Post by nightshade on Feb 15, 2011 23:58:22 GMT -5
I figured I'd share this as it's proved invaluable to me. Once read, you may say to yourself: "Self, I've done this before." Whether consciously or not. It's useful for practitioners of all sorts...
The Drift
by Stephen Grasso
The drift is a versatile occult practice that can be applied to many different situations and used in a variety of contexts. It is most commonly used to collect ingredients and materials for sorcery workings, and to seek answers to divinatory questions - but there are undoubtedly a number of other applications that can be unlocked by the imaginative sorcerer. The drift can be performed in virtually any location and at a moments notice, hence it is ideally suited for those situations when you are caught unprepared and need to work some powerful magic on the fly. It is also a very direct method of communicating with the spirits or genus loci of a particular geographical area, or in a wider sense, with whichever Gods or Goddesses you regularly contact or make service to.
The mechanics of the drift are simple. You are attempting to walk between worlds and bring something useful back with you. It is essentially a shamanic journey that takes place physically in real time, as opposed to an internal journey such as the drum-led trances of indigenous tribes like the Jivaro. The drift forces you out of your comfortable centrally heated temple space and puts you on the spot like few other occult practices. It gets your magic out into the world, in a very real and very physical sense.
A drift can begin in several different ways, depending on the situation and the intent. Sometimes drifts can be spontaneous. If you have sufficiently internalised the practice, it's not uncommon to find yourself kicked into a full-on shamanic drift at virtually any moment. Going out to buy a pint of milk, walking home from the pub, or visiting the shops can often be transformed into heavy magic without a minute's notice. The spontaneous drift can sharpen up your sensitivity and adaptability to a very high degree, but to get the best from it, you need to be able to receive and filter 'information' in an effective manner. The drift is a high-risk occult practice as far as your sanity goes, as it encourages a scary level of openness to spirit communication. Before you know it, you're the mad guy speaking with invisible beings on the high street and going through the bins looking for occult secrets. That kind of thing is pretty much par for the course with this kind of work, so to begin with, it's useful to learn a method of switching it on and off.
It's important to remember that what you are doing is attempting to 'walk between worlds' - with an emphasis on the word 'between'. It's relatively easy to go off into the deep end with this practice and become a paranoid lunatic remarkably quickly, but that's not the point of the exercise. It's your skill as a magician that allows you to safely navigate the wilder areas of consciousness and bring back something useful. To become accomplished at the drift, you have to develop sufficient skill at mediating between your normal day-to-day existence and the hyper-real shamanic experience.
In order to begin the drift, you should look for an appropriate starting place - a physical access point that will allow you to enter into shamanic reality and return again when your business is done.
The most immediate and accessible cross over point into shamanic reality is, of course, the crossroads. Every inhabited location will have a crossroads of one form or another within walking distance, and the crossroads is the supreme symbol of intercession between the worlds. However, any work involving the crossroads falls firmly within the territory of the various Gods, Goddesses, Saints, Spirits, and Mysteries associated with it. You need to ask their permission before you can go through the gate. This is easier to accomplish if you already have a working relationship with one of more of these entities. The general modus operandi would be to make appropriate offerings to them at their spot and ask if they will open the doorway for you, allowing you to go through and accomplish the intent of your drift. You should seek their blessing for your journey and ask them to ensure your safe return.
The mysteries of the crossroads are essential to the operation of this work. Although it's possible to begin a shamanic drift in a more freeform style, utilising a physical crossover point such as a gateway, railway arch, narrow alleyway, or similar symbolic route, these structures still fall under the domain of the crossroads at an esoteric level. Therefore if the entire operation is performed under the specific auspices of a crossroads entity, with both their permission and their involvement, you are likely to get far more effective results. Once offerings have been made and permission has been granted, you can begin the drift. Depart from your access point, either walking through the gateway/arch, or leaving the crossroads in a different direction to which you arrived. You are now entering shamanic reality.
In the early stages of the drift you should begin tuning into your environment. Pay close attention to what's going on around you and try to read the language of the city, or wherever you may be. Look out for any strange graffiti, headlines on discarded newspaper, unusual words or phrases that leap out at you from otherwise innocuous sources, and so on. Pay attention to snatches of overheard conversation, the lyrics of songs echoing from car radios, or announcements from train stations and the like. You are looking for a sign or signal that can be readily interpreted in relation to your intent. Don't try to force it or just make something up to fit. Relax into the drift and wait for something to come through of its own accord. The process of the drift is a two-way dialogue with the spirits. You might have to be patient, but you will know when you're on the right track.
The first piece of information that comes through will either answer your question right off the bat, or else it will lead you onto the next stage in your journey. Sometimes drifts can be resolved very quickly, for example, within minutes of leaving the access point you see a random piece of street art that answers your question in no uncertain terms. If this happens, then simply return to the crossroads, thank the spirits and ask them to close the door for you. Sometimes it's that simple. Frequently, however, the first signal that you receive will point you onto somewhere else, or only give you part of the story, leading you further down the road to look for more clues.
You should eventually start to get a sense that you are following a symbolic thread through the city. Each sign you receive brings you a little further towards your eventual destination and the realisation of your intent. Sometimes you might lose the plot completely and find yourself clueless as to where you ought to go. If this happens, just relax and tune back in. Try to pick up the thread again and get back on the right track. Occasionally the spirits might throw you a curveball. For example, you might pick up a fragment of map that strongly suggests you need to get on a bus to the other side of town in order to complete the quest. Or you could find yourself going on an elaborate and exhausting journey across the city, only to find what you were looking for outside your own front door. Anything can happen on a drift. You're stepping into a zone of increased potential and should be prepared for any eventual outcome.
One of the biggest obstacles to successful drifting is your own self-consciousness. The message of the drift might clearly dictate that you do something a part of you balks at. You might be required to steal something conspicuous from a public place, or behave in a highly unusual manner at an extremely inappropriate location. Often all that can be done in these circumstances is to go beyond whatever ingrained social conditioning your actions have disturbed and take a leap of faith in the name of magic. It's actually surprising what you can get away with in public without anyone batting an eyelid, particularly in a major city such as London.
The drift can sometimes be hard work, and if you don't come up against the occasional 'what the fuck am I doing' moment, then you're not fully engaging with the process. A useful psychological trick for getting beyond any embarrassment or self-consciousness is to put aside the intent of the drift for a moment and just consider the whole thing as an abstract exercise in de-conditioning.
If you find yourself hesitating over some fairly inoffensive but extremely peculiar action, for example picking up an old shoe in broad daylight and swapping it with your own, or acquiring an oddly resonant object from the centre of a busy roundabout, then you've inadvertently uncovered something very interesting about yourself. You've discovered one of the walls of your personality - something that sets limits on what you personally consider to be acceptable public behaviour. What is it doing there? What purpose is it serving? Look closely at the range of emotional responses you've tapped into and see what you can discover about yourself. The process of trying to move beyond one of these tiny barriers in order to acquire a power object could well be considered a powerful shamanic act in its own right.
One of the most difficult and complex aspects of this work is knowing how to strike the right balance between moving with the flow of events and tailoring what happens towards your ultimate goal. It's just as easy to be distracted by tangential phenomena and forget why you were drifting in the first place; as it is to be so completely focussed on your intent that important material is overlooked. Getting the right balance only really comes from experience and practice - so don't be too hard on yourself to begin with. Go where the drift takes you, but always keep in mind your reasons for embarking on the journey. If you feel yourself straying too far from the path, don't be afraid to gently guide yourself back on course. If any odd or tangential material comes through that seems unconnected to your goal, just make a note of it for further investigation at a later date - another separate drift may be required to uncover its mysteries.
To put some of this into context, here are a few practical examples of situations in which the drift can be utilised. The method is ideally suited to divinatory workings, particularly if you need to get a quick answer to an important question but don't have access to paraphernalia such as tarot cards or rune stones. A short divinatory drift can be employed during a lunch break, on the journey home from work, or in any situation where you need to gather information at short notice via non-ordinary means. It requires little in the way of planning or preparation. Simply visit the crossroads, make your offerings, ask the question and see what comes through.
A related information gathering drift practice is the underworld divination, which can be employed in any city that has an underground tube or metro system. Begin the drift near the subway entrance and literally envision your descent onto the tube system as a shamanic journey to the underworld for hidden knowledge. You are descending to an alien landscape of white tiled walls, harsh fluorescent lights, and metal worms that burrow through the earth carrying semi-conscious human cargo. Ride the tube lines until you get the answer you're looking for. Converse with its denizens, read its walls, listen to its voices, and try to understand its language. You might want to leave a coin with an underground busker or beggar as payment for any information you receive.
A drift can also be utilised if you need to work some spontaneous sorcery and don't have access to whatever tools or temple space you might normally employ. You would begin the drift in the usual manner and ask to be guided towards ingredients for a gris-gris bag or similar fetish item, which at a push could be constructed from a sheet of paper or small carrier bag tied up with an elastic band or piece of string. You will walk the streets until you find a specific number of items for the bag, all of which should at some level correlate to your intent. The ingredients could be anything from curious plants growing between paving stones, to sigils derived from graffiti seen on walls, to just about anything that feels right or manifests itself to you in an odd way. The more often you work with the drift, the better you tend to become at recognising and acquiring what you need.
After awhile you may even find yourself developing a 'language' of ingredients to use in work of this nature. As always, resist the temptation to just arbitrarily make up a list of aesthetically pleasing correspondences. Hoodoo ingredients should be revealed to you through the living shamanic process of working the drift. If you want to cobble together a symbol system one afternoon over a cup of tea and some biscuits, then that's fine, but you're only short changing yourself and not fully engaging with what you might call shamanic reality. Magic takes place in the wild and unpredictable territories outside of the individual ego, and you can't get anywhere near those areas unless you relax the controls and let the material emerge of its own accord.
Once you've drifted for the ingredients to go in your gris-gris bag, you might then look for an appropriate power spot to construct and charge it. If you're not familiar with the psychogeography of an area, let the drift itself guide you to an appropriate place. You could make offerings to the spirits associated with that specific area, or to whatever God/desses you regularly work with, and ask them if they will empower the bag for you. This could involve leaving the bag concealed at a particular spot, and returning after a set period of time to pick it up. Or it could mean walking anticlockwise around a statue or building nine times with the bag in your hand, or any number of possible formulae. Speak to the spirits, listen to what they have to say, and don't make any deals that you're unwilling to follow through on.
This guide to the drift method has been written from the perspective of the urban magician, but its principles can just as easily be applied to a rural setting or to whatever environment you find yourself living in. If you live outside of the city, you may find that information emerges via phenomena such as the flight of birds, arrangement of twigs on the earth, cloud formations, shapes made by driftwood on the beach, or any number of environmental factors. Try experimenting in different settings and locations to see what comes through.
You could speculate that the series of peculiar omens, superstitions and old wives' tales that have been handed down to us by successive generations are the remnants of codified information derived via methods such as the drift. So by engaging with this process yourself, you are building a direct relationship with both the land you live on, and the environment in which you operate as a magician. You're developing a living shamanism that has nothing to do with the various re-constructionist neo-pagan traditions that flood the occult scene, but grows out of the same methods that shamans have always worked with. Going out into the wilderness, speaking with spirits, and returning with knowledge and power.
The Drift
by Stephen Grasso
The drift is a versatile occult practice that can be applied to many different situations and used in a variety of contexts. It is most commonly used to collect ingredients and materials for sorcery workings, and to seek answers to divinatory questions - but there are undoubtedly a number of other applications that can be unlocked by the imaginative sorcerer. The drift can be performed in virtually any location and at a moments notice, hence it is ideally suited for those situations when you are caught unprepared and need to work some powerful magic on the fly. It is also a very direct method of communicating with the spirits or genus loci of a particular geographical area, or in a wider sense, with whichever Gods or Goddesses you regularly contact or make service to.
The mechanics of the drift are simple. You are attempting to walk between worlds and bring something useful back with you. It is essentially a shamanic journey that takes place physically in real time, as opposed to an internal journey such as the drum-led trances of indigenous tribes like the Jivaro. The drift forces you out of your comfortable centrally heated temple space and puts you on the spot like few other occult practices. It gets your magic out into the world, in a very real and very physical sense.
A drift can begin in several different ways, depending on the situation and the intent. Sometimes drifts can be spontaneous. If you have sufficiently internalised the practice, it's not uncommon to find yourself kicked into a full-on shamanic drift at virtually any moment. Going out to buy a pint of milk, walking home from the pub, or visiting the shops can often be transformed into heavy magic without a minute's notice. The spontaneous drift can sharpen up your sensitivity and adaptability to a very high degree, but to get the best from it, you need to be able to receive and filter 'information' in an effective manner. The drift is a high-risk occult practice as far as your sanity goes, as it encourages a scary level of openness to spirit communication. Before you know it, you're the mad guy speaking with invisible beings on the high street and going through the bins looking for occult secrets. That kind of thing is pretty much par for the course with this kind of work, so to begin with, it's useful to learn a method of switching it on and off.
It's important to remember that what you are doing is attempting to 'walk between worlds' - with an emphasis on the word 'between'. It's relatively easy to go off into the deep end with this practice and become a paranoid lunatic remarkably quickly, but that's not the point of the exercise. It's your skill as a magician that allows you to safely navigate the wilder areas of consciousness and bring back something useful. To become accomplished at the drift, you have to develop sufficient skill at mediating between your normal day-to-day existence and the hyper-real shamanic experience.
In order to begin the drift, you should look for an appropriate starting place - a physical access point that will allow you to enter into shamanic reality and return again when your business is done.
The most immediate and accessible cross over point into shamanic reality is, of course, the crossroads. Every inhabited location will have a crossroads of one form or another within walking distance, and the crossroads is the supreme symbol of intercession between the worlds. However, any work involving the crossroads falls firmly within the territory of the various Gods, Goddesses, Saints, Spirits, and Mysteries associated with it. You need to ask their permission before you can go through the gate. This is easier to accomplish if you already have a working relationship with one of more of these entities. The general modus operandi would be to make appropriate offerings to them at their spot and ask if they will open the doorway for you, allowing you to go through and accomplish the intent of your drift. You should seek their blessing for your journey and ask them to ensure your safe return.
The mysteries of the crossroads are essential to the operation of this work. Although it's possible to begin a shamanic drift in a more freeform style, utilising a physical crossover point such as a gateway, railway arch, narrow alleyway, or similar symbolic route, these structures still fall under the domain of the crossroads at an esoteric level. Therefore if the entire operation is performed under the specific auspices of a crossroads entity, with both their permission and their involvement, you are likely to get far more effective results. Once offerings have been made and permission has been granted, you can begin the drift. Depart from your access point, either walking through the gateway/arch, or leaving the crossroads in a different direction to which you arrived. You are now entering shamanic reality.
In the early stages of the drift you should begin tuning into your environment. Pay close attention to what's going on around you and try to read the language of the city, or wherever you may be. Look out for any strange graffiti, headlines on discarded newspaper, unusual words or phrases that leap out at you from otherwise innocuous sources, and so on. Pay attention to snatches of overheard conversation, the lyrics of songs echoing from car radios, or announcements from train stations and the like. You are looking for a sign or signal that can be readily interpreted in relation to your intent. Don't try to force it or just make something up to fit. Relax into the drift and wait for something to come through of its own accord. The process of the drift is a two-way dialogue with the spirits. You might have to be patient, but you will know when you're on the right track.
The first piece of information that comes through will either answer your question right off the bat, or else it will lead you onto the next stage in your journey. Sometimes drifts can be resolved very quickly, for example, within minutes of leaving the access point you see a random piece of street art that answers your question in no uncertain terms. If this happens, then simply return to the crossroads, thank the spirits and ask them to close the door for you. Sometimes it's that simple. Frequently, however, the first signal that you receive will point you onto somewhere else, or only give you part of the story, leading you further down the road to look for more clues.
You should eventually start to get a sense that you are following a symbolic thread through the city. Each sign you receive brings you a little further towards your eventual destination and the realisation of your intent. Sometimes you might lose the plot completely and find yourself clueless as to where you ought to go. If this happens, just relax and tune back in. Try to pick up the thread again and get back on the right track. Occasionally the spirits might throw you a curveball. For example, you might pick up a fragment of map that strongly suggests you need to get on a bus to the other side of town in order to complete the quest. Or you could find yourself going on an elaborate and exhausting journey across the city, only to find what you were looking for outside your own front door. Anything can happen on a drift. You're stepping into a zone of increased potential and should be prepared for any eventual outcome.
One of the biggest obstacles to successful drifting is your own self-consciousness. The message of the drift might clearly dictate that you do something a part of you balks at. You might be required to steal something conspicuous from a public place, or behave in a highly unusual manner at an extremely inappropriate location. Often all that can be done in these circumstances is to go beyond whatever ingrained social conditioning your actions have disturbed and take a leap of faith in the name of magic. It's actually surprising what you can get away with in public without anyone batting an eyelid, particularly in a major city such as London.
The drift can sometimes be hard work, and if you don't come up against the occasional 'what the fuck am I doing' moment, then you're not fully engaging with the process. A useful psychological trick for getting beyond any embarrassment or self-consciousness is to put aside the intent of the drift for a moment and just consider the whole thing as an abstract exercise in de-conditioning.
If you find yourself hesitating over some fairly inoffensive but extremely peculiar action, for example picking up an old shoe in broad daylight and swapping it with your own, or acquiring an oddly resonant object from the centre of a busy roundabout, then you've inadvertently uncovered something very interesting about yourself. You've discovered one of the walls of your personality - something that sets limits on what you personally consider to be acceptable public behaviour. What is it doing there? What purpose is it serving? Look closely at the range of emotional responses you've tapped into and see what you can discover about yourself. The process of trying to move beyond one of these tiny barriers in order to acquire a power object could well be considered a powerful shamanic act in its own right.
One of the most difficult and complex aspects of this work is knowing how to strike the right balance between moving with the flow of events and tailoring what happens towards your ultimate goal. It's just as easy to be distracted by tangential phenomena and forget why you were drifting in the first place; as it is to be so completely focussed on your intent that important material is overlooked. Getting the right balance only really comes from experience and practice - so don't be too hard on yourself to begin with. Go where the drift takes you, but always keep in mind your reasons for embarking on the journey. If you feel yourself straying too far from the path, don't be afraid to gently guide yourself back on course. If any odd or tangential material comes through that seems unconnected to your goal, just make a note of it for further investigation at a later date - another separate drift may be required to uncover its mysteries.
To put some of this into context, here are a few practical examples of situations in which the drift can be utilised. The method is ideally suited to divinatory workings, particularly if you need to get a quick answer to an important question but don't have access to paraphernalia such as tarot cards or rune stones. A short divinatory drift can be employed during a lunch break, on the journey home from work, or in any situation where you need to gather information at short notice via non-ordinary means. It requires little in the way of planning or preparation. Simply visit the crossroads, make your offerings, ask the question and see what comes through.
A related information gathering drift practice is the underworld divination, which can be employed in any city that has an underground tube or metro system. Begin the drift near the subway entrance and literally envision your descent onto the tube system as a shamanic journey to the underworld for hidden knowledge. You are descending to an alien landscape of white tiled walls, harsh fluorescent lights, and metal worms that burrow through the earth carrying semi-conscious human cargo. Ride the tube lines until you get the answer you're looking for. Converse with its denizens, read its walls, listen to its voices, and try to understand its language. You might want to leave a coin with an underground busker or beggar as payment for any information you receive.
A drift can also be utilised if you need to work some spontaneous sorcery and don't have access to whatever tools or temple space you might normally employ. You would begin the drift in the usual manner and ask to be guided towards ingredients for a gris-gris bag or similar fetish item, which at a push could be constructed from a sheet of paper or small carrier bag tied up with an elastic band or piece of string. You will walk the streets until you find a specific number of items for the bag, all of which should at some level correlate to your intent. The ingredients could be anything from curious plants growing between paving stones, to sigils derived from graffiti seen on walls, to just about anything that feels right or manifests itself to you in an odd way. The more often you work with the drift, the better you tend to become at recognising and acquiring what you need.
After awhile you may even find yourself developing a 'language' of ingredients to use in work of this nature. As always, resist the temptation to just arbitrarily make up a list of aesthetically pleasing correspondences. Hoodoo ingredients should be revealed to you through the living shamanic process of working the drift. If you want to cobble together a symbol system one afternoon over a cup of tea and some biscuits, then that's fine, but you're only short changing yourself and not fully engaging with what you might call shamanic reality. Magic takes place in the wild and unpredictable territories outside of the individual ego, and you can't get anywhere near those areas unless you relax the controls and let the material emerge of its own accord.
Once you've drifted for the ingredients to go in your gris-gris bag, you might then look for an appropriate power spot to construct and charge it. If you're not familiar with the psychogeography of an area, let the drift itself guide you to an appropriate place. You could make offerings to the spirits associated with that specific area, or to whatever God/desses you regularly work with, and ask them if they will empower the bag for you. This could involve leaving the bag concealed at a particular spot, and returning after a set period of time to pick it up. Or it could mean walking anticlockwise around a statue or building nine times with the bag in your hand, or any number of possible formulae. Speak to the spirits, listen to what they have to say, and don't make any deals that you're unwilling to follow through on.
This guide to the drift method has been written from the perspective of the urban magician, but its principles can just as easily be applied to a rural setting or to whatever environment you find yourself living in. If you live outside of the city, you may find that information emerges via phenomena such as the flight of birds, arrangement of twigs on the earth, cloud formations, shapes made by driftwood on the beach, or any number of environmental factors. Try experimenting in different settings and locations to see what comes through.
You could speculate that the series of peculiar omens, superstitions and old wives' tales that have been handed down to us by successive generations are the remnants of codified information derived via methods such as the drift. So by engaging with this process yourself, you are building a direct relationship with both the land you live on, and the environment in which you operate as a magician. You're developing a living shamanism that has nothing to do with the various re-constructionist neo-pagan traditions that flood the occult scene, but grows out of the same methods that shamans have always worked with. Going out into the wilderness, speaking with spirits, and returning with knowledge and power.