CW: Discussion of suicidal feelings, of the concept of suicide as a metaphor for magic practices, also mention of rape, addiction, and other traumas. 

Here’s something I’ve learned from magic and Devil worship:

Whenever you need to kill yourself, do it.

Just never do it physically.

The initiatory path is a series of spiritual deaths and rebirths. Alchemy is a cycle of putrefaction, purification and perfection. The power of a magician and a Satanist is the power of self-creation, of assuming agency over identity and destiny, and a very large part of that comes from the willingness to die to oneself, to shed old masks and old identities and old lives and old relationships, again and again if necessary.

Growth hurts, and sometimes growth feels like dying. Think of the tarot cards Death, the Tower, the Hanged Man, and even the Wheel of Fortune, under which we are broken and upon which we rise, again and again and again. These are all cards of change, reversal, renewal, and catastrophe, resulting in something new. Crisis is necessary for change, and change is the essence of freedom.

Having been through a few spiritual deaths and rebirths— some intentional but most of them admittedly not— I can tell you that I no longer see myself as a single discrete entity, with one identity continuous between physical birth and death. Instead, I have come to believe in reincarnation within a single lifetime.

The child I was died at the threshold of adolescence. The teenage girl I was supposed to be was murdered when she was raped. The traumatized young woman who replaced her passed away when I transitioned to male, and was replaced with an angry young alcoholic man. He in turn died when I got sober, and so on, and so forth. These are only a few of the people I have been, just a handful of the brief lives I have lived in this single human lifetime.

The person I was yesterday does not have to be the person I am today. Any time I get to a point where I can’t stand myself anymore, I can always die and be reborn.

Easy as that? No, not easy. As hard as that. As hard and painful as dying, and just as liberating.

I believe it was Michelangelo who said he didn’t sculpt, he freed shapes from the stone. I look at myself as a raw block of marble. I take up the chisel and I cut away, until for the time I am satisfied. But only ever for a time. Later I may cut away more.

But even this metaphor is imperfect because I don’t just subtract, I add, and I am no longer convinced that my raw material is the same as what I had when I started out. In a very literal sense, it is not— none of the cells in my body are the same as the ones I had when I was born. I am a collection of free-wheeling atoms, coming and going, and I can let desires, dreams, personality traits, habits, opinions, all these little things that I think are me, come and go as well.

This is why I have had so many names and pseudonyms and stage names and pen names throughout my life. In the internet age taking on new handles and identifying with them comes easy. Magicians do this too— in systems like the Golden Dawn, many take on a new name with each new magical grade. This is useful. Names have power. New born things deserve new names, and if you have died and been reborn, so do you. What do you think baptism, that symbolic drowning followed by naming, is all about?

Is there some essential, platonic me-ness underneath it all? I don’t know. I do have a true, secret name I cling to, the name of my Godself, but I don’t pretend to know that self or to truly be that self for more than a few blessed, fleeting moments here and there. I believe in in my Godself, I hope to know and become that self, but in truth it is an abstraction, an ideal.

The human self I think I know is an illusion, impermanent. I have been many people throughout my life. I don’t look back on all of my dead selves with contempt, although some of them I undoubtedly do despise. All of them were just who I needed to be at the time, my best attempt at an identity for that moment. Prototypes.

Someday I may become the philosophers stone, something polished and pure and utterly Myself. But for now, I putrefy, I purify, I putrefy again. Death and rebirth in an endless cycle without my mortal heart skipping a beat.

And any time the depression hits, I become suicidal, I want to die– that is a sign that it may be time for me to spiritually die again. When my current life, circumstances, identity become unbearable, I can change. I can do something new. There is no need to hurt my physical self, no need to leave this plane. Instead I can embrace the process of putrefaction, of ego death, go willingly into the nigredo phase of the alchemical project once again. It’s only natural, and I believe we all do it.

I have struggled with feeling suicidal all my life, but now I know the truth. I do not want to physically die, or leave this world. I want to transform, to free myself, to grow.

And I can, and I do, again and again and again.