The Dance of the Serpent Rainbow

Across virtually all cultures at all times there has been at the heart of the shaman, witch or magickian the notion of possession, a possession of a person by an external entity that will play, indulge, teach and dance. This can be one of the greatest journeys open to the individual magickian. It is a process by which the essence of life, death, ecstasy, sexuality and all the areas that define us can be explored. It is a way of working magick that is not merely a representation of the intended result but is, within itself, the end as well as the means. The power of this process is evident within all those that use it.

Possession at its most basic is a confrontation of fear both in a very real personal sense and also a breath of life into much of western occultism in an outward sense. To not fear the likes of possession, necromancy and evocation is to liberate ourselves in the truest sense from the dogma and fear of making magick dynamic and a real force within our lives.


Detail of magickal tool used in possession work.

The Rite

The bringing together of the self with its outer and outward potential within the most internal of experiences is an experience that, for the power and beauty to take shape, needs the magickian to forget all that he is and all those around him and call on the powers that will redefine him. Possession as we have used it is both a place that has gained us much and a place that has been beyond our capacities to cope with. By the fear and feeling of being beyond ourselves we have learnt much about our limits and our potentials. These ideas seem to me to be at the heart of magick, a magick that must encompass all emotion and experience.

Our first steps towards the actual use of possession begun with a working with the entity known as Lilith, an entity that caused strange electrical phenomena. This phenomena caused us to look to other cultural models for descriptions of similar effects. We came very soon to the entity Ayida Wedo, the rainbow serpent goddess of the Voudou pantheon. We then began to look at the possible ways of working with this serpent principle within our own ideas and approaches.


Astral vision of Lilith (JMS).
GEN 1998