The Master Works of Chaos Magick: Practical Techniques For Directing Your Reality - Adam Blackthorne 2016

The Fire of Gnosis

Once you’ve created your sigil, the traditional approach is to fire it into the abyss of chaos, whatever that means. In practice, you look at the sigil when you are in a highly excited state, or an alternate state of consciousness. This state is often called gnosis, and the most common method to achieve gnosis is sex, or (if we’re honest) masturbation. You glance at the sigil during masturbation, right on that moment of orgasm. You ’drink in’ the image into your mind at that moment of ecstasy, and then you throw the sigil away and forget about it.

There are other approaches to gnosis, such as slight suffocation, dancing, days of meditation, fasting, exhaustion and so on, but I’ve never found those appealing or effective. It sounds a bit much, and a bit too boring. You hear about people doing a five hour dancing ritual to get into a state of exhaustion, just to make a bit of extra money, and I think, you know, you’d be better off if you just went out and did five hours of paid work. Sounds cynical, but magick is meant to make things easier overall. Suffocating yourself is too much hard work.

In traditional chaos, you might be advised to create several sigils so that you don’t actually know which one you’re firing. This is so you avoid thinking about your goal. That isn’t required, and I think it’s way better to make sigils only for things you actually want to change than it is to do lots of random and weak magick. Make a sigil like you mean it, and fire it up with passion.

You’ve got your sigil - time to fire it. Most people are sexually active to some degree, so I really can’t argue with the orgasm method. It works so well that there’s not much to argue with. Do that and you get results. Or you can get as creative as you like. I once took a sigil with me on a very intense roller coaster, and made sure it was within my line of sight as I went through the trauma of that event. It worked. For me, roller coasters definitely bring on an altered state of consciousness, because I’m terrified of them.

You can carry a sigil and wait for an appropriate real-world event that, by its nature, brings about altered consciousness. Say you almost have a car crash, a near miss that could have been fatal. You’re enraged, heart racing, parked at the side of the road in wonder that you’re alive. This is an altered state. You glance at the sigil. This works, because it’s an altered state of consciousness quite unlike normal reality. The main drawback with this approach is that you need to wait around for such incidents, and you can go months without one.

Another method is to just leave the sigil lying around as though it’s not that important, so that the image gradually seeps into your subconscious without any grand ceremony or moment of gnosis. You can even create a painting or some other artwork out of the sigil and hang it on your wall so that it’s always there, being taken in, but never really looked at. This passive approach is fine for long-term workings. But I know most magicians are an impatient lot, so I think firing off a sigil with gnosis is better.

My opinion is that you should create the sigil and fire it within a day of its creation. Orgasm is the quickest and most tempting way. If you’re not interested in the orgasm method and don’t have a rollercoaster nearby, and if you’ve wisely chosen to avoid self-suffocation (because it really does lead to accidental death a lot of the time), what are the alternatives? Anything that puts you in an altered state of consciousness will work. Although having said that, I don’t believe drugs work. Drugs are popular with some occultists, but I think they make you dozy, dim-witted, sleepy, distracted, hyped up or otherwise out of it, and although your consciousness is altered, I think too much of your brain is offline or over-wired for gnosis to be as good as it could be. If you really don’t want to do the orgasm thing, chanting is a good way to get out of your mind fairly quickly.

When you become familiar with occult material, you begin to suspect that many of the words chanted in the really long rituals are there just to make you babble away in a non-language so that you lose track of reality a little. That’s ok, but there are some chants that do have meaning, and also seem to alter consciousness when chanted for ten minutes or more.

Here are five you can choose from, or you can use them all at once.

EE-AH-OH-EH

EE-ADD MOZZ ZEER

AH-RAH-BEATER

LEH-VAH-NAH

AH-RAH-BAH-OO-AH-RAH-BAH

These are divine names, magick opening words and such like, from eclectic sources. Focus on the sounds, and the archetypal meaning will slip through into your reality and shift your consciousness. (Could you make up any sound and get the same effect? Maybe. Probably not. Some words are better than others.)

Chant these out loud for ten minutes, and you will start to feel something. Focus only on the sounds and your body (not on the magick, or hope, the day you’ve had, or anything else) and you will shift to a dreamy state of consciousness. While chanting, you look at the sigil, and it’s done. It’s not the most intense gnosis, but it works. Orgasm is quicker, more intense. But, chanting does work if you can stay focused on the sound of the chant rather than drifting off in thought.

Now let’s take this up a level.

If you add emotion to the moment of gnosis, the magick is far stronger.

And what’s magnificent to know is that any emotion will do. It doesn’t have to be positive, pure or in any way related to your goal. Emotion, in this instance, is just like throwing fuel on the fire. It is raw power. You don’t need to transmute the emotion; you just feel it. Got a load of pent-up anger or hatred? This is where you can use that anger up, take the fire out of it, and put that power into your magick.

Emotions are interesting; frequently a side effect of your current state of mind. You think thoughts, you exist in a particular moment, and emotions spring up to reflect that moment. As such, there are many psychological systems and philosophies that can help you get in touch with your emotions and the sensation in your body (which reflects the emotion), to know yourself. This can be useful, of course. However, for gnosis, rather than trying to know yourself through emotions, you can direct your emotions to make yourself what you choose to be. This is not about feeling positive and trying to assure yourself that you’re happy, it’s about accessing any raw emotion. Whether it is a dark and satisfying emotion, something light, deep or beautiful, it will energize the magick like nothing else.

If you want to know why, I think it’s two things. Magick is all about carving out reality with emotion as a guide. Although magick uses imagery and outside help (from spirits), the shaping force is your emotional state. It is the essence of magick. I believe that emotion gives you direct access to belief. People try to shift their beliefs, and pretend to believe something, but the truth is that our beliefs are formed not through habits of thought, but from repeated emotional responses. We come to believe the things we believe because of the way we have felt about them. Our thoughts are less relevant. When you hit the moment of gnosis, the energy of emotion is the energy of change, and it can scorch a new belief into your soul.

How do you make an emotion appear? One of the best ways is through memory. Recalling a memory that triggers an emotion is easier than just cooking up the feeling out of nowhere. Some people can just feel things, just like that, no effort involved. If that works, voila. It not, try memory.

When you start out a ritual, you know you don’t yet have your result. That’s your belief. You reframe your result as a question, set in the past tense so it feels more like a reality. You’ve created a new belief — the belief that your result is a reality. You may not believe it yet, but the belief exists as a sigil.

You then absorb that image into your deepest self using gnosis. When you add emotion, you marinade that sigil with the force of change. It becomes a belief on the deepest level. And reality changes to match it.

Earlier, I went on about affirmations, and how they don’t work. No matter how often you tell yourself ’I am a confident person’, if you don’t feel confident, it is unlikely to change your belief. When you perform magick, you are changed on the deepest level. Your emotion changes, the belief enters your soul, and from there flourishes and bursts out to affect you and your reality.

When you’re doing the magick, you reach gnosis and you feel something intensely. That’s it.

Let’s pretend we’re still working on getting that piano. We’ve created a sigil, and we’re about to fire it. What emotion should we choose? It really doesn’t have to have anything to do with the piano, with magick, or anything in particular. The crucial thing is to find something you can feel easily.

If you’re in the middle of a ghastly argument with your ex-lover this week, your emotions are doubtless on the surface. Use them. If you’re enraged about something today, use that. If you’ve fallen in love, use that. If there’s nothing close at hand, think of a potent memory. Work over that memory in your mind until you can feel the emotion of it. Use that.

Here’s what you do. You’ve chosen your emotion, and you now turn your attention to reaching gnosis. You may choose to slam a hammer down on your thumb (it works, but I really, really don’t recommend it), or you may go for something else inventive that switches you out of normal consciousness, or you may chant, or you may just choose orgasm. If you’re canny, you’ll know that orgasm really is the best way, and it’s fun.

You do whatever it takes to get to gnosis. In this example we’ll assume it’s orgasm. You head off toward orgasm, and when you know you’re almost there you recall the emotion. Now, this can take a bit of practice. As orgasm approaches, your mind tends to fade away to nothing. But your feelings don’t. It’s easy to feel while you orgasm. The secret is to trigger the emotion just before orgasm. Too soon and it might get in the way of your lustful pleasure. Too late, and well… it’s too late. But if you time it just right, you will probably feel that emotional energy flare up beautifully during the orgasm. And if the sigil is within your line of sight, the magick is done.

Think about a time when you made love to somebody that you love, truly and deeply. When you achieve orgasm, you can feel your emotion of love in a truly explosive way. This is a very different experience than less emotional sex, or sex that’s just for fun. When you really love, and when you feel that love in the moment of orgasm, it’s a wonderful thing. Not everybody gets that. Some people focus only on the sensation. Others start to feel guilty as they get to orgasm. But if you’re lucky, then you will know that orgasm can take the emotions you offer, and fill them with power. That’s the secret of this advanced gnosis.

Use this process with your sigil. Feel an emotion, any emotion. Feel it just before you orgasm, and let the orgasm take that feeling. Look at the sigil. The orgasm and the emotion will then fade.

Let yourself return to normality in the slow, dreamy lazy haze of sexual afterglow, just as you would anyway. Avoid looking at the sigil. I screw the thing up straight away and throw it aside. After the moment of gnosis, it’s ok to see the image — the universe won’t collapse if you do - but you really don’t want to be pondering it now. Put it aside, because it is now within you. You can throw the sigil away. Burn it ceremoniously if you want, and scatter the ashes at the roots of an oak tree. Or do what I do - trash it with the mashed potatoes and onion scraps. It’s garbage now.

Forget about the magick as best you can. You don’t have to force it from your mind, but the magick is done, so move on.

If you have friends who are into magick, an interesting experiment is to fire each other’s sigils. Your friend makes a sigil and does not tell you what result is being sought, and you fire it for them. They fire one for you in return. I’m not suggesting you do this in the same room at the same time (although some adventurous types do that!), but that there is an exchange. I don’t think this is a necessary technique at all because chaos is so often personal, but it really works for some people. Worth trying once you’ve mastered the basic approach to firing a sigil.

And that’s it for sigils. That’s the core technique of chaos magick, remastered into something new. It works, and that’s what matters, so find something you want to change and do the magick.