The Frisson of the Threshold: Liminality, Aporia, and the Sorcerous Turn
Few concepts in occult circles are as frequently invoked, and as little understood, as liminality. Often romanticised, liminality becomes an easy banner for mystery, transition, or ambiguity but, in being invoked too casually, it risks being rendered hollow and of diminished value and meaning. True liminality is is a place of disjunction, of paradox, and of uneasy, charged potential rather than comfort. Its power in being merely “between” is part of its very becoming the axis of turning — what Andrew D. Chumbley called khiāzmos, the meeting and crossing of antithetical poles.
Where we find aporia, those philosophical impasses where thought collapses into itself, we find the sorcerous current most alive. This is not a place of happy resolution. Instead, we find the living, writhing space where opposites touch and resist and, in that resistance, the turn and counter-turn, the sorcerous self is dissolved and distilled. It is here, in that frictional gap — the frisson of null-point — where power emerges.
The true liminal is a crossroads where paths diverge and choices are made, including the darker, more fatal kind within the crossroads as terminus where each road cancels the others, where to stand is to hover between becoming and annihilation. This is the ordalium, a place of trial, of soul-weighing, of terror and gnosis rather than the whimsical ‘between worlds’ of overplayed pagan tropes.
Chumbley was a master of this art, understanding that magic is born less in safety, as much as the cut and drag of contradiction. To be truly liminal is to hold the tensions of irreconcilables within the body, to live in dynamic stillness neither ascending nor descending, neither alive nor dead, and to step into the Sabbat as crucible.
When we speak of crossroads in witchcraft, we often speak of potential — where all roads begin. But what if we look again and see not the potential of beginnings, but the violence of endings? The stasis at the centre where movement dies, where opposites annul one another and something other emerges, beyond dualism. Here, in this null-point, agency is born. Beyond the agency of the self acting upon the world is the self transformed by the act of turning, and that turn is power.
Cain is a potent exemple of the aporatic condition situated as he is between divine and profane due to his nature neither wholly damned nor wholly saved, he is punished yet protected, marked yet made mythic. Within many occult and traditional witchcraft mythos, Cain occupies a place between Abel, the obedient man of clay, and Seth, the man of light. Like Samael, Cain is both angel and adversary, divine and exiled, a paradox enfleshed.
In my latest work, I explore this same dynamic through Judas Iscariot, a figure who, like Cain, occupies a liminal and profoundly charged space. To the canonical Christian tradition, Judas is villain, traitor, cursed. And yet the entire machinery of salvation turns upon his betrayal: without him, there is no passion, no crucifixion, no resurrection. He is necessary, despised, destined and damned.
To some early Gnostic Christians, Judas was the only disciple who understood. He was the one who accepted the burden of betrayal as sacrifice — stepping into the role that would damn him in history and apotheosise the Christ. His is a profound and tragic liminality: caught between fate and free will, between love and betrayal, between human agency and divine necessity.
This is the space the sorcerer seeks to stand in contradiction and, to a degree, become it. To live as Cain, to choose as Judas, to know that the act of turning, not the direction of it, is where gnosis might reside. The crossroads is both where choices are made, and where one becomes the one who chooses again and again, in full awareness of cost, collapse, and consequence.
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