Baudelaire's Drunk

This rite was written for the Pan AX Conclave on April 6-7, 1996. The poet Charles Baudelaire's birthday happens to fall on April 6th, so a rite written with him in mind didn't seem soooooo far-fetched. So, this is what you get when you cross a French poet with Chaos.

 

Purpose

This rite employs reaching gnosis by an excitatory method and altering one's mood via visualization. It is based on Baudelaire's prose poem (from Paris Spleen) called "Get Drunk," and, as in the poem, proposes to transcend the burden of Time by being "drunk." As you will see from the poem, this "drunk" does not necessarily refer to alcohol.

 

The Poem

Get Drunk
One should always be drunk. That's the great thing; the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and bowing you to the earth, you should be drunk without respite.

Drunk with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please. But get drunk.

And if sometimes you should happen to awake, on the stairs of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the dreary solitude of your own room, and find that your drunkenness is ebbing or has vanished, ask the wind and the wave, ask star, bird, or clock, ask everything that flies, everything that moans, everything that flows, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask them the time; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird and the clock will all reply: "It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you please."


Materials needed for the Rite


The Rite

1. On your piece of paper, draw a clock of any sort.

2. Stain your hand (or just your thumb) with ink.

3. Say the key closing lines of the poem [a slight modification to the last line has been made]: "It is Time to get drunk! If you are not to be the martyred slaves of Time, be perpetually drunk! With wine, with poetry, with virtue, or as you please."

4. Get "drunk" - think of something that makes you or has made you in the past absolutely giddy, breathless, delirious, and unable to sit still. Visualize yourself in this excited state and recreate those symptoms. Wave your arms, whirl around, hyperventilate, fall over, laugh, smile, bump into things - whatever, but get giddy and drunk. Accelerate the giddy elation until you can't stand it any longer, and then continue in that unbearable state for at least half-a-minute more.

5. Gnosis has been reached by giddiness. Take your inked hand (or thumb) and stamp the clock. You have just conquered Time by being drunk without respite in a moment of gnosis.

6. Banish by snickering [at Time].

7. Afterwards, attach the paper near a clock you look at often to remind the clock of your victory.

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