…And this one time I invoked a Cenobite

The Rite of Agonistes and the Gnosis of Pain

Sometimes I try to be deep and philosophical, but today’s entry is the kind of fucked up stuff Chaos Magic is known for. This is from an older blog of mine, but I’m posting it here with some updated commentary because, in my opinion, it’s an excellent example of a Chaos Magic ritual. It also shows how you can develop a working ritual with very little overall information and use details that you have to work with from the source material to create something unique and quite workable. First, the background information:

Per Wikipedia, Agonistes is a character from Tortured Souls, also known as Clive Barker’s Tortured Souls, a series of six action figures and a novelette starring the characters of the series. Distributed by McFarlane Toys in July 2001, the series included six monsters designed by horror author Clive Barker. Each of the figures included a chapter of the 32-page novelette, written by Barker.

The relevant chapter of the novelette is available online here. I urge the reader to check it out. It’s important for how we made the story into a practical magic ritual. It’s not long, and Barker is a pretty good read. The novella chapter is all the existing information there is about Barker’s conception of Agonistes as far as I know, though I’ve since found out that the word itself also means ‘a person enduring an inner struggle’.

So, that’s what there was to work with. From the description I found Agonistes primarily Metamorphic in nature, but also possibly Illuminatory. He also seems useful in Magic designed to strike terror in one’s enemies, not like in such things as curses but more in causing fear, like a form of psychic self-defense.

The ritual I’ll be describing here was designed to be performed by two people, one invoking Agonistes and another acting as the supplicant, evoking Agonistes. In hindsight, the basic idea isn’t completely unlike the set-up of a traditional Goetic ritual. That being said, it could easily be converted into a solo ritual with a few minor alterations.

So, the set-up. Here’s what we did in a nutshell:

The background information says that Agonistes is found in “burning places”. We needed someplace hot. Given our working space we decided that the best option was to simply turn the furnace up full blast. We cranked it up a good while before starting the ritual and it did get pretty freakin’ warm.

It also mentions that Agonistes “sings” to the supplicant to comfort them. I had my partner pick a song that we could loop throughout the ritual, the most comforting song she could think of. She did.

I wrote up a preliminary invocation based on excerpts from the novella chapter ahead of time and memorized them. The novella also contains a ‘supplicants’ prayer’ that she memorized, which she would use as an evocation during the ritual while staring at a sigil of Agonistes. To our knowledge Agonistes has no symbol representing him, so my partner made one:

The description also says that Agonistes will sometimes give the supplicant some of his “flesh”. I used Prosciutto for this, and didn’t tell her ahead of time about this section of the ritual. I decided I’d offer it at the climax of the rite, making it sort of Eucharistic in nature, a little of Agonistes to take with her, as it were. I used Prosciutto simply because that’s what I was reminded of when reading the description. It turned out to have an incredibly special relevance for her, as it was a treat she had sometimes shared with her mother (who had passed away) when she was growing up. Sometimes Magic just happens.

As one might expect, Agonistes is summoned in one way, and only one way, through pain. The delivery of pain…the reception of pain. This is the gnosis employed. For the pain, we used flogging, first with a flogger and later with a belt because the flogger eventually broke. She was involved in the BDSM community, and I was not, so receiving pain was a different experience for her than inflicting it was for me, but, in hindsight, I certainly learned a valuable lesson from this experience. Breaking a perceived personal taboo is certainly a powerful method of altering your consciousness.

Here’s essentially how it all happened, from my journal at the time:

THE RITE OF AGONISTES

(The working space is as hot as possible. A comforting song plays continuously. The supplicant kneels, naked, facing away from the invocant. The sigil is in front of the supplicant)

Invocant: “Known over the Centuries by many names, we do now summon you by the first name given to you…. Agonistes, Transformer of Human flesh, Secret face of Genesis, Creator of Monsters, Wanderer of the burning places…….

O Dark Deliverer, be here in this place now to guide my hands

This supplicant comes to you, with sufficient need, with sufficient hunger for change. O Agonistes, accommodate her.”

Supplicant: 'O Agonistes, dark deliverer, make me in the image of my enemies’ nightmares. Let my flesh be the stuff from which you carve their terrors; let my skull be a bell which sounds their death-knell. Give me a song to sing, which will be the song of their despair, and let them wake and find me singing it at the bottom of their beds.

'Unmake me, unknit me, transform me.

'And if you cannot do that for me, Agonistes, then let me be excrement; let me be nothing; less than nothing.

'For I want to be the terror of my enemies, or I want oblivion.

'The choice, Lord, is yours.’

(Invocant To Supplicant) “YOUR WILL BE DONE”

Pain is administered, during which at random points the invocant says:

“This is the First Art.”

Pain is administered, during which at random points the invocant says:

“Thank you, O God, for making a world in which there is so much hopelessness and such a profound “hunger” for revenge”

And when the rite reaches a natural stopping point:

(While feeding the supplicant by hand) “Eat of the flesh of Agonistes”

Banish by preferred method