💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › cybele.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 08:28:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Cybele
Author: Masked Faces Coven
Date: 06-08-2021
Language: en
Topics: queer anarchism, insurrectionary anarchism, queer witchcraft, witchcraft

Masked Faces Coven

Cybele

“should I have to portray a convict-or a criminal- I shall so bedeck him

with flowers that, as he disappears beneath them, he will himself become

a flower, a gigantic and new one”

-Jean Genet, The Thieves Journal

“This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation. Revel in the

annihilation of man as the image of god. Destroy. Plot designs of death.

Disfigure the face of man and woman”

a meme based upon quotes by Pope Francis discussing the transgender

community *

TO BE QUEER, TO BE A WITCH means TO BE IN REVOLT. Our Queer Witchcraft

is a clandestine revolt against all forms of domestication and

domination. Ours is a craft of masks, from the balaclava to the star,

and all faces in-between that fit our personal mythos and positioning in

this world. Let us never forget that the witch and the queer have been

in perpetual conflict with the state since the formation of the latter

as a mode of domestication and control. There has always existed a

division between the witch and the priest, the queer and the “straight”

, in societies that have been sucked into the concept of the state. The

priest-class and heteronormativity is created and upheld by the state,

and under said control and patronage, exists only to further domesticate

the divide between normalcy and the Other, by policing it and enforcing

any points on intersection or gaps where subversion can slip into/out

from. The witch and the queer envoke A criminal element to this society-

a fear of that other, that has managed thus far to escape domestication

and control. We must learn to embrace this criminality- to attack not

only the fascistic priest-classes and conquistadors of so called Western

Witchcraft and Occultism, but also the new techno-priest classes of

modern industrial society and their cybernetic colonial empires of

control.

Not only is our craft marked by its criminality, our queerness too has

always been determined by its brush with criminality, by our negation to

that realm of the Other and the subsequent attempts to oppress that

otherness by the societies of domination and control wherever they have

emerged in the historical process. This being the case, both our

witchcraft and our queerness have been forged along the lines of

intersectionality from the very beginning. Our love and our rage, our

charms and our hexes have been syncratic from their origin- and always

forming from the marginalized aspects of society. Our powers can only be

harnessed and honed accessing this communal wealth of spiritual

accomplices through our revolt against all systems of domination. The

spirits we work with, demand Anarchy, and thrive on its abundance in all

its variations like flowers

We are casting aside the shackles of the industrial patriarchy. Like

butterflies, we are emerging from the shells of our past restricted

existence. We are re-discovering the ancient magic that was once the

birth right of all human beings. We are re-learning how to talk to the

worms and the stars. We are taking flight on the wings of

self-determination.

Come, blessed Lady of the Flowers, Queen of Heaven, creator and

destroyer. Kali — we are dancing the great dance of your coming.

-Arthur Evans,Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture

Both our craft and our queerness have been shaped by our personal

struggles as well as by the broader struggle of the oppressed and

marginalized against any and all forms of domination. We do not offer

our magic as allies, but as accomplices. Our struggles are as diverse as

we are, and interconnected. We do not offer a single system of magic,

but an assemblage of them. Our craft is not one tradition-instead it is

a magical bio-region, where a spiritual diversity is allowed to thrive

amid a collective bond held together via many various autonomies acting

in their own interest and finding affinity. We attack western occultism,

especially in its current intellectual and New Age forms, for its

Fascist insistence on hierarchies, its colonial chauvinism towards

“western Traditions” and the exotification/annihilation/appropriating of

all other spiritual traditions in the process that do not fit that their

modality, as well as their cisheternormativity and insistence on

gender-roles and binaries. Similarly we attack so called Western

Civilization, for those exact same flaws as well as any system for that

matter which seeks to oppress our bodies and our magic, whether that be

on the individual scale, or in the collective process.- an attack on one

is an attack on all, likewise a curse from one, is a curse from all- we

are multiple just as we are individual.

Our cult, as it were, is one of ANARCHY. On one hand, as a spiritual

endeavour that guides us through its revelry by revolt into that

ecstatic state of becoming , and one the other hand, a way of becoming

itself that seeks liberation from all forms of domination and control.

Our magic is one where love and rage, fucking and fighting are

synonymous means of worship and veneration. We are tender, just as we

are sharp, and always armed- with charms for lovers, and curses for the

cis gaze, our arsenal is one of poisons and potions, daggers and dildos,

brass knuckles and condoms. We imbue anarchy with sacredness, and in

turn the realm of the profane is wiped away. We give it essence, and in

turn we see its life-blood, its Teotl in the possibility of all things.

We feed it cum, spit, blood, lubricant, gasoline, and fresh flowers and

we give it a residence within this world that we now see as an altar.

Our bodies themselves, become altars, altars adored with the most

precious of flowers and bones, whom at a moments notice can become

Athames when the time is ripe for attack.

“our spiritual anarchy and intellectual disorder is a function of the

anarchy of everything else-or rather everything else is a function of

this anarchy”

-Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double

“Sorcerers have always held the anomalous position, at the edge of the

fields or woods. They haunt the fringes. They are at the borderline of

the village, or between villages. ”

-Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

We contend that ANARCHY is NOT JUST a SOCIO-POLITICAL philosophy, but

ALSO a COSMOLOGICAL VISION. A vision that effects all living things at

their autonomous centres and escalating out into their affinities and

exists at the level of Becoming vs Being. As queer witches, we hold in

esteem all guides that manifest before us, who penetrate us with their

mystical quests and liberate us with the urging on of transgressions

that point us in the direction of our own queer becoming. We are queer

insurgents. Guerrilla sorcerers of whatever lands we inhabit, from the

glory hole to the barricades and every wild forest and cruising spot

in-between. We have learned to traverse between all liminal spaces. We

are a society all our own on the outskirts. We are outcasts from

normalcy-our magic and our queerness must be a reflection of this. No

more gods and goddesses, no more gender-roles and binaries. We seek to

liberate ourselves fully from the control of heteronormativity as well

as the many various deities from their relegation to gendered roles and

god-heads. Our queerness offers up an entirely new pantheon. One that is

free of all colonial chauvinism and patriarchal hierarchies and

dictatorships. One that offers forces, who are all too keen on being

discovered. From house charms invoking Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P.

Johnson, to flowers and obsidian daggers offered in the name of

Xochipilli- a whole new arsenal of tools is opened up to us

<em>“These dead are hungry</em>. Fuck, Dance, run,kiss, steal, eat

decadently, sing, destroy, create. The energy of life, ecstatic life,

draws them close, nourishes. Let your kissing, dancing, fucking,

creating, destroying move you to trance. Give them space and adorn it

lavishly. Speak to them there, where they are comfortable and at home”

- First Protocols of Queer Goetia

We embrace this discovery- a cosmos of queer and insurrectionary

Yonaoshi, deities of a queer world-renewal, who rectify the imbalances

of the queer and other marginalized experiences that have been forced

upon us by racism, colonialism , patriarchal domination, and

heterosexual/able-bodied norms. We do not want a society where we “fit

in” or “belong”, we want a world all for ourselves, completely removed

from the exploitation of the colonial capitalist system that causes us

so much harm. We do not kid ourselves with the illusion that we have the

power to change a system that will always be exploitative, rather

instead we seek power over ourselves and the autonomy, responsibility

and jouissance that comes with that power. We reiterate that our

QUEERNESS and our WITCHCRAFT is a CONSTANT BECOMING, NOT an IDENTITY- we

are sorcerers of our gender and sexuality, shapeshifters of our own

potentialities and desires. We refuse to be political bodies , or

economic bodies any longer. Our bodies have entered into the realm of

the Sacred- the world we are renewing is not based on an economical

model, it is the heartbeat of the world, the mystical experience blended

into reality. We do not know the potentialities of these forces that lay

dormant or who are birthed every day within the prison confines of

modern civilization, but we hear in their many cries for liberation a

familiarity to our own wailing and sense of despair and agony that we

feel within the clutches of the spectacle. We do not seek dominion over

these forces, there is no seal that can contain them, rather we see

ourselves among them, wild and chaotic, and we revel in that vision.

“From hundreds of ingredients with incontestable results, we can cite:

lead acetate, which you can get in a few days if you leave lead shot

sitting around or leave a piece of lead in vinegar; pieces of rotten

meat; hemlock, which is so often mistaken for parsley and which grows

everywhere on the side of the road and on the backsides of ditches. At

least we will give back to our despicable oppressors some of the evil

that they give us every day. We will not smile and support the tyranny

knowing that our enemies’ lives are at our mercy… They want to be the

masters! Let them suffer the consequences

-Manifesto of Nihilist Women(1883)

“We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses,

our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion

parts and work in an ignoble mechanism of production which links

capital, exploitation, and the family. We can no longer allow others to

turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into

occupied territory—territory controlled and regimented by others, to

which we are forbidden access”

-Felix Guattari, To Have Done With the Massacre of the Body

We stand on the understanding that Capitalism has been the most

destructive magical system ever to be invented, that its embodiment of

the SIGIL in the image and valuation of that image as a commodity, its

SACRIFICE via its continued use/evolution of colonialism and ecological

destruction, and its ritual of heterosexuality and cisnormativity has

led to the greatest of spiritual catastrophe ever to face the multitude

of species living on earth. Our queer magic arrives as a direct

confrontation with that curse of capitalism. Our very becoming and craft

is formed by this insurgency against order and normalcy. Let us paint

the brick walls, the bathroom stalls and each and every passing train

with the queerest pages of our grimoires. Let us etch out doorways and

portals at every street corner, bus stop or underpass we frequent, where

the spirits of anarchy may enter and materialize. Let us take over the

beaches, the university campus, the webcam, the streets with the

multiplicity of all our different bodies and experiences. May our

various expressions of gender(or lack of) forever confuse the algorithms

that try to control our bodies and our existences and therefore our

spirit. We refuse any sort of offered performance for PURE AGENCY. We

are not concerned with presentation or with preservation in the current

system, but concern ourselves instead with a complete spiritual upheaval

from the present despair of our current condition and conditioning. Our

queer bodies have entered into the realm of insurrection. We no longer

see a need to be esoteric about our love or our rage- we embrace it as a

form of spiritual possession, we loose ourselves in our queerness and

our magic. We seethe at the idea of LIFE, of ANARCHY, and we allow this

ecstasy to form itself however it chooses given its conditions. Our

queerness and our magic are flowers, blooming whenever the time is ripe,

containing either a vital sustenance or a destructive poison.