Voidworking: Practical Sorcery from Primordial Nothingness

123 Pages·2020·0.824 MB·English

by  Dave Smith

Voidworking
Practical Sorcery from Primordial Nothingness

Voidworking
Practical Sorcery from Primordial Nothingness

Dave Smith

Stafford, UK
Voidworking: Practical Sorcery from Primordial
Nothingness
Dave Smith © 2020

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this
book, or portions thereof, in any form.

The right of Dave Smith to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

Editor: Storm Constantine
Cover Art and Design: Danielle Lainton

ISBN: 978-1-912241-17-0
Catalogue Number: MB0209

Set in Book Antiqua

Megalithica Books Edition 2020
www.immanion-press.com
[email protected]
This book is dedicated to Typhon Draconis, who left this
world and passed back into the Void in July of 2019. He
was a friend and a tireless supporter of my work.

Contents

Introduction – What is the Void? 9
Caveats 14

Part I: Laying the Foundation 19

Religion and Cosmology 19
Philosophy 25
Contemporary Magic 28
Popular Culture 32
Fiction 33
Music 36
Video Games 37
Film 38

Part II: Voidworking 40

What is Magic? 42
Why Do Magic? 45
Tuning the Magical Mind 49
Re-Imagining the Self 56
The Nature and Use of Ritual 58
The Importance of Symbols 64
Symbolizing the Self 66
The Glyph of the Void 67
The Primal Vortex 68
Emanations of the Void 70
Gods and Monsters 73
Visualization 77
Voidworking in Practice 78
Tools, Trappings, and Correspondences 79
Void Stones 81
Black Water 83
Hallowing 84
Banishing 85
Meditating on the Void 90
Disintegration 93
The Rite of Erasure 94
The Black Jar 97
Black Ice 99
Deep Diving 100
Distilling the Static 104
The Veil of Shadows 107
Scrying: Gazing into the Void 108
The Last: Contemplating Death 111
Conclusion 115

Sources consulted 117
About the Author 122
Introduction
What is the Void?

Do you know Nothing? If you don’t, you will, inasmuch as
it can be known. When I first discussed this project with a
friend, he asked what is there possibly to say about the
Void? That’s a fair question. It’s not a topic that seems to
have a great deal of approachability. However, through the
investigation of various sources and conceptions, this work
is intended to provide a thorough, practical understanding
of what the Void is, and how its power and potential can
be used in magical workings of various kinds.

The concept of the Void itself is one that most occultists are
likely familiar with but may not have spent much effort
contemplating. It is mentioned briefly in works that too
often seem to assume that the reader has a thorough
understanding of the concept and its aspects and
applications, but such an understanding is difficult to
acquire. Where is the entry point to this information? There
is a wide variety of material on the subject, but it is
scattered through magical, religious, philosophical, and
scientific works of numerous cultures and eras. These
sources are further enriched by a deep body of
contemporary fictional treatments of the Void in written
literature and video games.

I’ve long been both fascinated and discomfited by the idea
of nothingness. It seems natural to abhor it, yet throughout
the progression of my practice, in each of the paradigms
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Dave Smith
and faiths that I have worked in, I’ve always looked for
how each one addressed the concept. In English, it is
variously called the Void (from the Latin vacare, or vacate
via Old French), the Abyss (from the Greek abussos, or
bottomless), or simply Nothingness. Throughout this work
I will use whichever term is representative of the source
material that I’m discussing, although in my own
nomenclature, I refer to it as the Void, capitalized as a
proper name.

The first question to answer, is what exactly do I mean by
the Void? Is it a physical place? Is it a metaphysical
concept? Is it a state of consciousness? Much like the term
chaos, with which it is often interchangeable, it has many
meanings. It is each of these things and more. Just as Lao
Tzu wrote that the Dao that can be described in words is
not the true Dao, and Austin Spare held that the Kia which
can be expressed by conceivable ideas is not the eternal Kia,
conceptualizing the Void is inherently elusive. It defies a
single strict definition.

A workable place to begin with is that the Void is the
inverse of that which is. It represents a state of existence
that has not yet been ordered by a sentient force, nor
metamorphosed into another state of being via some
process of self-organization. It is emptiness without
bounds or limits. It is this state from whence we come, and
to which we shall return, and among most people it is a
source of dread. We cannot experience the Void directly
through our physical senses, but we can visualize it and
contemplate it in our minds. Semantically, it is a blank
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