APOTHEOSIS By Michael W. Ford

The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Luciferianism & the Left Hand Path

Foreword by E.A. Koetting    Order It Midnight, Tonight, ET-USA

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E.A. KOETTING   You know, something that I sort of learned how to do, and I actually had to ... I've been very fortunate to have what I just call passing mentors, people who they don't consider themselves mentors, but they just come into my life, they drop some golden nuggets, and then move. And one guy, this guy was actually trying to teach me how to improve my weight training program that I was doing, and he said, you know, you do have to add the mental and spiritual component of seeing your endocrine system as being the deliverer of demons. And it delivers demons throughout your body.

You see this, and let's say you're working on your biceps, as you're pumping those weights, see those demons filling up your muscles, and feel it. And then I, so I took that, and started applying that even just to running, I run a couple miles a day every morning just to ... I mean for a lot of reasons, it is so beneficial to get your heart rate, and just to challenge yourself. But as I'm doing that, I'll lock in my mind, if I have a specific goal I'm working on, I'll lock that in my mind and see it as if it's coming to pass while I'm running on the treadmill, while I'm in this heightened state.

A lot of people, I'm gonna be honest, a lot of people are just lazy. They don't wanna push themselves, they don't wanna work too hard, but if you do, once you do, you actually unlock something, I don't know that I can define it, but there is something that opens up inside of you that is capable of things that you didn't think you were capable of.

Michael W. Ford   Absolutely. And that's one of the things with magick, is you actually have to utilize in ways that you wouldn't think would be key. And those things are connected and deeply associated with that type of rolling of the power, the movement of the power. In Apotheosis, there's this concept that I narrowed down called the Triad of the Morning Star, and that's really some aspects that were in the Greater Church of Lucifer, which I formulated as liberation, illumination, apotheosis. And I see this as a wheel, something that you have to put momentum to, to get it to move. And they're not specific grades or anything metaphysical, or mystic, should I say. They're actually ... liberation is recognizing something that you need to overcome or change, and applying the steps to do that.

And in doing that consistently, creating a habit, you're overcoming that. You're changing the way your brain works, and a lot of thoughts and actions can change the way it shapes your brain. And then you have illumination, which is really expressing and expanding those points and how to do that. And it's the light, the black flame, that drives that and is enhanced by that. And then you have Apotheosis, which is not just, it's a continual thing, that's becoming a god, that's becoming something more. Connecting with your daemon.

But it's something that you have to build momentum to continually, and as you do that, you're creating a force within yourself, and expanding outside of yourself, that starts to make things happen. And you have to do it in the ways that you feel closely connected to, even if people would laugh at you for doing that. And the physical exercise part is very, very important, as much as you can do it, depending on the individual, to kind of break through those barriers, and yeah, that's a key thing.

E.A.K.   To jump on to Apotheosis, this is your work that's coming out. I can't even tell you how amazing it is that the company, Become a Living God, that I helped form with Timothy, that we're able to publish this. This is a ... I mean it is, as far as I'm concerned, it's a gift to me to be able to publish that. It's such an awesome work.

M.W.F.   What I liked about Become A Living God, and I'm a very solitary type person, I'm introspective, and an introvert in many cases. But what I liked about Become A Living God, and the forum, and everything that's connected with that, is that there's not a heavy statement on dogma. There's not a, what I call a buzz word quota, which you see in a lot of orders, or forums of people.

Left-Hand Path demands that you be open enough to be mutually respectful to others, even when you don't agree, and as long as they're approaching you with legitimate, what I would call dialog, or even argument, it would be towards specific points and keys, not just, you know, "I think you're dumb," or "I think this," or that. It should be not profane, it should be important, a very important part of discussing the work, and serious. And that's what I liked about that. Because there's not a lot of dogma, but there's a consistent thirst and discussion of the magickal spectrum.

E.A.K.   I do honestly think that the most important thing that anybody can do is have conversations with other people.

M.W.F.   Yeah.

E.A.K.   And especially people you don't agree with. You were talking about the social justice warriors and that kind of thing that's going on in political spaces, and it's like, people that don't agree with you, those are your teachers. Those are the people that can teach ... If everybody agreed with you, you'd have no impetus to evolve. You'd just sit around patting yourself on the back. But when you have somebody who challenges your assumptions, and says, "Well wait, you might not be seeing it from this perspective," you could be wrong, you could be right. Honestly, wrong and right's not really important. That's not what really matters.

Having a conversation and understanding something, I think is primary. And that can only happen if you're willing to sit down and have a conversation.

M.W.F.   Yeah, and you know one of the works that influenced, and just supported what I was doing, was the 33 Methods of Power. And that work, it has some points that I took on early on to apply and see how it changed things, and that is being able to ... even at like, the social justice thing ... if there are things that you don't agree with in every side, but if you look at the points you do agree with, those things can make it whole for you, to where you should be able to look at something and see the good in it, or how it can be a benefit, and not just ... Maybe it's not for, "Hey, I wanna learn from this," but maybe it's like, "I wanna understand it so I can see if this can be utilized."

Just by doing that, you can get some things, and find things that you totally agree with, and you see how it could be beneficial. The thing that is frustrating is when you see people completely falling into groups. When you start falling into groups, then you're losing the Left-Hand Path perspective, or the aim. You're going astray, and that is allowing groupthink to control and to shape you. Because there's not any depth to it, and it's very changeable. And it's a way of someone else controlling you.

So that's what people should consider when you jump into political organizations, or trains of thought that don't allow for independence or individual thought. Then you're being run, you're being controlled by somebody who is practicing magick on a different level, and that's what you don't wanna do.

E.A.K.   I've got a student that in the consultation just asked me a little big ago about these different Satanic groups that are out there. He's like, "You've got the First Church of Satan, you've got the Church of Satan, you've got the Temple of Satan," he goes, "Which of these is the true Satanic religion?" So I go, "As far as I'm concerned, the true Satanic religion, if there is one, has one member, it has one priest, it has one clergy, and that's you."

M.W.F.   Yeah.

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E.A.K.   If you are Satanic ... I mean we've talked about the fact that you and myself have been largely solitary practitioners, and I think that goes for just about every real black magician, that it's nice to get together, and to do group ritual, and that's awesome to help each other and inspire each other. But at the end of the day, when I come into this temple, and I perform ritual and I'm completely alone, just me and the spirits, I don't ... there's no holding back anything.

Any emotion that needs to be expressed, anything that needs to come out of me, I can let it out. There's so much inauthenticity when you're working in a group, because it does become the social ... you're looking into the eyes of everybody else trying to see a reflected view of yourself, rather than just engaging and losing yourself in the ritual. And so yeah, it does need to come back down to yourself, and to, like you said, I think it's especially when people mock you, when people say, "Well, what you're doing is too crazy, it's too out there, it's off base," but that's what your inner daemon is directing you towards, then that is the truest truth that you can ever experience.

M.W.F.   When people who are not succeeding in life, who don't understand the Left-Hand Path, are always the one that are telling you you're doing the wrong thing, or that's this, or that. It's up to you in how it's proceeded. If it works through you, then it's totally authentic. And the other thing is, and I've heard that before, questions like that, which group is the right one? Church of Satan, Temple of Set, Temple of the Vampire even, and various other groups all have beneficial aspects to them. All have ... it's always the people that are in charge, or the people that have written these works that formulate that kind of thought, who are always quite adept magicians.

They laid the groundwork, but here's an example. People will look at Anton LaVey, and you know the man's dead, but they will criticize his work, and they'll start pointing out, "Oh, well look at this, he really wasn't a circus trainer," or things like this, but what I look at is what his work contributed to my initiation. I don't care about him personally, and what he liked or didn't like. For me, he's inspiring and interesting, but really it comes down to what I'm doing.

And I leave that out of it, I don't think of him when I think Satanism, those things fed into this, and fueled this, and inspired me. Aleister Crowley is another one. You look at Magick in Theory and Practice, and the core writings, those changed modern magick, and they had a powerful influence on me, but I don't care about the man personally. I don't study his ... I've read all about him, and some of the things that he did I consider vile, personally, but I don't think about him in magick. It's what he contributed.

So you can look at any groups and see beneficial things in each, and if you're a member of one, learn from it, and take things that are good out of it. Even if you leave on a bad note, don't make it your career to put them down, use that to fuel yourself further. And that, if you can do that, you're gonna be a lot happier. So I learned about the group type thing with the Greater Church of Lucifer, and before that ... And you know, the Order of Phosphorous is a private order now that's very non-dogmatic, as totally as much as it can be.

But what I found in the GCOL, is you'll get a lot of people and there's little, like, peppered things in that mass that are the real embodiments of the black flame. But all of those other ones are just about telling people they're a member of it, or shocking their parents, or their friends, and they wanna be, often they wanna be told what to believe. And told what to do, and that was totally ... I found that was the conflict that I had with that. I don't wanna tell people what to do, that's counter Left-Hand Path it has to come from you. I can guide, I can instruct, but in a formal initiation setting, but I'm not gonna tell you what to believe. You have to make your own choices and drive yourself.

E.A.K.   That's a pretty strong ethic that you must have for that kind of honesty, because most people would grasp at the opportunity to have other people asking them for the directions on what to do with your life. And you could easily have perverted that and taken that any direction you wanted to, I mean you've got these sex cults that always pop up, and you've got all the different forms.

I'll tell you, the different cults and orders and groups that have derived from Hindu, and Yoga, and tantric teachings have become so preoccupied by sexual gratification and group drug use, and people just getting high, having hallucinations, and ...

But that must be a strong ethic for you to be honest with your audience enough to say, "No, no, don't come to me for the answers. Here's how you can find that yourself."

M.W.F.   Part of the test of the adversary, for me, one of me, was what do I do with this format, now that I have it? Because I didn't ask to create, I wasn't creating the GCOL. Someone was using my works, and teaching out of their garage who didn't understand my works, and I had a choice. There were all these little Luciferian people popping up that didn't understand what I was doing, and they were these types that, "I'm gonna use your work, but I'm gonna insult your name any chance I get." And then they're not gonna present the work right, because they're very ... they're not very intelligent.

So I had a choice. Do I govern this the best I can, and see what happens, or do I ignore it, and let these pop up, and start, you know. And then I start getting the messages, "Do you support this, or that." So I made the choice, I'm going to, we're going to, govern this, and see where it goes. But then part of my true will, the enhancement part, it was like the daemon was directly guiding my hand, in that this is an opportunity to utilize the energy of the adversary to create a shock and awareness for a time, to present this idea out.

And it's not to make the masses into Luciferians, that's not gonna happen. It's about connecting with those people who are alike, who have that black flame, and it's also about creating change that'll have ripples afterwards. And so the test that I had, all of a sudden you have, you're on TV, you have newspapers, and this whole media thing, it really challenges who you are, because do you ... and there were people, there were news organizations that wanted the show, they wanted the drama. But they also really wanted to see a cult. They wanted to see me telling people what to believe, what to do, and doing all those things that would increase money, it would increase all these things, but it was against what I was going for.

So I had to make that choice. That choice was the right one. The GCOL lasted one year, because they wouldn't renew the lease, because the land owner, the landlord was getting death threats from Christians, and at the end of the year I discovered I'd done all I can do with this, in this format, and it has to go into something else. But it was the first Luciferian, or really Satanic official building, not Anton Lavey's house, that was the ... but an official recognized building. But that was in honor of all the Left-Hand Path schools of thought and traditions that I went through. So it was honoring all of them, it wasn't just my thing, it was for everybody.

And yeah, that was a test, what do you do with that? Because if I had started telling people what to believe and do, yeah, I would create, that would feed my ego, yes I would benefit from that monetarily. But it would destroy part, it would slowly decay my principles and who I was. So I chose the ... you know, my true will.

E.A.K.   The fact that it lasted for one year is I think important. That's one revolution around the sun. For a lot of the more major rituals that I am actually trying to create massive change in my life, the full manifestation a lot of times takes a full year. I'll see little trickles of what I'm asking for, but then after a year, sometimes to the day, bam, it hits. So that, I think that's yet another testament to the fact that you were being led by a genius force, so yeah.

Before we have to wrap up, 'cause I see that we're running out of time here, this book Apotheosis is spectacular. You've really tackled an approach, I think, that just about anybody who is ... who does have that black flame, who is geared towards this, can pick this book up, and I mean it's packed with real information. There's no bullshit, there's no, you're not pulling anybody's strings, this is probably, as far as I'm concerned, one of your most honest books, as far as, you don't hold anything back, you lay everything out as far as what they're going to need to do, what they're going to need to invest, sometimes even what they're going to need to sacrifice for their own growth.

And at the same time, the opposite side of that, is what they're going to gain. And what they gain, I mean the title says it all. Apotheosis. Literal mastery, autonomy, over the self.

M.W.F.   Yeah, and thank you for saying that, and you know I appreciate your forward to the work, and that shows good collaboration, and we're all aiming towards the same things, even though we're obviously individuals. Apotheosis is really a replacement of the work Wisdom of Eosphoros, and it's just totally ... it takes the key things that I was trying to say in there, and presents it completely in a new way, and first part of the book is utilizing the philosophy, like the 11 points of power, and applying these consistently, uniquely, until you start to create that wheel momentum.

And then understanding what the black flame is, and how to apply that basically. And then the magickal aspect, which is ceremony and ritual. However, like I've been saying is, within the philosophy, that is the magickal foundation. That's the first ritual that you're going to undertake, and it's going to be the hardest, in that it's very easy to overlook the importance of things. So by the time you get to it, if ritual magick is your forte, that's what you wanna do, you're going to be so much more prepared for it.

And one of the things with Apotheosis is, I want you to understand that if you apply this work consistently, you're going to validate it. And then if you go on to different, you can go into different things, like you can go into some of the ceremonies and workings in your works, and many of them, probably most of them, and apply it from a ... it's very akin. So and you could go to something like rune magick, you could go to Celtic or Pagan traditions, and you still have those principles, that black flame, that's building you, and then utilize it however you wish.

E.A.K.   That is so important, because what you have, especially in the online communities, is what's called spell begging, where people jump on and say, "Hey, I need to cast a spell for this, what's the spell gonna work?" Well, what you're doing with Apotheosis is giving a template, here, you can use this template and make any spell you want. You can make any ritual, any change you want, and working with what Michael Aquinas would call lesser and higher magick, of using the mundane and the psychological, as well as the spiritual, in combination. It's so important.

M.W.F.   Yeah, that type of unity, you know the problem that people get when they go to ... So I understand why people offer magician services. It's something that was used in ancient Greece, Mesopotamia, this was a tradition, this was a vocation, because you're putting energy into it. I understand that some people will say, "Oh, that's not, you shouldn't do that," blah, blah, blah, for money or whatever, but yeah, it's a tradition, and it's very valid. So it's just as valid as anything else one can do in life.

But, people that get that service should also understand that yeah, still get that guidance from that service if that's what you've chosen to do, but also learn how to utilize your own learning, your own individualism, and apply those things within yourself. So your interactions with other sorcerers will be that much more impactful. And if you can do that, that really changes things. It's about becoming the temple of mind, body, and spirit of the adversary.

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E.A.K.   Right. Yeah, yeah, rather than looking, and worshiping, and revering anybody, you look at them as models. Let's say you hire somebody to perform a ritual, I do rituals for hire, and every single one of them I send a video, as well as step by step instructions on how they can duplicate the ritual, because I don't care how much you pay me, I don't care. I don't have the will, I don't have the desire that they have for their result. And so yeah, that's essential.

M.W.F.   Yeah.

E.A.K.   But yeah, so everybody, you've got to check out Apotheosis, this is coming out next month, May 7. [Editor's Note: place your order midnight tonight ET-USA]

M.W.F.   May 7th.

E.A.K.   Perfect, so that's coming up very soon at balg.co/apotheosis. We're also releasing, from what I understand, a complete work, where we'll basically be going through your bibliography, and putting those out. As far as I'm concerned, this is a magickally inspired collaboration, and it's awesome, so thank you for ... First off, thanks for coming on and chatting with me, we'll have to schedule very soon another session, because I could sit here all day and chat with you about all of this.

M.W.F.   Thank you, thank you very much, and I look forward to doing more of these, and yeah, it's been a great time.

Note: This concludes newsletter three of three in this series.

Liberation. Apotheosis. Illumination.