by a local group of ‘natural magicians’ of being psychic vampires.  Accordingly we adopted a gothic vampiric aesthetic into the rite.  We were also inspired by the Discordian idea that an ‘age of bureaucracy’ lasts for 73 cycles or until it reaches a paper shortage, whichever comes first.  😀

We opened and closed the rite using a banishing ritual we wrote for the ritual which we called the ‘Alchemical Banishing’.  It went as follows:

1. Salt was sprinkled around the magical space, whilst the group meditated in silence.
2. Indoor sparklers were lit to represent Sulphur, whilst the statement of intent was read aloud.
3. Incense was lit and wafted around the group in a censor to represent Mercury, whilst we chanted a mantra to invoke the black doll, which was held aloft and shaken like a rattle.
4. I representing those oppressed by the aeon of bureaucracy stripped naked and knelt in the centre of the group, whilst Jaq brandished a leather flogger.
5. To induce sadomasochistic gnosis through pain, I was flogged 73 times representing the cycles of the age of bureaucracy, but alchemically transforming this pain into strength to charge a vampiric sacrament.  This was a strange concoction of blackcurrant juice fortified with iron and possibly some other things to make it resemble the consistency and taste of blood.
6. We then all shared in this sacrament.
7. We then repeated the chant whilst the black doll was rattled and more incense was wafted around the group to represent that we were still in the gnostic magical state of Mercury.
8. Salt was sprinkled around the group in silence to manifest our intent.