I feel the years falling in on me, our walls dusty with time and our lives on a slow cycle, wearing this track deep. I look back before the heroin and I see in our pictures the images still of life and vitality. Addiction took so much from us, and after it came the pain, sucking away at my moments, binding my will. We now live only a survival level life, stretched to max capacity where every dollar is made of my pain.
Well, almost every dollar. Now there is a bit of book money, and friends and community have helped when I had no other means to survive. These are signs: I’ve finally come full circle to “Do as thou wilt,” in which I find that Crowley’s vision was to find your true path, to become that which you are meant to be. It echoes Jung’s concept of self-potentiation.
I have reached it, here in this deep physical rut. The roots buried by the struggle and pain have grown down through bedrock to find water. I’ve unknowingly followed some of the same paths in my past: the abandon in sex and blood rituals, unleashing the daimonic within and breaking the locks holding my subconscious back.
Now in middle age, I’ve become the withdrawn contemplative of Jung’s path. I too have my own Isolate Tower here in the basement, shielded from almost everyone and everything save that which flows from this bright screen. I plumb the depths within me and write my way whole whenever I break too far open.
My path was never easy, and as I sink further into the pain, it feels like moving through fiery lava instead of time. But the difficulty forces me to fight fiercer, hold all I do to a sacred standard, renew my vows to this Satanic path with every burning step.
Here in this living room, the seeds I have worked so hard to sow are blooming. Other minds, other hearts, come here and in this space we assemble, convoke, we plan and dream, and best of all, we connect.
This meme I’ve hitched myself to replicates itself within me a thousandfold, and I see in the faces of my growing community that same black fire. We are part of something now, a current that at last runs straight through my heart. We’re a patch of revolution growing on the decrepit structures of deceit and corruption─and we are spreading.
My community has reached out to help in so many ways when my own power has faltered. I sense the network around me─each person different, but also a node of a larger web that crackles with life. We are the agents of change, and in each other we have found an unexpected family, our dark tribe finally coalescing.
This is the purpose that drives me, beneath the struggle. I was and still am a fighter, even when so much of that fight has to go to basic survival. Now I am fighting alongside comrades who are also passionate, strong, intelligent, and completely committed when it comes to change and justice.
I accept this reward over and over again in exchange for pushing through the pain: I have found both my purpose and the tribe I’ve searched for all my life.
Art: "Star Tree" by Lilith Starr
Lilith Starr is Chapter Head of the Satanic Temple's Seattle Chapter, and the author of "The Happy Satanist: Finding Self-Empowerment." She holds an English BA from Harvard and a Journalism MA from Stanford. She lives in Seattle with her husband Uruk Black.