These are 2 example Awakenings to the Mastigos path
Discipline and crisis. Pain and transcendence. Mastigos Awakening is the Devil’s gift: the torment that liberates, pleasure that paradoxically destroys sensual obsessions. Mastigos Awaken to confront spiritual wounds, obsessions, and destructive thought patterns.
They’re the ones who didn’t fuck to feel good, but to feel something. They cut themselves. They’re manic artists chained to illness as a source of inspiration. They’re faithless priests and experiment-tampering scientists who’ve grown dependent on appearance over reality. They’re survivors with unstable coping mechanisms, headed for a reckoning.
Yet it’s important to understand that Warlocks don’t come to the Iron Gauntlet by straightening out their lives.
Pandemonium hates asceticism for its own sake.
Mastigos don’t do denial.
Awakening unlocks the potential of so-called base desires.
They justify them with personal spiritual systems, treatises on vice they might write down, but often commit to elaborate memory palaces. They turn obsessions into functions, symbols, even self-willed servants: minds within minds.
They Awaken in a rake’s progress. Obsessive desires lead them to ever-greater risks until they encounter moral or existential crises where the only escape is to take ownership of their passions. For some this takes the form of a symbolic deal with the Devil, but others take command of their wants.
Consider the faithless priest. He loves his vestments, chants, and doctrines. Instead of letting go he delves deep into scripture. His homilies bring up increasingly obscure theology. He revives antique rituals.
He hopes these will drag God back to his heart, but they don’t — his words sound like tired theatrics. His congregation dwindles. He wanders too far from orthodoxy, and his church dismisses him for an “extended retreat.”
He’s careening toward Pandemonium.
The Iron Gauntlet opens its hand when the world narrows to a choice: self-destruction or Awakening. The seeker defines her inner demons and confronts them.
Look at the artist, locked to cycles of brilliance and depression. She belongs to a counterculture that respects psychological differences and that keeps some of the stigma at bay, but friends still send her shitty memes about reasons to be cheerful; and when the work doesn’t flow and she runs out of money, her family attaches conditions to their help: time in the hospital, medication she doesn’t want to take — the sort of thing that makes her wish she had cancer instead, because they’d fucking get off her back.
She cuts them off, unfriends, screens her calls, and when the phone company cuts off her cell she appreciates the silence. But she still paints and sculpts and writes, even after she needs to steal her paint, repurpose trash for sculpture, and write poems on her own ragged clothes. She doesn’t see the eviction notice for days — she’s too busy scrounging.
The priest plunges into ancient, ascetic practices. He girds his thighs with iron thorns and chants prayers in languages he barely understands until it all turns into pain babble: raw suffering instead of the ecstasy that’s supposed to vault him to the right hand of God.
On the street, the artist takes her cart out of its hiding place, begs for change to spend on food and cigarettes, and after a carcinogenic exhalation, her greatest work lays itself out in the mind’s eye. Completing it won’t be easy; she needs supplies and a place to work.
Crisis opens the door to Pandemonium, abode of demons. Seekers navigate a labyrinth of thoughts and values.
The fallen priest wanders an enormous cathedral populated by the priesthood of his secret urges. A tall man in an ice-blue cassock represents his will to power, and he learns it was never about God, but his ability to command the flock. The Devil sits on the bishop’s chair. Its horns crack and its red skin peels off, and he sees his true self, unrepentant, ready to serve him because he knows its true identity.
He finds a lectern with a blank book, and begins a new scripture. For the artist, Pandemonium overlays the city, made into a maze by the barriers people place before the homeless and mentally ill. She visits family members, fellow artists, shop owners, and cops, who not only bar the way to her great work, but challenge her right to exist. But she finds shortcuts in the city — sympathies in her mind — to get everything she needs.
She paints, sculpts, builds, and defends her work against people trying to tear it down. She puts the brushes down and sees the result — an effigy not of the artist as she is, but as she could be: beautiful, inscribed with secrets. She’s still bipolar, but that wasn’t the problem. She no longer believes what the city has to say. She strides forth, without shame, to build her own streets through a beautiful world.