۞ A Dark Rev✞ew ۞

CRIT
01-20-02022

𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗴, for me, was a film about the price of knowing. What does it cost me to know something without doubt? Can a belief be a thing that can be experienced like a breath? Can I just inhale it without sacrifice or labor? If I can, then why all this sacrifice and labor in life to believe something? All this study, meditation, prayer, and penance, day-in-day-out? Why does it feel hyper-rational to me that deep knowing comes at a high cost?

A quick film synopsis: 𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗴 documents two persons (Sophia and an experienced occultist) attempt at the Gnostic ꧁magick꧂ ritual known as the ۞Abramelin۞. A months-long, grueling rite that holds the lofty goal of summoning one’s guardian angel. Once summoned, the ritual states that you can beg your angel a favor. Sophia wants to speak with her murdered son. Later, she admits that she also seeks vengeance on his killers in the form of horrible deaths and eternal damnation.

Let it suffice to say that the ritual, though interspersed with fleeting moments of beauty, is tortuous and brutal. The goal, as the magician attests, is to get the attention of the operators of the secret machinery of the world. To get noticed.

It takes work to get noticed.

My childhood was devoid of religion. My adulthood has been sprinkled with its own customized spirituality, but it has been calm, more rooted in pragmatism than some type of Pentacostal panache. Through a turn of fate, I have found myself in relationship with a person (and a family) versed in the methods of the more dramatic forms of mystical Christian rituals. After years immersed in fundamentalism, they all seem to be in varying levels of reform; from the periphery, I am learning what reform means. It doesn’t mean recovered, because recovery from such a thing would be too abstract, and it doesn’t seem to mean renunciation, because nothing of true value seems to have been put aside or rejected. There is classic ꧁ᗩᒪᑕᕼEᗰY꧂ going on here. The spiritual materials have been re-formed into simple, subtle, more elegant tools of faith and knowing. Witnessing this, I have become a bit of a jealous voyeur.

And today, I am a voyeur of 𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗴, or so it feels. I get to watch the characters pay the tolls of fasting, mutilation, and death. These are the costs of admission; but are they really required? What purpose does payment serve in this type of exchange? Is the toll required by God, or is it a human-invented means to become worthy of God, irrational extra steps? I have long assumed that anything of deep metaphysical value must come from labor. I have had to reconcile that with my belief in the free-flowing spring of divinity at the core of every human.

So . . . I don’t feel my own holiness until I work for it?

So . . . I am laboring for something free?

“𝖂𝖎𝖙𝖍𝖔𝖚𝖙 𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖎𝖓𝖊𝖘𝖘 𝖓𝖔 𝖔𝖓𝖊 𝖜𝖎𝖑𝖑 𝖘𝖊𝖊 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝕷𝖔𝖗𝖉” ~ 𝕳𝖊𝖇𝖗𝖊𝖜𝖘 12:14

“𝖄𝖔𝖚 𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖇𝖊 𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖞, 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝕴 𝖆𝖒 𝖍𝖔𝖑𝖞.” ~ 𝕻𝖊𝖙𝖊𝖗 14:16

I can see the lord without effort then? I’ve never delved deeply into the Bible, but the surface-level hypocrisies are baffling.

My partner, who is not a stranger to the old ways of Christian ꧁magick꧂, told me that when she was a kid, her friend spent a day in prayer requesting a visit from her own guardian angel. That night, there he was, ten feet tall, with an exquisite bedside manner.

"A𝖘k, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖇𝖊 𝖌𝖎𝖛𝖊𝖓 𝖞𝖔𝖚; 𝖘𝖊𝖊k, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖞𝖊 𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖋𝖎𝖓𝖉; k𝖓𝖔𝖈k, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖘𝖍𝖆𝖑𝖑 𝖇𝖊 𝖔𝖕𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖉 𝖚𝖓𝖙𝖔 𝖞𝖔𝖚:" ~ 𝕸𝖆𝖙𝖙𝖍𝖊𝖜 7:7

So why does pure faith become so unattainable to adult-me, who requires elaborate, torturous rituals to touch my birthright? I am sitting with this question: the question of the holy dormant within me and how to set it loose. Specifically, I want to be a self-employed, creatively fulfilled artist (let’s call this A͓̽ -͓̽ L͓̽I͓̽F͓̽E͓̽). I’ve been working in the realms of ꧁magick꧂ to manifest this life, but it is not unfolding with the ease I’d hoped for. I am belaboring through hours of meditations, writing, and strange books. I am studying the manner by which a belief, a faith, a knowing, is created and then held, free from doubt. The trust that such a thing is available for me; that I am worthy of A͓̽ -͓̽ L͓̽I͓̽F͓̽E͓̽.

The Greeks were so good with the subtle differentiation within a single word. One such subtlety is pertinent here. I intellectually know I am worthy of A͓̽ -͓̽ L͓̽I͓̽F͓̽E͓̽, but I don’t know it in the deep, unshakable clarity of gnosis. To know it with the same clarity that I know that I, Sean Jewell, am. (Hell, do I even know that?) The ancient ways of Christian Gnosticism grew from this type of pursuit; the Gnostics seek their salvation through personal knowledge of experiential encounters with the divine, as opposed to the faith in others in words, priests, and proxy.

Back to cost. 𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗴’s ritual holds appeal for me because I have an urge to fill the existential void in me with gnosis in something, anything, as long as it’s optimystic… as a lifelong passive consumer of capitalist 𝙆𝙤𝙤𝙡-𝙖𝙞𝙙™, beliefs in lack and scarcity rage in my mind at a decibel that drowns out the sweet subtle heart songs of worthiness and abundance. If I was a child, a quick prayer might suffice. But the child mind, in this sense, is a less rational place, less domesticated into the cult of struggle and bootstraps. Kids are closer to the womb. That first place where nothing was asked for because all that was needed came without request.




So I resonate–I resonate hard–with the narratives of toil in 𝗔 𝗗𝗮𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗼𝗻𝗴. When Sophia finally does see her angel, ten feet tall & glowing, the sword of dawn in hand, I was fucking moved. It was lovely to imagine that such a being might have my back, have each of our backs. And when she, in the light of that angel, asks not for revenge but for the power to forgive her son’s killers–to forgive herself–somehow my cynical impulse to mock all sentimentality was short-circuited, and I was moved further. Because there are simple knowings I want for my life that I feel I must move Heaven and Earth to obtain. Ideas as simple as knowing I am worthy of receiving A͓̽ -͓̽ L͓̽I͓̽F͓̽E͓̽ I need. The simple knowing that I am worthy of contentment; of happiness.

I’m going to motorcycle out into the Arizona desert. I’m going to hike a mountain. At the top, I am going to ask my angel to grant me the favor of A͓̽ -͓̽ L͓̽I͓̽F͓̽E͓̽.

And why not? It's already mine, right?