I haven’t written much about this most important part of my practice, because it’s highly personal and hard to explain. I came to it mostly through personal gnosis, and while it shares some commonalities with ideas from other traditions, it’s sort of my own weird idiosyncratic thing.

I conceptualize my being as a triple soul, a common occult practice. In Kabbalah the parts of the soul are called Nefesh, Ruach and Neshema. Psychoanalytic theory might term them ‘id,’ ‘ego’ and ‘superego.’ These models aren’t perfectly equivalent but you sort of get the idea– you could call them body, mind and soul, although that still isn’t perfectly accurate. The Kabbalistic model is closest to what I use but I still don’t fully understand it, because… Kabbalah.

The Inner God can be thought of as the soul, the higher self. The way I work with it is sort of similar to how Thelemites work with the Holy Guardian Angel, I think, but at the same time, not really.

Basically it’s like this. Most of the time, we are ruled by the conscious mind. That’s the part of me typing this post, the part of me that thinks and analyzes the world, the verbal part. I use the Kabbalistic term Ruach for this. It’s a wonderful thing, but it’s also the part of me that fucks me up.

My basic, animal self, the selfhood of the body, has a tremendous amount of wisdom the mind tends to ignore– physical needs, gut-level instincts, “I’m hungry,” “I’m tired,” self-care stuff my mind is often only too happy to blow off. This is the part Kabbalists might call the Nefesh.

(Here I pause the writing because I haven’t had breakfast yet and the meat is getting angry and I only noticed because the mind accidentally called itself out.)

The mind is also really good at coming up with super self-defeating and fucked up thoughts, because my mind is mentally ill and also an alcoholic. (I say the mind is an alcoholic, not the body, because the body actually instinctively hates all that crap I used to do to myself and feels betrayed by it. The mind, with its neurotransmitters, is where the ‘fun’ parts of addiction take place.) The mind is powerful, and aside from all the great stuff it can do for me, it can also use seeming logic to rationalize pretty much any horrible idea it might have.

So I choose not to be ruled by the conscious mind alone. I choose to consult my spirit, my soul– the part of me which is eternal, is divine, is God.

The trick to doing this, for me, is to realize that I can’t logic and rationalize and think my way into contact with my soul. I have to pray. I have to meditate. The mind has to shut the fuck up, for a little bit, and listen to something else.

Apotheosis, for me, is part development of a more perfect soul– and part seeking to be closer to a soul that is already more perfect than my mind.

What is the nature of the Inner God? I do not know. But I do know this much–

When I pray to the Inner God for strength, for courage, for healing, for patience, for clarity, for any type of inner or emotional resource, I always receive it.

And when I make a regular effort to commune with my Inner God, I find myself being a better person than I thought I could be. I’ve also found myself able to not take a drink or a drug even when people literally shoved them into my hands. (My Inner God is also my AA Higher Power.) Six years of sobriety, and of not being the asshole I used to be, are the only testament I personally need to my Inner God’s existence, because it has done things for me that I believed were impossible, and that were impossible for me until I learned to pray. (You don’t want to know how many relapses I had before I got clean. I don’t even know how many relapses I had. It’s probably in the hundreds. I tried everything to no avail, yet as soon as I was desperate enough to pray sincerely? It suddenly worked.)

I have given my Inner God a secret, sacred name, which I never write or utter in human hearing. Thus, I need a stand-in for this forbidden name, a sort of public magical name that is roughly equivalent. For this purpose I use the name Antichrist, not because I have pretensions to being the only begotten son of Satan and bringer of the apocalypse or some shit, but because it is a name that gets across my aspirations of divinity better than anything else I could think of (aside from the forbidden name itself).

I didn’t exactly choose the forbidden name– I stumbled across it in reading, and immediately knew it was perfect. I assumed it during my Satanic initiation/baptism.

I use the forbidden name to construct wards, imagining a mesh of burning letters whirling all around me. I breathe it into my spells when I am certain no mortal is around to hear. I meditate on its perfection– the word itself has many fascinating properties due to the connotations of the letters involved and their arrangement. Since it happens to be a palindrome, the name itself has the character of a circle of protection. I have sigilized it, and use that sigil in certain workings that require my magical signature (for instance, I used it to sign the pact I made with King Paimon). It can be a mantra. It can be a word of power, like “abrahadabra.” I use it the same way ceremonial magicians use the sacred names of YHWH. My theory is that every time I use my forbidden name with reverence and power, and every time I keep it secret from all others, I endow it with more meaning, more might.

Satanists talk a lot about self-worship and apotheosis, but figuring out what that looks like in practice can be difficult. I share these parts of my practice in the hopes that it may give others ideas. Worship (yourself) in your own way, of course.

May the Devil-God within you light your way always.