I began the simple invocation of Naamah. She did not come right away. It took a few minutes of chanting, then I felt her very lightly. I was feeling unfocused, the touch of the divine felt distant. I called her some more.
Suddenly I saw a very clear vision of huge red flames slowly rippling upward through blackest darkness. I knew that she was near, but I couldn’t see her. Nor could I see where the flame was coming from (no need to know). The only thing I could see was the dancing upper parts of the beautiful flames, silently flowing like the waving of grass.
I waited, watching the beautiful flames. Then I realized I was to step into the flames. They were still utterly silent, not hot or cold. They felt very good, and I enjoyed every second of standing in them.
Then I had a kriya of my head falling back, and I saw myself keening out loud. I began to make mourning noises, a long, full breath of what I realized was mourning. And I knew what I was mourning; the loss of who I was before my father attacked me, rejecting and stopping who I was, beating me with his belt as hard as he could for long minutes of unbearable torture. After that, I was too ashamed of what I had done, (it must have been unforgivably wicked to have been punished so severely), to be in the same room with my parents, except when we were eating.
Everything in my life is divided into before, and after. But I have never actively mourned this tremendous loss until tonight.
I did not cry at first. I grieved with sound, with my lungs, the quivering of my body. I would take a full breath, then out would come a long cry, the gutteral moan, a deep keening of my grief until my lungs were empty of air. Over and over, different sounds. Eventually a few tears came.
Then I saw below me a dark box, containing who I was before, moving away from me, going away forever. I began to cry as I keened my sorrow, sobbing, bereft, heartbroken. I was watching my first, whole, and intact self—with all of my stolen potential—drifting away from me forever. Lost, loss. It broke it all open. I sobbed and held myself, rocking the sorrow.
Finally I was silent. I was still holding my athame (ritual knife), and I spontaneously cut each of my arms from the outer shoulder to wrist. Then I dumped the ashes in my brazier onto my hands, and rubbed them onto my face.
(Don’t worry, dear reader. I am not a cutter, and the cuts were like deep scratches. They bled a little here and there).
I put out all the candles and sat in the darkness. The long wounds down the length of my arms felt like the place of release, with a pleasant current of sorrow as white light energy flowing outward from both arms.
I took a shower and disinfected my wounds. I imagined what to say if someone asked me about them, and I didn’t want to tell. “I got my ass kicked by a zipper.” What a great lie!
It has only been within the last month or so that I have realized that my life has been deeply and unnecessarily painful because I thought that I am a part of this, the mundane world. I thought that I had to fit into it somehow. I contorted myself. I pursued things that were completely wrong for me. I tortured myself over my failings, over my lack of any depth of feeling for the world around me. I developed neurotic coping mechanisms about which I felt deep shame, so that I had to hide who I was, and the self-negating ways in which I compensated for my failings.
Now I know. I apply Belial’s lesson about standing in the circle, existing in my place that is completely separated from the mundane world, which is blurry and distant. This is the profound antidote to a massive tangle of useless and destructive habits from so many years trying to fit into and connect with the mundane world.
I trust myself now. All of before is dissolving away. I am no longer empty of any real substance, a mass of longing.
I have found my world, the real world: the world of magic.
Twilight in the Underworld 
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