Occulture

I could sit here and write the typical how-to BS article about circuit bending you can find anywhere on-line but instead I'll approach it in a spiritual sense. Circuit bending is one of the latest forms of occult technology to emerge over the past 20 years, and I would argue one of the most potent due to it's correct form. You're prolly wondering what qualifies this as occultech? I mean it's just making instruments out of kids toys and other abandoned (usually) battery-operated noise producers, right? No, - it's a direct channel into chaos, as circuit bending takes circuit boards and rewires them to send incorrect voltages to transitors, capacitors, etc. This results in random output from the machine. It is in this manner that we establish a channel to divine chaos' manifestation within this technomantic art.

There is a long history of deities contributing to the development of magicians’ psyches, networks and magickal works. In the past, and for more traditional folk, usually one cultural pantheon is favored and more frequently called upon than others. Many modern occultists exercise their freedom to build their own pantheon. Their personal deities can range from traditional mythological heroes and god/desses, faery folk, totems and generally accepted archetypes to comic strip heroes, pop-culture icons and celebrity personas. Members of the pantheon are often chosen for specific purposes or by the general affinity of the magician; although some have been known to come storming in uninvited and remain firmly planted until a lesson is learned or purpose is fulfilled. Attributed meaning and concentrated energy is fuel to keep the pantheon running smoothly and the lines of communication open.

I used to hate cooking, to the point that when I was still a lonely bachelor in a one bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh, I subsisted primarily on Campbell’s soup and raw produce. To me, it was just a big waste of time. Why cook when I could be writing, creating artwork, or other such interesting things? Add in that I tended to stray away from the traditional (stereotypical) female gender role anyway, and cooking just wasn’t high on my list.

IN THE LATE 1970S PETER CARROLL BASCALLY SYNTHESIZED BUDDHISM, PHYSICKS, CROWLEY AND SPAER INTO CHAOS MAGICK!!1

I've always found mantras (vibrated chants) to be fascinating.

One area of recent experimentation with animal totems has been using chemognosis to contact totem animals.

What is the subtle and sublime mechanism that underlies magick? In whatever system or technique, by some process we manifest mind into reality. Internally we can call it self improvement yet we know there's so much more. By some arcane, digitally feral technologies our thoughts are often heard by the chaotic web of life, which responds in kind giving us that one sideways glance and cocked smile at just the right fucking moment to be beyond a doubt a sudden mind-blowing manifestation of magick. It's as if there is a great presence existing in some very real yet abstracted layer of reality that interpenetrates everything, leading from the backs of our minds right to the central servers of the Akashic Record.

While other Key23 contributors will likely make you wait until December at the earliest for their “Year in Review” columns, the Good Doctor sees no reason to make his loyal and eager fans wait. After an intense sit-down session with my scrying crystal and a dropper full of heavy liquid in my ear, I saw 2006- the year of 06/06/06. Fear not, loyal listeners. My prognostications for the future do not involve a single instance of “and lo! I beheld a bowl!” What I do offer is some practical advice on how to avoid calamities, catastrophes and cataclysms in this, the “year of the Beast.” You may laugh or cry but you will ignore my warning at yr own peril.

Does the optimistic and pessimistic philosophic polarity really have a place in occult thought? Just rambling because I seem to be swinging wildly between fatalistic pessimism and blind optimism in my life currently, with disastrous consequences for my emotional well-being. My thoughts in this article do not represent well formed ideas, but rather general musings about my plight.

Image consciousness in occulture

Subjective and objective, two simple words with such a wealth of meaning that I believe we often fail to appreciate fully. At the moment I'm typing on my keyboard, I know that the sensation of the keys under my fingers and the colour of the plastic are simply the way my brain interprets tactile and visual information, I know that if I pick the keyboard up it's weight is relative to the force of gravity on this blue green orb and the strength the muscles of my arm can exert. More subjective still, I changed keyboards this morning (my repeated heavy handed typing hammering my own keys to oblivion) and this new keyboard doesn't feel the same. The keys are in the same place and formed of the same plastic of it's predecessor but the subtle bond I developed with the tool I used almost everyday is absent from this new object.

The Disorder is an attempt to stimulate some New Thought on Chaos Magic by creating a magical communication network with some structural features which help make Chaos Magic real. It is an Order about Chaos, and a Chaos about Order.

Last year I entered my 'Saturn Return' (a clever astrological term for the life and hormonal changes generally experienced by those entering their 30s) and the processes I have gone through as a result, generally concerned with personal limitation and mortality greatly influence this article, which is an examination of the how the mysteries of Thanateros related to the Jungian archetypes of the Senex and the Puer, and how all these ideas relate to sexuality, the Mind-Body polarity, the Spirit-Matter polarity and the quest for an Anarchist society.

Watching the Foolish People carnival one is reminded of one of those tag lines from an old 50's B-movie, the one where you're told to keep repeating to yourself 'It's only a Movie, It's only a Movie'.

In your face from the start with bondage, threatened anal rape and a screaming siren who claws her way naked through the audience shouting prophecy, all occurring within the first twenty minutes you know you're in for a bumpy ride.

Letter to a Seeker…

I've had my share of tumultuous times and chaotic emotions, confusion and despair. Believe me, none of those things were trivial. Because I learned from them.

We are multi-faceted beings, each a collage of memories and preferences. Every aspect of personality can change if you allow it, if you want it and sometimes even if you don't. Who You Are will very likely change drastically over the years as you experience and grow. You may change so much that you will wonder how you ever felt differently. But you will always have your past to grow from.

There are few labels I have hung onto as long as punk rocker and magician. I was a punk before I was a magician, and arguably a chaos magician for as long as I have been a magician despite not having even heard that term until long after starting to muck around with this occult business. I think the reason these two labels have stuck for so long is because they are for me very much intertwined, and celebrate the same idea(l)s. One thing I love about the punk scene is that it is very welcoming and supportive of young people. Discovering punk rock saved my life. So did discovering the occult.

Mother Mosquito shoved an ancient pencil and scrap of envelope into my hands and made me take down the following list of spell components:

feathers, keys, nesting dolls, figurines, dried flowers, pages from old books, strange stones, egg shells, branches hit by lightning…

A way out…

Let go of it. Change your response. Take control of your reaction. Understand that you do not have to be slave to your normal chain of emotions or to the expectations of others. Refuse to let it get you down. Remember that it is your ego that is a tool - use it, don't let it use you. Use theatrics. Play. Remain ridiculously calm. Step back and think for a moment. Ask yourself if it really matters in the grand scheme of things. Try to justify it. Find out if it is for the “highest good” whatever you deem that to be. Find your center and stay there. Work to heal others by healing yourself. Seek out emanations of love and beauty. Don't let the fear of change stop your transformation. Forgive your perceived mistakes. As often as possible do what feels good and right deep down. Put into life what you hope to get out of it. Play Devil's Advocate with yourself and examine things from as many angles as possible.

Good luck.

D.J. Lawrence has uttered the words of a 2nd generation of chaos magic with his Chaotic Mandate, meant to bring together the disjointed tribes of chaos and usher in the 5th Aeon. Here's an excerpt:

Bittorrent Tracker at Greylodge, at Conspiracy Central, and at Media-Underground</p>

what is bittorrent?

Recommend more in comments.

Introduction

This is article number one in a series of three, the other two will be on the breath and the spine respectively. I’m trying to distil the working philosophy and influences that I’ve developed over the years into a coherent set of articles. Saying that I’ve also tried to make this as practical as possible, so if you want to skip the philosophical preamble and head straight for the exercises I’ve placed links to them at the top of the page so you can jump there easily.

23 minutes with Freeman on Key23 Radio (33MB.MP3)

I interviewed Freeman of The Freeman Perspective (while Ty of scarsmyown joined in as skeptic)

We talk about the nephilim, the templar bloodlines, lilith, aliens, and road magic.

With audio effects and music by LVX23

This is a chapter out of one of my current book projects, the sequel to Pop Culture Magick, the Pop Culture Grimoire. But it’s also a challenge to all of you who write in the occult scene. Read on…

This piece was written out of a desire to turn the current disaster situations into more positive steps towards the future. That is, if survival’s actually important for our funny little species.

Just an excited note to all that the new Disinfo anthology Generation Hex is now shipping. I’m proud to be one of the contributors to this truly excellent volume. Here’s the cover blurb:

I intended to write an essay about channels of communication in symbolic magic, being sufficiently abstract as to not arouse my own fears and dreams. Then reality intrudes with vortical wrath. Deluvian torrents batter, some of us literally, but we all feel increasing tension in the forces of power that envelope us.

Much my work involves the abstract and metaphysical — reformulating models of deep reality by plundering and remixing our magical heritage. But this yet remains disconnected from my immediate actions, from the events which assail and storm through my life, and through the lives of individuals struggling for survival now. I want to integrate these levels of the abstract and immediate, but I can no longer sit idly philosophizing without taking action.

I was in a living room sitting on the floor. My wife was on the couch serenely reading. In my hands was a book open to a single illustration of a harlequin in flowing diaphenous purple veils. Wordless, I invoked the harlequin and began to quickly fall into a mounting trance. The weight of it came crashing onto me and as I begun to go under I waved to my wife to let her know I was leaving.

When we are very young we are afforded the luxury of living in the now. You’ll never hear a parent admonish a child who has just discovered their own reflection that they really ought to consider what they’re going to do with their life. That all changes soon enough when we are sent off to school. Sure the first few years are all nap time chocolate milk and recess, and then it happens. We’re told there isn’t time for any of that foolishness, we must prepare for the future. The past it seems is only useful for charting the future. We’re told not to dwell on the past, not to cry over spilled milk, after all, what’s done is done right? People like to pay lip services to the idea of living for the moment, as you read these very words someone is working themselves to death because of plans they have for the future, their sole consolation their next day off, and hanging somewhere in their work space is the phrase “Take time to stop and smell the roses.” The key idea there is to stop. I remember vividly my first kiss, so vividly in fact that I can conjure it and relive with the same sense of the present you have as you read these words. I can feel the warmth of the late summer sun, I can see her sitting on an upturned trash can in front of me, the sparkle in her eyes, the light playing in her dirty blonde hair, I can smell her shampoo mixed with the promise of an early New England autumn, and as I lean in time slows down and as my hands come awkwardly to rest on her thighs time slows to a stop just as my lips touch hers. The past the future, the present all become meaningless as they merge into one eternal moment expanding outward in every direction in time, in kairos, and I am eleven years old forever and I can see every possibility laid out before, and like a kid in a candy shop I know I can choose any one of them I want, and even with all of these laid out before me this moment with her is what I will choose, know that I will always choose to end that summer day with that first kiss. Like a first kiss on a cosmic scale, that is time magic.

From my personal journal:

“I’ve been working like mad through the night creating and charging these sigils. Feel free to copy and paste these, spread them anywhere you want, expose them to as many as possible the more the better. All these sigils are based on the thematic intent of aiding the relief effort, easing the suffering of all the victims, calming the entropic chaos that’s going down, and just generalling healing all the survivors, the cities themselves and all the people who love them. Charge all of these or only the ones that grab you, like I said they’re all designed to to help those who need it, after the recent tragedy in the Gulf Coast. I implore all of you to do more than just charging these sigils, donate your money, your blood, your time. Look I know life can get busy, and we all have our own problems, but I’ve yet to meet the person to busy to take a few moments a day to launch a sigil. Those of you unsure about how to charge/launch a sigil are directed to the excellent primer found here: http://www.grantmorrison.com/mag.htm If any of you know of other magical efforts being made, please hip me to them in the comments.”

There are several of these, so I wasn’t sure if it would be cool to just post the images, instead I’ll offer this link, for anyone wanting to participate:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sammaelhain/75324.html

I have been pimping The Freeman Perspective for a while now, here and on my weblog, and I promise this will be the last time I whip this horse on Key23 (thing is, I don’t know if this horse is dead or a potential derby winner - I hope it’s the later). Now at last the first full six episodes are available for free, and you can watch them as soon as you finish downloading them and decide for yourself if he’s on to something or not.

Size: 4.35 GB (opens into information page, not actual file)

I don’t have bit torrent, but I did have some cash so I donated it to him for a physical copy, but I figure most of y’all are spending all your extra cash on gasoline & besides - free stuff rocks.

Halliburton, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics. These are the servants of the dark archons, perpetuating armed conflict to maintain their profit margins. The leaders of these occulted corporate organizations have abandoned all hope for salvation and given their lives to Murder Inc. Do they find solace in the demons and lords of red war and black hearts? Indeed, their deal with the Devil was a great one for the Dark Prince.

I'm currently working on a new Magickal work in the form of an installation entitled DR BLEACH, which will be opening at a Gallery space later this year in London. I offer the details of it here as a work in progress.

DR Bleach Synopsis

Grant Dee exists in two places at once. He exists in the physical reality of our world but also as a data shadow recorded as pure information by those who watch.

Thousands of hours of CCTV footage of his every move, the footprints his credit card leaves, GPRS tracking his exact geographical position on his mobile phone and the tracks he leaves online all combine to represent Grant as an idea alone.

Grant has proof that the Grant data shadow, the Grant meme, has stolen his soul.

Tonight he plans to visit Dr. Bleach, the only person with the abilities necessary to give him back what he has lost.

Dr Bleach will take back his clients soul through advanced soul retrieval techniques. He will combine, collate and display all the relevant recorded information to invoke the Grant data shadow.

The question is will Grant have any flesh left to hold his soul.

James Randi Educational Foundation - An Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural

Satanist? Randi needs to make this a WiKi. His entries need tweaking.

(via BoingBoing)

a few days ago I got in touch with Freeman again. I mentioned his show down in Austin Tx in April and he’s quite recently gotten in touch with me & provided me with some preview footage of his shows. He’s got no real funding, just determination and a head filled with data from an itinerant life, and the material he covers is trully bizarre.<br/> here’s the links to downloading his footage:

Just some ideas, new & old. Please feel free to add more in this thread.
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Hold conservative book burnings (Ann Coulter, Rush, etc) in public places. Invite the media. Prepare statements claiming that the event is a religious action to restore decency and morality to our wayward society.

Sticker and poster hi-volume areas. Make B&W prints at work and carry a wheatpast spray bottle and a brush around town. Hit cross-roads and intersections, bus & train stops, bar & restaurant bathrooms, overpasses, poles and utility boxes, cargo trucks and taxis.

Sponsor food or book drives for local schools in the name of your favorite deity, liberal press outlet, PAC, or occulture icon. Prepare statements and inform local press.

When most people think of leylines, they usually think of natural lines of power that connect reservoirs of natural energy, known as power spots, to each other. These leylines act as spiritual roads for the energy within the Earth. Both animals and people will gravitate toward the pathway of that energy.

The other day I found myself on some pseudo-fancy cruise ship down Pittsburgh's dirty riverways, and while sitting up on the deck trying to ignore the innocuous blaring muzak and outrageous drink prices I watched two drunken frat boys loudly harassing the other passengers and eventually getting them to do the wave in their seats. Part of me imagined the crowd's compliance to this request was out of fear of reprisal, or out of utter boredom of being stuck on this boat without much else to do; but what struck me was that in that moment these two yinzers had unwittingly assumed an undeniable position of authority that enabled them to make something interesting happen.

Caught up in the inertia of novelty we tend to always expect new paradigms, new ideas and thoughts and creations. But perhaps it’s not always about saying something new but, rather, saying something old in a new way. Packaging and delivery can make a big difference, and it’s important to tend the light, keep the currents flowing in the right direction.

So is there a new magickal paradigm brewing, lurking just beyond the horizon like a raging star at dawn? Or has so much come before us that we’re left as esoteric remixers, cutting and pasting and collaging the old into some Po-PoMo mish-mash? Submerged in the relentless data glut of modernity, it’s challenging to find anything truly novel. Half the time I think I’ve discovered something unique I end up reading some text from 10 years ago that says the same thing. Perhaps the intellectualization of the esoteric can only go so far before it runs up against some inherent hard limit.

The city I reside in resembles a hive of liberal maggots in SUVs aiming for dykes on bikes. Trust funded middle aged men take pictures of teenage girls in short skirts outside coffee shops. Marijuana flows like water at karaoke after parties on citronella porches. Only 28 grand in town during the on season (read: “school year”) and the infra-net hums with activity. Cryptic sigils scratched out with paint markers on back alley doors for the Illuminated Masters of Sacred Bullshit to know, will, dare and keep silent.

This town feels like a terrarium built by aliens to see how human beings interact in a microcosmic urban environment with everything in, say New York City represented. Except only once instead of ten thousand times.

Upon first moving to town I noticed one name and one name only written on the walls of buildings and in the cracks between the petit-bourgeois reality paradigm which rules my city. $oldie®. $oldie® doesn't look like a tag. It doesn't look like graffiti. It looks like vandalism. The letters look like something out of a font book, not Style Wars. One of the ugliest words in the human language written all over buildings with two of the grosses viral sigils in human history incorporated into the design. $oldie® seemed like a total cunt.

I normally wouldn’t just post a news article here but I think this one is deserving and pertinent to our ongoing discourse. Thanks to Klint at Technoccult for pointing this one out.

“… gathering the combined efforts of the kingdom of Satan toward a conspiracy of apocalyptic proportions.”

[Some thoughts on ideas I’m trying to bring to the surface and congeal into a more comprehensive interpretation of modern magick. More to come…]

My Mom prays for her family, each by name, every morning upon waking and each night before bed. Even though she’s praying to a Catholic god from whom I spent many years trying to get free, I still rest a bit easier knowing she’s working her own type of magick to keep me safe. And she’s surely working magick, focusing her attention on the security of her loved ones, denying material causality and embracing the chaotic plenum of life, nudging it just a bit in the direction of her will.

Happy Friday the 13th everybody! As all you secret society buffs know, Friday the 13th first became significant in occult lore when Philippe Le Bel, King of France, ordered the arrests of the Knights Templar on charges of heresy on Friday, October 13, 1307. Seven years later, again on Friday the 13th, the Templar Grandmaster, Jacques de Molay, was burned at the stake, reputedly cursing Philip and Pope Clement. (Both died unexpectedly soon after).

There’s an old legend that after Louis the XVI was guillotined a man leapt to the scaffold and threw the King’s blood over the crowd, shouting “Jacques de Molay, thou art avenged!” (Wilson and Shea have a lot of fun with this in Illuminatus).

Why should you care? Well, mainly because many crazy (and quite powerful) men and women for the past 700 years thought it was important. Whether it’s fucking <em>true</em> is quite beside the point.

But now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. The gang and I are driving our van out to the old abandoned summer camp nearby. Woo-hoo, Camp Crystal Lake here we come!

Televisions suck psychic blood. The 11 O'clock News appears to have really refined the techniques involved. Try watching it for a week. My money says you'll feel like someone fed you a steady diet of valium and caffeine for a week- jittery, but just wanting to lay yr head down and sleep all day. Generally, television <b>programming</b> revolves around this function. Intelligent television owners have long since discerned the “useful television programming” or else consigned their television to working as the DVD player's workhorse. However, like all of the Con's systems of control television contains potential for pleasurable subversion.

I don't mean to imply Futurama or schadenfreude viewings of Fox News. Television feels anachronistic in the age of two-way digital communication. The Internet2 could make everything coming out of television look like a pound and a half of human feces in comparison. But there remains one function which almost no one ever utilizes. The irony seems that this function occupies the bulk of the broadcast band in the United States and perhaps the world.

I have been spending some time searching the excellent but very antiquated and odd Neith Network online. I’m not sure that I have a grip on it’s interesting position quite yet but I did find some answers within its html source.

Bubbling up from somewhere deep below the ability to differentiate, the source of union and identity, or even further down, the sense of I is assailed by the unavoidable knowledge of connectivity. The mind that evaluates you based on psychological and emotional abstractions, that defines you as other and categorizes your affiliations and affinities by how they differ from “me“, is simply a screen, an inter-face. It’s an overlay constructed to guard the frail ego residing within and preserve the biosurvival metaprogram coursing through all life. If “I’ sit and watch “you”, calm and still, as “we” breathe together the rise and fall of lungs might happen to synchronize, gently aligning the hemispheres cascading with alpha waves, then the inter-face recedes and opens to receive the Other before us both. You there and I here as if space actually existed between us, overcome by the persistent tug of singularity deep deep below yet just a micron away. We re-join to become I and All. Your thoughts, opinions, hopes and fears, your guise and fashion, manner and tone, your loves and hates are all mine as well, held in the One Heart pulsing in the Soul of life. There is no difference. To define the thing is to limit the thing. You and I are the same, beneath the tattered rags of identity ripped in the winds of time. There is no difference. Divided only for Love’s sake, for the bliss of re-union. Don’t get lost in identity. Don’t forget that the Kingdom is in the Crown. Open up to the Other. Open up to each-other.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is perhaps best known for his theory of contradiction and reconciliation. He believed that an idea traverses from an initial conviction to its opposite, and then to a newer, higher concept that involves both, but also transcends them. Since Hegel also identified reality with thought, he additionally believed that the same triadic tranformation can be found in nature, history, and culture. In universities, this is taught as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

The conundrum of the recently initiated ultraculture is that it is attempting to supercede both the culture and the counterculture without becoming a shallow reflection of both. Hegel’s triadic formula places the ultraculture as the synthesis resulting from the opposition of the culture and the counterculture.

The problem is that most counterculture activists are such for a reason; and the counterculture doesn’t see itself as needing any infusion of additional right-wing cultural propensity. The ultraculture’s attempt to be hip will be seen by countercultural - and some occult - gurus as a facade of I’m-a-hipster-against-the-mainstream-look-at-me-I’m-so-cool attitude, which is a reflection of modern America’s ability to turn any liberal agenda into a capitalistic marketing campaign, and ultimately reduce it to a shadow of its intended idea.

When confronted with disorder the brain will attempt to overlay some form or pattern to make sense of the chaos. The meticulous geometries often accompanying psychedelic hallucination are one example of this phenomena. The brain, it seems, is an organizing device that recoils at disorder and attempts to subdue it with it’s own imposed sensibilities. Such is the experience of reading James Curcio’s mindwarping novel, Join My Cult!

Recently on the key23 e-list there’s been a lot of discussion on the lack of innovators and experimenters in magical practice. In response to that I present Magick on the Edge, a chance to be known as an innovator in magical practice.

A friend of mine is running his own tv show on Austin, TX local access channel 16 every sunday at midnight.

he’s focusing on UFO connections to secret societies, and I’m not sure what else since I don’t live in Austin & I haven’t gotten my copies of the show in the mail yet (*ahem*) but he’s got so much data on this stuff I’m positive his show’s worth the wait

anyone in Austin seen this yet?

A question that keeps coming up in my magical practice is how we represent different states on an energetic level. Not just basic physical, mental, and emotional states, but all the subtleties in between that make up the vast range of human experience. What are these states, how can we access them, and what are they good for?

The following is one of the articles I had published in the most recent issue of Konton magazine. Some of the material was presented in a post I made a while ago, but there’s a lot of new stuff in here. The emotions present in strong memories is a potentially powerful tool, and one which I have used often. No matter how much we would like to live in the now, memories of the past have a profound impact on how we respond to our world, and for that reason taking control of the process allows us to more fully create ourselves. Perception can be compared to the magickal idea of will, and for this reason, memory modification/manufacture also presents a rather powerful way to create change in a way that frees us from the self imposed restrictions of time. This has certainly been my experience. In any case, I hope you enjoy the article, I’d love to hear about any experiences people have had with any of the ideas and methods presented in this article, and look forward to sharing some of mine in the very near future. Enjoy!

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Today, Ultraculture is excited to announce the upcoming release of our patented Myth Fusion Technologies. By synergizing personal intent with the global information marketplace, Myth Fusion Technologies employs advanced temporal strategies and traditional archetypes to vastly extend the reach of our enterprise clients. Users will dramatically improve the bandwidth of non-local communication pipelines while seeing a hundred-fold increase in mythic productivity.

Leveraging hive memetics and psychic resonance, Ultraculture has been solving critical phase transition problems for 23 years. As an advisor to News Corp, KBR, and the Trialteral Commision, Ultraculture has contributed to the progressive values of modern youth movements and the evolution of the global political myth complex.

I’m often asked about the gematria of current 144. Truth be told my reasons for ascribing the number 144 to the current had nothing to do with gematria. The number was chosen because of a variety of synchronicities involving 144 and the people places and ideas that contributed to the formation of my conceptualization of the current. Occult symbol systems are essentially arbitrary, but even so what is gematria but a meditation on the synchronicities between numbers and letters and their relationship to ideas and concepts that create our reality? With that in mind I present the history of current 144 with a focus on the gematria surrounding it.

At the top of a pyramid, swarming with tourists, I slipped through time. We were there on holiday, drawn to the majesty and mystery of this ancient culture so unique and inspired. In the Gregorian moment of April 6th, 3:30 eastern standard time my wife and I swayed on the 356th step of the great pyramid of the feathered serpent, Kukulkan, dizzy and winded from the climb, mind’s reeling at this point of contact. We’d finally made it to Chichen Itza. Among the many exemplary Mayan & Toltec ruins, the central timepiece of Kukulkan was the reason for our journey and the immediate point of our first visit. We each, in turn, approached the great base and laid hands on it’s ancient stones, gazing up along it’s ridges at the whisping cloudlets passing in the wind. Around to the other side and up the steep slope of 91 steps, calves burning moving past numerous apes, some too unfit to make the journey. Inertia doesn’t stop up on the top in the temple, milling through the thickened crowd, looking, seeking, tuning…

I’ve waited about a month to post about any of this because it’s taken me about a month to sort through it, and although undoubtedly I’ll be making new connections for years to come I feel I’m ready to post on the subject. Several months ago I embarked on what I termed The Nephilim Working.

I have spent the better part of my life transforming myself into a magician. This kind of transformation is, if nothing else, an act of magic in and of itself. Results are all that matter! This is the mantra of many modern magicians, myself included, but what do we mean by results when it comes to our transformation into magicians? For me, the result is adepthood, that sublime state in which magick is worked almost effortlessly. I have spent years exploring various paradigms, but it was the process of deconstructing those paradigms that propelled me toward adepthood. This has allowed me to deconstruct the process of transformation itself, resulting in the discovery of a variety of shortcut techniques. One of these techniques is image alchemy.

I had no intention of mentioning the passing of the Pope in any sort of real way, but my work this evening (outline of a book studying the concept of the “messiah figure“) has me drifting dangerously close to the subject so, what the hell? (Besides, nobody laughed at my joke.)

I have a terrible memory. I couldn't tell you coherently the paths and events I travelled to become who I was pre-Paradigm shift, but what I could communicate and understood fairly easily from an early age was how my internal landscape created desire and intent. It was due to this gift that I found out what I wanted, and needed, to do was to create live art. Specifically Theatre and it was through art I learnt that Magick is truly the science of art.

If any human stares long, hard and honestly enough inward they will eventually find Magick. It happened to me, because of my work and the self-analytical time spent creating it.

I went to a talk last night at Treadwells in London, the talk was by Owen Davies and was related to his book Cunning Folk which I’m about half way through reading, I thought I’d give a quick run down of the history and practices of these folk who I was previously unaware of as you may find it interesting.

The term ‘Cunning Folk’ appears to be Anglo Saxon in origin and was in common usage from around about the 14th century up until the early 20th. It referred to a professional practitioners of magic, people who employed magical means to find lost or stolen property, cure ills, find a loved one or protect a livelihood, for a price. They came mostly from the upper end of the lower class (literacy was often essential as many cunning folk were self taught) and were often artisans or craftsmen as well as cunning folk (this, it is thought, gave them enough flexibility to see clients and a useful cover for their practice which was for most of it’s history existed in a legal grey area).

Call me quaint, but I believe a magician must be able to clearly, plainly, and vociferously argue a point (s)he does not agree with, to the death if necessary*. I believe a magician must be free enough of any muscular and linguistic constraints to be able to fully adapt to, and exist in, the moment (s)he finds hirself in–regardless of such irrelevant primate urges as being right, looking good/cool, or making sense. I believe body rhythms, hungers, addictions, and other patterns, postures and quirks, are only mimetic affectations to be played with. For no reason.

I just want to point out a link to a entry in my ‘blog discussing Colin Wilson’s The Killer’s Among Us. The article might be of interest to you, touching on prior discussions of metaprogramming / evolution / illumination we’ve had.

The article is is here.

Meaning is created through attention. In On Structural Sigilisation Simon Fabolous by way of M.K. gives us the formula “THE MOMENT OF INTENSIVE THOUGHT BURNS HOLES IN THE FABRIC OF REALITY.” I’d say holes is a touch understated, that in actuality this intensive thought creates discrete wholes. That moment of intensive thought is attention apprehending abstract wholes. To return again to magic then

there is a war on, and in the spirit of ‘radio free wherever’ digitrash studios presents Raido Kaos

tracks:

1 The Money & The Power

This is something that has been mulling around in my head for the last few weeks, its still a little rough around the edges (I haven’t even really got a name for the concept/technique yet) but I think it’s coherent enough to throw to the crowd here to get some feedback and ideas.

It's not really a new technique or ritual as such, more a new way (for me anyway) of looking at existing rituals and enchantments. The idea has been born out of the some of the discussions on time and space magick written on this site and some stuff I read recently on Hindu Gods (but for the life of me I can't find the reference).

Previously when I've thought of Sigils or any other magical object I've seen them as just points of focus, objects or receptacles for a magical charge much like an ethereal battery. However some of the stuff I've been reading recently has made me reassess that model. If the linear notion of time and space is nothing but illusion, just a handy construct that we use to make sense of the information around us then how does this effect our concept of magickal objects?

In keeping with the recent call for rituals on Key23, I thought I’d submit the following. Though rather than being a ritual you could do later on if you feel like it, this is a ritual in progress as soon as you click the link. I’ll post some purely instructional ritual later on I’m sure, but for now:

Everywhere you look there are gateways. Some are hard to spot others hard to miss. Sometimes we don’t realize we have come to a gateway until after we have stepped through. This is not one of those times. This entry is an active enchantment, a functioning gateway. I will tell you this much; walking through this gateway is an initiation into current 144. Simply put this current deals with time magick with an emphasis on causing real change in yourself and the world. If you need more information that that you’re not of the right disposition for this work. Additionally this gateway contains a servitor which is designed to function inside a host body, it is entirely possible a casual glance at the hidden sigil inside will result in infection. For those bold enough to enter, simply read and meditate on every image and bit of text contained inside.

This was to be about magic. About hitting the reality adjustment buttons, about quantifying thee ineffable. Fair enough. To discover magic one really need only thumb through the dictionary (since I’m male I’ll probably do this badly… do bear with me and I’ll eventually unravel this dreadlocked meaning.)

*edited for clarity*

Now available from ChaosMagic.com!

Check it out here:

Konton Spring Equinox

Please support occult writers by purchasing and contributing to Konton!

When I was studying this stuff in high school, my sources of information for this kind of thinking was almost exclusively culled from Robert Anton Wilson’s books Quantum Psychology, Right Where You Are Sitting Now, and Reality is What You Can Get Away With. Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge got me looking at bbs text files (many of which are still at textfiles.com) and writing a paper on Timothy Leary for cash for a fellow student introduced me to the true history of neurochemical research. Swirled into the mix, a friend of mine gave me a copy of Way of the Shaman and I spent days trying to visually wander around in the shamanic underworld.. but since I had neither drums nor cactii I was somewhat at a loss as to where to start. John Lilly describes these amazing psychomental journeys in The Center of the Cyclone, but he’d shot himself up with ketamine and stashed his carcass in an isolation tank to get there.

Another school shooting, another round of finger pointing will follow. We’ll blame just about everything but ourselves, it’s too hard to honestly ask ourselves:

“How did we create a society so sick, that this seemed like a viable option for someone?”

or

“How do we manage to be so blind that we don’t see the depths of human misery until it’s put a bullet in another human being?”

Better yet, why don’t we ask ourselves:

“What am I doing to make my world a better place?”

Ceilede’s Chaos Rainbow Ritual (An Illuminated Banishing):

1. Observe a brief period of no-mind.

This is a call for folks to start writing down rituals and posting them on Key23. We offer a lot of thoughts and philosophies but not a whole lot of practical recipes. Don’t worry about reporting results, just step-by-step instructions that will allow others to repeat your rituals. You provide the lessons - the education will follow with the practice. Create new posts or comment here. Cheers!

Wanted: Magicians who have not yet forgotten that magic is play, who are willing to teach any and all children that there is power in the imagination, that every person is a star and every star wants to shine! (Evil intentioned warlocks need not apply)

in which the fool archetype is invoked, and a funhouse mirror is held up to a surprisingly controversial issue.

For a while now I’ve been concocting a plan, it started shortly before reading Jason Louv’s first call for submissions for his Gen Hex project. Reading that call sort of cemented these ideas and eventually lead to a project I tentatively called Guerilla Occultism.

Magick is held back by two forms of occultism. The first is the occulting of ritual processes. The second is the use of theory to occult practice of magick. The latter form of occultism is especially sinister in that that it can derail all attempts to de-occult the former. The crucial question that must be asked of any aspect of magickal practice is the question of function. What function does magickal theory serve?

Below is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Space/Time Magic, on retroactive magic.

I’ve recently been struck repeatedly about the head with the notion that magicians of the past have grossly overcomplicated the issue of Knowledge & Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. K & C is something that happens naturally for the ever-progressing mystic. The whole idea of the HGA now is cowled in unnecessary mystery and confusing terms and concepts. In many ways I resent that our foremagicians have greedily obscured the process or encumbered it with so many complications. (more…)

In the spirit of shameless pimpage, I recently placed two sketches of the flower online that are more geometrically “pure” than Yiuk’s beautiful interpretation. Those interested in taking a gander can do so at the following url:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/sammaelhain/57587.html?mode=reply

I’ve noticed a handful of folks around these parts who are working on books. In that vein, I’ve recently published a collection of my writings over at Lulu. It’s called Walking Between Worlds and collects articles I’ve written for key23, Future HI, LVX23, and a few posts over at Barbelith. The collection spans the last 2+ years and includes “The Self as Metaprogrammer”.

A highly useful device in circumventing our normal linear perception, as well as being useful in a number of other aspects of time/space magick is the Time/Space Avatar. This avatar, which embodies the 144 current, allows us to side step self imposed perceptual limitations by vieing it as something other than ourselves, something not burdened with the limitations we see ourselves as having.

I wrote this article several days ago on how our perception of reailty is shaped by the attention we pay to the vast web of influences that continually pull on us, but wasn’t originaly going to post it because it was written in a rather free form manner. However, relevence won out over whatever desires I might have to be coherent. Enjoy.

This is an excerpt from my forthcoming book Space/Time Magic (out in August 2005)

Originally published as “Tesseract Magic” in Konton Issue 1 Vol 1, art work created by Yiuk . This article deals more with the mechanics of my approach to time magick, but also dips into a bit of useful mysticism that has sprung up around the development of these methods.

Time magick is something that interests me greatly and makes up a large part of my personal practice. Most of what I have published online and in Konton has dealt with technique rather than theory. The following essay is what I like to call practical theory. Practical theory amounts to beliefs or explanations that can be useful to adopt when attempting a specific magical endeavor.

Originally published in Konton Magazine, Vol. 1, Iss. 1.

“The mind can make substance and people planets with beings brighter than have been and give breath to forms which outlive all flesh.” -Lord Byron

Sometimes when we experience very strong emotions, particularly over a long period of time, wacky things start to happen. As a novice in the realm of abnormal psychology, I can only speculate as to what type of person might be prone to these experiences or why and how it happens. What I can do with confidence is describe what happened to me, and consequently, to others who came into contact with what I inadvertently created.

What’s the most fun bit of magic you’ve ever done? Something playful, happy, laden with ludens… something cheerful and beautiful…

Share your stories!

Hunger Moon. Snow Moon. Wolf Moon in Leo. Attune tonight.

A while ago I mentioned local heavy metal act The Esoteric as an example of overltly discordian metal, and The Curse of Greyface is worth a listen, especially if you live the harder edged metal sound:
“We can’t wait for the world to turn by our own fire. We shall burn.” - the esoteric, the curse of greyface

yesterday their house burned down, with their guitars, their computer, all their personal stuff

I was talking with a friend recently, reminiscing about our own personal awakenings - that time in one’s life (usually the early 20’s) characterized by mass consumption of alternative memes, psychedelic substances, and transformative experiences, which seemed to call out to the universe drawing down innumerable synchronicites and unexplainable circumstances. While my experience was attended mostly by visions and guides, his was filled with black helicopters and spies. In talking it occurred to me that most people who undergo such a sudden transformation and initiation into the psychedelic mysteries of Creation inevitably seem to experience some sort of bizarre contact with either aliens, secretive government agencies, angelic/demonic entities, or some combination of the three. (more…)

On Lucid Living Notes from the Digger’s Manual… 1-16-04

Reality is whatever we make of it, our perceptions are shaped by the ways we approach the world and the filters we use to see the world through. Quantum physics points to innumerable different views on what the underlying reality could be, whether as shaped by our perceptions, an infinity of possible worlds, as a hologram, or colliding waves of energy. Any or all of these views could (or not) be correct in describing reality as we can know it, and may all just be different methods of interpreting the patterns we discover in the world. In this sense, anything we can imagine can be possible, as long as we develop the filters to perceive the world in a certain way.

Back in October I finished a month-long rite designed to bring compassion and enlightenment to employees of Fox News. The details of this rite will be forthcoming in another medium, but the idea was to engage the Fox egregore on as many levels as possible while cultivating compassion and devotion to my allies. Part of this working was an audio ritual that was designed to be a dynamic spell charged everytime it was played.

In my dreams, “I” am a hero.

That is not quite the right meme. I do not mean a comic book superhero or tights-wearing mutant, as that word often connotes. I mean something more along the lines of a fantasy role-playing game hero with magic. And by dreams, I do not mean my day-dreams.

Sixteen years ago, my “dream quest” started. Since that time I have tried to hunt down anything that would help me understand what I am experiencing. I practiced lucid dreaming awareness and visualization exercises and Dzogchen dream yoga, which I picked up from books. Yet I am untrained and unfocused, and this process has been rough going. The closest representation in literature is The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic has a storyline that is also similar, called A Game of You.

The dream quest is a continuous dream. This is not quite a recurring dream, where the exact same dream plays over again each night; instead here the dream picks up where it left off the night before, like a TV or radio serial. Each night’s dreams occur in the same world, with the same characters and follow a single arcing plotline that has consumed approximately 1/9th of my entire life. The world and characters are not static, but grew and changed as I interacted with them over the last sixteen years; I know a few of the characters better than I know some real people. My active decisions shaped the future outcomes of the plot. In tone the dream is like a fantasy adventure, centered on an epic battle between the forces of light and dark.

Servitors represent one of the more versatile tools in the arsenal of the modern magician. They can be thought of as manifestations of the magician’s desire brought to life through the magician’s will/perception. The servitor is a semiautonomous entity programmed to carry out the will of the magician. They range from short term throw away servitors to long term servitors capable of performing a variety of tasks. Their shelf life and their parameters are determined by the magician during the creation process.

Time as a dimension could be seen to have an approximate starting point and end point.

With all the recent talk on futurestance, I thought it would probably be appropriate for someone to suggest that it if you bring change into the world without the clearest of intentions and idea what the effects could be, startling and sometimes rather unpleasant things might happen. But they also might have happened in some way regardless if you had done nothing.

Does reality exist? Do our perceptions accurately map the world on the other side of our senses? Can we know with any certainty that the “out there” matches what’s “in here“?

A discussion I was in earlier tonight yielded the following thoughts. As some of you may know I’m currently pursuing my ph.d and my eventual dissertation will be on the literacy of magic. I welcome your thoughts and critiques.

I have collected something of a reader on the shamanic use of psychoactives

not once do I use a reference from carlos

any and all information added to this thread will be appropriated and reformulated into a future article on consciousness - this is only the source thread for that article to provide some retrocontinuity,… not chance, but futurestance

enough blathering, I’ll initiate the reader:

I've been a little disappointed by the emphasis on “power” and “results” in the discussions regarding the merits of old gods and angels vs. new idols. However, since I'm not sure how else to measure the “success” of a ritual, let's continue to frame the discussion as a matter of results and effectiveness.

The 30 Trials of Ix and the Angels by Mark Durant

To begin: agreeing to review The 30 Trials of Ix and the Angels was more of a profound experience than I’d been expecting. As most of us mucking about in the occulture might surmise from the title, this book is something of an updated The Vision and the Voice, written in today’s language, reflecting the cultural content of the modern world. Straight forward language peels away the interlocked symbolism of earlier works, most of which I’ve admittedly yet to read and have but skimmed in preparation for this review.

The main character, one Ix Orion Pantheon, sets out to deconstruct his ego boundaries and, over the course of the text, become one with the all, a kind of alchemical undoing. In the course of this, the imagery creates a path to the heart of all things and back again.

I awaited the arrival of our issue of Konton Magazine with great anticipation - partly because we contributed to it, but also because I knew that so many great magicians had submitted their work as well.

New website! Introducing:

Art of Magick

Lately I've been considering my approach to magic from a different perspective, a multimodal perspective. In academia, Multimodality deals with the modes of media, and how those modes of media cross over, producing multimedia events. An academic definition of multimodality is: “we move toward a view of multimodality in which common semiotic principles operate in and across different modes, and in which it is therefore quite possible for music to encode action, or images to encode emotion” (Kress & Leeuwen 2001, P. 2). While this multimodality is nothing new, just look at industrial music for instance to find music that it encodes action. The realization that academics have had, which is that there are certain communicative principles in common through various modes of communication, is also worth exploring in terms of magical practice.

These are some preliminary notes on the creation of a hypersigil in the format of a daily newspaper or news site. Taking The Onion as inspiration, some founding guidelines are suggested for creating an “entertainment journalism” entity operating with magickal intent.

I wrote this over a year ago, probably closer to two by now. I’ve since refined the methods as those of you who have read my article in Konton will notice. Even so this still holds up, it’s written for beginners in magick but hopefully everyone can enjoy it or get some thing out of it.

For nearly five hundred years the Mona Lisa has been an object of cult-like adoration. Like the Sphinx, with whom she is often compared, this beautiful lady seems to smile at a joke impossible to share. Yet esoteric tradition says there are some who laugh along with her jest. Now, with the recent announcement that America and France’s sweethearts, Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou, will star in an adaptation of Dan Brown’s pulp potboiler, The DaVinci Code, interest in this most famous, and mysterious, of all artworks continues to rise. So I thought it of some interest to provide a brief history of, and a rambling consideration on, Leonardo’s enduring masterpiece.

Whether you’re considering the way A.O. Spare immortalized himself via a potent combination of sex magick and art, or Lavey’s ideas about the fountain of youth of nostalgia via erotic crystallization inertia, or any other number of immortalization theories (including apotheosis or past life regression, ascended masters ect)the key to the process is memory.

I see Baphomet as comparable to Choronzon or the angelic office of Satan, in certain of hir functions.

This article is about a pet subject of mine, the raising of Kundalini. I’d been meaning to write this for a while and then going on the site and seeing Bastarts article on Tantra made me go back and cobble this together.

This article will hopefully serve as an introduction to the concept of Kundalini, what it is and what it does. I won’t be going into detail about the specific techniques people employ to raise Kundalini because it is something that should be approached with respect and it’s a dangerous thing to attempted without the correct supervision, I hope though that this will serve as a primer and introduction into what I believe is a very fascinating subject.

[With apologies for any graphic material herein.]

As a young man living in the United States, two of the most overwhelming forces in my life are President George W. Bush, and my dick. Roaming the wilds of the internet yesteday, I spent the majority of click-time on two things: porn, and photos of protestors getting beat up at the inauguration of Bush’s second term. The former gave me a righteous hard-on, the latter just made me furious. Two powerful emotions, and nowhere to put them. Until now.

Any Good Magician Could…

Read between the lines. Notice trends and currents. Recognize important similarities. Use a good analogy. Create something worthwhile. Understand the power of names. Work a mystery. Employ associative thought. Personify inanimate objects. Make interesting small talk. Appear eccentric. Or completely normal. Become effectively invisible. Put on glamours. Shapeshift conveniently and convincingly. Perform minor miracles. Multitask. Entertain hirself in the most bland environments. Produce a clever parable. Do magic for the sake of doing magic. Cultivate personal mythology. Put morals aside. Be quite contrary. Layer meanings. Act as a healer and oracle. Hex with a blesssing, and vice versa.

Why do I practice magick? I’m asked that a lot, and it’s a tricky question. Usually I give an answer about wanting to improve myself, and the world I find myself in. And that’s mostly true, but really why did I, did any of us practice magick for the first time? What about it forced us or persuaded us to dedicate our lives to it. I don’t know many folks my age who are as dedicated to anything as I am to magick, so why is that?

I like to think it was a choice but if it was it was an ill informed one. I had no real idea of what I chose until years later, it would be impossible to know before becoming a magician what it means. So why do I practice magick? If I answer truthfully I must first tell you this.

The chaoist commitment to the experiential process, to increased efficacy in magic boils down to one goal common to every chaoist. Chiefly a dedication to absolute individual freedom of thought and action in the here and now. What forms those freedoms may take (or the methods used to obtain them) will necessarily differ from chaoist to chaoist, but the goal in the most generalized terms remains total autonomy.

“The occult war is a battle that is waged imperceptibly by the forces of global subversion, with means and in circumstances ignored by current historiography”-Julias Evola

In this article, we’ll look at the cosmological foundations of Astrology, what astrology can and can’t do as part of a magical practice, and how to get started on using astrology rather than learning it.

Aristippus stated that philosophers differ from other men in that they alone would not change their lives if all the laws of man were abolished.

What is the aim of magicianhood?

To become self directed, self realized, to set yourself up so that if all the laws of man were abolished there would be no cause in that event to change how you live your life, to be fully autonomous.

Magic is first and foremost a tool of liberty, therefor let the magician of the new millennium be a liberator.

This Is Not A Game by Dave Szulborski

Once created, over time works of art, characters, places, and other shards of imagination stake out their own territory in the collective unconscious. These works have a hyperreality, and it is the interaction with these hyperreal entities, deepening their spiritual existence, which has always fascinated me. The idea of someone actively authoring a character or corporate entity in real time in reaction to the player/readers is both compelling and intrusive. That’s why this book is so necessary.

Being clear and direct in the text, D. Szulborski wastes no time in clarifying both what a game and a story are and how they intersect. The first third of the book tackles what ARGs are, and reminded me very much of those ubiquitous sections in rpg texts given over to explaining what the concept of role playing encompasses, and in fact my first impression was that TINAG was something of a GURPS for LARP, to descend into gamer-speak.

Around the time when I was really just starting to apply my ideas about tesseract magic, and trying to make sense of some very intense and weird things, I wrote an essay about being able to lose reality without losing touch with it. Now that I’ve begun to share my ideas and experiences with tesseract magic with the public (In Konton Magazine, and various online forums) I’ve gotten two responses, the first from folks who think it is very cool and cutting edge, and those who think it’s total trash. As much as I love hearing the positive feed back the latter had been bugging me, until I rediscovered that essay.

All aeons exist simultaneously. The dominance of one aeon represents the prevailing paradigm of the age (nomadic, agrarian, dark ages, renaissance, industrial, modern, post-modern, etc…). The prevailing paradigm of an age is, in turn, informed by the technologies developed.

Across arid deserts sand blown and scorched three great beings rage against each other for dominance, whipped by winds and beaten back by the melting ochre of an aging Ra hung heavy and languid in the sky. Like the winds themselves, the dust devils, they whorl and spin, at times fierce and swift, at others thin and empty.

Wombaticus Rex mentioning that he raps got me thinking about magick in hip hop. Grant Morrison used to call the Dr. Octagon album an exercise in “voodoo rap,” I doubt there was any sort of voudoun or any other intent behind the album besides Kool Keith’s general weirdness and schizophrenia. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kool Keith, but I just don’t think he really counts as magickal hip hop.

So who else? Wu Tang Clan and Immortal Technique make references to secret societies, but as far as I know there’s not really any magickal intent behind their works either. Apart from Christian and Muslim prayers as songs, is there any magickal hip hop out there?

Spammers suck furious ass. A pox on your genitals, you slimy web parasites.

Sometimes when I get really caught up in an “Us vs. Them” mentality, I start to wonder if any side really has the right to claim that they know how things ought to be - if there is in fact a correct and proper map for relating with the world around us. It’s the whole hashishim chaos maxim “Nothing is true, everything is permissable” that’s permeated a lot of post-modernity. Grant Morrison’s own ontology speaks to this implying that the material world is simply placental waiting for us to be birthed into the supercontext. Somewhat implicit in this view is that it doesn’t really matter what we do while we’re here. Such concerns are left for moralists and philospohers.

Sure there’s the obvious horror genre as a whole - a deluge of monsters summoned to near-life through light and shadow… but again, this is about those works where you know, upon repeated viewings, that the writer and director get it… that there’s a deeper thread woven through the fabric of the tale than was required of the vast pool from which mst3k dips

colin wilson goes on & on about magicians evolving faculty x - fair enough, but what do you do with it once you got it? A. Alli’s work Angel Tech hints: create with it. & what do people create once they’ve been steeped in occult lore if not occulture… sourceryforge has a page on magickal fiction and I thought a key23 article might help so

Psychic TV: A Live Disconcert<br/>DNA Lounge, San Francisco Nov 3rd, 2004<br/>Support: I Am Spoonbender 1.1.1

“It seems we had to come out and explain the whole concept of psychedelic rock all over again”. Those were the words that a weary Genesis P-Orridge finally spoke into the mic, his voice resounding loud and clear over the roar of the crowd. “Too many fucking computers out there… Music was never meant to be perfect.”

Four more years of a fumbling trigger happy Texan is not what many of us expected. And it’s a simple matter to discern what exactly happened in this bitter contest: we failed.

There are no excuses on any part. It’s plain and simple that we failed. Despite any attempted anti-Bush working or Potus symbology, the occult community (which apparently is decidedly liberal) failed in it’s execution of it’s most important attempt at change. Why? Because things are definitely not black and white in politics.

The course of my own path has always been one of awe and wonder at the inconceivable complexity and economy of existence. I’ve only ever wanted to be able to conceptualize it in some meaningful way, uncaged by rationalism and conventionality. All the numinous, barely-utterable experiences of communion and transcendence I’ve been so fortunate to participate in, all washed over me eroding the stoney crust of accepted consensus reality. Yet in many ways, as I walked down city streets and interacted with “normals“, those experiences seemed to highlight my own freakishness and cast me as an outsider, hiding masked behind the pretense of civilization.

the album is finished, uploaded, and the details will be added soon..

track list

The bloody hunter’s moon hangs in the night sky, bathed in light washed through the hazy terran atmosphere. Rolling sets of dark swells march inland, platoon-like in formation, relentless. Saline mist hangs in the air, atomized and held aloft on sea breezes. Like the wise moon above, secrets lurk in the deep waters below, somehow swollen and fitful with the steady march of Fear at the dawn of the new millenium.

Tonight, the evening of Wednesday Oct 27, our moon will journey into the shadow of Earth around 6pm (PST) for a 3-hour occulting. Light from our Sun will pass through our atmosphere and scatter, casting a red-orange glow across the face of Luna - the Blood Moon. It goes without saying that such a celestial occasion is a fine time for celebration, ritual, and trance.

Not everything is fun & games, there’s snakes and spiders in them there swamps, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a few people have already tread down these dark corridors and come away with some insights, outgrowths of wisdom, kernals of knowledge about what might lie in wait. Mauraders and poets come out of the woodwork when yr werking wyrd shit, inefficient designs and muddled magick transpires when you ignore the basics, and there’s more than a few potholes on the way through the chapel (or maze or whatever…) hence this sub-category of sludge

Sludge slows you down & gets all over everything with which you’re interacting (think tar baby from b’rer rabbit, or poe’s song ‘terrible thought’) and there’s a few significant sludgy things that can happen to a mage’s psyche that I’ve noticed - like aphasia Apophenia .

My wife and I just saw the film “What the Bleep Do We Know” and I have to say that, not only was it fantastic and wonderfully thought-provoking, it was also the best, most concise explanation of magick I’ve seen to date. Very resonant with a lot of the things I’ve been pursuing in my own path. I highly recommend seeing it at your earliest convenience.

Recent e-mail conversation with Jason Louv got me poking around the net looking for details on the Voudoun Gnostic Workbook. Here’s what Google found.

This Tuesday, 10/5, is the only live, televised debate between vice-president Dick Cheney and contender John Edwards. Aside from being the longest time Dick has ever been seen by the public, this is a fine opportunity for us chaos engineers to work our mojo and twiddle the aetheric dials of the Master of Evil.

coming soon: Unquiet Mind : Teotwawki

A sampler, featuring the first 11 minutes, is up at um.dmusic.com now.

as always, download tracks free:

• EmbracEvolv
• Teotwawki
• T.he H.uman E.xport (2:35 mix)

tenatively scheduled for pre-release online by the 23rd of October

I see a vast disciplinary shift in magick that has passed over these tumultous years; and like the current ideology of time speeding up as we head towards the future - much like technology, etc. - so too it seems that magick has been changing faces and systems expeditiously with each passing season.

Ceremonial magick, in the traditions of the Golden Dawn, O.T.O, etc., which adhered to a certain set principles and mythologies - with complex rituals saturated with Kabbalistic and astrological correspondences - declined in favor of the Chaos paradigm in England. While in America, those disillusioned with both high and low styles of magick, side-stepped into the realm of Ockham’s Razor and modern Satanism.

Chaos eventually caught on in America, but not in its original form. Intended as a refined magick for refined magickians, Chaos magick became an excuse for would-be practitioners to forego hardcore study and practice, and instead, salute the face value of the quote “nothing is true, everything is permitted.”

Yes, magick is everywhere. And yes, anyone can do magick. But just because air is everywhere, and everyone can breathe, doesn’t mean that we are all cardiovascular champions with pranayama potency.

Chaos magick needs to grow up. It seems to be going through this decadent, self-serving, materialistic phase where the great work is little more than wanking off for a new job or lover. Where, contrary to Old Uncle Al, results are everything. This type of magick only serves to further separate the mage from the rest of humanity and basically reinforces the primate alpha male instincts that have been fucking everything up for so long now. This is where chaos magick starts to become indistinguishable from LaVey’s satanism. It becomes sorcery for personal gain.

We live in dangerous times. Life as we know it could easily be wiped off the face of the earth, or shackled to the machines of war and greed, stripped of freedom and sold to the highest bidder. The planet that bore us strains under the weight of our consumption and the blind ignorance of growth. Help is direly needed.

I suggest that the only good magick is magick that goes beyond the individual and seeks to empower us all. We need magicks to feed our hungry souls, to ease the suffering perpetuated by wrathful parents and unloved children, to bathe the natural world in the glow of primate love and adoration. I want to hear more about deeply ecological rituals, about blatantly political acts of magick, about group rights held in american malls and football games. This is where the rubber hits the road. All else verges on solipsism.

We control psychic and aetheric energies. That’s what magick is all about. Let’s put it to good use and boldly move to oppose the great forces of evil marching across the globe. Whether you’re overtly seeking to depose powermongers or petitioning the goddess to bring love and compassion to all species, step out from behind your fear and give a little bit more of yourself to enkindle the spark of freedom and life that flows through us all.

Magick is not just the result of intense arcane ritual or focused workings of will. It is not just an internal focusing of intention. Magick also occurs in the spaces between us, the moments of connection between individual stars subtly recognizing the godhead within each of us. One of the most profound forms of magick can occur simply between the eyes of strangers.

When you pass someone on the street, look them in the eye and say hello. This simple act overcomes the illusion of separateness imposed between us all, combats our fears of the unknown, and establishes a magickal link between both persons. In that moment of eye contact, look deep within the other and acknowledge their part in the great drama of life. We are each, after all, actors on this grand stage playing our roles, each influencing the whole of creation in our own uniqe ways. Overcoming fear and making contact with strangers reinforces the web of humanity and establishes greater links between us all. Once you’ve made the link, it exists forever.

Life’s only constant is change. Transformation. Reinvention. Outgrowth.

& from that cliche’ a whole host of magical associations are created.

Nearly a year ago I started working out a conceptual approach for magical attacks on corporations, based on something briefly mentioned by fenwick rysen and meown limited understanding of memetics and how memes could be approached in a significant way (i.e. through signifiers.)

I wrote this with the idea of a very serious ceremonial magician tackling incredibly powerful entities through adaption of traditional rituals. Personally I eschew proscribed ceremony on principle, prefering to create signifiers then modifying them through artistic trance in a ritual atmosphere, & I suspect that’s where the majority of this article’s readers do their most intense work.

The second idea that fueled this piece was an assumption that corporations have a very real center present in a spiritual form. An animating force, lurking behind the logo, behind the smiling clown, green giants, and treehouse elves, essential to maintaining a cohesive conceptual structure.

it already feels like a dream
slightly hazy
yet in such sharp contrast to my life here
in this house
was i really there this morning?

Kohl’s retail store does not carry any plain long sleeve cotton t-shirts. Nike, yes, Fubu, yes, logos are for losers, yes, no fear, yes…but not one single plain color no-logo fronting tee. Let me ask you fellas a question.

What does one forget in the morass of the cultural media? It’s distraction from oneself, simple as that. You stop being you, you buy into an identity, it creates a feedback loop. It’s magic, although not neccessarily of a conscious sort. If you can get it into consciousness (i.e.: realize what you’re doing) you can use it to your advantage. here’s how.

There are more ways to distract a person than there are food dishes ruined by to much saffron. Which is to type, alot. Colors, tones, lighting, movement, all these and more keep our pupils doing the hokey pokey an average of 12 hours per day. Even more if you count any and all dreamstate conciousness. What gets a crowds attention at a concert? The drums beat, people come on stage and stand in thier assigned positions anticipating the next tempo cue. At the movie theatre, the lights dim, curtains open…something to signify that attention is ment for this time, space and direction. That all are to focus on that which is seemily to be more organized than ones self and company. In advertising, the focus is more subliminal.

Bust out those AntiCorp lunar rites…

There’s a couple of articles on TransVision 2004, one at Betterhumans.com and another at bmezine.com.

Hyperglyphic

It looks like a good word, useful, something you could wrap a metaphor around, dangle a concrete abstraction… but let’s define it before we try incorporating it blindly into a practical model. A glyph is any symbolic form intended to be used in non-verbal communication. Hieroglyphs, bindrunes, individual letters, stick figures, (un)holy symbols - pretty much anything written or drawn is a glyph, although primarily the word meant stuff really friggin etched into something, back before dot matrix printers and typewriters. Hyper simply means excessive. So hyperglyphic could really mean any old novel, a newspaper, a can of pop. (see?) So, now for the esoterica:

Digital Media Communications creates viral ad campaigns for major lifestyle manufacturers like Levi’s, Virgin Mobile, & Canon. While top-down approaches to advertisinig have been well developed, companies like DMC focus on generating buzz from the bottom-up. By infiltrating and infecting common social interactions and communication networks, viral media seeks to slip under the radar, past the bullshit detectors, and into the social memestream of the street.

While the occult has its traditions, what is most traditional about it is its anti-traditionalism. Ideally, each one who comes to it would take apart the whole language of the occult and reconstruct it from scratch. But while the language it employs–take for instance, the elements, the stoicheia–exists inside and outside the tradition, occultism attempts to lay a certain claim to it by deliberately obscuring its origins. Part of what occultism occults, an enormous part, is the historical links it has to the rest of the culture. It removes citations from its literature, pretends that with each new author, the tradition is created anew. (Dehiscence blog entry)

This is an attempt to present some of the main elements of western esoterica with a particular focus on Aleister Crowley’s system of Thelema. It is only a topical overview and in no way constitutes a full discourse on the subject. Everything is open to interpretation and different schools may have different opinions of the specifics, but I’ve tried to stick to the authorities and canonical interpretations.

For the longest time - despite my spiralling consumption by the occult world, and subsequent engulfing of Eastern philosophies - I always had a problem with the concept of karma in relation to our cultural bias and hustling worldview.

Maybe it’s my indifference to the prospects of reincarnation, but karma, to me, seemed to only represent a quaint idea formulated by do-good holy men and perfected by “new age” alcolytes in an attempt to force the world into a better place through the modern non-denominational version of “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

The witches’ creed often incites the poetry of whatever you cast out, comes back to you three-fold - a nice way to keep would-be young witches in line during their training, but how much could that phrase really be true? This version of karma - should it ever come to pass - is more the “self-imposed” psychological prison than the universal law. It seems to be nothing more than a trick to play on oneself - a personal inhibition.

Like an onion, we peel deeper though the layers till we reach the center… or are we already there and working our way out? Is the glass half-empty or half-full? There seems no point to these mental exercises anymore. Previous neuronauts have stated that our language should be couched to protect ourselves from the unenlightened, but who am I to say I’m enlightened any more than the next person? I’ve seen things I have trouble describing even to myself sometimes, but other times it’s all too easy to explain them away as illusions of working the perspective shift. Ambiguity is heavily derided in today’s society because the average person is said to need solid ground beneath their mental constructs. Is this really how things are, or how we’re making them for everyone? I’ve dealt with stammering simpletons before, so their strange loops of circular logic are real enough, but is there a way to break through them? Why they feel threatened is beyond me, but so be it. I can deal. I really wish it were easier to open their minds. I don’t remember feeling any differently than I do now when it comes to logic and questioning things, so I couldn’t say if people like myself are mutants, or if we’ve never been properly ‘trained’ in closing off our minds. I really don’t want to believe it’s the other way around.

This article explores the identity of the corporate body and how it can often become an independent entity, outside the control of any singular individual. In magickal terms the corporation can, by virtue of its presence in memespace and its influence over the collective human psyche, become the magickal construct known as an egregore. Much of this can apply to all corporate or cooperative bodies, but the lifestyle providers that dance on our TV’s, follow us down the streets and in our cars, and who gently invade our homes and minds, are the most powerful and compelling.

The modern corporation is far more than simply a building full of people that creates a product or manages resources. It exists in physical space, data space, and in aetheric space. It is a collective of intentional will committed to self-preservation, growth, and profit. It wields language and media to establish its presence and identity in the age of global trade. The corporation is unified in its focus, executes on its desires, and manipulates resources in accordance with its intent. It is in many ways an individual composed of many cooperative cells. Like the human body, the corporation maintains its identity and function in spite of the continuous recycling of its cells. The structure persists by its own will and inertia. The corporation is not bound to any one location. It can move, disperse, and distribute through data networks. It behaves with a single will, informed by the will of the corporate collective, bent towards the same end: maintaining the existence & continued growth of the corporate entity.

There was a post on Barbelith not too long ago about anti-corporate/anti-BushCo rituals and someone mentioned how they would be doing one every full moon until the election. This struck me as a fantastic idea so I started last month. In preparation for the comoing blue moon on July 31st I’ve written an AntiCorp ritual to unseat the corporate powers from world domiination. A lofty task, I know, but I believe activism should proceed from many angles.

This is only one example of such a ritual. Proceed with caution. Assaulting vast corporate egregores can be risky.

1) Light at least one candle.
2) Burn some sage, and walk the inner perimeter of your room or home if you can.
3) If so inclined, play some music. Could be light and spiritual, or hard and punk rock (this step should be informed by step 5 ahead).
4) Banish in whatever fashion is most effective for you.
5) Invoke an AntiCorp hero. Sid Viscious, Jimi Hendrix, Curt Cobain, Karl or Groucho Marx, Walt Whitman, etc…
6) Make appropriate offerings.
7) Beseech them for help in battling the corporate egregores. Vow to further the cause of independence, freedom, and rebellion. Vow to pay homage to their spirit evermore (if you make this last vow, don’t skimp. You probably wouldn’t do well to have the spirit of Sid Viscious pissed off and betrayed by you).
8) Sigilize your intent and bind it (circle, candel wax…).
9) Enter trance in your favorite manner.
10) At peak of gnosis, absorb the sigil, then project your intent as powerfully as possible towards the corporate egregores. Projection should be very confrontational, in the sense of it being deliberately aimed at the archons. It can be peaceful or fierce, as long as it’s directed at the target. [You could also use an anti-sigil - a specific corporate logo as a point of entry. Just be careful not to absorb its intent. You could end up on a Nike shopping spree.]
11) Give thanks to your invoked AntiCorp hero, then let them go. Follow with thanks to your favorite grand diety (I usually use Nuit).
12) Center and banish thoroughly.
13) Burn more sage and intone words of power & grounding. Sing or say a few lines popularized by your AntiCorp hero.
14) Drink some water and have a bite to eat. Return to the mundane world as fully as you can.

Again, use caution. Be sure to clearly mark your entry and exit points. These things have great power. Don’t leave half your psyche in their world.

From hypersigils to hyperstition or even Michael Moore’s claim that we’re living in fictitious times, the life as fiction meme seems stronger than ever.

Grant Morrison often talks about hypersigils, which to him seem to represent one of the highest workings of magic. In his “Pop Magic!” chapter of the Disinfo Book of Lies, he writes “The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try.” His own famous hypersigil, the Invisibles, came in the form of a comic book serialized over six years. He’s been inconsistent about the intent and the effects of this hypersigil, but I think he sums it up when he says it “enveloped me in a shiny, global sci-fi lifestyle I was really only dreaming of when I started writing the book in 1994” (CBR interview).

In other words, it made his life more exciting. For Morrison this is one of the most important aspects of magic (though he also says “… if you’re going to be a magician at all it’s not about wanting to be scary and wearing a robe or something, what you have to do is you have to do things for people” (Disinfo interview).

R.U. Sirius describes a rather easier method of achieving a “narrative lifestyle”:

And, actually, Morrison sort of backs this up:

At the other extreme, hyperstition, a confusing theory getting a thorough discussion on the Hyperstition blog, is more work than hypersigilization. Although loosely defined as “fictions that make themselves real” hyperstitions have more complex characteristics than hypersigils. Anna Greenspan elucidates this in several posts on the blog, but a good starting point is here.

As a completely lazy writer, I’ve had more luck with R.U.’s method. There was a thread on Barbelith a while back asking if your life was written and drawn by comics creators, who would do it? I determined that my life was currently being written and drawn by Peter Bagge, but that I’d like it to be written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Philip Bond, and have a soundtrack by Gold Chains. But I never did any ritual to invoke a creative change in my life. But I did eventually write a statement of intent on my blog, and it seems to have worked. Since then my life’s been a bit more exciting. Among other things I’ve traveled across Europe, taken up rock climbing, and joined this elite band of occulture thinkers.

I’m curious to hear personal experiences of hypersigilization, hyperstition creation, and fiction as life, as well as ideas for furthering the process.

Honestly, I don’t even know how it all occurred. It’s a blur, really; a twist of psychedelic schism. The intent always seemed to be there, but the activity leading up to the conclusion/beginning you see before you was less controlled by forcible action and more a result of flowing through the currents of wu wei wu - action through non-action.

When madghoul.com first went live, I was stuck looking for intelligent, like-minded web sites with syndication feeds that I could scarf up for a specialized section that I was developing. Through some happenstance of direct inaction, I stumbled upon Klint’s Technoccult site and sought to syndicate it for my own purposes.

Along the way, I became an avid reader…