Those who have been following my work here at The Accelerated Chaote for a while now will know that my chosen godform is Lilith, specifically in her rebellious aspect. The following article, one of a sequence designed to explore the concept of the void as a seething, roiling womb of both creation and dissolution initially saw digital print over at ChaosMagick.Com towards the end of summer 2022. A doorway to ritual, roadmap for shamanic journeying and an excuse to lay my wounded soul bare for you all, this deeply personal narrative will hopefully be well received by sorcerers that have made similar pacts.
The Womb of Tiamat
Chaos, Lilith and the Void
By Gavin Fox
I sit naked, my body shrouded in the curling currents of incense smoke. The circle of candles which form my barrier against the mundane world appear like becalmed fireflies in some wood-paneled wasteland, stunned into inactivity by the heavy scents of frankincense, tobacco, and oak moss that fill the room. The charcoal pops and spits in front of me, demanding more resin, enough to strangle the last of the clearer air from my lungs. I unsteadily feed the embers before returning to the task at hand, my mind already elsewhere.
I am looking to approach a particular spirit to work with me on a highly personal project. One stage of a larger ritual involving a rebalancing of my broken psyche. Unfocussed anger and depression have ruled my life for too long. Drastic measures must be undertaken now, and growth achieved at any cost. I used to consider myself strong, but as I have got older I have realised that not every battle can be won on my own. To be ready to receive this spirit’s wisdom I first have to make room. Too much of me is trapped within this skin. Blood, bone, memories. My breath slows. I seek the void.
The incense continues to rise. The sound of the charcoal recedes from my world, though in yours the rasping demand to feed the pyre has likely not changed in pitch since the last handful of moss was cast upon it. I am stumbling inward through sheer force of will, walking an oblique pathway towards a limitless ocean of everything and nothing. This knowledge is ancient in origin, yet needed now more than ever. Few magickians can claim to have achieved viable results without diving into the tempestuous waters of Tiamat at least once. But it is not she who I seek. Her womb is the gateway, nothing more.
Some, like myself, have learned to embody this emptiness when the need arises. I exhale. Hollow now, my hunched frame forms a channel which ideas and concepts flow through without ever filling. Achingly empty, but ultimately content with the space that loss of self creates, my skin cools. Ice drifts through my veins like the chunks of dead worlds that endlessly sail the heavens. Purposeless, yet doing what is expected of them even when no one is there to witness their passing. I hold on to enough of myself to keep my lungs from collapsing in the void. My vision dims.
I have no time for pacts. For me, the gods and demons of medieval folklore are constructs. Bundles of memetic information fed by those who would give them attention. They could be cultural glosses over the fractured mirror that is the human mind. Perhaps they are glitches in the coding of the zeitgeist. Or even the original children of the noosphere created long before that term had been coined. No matter. I seek to be empty so that one of them can fill me. One who I have known intimately. My queen or sorrows.
I feel my flesh rot. My lungs are on fire as they refuse to fill. I am blind, spinning in a deep black ocean of unrelenting undercurrents and unable to stop the lack of oxygen from starving my brain. Somewhere a crow calls in the night, the sound like thunder as the very things which make me who I am fall away. A herald of my unbirthing on steadily beating wings. And as the sound gets closer you see my body tense up unnaturally in response. The attack begins.
Blackened creatures grind obscenely against me. Corvid in appearance but with disturbingly indistinct silhouettes, they may have once passed for human but could do so no longer. My mind races in panic, trying to convince itself that I am creating these demons from nothing more than archetypal shadows. Imagination given wings by an unplanned external stimuli. Children of a crow call that should never have been audible in my entranced state anyway.
Yet despite my futile attempts to banish these malformed beasts from my mindscape they pull at my flesh, a seething mass of claws and teeth and all-consuming hunger picking over my broken bones as I drift in the nothingness of Tiamat’s womb. I am unmade. Consumed. The potential loss of the last vestiges of my rational self is nothing if not welcome. I want to be free of the pain. Maybe failure is the answer. Perhaps I should just give in. I teeter on the edge of the final abyss.
No. Adrenalin explodes, spiking through my bloodstream. I stand at the crossroads between fight or flight, the very core of my reptilian brain refusing to lay down and die. Instinct takes over. I choose to fight my devourers, struggling free of their razor sharp embrace, willing to leave the shards of me that are trapped between their teeth and under their claws behind to crawl through their massed ranks and deeper into the void. I will not allow myself to be consumed without a fight. At the verge of exhaustion, I stand to face my pursuers just as my patron slides into view. She waves her hand and her children disperse. We are alone.
There is little about Lilith in the Medieval grimoires of course. When she is discussed her name is often confused with that of another spirit, or even entire classes of them. In some ways, she feels more modern than those texts. Her hold on the cultural undercurrent is just too vital to ignore. Perhaps this is as it should be, for these puritanical missives could never adequately describe the dark and bloody rebel who is now running a single, clawed finger down my cheek. She knows why I am seeking her out. We have danced this dance before, and she is impatient at my lack of understanding.
I have offended her with my weakness, for she is the first of all rebels, standing naked before the Abrahamic God and unwilling to bow to his demands. I claim to have such strength, but when every day is a struggle against your own self-loathing it is hard to keep going. Yet in her disgust at my failings she finds compassion. To even be alive after what I have been through is a sign of dogged determination. To seek the aid of others to repair my psyche is a symbol of my refusal to be content with the hand which I have been dealt. Even crawling is forward motion. No, the void cannot have me, for I am, and always will be hers. She smiles.
The tingle starts at the very base of my spine. Slowly, she fills my empty shell, drifting upwards through nerves and tissues, caressing every organ as she goes. It is like lowering myself into a warm bath with razor slit wrists, pain, and sorrow leaching away into the water, my tooth and claw exposed veins draining those memories into the blackness around me. She kisses the cuts caused by her children closed as I drift in a sea of memories.
There are plenty of regrets in there, of course. I have known wants and lusts like any other man. Lilith reassures me that my pain is far from unique. Nor are my bruises and scars. She continues to warm my void drowned body, aiding me to weather the storm as the past lashes at the last bastion of my broken psyche. Synapses fire, my life flashes before my eyes. I was unwilling to be consumed earlier. Her children did not deserve to have me for themselves. But in her embrace, I find peace. If this is death, then so be it. ‘Not today’ she whispers.
I am born. You see me suddenly lurch forward, driving my clenched fists into the wooden floor before me, blood spitting sluggishly from knuckles already scarred from fighting off the shadows of my former selves. The warmth recedes, exiting from whence it came as my vision returns. Lilith is drifting back to wherever such entities dwell. My deep mind. The Noosphere. Hell. It does not matter. The grimoires were but one map of the unseen world among so many others, and the map is never the territory.
I punch the floor again and again, wearing the skin on my knuckles down to red flecked lumps of indistinct gristle. I revel in the feeling of physicality that it creates, remembering myself as the pain reignites my previously void starved nervous system. Rationality reasserts itself. The charcoal has spilled across the floor and burnt small rings in the wood while I was away. Many of the candles have died, and the room smells of stale sweat and fresh blood more than frankincense or tobacco now.
It seems oddly empty, like a subway station after hours. There were once creatures here, though you would not have seen them. Hunched and twisted corvid parodies of women with blood-flecked teeth, yet their absence seems more distinct than their actual presence. I have been expelled from the womb of Tiamat, back into your waking world, my body unharmed and mind forever changed. Lilith could not follow me, but her actions were clear even if the reasons behind them will forever be beyond my understanding. We banish with laughter.
In hindsight, I still consider myself to be strong. A weaker man would have failed to traverse the void in the first place, let alone return with the knowledge that he sought. As I got older the realisation dawned that not every battle could be won without help, and if that assistance can only be found by hollowing myself out and allowing darker spirits to dwell within me than so be it. True, the grimoires are useful as guidebooks to strange and unusual places. But as with anything else, the most rewarding experiences are only encountered when you throw the map in the trash and go off the beaten path by yourself.
The Accelerated Chaote 