Identity is a topic that has fascinated me for years. The Process played a lot with images, deliberately adopting and discarding them. Some senior members worked through two or three in the time I knew them, and behind the publicly known Sacred Names we were given or adopted (Brother Luke in my case) were Magickal Names, and, for the people we termed Priests and Masters, Magickal Names of Power. The Magickal Names came from many different mythologies, the Magickal Names of Power apparently from the Shem-ha-Mephorash, the long, sacred incantation derived from the Hebrew letters of Exodus XIV, 19-21, which Moses uttered to part the Red Sea. I say ‘apparently’, because I only saw a list once and illicitly, and that briefly, and I knew next to nothing about Qabalah until much later in life.
But each added a level, a dimension, to how we saw or presented ourselves. The Sacred Name conveyed status, the Magickal Name exclusivity and a broadened sense of inner selfhood. I can’t speculate validly on the Magickal Name of Power, but identification with an archangel would clearly have had its own special effect.
Like most people, I have several identities today: a professional one, one for my family, Skepth obviously, and more private ones. Each of these is ‘magickal’ in the sense that it has a particular effect on myself, and thus on others with whom I come into contact.
The Process used magick (its preferred spelling, borrowed from Crowley) in a different sense to that most people would assume. As an organisation, it was always light on ritual, and even lighter on the idea of private devotion. Both were tried at different times, but the primary ‘ritual’ was the one we performed on the streets, soliciting funds. In a post called The Group Mind, I wrote a year or two back:
The Process never let up. The accoutrements of ritual - use of our Processean names, special clothing, evocative language, the psychic intranet of the members, and reverence for the sacred sources of its energy - were always in place, even if ceremonial ritual per se was a very minor part of our lives. The only way to banish The Process from one's aura was to leave entirely, and take the fall into depression that such a loss of identity triggered.
It was all of that, including the sense that we were linked to a specific source and to each other that people encountered, sometimes even knowingly, when we walked up to them. Today, I find the whole thing more sinister than I once did, because we were constantly reinforcing our own identification with the group. Perhaps others had more of a feeling of contact with the sacred, but the further in I went, the less present it was. The diametrical opposite was true when I joined, since I had an major epiphany (see Thelema’s Gods - I) which pushed me into the thing, and for some time I drew my support and inspiration from that. ‘Luke’ thus had a secondary identity that was partly concealed even from the group, an identity vested in a kind of conspiracy-of-spirit that both sustained and separated him.
A key factor about Thelema that I find both depressing and refreshing is that it places little store in such identities as things that last. Thelemites, and Thelemic magicians especially, will play with various ‘heavy’ identities, but with far less basic self-deception than The Process did. The core of our beings is simply energy, not a thing in itself, and while self-chosen names and guises may be a means to get to that, they are explicitly understood to be temporary measures. They are designed to be exploded as much as exploited.
Walking home last evening, a grumpy mood on me, I recalled and replayed in my head an old argument with a one-time friend. At some point, I found myself angrily telling her (as I’d not done in real life) that I no longer cared. Instantly, the late day’s detritus cleared. For a short time, I was in a landscape of light, despite it being 20 minutes after sunset. The false identity I’d been carrying, of someone wrapped up in other people’s ideas of what should be done and said, dissolved. like a snowflake hitting hot coffee.
Of course, a ‘protective’ identity re-wove itself soon enough, made up partly from my mundane self and partly from the experience itself. It wasn’t that I’d never been in that state before, but it was, briefly, an identity-free state. I was ‘not caring’ with enough conviction that I was temporarily out of my own game.
The Process wove its members into its own fabric, and real detachment was rarely possible. We let ourselves be coaxed or manipulated into roles, and into group enactments based around those roles. As I’ve said before, it was a failed spirituality, yet gave a better impression of actual spirituality than most other faiths. But choosing to be, and becoming, a person going into such a situation is itself an assumed identity. The real grace comes when all that drops; when the compulsive need to be something or someone dies, and at least the threshold of transcendence becomes visible.