Ecstatic Agendas

The following is a partial transcript of a talk I delivered on December 6th, 2025 at Amoura Love Store in Pomona, California, in support of Barbarous Tongues: a Journal of Arts and Esoterica. At the conclusion of the talk, I performed my original syncretic ritual Systasis with Helios, formatted as a group blessing. I have included a version of that text below as well. Many thanks to my host Leticia Valdez, co-presenter Mandy Wilde, my friends Remington and Brenda, and everyone who attended.

Yours in Love and Power,

Jason Triefenbach, HFHR, MSG-PF

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I want to tell you a story broken into two parts. We’ll call the first part “Ghosts, Art, and the Crisis of Identity”, and the second will be called “Magic and Transcendence”.

1. Ghosts, Art, and the Crisis of Identity

I’ll start with a bit of background as to my own personal history with magic. I was raised in a family that, as I was growing up, still exhibited the faintest after effects of Appalachian folk traditions – little quirks of personality that my family by that time called “superstitions”, but which they nonetheless believed in wholeheartedly – like never sweeping dust out the door, always eating black eyed peas on New  Year’s Day, throwing a pinch of salt over your shoulder if you’d spilt it…  and to this day my Aunt Constance will insist that if she leaves the house, remembers something she forgot, and returns for it, she MUST take a moment to sit down in a chair or she will have bad luck.

Some of my older relatives readily discussed having seen ghosts in their younger days, and my grandmother passed down from her forbears the belief in a certain Bible verse which was thought to stop the bleeding of a mortal wound if read over the victim. A belief in the intercession of Angels disguised as humans was also professed. An uncle, living the wild life of a country shitkicker, told of being stranded in the cornfields on three different occasions, having drunkenly driven his car off the road and into the mud. In each of these misadventures, an elderly couple came to his rescue, appearing along the dark lanes, and offering him rides back to town. No one knew these people, nor ever saw them in the small, close knit communities in which we lived. Yet on these three separate occasions, in different locations, they arrived serendipitously in his hour of need, never judging his drunkenness, nor hesitating to help. Among my family, they were generally thought to be supernatural helpers of an angelic persuasion. So these are some of the things in my upbringing that I think have had a lasting influence on me. 

In my teen years I consumed a lot of underground music, film, art, literature, a lot of which had an occult sort of slant to it – some favorites were the music of proto-industrial composers COIL and the rock band / cult propaganda group Psychic TV, the art of the Dadas and the Surrealists, and the writings of William Burroughs. Around this time I started experimenting with rituals of my own, drawing circles and snakes in the driveway and by the burn pile in our plot in the trailer park, candle scrying, and sitting in cornfields listening to birds. And also somewhat dumb teenage ideas about how to alter my consciousness – putting a bucket over my head to warp my acoustics and then humming for extended periods of time, sitting under a blanket with a strobe light, or making nonsense words and repeating them over and over again. Just intuitive play.  But sometimes as an adult I’ll read about shamanic techniques or ways that serious minded mystics might go about seeking trance states, and it’ll seem similar to things I experimented with back then. And I’ll think, I was doing that! But it was just games and basically the urge to be as different as I could from all the hicks and jocks around me.

Later, starting bands with friends and classmates, I learned as well about the energy of groups, and how a performer can influence and steer a roomful of people toward nonrational, ecstatic states. And through college and beyond I kept evolving my little mind altering activities and self-scripted rituals. 

Still, though, I would say that I didn’t start studying magic seriously until I had what I consider a crisis of self. In 2008 I left the midwest and moved to to Southern California to pursue in earnest the path of art world success. This was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done up to that point – if you grew up in LA, I don’t know if you can grasp how much more difficult it is to maintain the basics of daily life, compared to places where things are slower, cheaper, rent is lower, and there are just way less people around you, competing for jobs, shows, studio space, recognition, etc. It was very trying for both myself and my spouse as we worked coffee shop jobs and lived in a one room apartment near Olympic and Western while I tried breaking into the gallery scene without the support one might get from a local art school affiliation and the cohort of peers that comes with it.  I did pretty well though, with performances in lofts and group exhibitions in small startups. But by 2010 the strains on my marriage were almost breaking us, – the financial crash of 2008 had brought unemployment in my neighborhood to nearly 30%, debt was mounting, and we’d wracked up a couple grand in parking tickets from trying to live in Koreatown without a garage membership.  One day my wife told me she was leaving California whether I came along or not, and so we started making plans to flee to her brother’s home in the mountains of North Carolina.

It was at this juncture, just weeks from leaving, that what could have been a major breakthrough occurred.  A local gallerist who I won’t name requested a studio visit, and asked if she could bring a friend along. As it turned out, that friend was a board member at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, who on the spot paid me 1200.00 for a weird lump of unfired clay I’d been spraypainting and gluing bits of litter to! I was also offered a solo show at the gallery, for early the following Spring. But the wheels of dissolution were already rolling, and I left LA in an overloaded station wagon with wife, dog, books and art supplies, heading for Western North Carolina like some kind of reverse Beverly Hillbilly. 

This was devastating to my self-confidence and my sense of orientation and trajectory in life – especially when the gallerist dropped me suddenly, saying we couldn’t be of help to one another if I wasn’t present locally to attend parties and openings with her to schmooze and meet people. 

I was spending my time angry, depressed, and wallowing in a real sense of grief as I felt that the person who I thought I was had died.  I now see that this was a bit of  tunnel vision that I was in as I had come to place an unhealthy level of my self-worth in the idea of so-called art world success in the cultural mecca of Los Angeles.

At the same time I had been privately dealing with a crippling fear of my own mortality, for roughly the same time period of two years between leaving the Midwest, living in Los Angeles, and becoming displaced from my dreams, and feeling forced to give all that up and move to the South. 

So in other words, I was a real wreck.

Luckily, a few days before leaving Los Angeles. I stopped in a nice little shop – Stories bookstore in Echo Park – and from local poet John Tottenham,  who worked the register there most days, I purchased two books.  The first was “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts, which, to this day, I still consider the most important book I’ve ever read. And the second was called, “Singing the Soul Back Home: Shamanism in Daily Life” by Caitlyn Matthews. That one I didn’t even finish, but nonetheless it gave me an important jumpstart into reflection and practice of a deeper and more total consideration of the world of spirit. And it’s these occurrences that really reset my life: my somewhat forced break with what up to that point had been lifelong goals since childhood, and then chancing upon these two books, which I intuitively felt would help me overcome this crippling fear of death, which had come upon me very suddenly approximately two years before.

So, as I began my life in the mountains of North Carolina, feeling very much out of place, very much disconnected from myself and society and the people around me, I had no choice, I felt, but to begin an honest engagement with the invisible forces within me and without. I also at this time happened upon the late grimoirist Jake Stratton- Kent. This was around as I said 2010 / 2011. What I’d consider his opus, Geosophia:The Argo of Magic, had just been published, and his whole attitude about magic and the world became extremely influential upon me as I began to clumsily and somewhat carelessly explore the spirit ecologies of the extremely haunted Blue Ridge Mountains. Which I won’t get into too much because that’s a huge subject and I do want to stop digressing and get onto our main subject matter here today. But in short, through reading the work of JSK I began practicing a ritual that he called the Headless One. And that, as Robert Frost would say, has made all the difference.

…….

2. Magic and Transcendence 

It is my belief that we align ourselves with aspects of the spiritual in every moment, every action, every trajectory of our attention, whether or not we are conscious of that fact. Most people go through life very much unconscious to the spiritual, or else they cede authority of their spiritual destinies to organized religion or the equally constraining philosophies of secularism, western scientific rationalism, or plain old hedonistic nihilism.  But some of us, and of course all of us here today, choose to, or are compelled to, open that aperture, reach into that diaphanous membrane, and take a deeper look.

Nowadays, a lot of the work, but not all of the work, that I do magically is based in the sensibilities of the Greek Magickal Papyri. I’m drawn to this porous system in part because it is a wonderful cultural blender of different ancient traditions from the Mediterranean, Africa, and the so called Middle East, and represents as such a quintessential sorcerous tradition if there is such a thing.

We talk about open traditions and closed traditions, and as an Anglo American I have tried to be careful not to steal or appropriate, or grab from those traditions which are not mine by lineage or ethnicity or initiation. At the same time, I feel no emotive alignment with the concept of  whiteness, and as someone whose family tree is full of broken branches, rotten roots, redactions, rumors and outright lies, the spiritual traditions of northern Europe, to which I might be tethered by name and skin, do not resonate with me anymore than others might.

Or, as I put it in an unfinished song I started to compose many years ago,

“I have no father

I have no son

I’m an island in time

I’m the only one”

But the papyri, as collected in a volume by Hans Dieter Betz, are my main source of magical praxis these days. Betz’ translation is sort of a recipe book really – there isn’t any discussion of philosophy or the WHY and HOW of magic. It’s just a huge compilation of mostly short little spells by so-called working magicians – sorcerers for hire – in the ancient Mediterranean. There’s currently a fair amount of buzz around this flavor of magic- a lot of books are being published about it and random people on facebook will happily tell you how to do it 

or especially how what you’re doing is wrong 

and your questions are stupid 

and you’ll never get it like they get it!  

But all you really need to do is flip around in this book for a while, and work up your nerve to follow the recipes.

Thats not to say there aren’t some legitimate teachers out there – Mandy, Leticia and myself have all benefited from one we have in common. But I will insist  that secondhand knowledge is useless until you have your own fingers in the dirt, your eyes stinging with sweat and tears, and you feel the rising tide of the uncanny traveling up your spine and spreading across your neck and heating your cheeks with the uncertain certainty that something strange is happening!

And one more thing I’ll say about the recipes in the book, is that they were written thousands of years ago, and there are instructions in the book that might be quite distasteful to most of us – things like drowning a bird in milk and similar cruel and  unpleasant actions. There are also spells that a person who is committed to consent and self agency will find morally repugnant;  and so it’s important to choose for yourself what you will take from a book like this, and what you will leave in the dust of the past.

 I have made quite fruitful use of this volume without killing any animals, without forcing myself on any people, and without twisting the will of others, toward ends which they themselves would not choose. And knowing Mandy and Leticia, I can easily conclude that they too have used this book in morally upright, empathetic ways.

Now, as I’ve said, this magic is a magic of individual practitioners – sorcerers – in many cases people on the fringes of their society, enacting magic on behalf of others on the fringes of society. However, these things were embedded in an overall spiritual milieu that encompassed thousands of years of religious thought and ceremony and tradition; that penetrated their culture in fundamental and all encompassing ways. I have sought a deeper connection with this text by studying some of the thought, and philosophies of the people who I can only guess were using this material originally. This includes Pagan and Jewish mystics, gnostic Christian groups, the Greek and North African devotional and divinatory mysteries, as well as things further afield including so called Solomonic magic, the techniques of collage and cutup inherited from some of the artists and musicians I mentioned before, and my own percolating engagement with magic and nature and architecture as I meet it day to day. 

 In the essay that I wrote that is included in Barbarous Tongues, I focus on solar devotions, and my work with the Greek titan Helios. However, I was led to work closely with Helios through my devotions and association with Hekate. About two years ago I performed a compound ceremony of devotion to Hekate that was written by our teacher in common, Jack Grayle.  At the end of this “nine night rite” the aspirant seeks permission from Hekate to enter her forest and devote one’s life to her.

 And she answers. 

Maybe yes, maybe no…  sometimes other answers that aren’t clearly yes or no.  The answer I got, which was confusing and caused me to question her repeatedly through the methods supplied in the spell, finally led her to tell me : “No, you cannot enter my forest. Because you are already in my forest.”

 This really floored me. 

And it was followed in short order by an extremely intense dream I had that involved ancestors and living family members and culminated in a scene in which I was kneeling in a rainy parking lot at night, and the black cloaked figure of Hekate taught me a song to the sun. And as I sung this song on my knees in the wet lot, I held in my hands a large golden flower, which I twisted into a sharp point, and drove into my own chest. And since then, although I still make offerings and prayers to Hekate, I have for the time being set aside Mr. Grayle’s grimoire to explore the solar mysteries of the god I have come to call Helios-Sarapis-Ra.

As I outline in my essay, this has involved dream incubation (or the deliberate seeking of instructive dreams), the casting of magical circles, cartomancy and other forms of divination, devotional rites, offerings, trance states, and ecstatic dance. Over the last year and a half I have used the Papyri to create and practice two composite rituals that combine different spells from the text. One of these which I’m going to perform today is called Systasis with Helios. Systasis being the process of coming into intimate contact and commingling one’s essence with the God. The second spell I crafted from fragments of the PGM is called Night Journey of Helios, and it is a further initiation through ego death, that one might perform after having worked with solar deities and securing their permission to join the solar god in his boat, to journey through the horrors of the underworld.

The traditional theurgic route to this type of communion with spiritual realities was to arrange conducive conditions, prepare oneself physically and mentally,  and – through both practice and study and sudden breakthroughs of inspiration – learn to join that spiritual discourse. In my case I am working with  the physical embodiment of light and warmth supplied by the sun, along with all that means in terms of a sensual engagement with the natural biosphere here on earth. But I am also seeking communication and acceptance, and to some extent oneness, with an archetypal notion of light that exists beyond the physical and entails illumination of an intellectual and emotional and moral and psychic nature.

 Around 500 or 600 years ago, literal  Renaissance Man Marsilio Ficino wrote “just as the eyes have been purged, and are looking at the light itself, suddenly its radiance pours in, reflecting abundantly from colors and shapes of things, and the more it surrounds the mind with light, the more it also blessedly fills the will with joy”

This is what I’m seeking and sometimes achieving. The magic that I have focused on during this time is not so much what I would call practical in the sense of casting spells to find my lost keys or to get the job I’ve applied for or to find love or to punish an enemy. I have nothing against those things, but in seeking systasis, I have come to trust that the light pouring in is filling my life with abundance, and leading me in the direction I need to be going. 

This begins to sound religious, especially when I say it out loud to other people, but that is not my intention.  For me this is a personal mystical quest, and one which I believe will, in a circular fashion, bring me back around to other forms of magic; having attained a greater sense of empowerment as well as powerful gifts and allies.

Here ends my story thus far, and I would like to conclude with the ritual I mentioned, Systasis with Helios.  Today this takes the form of a group blessing to help us rise toward that transcendent light, as well as to pull that radiance down, into our lives and communities….

SYSTASIS WITH HELIOS

Hail, bright celestial one! Thee I invoke, who rise from the four winds of the world! It is Thee, Thee I invoke: Sky – Transiting Great One. Come to me today and hear me, and be with me now, in this rite I enact.  Hail, great serpent, and noble lion, hail source of all fire. Hail to thee who alight on clear water and bend the shadows of lofty tree, and you who gather up clover in broad armfuls from golden fields, who cause gentle foam to gush forth from pure mouths. Hail Scarab, who drives the orb of fertile fire! Give strength and capability and every blessing of your hours to me in this which I perform. Yes! Grant all the petitions of my prayer completely! Oh self- engendered one, Two-syllabled, AĒ, First-Appearing one, say only YES to me, I pray, be friend this day and all days, because your mystic symbols I declare:

ĒŌ AI OY AMERR OOUŌTH IYIŌĒ MARMARAUŌTH LAILAM SOUMARTA. 

(x3 or more)

Hear me, You who with self- reflexive self perpetuating power raise the light and lower the darkness, accept me and hear me in every matter I put before you, Come to me with a happy face, from every element from every wind, I who do invoke your holy name from every side and every direction. You who are begotten in every human body, who vivify and arouse the blood and hunger of all incorporate beings, come revealed, and inspire us. Come to me today, in this hour, in this moment, you who in all the varied hours take all the forms you wish among all the variance and finery of the wide world: young monkey, crowned sloth, and the one who brings forth the silver fir and the olive, the ash and birch and oak and cedar and yew. Invisible Stone are you, and Singing of Many Birds are you. Impossible unicorn, heart of all pottery, foundation of the sandstone temple and dweller therein, and the altar before the dweller therein, and the fire upon the altar therein. Oh Song of Frogs, oh Great Bull Upon the Heaving Land! Your names are written in amethyst. You are the turtledove and the lion, the magnetic center, the gleaming crocodile. Donkey and donkey slayer, Wound the Thorn Makes is your name! Oh jellyfish, oh white – faced cow! Opalescent crab and the cat who hunts it! Hippopotamus, ibis, chameleon, falcon! 

PHROUER BAZĒTŌPHŌTH AKRAMMACHAMAREI DAMNAMENEUS PHOKENGEPSEUARETTATHOUMISONKTAIKT EIAU – AKRI – LYX ADONAI

You who break apart rocks and change the names of gods, enter in, appear to me, you who have in fire your power / and your strength, IAO SABAOTH ARBATHIAO SESENGENBARPHARAGGES ABLANATHANALBA AKRAMMACHAMAREI AI AI IAO AX AX INAX. You who are seated within the 7 poles, AEĒIOYO: Luna, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, oh great and radiant Helios-Serapis-Ra, you who have on your head a golden crown and in your hand a Memnonian staff with which you send forth the gods in authority, your name is BARBARIEL BARBARAIEL BARBARAEL BEL BOUEL. Enter in, lord, and answer me with your holy voice in order that I might hear clearly and unerringly! Stay allied to me, NN, who art… [do the usual]… And by these names know this: that I call on behalf of, and with the authority of… [insert personal patron deities here as applicable]

Be gracious and send strength as my companion, and to my friends and loved ones near and far, Give goodwill, affection, friendship and sweetest power, granting us intellect, speech, and knowledge; Intellect so that we might understand you, speech so that we might call upon you, knowledge so that we might know you! Accept my petition, and this offering to you which I have prepared (details here), that you shall now illuminate me with knowledge of things beloved by you, Accept the offering from my unquiet spirit, that I may rejoice because you showed yourself to me; O eternal continuation of the pregnant father, O Knowledge, O womb pregnant through the father’s being, O womb of all, who deifies us by the knowledge of you, knowledge and to come to know you, great solar titan! From the right of the axis your name is: IAO OAIAO OAI and from the left of the axis your name is OAI IAOAI IAO.

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Jason Triefenbach is an artist, writer, and non-denominational minister with a garden and a lifelong interest in lurking around the Occult/ Paranormal shelves in bookstores worldwide. As Sun Duel they record and sometimes perform music with a variety of friends and loved ones. Jason has been self-publishing zines and pamphlets since the early 1990s, beginning with a sloppy collage broadsheet Licking the Toe Jam, and culminating thus far in the limited edition perfect-bound paperback Barbarous Tongues: a Journal of Arts and Esoterica.