Review - The Benighted Path

Richard Gavin’s “The Benighted Path” may be one of the more interesting and pertinent books on magical dreaming I’ve come across in the decades of my own nocturnal practice. More poetic manifesto than ritual manual, this rare tome is a powerful testament to worshipping and working with the Night Primeval, both in the form of oneiromantic practices as well as an embrace of the monstrous side of one’s own self. 

From a theoretical standpoint, Gavin’s work may be one of the few occult/metaphysical books on dreaming (alongside Andrew D. Chumbley’s) that recognizes that true magical dreaming treats the realm of dreams as an objective reality we enter into rather than as merely a symbolic cypher for our day lives: “The individual who experiences these symbols does not reify the image, but instead RARIFIES their own soul so that they may enter that realm” (40). The idea that we rarify ourselves into the dream world is a crucial part of the metaphysics of dreaming as an intermediating reality found in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabī, and is discussed by Chumbley, Corbin, and others who treat dreaming as an authentic realm of being. 

Likewise, Gavin discusses how dreams do not serve the purpose of day consciousness with its Enlightenemnt rationalism. Rather, dreams utilize “Night Consciousness,” a term drawn from the work of German mystic Ludwig Klages, which results not in nihilism or primitivism but a “muting of the logical dayside approach to reality in favor of the exaltation and exercising of humanity’s darker, deeper, most intuitive powers” (28). This idea is surprisingly similar to one espoused by James Hillman in “The Dream and the Underworld,” which suggests that dreams serve their own purposes radical to the day, including for both Hillman and Gavin as preparation for death. It’s a shame that Gavin only briefly quotes from Hillman’s introduction to “Pan and the Nightmare,” as it feels that “The Benighted Path” goes hand in hand with Hillman’s work on the underworld of dreams. 

Considering dreams and the underworld brings us to Gavin’s main practical approach, which is the use of dreaming as a a Katabasis or visionary underworld journey that is defined as “a rarified process of immersion into the Benighted path. The process involves not only a descent, but also an outward going” (33). While Hillman only speculates about the Katabsis as a metaphor for dreaming, Gavin operationalizes it as the primary ritual method for entering into the depths of the night. The Katabasis has been a primary part of my own approach to dream magic, as one example of the larger technique that I call dream-questing. While the uncanny depths of the underworld serve the closest image for the entry of dreams into the unconscious, it is not the only imaginal realm we can visit in the night. Nonetheless, “The Benighted Path” is the only work I’ve seen that discusses this practice and situates it as a central technique of magical dreaming. 

The second half of “The Benighted Path” approaches the concept of Night Consciousness from a different direction, which is through the lens of horror, the gothic, and the monstrous, filtered through a Freudian lens of the Uncanny and Kristeva’s “The Powers of Horror.” This practice involves the embrace of nightmares as a means of unleashing one’s “Monstrous Soul” as one’s true, antiheroic self. While I have worked this vein as well through dreams and have found it a powerful mode for self-transformation, I see it as fundamentally distinct from dreaming. Despite this, Gavin argues rightly that the Night Consciousness of dreams opens us up to powerful emotional experiences, often wrapped around fear, lust, and the Mysterium Tremendum, and even though Hillman pushes back against positivist growth psychology as a reading of dreams, there is certainly room to lean into the effective power of and strategies for handling the raw emotional core unveiled in our sleep. It would be interesting to see this compared to the psychological concept of shadow work, in particular methods that involve embracing the shadow. 

As a work more of enthusiasm than scholarship, “The Benighted Path” does fall into an issue common in occult writing, which is the conflation of historical spiritual practices to fit its self-designated mythography. Specifically, Gavin seems to mash together Buddhist Tantric concepts with Hindu and Greek myths (alongside Kabbalism, Voudon, etc). The problem though is when this presents factual errors, such as his suggestion that Shaktism, a branch of Hindu goddess worship, is the original religion of the Indus River Valley area, when in reality the early Vedic tradition had very few goddesses, who played a minor role, in the ritual texts, and it is only in much more recent Indian religiosity that goddess worship became a thing. 

At the end of the day, I found this a thought-provoking work that pushes against some of the more conventional ways of thinking about both psychology and the occult, and helps delineate core oneiromantic practices that have received too little attention.