Dance With The Devil: Now I work at Africa Imports..Part 5, Epilogue
A year ago, I posted this story about my experience with what I then called, sympathetic magick, below, but now I am working at Africa Imports in Denver, CO, and I have a much better understanding of it all, so I will call this the Epilogue...
I am surrounded now, with African "ART", which is mostly actually ceremonial servitors and Godforms that were created by tribes for their own ceremonial purposes and now for whatever unGodly reason - are being sold to rich Americans and Europeans world-wide through eBay and Etsy...
it's so weird. All the Masks and Statues are in the basement of the owner's home in Northeast Park Hill, Denver...
African Traders come with vans full of more and more beads, statues, effigies, masks, baskets, textiles, weapons, and the like, and create a sort-of Grateful Dead Shakedown Street of wares to be sorted and purchased ... then we - the worker-bees photograph them, label them and bag them and then we have to "put them away" - imagine the dismay of these entities to be cataloged in a basement with other thrown away used up Thought Forms... Toys In The Attick... as it were...
But my now experience is that the Mexican Devil Mask I encountered in the 80s and 90s, was such a creature - created with a purpose to express the dark side or to protect it's village - and then it was moved and sold to rich white people - and the spirit turned. It was perhaps a Tulpa and not just a Servitor and it became sentient, possessing and torturing anyone who was associated with taking it from it's home.
I was one of those nescient and unhappy empath's - and so continued my journey with the occult...
Often I have to go into the basement to get an artifact which has sold for hundreds of dollars - and I say "JESUS CHRIST" - and the cockroach spirits go running into the shadows.
I am suseptable to possession - as seen in the later part of this story... so, I have to shine the brightest light possible on the scenario...
Part 1:
Warning: Before Reading This Story...
Ask for PROTECTION from the images herein.
I have always been protected from my weird adventures on this path I am on...maybe it's Sagitarius Rising - it also protects me (and others) from the worst effects and allows me to learn and grow Spiritually as a result of my blunders.
In 1983, I was attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I was a much different person than I am now. I was mostly terrified of everything. I had lived a very sheltered life, my family taking care of all the hard stuff for me. As a result , I trusted no one, let alone myself.
I attended a summer art workshop in Woodstock, NY at Birdcliffe Artist's Colony Theater.
By day, we would be drawing and painting...
image
By night we listened to great music at the Joyous Lake and Cafe Espresso...where Rock Legends Bob Dylan, The Band, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix all got their start, with Albert Grossman as their manager...
It was a fantastic experience for me... but I was still super uptight as an artist. I just could not let go. I over analyzed everything and pretty much had to be stoned to be able to let it rip.
On the last day of classes, one of our teachers, who lived in Saugerties, NY - just down the road, brought a Mexican Devil Mask to Class for us to draw in a still life...
I fell IN LOVE - but this is not the actual mask
I could feel it in my heart. I whipped out the cray-pas and drew an extremely expressive still life drawing of the Devil Mask placed on a Native American Blanket, and it's shadow on the wall... (the still life is gone - I had to burn it in the end) - but I was FREE - I guess I traded my physical freedom for another form of spiritual imprisonment.
What I did not know at the time was that the Mask was possessed by a Spirit which then took possession of me, and led me down a long path of both exhaltation and destruction. From this experience I learned the power of Sigil-Making and the power of ART...
Something which the dark occult of this world have robbed the artists of the knowledge about - that when we take a mark-maker to a substrate, we are actually capturing a spirit and embodying it within ourselves and within the medium we use - that's why it's called a medium.
"The Two Parts of Sympathetic Magic
Frazer broke down the idea further into two distinct parts: The Law of Similarity and the Law of Contact/Contagion.
He said, “From the first of these principles, namely the Law of Similarity, the magician infers that he can produce any effect he desires merely by imitating it: from the second he infers that whatever he does to a material object will affect equally the person with whom the object was once in contact, whether it formed part of his body or not.”*
-https://www.thoughtco.com/sympathetic-magic-2561922
Stay tuned for Part 2…
Warning: Before Reading This Story...
Ask for PROTECTION from the images herein.
Here is Part 1 of this story.
Taking A Moment To Redefine What An Artist IS:
I am going to segway a moment to "artists", as an asside topic. Looking back on all my experiences up to this point, I now view artists as Shamans. In the beginning, artists portrayed on cave walls the Vision of the tribe before the hunt, their goal for survival.
Later, Shamans used images and signs from nature, vision quests and dreams, to discover what the future held...
Or as in Sumer - they documented their own creation on clay tablets...
image
Nowadays, an artist is encouraged to paint pictures of nature or super-realistic images likened to photographs or portraits. A "good" artist is someone who can replicate what exists in the 3rd dimensional reality.
image
In "art school" there is the "conceptual" artist that is encouraged - it is really the "Emporer's New Clothes" of the art world.
image
or the most risque topics and movements, ie Feminism are moved forward as with the performance feminist art of the 70s - women naked on stage pulling scrolls out of their vagina -
Judy Chicago, The Dinner Party
or painting pictures of women's genitalia on dinner plates...shock - scandal...
Another art form of the people, is of course, tattooing... this is something I am currently doing ... it's a way to bring art back to the common people once again.
And of course nowadays, Satanic Ritual is considered performance art
All of these forms of "art" are a long way away from the Co-Creators that artists actually ARE, based on my experience. I have come a long way down this path to my new truth, where I see myself as a person who can help another person embody God in healing and exorsize demonic possession through image and sigil making.
The Dark Occult
They don't want us to know the occulted knowledge of embodying spirit within a mark made by a mark-maker on a substrate, and that we have that power at our disposal. They want us to paint pretty flowers, or amuse ourselves with egoic concepts that matter not at all while they use the knowledge as a power differential to rule over us, violating Natural Law.
Back to my story...
The summer class ended August 1, 1983. I had been set free in the last class by drawing the Devil Mask ... I was not ready for it to all end. I needed to be in the presence of the Mask which had given me a new Freedom...and under who's spell, I lingered.
So I got drunk and hooked up with the teacher who was in possession of the mask... and stayed with him at his place for another month before returning to Manhattan, where I lived on 109th and Riverside Drive.
I spent that whole month of August drinking and drawing pictures of El Diablo...
...with the new love of my life, teacher-dude...
... of course, I was just using him to be near the Mask...
...
...
At some point in there, he ran out of booze and went into withdrawals and had hallucinations, and I decided things were a little too far gone for me, so I broke up with him, and the mask, and went back to the city...where I lived and worked as a freelance editorial illustrator...
http://joannawhitney.weebly.com/commercial.html
At that point I had enough drawings and photographs of the mask to satiate my desires...and I forgot about the mask and my experiences for a while...
Stay tuned for Part 3…
10 years later, in 1993, I was attending Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, receiving my MFA in Integrated Electronic Art. I was on summer break before entering my 2nd year of a 2-year program, and I was getting ready to decide what I was going to do for my Master's Thesis. I was in Woodstock, for the weekend - which was about an hour south on the NY State Thruway.. I was walking down Tinker St, and passing a gallery next to the hardware store, I looked in and saw the MASK!!! All my LOVE for the Mask returned in that instant. I wanted it so badly!
Teacher-dude, the artist, had made it into a chest of drawers, and was selling it for $3500. Of course, I could not afford to buy it! I took a picture of it and decided to make a copy of the mask out of clay.
like I said, i have no images of this anymore, because in the process of excorsizing this entity from my psychie I had to destroy all the images I had of it...and i have said protection prayers just so that I could draw these pictures now and just to tell you this story today
I made this mask out of airdry clay and did not paint it.
I am also going to admit to you that I must just have been extremely gullible or extremely naive - i know now that I should not have been messing around with this stuff maybe the way one looks back on playing around with a Ouija board when we were kids - but at the time, i just thought of myself as an "artist" interested in following a subject matter that felt close to my heart.
I did not realize that I was doing anything wrong or doing anything that was going to bring great harm upon myself in any way.
As a result of this clay mask making process, I decided to base my Master's Thesis upon this Mask and explore the idea of the Devil and create a performance, video and music about it... i watched tons of movies about the Devil, read tons of books about "him" and then...the next thing that I did was that I got that drawing above, tattooed on my arm.
I have seen dozens of people with negative images tattooed on their arms and none of them seem to have had the experience I had with this practice. I had no idea that I was having a Sigil embedded in my skin, nor did I consider the tattooist and how she felt about me, nor whether or not I was actually putting the spirit of that mask into my body... which to this day I still do not know.
What I do know is that what I brought upon myself was a horrific series of events which, looking back, brought me to my knees and to a place where I was able to and willing to allow Natural Law in what I know it to be it's highest form for this aeon of time (in a non-denominational, non-evangelical way) to enter me and cleanse me fully and provide me with a manner of living by which I can grow spiritually in the light, for the rest of my life...
In a way, i see God used this complete arrogance on my part, as a way to allow me to give my Free Will over to Him, and for that I am eternally grateful, however I don't recommend that YOU try this at home.
Stay tuned for Part 4…
Please Help Me To Figure Out What Happened!
I would like to hear from people who have had any similar experience or know of such an experience, so that they might share with me what they think this all was that happened to me, because beyond my limited knowledge, I honestly don't know - besides Demon Possession
I Will Give 5SBD To The Person With The Best Account of What Happened To Me With This Devil Mask
From Part 1 to Part 4 - I truly want to know what other experiences like this people have had and what their processes are to recover from such an experience.
Please write your experiences below in the comments section. If I don't get a satisfactory explanation this time, I will make it into a real Steemit-Challenge, in the coming weeks.
After I Got The Tattoo:
After getting the image of the Devil Mask tattooed on my arm in February of 1993, I met a guy who looked alarmingly like the mask, in August of 1994. I remember thinking that when I first met him but I did not really think anything of it again until 6 years had passed and I was trying desperately to get him out of my life, when I looked down at my arm and realized that perhaps I needed to get the tattoo covered. I believe that God was talking to me and gave me that intuitive thought.
My First Experience With How Sigils Work
Although I did not realize this at the time, I see now how this Devil Tattoo was a Sigil which brought into my life all the spirit of that Demon had to offer me by being on my right arm where I could see it every day. I was telling my subconscious mind that I wanted that experience.
Dan My unKinda Soulmate
The guy I met was a soul-mate of sorts. i had a vision of him before I met him and I knew it was him when I met him, but he was not there in my life so that we could live happily ever after. Instead, he was a guy who was going to join me on a path to hell and back so that I would beg for God's Mercy and be willing to do anything to not have to live life as I had been living it up to that point. His name is Dan.
Dan is addicted to crack cocaine and I met him at Woodstock 94. Dan is still in and out of rehabs to this day - he has had periods off the dope, but just recently, he is in rehab yet again.
I fell madly in something I called love at that time, with him, at first sight.
After the first 2 weeks of knowing him, I drove to CT from NY to bail him out of jail. I was hooked. I began painting these giant canvases- about 8' tall all of them, to process the agony I went through over him.
Dan would be super sweet one minute and the next day he would not come home because he would hitchhike to CT to cop crack.
At some point, Dan's PO in CT sat me down and told me that this guy, that I was supposedly madly in love with was a charmer and a con man and that he was going to sign Dan over to my custody, so that he could leave CT and move to NY but, he said - he would not recommend it because he told me, this guy is a psychopath.
I didn't listen. I just kept painting. This painting is mixed media paper towels and paper mache covered with oil paint. Dan was in his first rehab that I know of when I did this one. Dan signed over his parental rights to his ex-wife so that he could be free of paying child-support so he could continue to use, and I was so under the spell, I did not blink an eye.
This painting contains the "visitor" stickers that I got when I went to visit him in rehab. He stayed there for about 6 months, so I got through a few paintings about this topic.
I did this painting when I was doing the family program with him in the rehab. I would come visit him and we would go out back in the woods and do the nasty while we were supposed to be in group. I should have known then that it was all a joke, but I was mezmerized.
When he got out of rehab, he went right back to his old habits. I was devastated.
On Sept 2, 1996 I painted this Star of David while there was an astrological phenomena of a Star of David in the sky, intuitively. It was not planned.
March of 1997, Dan went to rehab again, and I went to Mexico. I painted 3 paintings about this adventure.
I went Marlin fishing in Mexico and caught a Marlin which turned purple right before it died.
I gathered gold shells off the beach and glued them to this canvas and painted in silver and gold. I was in Mexico for 2 weeks.
Dan got out of rehab and went immediately back to using. I painted a painting of myself as the Justice Card with a prayer that Jesus went to Hell to get him, like Persephone.
Dan came back to me for a while. I painted a picture of us having sex - and later I saw a demon sitting behind us in the greenery. At this point I had gone with him to New York City with the drug dealers in the car to collect money from their crack whores. I was hanging around with the Bloods and the Cryps and risking my freedom and my life every day, just to be with Dan.
The Devil Painting
This was the last of the series. I was painting what I thought was a completely abstract painting one day and Dan came over to my house to ask me if he could hide his money there so he wouldn't use - he thought. I had been up for days painting and crying. I was a mess. It was 1999. He took one look at the painting, and he said "It's the DEVIL!" - I had not even seen it in the painting. I had painted it without even knowing.
The Bottom
This event knocked me into a state of shock and horror - I realized that I was on a suicide-mission and that I had better do something quickly, if I hoped to live.
I immediately made an appointment to get the Devil Mask on my arm covered. In the end I had a black butterfly tattooed on my arm. At first I tried to just transform the mask into a butterfly but I could still see the Devil through every attempt. Until we simply blacked it out, I could still see it. It took 3 tries. Now that laser tattoo-removal is available, I think I will get it removed once i start making a living as a tattoo artist.
After I got the tattoo covered, I broke and burned and buried all the devil remnants - all the drawings I had done, I carefully burned and buried the ashes in the ground. Other wooden devil masks I had bought, I smashed with a hammer burned and buried. The clay mask I had made, I smashed and soaked in water and then buried outside in the earth.
Immediately after that, I found a spiritual process in Natural Law which helped me to see the truth about Dan and most importantly about myself and what I had been avoiding in my life by being in this crazy relationship, such that I was able to ask him to leave and my life began to take a turn for the better. It was a slow process back to a level of life that I now have, better than the best I had ever known before.
I don't think about this story much, except that the other day, I got a text on Facebook from Dan's best friend, Ivan, saying that he has been living in Denver with his girlfriend from rehab and his 3 year-old daughter and he would like to get together with me and get tattooed...
I posted this drawing with reading about whether or not I should get together with him: https://steemit.com/artzone/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-revisited -
God told me that Ivan is just a hologram of Dan, and that I would be much better off if I stayed away and definitely refused to tattoo Ivan. I have evolved so far spiritually now that it was a no-brainer and quite easy to do, although it did dredge up this whole story for me to tell you.
The timing is also interesting, because at this time I am revisiting my own relationship with the principle of Receptivity vs. Taking as demonstrated in this video. https://www.chabad.org/multimedia/media_cdo/aid/3335300/jewish/Receive-More-and-Take-Less.htm ... At the time when I first met the Mask, back in 1983, I believe that I "TOOK" a shortcut to "freedom" which was actually to another level of imprisonment. The return of this story for me is for me to see how taking does not work, but receiving does. It's a subtle difference in attitude - one makes me feel like I am in control (taking) while the second guarantees that I will get what I want, but I will have to let go into free fall.
Previous Posts
https://steemit.com/aakom/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-a-true-story-of-sympathetic-magic-part-4
https://steemit.com/aakom/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-a-true-story-of-sympathetic-magick-part-3
https://steemit.com/aakom/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-a-true-story-of-sympathetic-magick-part-2
https://steemit.com/aakom/@in2itiveart/dance-with-the-devil-a-true-story-of-sympathetic-magick-part-1