Before we get into it, I have a little disclaimer:
Warning: Do not attempt this technique if you have serious physical or mental health problems. I take no responsibility for any damage this practice causes you. You have been warned.
So what the fuck is death posture anyway? You’ll hear lots of chaote’s throw the term around without much explanation. Simply put, it is a kind of alternate form of meditation. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that. Austin Osman Spare, the creator of death posture, defines it in the following way in his book “The Book of Pleasure”:
“Lying on your back lazily, the body expressing the condition of yawning, suspiring while conceiving by smiling, that is the idea of the posture. Forgetting time with those things which were essential-reflecting their meaninglessness, the moment is beyond time and its virtue has happened.
Standing on tip-toe, with the arms rigid, bound behind by the hands, clasped and straining the utmost, the neck stretched- breathing deeply and spasmodically, till giddy and sensation comes in gusts, gives exhaustion and capacity for the former.
Gazing at your reflection till it is blurred and you know not the gazer, close your eyes (this usually happens involuntarily) and visualize. The light (always an X in curious evolutions) that is seen should be held on to, never letting go, till the effort is forgotten, this gives a feeling of immensity (which sees a small form ), whose limit you cannot reach. This should be practised before experiencing the foregoing. The emotion that is felt is the knowledge which tells you why.”
So that’s all well and good, but lets put it into some more modern terms. This is the way that I do death posture. Keep in mind, this is just the way I do it, and there is not an “absolutely correct” way to do something in chaos magick. This is just the way it works for me. Feel free to change any of it to suit your personal needs.
1. Find a place where you won’t be interrupted for a while, preferably a nice, quiet dark room.
2. With your back to a wall, close your eyes (closing your eyes is not always necessary, depending on your goal) and stand on your toes. Lock your arms behind your back with your hands interlocked together. Arch your back and extend your neck as far as you can.
3. Your breathing will become/should become more labored and faster, bordering on hyperventilating. You’ll also start to feel tingly and exhausted. It will feel intense, so be prepared.
4. You will begin to feel incredibly uncomfortable, start hyperventilating, and your vision (if you keep your eyes open) will begin to blur, but stay locked in this pose for as long as it is possible.
5. Right before you collapse from the strain, you will enter a kind of altered mental state. At this point, you may feel like your floating, or like your muscles are on fire. While in this state, it will be possible to do certain acts of visualization. This is also when sigils can be charged, or an affirmation can be said.
6. Collapse to the floor and relax. Hopefully, you didn’t blackout, but it is possible. You will probably feel fairly strange but this is normal. Do whatever banishing ritual you feel necessary (I usually go with a laughter banishing, but it doesn’t really matter as long as it works for you) and then get up slowly so you don’t accidentally fall over and crack your head open.
So why the hell would you want to do this? It sounds pretty awful.
Well, yeah. It kind of is awful. That’s the point. I initially said that death posture was a kind of meditation, which is true in a sense. Claudio Naranjo once said:
“The word ‘meditation’ has been used to designate a variety of practices that differ enough from one another so that we may find trouble in defining what meditation is.“
Death posture exemplifies this, as it is meditation, just not in the sense of what we typically imagine meditation being. Like any form of meditation, the primary goal is to attain a state of gnosis (something I will cover more in depth in a later WTF is article), but in attaining this gnostic state, you then use it for a work, whether a sigil, spell, or whatever.
But wait, how do I use a mental state for spellcraft/sigil craft?
You’ll hear me often say this, echoing a bit from bluefluke‘s Psychonaut field manual, but visualization, visualization, visualization. You’ll need to hold the image of what your are trying to accomplish in your mind’s eye when the gnostic state is entered (and preferably for the entire duration of the instance of death posture.) I’ll cover different visualization techniques in a later article.
Thanks to enochtopus for suggesting I talk about this. I think I’ll do sigil magick next, then move on to gnosis and visualization.
There are many different types of super senses and you can train yourself to learn most of them. Clairvoyance is also known as ‘Clear Vision or second sight’ which is seeing or knowing things before they happen based on what your clairvoyance has shown you, being able to read peoples present situations or their past events through these visions.
Signs you are Clairvoyant:
You have vivid dreams/ dreams that come true, or often lucid dream
You have a vivid imagination
You can visualize or daydream easily
You see flashes of twinkling lights, colours, symbols, shadows or images
You had imaginary friends as a child
You can see glowing light around people (aura)
Other types of super senses you may have (that I will not go into great detail on this post with) are:
Clairaudience: clear audio/hearing
Clairsentience: clear sensation/feeling
Clairscent: clear smelling
Clairtangency: clear touching
Clairgustance: clear tasting
Channel/Channeling: Being a mechanism or channeling from the etherial world.
Activities/ways to strengthen your Clairvoyance and supersenses:
KEEP A DREAM JOURNAL: If you are having vivid dreams you should be keeping a dream journal to learn how to lucid dream, which can later help in astral projection, dream journals also assist with clairvoyance because it is a part of remembering and strengthening your visual imaging, the most important part of developing clairvoyance.
CRYSTALS: Some crystals can aid in enhancing and developing clairvoyance. Third eye crystals are better at helping with this as your psychic vision comes from the third eye chakra. Great crystals for developing clairvoyance are: Magnesite, Labradorite, Lolite, Dumortierite, Lapis Luzuli, Azurite, Malachite, Amethyst. You can place any of these crystals under your pillow when you sleep, carry them with you throughout the day and meditate with them.
MEDITATION: meditation can help with almost anything, and is especially good for developing clairvoyance. You can meditate with your third eye chakra crystals to help open your third eye. You can meditate on focusing to become more clairvoyant, asking your spirit guides to aid you with this, you can also meditate focusing on your third eye, visualizing your ‘eye’ develop. There are many meditation activities you can learn to help with developing clairvoyance.
VISUAL JOURNEY’S: developing your visualisation skills will be a huge advantage in becoming more clairvoyant, visual journeys are a great way to do it! You can find visual journey tapes and recordings online, YouTube has a good variety, just try some different ones out until you find one that you like and practice on it. A visual journey is a guided walkthrough meditation that lets you ‘be in’ a different environment, almost like a dream.
DIVINATION: practicing divination through the use of tarot cards, oracle cards, scrying, lithomacy, dowsing and sensing can aid in developing clairvoyance. Using these methods of divination help you focus your clairvoyance on matters which may be occurring at a distance, or back and forth in time. You can start off by choosing 1 oracle or tarot card per day and try to interpret its meaning before looking up its meaning in the tarot or oracle book, you may be surprised at how close you can match the meaning after a while. Learning divination takes patience and some forms of divination will be easier for you to pick up, not every form of divination will come easily to you, just do whatever you feel comfortable with.
INTERPRETING YOUR DREAMS: Along with your dream journal try and interprate your dreams meaning when you wake up, at the end of the day or the week look back at your dreams and see if any of your interpretations matched real life events.
REGULAR PLAYING CARDS: you can practise your intuition with regular cards, by keeping the shuffled deck face down, and not looking at the face of the cards, trying to visualise or guess if it is black or red, and putting them in two separate coloured piles, once you have gone through all the cards look at the two piles you have created, you will be surprised at how many of them you got right, and you will get better at it with practice.
I hope this post helps you develop your super senses and helps you with your clairvoyance and intuition.
I will do a divination post whenever I can to help with tarot, oracle, lithomacy and scrying development, I will also do a post about spirit guides. Do what your comfortable with and go slow, these are skills that will last you a lifetime so do not rush them 🔮🌙🌌
Training in magick often includes building up skills ov visualization. One may visualize something moving or stationary. A physical manifest object or an abstract geometric figure etc, but it often omits the most basic orientation to the practice: Where is it?
There are four ways of visualizing, what you are visualizing is located somewhere in physical space, somewhere on or relative to your body, on your field of vision, or nowhere.
The skill of visualizing in physical space is crucial for many rituals. Whether casting a circle, manifesting a thoughtform, etc. You want to practice firmly holding the visualization of something located around you. As you practice you should be able to move around the thing you are visualizing and see it from different perspectives.
Visualizing relative to the body is related to visualizing relative to physical space, but is different in the way you hold it. The brain maintains a separate map of the body in space from the map of space around you. This is practiced by visualizing things in, on, or around your body.
Visualizing a symbol on your field of vision is best for geometric or other abstract patterns, such as sigils. These need not be anywhere relative to you or of any definite size other than a sense of the position in your visual field.
Finally, you should practice visualization where it bears no relation to physical space. This will feel 3rd person, like looking at a picture or watching o movie. This should feel different from an overlay of imagined space over the space around you. When practicing 3rd person visualization, watch for a subtle feeling of a location around your person that is acting as a gateway to this space.
Occult Aspects 