Chaotopia! Sorcery and Ecstasy in the Fifth Aeon - Lee Dave 2006

FOREWORD TO THIS

EDITION

I finished writing Cbaotopia! in October 1997, published it, and then, in half the time I’d allowed for, sold out of copies. I moved on to other projects, writing and otherwise and, when I picked the book up again with an eye to republishing it, had the gratifying experience of disagreeing with myself over some of its content. So I started to rewrite it, in the hope of producing a more definitive picture of what I’ve learned from my years of magical experience. But of course the picture is still moving, and the rewrite would have turned out to be another snapshot along the way.

So I decided to content myself with rewriting the introduction, adding some new material and a Glossary of Chao-Speak, because it was requested by readers who didn’t want to work through an entire reading list to find out what Chaos Magicians are on about. Who says books on Chaos Magic aren’t user-friendly?

The core idea of Pete Carroll’s Uber Null was to model

what actually works in practical sorcery. The core idea of Chaotopia! was to extend that ’whatever works’ approach to the techniques of ecstasy and the still-wooly realms of mysticism, and to see what can be learned from the connections between them. That project continues.

Dave Lee, London 2004

INTRODUCTION

CHAOS MAQIC : THE STORY SO FAR

In 1978 the first edition of Pete Carroll’s book Uber Null appeared. This laid the groundwork for what was later to be called Chaos magic(k). Inspired by the individualistic approach of English artist and magician Austin Osman Spare, Carroll took apart various magical systems and constructed his own minimalist model of how magic can be made to work. He identifies two core principles of successful magic:

1. Gnosis : which means in this context an altered state of consciousness. Gnosis is achieved through excitation to the point of mental saturation via dancing, drumming, sex etc, or through inhibition of the normal mental/emotional functions through prolonged meditation, stillness, breath control etc. The result in both cases is (hopefully) a brief cessation of the internal monologue and a focussing of the powers of consciousness onto a single aim or symbol.

2. Belief as a technique : we take on a belief in order to achieve a particular effect on our circumstances or ourselves. The belief is considered “true” only for the time we employ it; a belief becomes a tool of magical transformation and sorcery, rather than the envelope of “truth” inside which the magical practice is performed. This is signified in the slogan Nothing is True, Everything

is Permitted.

These principles show that Chaos magic is not a system, but a way of looking at systems of magic and extracting from them the parts that really work for the individual magician. Obviously, this approach to magic didn’t start with LiberNull, but Carroll’s early work brought this approach into focus for many people, people who had wanted to do magic that actually works in a real and tangible way, but were lost in the usual morass of obscurantism, pretension and endlessly-rehashed renaissance texts.

The Chaos magician strives for excellence in magical skills, and regards a tangible result as proof that the magic has worked, in contrast to the credulous consumer of new age workshops, who would probably be scared away if any real result followed his ’shamanism’. Many Chaos magicians have tended to define a ’real’ result as some physical, objective change in the magician’s world. Whilst this is obviously not the only form of magical result, it is certainly ample proof that something unusual is happening, and Chaos Magic texts have concentrated on this aspect of magic — ’results magic’ or sorcery.

Once one is fairly competent at practical sorcery, there is little of importance that remains to be said or read about the subject; the magician at this point tends to emphasize inner development in his work. It seems to me that Chaos Magic itself has reached this point; the basic ideas needed for anyone to construct his or her own system of sorcery and to hone

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their skills are already covered by the available books. What has been lacking so far, is a Chaos magical approach to the investigation of the ecstatic states that underlie magical gnosis. This book, rather than trying to provide yet another slightly different flavour of Chaos technique, takes as its starting point the relationship between ecstasy and magic; between Chaos Magic and Chaos Mysticism, if you like.

CARVINQ UP THE BEAST

The above considerations gave me the book’s tide. Chaotopia is neither Utopia nor its opposite: it is what Austin Spare called ’the chaos of the normal’, seen through an illuminated eye, the eye of the sorcerer. Various obsessional themes run through the chapters: principles of evoludon; consciousness models; Body Alchemy, ecstasy; Aeonics. These themes are distributed through most of the book, culminating in the final chapters.

The chapters on Sex, Conflict and Money are technical updates, not exhaustive manuals. Themes in these areas don’t change much; after all, these are three of the four stereotypical reasons why people are attracted to magic in the first place, so their inclusion is not in any way controversial. The fourth is Healing, which is dealt with under the rather more complex topic of Body Alchemy. Nobody in Chaos Magic argues much about these areas. All the arguments are about Illumination, Aeonics and other abstract themes.

The other chapters deal with the more contentious topics, approaching them from various novel angles, taking slices through the Beast that is Magic. The question I ask when I come across a theory is: What use can I get out of this?

Magic is like a multidimensional entity, a concept so large that it touches everything. And, by its very nature, most of it is hidden, in the domain of the mystery, eternally pursued by the questing mind. There is no absolutely satisfactory system or model of magic; at best, a book on magic is an evaluation of technique wrapped around a believable model. We all cut

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through the beast at an angle decided by our obsessions, and that is exactly what I shall be doing.

Magic is a delicate art, with a low success-rate, at least initially. The motivation for it is non-ordinary; generally, if I could do something without magic, I would. Magic stretches your boundaries, gives a sense and an intelligence to life, allows the development of purpose.

We choose our worlds all the time; we affirm or deny some ’fact’ or other many times a day. A magician is careful how she does this: it is precisely how we hold together our reality. Consciously or not, we are always choosing beliefs. We tell ourselves stories about who we are and what the world is in relation to us.

Chaos magicians use whatever belief system enables and facilitates magic at the time. Generally, the belief will ’wear out’ as the critic in you latches onto its flaws. This partially explains the phenomenon of beginner’s luck in magic — when I first started doing sorcery, I had a great run of successes. Then it stopped. It was a while before I realized I had punctured my own naivete, and had to think again, to come up with a new belief shift which would re-enable my sorcery.

As we get more conscious of this process the effects get more obvious, and we are forced to choose our beliefs ever more carefully. This is when we start to have strong opinions about what meta-beliefs to hold, when we start to construct our own Chaotopia. This is also the point at which we can be said to be understanding the patterns of our True Will’. Our own unconscious I greater mind, in the guise of the universe, presents us with limitations like the above. These crises invite us to jump out of obsolete frames of reference into new creative approaches.

Amongst the hordes of definitions of magic, the one I like best at present is: The technologies of organic belief. This forms the basis of a very generalized and simplified model of magical activity, utilizing Austin Spare’s concept of organic belief, a

Dave Lee belief which has been implanted so deep, that it conditions one’s world quite automatically.^--

• 1) SELECTION OF GOAL

4/

• 2) GNOSIS

4/

• 3) EMBEDDING OF NEW (ORGANIC) BELIEF

4/

• 4) EFFECT OF ORGANIC BELIEF ON CONSENSUS REALITY.

Careful and precise selection of goals is vitally important, but the techniques for doing so exist in the realm of mundane psychology — the techniques of ’Well-Formed Outcomes’ and ’Congruence Testing’ can be found in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Gnosis we’ve already mentioned. The embedding of the new belief at a deep enough level to become ’organic’ is the tricky bit: the mind has to be presented with the instructions for creating the new reality you want in a way which does not conflict with the beliefs already in the unconscious. Belief becomes organic if presented to the unconscious mind in a congruent way, embedded within an appealing paradigm. A powerful gnosis can shatter the bonds of belief, but the magic may be sabotaged by unconscious resistance to the implications of the new belief, unless the mind has been prepared, oiled as it were, by the most appealing paradigm shift. When we aim our belief shifts with subtle accuracy, we may find that we are capable of a much more powerful magical action, or we may achieve the same result with only half the strain and twice the pleasure. To use Spare’s phrase, we are making our own “sacred alignments”, homing in on the point in consciousness that makes the magic possible

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in that moment. Unconscious resistance is undoubtedly the commonest cause of magical failure. This makes the selection of belief a major theme in enabling or disabling your magic. It is also the area in which most controversy takes place, thereby the most interesting reason for which books on magic continue to be written.

Chapter 0

MAQIC AND ECSTASY

The very last thing a book can communicate may be the thing it most urgently wants to. The writing of this book has been a series of illuminations in itself, and, by the very nature of the process, I cannot communicate the most ecstatic states that went into that process. In a similar way, in order to make general statements about magic, we have to be ’outside’ it, in a bigger frame which includes magic.

So what is magic?

The existence of magic presupposes various things, the most obvious being the matter of control. Magic may be defined as: causing change to occur in conformity with will, expanding your achievable reality, the pursuit of power, and so on. All these definitions presuppose control as the central theme in magic. This is all fine and good, but it illustrates that from within a magical viewpoint we cannot address issues outside of the sphere of control. These are issues that are usually chunked up into mysticism, and neglected or anathematized by Chaos magicians. This is a mistake, because the half of our quality of experience is dependent upon our ability to let go,

stop worrying, stop controlling, and enjoy. Ramsey Dukes, in a lecture in 1993 (Thelemic Symposium, Oxford, UK), tackled this very point: that, whatever our degree of control of circumstances, the outcome is not guaranteed to please us. He used to illustrate this duality the Tarot Trumps of The Magician and The Fool. The Magician represents Control, The Fool, ecstasy. In their extreme forms, where their nature shows through, the Magician would like to have perfect control over the universe, everything going according to plan; the Fool a mystic, weightless kind of bliss. Between these two extremes, all magic is enacted. Ecstasy is the basis of gnosis; without the counterbalance of focussed will, it slides off into unstructured fun. Control is the basis of magical structures, defining one’s will in a given situation, but without ecstasy it doesn’t go. Without a tank full of gnosis, the magical vehicle will not run.

The basic exercises of magic build a stolidity, a strong will. Completing a good basic training course in magic marks one out as someone who can persist when the going gets tedious, by sheer bloody-mindedness. This self-discipline comes into dynamic tension with flexibility of belief, and together, these are the magician’s core assets.

Let us take one of the definitions of magic: the pursuit of power. In the context of magic, what is power? Power is the ability to do things. The more “horsepower” or kilowatts an engine has, the more work it can do in a given time. When we do magic, we may employ a physically demanding gnosis, such as dancing or drumming for prolonged times, and make some connection between our sweated work and our magical power. In our astral imagery we might visualize ourselves growing, swelling, shining, crackling, glowing with some sort of magical ability. Our visualization of power in that instance is based on images of physical power.

The analogy of magical to physical power can be very limiting. The pouring of this kind of work into any ritual can only enhance its magical effectiveness by the contribution that

Dave Lee the work makes to the magical trance or intensity of gnosis. Even the notion of an intensity scale for gnosis could be misleading: we might be tempted to pass off a sensation of physical energy or of extreme disorientation alone as adequate gnoses, and be puzzled at the failure of our sorcery.

The physical image of magical power has a further drawback: it suggests pushing against some resistance. The resistance most usually encountered in magic originates in the wizard’s own mind, and the harder he pushes against that, the harder it will push back. This is the paradox of Lust of Result, and the sorcerer must apply cunning to circumvent it and succeed in his enchantments. So rigidity is a menace to real effectiveness. The TaoZrZt understood this. Power is more like a flow condition, where the magician slips easily from one reality to another. Taking his universe with him.

Therefore, magic can be seen as the pursuit of power, via the dynamic tension between ecstasy and control. There are plenty of other ways of defining magic, but, as stated above, they will all imply control.

So, what are the boundaries of magic? Many Chaos magicians have tended to take the view that magic = sorcery; i.e. if it doesn’t have some sort of result in consensus reality, it ain’t magic, but mysticism or religion. To give a counterexample, adherents of Thelema as practised by the OTO are practising religion, mysticism and (occasionally) sorcery, and subsuming it all under the term magic. In order to clarify this issue, a few definitions:-

• 1. Religion: a set of beliefs and meta-beliefs that say definite things about life, ethics, the universe and perfection, and that thereby give the adherent a sense of belonging in the universe;

• 2. Mysticism: the body of philosophy and techniques designed to recover ecstatic unitary consciousness. This experience is sought because it leads to a gnosis of completeness, wholeness,

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the ultimate ’peak experience’, as psychologist Abraham Maslow called it. It is sought for its own sake, though attainment of it invariably results in a revisioning of one’s identity. The unitary consciousness can be identified with the experience of a non-local ’quantum mind’ (see Chapters 4 and 7), unconditioned awareness.

• 3. Sorcery: making things happen in consensus reality according to will;

• 4. Self-transformation: making things happen to consciousness according to will.

This latter category gives us problems; this type of magic is defined by Pete Carroll as illumination, which he subsumes under ’enchantment’, as in ’enchantment upon the selves’. However, once we start talking about changes in the selves, we are talking about states of consciousness that can operate upon other states of consciousness. And if the desired result of the illumination magic is openness to ecstatic states, then that would be mysticism, wouldn’t it?

What we need is a model which enables us to disentangle these definitions, put them in perspective. One that helps us to understand the links between sorcery, self-transformation and mystical states is the Eight Circuit Model devised by Timothy Leary and developed by Robert Anton Wilson and others.

THE EIQHT CIRCUIT MODEL

The model postulates that our experience of consciousness and our behaviour are controlled by an unknown number of neural ’circuits’, of which eight are identified. These circuits process information that comes into the organism (’input’) according to particular ’imprints’. Each of the eight circuits is ’imprinted’ by a key experience in personal history. The experience colours the imprint, and the imprint remains in place

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as the determining pattern of that level of consciousness, unless a stronger imprint overwrites it.

The first four ’terrestrial’ circuits form a unified model of much of the psychology of this century. For example, on the 1 st Circuit an imprint is taken according to the early childhood bliss experience of suckling, being cuddled — or lack of same. Such an imprint will generate a bias in the individual towards physical security or insecurity.

THE FIRST 4 TERRESTRIAL' CIRCUITS.-

1 ST CIRCUIT: BIOSURVIVAL: This is the level of the babein-arms, preoccupied only with physical security/insecurity. Ease and discomfort circumscribe the world, and are felt as sensations all over the body. This is a one-dimensional trance.

2ND CIRCUIT: EMOTIONAL-TERRITORIAL This is the level of the toddling infant, preoccupied with physical activity and pre-conscious power transactions. The toddler stumbles into danger and the parents restrict its movements. The ego boundaries develop; this is the self of territorial imperatives, where the most primitive mammalian emotions are generated.

3RD CIRCUIT: SEMANTIC, TIME-BINDING: Intellectual & linguistic skills for communication of ideas. Talking infant. Learning to read and tell the time. A world bounded by clocktime appears. The rewards and drawbacks of being intelligent are learned. The drawbacks may teach you secrecy. This is a 3-dimensional self, of mind, symbols, time, work, logic, communication, semiotics. The skills of this self are socially approved for industrial servitude. The ego is tied up with symbolic intelligence.

4TH CIRCUIT: MORALISTIC-SOCIAL: Adolescence. Children are fed rules, precepts, moral codes by parents, school

and society. With the first sexual experiences, all this teaching is put into sharp relief: the delights of sex war with the absurd rules in the head. The culture attempts to control the bonding of breeding pairs and instruct the young adult in how to pass on the narrow tunnel vision of the tribe’s moral codes to the next generation. This batdeground of sexual pleasure against tribal ideology forms the 4-dimensional self, personality in the context of society. The ego is tied up with morality and ethics. These first four ’terrestrial’ circuits are the ones we are all inevitably exposed to and forced to go through by a combination of our hormones, family processes and peer groups. The rest are achieved, if at all, on a more stochastic basis. The ’post-terrestrial’ Circuits 5-8 are considered to have been imprinted in very few individuals in the past. They are imprinted when extraordinary altered states are activated. They are:-

STH CIRCUIT: NEUROSOMATIC BLISS; Consciousness perceives body states as energy; Body alchemy and the healing trance. Imprinted by prolonged ecstatic sex, ’falling in love’, dance, body energy work — especially the connected breathwork techniques usually called ’rebirthing’, ’vivation’ or ’holotropic breathwork’ (see Chapter 8 for further discussion of breathwork) and disciplines such as Chi Kung. The first experiences of this trance may also come from cannabis or MDMA. This Circuit is where Superhedonism' starts: beyond the revolving wheel of Desire, Gratification and Frustration are the ecstasies that are not time-bound, not the products of habit, not localized to the genitals but distributed all over the skin surface. The 5th Circuit is where ecstasy proper begins. Rising above the wheel of ordinary pleasures, the mind gets its first taste of ’eternity’, of forms of time which feel unbounded, unhurried, blissful, where experience is perfect in itself. This trance is more flexible than the first four Circuits. The self is concerned with pleasure.

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6TH CIRCUIT: METAPROGRAMMER-, Consciousness perceives its own mechanisms; the nature of mental process itself becomes transparent. This is the level from which the mind can be consciously re-programmed. The techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, especially those involving hypnotic trance induction, utilize this level to change beliefs and implant skills. The techniques of enchantment utilize this Circuit: beliefs are made ’organic’ by their implantation in the form of the internal languages of sigils, mantra and spells. Imprinted by hypnosis, self-hypnotic meditation and magical exercises involving concentration for self-reprogramming. Much magic is done in this trance. The self is highly flexible, and concerned with exploration, flexibility, adaptation and control of consciousness.

7TH CIRCUIT: NEUROGENETIC TRANCE; Consciousness perceives identity and thought as a ’mere froth’ on the surface of a gigantic, pre-conscious, transpersonal process; visions of biological forms, racial/species destiny. Reached by advanced magical exercises, maybe involving psychedelic sacraments. This experience is also the subject of ’mythic seizure’, Joseph Campbell’s term for total immersion in an identity derived from myth. Identity is fractal at this level; self-similar emotional and cognitive patterns appear, disappear, reappear in a continual swirling dynamic, and yet these fragments eventually cohere in the process of mythic seizure, into what I would call a mythic identity. Atavisms arise, sweep through consciousness. The first experience of this level is often terrifying, as the self is swept away in a vision of the futility of human history whose awesome impersonality seems to render everything irrelevant. As a result of this Trance of Sorrow experience some selves fly, terrified, straight into the nearest available religion or political ideology. The born-again acid casualty is one type of example. Another might be Sartre’s conversion to Marxism after his philosophy took him to the

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state he described as The Nausea in the novel of that name. The description of that vision perfectly reflects the symbolism and terror of the 7^th Circuit horrors. Racial destiny is a theme that emerges at this level, so it is not surprising that most religions and many political ideologies have strong racial elements. The experience that Crowley called confronting the Abyss seems to be the engine that generates religion. The Chaos Magic approach is a method of immunizing the self against infection by religion or ideology; therefore, it could be said that Chaos Magic is a 7^th Circuit technology. In fact, Chaos Magic has yet to address the issues raised by 8^th Circuit experiences.

8TH CIRCUIT: NON-LOCAL CONSCIOUSNESS; Consciousness loses its spatial centre in extreme forms of this level: multiple locations; visions of terrifying ’alienness’ or mystical union with large-scale cosmic processes. Deep-level dream-work is the main gateway to this trance, although full imprinting of this Circuit by dreamwork alone is very difficult for most people. Out-of-body experiences and the paradoxical nature of lucid dreaming also relate to this trance; it has properties of both sleeping and waking states. Dissociative anaesthetics such as nitrous oxide and ketamine have been used by some practitioners to break through to this level. The forms encountered in this trance may be profoundly alien: cyberscapes, impossibly convoluted surfaces, infinite grids of dubious dimensionality, machine-like entities. The horrific experiences of this level are suggested by Frank Belknap Long’s story The Hounds of Tindalos, in which the protagonist takes a drug and has a horrific experience which spills over into his ’normal’ existence. The visions in the story involve the idea that humans are evolved from a ’curve’ and some other kind of entity — the Hounds — are evolved from a ’line’. This curious symbolism points at the sharp, bloodless alienness of the cyberscapes and machine-like beings of the 8^th Circuit

Dave Lee

experience. The straight-line theme may also relate to the ’deathroads’, straight, terrain-oblivious roads which were used for funeral rites in ancient Europe and other cultures. This trance is concerned with the mind-machine interface, and with the spirits of the dead. Full immersion in this level tends to involve a mystical experience, of unconditioned, ’useless’ ecstasy, which is nonetheless totally conscious. The clearest allusions I know to this state are in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, for instance:-

“The Way is empty, yet use cannot drain it.”

This state in turn appears to be another modality of the Omega Point experience, the vision of the end of time. As Terence McKenna put it:-

“A shaman is someone who has been to the

end...seen the wiring under the board...”

The relation between the Taoist trance and the Omega Point vision is that they both partake of a sense of completeness. Each time such a trance is achieved, there is a sense of familiarity that runs like a thread through all previous experiences. Eventually, the trance is imprinted with full consciousness and then becomes a faculty of consciousness which can be reached without the original extreme assistance.

Circuits 5 and 6 represent the zones of consciousness used in practical sorcery. Circuit 7 is not likely to be used in sorcery, only for self-transformational work. Circuit 8 is used in lucid dreaming and remote viewing. The most intense aspects of Circuits 7 & 8 are beyond the pale of usefulness in practical magic. The distinction between the more mundane functions of the shaman and the world of these higher circuits is elegandy expressed by Terence McKenna, writing of communal ayahuasca ceremonies:-

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The more disorientating and profound forms of intoxication are kept out of the ceremonies we have seen, probably because these are social events and some sort of collective ambiance must be maintained. And certainly these states are strange — they are not mere phantasms drifting before closed eyes, but are complete immersions in higher topological manifolds and experiences potentially incomprehensible or frightening. Individuals may take power to themselves by boldly, even recklessly, exploring these dimensions, but even though these places are the heart and soul of shamanism, they are too numinous and energyladen to be accessible through a tradition.

- Terence McKenna, from Among Ayahuasquera, in Gateways to Inner Space, collected by Christian Ratsch.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

The following five chapters take up the main themes of practical sorcery: Money, Conflict, Sex and Healing, with the chapter on Magic & Physics providing some of the concepts used in later chapters. Chapter 6, Chaos Illumination, elucidates techniques which are applicable across the whole range of magic. The final three chapters deal with the more theoretical and speculative areas of the mystical quest and the True Will, Evocation in terms of the evolution of complexity, and Aeonics.

FURTHER READING

Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising.

Excellent introduction to the 8 Circuit Model.

INTERLUDE:

FRACTALS FOR CHAOS

MAQICIANS I

Dion Fortune might well have channeled the seed concept of the fractal in her book The Cosmic Doctrine. The small amount of sense I could make of this bizarre text was acquired as follows: I read it from back to front, starting at the last chapter, which is about a recognizable universe, and working to the utterly self-referential abstractions at the front. This gave me the idea that, like a fractal, the very simple abstract ideas at the beginning create the enormously complex and chaotic world we actually live in. I’m sure she would have hated the idea...

AN EXPERIMENT IN WEATHER MAQIC USINQ THE MANDELBROT SET

Take a picture of a section of the famous Mandelbrot Set. This is a fractal plot - the closer you zoom in on the picture, the more detail you see, ad infinitum. This makes it a good glyph for conceptualizing profoundly chaotic systems, like economics, human emotions or the weather.

Taking the latter, define the different colours (or different densities of grey) on the plot as different kinds of weather. Define a particular time and place — somewhere you will be on a particular date when you want the weather to be right — for an area of the plot representing, say, warm dry weather. Imagine the swirling patterns of weather in the shadow future you are aiming at as the emergent swirls of the fractal plot....

In my experience, only the very lightest touch is required in weather magic, as long as there is a reasonable probability of the desired weather manifesting anyway.

Chapter 1

WEALTH &

MONEY MAC/ICS

WEALTH AND MONEY

It should not have to be said that money and wealth are not the same thing. However, people both poor and rich do mix them up, so I’ll say it anyway: Money does not constitute wealth and wealth does not consist of money; ultimately, it has only marginally to do with money at all. So what constitutes wealth?

Wealth is abundance where and when you want it. To be wealthy is to live your life the way you want to. The condition of wealth is the experience of confidence, relevance and abundant pleasure in one’s material environment. Wealth magic is driven by desire; money magic is more closely related to insecurity about survival, which is the one-dimensional drive of the First (biosurvival) Circuit.

Money is a parameter, whose value is arbitrary and impersonal; Wealth is a skill, whose value is arbitrary, and personal. Money is a Spirit, an elemental; Wealth is the attribute of a God.

In fact, it is the relevance of possessions and experiences

Dave Dee

to your desires that matters. Considering that these terms are subjective, the work consists of defining what kind of magician you want to become. Success in this process liberates the power to attain the sphere of material control that you desire. As a wealth magician, you practice the art and science of living your life as you wish.

THE HIERARCHY OF FREEDOM

The distinction between wealth and money can be spread over a spectrum, illustrating the different emphases that magic will have at each level:

The wealthy individual is free, enjoying the material resources he desires, playing with the kingly grace of a creature at the top of a food chain, a big cat or bird of prey. The world of a truly wealthy person is held together by a resource of joyous power that stems from the experience of radical freedom at the innermost core, the quantum chaos of consciousness. Without the will to play confidently in the world, everything stays at the crudest and most temporary level of money magic.

The next level down, the magician realizes that the only things worth enchanting for are experiences, conditions of life which fulfill his dreams. The identification of one’s driving dream, and the knowledge of the resources needed to realise it, form a large part of the work at this level.

The spectrum now slides away from freedom, towards enslavement, towards obsessional insecurity about money. Many people who are competent at making money are terribly insecure about their survival and status, so that their money does not bring them wealth in the above sense - only more obsession with making more money, which is hardly freedom. Such people are workaholics or wage slaves. Each day, each paycheque, each repetition of the same meaningless task — this is the key to the demonic aspect of the money spirit, that its mastery over you will lead to immersion in boring repetition and routine.

CHAOTOPIA!

The worst condition is the poverty well. Like a gravity well, this introduces a different perspective. It pulls wealth and money together so that they can’t be disentangled. In the poverty well, the only parameter is cash. The poor person is enslaved to money, and will often do anything to get it. In this state, money is all important, a continual emergency, much of the content of one’s internal monologue.

The following section enables you to quantify your freedom and wealth.

HOW WEALTHY ARE YOU?

Since wealth consists of living your life as you please, we are going to examine how the amount of leisure you have conflicts with the amount of money you earn.

The following 2 exercises will enable you to quantify the relationship between your wealth, money and work.

EXERCISE 1: WEALTH AND MONEY

• a) Write rapidly the list:

TWENTY THINGS 1 ENJOY DOING REGULARLY;

• b) Now choose your favourite 10 of these;

• c) Now take your 10 favourite activities and write down whether or not you would spend more money on each one if you could.

This exercise has allowed you to quantify your wealth at the present time.

EXERCISE 2 : TIME AND WEALTH

Now take each of your 10 favourite activities again, and for each one, write down whether you would like to devote more time to it.

This exercise allows you to quantify your enslavement to money at the present time. In other words, it measures your negative wealth. Enslavement to money is the opposite of wealth.

Dave Dee

To explain this point, let us take an example.

Suppose someone’s 10 favourite daily activities, and their

So, he scored 7 out of 10 in terms of the MONEY he has to spend on his activities. You could say he is 70 per cent wealthy at the time of doing this exercise!

However, he scored only 2 out of 10 in terms of the free time he has to enjoy his pastimes.

He might therefore draw the conclusion that he is spending too much time doing things he doesn’t enjoy, and not earning quite enough money!

ISSUES AROUND WEALTH AND MONEY

• 1. THE RELEVANCE OF POSSESSIONS

There is no point in having possessions you don’t need or don’t enjoy. Following the driven consumerism of this culture, many people mistake a cluttered material world for a wealthy one. Also, many magicians fail to achieve what they believe to be wealth, simply because they haven’t worked out what they want the material conditions of their lives to be like.

Just because someone tells you that a BMW is the most

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desirable car, doesn’t mean that it is of the least value to you. Just because you know that a holiday in Bali represents luxury to some people doesn’t mean that it would be any more than an inconvenience involving insect bites and sunburn to you. If you go ahead and enchant for an item you don’t really want, it is highly likely that your own unconscious resistance to acquiring it will prevent success. Decide what you want first, then enchant for it.

• 2. PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY: SELF-ESTEEM

Undoubtedly one of the chief barriers to wealth and money is low self-esteem. If, at some level of your internal monologue, there is a voice saying ’I don’t deserve to be well off, I don’t deserve to have more money’ and so forth, then however sophisticated your magics, they will mostly fail. Therefore, work on your self-esteem, your sense of worth. Flex the muscles of desire and positive self image by using the following exercises.

EXERCISES:

• i) Consider your desire for money. Consider it a lot. Not while you’re doing a particular working or ritual — that would only serve to bring lust of result to the conscious level — but as a general mental process informing your life. Know you have a right to that desire, and yet tell yourself you would be a fool to attach yourself to that desire.

• ii) Think about money and observe your feelings about it.

Write down these phrases and repeat them to yourself:

I love money

I enjoy money

There is no such thing as having too much money

When I have a lot of extra money I enjoy it.

• - and other similar positive phrases. Pay careful attention to the feelings in your body as you repeat each sentence. When the feeling is unpleasant or ’dubious’, re-phrase the sentence

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and try again. Keep on doing this until you feel a real glow of pleasure at the idea you have phrased.

In this way, you begin to tune your mind in to positive attitudes about money. Let your desire focus in on money, on receiving money, on having money, on spending money. Visualize money flowing through your hands, pockets, wallet, purse. Keep this exercise up, creating new affirmations and fine-tuning them through observing your responses and adjusting the phrasing.

Finish on a positive statement!

• 3. PSYCHOLOGY OF MONEY: SECURITY

Obviously, money has powerful emotional dimensions. Generally, people feel pretty insecure when they’re not carrying some form of money. On the other hand, when you have, in terms of the local economy you’re in at the time, lots of the stuff, you tend to feel secure and confident. The First Circuit is to do with avoiding pain/approaching pleasure, and is rooted in the imprints that the baby gets from its mother’s care -feeding or having to wait for food, warmth or cold, being cuddled or being isolated, and so forth. These imprints orientate the nervous system in the direction of physical insecurity or physical security. Typically, dysfunctions on this circuit are felt as whole body sensations, rather than specific emotions. Money activates this area of emotions.

EXERCISES:

• 1. Try such phrases as the following out on yourself, and see how you feel:

I am my own source of security

I always feel secure

Phrases like these always bring up some negative response. For instance, if you tell yourself ’1 always feel secure’, you will probably get an immediate internal voice saying ’Rubbish, what about that time the other day I got stuck in such and such a place with no cash...’ etc. etc. Don’t worry about this; the

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purpose of using such statements is not to lie to yourself until you believe you believe it, but to loosen the girders of belief a bit, to work on old embedded responses and expose the internal monologue that keeps them in place. When you get a response like that, it’s a sign that the process is working. Change the phrase you were using just a little, shifting its emphasis, and try again.

• 2. Meditate on the biological function of money. Consider money as biosurvival tokens. See how this concept links up with your feelings of security or insecurity.

• 3. Meditate on the social & emotional functions of money. Next time you spend or receive some, reflect on the meaning to the other party of parting with money, and the meaning to you of receiving it.

• 4. LUCK

This is one of those elusive qualities which a magician should be interested in; wherever chance operates in life, there is room for magical influence.

EXERCISE:

Learn to attune yourself to your feelings, the signals in your body, around the issues of luck. Ask yourself whether a particular move is a good idea, and ’listen’ for the sensations. Ask yourself how lucky you are feeling, and feel what happens. Learn what these body-sensations mean in terms of your luck.

Experiment with trusting your ’lucky’ feelings. Familiarity with the sensation of luck can be enormously helpful in all sorts of situations.

• 5. INVESTMENT

The function of investment is to give yourself an income without working for it. This is the financial freedom that most people aspire to, but not all achieve. Without some form of consistent investment strategy, you are not taking control of

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your financial future. Again, many people, including magicians, have negative feelings about investment and saving. The solution here is to examine what it is you want out of investment, then discipline yourself to save. Try this exercise: Meditate on the sentence:-

MONEY MAKES MONEY BETTER THAN WORK MAKES MONEY

It is not suggested for a moment that you regard this statement as true for longer than it takes to understand the mind-set of the investor. Many people are uneasy about investment, either because they don’t understand it (because they’ve never done it, or have, but never thought about it), or out of reservations about the ecological or humanitarian effects of it, or even because they believe that the financial system that supports it will have collapsed before they are able to draw their pension. For better or worse, we are all embedded in capitalist economics, and it is important to understand the cornerstone of capitalism — investment — and evaluate its usefulness to oneself. To examine your values around investment, try some of the following exercises:

• 1 Ask yourself what your reservations (if any) about investment are.

• 2. Consider whether there are better options than investing in public enterprises, such as investing in your own or those of your friends.

• 3. Consider whether your reservations can be overcome by fine-tuning, or whether you find yourself against investing, full stop.

• 4. Ask yourself what level of security would be required for

CHA0T0PL4 ! you to invest in something.

• 5. Considering your actual behaviour, do you prefer to take risks to make money, or would you rather earn money by low-risk procedures?

• 6. WORK

The distinction between wealth and money is pointed up vividly by your attitude to work: What is the point of working at a job you hate in order to get the money which you will spend in obliterating the misery and frustration of your working day ?

Many of the problems associated with work are due to the form of the work : working for someone else, in a job. In my experience and in that of many others, self-employment is the ideal form of employment for the magician, and is nothing like as unstable as many people believe. There is no stability in the labour market in any case — people of all ages, levels of experience and in all kinds of jobs lose their jobs these days. Job security is an hallucination in nearly all cases. The adventurous magician would be much better off designing his own form of income generation.

The outlook of the self-employed trader is strongly supported by the following fact: All income is derived from sales. This doesn’t just apply to the salesperson; consider where all businesses get their money from to pay their employees : from selling products or services. Therefore, one skill that all self employed persons need is the ability to sell their product or service.

When we go on to consider that all products and services were once ideas in someone’s mind, we are approaching recognizably magical territory. Ideas are the result of creative processes, so can be said to originate in the Chaos of the mind’s quantum core.

To summarize:

All income comes from sales of products or services;

All products and services start off as ideas;

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All ideas originate in the creative mind.

This formula is capable of being restated in numerous ways.

It can be compressed to:

ALL WEALTH AND ALL MAGIC IS SUPPORTED BY FREEDOM !

EXERCISES:

• 1. Consider why it is you work: do you do it because you enjoy your work? Or because you enjoy the money it brings you ? Or because you desperately need the money it brings you?

• 2. Imagine your ideal work: What would you be doing on your typical day? What kind of people would you work with and meet in the course of the day? Think of what you put your love of life into, and imagine working at something that has that enthusiasm behind it.

• 3. List 20 of your favourite activities. Pick 3 that you might be able to make money out of. For each of these 3, write a list of how you might do this.

7. MONEY MANAGEMENT

Most people suffer from debt problems to a greater or lesser extent. This is no accident — the banking system makes most of its money out of lending at interest, and so it is in the interests of the banks that people feel anxious about money, and desire a quick fix of cash to gratify some impulse that is probably generated by consumerism in the first place. The long term solutions to debt problems do not lie in the magical dimensions. A successful spell may extricate you from a particular financial crisis, but without addressing the money habits that cause you to go into debt you will simply fall back into crisis again.

If you are prone to such problems, a solid, down-to-earth

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approach to reorganization of your finances is required. This is outside of the scope of a book on magic, but plenty of books are available on these subjects.

One further word about planning: Plan for Success ! Organize your life so that you are always creating new inlets for money. When you work for large sums of money, make sure you have opened plenty of channels of manifestation. Otherwise, you may get it by your Uncle Ernest dropping dead and leaving you your stake in his will, or your lover being crippled in an accident and getting compensation.

MONEY AS A MAGICAL OBJECT

Money has some curious properties. For a start, all similar banknotes are almost exactly identical, bar the serial number and degree of wear. Banknotes have weird pictures on them, rendered in such complex detail that they are relatively hard to forge. The British banknotes have little scenes from the lives of famous people on them. The US notes have the infamous Eye in the Pyramid glyph, beloved of conspiracy theorists.

Nearly everybody has money. It is almost as common an attribute as having two eyes or two legs. Money is an excellent object through which to work sorcery, which is the manipulation of symbolic objects to magical effect. To get into the sorceries of money, try the following exercises.

EXERCISES

• 1. Learn to pay attention to money. When someone hands you money, look at the coins, the notes, the cheques... Banknotes in particular are complex talismans, beautiful and somewhat mysterious. Acquaint yourself with these magic pictures. Feel your money, sniff it, rub it between your hands, caress it. Quietly observe your own reactions.

• 2. Make a list of 20 things you can see in a banknote.

• 3. Meditate on the universality of money, the way it turns up everywhere. Think of money in your pocket, in other people’s

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pockets, in houses, offices, factories, shops, on buses and aeroplanes.

• 4. Consider the uniformity of notes and coins. Make a row of identical coins or notes and look at them, gaze at them, let ideas come into your mind. Play with them like a child might.

THE NATURE OF THE MONEY SPIRIT

Let us return to viewing Money as a Spirit, something alive in our common inner worlds, something with its own magical character. What are the attributes of this Money Spirit? It is often seen as mindless or nearly mindless; this gives rise to the popular image of Mammon, a force of blind and brutal greed. However, this image is judgmental, and too imprecise for our purposes. I think of the Money Spirit as being like the great Elemental Kings of the Enochian psychocosm, with their endless Names of howling and soughing vowels. A vast, impersonal elemental force, money flows and flashes down the circuits of communication systems, its true Name hidden in its countless billions upon billions of alphanumeric digits.

The Nature of Money is reproduction, movement. It withers if kept still; it loves to move. It is important that money changes hands, significant that it reproduces by trade and investment. It has enormous power over people’s lives, over the decisions they make, over the choices of how they spend their time. It is responsible for great motivation, great misery and great stupidity.

The Money Spirit can be explored personally through trance work, as in Shamanism.

There are no doubt those who would object to my characterization of money as a spirit in the shamanic sense. In answer, I would point to the attitudes of an old Amazon Basin shaman I saw interviewed on a TV programme a few years ago. This old man had been displaced, along with other members of his tribe, when they refused to accept the violently imposed Christianity of the loggers and their missionaries. They

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had set up a community together with other refugees from the clearance areas, and continued to practice their ancient ways.

Just before the occasion of the interview, the shaman’s son had taken him into a town for the first time. They had ridden on a bus and gone to see a film at the cinema. The old man was tremendously excited by all this; he had lived all his life in the forest, and had learned the spirit songs of animals, plants, rivers, elemental forces. Suddenly he had been precipitated into an environment where he knew very few of the spirit songs. To him, a car or a cinema was as worthy a subject of a spirit quest as any creature or object he had been brought up with. He told the interviewer how he was performing his spirit vision quests to learn to sing the song of the car, and the song of the cinema! Since these things were now in his mind, part of his mental environment, he saw no reason why they should not have songs, songs that would be his tools for improving his power relationships with them. Such an approach is far away from the guilt ridden anti-technology attitudes of new age “shamans”, and is of the essence of the ancient current.

ON THE OTHER HAND...

In this chapter, I’ve given a fairly one-sided, positive view of the pursuit of money. However, it is impossible to write about money without addressing the fact that it is a consensus hallucination — if everyone decided tomorrow that it was valueless, then it would lose all its value. Now this would barely matter for most purposes if money was really what it purports to be: a rational and convenient substitutefor barter, forfacilitating free exchange of goods and services. Goods and services are the basis of wealth, and they are exchanged directly for money, in order to further exchange the money for more goods and services. In the real world, this is only a small part of what money is; this description would fit the kind of proto-money that is traded in LETS type schemes, pure exchange value. The money we have in our pockets fulfills this function whenever we simply

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use it to buy things.

A second aspect of money is: a means of creating extra money for those who accumulate enough of it, by lending to wealth creators. Wealth creators are people who supply goods and services, which are the basis of wealth, as distinct from money. The money in our pockets takes on this attribute when we invest it. Wealth creators are able to make a profit (and thereby pay their investors) by exploiting someone else’s labour. In First World societies this is done by contracts between those who want less responsibility for the performance of the company and those who are willing to take more, and pay themselves more. Such old-fashioned distinctions may be breaking down in the most advanced First World companies, but the poverty in other parts of the world that feeds global capitalism remains untouched.

This function of money is a basic attribute of small-scale capitalism.

A third aspect of money indicates a wholly negative side: Money as a means to create more money for those with enough of it, without any relation to wealth creation. This is a point on which the whole economic system lies systematically to us, in order to blur the distinction between money and wealth — which is ultimately the distinction between what is worthwhile and what is worthless. Trading in actual ’money markets’ is an example of a money-creating activity that — in many, or most instances — generates no wealth at all. This function of money shades into its darkest aspect: the method of its issuance. Banks are private institutions with no loyalties other than to their owners. When they issue money, they are lending it to governments, and demanding a return on it. This is what creates most of inflation: the result is that all of us owe interest on everything to the owners of the issuing banks. This is a ’fix’ perpetrated by bankers to maintain and expand their control of the world, through the manipulation of boom and crash, war and peace. Industrial capitalism would probably have transcended itself

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decades ago if it wasn’t for the parasitic nature of banks.

Essentially, our whole culture is being conned daily by a vision of life in which the drive to survival is cheated of its satisfaction by engineered debt. This powerful drive is then harnessed to a level of consumption which is not necessary to survival, and therefore leads to pointless production. This leaves us with a Dwarf-World poisoned by pollution, and inhabited by soul-dead wage-slaves. This negative view of money has to be dealt with to complete the picture. The money spirit in its present form is a prisoner of the banking system, but the adventurous magician might pause to consider that this is not the only form the money-spirit can exist in...

EVALUATION OF SOME MONEY MAQIC TECHNIQUES

• 1. MONEY SORCERY: SIMPLE ENCHANTMENT

EVALUATION:

Doing sigils or spells for money has a similar rate of success to most other forms of basic enchantment.

One of the differences is that most people desire or need more money more frequently. This means that many sorcerers favour the use of a servitor or other form of spirit suitable for repeated workings.

• 2. WORKING WITH THE MONEY SPIRIT

Try devising a Shamanic Vision Quest to bring you more into contact with the Money Spirit. An example is as follows:

MONEY IN THE SPIRIT VISION

Prepare your Temple, or find an outdoor working space where you will be undisturbed. Prepare yourself with exercises such as those above.

Prepare a simple chant addressed to the Money Spirit, such as:

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I LOVE MONEY AND MONEY LOVES ME, MONEY I WISH TO JOURNEY TO YOUR WORLD AND MEET YOU, etc. etc..

Make a sigil for money, by any favoured means.

Ready yourself for trance. Close your eyes. Prolonged pranayama or brief hyperventilation are useful. Use a rattle or a drum, or simply two sticks, to produce a hypnotic repetitious rhythm.

Begin your chant, repeating it continuously, letting it change and develop as inspiration dictates. Begin to visualize yourself in darkness, with swirling forms just beyond your sight. Feel that you are passing underground, into the realm of spirits.

When the trance feels deep enough, visualize the money sigil like a doorway, continue your chant, and pass through it. You are in the realm of the Money Spirit.

Now describe what you see, out loud. This will help to focus your attention, prevent you drifting off, and facilitate recall of the details at the end of the rite.

As your inner senses lock into the feeling of the Money Spirit, begin to talk to it, addressing it out loud. Make friends with it. Listen to its replies and repeat them out loud. Make requests of it, if you wish.

When you are satisfied with the working, or cannot go any further, thank the Money Spirit, and depart from its world, talking yourself back into the outer world.

EVALUATION:

This approach is essentially the beginning of a sequence of workings; the Spirit, or your experience of it, will probably suggest what the next stage should be. If you can get good communication with the Money Spirit, this is a very promising approach.

• 3. USING SERVITORS

Techniques of servitor creation are many and varied. A servitor

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may be created purely by pre-programmed visualization in light trance. If one’s powers of visualization are good enough, no material base is needed for this kind of servitor.

EVALUATION:

Servitor workings have been used very successfully by individuals. Another approach is to use the energy of a group to create a money servitor for the use of that group. The results from such workings can be excellent. It is generally a good idea to keep the knowledge of this type of entity to the group alone — it seems to ’concentrate’ the power.

• 4. GAMBLING

EVALUATION:

One form of money magic which gets written about, usually in the more primitive and superstitious books on the subject is gambling magic. For the people whom such books are directed at, gambling is viewed as the only source of additional money. From a non-magical point of view, this is almost total nonsense: it makes sense to do the Pools or enter a big lottery only if you don’t rely on it to make you rich. It’s not only fantastically unlikely that you’ll win such a lottery and get rich, but your very dependence on such a hope will vitiate your attempts to get money by more certain means.

Having said that, there are two aspects of gambling which are of interest to the practicing magician.

Firstly, it is always a good idea to have some big payoff, low probability gambles on the go. Fill in your Pools coupon (and don’t forget to post it off!), buy your lottery tickets. Do it without lust of result, do it as a habit which barely impinges on your consciousness, and doesn’t stop you getting more money in the meantime.

Secondly, it is sometimes worth experimenting with low odds gambling, such as fruit machines or races. Gambling machines, with their low stakes and payouts which won’t change your

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life, can be used sparingly by the wise magician who wishes to investigate the symptoms of luck in his consciousness. If you feel lucky, give it a go, and see if your feeling was correct.

Betting on horses and dogs can be approached through divination techniques. Reports seem to indicate that the use of synchronistic occurrences is the best form of divination for racing. The names of horses and dogs are quite likely to turn up in the course of a day’s ’random’ intake of information, and so provide a guide to placing a bet.

Betting at Casino tables is generally a poor game for the magician. The best results are obtained with intelligently constructed systems. That some such systems work is attested by the fact that Casino staff are usually on the lookout for anyone who is working a system.

It is important to understand that, generally speaking, gambling is a form of entertainment for those so inclined, not a source of ready cash. An attitude of fun will improve your relationship with luck, and give you some protection against a sad addiction.

• 5. ZONE OF AVAILABILITY

The principle here is that your ability to acquire possessions depends quite strongly on what possessions you are accustomed to owning. This is symbolized by the Zone of Availability. I came across this concept, in a somewhat different form, in a book by Ophiel with the wonderfully evocative title of How To Get Material Things by Creative Visualisation. Ophiel tells the story of a man who was so poor that he lived in one room without even a carpet. After many days staring at his floor, he began to visualize a little rug there. The next day, he goes out and finds a nice scrap of carpet, perhaps in a skip. He goes on to visualize his world bit by bit, building it up until he becomes a very wealthy man.

The moral of the tale is that he could not have done all this in one step; that when he was poor, his Zone of Availability

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was down to a very modest bit of floor covering. When he had acquired that, his wealth consciousness had increased, and he was able to visualize other, more expensive possessions, so that only by successive acquisitions did his ability to visualize his wealth grow.

EVALUATION:

Actually visualizing what you possess and what you might possess soon is useful if you are interested in possessions, but not so bothered about money, for which it doesn’t seem to work so well. However, the general approach of building upon the habit of becoming wealthier is valid at every level of wealth.

• 6. LUCKY HOODOO SPIRITS

EVALUATION:

This is an off-the-peg system of evocation and invocation from Michael Bertiaux’s Grade Papers of the Monastery of the Seven Rays, reprinted in his Voudon Gnostic Workbook. I cover it as a system of spirit work in Ch.8. Suffice it to say here that there are 3 money/wealth workings in this system: a very basic, general spell; a gambling magic technique (which was not to my taste) and the Contraite. The latter is a form of contract with the spirits in which the operator feeds them energy, and they do the money magic. I used this in the context of a prolonged working, which proved exceptionally effective.

INTERLUDE: A

PSYCHONAUTIC

BANISH INQ

Psychonauts occasionally favour the use of extreme & unpredictable cbemognoses. Research seems to indicate that the peak phases of such experiences are useless for most forms of sorcery, but may facilitate Shamanic forms of Illumination and some areas of abstract magical research. It is also possible that these more extreme areas contain as yet undeveloped magical potentials which could be activated by radical paradigm shifts. These experiences can also provide insights into physical-magical notions such as delocalization.

In this peak state, the consciousness of the psychonaut walks a razor edge between the poles of Control and Ecstasy, veering much closer to ecstasy than is the case in most magics. This existential tightrope act is danced at the dislocating warp speeds typical of major chemognosis, and the magician can do without an excess baggage of fear.

The following Banishing is designed to be used at the outset of an extreme psychonautic adventure, to evoke extraordinary physical and mental sensations and assimilate them into consciousness as ecstasy.

Four evocations of elemental sensations are performed, each element being invited to dismember the magician in the manner of the visions of a shaman. These invocations are crowned by a 5th, evoking the terror of freedom itself, the final veil of resistance to the holy chaos at the core of consciousness.

The ritual is structured as a pathworking, and can be committed to audio tape. The declarations at the end of each section are deliberately devoid of identity or “is” words, to avoid the replication of identity viruses.

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NB: No one who is not in good physical and emotional health should attempt major psychonautical exercises. This ritual is emphatically not a substitute for health, sanity or experience.

THE MEDITATION

Sit quietly. Let your breathing become slow and relaxed. Your mind is clear.

Begin to feel a warmth in your body, a pleasant gentle heat. Feel your way into this sensation, and let it increase. You begin to feel hot rushes snaking through your body, waves of pleasurable fire in your nerves, blood and muscles.

Soon the sensation of heat spreads. Your skin is hot, and your torso is soaked in red flame. Soon your whole body is afire. Relax into this fire, contemplate and enjoy it, as it burns away unwanted thoughts and makes your mind bright and lucid.

Now let the temperature increase again. You are a furnace, melting metal and brick. Your molecules are disintegrating, and the heat just keeps on increasing. The electrons are peeling away from your atoms... you are a thermonuclear plasma at fusion temperatures. Your body is now pure fire. Relax and breathe into this, and think:

ECSTASY OF FIRE

Let your body of fire cool down, until you are back in your usual form.

Now you are floating in near darkness, with the sound of waves in the background. Your body is soft, jelly like, and waves of vibration pass through you. You are totally relaxed, all sensations dying away to exquisite stillness.

Water has entered your every pore, and has filled your lungs, and yet you continue to breathe deeply. You are translucent and permeable, open to the passage of the ocean currents.

The darkness deepens until it is total. Now there is no sound

at all, just vast pulsations of primal feeling that well up in you and then die down. Your body fills a vast trench in the ocean floor, and you begin to see flashes of cold radiance, pinpoints of eerie light. You are filled with an indescribable, alien pleasure. Think:

ECSTASY OF WATER

Let your body float gendy to the surface again, breathe air, and resume its normal outlines.

You are standing on a rocky pinnacle, overlooking an abyss of air.

The wind rushes around you, and you gasp with the sharp cold. You sway in the breeze, and begin to turn, with your arms outstretched.

You are whirling faster and faster, and then your are airborne — there is no ground below you, and you are tumbling head over heels through the abyss. Fear and exhilaration mingle in your mind.

You breathe deeply and let the fear pass — and you are flying. Think:

ECSTASY OF AIR

Let yourself down gendy, and stand on the ground.

Now you are lying on a flat plain of rock. You are aware of your weight, the density of your body. Let the mass of your body increase, as if all the spaces between the atoms were filling up. You become heavier and heavier.

Now you are so heavy that the rock beneath you begins to feel soft. You sink into the earth, down into regions of greater and greater mass. You are completely buried in matter, submerged in a region of inconceivable density. If you were not so dense already, you would be crushed by your own mass.

Now your atoms begin to collapse, electrons and nuclei

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condensing into neutron matter. Your density approaches infinity. Think:

ECSTASY OF EARTH

Begin to return to your normal density. You feel that your limbs, head, and internal organs are light and strong. You are full of elemental vitality. You take a deep breath, visualize the 8 rayed Star of Chaos and laugh.

The Chaosphere hangs in the air before you, leaking black radiance around it. You plunge through it, into impossible spaces. A profusion of forms, the spawning of a billion lives, visions of the machinery of the universe. Infinite acceleration, infinite information, ultimate experience. You can send information instantaneously, reinvent physics to your own design, see your desires materialize without pause.

You consider this: you are creating all of this experience. You and you alone are responsible. There is nothing to hold you back, no ground to stand on, no safety net and no rules. For a moment it might occur to you that the responsibility is unwanted, that your freedom is a burden, that you are trapped in manic creation, and you want to come down into the bonds of robotic consciousness.

Then you reflect that your freedom is greater still than you thought — because you can even ignore it. You are free to hold any sensation in any context whatever, and believe whatever you desire about it. In fact, you are free to do nothing at all, to simply surrender your identity into the pure ecstasy of being. You take a deep breath, and let the black light of chaos fill you. You think:

ECSTASY OF FREEDOM!

And you laugh!

Chapter 2

CONFLICT

AND EXORCISM

PERSONAL POWER

In the Introduction I touched upon magic as the pursuit of power. As well as this core definition, the word ’power’ has other resonances within magic. People often hear ’power over others’ when they hear the word, and this is one of the reasons why people get into magic — in the hope of controlling others, bending them to their will.

This impulse stems from the ego’s insecurities, which are imprinted at the 2^nd Circuit, the toddling infant. Feelings of physical fear and aggression reflect the magician’s social reality to a greater or lesser degree: it makes sense not to walk down certain streets at night unless you have to, and have appropriate defensive measures at your disposal. However, seeing everywhere the danger of being hurt or dominated by other humans is counter-productive; as in other areas of life, the magician strives for a balance which enables him to do his will effectively.

All magicians should at least experience some training in

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martial arts; both ’hard’, like karate, or ’soft’, like t’ai chi, are of inestimable value in increasing confidence and centring the will.

There are two main issues in magical conflict: the launching of magical attack, or cursing, and response to magical attack. Non-aggressive situations also sometimes call for martial measures. For instance, if you are dealing with intractable or unmotivated people in corporate or government hierarchies, or repairing an injustice done to you or a friend, you would do well to use some magical preparation to make sure you get your way. Some techniques for imposition of the will are evaluated at the end of this chapter.

JUST CURSINQ

Curse magic does have a bad reputation in some circles. Whilst aggressive spells make up quite a small part of most sorcerers’ lives, they nonetheless have their place. Situations sometimes arise in which the magician feels justified in taking aggressive action, and where the best or only way to do so is via sorcery.

The key issue here is that the aggressor feel no inner conflict about making the attack. The accompanying emotion is usually one of righteous indignation, controlled and directed anger. This might arise, for instance, as a response to injustice to yourself or those you care about, to remove from your scene some insane or dangerous person, or to get some particular criminal locked up.

So, if you are in a situation where you feel justified in acting, the question is: To what extent? What is the exact nature of the events you want to happen to your target? Many magicians who are naive about attack magic assume that all curses are designed to lead to terrible consequences — death, extreme injury, terminal illness, mental breakdown, destruction of the victim’s life in some way. These are obviously options, but rarely appropriate ones. Lesser forms of injury, sickness, loss, embarrassment or stress are almost invariably favoured.

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Another option is exposure: sometimes, all that is required is that the miscreant’s behaviour is drawn to the attention of the right people. Exposure can also supply information for further workings.

The key issue around the degree of aggression you use is your own inner congruence about what you are contemplating. When you first get the feelings of offence and righteous anger, it is easy to imagine yourself doing terrible things to the wrongdoer. If you act at that stage, on that impulse, it is likely that your attack will fail, and that you’ll feel terrible yourself, as your impotent anger recoils on you. (This experience is probably at the root of the ’cursing leads to bad karma’ school of thought. People who always suppress aggressive feelings are invariably poor at handling them when they arise; this can lead to the above type of inappropriate, ill-thought-out action.) After some thought on the matter, you can imagine a more appropriate level of force, which actually feels congruent. This is the start of the refinement of your spell towards a usable form.

The basic techniques of aggressive magic are covered in the evaluations at the end of this section: sigils, dolls, collages and so forth.

MAQICAL CONFLICT

Actual magical combat is extremely rare. There follows a selection of reasons some people have for feeling that they are under psychic attack:-

• 1. You’re paranoid;

• 2. You’re ill. Go and see a doctor or healer;

• 3. You’ve been reading books which give the impression that everyone is attacking everyone else all the time (e.g. Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defence)',

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• 4. You’ve been using psychedelics unwisely, and your ego boundaries have got weakened. Stop taking the tablets, and raise your standards of consciousness.

• 5. You’ve entered a white magic paradigm, you believe you’ve been given the job of saving the universe, and you’ve become deeply suspicious of anyone else’s magic. Talk to someone outside of your paradigm.

• 6. You’re crazy.

• 7. You’ve been working very hard at your magic, and you’re suffering from what’s known in the trade as gnostic burnout. Sleep, eat, exercise, tidy up your home and cut down on the magic for a few days or weeks.

• 8. You’re beginning to enter a magical worldview for the first time, and the synchronicities are getting frighteningly dense. This is the Chapel Perilous situation. Same remedy as (7).

• 9. You are in a bad house. Get an exorcist of sympathetic magical persuasion, or move out. Or both.

• 10. You’re worried or guilty about something, and you’ve suppressed it. Confess to a friend, or to the person you think you have wronged.

• 11. You’re in contact with psychic residues of pain etc. that are lurking around some object you have. Get magical advice.

• 12. Your ego is enjoying the attention: “The fact that I’m getting attacked means 1 must be important...”

• 13. You’ve come into contact with genuine, powerful magical forces that mean you no personal harm, but that are too much

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for you at this stage. Talk to a magical friend.

• 14. You are undergoing major transformation: your inner needs have breached your ego boundaries, and elements of what you previously considered non-self/alien are leaking through into mundane consciousness. Remedy: admit to yourself what is happening. If this reframe doesn’t help, don’t be too proud to ask for help, preferably from a friend. If you decide to choose a counsellor, make sure that he/she does not have a spiritual axe to grind.

• 15. You’re under genuine magical attack.

Having decided that you have a genuine magical attack on your hands, you obviously need to do something about it. However, this is a very delicate and dangerous stage in anyone’s magical career, and much of the danger can stem from your own mind. The paranoia invested in switching into the psychic attack paradigm has to be experienced to be believed. The application of martial discipline certainly sharpens the wizard’s wits, but all experience is filtered through a paranoia-generating worldview. The martial aspects of magic should not be overemphasized for this reason. Magical attack is actually very rare, and a few simple guidelines are all that should be given.

MAQICAL STRATEGIES

OVERALL OUTCOME

The most important feature of the strategy should be to know what your criteria for victory are. In other words, frame an overall outcome for the whole conflict phase. This can be modified as the situation unfolds, but it is important to know where you want to head at any given time. It is absolutely no use getting a ’victory’ that reduces you to a shell of your former self, a ’victory’ that would be called a defeat by a more objective observer. One of the most damaging kinds of defeat is to be

drawn into competing with your opponent on his terms; if your opponent is cunning enough, he may well set things up so that you lose sight of what you want out of your life, and end up defining your needs in reference to the combat with him. Unless you become aware of this happening, and get around it, you are as good as ruined.

OUTFLANKING BELIEF

An extension of the above principle is to outflank your opponent’s frame of reference. The breadth of belief, the breadth of your faith in yourself and what you are doing, is your basic outflanking mechanism. To take an example in fiction, in Crowley’s entertaining and instructive novel Moonchild, the protagonist Cyril Grey and the Taoist mystic Simon Iff respond in their different ways to a magical attack from their enemies in the form of a terrifying entity. Whilst Grey’s approach would be to hurl Goetic demons at the critter, the sheer breadth of Iff’s perspective enables him to absorb it entirely. Crowley gives us a background to Iff’s mental processes in that he shows his top-end belief to be Taoist, his strategy arises from the biggest frame of all, the profound serenity of Lao Tzu’s adept, in whom:

’...there is nowhere for the weapon to lodge its blade.... Because for him there is no realm of death.’

- Tao Teh Ching

This is obviously not an easy state of awareness to remain in when there’s a battle going on; but the fact remains that profound serenity is the most invincible strategy in any conflict. The sorcerer might consider choosing or making a material object that acts as a touchstone for this kind of serenity.

At any level down from this, we are into tactics: any emotion or blatant power revealed is done so deliberately, tactically. Passion is harnessed into: the work of sorcery, the evocation of servitors, bouts of self-strengthening and healing exercises, 56

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and meditation. Some approaches to tactics are discussed below.

EVALUATIONS OF ATTACK / DEFENCE MAQICS

ATTACK/CURSING TACTICS

• 1. Doll magic: when doing magic to affect another person, one of the indispensable features is a magical link. A doll containing something of the target person or something that has been in contact with them is an excellent magical conduit for all kinds of spell. In a conflict situation, if you have identified your opponent, a doll is a very useful tool.

• 2. Mirror spells are simple and effective, operating on the basic, simplistic plane of symbolic sorcery, like dolls. As such, they are quick and easy to do if, for instance, you wish to deflect a sorcery object that has arrived through the post back to its source. However, like most simple spells, they are useless for prolonged or intense conflict; their usual usage is the one-off, the quick response when needed.

• 3. Photographs/collages/cut-up: Another form of magical link is a photograph. This can be used in conjunction with a doll, or as part of a magical collage. Sound cut-ups of the opponent’s environment can also be used.

Collage-making is a very personal art (like most sorcery), and is too little-known amongst magicians. I’ve been making collages from newscuttings and magazine pictures for some years. What started out as an amusement I came to realise was a fascinating and powerful magical tool. The first collage I made was made for fun - it was a kind of advert for Chaos Magic. It incorporated — for reasons I don’t remember or never made conscious — a newsclipping of Jim and Tammy Bakker, the American evangelists, with the words ’pleased about buggings’ around them. The week that I first photocopied the collage it

Dave Dee was announced on the news that they had been caught up in some corruption scandal. This was my first hint that collage could be a magical method, even when not consciously applied for magical results.

After this and other successes, I began to experiment with deliberate collage magic. The next one I made was part of a magical working involving a number of other people, and we got a positive result. However, it could have been the other work that was done that connected with the result. I had a feeling that the collage in itself would have failed, for the following reason: it was too deliberate and serious, too heavy handed, compared with the lightness of touch of the earlier ones. So, I began to attempt to recapture that lightness. I found the use of advertising slogans helpful, and headlines from tabloid newspapers, because their incredible superficiality helped to release me from lust of result.

• 4. Evocation, Servitors and Demons: Aggressive spirits from a system such as the Goetia can be used in combat, but it is not generally advisable, for the following reasons:-

• i) They can be very unreliable;

• ii) If you are dealing with an advanced magician as an opponent, he will probably have limited the effects that such a well-known type of entity could have on him. If you want to use entities, it is better to design them yourself from scratch, incorporating all the levels of your intentions for victory into the servitor. This is the most complete and sophisticated tactic in magical combat, and can be combined with the use of a doll.

• 5. Invocations of Gods and Goddesses of destruction: Again, classical deities can be summoned to bring down destruction on your opponent. Examples might be Nemesis, The Morrigan, Kali or Thanatos. However, this is risky, for reason (ii) above — your opponent’s probable familiarity with

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the parameters of the entity; in fact, he may be able to turn the deity against you. In any case, deities sometimes have their ’own agenda’ — that is, by their nature, they are not under your conscious control.

• 6. Invocations of martial deities: this is less a technique of attack than a realignment and sharpening of your will. Choose a deity that you resonate with. Examples might be:- Mars, Ogun, Thor.

DEFENCE TACTICS

• 1. Amulets and talismans: these are only as useful as the wearer’s belief in them, in most instances. To an experienced sorcerer, they can only serve as reminders of his overall intentions, or form the material base for a powerful combat servitor.

• 2. Banishing spaces, casting circles: the act of doing a banishing ritual — especially one that is familiar to the practitioner to the point of automatism — has a reassuring, strengthening effect. Also, it does serve to remind the sorcerer of his responsibility for keeping his space ’clear’. Banishing should be one of the first things the magician does when he feels that there is a threat.

• 3. Aura cleansing: this is vital in long-term conflict, for the following reasons:-

i) To remind you who you are, to regain your centre, which can all too easily be lost in the course of a conflict situation which drags on;

ii) To remove any changes which have happened to your subconscious levels, either through your own fears, or through attack from your opponent.

Dave l^ee

Techniques of Aura Cleansing

i) Bathing: most people are aware of the change of emotional-mental state that a bath or shower can generate. Adding a magical intention to bathing or washing is a highly effective, if short-term, method of changing your state and removing whatever residues are left in your aura. Essential oils, herbs or magical powders can be added to baths to enhance or fine-tune the effect.

ii) Meditation exercises: certain essential features will form the basis of all aura-cleansing meditations. The Middle Pillar exercise as recommended by Israel Regardie is effective if you resonate with it. The following exercise uses these core techniques, and can be adapted to suit the practitioner.

AURA CLEANSINQ EXERCISE

Close your eyes. We’re going to get the etheric energies moving about and within the body. Breathe easy, feel the energy of breath as you draw it in, the universal energy flowing into you.

Imagine the inbreath coming to you from the edge of the universe.... and the outbreath flowing out to the edge of the universe...

Let the energy flow up and over you as you breathe in. Let all tension, all toxins, all anxiety flow out as you exhale.

Vibrate the sound INNNNGGGGG, feel it like a protective barrier at the skin.

Breathe in more energy from the edge of the universe-pure energy filling you, filling you to overflowing... feel the tingle of aliveness as the breath floods you with pure clear energy. Exhale all the staleness, let it fall over the edge of the universe.... let it go...

Vibrate the sound INNNGGG again, let it fill you with strong, protecting light.

Let that light flow through you, until it flows out of the pores of your skin, building up your outer aura. Breathe the

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power into your outer aura... feel the tingle in you... As you inhale, let the light flow up the back of your legs, up your back, to the top of your head. As you exhale, let the light flow down the front of you, all over the outside of your aura, strengthening, filling you up with power...

Now you feel a gentle breeze of soft pure air, light and refreshing, washing over you... Let it calm and cool your aura... you are hale, you are healed, you are whole....

4. Watchfulness and sensitivity: Whilst it is important to raise barriers against magical intrusion, it is also necessary to be aware of what might be happening on the inner levels. Selecting the right kind of openness to signals is vital. The principle here is act as if nothing is happening, adopt a studiedly casual attitude to psychic sensations. Whilst doing mundane domestic tasks or watching TV, let your mind scan your feelings, paying attention to anything unusual, or anything that is accompanied by weird physical sensations. The latter may be signals from your unconscious that something has intruded.

IMPOSINQ YOUR. WILL

• 1. Aegishjalmr or Helm of Awe: this is a device of Teutonic sorcery. It is visualized strongly on the forehead whilst or before going into a situation where your will must prevail. Its simplest form is 4 algiz runes radiating out:-

  

• 2. In more extreme circumstances, extreme and overt weirdness/dominance signals can be transmitted. This is a very risky procedure, and is likely to raise the stakes of the conflict.

For instance, the ability of the sorcerer to give a fixed dead stare is well known. Few people do this, so such overt alienness frightens; the steadiness of the sorcerer’s mind dominates the shallowness of the robotized recipient. Enforced eye-contact brings up shame and suppressed feelings in those it’s directed at, which is probably why such people were murdered by the peasants they used it on in the middle ages.

By the same token, some people prevail by appearing insane, seeming that there are no limits to what they might do. This is a very dangerous tactic, unless you are prepared to back it up with ’insane’ behaviour.

• 3. A milder form of outweirding is to use silence. People feel uncomfortable when it’s quiet — that’s why they not only play muzak in supermarkets, but they deliberately do not suppress the sounds of fridge motors, air conditioning, heating etc.. Develop the ability to be comfortable with silence, and observe its effects on people.

ATTACKING INSTITUTIONS

One occasionally hears tales of sorcerers doing aggressive magic towards institutions and political figures. This is seldom successful, because of the massive inertia of institutions, and the curious fact that the targets of such attacks are often genuinely popular. To take mundane examples, look at the assassination attempts on the Pope and President Reagan back in the 1980s. Both were rather decrepit old men; both survived gunshot wounds. I would speculate that it was their popularity that acted as a shield. Millions of people would have been praying for the Pope every day, and millions of pieces of almost nothing add up to something, magically. Mass consciousness stabilizes its figureheads, just as the British Royal Family almost invariably get good weather for their outdoor rituals.

Another reason why political magical attack is highly risky is seen in the probable outcomes of successful attacks on public

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figures. Imagine for a moment the hated leader as possessed by a wordvirus, a mind parasite in the form of stupid memes. If the host of the parasite is killed, then the parasite will simply fly to another host. The same words will emerge from the mouth of another robot, and those memes will be considerably empowered by the human sacrifice that just occurred. The stakes simply get raised. Those who are thinking of trying to influence large-scale systems and institutions by magic would do well to formulate exactly what result they want, and then proceed by finding the points of weakness in the system.

QETTINQ A MURDERER CAUQHT

An instance of this kind of magic concerns a number of magicians in the Yorkshire area in late 1980. In groups and separately, using various techniques, they set to work to get the serial killer known as the Yorkshire Ripper caught. Peter Sutcliffe was actually caught after one more murder, amidst an incredible swarm of synchronicities around individuals on that scene.

EXORCISM

Related to the martial magical arts is the subject of exorcism of persons and places. As magicians, we are constantly referring to entities we have created, either alone or collectively. The concept of having a servitor or two around is familiar territory. However, the entities we usually come into contact with are ones we made earlier, so to speak. It can be a fascinating experience for the experimental magician to encounter entities experienced or semi-consciously created by non-magicians.

Assuming you have the good fortune to investigate at first hand an apparently paranormal event, it is a good idea to prepare a plan of action before meeting the clients. The following elements have been found useful:-

• 1. Decide whether you want to work solo, or in a team.

Both have advantages — the lone investigator has more of an edge of tension and intensity, and this might help to bring the entity through strongly. On the other hand, a well-picked team will be able to discuss the experience and reach more solid conclusions much more rapidly. Also, within a team you can experiment with different roles; for instance, you may split the team into psychics, who don’t know any of the background to the story, and exorcists, who do. The psychics can then get impressions of the place without prior assumptions, and the exorcists can question the clients. In practice, the psychic role can be abandoned once initial impressions have been acquired. Pick your team carefully.

• 2. Decide on questions to ask the client. A sample questionnaire is appended. Keep a record of everything.

• 3. Prepare a number of contingency plans, to be used according to what kind of entity you decide it is. For example, it might be:

• a) Human remnants-, be ready to do a Requiem rite of some kind. (Another option is to capture the human ’soul’ — this is done in Voudon and Palo Mayombe to gain a magical servitor of great power. However, the client situation, or your own scruples about such a procedure, will make this an unlikely choice).

• b) Animal remnants-, as above, or be ready to capture it, using a crystal or other spirit trap.

• c) A ’poltergeist-, these are usually connected to an individual. Be prepared to deal with the psychological as well as the magical aspects of the case. Consider using hypnotism, or capture of the entity, or exorcism of the client/host. Some hints for exorcising people are to be found in Carroll’s Lsychonaut.

• d) A ’hysteria egregore’-. unpleasant events and feelings can literally haunt a house that has had layer after layer of psychic leakage, misery, obsession or neglect. Houses where numerous junkies or alcoholics have lived; even neglected multiple occupancy houses. These usually need real physical changes,

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like extensive redecoration, to make a lasting impression on the place.

• e) An entity which is connected to the place, but none of the above: consider geomantic/feng shui approaches. Anton LaVey’s paper The Caw of the Trapezoid outlines a theory of the psychic effect on humans of walls that lean inwards. Take a plumb line if you want to investigate this aspect.

In any case, be prepared to do a house cleansing ritual. Remember that much of the form of the ritual will, like a funeral, be for the benefit of the clients (assuming they are present, which is usually a good idea). Even if you are convinced that the source of the visitations is one of the clients or inhabitants of the house, and that this person will simply reinstate them in another day or two, the house cleansing will give the clients time to relax and centre themselves, to remember what life was like before the entity came, and maybe decide on further action.

EXORCISM QUESTIONNAIRE

• 1. FIRST (HUMAN) CONTACTS:

• i)

DATE

• ii)

DATE

• 2. CLIENT CONTACT:

NAMES

ADDRESS

PHONE

• 3. WORKING TEAM:

• 4. THE PEOPLE:

Dave Dee

• a) Who has experienced this entity?

PERSON 1: Name Age Sex Job

Lifestyle

Attitudes to the paranormal

Any previous paranormal experiences

PERSON 2: Name Age Sex Job

Lifestyle

Attitudes to the paranormal

Any previous paranormal experiences

(See separate sheet for further persons)

• b) Is there anyone involved who has not experienced anything in this situation?

• 5. THE PLACE:

• a) Type of place (e.g. home, factory, woodland, etc.)?

• b) Any significant structural details of the place, e.g. watercourses, power lines, odd angles, cellars, ’character’ of building, etc.:

• c) How long have you used this place/been visiting this place, and what for?

• d) What is its history of occupancy/usage (e.g. student house, old mill, lovers’ lane etc.)?

• e) Does it have a history of paranormal events (e.g. entities, presences, UFO’s, etc.)?

• 6. THE ENTITY/PRESENCE:

• a) Is it localized to just one place? How wide is its range of movements?

• b) How long has it existed (known ’lifespan’) to your knowledge?

• c) What kind of atmospheres does it create/respond to (e.g.. fear, loneliness, etc.)?

• d) How does it manifest (e.g.. shape, feeling, temperature drop,

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etc.)?

• e) What does it do (e.g.. throw things, lurk, pull hair, etc.)?

• f) Would you describe it as dangerous, frightening, comforting, etc.?

• g) How frequently does it manifest?

Is this subject to change?

• h) Have you any reason to believe this is a hoax or trick?

• i) Have you any reason to believe that this is a genuine presence?

• j) Have you tried any method of dealing with this experience yet (e.g. consulting a medium, priest etc.)?

• k) Do you want it removing, laying to rest or simply investigating?

• 7. FURTHER DESCRIPTIONS OF ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ENTITY.

ADDITIONAL POINTS.

REPORT ON AN EXORCISM

Our team on this occasion was large, consisting of 4, two ’psychics’, who did not know the background, and 2 ’exorcists’, who did. We also had a trainee filmmaker with a video camera. The following is extracted from a report:-

’The house was in a quiet suburb of a northern city. The Psychics took a look round the house while the Exorcists chatted with the client B. and his girlfriend P.

’Our psychics detected a weird presence in the main bedroom, especially in a long mirror on the wardrobe door. Later we learned that this was the main focus of the activity.

’It was clear that B. was enjoying the attention we were giving him, and also the attention he got from the ’cat-like’ entities he described. They both had visually seen the ’cats’, sometimes like a ’heat haze’. Their own (real) cats didn’t like the entities.

’When P. began to tell her story, things started to fall into place. Whatever the entity was, it was feeding off her. She was physically drained and felt ill and paranoid’.

It seemed like it was B. himself who was the focus for the entities, rather than the house. We got the impression that he knew what they were, and enjoyed having them around. Clearly, it would be difficult to keep the house clear, if he was going to keep on creating them.

We set up an altar in the bedroom; it was in here, before sleep, that they felt the ’cats” presence most strongly.

We began with a Lesser Pentagram Ritual.

Herbs were taken around the house for protection; the clients were taken through a pathworking-meditation to surround the house with a sphere of light, and a crystal was utilized to capture the entities.

’The change in the clients was strongly indicative; he was just as smug as before, but she appeared to be a lot happier after the workings — her face and voice were changed dramatically — and she was very grateful that we had been able to help. This convinced us more than ever that he was the source of the entities, and that she was being parasitized by them. Our fears were confirmed by a follow-up phone call with P, in which she told us that the entities were back. Her voice betrayed the weary hopelessness of our first visit. She was not willing to do any further work with us.’

In this situation we had done all we could, insofar as we no longer had willing clients. The entities obviously served a psychological purpose in the clients’ relationship. P. was suffering badly from their effects; B. appeared to enjoy their presence, and not care about their effects on his girlfriend. Any further work would have had to focus on getting B. to take responsibility for the situation, which he clearly was not willing to do.

• B. had denied any involvement in occult work, yet seemed to be able to produce ’elementals’ at will, via some kind of instinctive magical process. He felt them as ’cats’, but saw them as heat-haze like blobs when they were visible. An unexpected bonus came when we finally viewed the videotape: it clearly

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showed such a blob wrapped around his neck, exactly as he had described it. This is a form of evocation to visible appearance.

FURTHER READING

Hannibal The Cannibal - The Voice of Reason; Crime and Magic, in Chaos International 17.

Anton LaVey - The Raw of the Trapezoid, in The Devil’s Notebook, Feral House, 1992.

INTERLUDE:

FRACTALS FOR CHAOS

MAQICIANS II

FRACTAL FLAME - THE MICROSTRUCTURE OF ECSTASY

The little twitches you become aware of when you relax... these are the unconscious speaking, the body-considered-as-a-whole, Spare’s Zos... half-formed thoughts bubble up into the silenced mind, seeking form...

There are no selves, only the endlessly fractal microstructure of experience, which manifests self-similar structures which, for convenience, we may label ’selves’, but they are just the knots of desire and obsession which revolve again and again, never quite passing the exact same point, but coming back to something similar enough to be recognized... our human pattern-making facility working overtime. Of course the self is inconsistent; that doesn’t make it a colony of selves, except as a convenience for our minds to grasp more readily than this inconceivable Mandelbrot set of flowing desires and memories.

Chapter 3

MAQIC AND SEX

BASICS: THE INS AND OUTS OF SEXUAL MAQIC For our baseline concepts, most sex magicians would probably agree with the following scheme:-

PROLONGED INTENSE SEX I I GNOSIS-----BLISS---ECSTASY

I I

BODY —/--------PRACTICAL---/—INVOCATION---/-------SEXUAL

ALCHEMY SORCERY  RECONDITIONING

Practical sorcery would include charging sigils, maybe with sexual fluids, the generation of ’astral offspring’, such as so-called ’bud-wills’ or servitors. This aspect of sexual magic is the most written-about, and yet ultimately the least interesting, being concerned with using only a small part of the energy available from sex.

In sexual invocation, each participant views his or her partner as God or Goddess. This technique shades into the invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Some information is available on this practice in other books.

Sexual reconditioning is the replacement of 4^th Circuit imprints whilst in a state of 5^th Circuit ecstasy, in order to develop or liberate one’s sexuality.

Early Chaos Magic writings tended to have a reductionist approach to sex magic, concentrating on sex purely as a gnosis for doing sorcery; this was refreshing and vital, de-coupling sexual magic from the host of mystical interpretations it had

Dave Lee accumulated. However, if sex is viewed as just another gnosis, it means that there is little more that can be said about it, other than a listing of physical techniques. For an unparalleled technical manual on sex magic, see Frater U.D.’s book, published in English as Secrets of the German Sex Magicians.

Whilst the above scheme shows the main parameters of sexual magic, this is not a manual of techniques. However, one technical point is central: sexual ecstasy. The difference between the fleeting pleasure and satisfaction of a ’quickie’ and the full-on mode of ecstatic sex is enormous, and central to magical sex. The ’quickie orgasm’ can be used as a gnosis for sorcery, just as any transient intense sensation can. Sexual ecstasis, on the other hand, is the product of more than a few minutes’ fucking, and has the capacity to act either as a simple gnostic lever or to transform the psyche much more profoundly. The special inner sensations accompanying the richest sexual experiences have been described as the ’Tantric Bliss Wave’. This experience is where sex crosses over from the normal, functional, 4^th Circuit stick-it-in-and-come reflex (enjoyable as it is) to the superhedonism of the 5th Circuit.

Sex is an enormous subject that touches upon all aspects of life. What is more, many aspects of sex are still ’underground’, despite the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. This essay deals with how sex fits into magic, and how magic fits into sex, so to speak. In doing so, it explores some of the peripheral areas of sexuality that are valuable in magic.

SEX AND RECONDITIONINQ

The adolescent imprinting that occurs on the 4^th Circuit links one’s first sexual experiences with the cultural values around at the time. The imprint functions so that the fertile young adults of a society take on board these values, ready to programme them into their own soon-to-be-created offspring. In other words, the imprint is supposed to perpetuate the tunnel

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vision of the society via co-opting sex for reproduction and moral propaganda. As William Blake put it:-

As the catterpiller chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys

- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Sexual morality is the group of wordviruses that facilitate the production of whatever type of conforming human the society needs, more cannon-fodder or production-line-fodder, usually. In postmodern society, in which consumerism is God, we are fed sex images to sell us products. Consumerist society ostensibly values ’freedom of choice’, and yet the sex images we are presented with are invariably stereotypes based on some need of the fashion market. We are immersed in a culture which superficially celebrates novelty, but actually pushes us towards sanitized conformity as far as sexual stereotypes are concerned. The magician, as in every sphere of life, will want to reprogramme the 4^th Circuit in order to maximize enjoyment of sex and minimize the pre-conscious effects of consumer culture on his/her sexual choices.

This can be a very long-term process. Finding out what makes you happy sexually means experimentation with different sexual lifestyles, and finding partners who are willing to explore along with you. Reconditioning yourself away from society’s sexual expectations is sometimes difficult, because sexual limitations and conditioned reflexes may only manifest in the situation they relate to. For example, you may think you are completely free of jealousy, only to find it leaps out at you with a particular partner in a particular situation. Fantasies may or may not provide a reliable guide to what you really want; it can happen that a fantasy will persist only up until the time it is physically gratified. In any case, fantasies have a way of changing with circumstances, or even from day to day for

no apparent reason.

It seems that sex is a truly chaotic, anarchic impulse. This means that attempts to wrestle your sexuality into a Procrustean bed of final satisfaction will only be met with deep disappointment, cynicism and a drift into the general greyness of the non-magical world. Active, ecstatic sexuality is change; this doesn’t mean that long-term sexual liaisons are impossible, but it does mean that certain things are indispensable to them:-

• i. Self-honesty: the suppression of honest impulses of desire in order to please someone else can only lead to a deadening of the emotions, a cutting off of the sexual self from the other selves, a degradation of sexual pleasure, and ultimately a condition of hypocrisy which undermines the relationship.

• ii. Honesty with each other: the couple that steer carefully around each other’s weaknesses and neuroses, never mentioning Certain Things for fear of a fit of the sulks from the partner end up resenting each other for the dilution of their authenticity. This resentment is often turned outwards, using other persons as scapegoats for their unhappiness — the classic Gruesome Twosome scenario.

• iii. Ecstasy: without a renewal of the glorious delight that brought the couple together in the first place, the relationship tends to drift into the mundane. Too much importance is placed upon winning or losing arguments. Trivial things like shopping expeditions become big issues. The couple may seek alternative justification of their relationship in the accumulation of money and property, or other joint projects that enable them to forget what they have lost.

It cannot be stated strongly enough that sexual re-imprinting through ecstasy should not be a one-off; it needs continually renewing. When people regularly enjoy mind-blowing sex (if

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necessary boosted by empathogenic or psychedelic sacraments), they are continually re-imprinting their 4^th Circuit couplebonding habits by using the ecstatic capacities of the 5^th Circuit, which, by its nature, is free of mainstream social conditioning. The sudden, shocking sweetness, the rude vividness of flesh is revealed, free, for that moment, of the glossy taint of the hyperreal. Really great sex has something of a quality of surprise and genuine novelty built into it. The recovery of the fresh, unmediated reality of sex requires the technologies of the 5^th Circuit ecstasies. This ecstasis can be assisted by immersion in the so-called dark senses.

SEXUAL ALCHEMY AND THE DARK SENSES

The dark senses are the borderline information streams arising from:

• * peripheral vision and night vision;

• * hearing down at the threshold level;

• ♦ most of the sense of smell;

• ♦ the electrical senses of the skin surface — especially the mouth;

• ♦ the sense of spatial orientation arising from the balance organs and internal sensors (proprioreception);

•visceral and hormonal kinaesthesias — ’gut feelings’;

• ♦ the ’internal chemical sense’ that indicates the presence, strength and even identity of toxins by ’hallucinations’ of taste; ♦pressure and moisture sensitivity in the skin, which is related to the complex manifesting as ’weather sensitivity’;

♦and of course synaesthesias arising from overlaps of these. Increasing one’s sensitivity to these data is quite simple. They are continually being input to your brain, but your survival programming filters them out. What is required is to lower one’s sensory ’filter cut-off’. This is achieved by a willingness to trust the weird perceptions that flicker at the corners of awareness. The following techniques can help:-

Pranayama-, try the following exercise:-

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EXERCISE: BREATHING INTO THE DARK

• 1. Get comfortable in a darkened room. Lying down is best, although you may need to resist the body’s programme to go to sleep. If this starts happening, just sit up and continue. Close your eyes.

• 2. Breathing through the mouth, take a few very deep breaths, stretching the lung capacity.

• 3. Continuing to breathe through the mouth, practice continuous breathing; i.e. do not hold, lock or stop the breath. As you end and inhale, begin and exhale. Remember to relax when you breathe out — the difference between this type of breathing exercise and hyperventilation is that with the latter the outbreath is forced. Keep up this breathing for the whole exercise.

• 4. Relax. Be aware of the zones of tension in your body, and consciously, repeatedly relax them.

• 5. Pay attention to what is going on in your body. If you have a lot of internal dialogue, breathe deeper — this will increase the amount of physical sensation and reduce the internal word processing. If the sensations or emotions are unbearably powerful or uncomfortable, breathe faster and shallower until you feel comfortable, then resume deep breathing. Let your attention focus on the most intense sensation at any given time, then move on to the next intense sensation.

• 6. Do this for about ten minutes, or until you feel tingling sensations in your extremities. This is a sign that your oxygen levels are up, and that you are on the brink of 5^lh Circuit trance.

• 7. Open your eyes and look out into the darkness. Continue the breathing, and just pay attention to whatever happens in

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your body and visual field.

The above exercise is a good preparation for the next technique: ’aura touching’

AURA-TOUCH INQ EXERCISE

This exercise can be done on your own or with a partner.

1. On your own: after practicing Breathing Into the Dark or a similar sensitizing exercise, raise your hands in front of your eyes. Start with the palms about 6 inches apart, and bring them slowly together whilst watching the space between them. When the quality of the light between your hands changes, try moving them apart again. Notice what happens. Try this under various lighting conditions.

2. With a partner: with or without doing the exercise on your own, try it with someone else. Both naked is best. Bring your hands together, and concentrate both on what you see and what sensations you get in your body. In low light, with sufficient energization, you should notice an ’aura’ light between you. Having seen it in this way, you might then start to notice it around your partner’s body. Now try ’stroking’ your partner’s ’aura’, moving your hand over his or her body a few inches away from the surface. Pay attention to the feelings in your body. This phase is often accompanied by gasps of amazement or laughter. The exercise is an excellent preliminary to sex. Have fun!

Use of psychoactive sacraments-, even the mildest sacramental substances, combined with breathing and relaxation, can produce quite dramatic effects on the dark senses.

Sensitizing oneself to these subliminal inputs—often called ’vibrations’ by the superstitious—produces a number of effects:

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• ♦ the body may feel immense;

• ♦ the mind may flick between anxiety and deep calm;

• ♦ the breath will probably deepen — if panic ensues, increase the breath rate and make it shallower;

• ♦ intensification of emotion;

• ♦ attacks of paranoia — if this proves more than a passing discomfort, you can control it by using a banishing ritual before the exercise;

• * increase in intimacy with your partner.

It should be clear to a magician why a gnostic experience of such power would be fun, not to mention useful.

SEX AND SMELL

Smell is the major sense that is least often consciously trained. The power of smells to evoke precise memories of past events is well-known: a perfume worn by an ex-lover, the damp plaster of an old house, plastic toys from childhood — the less often the smell has been encountered, the more vivid the flash of memory. It is as if the very fact that the sense memory of the smell has less conscious content, that it is more obscure and mysterious, gives it its power. After we have re-experienced the memory a few times, the vividness of it may fade; it has been overlaid with some conscious interpretation, its original power diluted by irrelevancies. The sense of smell is trained, like any other sense, by exposure to named stimuli, and then comparison with other named substances. The perfumer sniffs carnation absolute, and knows it has somehow chemically related to clove oil. Then, of course, he becomes more sophisticated, and speculates that the ’dark’ smell of oakmoss resinoid suggests it would be a good base note or fixative. A catalogue of connections is built up.

The smells of other humans attract or, more often, repel; issues of power, conformity and subcultural styles are obvious

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in many people’s smells, even at a Euro-American social distance.

Sexual attraction is another layer; how public people’s sex smells get is a very locally-variable issue. By and large, North Americans tend to favour a more complete eradication of natural body odour than most Europeans, for example. A subtle level of sexual odour on a woman or man can enhance attractiveness, but this is always balanced against the social unacceptability of intense body odours. This is the original reason for the existence of the perfume industry: the best traditional perfumes blend with the smell of skin, armpit and genital secretions seamlessly, creating a socially acceptable level of olfactory erotic display. Modern, highly synthetic perfumes tend to annihilate body smells entirely, reducing everyone’s smell to the same bland conformity.

Before and during sex, smells are enormously important. Some people might look nice, but when you get up close they just don’t ’smell right’. Try to recall and articulate the smells of people you have leaned close to, people you have kissed or embraced. Remember the feeling in your body, or the words in your head, when you recall the smell.

Sensitivity to smells helps in the refining of sexual elixirs, as does the electrical sense the inside of the lips appears to have. Ecstatic sex is sometime described in terms of a golden light in or around the body; the olfactory equivalent can be smelled in the sweat or sexual juices — a sweet odour, described as ’golden honey’, storax (methyl cinnamate), ’the odour of anointing’. This relates to the smell of the sweat after prolonged ecstatic dance, or pranayama. Some sexual elixirs tingle in the mouth; some have a harsh flavour; some taste metallic.

The peripheral areas of sight bring magical information too: auras of light around the lovers in a darkened room, blazing sigils behind closed eyelids. All of these effects bring magical information to the celebrants, once they have worked with their dark senses for long enough to build up associations.

SEX AND PERVERSION'

The ’sexual revolution’ of the 1960s probably resulted in more people having more orgasms and feeling less ashamed about it, which is certainly something. As is usually the case, most people were satisfied — or at least quiet — with very little. However, there has been a slow drip-feed of ’perverse’ material being sanitized for the mass market by lifestyle magazines. Issues such as fetishism, fantasy and bondage are tidied up and diluted to form the bases for questionnaires on ’How Imaginative a Lover Are You?’. (’Harder’ ’perversions’ like genuine sado-masochism and group sex are not yet appearing in mainstream mags, but who knows how long it will be before someone finds a way to make them less threatening to today’s trendy young couple?). In the less censored medium of the Internet, and some of the braver small-circulation magazines, people are discussing issues of sexual behaviour that are definitely not mainstream and probably never will be, such as bestiality.

Mass exposure of such material illustrates two points:-a) many people who have been doing ’perverted’ things for ages are now much more willing to communicate about it, and see if there’s anybody else out there who shares their tastes; b) the ’sexual revolution’ has barely begun, and most people will not be interested in it in its more extreme forms; the majority will still be subscribing to serial monogamy or faceless promiscuity, the two sexual ’lifestyles’ currently provided for and tacitly approved by WestCiv.

It should go without saying that those who practice sex for magical purposes as well as to have fun are even further beyond the pale of normality than those who engage in the weirdest ’perversions’. Sex as presented to the general public by magazines and TV is highly sanitized, and attempts to push people towards conformity, usually successfully. Sex magic as

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presented by many popular authors on the subject is also sanitized, refusing to deal with issues the writer views as perverted. Two areas in particular point up powerful dimensions of sexuality that have been largely ignored in the course of the current magical revival: group sex, and the power-transaction aspect of sex.

QROUP SEX

When the subject of group sex comes up, most people think of ’swingers’ clubs’, where couples in search of excitement spice up their sex lives by rubbing latex-clad genitals with as many other people as possible. This is, from the point of view of this essay, simply a multiple-partners version of the ’quickie orgasm’ mentioned in the introduction. Penetrative, ejaculatory-orgasmic sex is what most people want most of the time, and who can blame them. As with the Quickie Gnosis, this kind of orgiastic release can of course be used for sorcery. What is much more interesting to the magician about group sex is the potentiality for dissolving one’s boundaries in a maze of non-orgasmic skin sensations.

Now it is possible to experience some of the erotic potentials of the skin in couple sex. (Generally, the withholding of orgasm is necessary in a man, in order to sustain the tension that would otherwise be released by ejaculation; in a woman, this may not be necessary — a woman might try this type of practice both with and without orgasm, and discover her own preference.) However, in a group, there is a special kind of dynamic, in which a much more complete dissolution of boundaries is possible. Arousal without climax — and indeed without penetration — suspends all the usual expectations about sex. Combined with the excitement of the special, exotic situation of the group, unconsummated foreplay can produce a special kind of ecstasy. The falling away of boundaries in this situation can be particularly deep when there is sufficient trust between the celebrants. All the preoccupations of the first four

Dave Dee ’terrestrial’ circuits are transformed:

• ♦ First-Circuit physical security is enhanced by the enormous amount of physical, touching attention everyone is getting;

• ♦ Second-Circuit emotional-territorial-competitive games are overwhelmed by the intensity of cooperation;

• ♦ Third-Circuit time-binding is disrupted by the continuity of bliss

• ♦ Fourth-Circuit imprints of jealousy are severely undermined by the lack of urgency in people’s sexual responses.

It is of course true that all these effects can be produced by a couple doing seriously ecstatic sex. One of the differences is that, in this kind of group situation, sex itself has been transformed into something else — something both more than and less than ’sex as we know it’. Such a situation can transform people’s perceptions of their sexual imprinting without the use of chemognostic sacraments, even if they had never before experienced truly blissful sex. Naturally, we should not rely on such situations to get these effects, because they are unfortunately rare, even amongst left-hand path magicians.

DOMINANCE, SUBMISSION AND PAIN

The transaction of power between partners has always been one of the great ’hidden’ themes of sex. In past aeons the socialization of sexual coupling into male-dominant monogamy had an overt agenda about power: the man was the Lord and Master of the woman; she was a mere chattel, named as his Mrs. — i.e. mistress. She was valuable only in terms of her work and breeding potential. A further myth, that of romantic love inside of marriage, overlaid this notion with another level of possession — the man possessed the woman as a beautiful

CHAOTOPLA 1 object, which he cherished. And was still her lord and master. Probably the only Western subcultures that subscribe explicitly and ideologically to this model of sexuality are the fundamentalist Christians. However, everyone else who subscribes to any form of marriage partnership has to deal with the fact that there are no generally accepted rules any more. The power aspect of sexuality is up for grabs.

The 1960s/1970s rise of liberalism helped destroy the common belief in such simplistic sexual ideals, but brought along with it the hideous spectre of ’political correctness’, which denied the validity of power relations in sex altogether. People tried to form couples without any acknowledgement of this vital dynamic, and the result was that power transactions still happened, were still central to coupledom, but were simply unacknowledged. Just as so-called non-hierarchical groups invariably generate leaders, which are unacknowledged, and whose influence is thereby unlimited by any checks and balances, similarly, where there is no acknowledgement of power transactions in a couple, one tends to be dominant anyway. The exploration of dominance and submission roles can therefore be enormously enlightening.

The core issue in dominance/submission or S & M is consensuality. Individuals should be clear about how far they want to go, and communicate this to each other. Tolerance to pain, restraint or humiliation vary from one person to another, and may change for anyone from time to time. The extent of the games — what is acceptable to both parties — should be decided on beforehand, by way of verbal or written contract. ’Safe words’ are also important; the sadist may get carried away by enthusiasm, and a simple ’Stop!’ may be interpreted as ’It hurts, but I like it!’. Special words for ’More!’, ’That’s good’ and ’Stop!’ can be agreed upon before play. Dominancesubmission and S/M games are usually built up from:-

♦ Restraint/Bondage: with the body restrained, the will is placed

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in a submissive position. Control and trust are given to the dominant, and this in itself transforms the emotional state of both participants. The control aspect of the game is emphasized by the use of

• ♦ Verbal signals: agreeing to call each other ’Master’ and ’Slave’ moves the game onto a different and, for some people, unacceptable level. More extreme forms of verbal technique involve humiliation and insult. As with other aspects of S/M and sub/dom, how far this goes is a matter of personal taste.

• ♦ Application of pain: this is what most people think of as S & M. Beating with whips, paddles, belts and so on, the use of hot candle wax and ice, pricking, cutting, and all the other ways of causing pain form a vast menu of potential sensations. Most people will tend to specialize, inasmuch as they will have strong preferences for different types of pain. Some forms of pain infliction lend themselves to elegant magical rituals, such as painting a sigil on someone’s back in diluted propanol, and then setting fire to it. Body piercing sometimes forms part of S&M.

These dynamics can be used in magic, both for sorcery and for self-transformation/deep gnosis. The latter works in the following areas:-

• ♦ Power transactions are based in 2^nd Circuit trance, territorial-emotional stuff. The exploration of Dominance and Submission roles can be used to play with your programs at this level. Trying both positions :-

• i. clarifies what your primary role is;

• ii. indicates how flexible you are — i.e. whether and to what extent you can switch roles;

• iii. enables you to increase the effectiveness of your chosen role.

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• ♦ These effects extend into mapping your degree of dominance or submissiveness in sexual liaisons in general, whether or not they involve sub/dom role-playing. Understanding your habitual past patterns of power transaction enables you to change them, or at least enjoy them more.

• ♦ In the quest for the HGA or Divine Lover, the partner can be envisaged as the Angel; the partner, in the context of the S/M play, becomes the ideal towards which the magician strives. This use of S/M dynamics is implicit in Sacher-Masoch’s ’Venus in Furs’, and is explored more thoroughly and from an explicitly magical point of view in Crystal Dawn & Stephen Flowers excellent Carnal Alchemy.

NOTES ON SOME SEX-MAQICAL PRACTICES

• 1. Pubococcygeal (PC / pelvic floor) muscles exercises, usually called Kegels: these are recommended by medics to strengthen the whole area. Useful for enhancing intensity and length of sex — for instance, enhancing control of ejaculation in men, and strength of contractions in women. When withholding ejaculation, these muscles are clenched; the contraction of them is what the body does automatically during ejaculation. Holding it back by clenching appears to localize sensation and slow down the build-up to orgasm. Relaxing them, which may be difficult for some men, results in a buildup of orgasmic potential all over the body. This is usually felt as a tingling in the back/backs of the legs, sweeping up into the head and localizing in the contractions of the ejaculation. This type of orgasm can sweep over the whole body.

• 2. Sharing Breath: The effects of breathing into each others’ mouths are related to the effects of pranayama, but tend to have a much more rapid onset. It takes a certain amount of trust—after all, you are breathing each other’s stale air. However, the resultant swoon can deepen erotic trance, and may create

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an oceanic feeling.

• 3. To Come or Not To Come:

Should the male magician seek to ejaculate or not?

For: There is no need from a body alchemy point of view for men to avoid ejaculation. Old texts that advocate semen retention for health were probably written in societies where most people had diets that were deficient in zinc. In fact, as far as health is concerned, it may well be better to have as many ejaculations as possible. After all, death is an excretory process, from the point of view of the genes: once the DNA gets signals that you’ve had your last ejaculation, it gets ready to discard your body. Practitioners of body alchemy are prone to neoteny, the acquisition of adult characteristics in an immature body, a refusal to stop changing. The maintenance of a strong sexual appetite gives the signal that you haven’t finished with this body yet, thank you.

Against: According to some traditional systems of body alchemy (such as Taoist sexual alchemy and Tantra), we are born with a limited supply of Original Chi. When this is used up, we die. Ejaculation requires the replacement of sperm, which is said to require the expenditure of Original Chi, not just zinc and proteins.

Some Taoist alchemists claim that advanced Chi Kung exercises can replace Original Chi and thereby extend life, but this seems to be a contentious point in such circles.

What is important about prolonging the sex act is the prolongation and intensification of ecstasy - it is the effect of the prolonged ecstasy on the brain that is the important thing, not the retention of semen. Retention of semen is quite easy to master, and reversal of the sensation of ejaculation not so difficult. This is an interesting area to experiment in, and find your own preferences.

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• 4. Solitary sex; enjoying detailed masturbation fantasy can liberate you from lust of result. Magical masturbation (8th Degree Hand Relief) can be used for invocation of the Divine Lover/Angel, for Evocation of personal demons, and for the launching of Servitors.

Pornography can be used enjoyably, but most of it uses boringly stereotypical imagery, and tends to habituate one to repetitious fantasy images. Magical masturbation can be performed while suppressing all the images that arise. This type of masturbation, especially when combined with the type of breathing in the Breathing Into The Dark exercise, can also be used to reach deeper and deeper levels of self-sensuality. The experience of generating one’s own erotic energy, rather than relying on particular external or imagined stimuli, can lead to varying degrees of whole-body orgasm. It also has the effect of breaking associations of sexual arousal with particular types of sex partner, and increases sexual self-esteem.

• 5. Sexual elixirs should be ’cooked’ for a while in the receptive vessel, the ’athanor’, then licked out, in preference to handling; the taste is definitely more interesting and ’alive’ than juices that have been exposed to the air. Obviously, in these days of potentially deadly STD’s, exchange of fluids should be carefully considered.

FURTHER READING

Frater U.D - Secrets of the German Sex Magicians-, pub. Llewellyn, 1991

Aleister Crowley - Uber Agape/De Arte Magica; pub. Kadath, 1986

Crystal Dawn & Stephen Flowers - Carnal Alchemy, pub. Runa-Raven 1995

Peter Redgrove - The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense-, pub. Bloomsbury, 1987

INTERLUDE:

THE CITY AND THE

TUNNELS

Cities are eerie places, profoundly dual-natured. Way back at the start of my magical career, during the craziness that can be brought on by intensive numerology, the numbers I generated brought together the phrases The Shining City and The Tunnels of Set. The image I got was of proud towering spires and skyscrapers, and the sewers and drainage systems above which they are built. The higher the towers are built, the deeper and wider must be the systems that carry away their waste. The cities are lit with electricity, the light of knowledge, light for visibility, for security from attack. This light is produced by the burning of fossil fuels — black oil and black coal from deep in Pluto’s mines... or from plutonium, the jump-gate to other dimensions, a non-terrestrial substance born from our manipulation of other metals in turn created by remote cosmic processes of inconceivable energy, finding its apotheosis in the sterilizing nuclear flash...

Consider the power and freedom of a car, and consider what it leaves behind — tiny flecks of rubber and metal scraped off by the road... oil, the exhaust gases, all washed away by acidified rain into the surface drainage channels... Consider a bright new pen in its disposable bag, and the fibres, plastics and disinfectants that go to the sewage beds and landfills... As one side of the equation - light, newness, freedom — advances, so does the other, the side we’d rather not know about...

The Tunnels are a half-mapped network of sewers beneath the Celestial City, where ontological terrorists move unnoticed from one zone of reality to another... they are wormholes left behind in the construction of the City’s paramount reality,

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wormholes under the surface of orderly appearances, under the surface of time that is marked by clocks... They are accessed through tunnel vision, through the overwhelm of horror... through the vision of the Sunken Ones in the abysses of Time... their journeying feeds the roots of our being in a way the conscious mind can barely grasp at all....

Chapter 4

MAQIC AND PHYSICS

Chaos Magic emerged at the end of an era whose ’grand narrative’ was based on Science and Progress. However, the ’weird science’ narrative of Quantum Mechanics has opened the door to phenomena that would previously have been rejected. Chaos Magic has, from its inception, been coloured by this micro-Aeon of postmodernist science. How much use to the sorcerer is this science?

THE SCIENCE-MAQIC INTERFACE

In the past few decades, mystics and magicians with a theoretical bent have drawn increasingly on the physical sciences for models of their experience. Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu U Masters started the ball rolling by developing the mystical implications of the observerdependent universe; Robert Anton Wilson suggested how quantum physics is compatible with magic in Illuminati Papers. More recendy, Peter J. Carroll has constructed a full-blown

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quantum-based theory of magic, Chaos Magic Theory (in Liber Kaos).

First, some background: The peculiar features of quantum theory are:-

• 7. The wave property of matter and energy. Any object which obeys quantum theory (e.g. a particle such as an electron) can be in more than one place at once. Its position is ’smeared out’ into a probability function, which tells us the probability of finding it at any given place when we measure its position.

• 2. The particle property of energy and matter, when we measure the position of a quantum object, we pin it down, as it were, to a particle-like state — i.e., previous to our measurement, the object wasn’t really anywhere in ordinary space-time; it only had a probabilistic wave nature; after we measure its position, it gets a real position in ordinary space-time. This is called ’collapsing the probabilityfunction ’ or ’collapsing the wavefunction ’. What happens is that our observation causes its properties to manifest.

• 3 The observer-dependent universe-. The fact that our observation creates the particular manifestation of the reality we are observing, as in point (2).

• 4. The quantum jump-, quantum objects have the property of disappearing from one place and reappearing in another without crossing the intervening distance. An electron moving from one orbital in an atom to another does so in this way.

• 5. Indeterminacy: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot measure with arbitrary accuracy the position and the momentum of any quantum object at the same time. The more accurately we measure the position of a particle, the less accurately must we measure its momentum. Position and

Dave Lee momentum are a conjugate pair of variables, and Heisenberg’s equation also shows that there are other conjugate pairs of variables, like energy and time.

• 6. Lion-locality. The collapse of the probability function caused by our observation implies that the observer-dependency is nonlocal in space; this non-locality is further born out by the experiments of Alain Aspect, and John Bell’s interpretation of them. In these experiments it was demonstrated that if two photons are fired out from the same source in opposite directions, and we polarize one of them, the other gets polarized too. Somehow, they remain connected, even thought they are travelling apart at the speed of light.

These features of quantum theory sounded the death-knell of the old monolithic scientific materialism, which was strongly dependent on the notion of an ’objective’ universe out there. The observer-dependency of phenomena makes it very likely that it is the observer consciousness itself that collapses the wavefunction. This makes magic a far more likely option than it was in the Newton-Descartes clockwork universe, in which consciousness was a ’ghost in the machine’. Magic-friendliness is increased by non-locality too: if objects that have been in contact with each other remain in contact non-locally, then we have a kind of magical link.

Pete Carroll makes use of these features and others in his Chaos Magic Theory (CMT). He also makes some quantumbased predictions about magical reality. For instance, CMT states that the information about an event or object only continues to be emitted as long as that event or object continues to exist. There are no echoes of an event surviving into its future, no Akashic Records.

A profounder feature of the emerging quantum metaphysics is that its proponents takes seriously the peculiar quantity called the wavefunction. One of the pioneers of quantum theory, Erwin

Schrodinger, devised a mathematical description of waves around an atom — the Schrodinger equation — which defined mathematically the wavefunction. This quantity is turned into the probability-function by squaring it. The probability function is the quantity that enables us to calculate the probable positions of electron orbitals around atoms. Its square root, the wavefunction, has previously been considered to have no physical reality, even though it is the basis of the equation; most physicists and chemists are accustomed to regarding it as a mere mathematical convenience with no physical or metaphysical counterpart. More recendy, both Carroll and the physicist Amit Goswami (in The Self-Aware Universe) have postulated that the wavefunction does have a reality. Goswami develops a theory of idealist metaphysics in which the underlying reality is seen as a non-local mind that collapses the wave. He regards the probability waves aspotentia, possible states of a physical system existing in a kind of metaphysical Platonic realm. He writes:

... monistic idealism takes off from where the Copenhagen interpretation becomes fuzzy; it declares explicitly that the quantum waves.. .are real but exist in a transcendent domain that is beyond and in addition to material reality.

I propose that the universe exists as formless potentia in myriad possible branches in the transcendent domain and becomes manifest only when observed by conscious beings.

This is clearly similar to Jung’s position on synchronicity, familiar ground to most magicians:-

Synchronistic phenomena prove the simultaneous occurrence of meaningful equivalences in.. .causally

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unrelated processes; in other words, they prove that a content perceived by an observer can, at the same time, be represented by an outside event, without any causal connection. From this it follows either that the psyche cannot be localized in time, or that space is relative to the psyche.

Carroll develops the notion of wavefunctions as metaphysical-magical realities:-

The CMT paradigm states that the wave functions are actually a mathematical description of etheric patterns and that this ether can be considered as a form of information exchange between material events...

.. .quantum wave functions do not direcdy describe the actual behaviour of classical... events. They describe the probabilistic effects of ether patterns, which can be considered as a kind of shadow substance, upon the progress of material events.

- Liber Kaos

The spirit-matter dualism is rejected by both Goswami and Car roll. Car roll writes of :

...that chaos from which matter and ether coevolve...Matter and ether are just two of the properties that the ever-mysterious stuff of the universe exhibits to our perception - ibid.

Returning to Jung, we find the same conclusion:

.. .it is not only possible, but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing.

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There seems to be a consensus emerging that ideas based in dualism, as well as in materialist monism, are hopelessly flawed, and that quantum physics needs taking seriously as a theory that embraces the experiences of both matter and consciousness.

THE PHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The quantum-based magical theories propounded so far all relate to the universe at large, and say virtually nothing about the physics of consciousness. The physical nature of the processes which link the events in consciousness with the events in the “outer” world has never been precisely identified; the schism has remained from Cartesian dualism, a link missing, a gulf between consciousness and matter. The observer/actor has been integrated into the equations, but as an unknown, a black box, a fiddle factor; none of the current theories of consciousness are at all satisfactory with regard to a link between magic and physics.

How do we get from the quantum macrocosm to the microcosm of neural processes in our skulls? On the one hand we have a universe well suited to magic: information is delocalized in space, making the basic acts of divination and enchantment possible. On the other, we have a kilo or so of warm, wet micro-circuitry which science has told us is limited in its effects to the (partial) control of a few dozen kilos of assorted tissues. The two halves of the process do not match; the nervous system seems simply too classical in its physics to be doing anything interesting to Our Lady of the Quantum Vacuum. Our physical image of consciousness is arrested at the level of the soft machine. The phrase implies mechanical causality, an essentially 19th century notion. This mechanistic image comes readily to mind when one considers the model of consciousness as epiphenomena of events in neural wiring layouts.

This model of circuits, this disentangled subway map of

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the brain’s electrical pathways, seeks to contain the phenomena of consciousness. The circuitry model is analogous to switching and memory retrieval systems in computers, but it does not provide a convincing picture of what it is that is doing the retrieving and decision making. So what criteria would a magical quantum theory of consciousness satisfy?

1. Identity, or at least convincing similarity of type, between the physics of the stuff “in here”, in the body mind, and the stuff “out there” in the universe that surrounds it.

2. Subjective credibility, to the extent that the theory collapses the mind/matter dualism. As long as physics leaves credibility gaps which do not satisfy the subjective dimensions of consciousness, transcendentalist theories will fill them.

The theory should also generate new magical perspectives.

CONSCIOUSNESS AS A LARQE-SCALE QUANTUM STATE

To apply the principles of quantum mechanics to the neurosciences requires that structures susceptible to quantum effects be found in nervous tissue, and that these structures be capable of generating large-scale quantum effects. The most likely candidates for the job are microtubules, which are cylindrical protein polymers found inside cells, including neural tissue, in which they play a part in regulating the synapses of the neuron. Thus the neuron is seen more like a tiny computer than merely an on/off component in a larger one.

The microtubules are highly ordered, like crystals, which makes them susceptible to quantum effects, including nonlocality. Structures which can generate long-range ordering are said to have phase coherence, and are known as condensed phase structures. Examples of condensed phase systems are: lasers, within which all the photons are in phase, magnetised materials,

where all the magnetic domains are polarized in the same direction, supe fluids and superconductors. The special properties of all these systems are due to their condensed phase. These examples have some degree of phase coherence (the ability to generate long-scale effects), but the most ordered form of condensed phase, known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, is believed to be present in microtubules.

The non-locality of quantum effects means that neurons distributed over the entire brain can be in exactly the same state, coordinating the whole activity of the brain, and thereby giving us a physical basis for the unitary sensation of consciousness at any given moment.

The theory of consciousness as a Bose-Einstein condensate was originated by Dana Zohar in The Quantum Self. The distinguishing feature of a Bose-Einstein condensate is its extreme coherence. Zohar says:

the many parts which go to make up an ordered system not only behave as a whole, but they become whole — their identities merge or overlap in such a way that they lose their individuality entirely .

-TheQuantum Self

The author of that paragraph is not being excessively mystical by the standards of quantum mechanics; she is describing the familiar notion of the indistinguishability of overlapping electron states, identical wavefunctions.

We have here the basis of our consciousness model: Consciousness is the subjective experience of this coherent system, of a sizeable chunk of quantum coherence in neural tissue. There is increasing physical evidence for quantum coherence in the brain: meditation researchers have studied brain waves from different brain areas, looking for phase coherence. The similarities in brain waves in different parts of the skull were found to exist, and this work has been confirmed

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by other researchers. What is more:-

the degree of coherence is found to be directly proportional to the degree of pure awareness that the meditator reports

- Goswami, reporting the work of Orme-Johnson and Hayes, 1981

The passage of electrical currents within neuronal circuits — the classical brain-mind — is no doubt connected with the phenomena of memory storage and retrieval, but the experience of actually being conscious, with all the non-local, quantum properties of consciousness is mediated by the brain from a macroscopic quantum coherence, a Bose-Einstein condensate. So the brain may be operating a two-tier system: the ’quantum mind’ gives a physical underpinning to mystical experiences, the experience of the ’higher neural Circuits’, and to the experiences of magical gnosis; the ’classical mind’ describes the experiences of memory, personal history and therefore personal identity.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE THEORY

The Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) theory actually predicts a similarity between the behaviour of fundamental wave/ particles and that of brains — because the one is rooted in the other. The way human consciousness physically works is a more complex version of the way things like photons and electrons behave, things we don’t generally consider conscious (unless we’ve been overdoing the sacraments). Zohar suggests that the process of making decisions actually works like the collapsing of the wavefunction into a single value — a particular thought or state of mind. Thus the wave/particle complementarity of quantum physics has analogies with consciousness states. We could say that the “wave-like” state of consciousness is the condition before a decision is made,

various “virtual realities” or alternative possibilities existing in the mind. The mind has a “wave-like” openness to possibilities. Making the decision collapses all these virtual realities except one, and the mind becomes singular, and “particle-like”. What is more, the achievement of that particle-like singular state corresponds precisely to the observer who does the collapsing of the wave function when a measurement is made. The ’classical mind’ is the measurer, the observer, in quantum physics experiments.

So, does the BEC model satisfy our criteria?

1. It restores the identity in kind between the stuff in our skulls and the fertile chaos of the quantum macrocosm. The BEC of the human mind has the ability to collapse the wavefunctions of potential realities in the universe, because that is the way it operates upon itself. Our consciousness is seen as a property of overlapping bosons. Bosons are the particles of connection and coherence between phenomena — photons, gluons, gravitons and other more exotic particles. Zohar suggests that this overlapping of bosons into states of greater complexity and coherence is at the root of the evolution which produced our consciousness. “As above, so below” is reinstated.

2. In terms of subjective experience of consciousness, the theory is very attractive, because of the concept of thoughts as quite large patterns of waves in an even larger substrate. I’ve never been at all comfortable with the idea that thoughts are microscopic electrical impulses travelling round in the “wiring” of neurons and synapses. Consciousness simply doesn’t feel like that. To adopt an off-the-peg concept from yoga, careful introspection has at times revealed a sense of the mind stuff, chittam, the basic background “field” out of which everything else in the realm of mind is shaped. This begs to be identified with the ’quantum mind’. Experience of the quantum

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mind begins at the 5^th Circuit, and reaches its fullest extent in the 8^,h.

In general, this model makes our magical models work better. It is simpler to understand how divination and enchantment can operate when we consider the quantum nature both of the mind and of the rest of the universe. Two examples of magical thinking using this theory are:

1. CONSCIOUSNESS OVERLAP

What would it be like if human consciousnesses could literally, physically overlap? Maybe this happens in ecstatic sex. Maybe it also happens in group magical work. Goswami claims that there are no individual quantum minds in any case — just the one, unitary consciousness, and that individuality is generated by the ’classical mind’. The formation of a group mind or egregore would be modeled as the awareness of the quantum mind within a group, and a downloading into ’classical’ divided consciousness of that collective process. Clearly, the key to this event would be intense sympathy of purpose, a degree of motivational intimacy predicated upon a trust strong enough to allow extreme abandonment of self at the gnostic peak. The resultant “egregore wavefunction” is formed at the limits of our concept of self, where the fear of dissolution which held us back from intensity is itself added as fuel to the fire. Something like this is sometimes noted in highly successful ritual work.

Such ecstasis should correspond to an extraordinary gnostic state, even if we still consider the gnosis from the point of view of the individual wizard in the group. An alternative possibility is to consider the gnosis from the viewpoint of the egregore itself: that it is the collective awareness of the quantum consciousness that is actually doing the magic. The consequences of such a paradigm shift are difficult to evaluate at present, largely because of our poor knowledge of the nature of egregore formation. Research into the detailed kinetics and

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cybernetics of these processes is still in its infancy.

2. THE PHYSICS OF EVOCATION

In evocation, we begin the formation of servitors by imagining a sub-personality, a mere set of automatic mechanisms with a job. The first stage, of making decisions about the servitor’s function and structure, would correspond to the collapsing of all the potential forms under consideration into a single idea in the classical mind. The next stage — that of externalizing or launching the servitor — presents interesting challenges to any materialistic theory of magic. Cybernetically speaking, a servitor is a package of information. If we accept the CMT view that information is local in time, and only persists whilst something physical emits it, this leaves us with the problem that for a servitor to continue to act, it must be attached to, or rather emitted by, some material base, which could include the human brain. Three models of servitor launching are considered here:

• 1. The servitor’s base is located in the human brain. Instructions are embedded in the brain, unconsciously present until the external conditions trigger the servitor to run its program. This is probably the simplest model for the talisman or amulet type of servitor, which exists to protect the wearer, or to take advantages of opportunities to perform its function. It is possible that the instructions are only emitted when the sorcerer looks at his talisman, or alternatively, that a “loop” of instructions plays constantly or intermittently in the subconscious recesses of the sorcerer’s brain. On this model, a multi-purpose servitor without an external physical base would correspond to a resource of power with a flexible programming facility located in the magician’s brain. Such a servitor could be seen as a kind of tame elemental on the inner levels, or, in a more reductionist paradigm, as a kind of sleight of mind which is performed to give the wizard “permission” to launch what amounts to a new servitor at a moment’s notice.

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This is essentially a ’classical mind’ model, up to the point when the servitor runs its program. Then it collapses some wavefunction in the world corresponding to the willed outcome.

• 2. The servitor’s base is in an external physical phenomenon. Such a phenomenon would be required to process energy independently in order to keep itself coherent. It would also have to have the property of being able to contain and carry out all of its instructions without the intermediary of the human BEC. The first of these conditions indicates that the launch would consist of the generation of a localized, coherent pattern of energy. The entity in this paradigm would be seen as a kind of self sustaining dissipative system in the sense that Ilya Prigogine writes about. (For some fascinating speculation on this type of structure I am indebted to “Chaos Invocation” by Charles Brewster). Examples in everyday life would be a smoke ring, or a vortex in your bathwater. Such entities consist of systems that maintain their coherence within larger chaotic systems by taking in energy and patterning it in accordance with their existing pattern. The entity seen as a dissipative structure actually takes energy in and lets it out again, in such a way that it sustains its cybernetic integrity.

• 3. There are no such things as servitors. On this model, we reduce all “servitor” activity to the action of various spells residing in the magician’s mind. The theory of servitor action is identical to that of sigil action: the information for doing the task is located in and emitted from some subset of the wizard’s neural wiring, ’classical mind’. The magician comes to believe that the same spell can be triggered again and again without the repetition of the enchantment procedure. It is performed simply by having a word with the relevant “entity”. Again, sleight of mind has given the magician permission to believe in a short cut. This is a ’classical mind’ model to the same extent as (1).

This third theory is destructive of the subjective experience of evocation at the levels of sorcery, ritual magic and shamanism. In these paradigms, you actually talk to the entity, and treat it as an independent consciousness. The servitor paradigm is of far too much practical use to magicians to collapse it summarily into another paradigm which is in itself only partly understood. This is an example of the danger of reductionism in vitiating useful magical ideas.

Theory 2 is attractive; the notion that such an entity could perform its function without the human sorcerer actually projecting the information is an interesting one. According to CMT, a sigil scribed on a piece of leather will emit information about its shape and materials only, not about its purpose. Its function, the information it requires to do its job, exists in and is emitted by the sorcerer’s brain alone. For the dissipative system to fit our theory, all the information required for the job in hand would have to be physically encoded in the energy patterns of the system itself. Such an entity would probably have to be a lot more complex than a smoke ring to contain sufficient bits of information for the average spell. There is litde evidence at present for the independent physical existence of dissipative systems sufficiently complex to do spells automatically. Furthermore, could such an entity have the ability to collapse wavefunctions in the world? It would need to have a quantum mind-type of nature as well as its ’classical’ structure.

The first theory suffers from neither of these drawbacks, but is not necessarily to be preferred over Theory 2 solely for that reason. Further developments in physics will no doubt give us more information on what dissipative systems in magic might be like, and whether they would be capable of quantum mind-like action.

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CONCLUSION: SORCERY METAPHYSICS AND SCIENCE

In our current scientific mythos, we can confidently identify non-local consciousness as:

• * The ’quantum mind’ that collapses wavefunctions by making observations on them, giving rise to the ’classical’ universe of ordinary sense-perception;

• * The ’greater mind’ that actually makes magic possible, and is the source of psychic effects such as telepathy;

• ♦ The physical basis of all gnosis, especially:-

• ♦ the transpersonal ecstasy of the core mystical experience, in which identification with the ’classical mind’ ceases; this feature is dealt with in Chapter 7.

As research progresses in this area, we shall see how well the model continues to fit. But we also need to consider how useful scientific models are to magicians in any case.

Chaos Magic has always had at its core a profound respect for technical excellence in sorcery, and a profound impatience with metaphysics. When assessing a belief, the criterion is (or should be): Does it help the magic work? Sorcery should thus be absolutely ruthless with metaphysics: what matters is not how consistent the belief is with the rest of one’s beliefs, but whether one can believe it long enough to do the sorcery. For instance, to deny pseudosciences such as astrology adds absolutely nothing to sorcery, so why do it? I am reminded of the old joke at the expense of theoretical physics: confronted with an astonishing experiment, the theoretician says: That’s all very well in practice, but how would it work in theory....?

This position can add only to some kind of Grand Narrative; in this instance, the religion aspect of Science. We are not

assisted in any way in our magic by the rejection of non-scientistic belief modes, unless this position has an agenda of a return to Science as a religion, the Religion of the 4^th Aeon. In that case, such a belief will help us only if we cannot move outside of a single-model approach, a profoundly Modernist limitation.

There is of course nothing ’wrong’ or reprehensible in using Scientism as the sole metaphysical basis for your magic, but such an approach is not really saleable as Chaos Magic, unless it admits that this position is a purely personal self-restriction of belief. In other words, the very fact that there are successful magicians out there using all sorts of exotic or goofy belief systems to make their sorcery work just fine, in itself invalidates such spurious universalism. Only to believe in magic if it is backed up theoretically by the present state of physics is fine, but it has the same lack of universal validity in the Chaos Magic metaparadigm as a Rabbinical wizard claiming that Qabalah is the one and only true system of magic. Are everyone’s beliefs, ecstasies and hopes to be found enciphered in the mathematical cryptographies of advanced physics? I doubt it, and to say that they are restricts the growth and development of the Chaos Magic current. In any case, totally tidy theoretical closure is probably impossible, and almost certainly inadvisable. After all, great sorcery, like great sex, is often messy.

Every era has its scientific-occult metaphors. Whether we talk of ’vibrations’ the ’aether’, or quantum indeterminacy, what matters is the power of the metaphor to facilitate magic. Magicians are at their most effective when utilizing the paradigm that works best for their own sleight of mind. Sorcerers with a scientific background are likely to get the ’Wow! Effect’ from such speculations; others will miss the Wow! and therefore view the insights of the model as being over-valued. That is precisely how useful scientific theory is for us as sorcerers.

FURTHER READING

Charles Brewster - Chaos Invocation, Nuitlsis magazine, issue 9.

Dave Eee

Rupert Sheldrake - A New Science of Lafe', pub. Paladin, 1983.

Danah Zohar - The Quantum Self, pub. Fontana 1991.

Amit Goswami - The Self-Aware Universe-, pub. Simon & Schuster, 1993.

Stuart Hameroff - Quantum Coherence in Microtubules: A Neural Basis for Emergent Consciousness?; Journal of Consciousness Studies, 1, No. 1, Summer 1994

INTERLUDE: COHERENT

SYSTEMS AND

LANDSCAPE VISIONS

A theory of some magical significance has taken shape out of sight of most magicians, in the field of earth mysteries. Over 10 years ago Paul Devereux, editor of The Ley Hunter earth mysteries journal, proposed the Earthlights theory of UFO encounters. According to this theory, certain spots on the earth near fault lines emit a kind of glowing plasma under tectonic stress. This plasma rises up into the air, moves around, and people mistake it for various flying objects. Small and short lived volumes of plasma have been produced under laboratory conditions, using enormous pressures on granitic rocks to imitate the effects of plate movement.

When it is experienced from a distance, the earthlight plasma is seen as an unexplained light in the sky, and the mind will naturally fly to find some acceptable explanation to fit the experience into. So far, so good. However, the earthlight theory goes further, and considers the plasma, when encountered at close quarters, to have an effect on human consciousness rather similar to psychedelic drugs. Those who get too near to an earthlight appear to lose conscious memory of the event and hallucinate an entire production out of their own dream time. They might experience abduction by aliens, or, for that matter, the Blessed Virgin Mary. This effect has been called the Oz Factor by earthlights researcher Jenny Randles. There has not yet been proposed an entirely adequate mechanism for the earthlight’s effect on the mind.

The BEC model, together with the notion of the selfsustaining dissipative energy system (the bathtub vortex), gives us some interesting ideas. Let us assume that the earthlight is a

short-lived dissipative system. It may have a high degree of coherence within it, it may be a condensed phase of some kind. When the human BEC enters the earthlight, the human consciousness is completely embedded in something larger, and loses its boundaries. The very physics of the situation would predict this.

It is not surprising that the result is a profoundly altered state of consciousness. Like a swimmer in a whirlpool, you are immersed inside the body of something which may have no intelligence, but which processes much more energy. Your own imagination supplies patterns from your depths, the earthlight’s effect on your BEC amplifies these, and you enter a different reality that is completely convincing.

It is worth considering whether some large-scale structures, both natural landscape features and landscape artefacts such as stone rows and circles, are able to generate short lived coherent structures. Perhaps a particular arrangement of materials will, at a particular time of day, receive just the right electromagnetic input from the sun to form a condensed phase sufficiently similar to human BEC’s to produce the mystical exaltation or psychic oppression associated with some landscape features. The details of the process, the content of the visions, emerge from the individual’s imagination, but they do so under the enveloping physical influence of a surrounding coherent structure which is not human. It is not necessary to postulate a “high physics” level of cultural development to attribute physical effectiveness to megaliths; their builders were no doubt operating under different paradigms, but nevertheless working with the same physical effects.

As in the case of the earthlight, the human consciousness, the human BEC, is embedded in something probably less complex but much larger. The earthlight or other cybernetically coherent energy processing structure is, in a sense, made of similar stuff to our own consciousness. In this case, it is not too difficult to see how the one could affect the other.

Chapter 5

BODY ALCHEMY AND HEALINQ

ARQUMENTS FOR MAQICAL HEALINQ How effective is conventional, reductionist medicine? One problem is that very few people actually subscribe instinctively to its paradigm, other than as an automatic response to the authority of doctors. Another is that it is simply powerless in too many situations. For instance, the increasingly frequent appearance of ’new’ diseases is guaranteed by two factors: the increased mobility of populations and individuals worldwide, and the size of the human population itself. The first means that pathogens that used to kill off a few people in a particular village now get to other communities before the original epidemic runs out of victims. Viruses are spread around the world as fast as a plane flight. The second factor operates because, in order for a new microorganism to emerge, it needs to breed through its victim. The more victims, the more individual viruses. The more viruses, the more chance of lethal new mutations. There is a deal of evidence that new diseases are continually emerging; Ebola disease is considered to be an

Dave Dee example of a ’young’ disease, because it kills its victims so rapidly. If it were an older, more ’experienced’ gene sequence, it would let them live longer so it could reproduce more. These examples concern illnesses which are the result of infection; the argument is even stronger when applied to the majority of sicknesses, which are generated by the patient.

The inability of conventional medicine to control disease is getting more and more obvious. Modern surgery is truly amazing, but when it comes to fighting pathogens or adjusting metabolic disorders, the illusion of boundless progress is cracking. 20^th century drug medicine has had some great triumphs, but will probably be regarded in a few decades with the same astonishment with which we now regard mediaeval medical techniques. Basically, Western medicine took the wrong turning when it increasingly came to rely on drugs, and the companies that develop and push them. It’s an easy way out, take a pill, and in most instances the good that comes of it is probably a placebo effect, a faith healing polarized by the victim’s unthinking worship of the doctor’s glamour. What we now see as magical healing is almost certain to form the next phase of mainstream medicine, as the failures and distortions of the latter become all too apparent.

Sorcerers in any case will want to develop magical healing, both to add an important string to their bow, and also to repair themselves from contact with the dizzying spaces of Pandaemonaeon magics. Magicians may be vulnerable to what is sometimes known as Gnostic Burnout — if you give a lot to your magics, you may get exhausted & disorientated. After all, in the case of the shaman, such an individual is often identified by the fact that he or she suffers a serious illness, and heals herself. Then, of course, one of her main roles as shaman becomes that of the community’s healer.

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PSYCHOSOMATIC MEDICINE AND THE HEALINQ TRANCE

Psychosomatic healing is central to all forms of medicine; even conventional medicine admits to the existence of the Placebo Effect. In a more traditional context, there is also the importance of the doctor’s ’bedside manner’, in other words the bag of psychological tricks the doctor uses to help trick the patient into healing himself, which is all that any kind of healer can ever achieve. If an individual is resistant to health because of their own internal mental processes, then the most sophisticated physical medicine in the world will not make a jot of difference.

On the other hand, a positive attitude to healing can produce apparendy miraculous cures. The fact that diseases classed by doctors as incurable are often cured illustrates that most people’s confidence in their self-healing powers is far below what it need be.

We are all conditioned by the reductionist paradigm of medicine to doubt these universal abilities, lowering our own expectations of health. A magician will strive in this area, as in all others, to reject such negative programming and take control of his own health.

The human nervous system is probably the only one on this planet that is conscious of the process of its own ageing, for instance. This is often seen as a tragedy, that we are aware of moving inexorably towards a gaping abyss of decrepitude, senility and death. To turn this property of our consciousness around, it also appears that we possess the only nervous system capable of direcdy altering the processes of our bodies by conscious action, which is to say magical healing.

Whilst we are conditioned to believe that certain stages of decrepitude occur at particular ages of life, this is not necessarily the case. We do not know what the maximum human lifespan is — we merely make the usual assumptions because everyone else does. Whatever is inevitable about the ageing process will

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only be revealed when the old beliefs about ageing are finally overcome.

The core principle here is that the body, at any point in time, is the end product of all one’s beliefs and intentions. We are continually making and unmaking our bodies.

The process of changing the body’s physical state of health can be instantaneous: workers in the field of so-called Multiple Personality Disorder have noted that, when the personality changes, a variety of physical effects can occur immediately. These include eye colour change, marks on the skin appearing or disappearing, and even chronic illnesses such as high blood pressure and diabetes halting or resuming; it appears that the disease in question was a property of the personality, not the body in which it expressed itself.

What then is the basis of psychosomatic healing? Leary refers to the 5^th Circuit as ’Neurosomatic’ — his re-working of the word ’psychosomatic’ — and attributes body-mind-bliss to it. This bliss is the basis of all healing; primitive belieftechnologies such as faith healing and Christian Science derive whatever effectiveness they possess from this trance, and sorcerers and shamans the world over utilize it on an almost-daily basis.

The 5^th Circuit trance is characterized by the following features:-

1. A sense of being suspended away from the problems and urgencies of ordinary existence;

2. A feeling of pleasure that is not dependent on sensory stimulation (although it may be enhanced by it).

The following effects are typical of what can be referred to as the healing trance itself:

i. A reduction in the internal monologue. This is the beginning of deeper levels of trance: the experience of doing hands-on (or hands-near) magical healing is often accompanied by a cessation of the ego’s babbling, and a sense of direct connection

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with the task at hand. Intuition is one’s guide as to what action to take; some healers experience this as channeling

ii. A sense that the flesh has become ’light’, or ’filled with light’, or ’suspended in light’, or even that the flesh is no longer ’solid’, but ’fluid’, mutable, even immortal. The body as process, rather than ’frozen sculpture’.

The latter sensation is at the root of some forms of esoteric ’aura’ models. In these, the body’s cells and organs are viewed as being suspended in a matrix of subde structure, of ’etheric patterns’. Whilst literal belief in such a model is in no way necessary in using the experience of the trance itself for healing magic, there is increasing evidence for some form of field around and within biological organisms that is generated by the organism itself and which functions as a long-range structuring device. Such a model may be provided by a hypothesis called bioholography.

THE BIOHOLOQRAPHY CONCEPT

This idea was developed from the work of Stanley Krippner by Miller, Webb and Dickson in the paper A Holographic Concept of Reality. This thesis makes use of the facts that all biological molecules and cells possess spatially-oriented electric charges and magnetic fields, and that tissue and organ integrity can be influenced both positively and negatively by applied magnetic or electric fields. Healing of ’awkward’ fractures by magnetic fields which influence the piezoelectric growth strategies of bone is one use of this effect. Tissue regeneration appears to be accompanied by electrical currents in the injured zone that cause the local cells to de-differentiate and then re-differentiate into the cells required to re-create the lost part.

The authors go further, and postulate that the integrity of the organism is actually held together by a holographic field, interpenetrating the cells and organs of the body:

.. .it can be suggested that the field phenomena

...are in fact more real, if that term can be used, than the particulate matter .. .of which we have been speaking... The structural configurations themselves or the geometry of the fields and the particles are more fundamental than either the fields or the particles... Human beings are better seen as .. .dynamic, shifting, changing field entities (or field patterns) that serve as a matrix for the flow-through of biological substances....

This field is always there, but always changing. It senses the electromagnetic environment, and adjusts itself accordingly. Fluctuations in the local electromagnetic field indicate the presence of other creatures, objects and so forth. In other words, the electro-magnetic field of an organism provides it with another sense mode. This dark sense is below the conscious level of awareness most of the time; however, it is possible to train oneself to sense it, once it has been experienced.

Try walking round a darkened room with eyes closed and ears covered (to prevent ’echo-location’ effects), and open them when you feel a ’strange’ sensation in your body. You may well find that you were about to bump into something. As with other dark senses, when you learn to trust your perceptions, the sense begins to become more acute. The sensing of weather-changes by many creatures, including humans, is certainly dependant, at least in part, on this sense. Sensitivity to sunspots and lunar cycles may also be connected.

It may be that this field is generated by the DNA, radiating out its pattern to the macroscopic body. It has been suggested that this field is mainly produced by the DNA of the brain in particular. It used to be thought that the brain’s DNA was virtually inactive; this is now considered to be far from the case. This, of course, implies a link with the individual’s neurological state, and, to make a further leap, his degree of

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5^th Circuit consciousness, because this is the trance in which the sensations of the body really come into their own, without being filtered down into the mere trickle of sensations required for survival.

The holographic field, as a sensitive energy system which has a moment-to-moment structuring effect on the cells of the body, fits our requirements for a physical basis of magical healing.

BODY ALCHEMY

Body Alchemy involves all the overlaps of the physical and mental/emotional levels. It concerns bending the ’rules’ (which are just habits anyway) of biology to your advantage. It can be defined as the practice of changing the body’s condition by magical means — i.e. the generation of physical states which either conventional biology would regard as impossible, or ’normal’ states generated by means not admitted to by conventional biology. Its practical disciplines include:

The consumption of magical elixirs-. The magical consecration of food and drink, are often neglected by sophisticated magicians, but these technologies can be extremely powerful. Wholeness, energization, clarity, personal power are obvious examples of magical intentions one might want to infuse into one’s food intake. It is well worth experimenting with this type of consecration every day for a week, and see what difference it makes. Before eating or drinking, concentrate upon your food/ drink. Draw a sigil that represents your intention over the food. This is a form of positive feedback, the newly-energized mind forming an even better elixir the next time. The long-term effect is to replace negative attitudes to body alchemy with positive ones. Most magicians, even experienced ones, are astonished by what can be achieved with this simple technique.

Elixirs of sexualfluids are covered in the Sex chapter from the

point of view of sexual wizardry. An elixir practice related to self-healing and self-transformation is to focus on one’s intention whilst masturbating, then to consume the elixir formed. This is a kind of Ourobouros loop, bootstrapping the body-mind complex using sexual energy, and is especially powerful because of the delicious vacuity and imprintvulnerability of the post-orgasmic state.

Chemognostic sacraments are another area of elixir work. Anyone who has ever taken any kind of psychoactive drug, including alcohol, knows that its effects are: a) learned in the first place, and b) almost totally dependent on the state one is in when consuming it. At the most powerful and subtle end of drugs -the psychedelics — there is a recognition amongst all experimenters of the vital importance of ’set’ (condition of mind and expectations) and ’setting’ (environment). This effect is incredibly obvious with psychedelics, but is still relevant even with drugs like alcohol. How often have you had a completely unpredictable, maybe disappointing, result from alcohol consumption? Clearly, the body is doing different things at different times to the booze that you put into it, giving you a different subjective experience. Experiments on students some years ago illustrated that tranquilizing drugs can have stimulant effects if the subject believes that he has been given a stimulant, and vice versa. Psychoactive effects can sometimes be generated using sacraments that have little or no drug in them.

Negative Elixirs: All the above principles apply equally to the production of elixirs that cause depression and sickness. The simplest example is of persistently negative attitudes to whatever one consumes, leading to a cycle of alienation from the signals of the body-mind complex, and the production of further negative potions. All chronic sickness has an element of this effect.

Dance and movement gnosis: As Wilhelm Reich pointed out, the energy of the body is often locked into muscular tensions,

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’body armour’. This energy is unavailable for use by us, and produces a blockage of emotional response, which eventually leads to physical illness. Movement meditation such as t’ai chi, dancing and shaking can all help loosen up and redirect this energy. As a gnostic technique for self-healing or as a preparation for healing another, shaking is particularly appropriate. The technique is simple:

• * Stand with feet about shoulder-width apart, breathe evenly, and begin to loosen up.

• * When you are feeling relaxed, begin to shake the hands gendy. Let this movement spread up the arms, to the shoulders (which roll rather than shake)...

• * Begin to shake the legs, letting the movement spread to the hips and buttocks. Let the shaking extend to the whole body except the head, which should be light, at ease, as if suspended by a thread from above. Do not jerk the neck around — gentle rolling is the most that should be done.

• * When the shaking movement has spread over most of the body, you will cease to notice certain parts of your body at a time, and these will become relatively still. Pay attention to the breath, keeping it deep and relaxed.

• * After a while of practicing this movement, you should feel rushes of pleasure with the breath, and a pleasant sense of heat and looseness in the body. At this stage, the exercise can go free-form, allowing your body to move in an uncensored way, allowing your breath to come in great whoops or shudders. * Begin to become aware of the body energy, if you are not already. Experiment with moving energy around; feel it in the hands, in the lower belly, in the feet. Bring it back to the centre in the lower belly after moving it around. 15-20 minutes of this exercise will generate some shift of consciousness; it can be performed for an hour or two at a time if desired.

• * If the exercise is for self-healing, begin to concentrate on the part of your body you wish to heal. Move energy to it, and

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think of the positive outcome you want.

• • If the exercise is a preliminary to healing someone else, let the energy move to your hands, and proceed.

The use of pranayama: Any magical training system worth anything teaches some pranayama. The student learns that modulating the flow of breath can be used to:

• * temporarily increase physical energy;

• * clarify the mind to the extent that thought vigilance becomes possible;

• * through hyperventilation, generate a short-lived state of intensity of emotional and physical sensations that can be used for a minor gnosis;

• ♦ reduce or increase the intensity of emotion;

Beginners in pranayama, following a basic course of magical training, are unlikely to encounter the most powerful aspects of breath technology. Pranayama generates a state of consciousness which is perceived as the junction between the awareness of body and the awareness of mind. In the context of healing, prolonged, relaxed breathing, combined with some simple cognitive elements, can be used to integrate troublesome, uncomfortable and painful emotions and sensation into fullblown 5^th Circuit bliss. This type of technique was rediscovered by Leonard Orr in the 1970s. He associated it with the restimulation of birth trauma memories, and called it rebirthing. This is a somewhat limiting term, because the effects of this technique do not necessarily include birth memories, or any kind of trauma at all, in fact. His students Jim Leonard and Phil Laut reinvented the whole process and called it vivation. While this is a clumsy neologism, it de-couples the technique from the loaded linguistics of ’rebirthing’. Laut and Leonard emphasized instead the ecstatic features of the experience, rather than programming their students for trauma and

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’breakthrough’. As far as they were concerned, what matters is not that people break through traumas, but that they achieve bliss.

A similar type of breath technology was devised by Stanislav Grof, the brilliant researcher on psychedelic healing. When it became illegal to use psychedelic drugs in his practice, Grof developed what he called holotropic breathing, in order to be able to get his clients into 5^th Circuit consciousness and do the healing with them. In general, all of these 5^th Circuit breath technologies are referred to as connected breathing. All of the versions of have a number of points in common. In summary, the techniques amount to:-

• 1. Connected breathing: Breathe without pause or lock; as soon as an inbreath is complete, you begin an outbreath. As soon as an outbreath is complete, begin the inbreath. Remember to relax the exhale: the difference between hyperventilation and connected breathing is that the former has a tense outbreath, and is not supportable for very long.

• 2. Complete relaxation: Keep on relaxing the body. Muscles will tense up as thoughts and feelings sweep through you; this is fine, but as soon as you notice a tension, relax it. Pay attention particularly to the facial muscles.

• 3. Attention to what is happening in the body: as soon as you relax and breathe, you will notice a whole range of shifting sensations in the body. Pay attention to the fine detail in these sensations.

• 4. Reframe the emotions you get so that you experience them as bliss: This is the most difficult part of the process to describe. Understanding of this procedure depends on viewing emotions rather differently from usual. Basically, emotions have a kinaesthetic component and a cognitive component. In other words, what we experience as an emotion is in fact a physical

Dave Dee sensation, a kinaesthesia, a bodily experience. This has attached to it an habitual interpretation, a label we place on the sensation. The trick is to experience the kinaesthetic aspect of the emotion — which is easy when you are doing intense breathing — whilst detaching from the internal monologue’s commentary on the sensation. This frees up the sensation to be reframed as something pleasurable. For instance, an obvious example of this is the emotions of fear and exhilaration: they are both the product of adrenalin coursing through the bloodstream, but with different cognitive constructs and expectations. The concentration on bodily sensation that the breath technique brings about enables you to ignore the usual internal monologue that comes up when you decide that you are feeling fear, and reframe it as excitement. Other emotions are not quite so simple to reframe, and this is where coaching from an experienced ’breather’ helps enormously.

• 5. Don’t worry about whether you are doing it right. The worst that can happen is that it takes you longer to achieve bliss than you expected. Not all sessions end in complete satisfaction, and it doesn’t matter.

Two simple practices for connected breathing are: i. ’20 breaths’: Just do twenty connected breaths, as follows: 4 short breaths, one long, deep breath. Repeat 4 times.

ii. Three types of breathing: Considering that there are two main parameters for breath — speed and depth — gives us four types of breath. Slow, shallow breathing induces sleep, so it is not used. Fast, shallow breath is useful for reducing the intensity of emotion and physical sensation whilst staying alert. The extreme form of this is panting. Fast, deep breathing increases physical sensation, brings you back ’into your body’ if you have been doing a lot of internal monologue. Slow deep breathing is pleasure breathing, breathing for full enjoyment of all sensation. Try each kind, remembering to relax the outbreath.

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These breath types are all you need to modulate feelings to the level you want them during a full session.

If you decide you want to master this type of breath technology, it is best to do your first few full sessions (these tend to be at least one hour) under the guidance of a breathwork professional. This coaching will help you maintain your momentum and get rapid results.

This technique has been approached as an individual, selfhealing technique. However, once you are skilled in achieving 5^th Circuit trance by these methods, you can apply it to healing others.

SUMMARY OF HEALING TECHNIQUES

Thinking in terms of the Five Elements of traditional magic, we can summarize as follows:

SPIRIT: Core beliefs. Core attitudes. Resistance to death programming. Paradigm shifting to allow the transformation of your beliefs into more healing-friendly ones.

FIRE: Attitudes and programs about sex. The removal of damaging, limiting sexual conditioning. The use of sexual ecstasy to re-imprint the whole being with joy. Use of sexual gnosis for healing.

EARTH: Obviously, care of the body. Diet, exercise; the sense of physical power, endurance, stamina, relaxation, pleasure.

AIR- Breath. Paying attention to the breath allows the body to find its own balance. The integration & modulation of feelings & thoughts. Attitude formation. This strongly supports the Spirit aspect of radical thinking. Adapt & survive.

WATER Emotional resolution to generate happiness and emotional resilience, and allow habits to be changed. Getting

Dave Lee

used to admitting to your emotions rather than suppressing them prevents the build-up of toxic stress hormones in the system. Emotional engineering to avoid indulging in selfdestructive internal monologue.

EVALUATION OF SOME TECHNIQUES

• 1. THE CREATION OF A GENERAL PURPOSE HEALING SERVITOR

A group I was involved with created a general-purpose healing servitor. The servitor is capable of healing at any level, because it works outwards from the immediate condition of self-love, convincing the recipient to feel good about him or herself and so initiating the process of self healing. The servitor is equipped with heuristic “expert software” concerning human existence.

The method employs a connected breathing technique, as described above, which is designed to hold one’s attention in the sensations of the body.

When working this in a group, the breathing technique was introduced first, to ensure that everyone was familiar with it. After taking the group through a few “demonstration” breaths, everyone practices the technique by doing just 20 breath cycles. They were now ready to start the Pathworking.

Pathworking

Close your eyes.

It is our intention to create and launch a servitor for healing. You are in your body. Relax completely. Feel the relaxation in your feet, in your legs, in your knees, in your buttocks, in your back and belly, in your chest, in your shoulders, in your neck, in your jaw, in your face, in your brow.

Breathe easy and strong. Let your breath out gently, with gravity. Begin to connect your breathing, letting each inhale follow each exhale without pause. Remain completely relaxed.

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Relax with each outbreath.

Now begin to pay special attention to what you are feeling. Scan through your body from head to foot and back again, pausing at the most intense sensation, whatever it is. Examine this sensation, continue to breathe and relax.

Now begin to visualize. It is night. You are on a beach, whipped by a wind of spray, with the sea crashing nearby. You are freezing cold, really uncomfortable.

Now close your inner eyes and concentrate on the sensations in your body. All the sensations in your body are distorted now; you are aware of their unpleasant aspects. You may be viewing these sensations through a context of pain and discomfort, of not wanting to be there. But you are. Be realistic, and own what it is that you feel. Sink into the body sensations, pleasant or painful.

Now deepen your breathing. Remember to relax with each outbreath.

Now begin to make your breathing quieter, letting each breath out as if it were a gossamer web floating to the ground. You are a network of energy patterns, flows and flickers of internal, kinaesthetic light. Relax into this sensation, staying aware of its details, the details of your body energy sensations.

You become aware of a slow throb, a heartbeat pulse of infrasound.

The world is filled with this slow, relaxed heartbeat. Let it repeat its slow pulse like a mantra in your body.

Now open your inner eyes, and observe that there is a circle of flickering lights playing over the sea, like a slice of an aurora. Let your vision penetrate the sea beneath the aurora....down, down into oceanic silence........down, down into a dark stillness

where distant light flickers and throbs. The light is a soft sphere, deep in the water, a quivering ball of radiance shot with pink, yellow, green, and octarine rays. This is the raw substance of our servitor.

Dave Dee

The heartbeat still sounds in your mind.....gradually, you

begin to make out syllables, dim echoes of a word...begin to vibrate this heartbeat sound out \oud....munumm munumm.....the

sound builds to a mantra....munumm munumm munumm munumm munumm....vnt\x your inner eyes, you see a disturbance on the sea, a swirling of colours, then the ball bursts out of the sea and dives at us, enclosing us in its coruscating lights. Swathes of light pass through us — these are the healing information patterns of the servitor, returning us to self love whenever we wish it, raising our self esteem, encouraging us to accept and master our changes, teaching us a tightrope walker’s grace in the dizzying spaces of Pandaemonaeon magics. This is healing, this is self love, this is a resource of incredible harmony. You can call this entity at any time by vibrating the mantra munumm munumm...

Spend a minute reflecting upon your healing needs, and programming the servitor to solve this problem, to bring you and all its users health and vitality.

Now prepare to launch the servitor into the aethers. With eyes still closed, join hands in a circle. We are sitting inside the body of the servitor, and we will launch it up and out of our auric space at the end of the countdown, with a great outbreath, a surge of voice. Resume the mantra, feeding power to the servitor......munumm munumm munumm......Continue the

mantra .........10............9.............8........7... 6...... 5.......

4..........3......2..........1............. NOW!

This entity has been used by dozens of people now, often with spectacular results.

• 2. FURTHER. WORK WITH THE HEALINQ SERVITOR

The above entity was developed further, and then another group started to work with it. This group specialized in working healing magic in dance clubs, using the intense collective energy

of the music, dancing, and associated chcmognoses. The power was directed against the retroviruses, particularly HIV. A significant number of deep remissions have now been reported, including massive increases in T-lymphocyte levels, and a remission of Kaposi’s sarcoma. The work continues.

• 3. OTHER. RITUAL TECHNIQUES

Various groups I have been involved in have had some striking results with fairly straightforward magical enchantments. One example involved a relatively large group performing a chaos-voudon style invocation of loa of the Guede famille. The intention was framed as: ’Total and miraculous healing for Frater X’s kidney disease’. Frater X was absent, represented by a doll. The result was the recovery by Fra. X of one third of his total kidney function, which had previously been lost.

This example illustrates that one should never ask for too little when doing magical healing; the word ’miraculous’ in the Intention is perfectly apt, especially since Fra. X’s kidney specialist was completely puzzled; his only advice was ’I don’t know what it is you are doing, but keep on doing it!’

FURTHER READING

R. A. Miller, B. Webb and D. Dickson - ’A Holographic Concept of Reality’; pub. in ’Psychedelic Monographs and Essays’, Vol. 5, 1990.

Jim Leonard & Phil Laut - Vivation; pub. Vivation Publishing Co., 1983 [Breathworking technique]

Dave Lee - Connect Your Breath! Connected Breathwork,, Ecstasy and Healing. Booklet and audio CD, attractor, 2002

INTERLUDE:

NAME THAT DEITY: A

PARTY QAME FOR MAQICIANS

The game of Name That Deity was developed in the so-called Chaos Circle, the North of England Chaos group, in the mid eighties. It is suitable for 3 or more magicians — the more the merrier. There is no point in trying to play it without at least some people who are reasonably versed in mythology, and with an irreverent approach to deity.

The rules of this game are simple: one participant volunteers to start, or a starter is chosen by lot. This person adopts the ritual stance or posture of a god or goddess. This can be a Godform in the Golden Dawn sense, or a piece of mime indicating the deity’s attributes.

The other participants try to work out or guess the intended god. Whoever guesses correctly has to take the next turn. If no one can guess correctly, the performer has to do another deity.

In order to keep the pace from slackening, it is best if, before a participant guesses a god, he or she already has an idea of what god they’ll do next.

Various uses of this game come to mind: as a training module for Invocation, for instance. Another possibility is suggested by the record-breaking round of NTD conducted at a large meeting a few years ago, with a mixed language group of about 8. The game went on for 3 hours, and over 30 deities were brought into play, from an astonishing range of pantheons. Well into the game, I and another participant noticed that we were thinking of the next deity which was then chosen by the

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next player, as if we were experiencing telepathy or precognition.

This happened 4 times out of 5 in one sequence. I tried to control the process consciously, by attempting to implant the next deity in the next player’s mind, but this failed completely. After this attempt, the effect started again.

• Chapter 6

CHAOS ILLUMINATION

Wmy do Chaos Magicians need psychology? The answer lies in the limitations of traditional magical procedures to generate lasting change in the magician. The kind of change we are talking about is what has been called Illumination, that is to say enchantment on oneselves. The classic magical approach to personality change would go something like:

• 1. The use of invocation to bring the presence of a god/dess to bear on the problem; for instance, one might choose Mars for assertiveness;

• 2. The use of evocation to call up and bind sub-personalities or obsessions and treat them as elementals or demons, and make deals with them;

• 3. The use of talismans (sigils, bindrunes, crystals, perfumes, metals, magical jewelry etc.) to infuse the selves with a new

CHAOTOPIA ! skill or attitude.

The better magical teachers also recommend training exercises to loosen up the identity. These usually consist of habit-changing exercises, such as Crowley’s exercise in which the magician changes his opinions depending on which finger he wears a ring. Another example is Carroll’s Metamorphosis section in Liber MMM, which involves making trivial changes in one’s attitudes or beliefs, in preparation for more significant transformations. Crowley’s Tiber Jugoram takes this a step (or three) further, in taking more important vows and holding to them by a regime of self-punishment. One problem with the whole area of habit-changing is that changing trivial habits is usually easy, and changing deeply-ingrained habits can be fantastically difficult. It is certainly of value to know that one can adopt an arbitrary political stance as easily as changing your hairstyle, but the record of magicians in changing selfdestructive habits is not quite so good. The ’demons’ of alcohol and heroin have claimed a few, not to mention the many who are slowly destroyed by sicknesses that are given prominence by the person’s mental habits.

Looking more closely at the classical techniques oudined above, they would generally be used in combination. Invocation on its own means letting go and giving in to overshadowing or possession by the deity. Since deities tend to have their own agendas, unless the change you are invoking for is a very broad one, the results are unlikely to be sufficiendy focussed and specific. A Hermetic magician may invoke a god-form, then proceed to summon a spirit which he commands from the god-position. This type of procedure is similar to Goetia, which can be used similarly. The problem is that ’off the peg’ entities are unlikely to be specific enough to accomplish a change such as giving up smoking or overcoming sexual jealousy. Generally, the magician is better off designing her own approach, for instance a shamanic magician summoning a spirit relevant to the change he seeks. This would probably take the form of

Dave Dee discovering the precise spirit which deals with the desired change. She then enters into dialogue with it, ascertaining whether it is capable of doing the job, and what it might require in exchange.

This type of free-form Shamanic-psychology approach is effective in certain situations, but it may well have its own problems. In particular, the change might involve other spirits. For instance, the spirit selected may have power over the area of your life you are trying to change, but the change itself might encounter resistance from other spirits of your selves. However powerful the selected spirit, you would be setting yourself up for inner conflict and eventual failure in such a situation. The only way around this is to enter into negotiation with the second, resistant spirit, and so on. Alternatively, the magician might get round this by constructing a powerful servitor with a degree of independent intelligence, tailor-made for the desired change. Again, there is no guarantee that this entity will not come into conflict with other elements of self. The problem here is that the magician may have restricted herself to an over-complicated approach. Rapid and sensitive negotiations with one’s spirits/selves for self-change is often best accomplished without recourse to conventional magical techniques at all. Even if the magician feels more comfortable working with traditional methods, their best features can be retained and extended with knowledge of psychological change techniques, as described below. First, let us look at the nature of resistance to change.

HABIT PAIN AND CHANQE

Magicians are generally aware that, in order to get results and fulfil your potential, you have to do things you don’t initially like — you have to break out of your ’comfort zone’, in order to change. To rephrase a popular slogan: ’No pain, no change’. So why do people, including many magicians, put up with so much mediocrity and unhappiness? Obviously, the specifics

are different for everyone, but the general principle is that change is resisted by the nervous system. We prefer to repeat comfortable and familiar thoughts, even if they make us unhappy, rather than strike out into new thought patterns which would make us feel better; we tend to repeat familiar actions which have become ineffective rather than adopt new and more powerful strategies. Psychologists have estimated that 90% of today’s thoughts are an exact replay of the previous day’s thoughts.

This conservatism of the mind arises from its habit-forming faculty. Any behaviour that is repeated a lot becomes a habit; the mind has learned how to do something one way, and it finds it works, so it keeps on doing it that way. Eventually, the mind no longer thinks about the behaviour at all — it is repeated without any conscious thought. This works well for skills like driving a car - habitual, unconscious competence is precisely what learners aim for. Assuming that the patterns that were learned in the course of driving instruction are effective ones, it is unlikely that one’s driving skill will ever need to be radically overhauled.

However, the same forces form our learned attitudes in areas of life where more flexibility is desirable. This situation arises because there seem to be two drives in us:-

1. A habit-urge: to remain comfortable, to take the path of least resistance in any situation;

2. A change-drive: to evolve, to adapt actively to new conditions, to move ourselves along and make the best of situations.

At first sight these impulses seem radically opposed: the habit-drive appears to be a kind of ’spiritual laziness’ which holds us back from achieving our true potential, a ’bad’, or at least tedious side to our psychology, whilst the change-drive appears as the ’good’ side. This kind of quasi-religious dualism is profoundly unhelpful; the reality of the matter is that these

drives are complementary. The habit-drive is the natural urge of all beings to move along the path of least resistance; without it, relaxation and pleasure would be impossible. The changedrive exists to enable us to overcome the limitations of our thought patterns and install new, more relevant ones. These new patterns then bring us more relaxation and pleasure, serving the drive to comfort.

It is in the realm of emotions that habits are most obviously troublesome. We all live in our emotional past to varying degrees; all our present feelings are generated by our nervous systems, together with all their past imprints. These imprints form a set of unconscious priorities used to evaluate situations. Whenever you have any sort of experience, these imprints colour your response to the experience. This means that your response is refracted through layers of your past experiences. In other words, it is very seldom that you live in the present. Since people do more to avoid pain than to obtain pleasure, the tendency is to dampen and reduce all experience. Since all pleasure, all ecstatic experience, is present-centred, it follows that anyone who wishes to live fully and intensely will want to acquire the skill of living emotionally in the present. The breath technologies discussed in Chapter 5 provide body-work based approaches; some useful cognitive techniques follow.

COGNITIVE CHANGE TECHNIQUES

• 1. THE POWER OF BELIEF

I have defined magic as: The technologies of organic belief Austin Spare coined the latter term to describe the precondition of success in sorcery. In the realm of the selves too, belief is the core issue. All inner change occurs through a change in belief or skill at some level or another. Beliefs are instructions for interpreting reality; the personalities and sub-personalities can be viewed as nested loops of instructions, with the higher levels of organization controlling the lower ones. Each level contains

all the most general features of the level below it. This means that change at any level will affect the levels below it, but not necessarily the levels above it (although the lower levels also generate feedback, modifying expression of the higher ones). It is not the case that higher levels are more important than lower; rather, the model reflects the way in which willed change works: it is more effective to make a change at a higher level, and that is precisely what makes it a higher level. A useful hierarchy of levels, derived from the work of Robert Dilts and Anthony Robbins, follows:-

BEUEFS ABOUT IDENTITY: all the things we tell ourselves about who we are; we are often not conscious of the self-referential loops that inhabit this level;

VALUES, CRITERIA AND EVIDENCE: Values and criteria are beliefs, both conscious and unconscious, which form the instructions for making all our decisions. Evidence strategies are our criteria for knowing that we are fulfilling our values. The above levels are concerned directly with techniques of belief. They operate powerfully upon the remaining 3 levels, which are the more mundane and obvious levels of our reality: -CAPABILITIES: these are our skills - not just manual or recognized intellectual ones, but the abilities that enable us to get through our everyday lives, socialize, make decisions, engineer our emotions and so on.

BEHAVIOUR: what we actually do in the world. Our usage of time.

ENVIRONMENT: the final level we seek to change through our magic.

Looking at the levels of belief in turn:-

Identity: Any change made at the level of identity produces change at every level. Identity change is so powerful because of the drive that the selves have towards consistency of behaviour. Developing new beliefs about who we are will result in our behaviour changing to support the new identity. There is a crucial feedback between behaviour and identity; we tend to look at what we do to determine who we are.

The most sophisticated brainwashing techniques rely on this very principle: if you can get a person to behave in a fashion that is completely out of line with his old identity, but in line with the new one you desire for him, then he begins to take on the new identity. Once this is achieved, you can change lifelong beliefs and values, and generate complete change in his actions. The key to change at this level is therefore to generate references that prove to you that you are becoming a different person. This corresponds to Invocation in the classic magical paradigm.

Values, Criteria & Evidence: We use our values and criteria every time we make a decision. The process is not usually conscious, because we do not generally know our values. This puts us in a position of automatic, conditioned reflex about our choices. Further, our values may be in conflict. For instance, if you believe that material security has a higher value than creativity, you might take a job which rapidly bores you. The antidote to this situation is to elicit your hierarchy of values, finding out which is more important. This can be a revealing, thoughtful, profoundly uncomfortable process, as you face up to the real motivations behind your decisions, not the ones you would like to think you have. The process should be updated from time to time. Any indecision or internal conflict you have can be traced back to a conflict in values.

Evidence criteria should be deliberately constructed for each of your values, otherwise you will not be sure that your values are being lived and experienced. Procedures for this are detailed in Anthony Robbins’ book cited below.

CHA0T0PL4 1

• 2. WORD VI RUSES & IDENTITY

Language is a set of tools for creating social reality. The beginning of language meant a new method of transmitting living information; just as the gene is a unit of genetic transmission, the meme is a unit of cultural information. Its use has transformed the world, so that humans live pardy from their DNA — the biogram — and partly from their replication of memes or wordviruses — the logogram.

William S. Burroughs invented the concept of the wordvirus, the self-replicating set of verbal instructions that haunts our internal dialogue and controls our thoughts. This idea surfaced again in the books of biologist Richard Dawkins as the meme, the unit of cultural (paragenetic) transmission which is acted on by the selection forces of human society.

Wordviruses are not just something added to us, added to personality and identity; the identity is made up of wordviruses.

Wordviruses and Reconditioning: The pursuit of magic involves the decoding of your trigger memes, the wordviruses that have real power (negative or positive) for you. Automatic responses are the chinks in a magician’s armour. Investigate all your most loaded concepts. Observe the tunes to which your behaviour dances, the drumbeat you march to. Adopt wordviruses that are novel for you, in the form of statements, and feel what it is like to invest them with belief. Eventually you should reach a level where the remaining memes are extremely powerful and lodged firmly in your behaviour.

These structures are the core patterns of your selves. In a negative context, you could say they were your great personal demons. On the other hand, they are great sources of power; consider how intensely your obsessions focus your thoughts, beliefs and behaviour. The problem is just that their nature is inherently conservative, being of the viral nature of Word, always seeking to replicate itself intact. Imagine what that focus could achieve if it applied to the things you actually want to do, the person you want to become. You can shift identity

Dave Dee

by choosing the wordviruses you expose yourself to. An appreciation of this level of awareness is enhanced by the magical training exercise of mindfulness or thought vigilance. Try the following: -

Get into a comfortable meditation posture. Let your breathing become steady and easy. Begin to pay attention to the flow of thoughts, as an outside observer. As you do so, view the thoughts as units of meaning. Ask yourself the questions:- Where are the thoughts coming from? What shape are they? What do they feel like....?.

The boundaries of your thoughts loosen, fall apart. Your own mind is a colony of wordviruses. Each is a collage of ancient meanings, atavistic memes, each in themselves built up from shapes and sounds, the primal phonemes of the primate hunting group, the cries of babies. These structures form the content of all your thoughts and ideas.

In the realm of mundane identity, of classical mind, there is no means of communication other than the virus medium of words, and it can also be seen that individual identity itself is a colony of these viral structures. In mundane consciousness, there are no other options than to assimilate, understand, feel, be engrossed in the modality of the word. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Virus. However, as Burroughs puts it, You cannot take words with you into space. Space is magical consciousness, quantum consciousness, the ecstasy beyond viral identity.

• 3. EMOTIONAL ENQINEERINQ

Reframing Emotions: 1 mentioned above the tendency for the mind to live in the emotional past. Emotions are our closest link to the present moment, therefore our key to vital, spontaneous consciousness. That is why it is so vitally important, in order to break out of past patterns, to experience emotions fully, at the kinaesthetic level, without the learned cognitive overlays. This experience is facilitated most powerfully

by the kinaesthetic techniques of connected breathing, as dealt with in Chapter 5. Conceptual approaches can also help, and one of the most useful ones is the analysis of the basis of emotions. Emotions can be regarded as having two components: content and context. The content of an emotion is the actual, present, physical sensation of it. Its context is the verbal label you give it, complete with implicit judgments about whether it is a ’good’ or a ’bad’ emotion. For instance, the sensations of a racing heart, alertness and sweating palms are labeled as fear. The same physical sensations are also labeled exhilaration', all that has changed is the context in which you hold those sensations. In deep connected breathwork (see Chapter 5), the idea is to overwhelm the internal monologue with intense breathing, and thereby experience the unmediated content of the emotion, leaving you free to change its context.

In the present, it could be said that we only experience the most primitive of feelings — pleasure & pain. Pleasure isn’t a problem. Pain generates other emotions as follows: Pain is present-, Pain in the past is remembered as anger (frustration)-, pain anticipated is felt as fear, inturned anger is guilt, and this in turn causes depression by reduction in energy.

Thus pain distorts everything, is the basis of all so-called negative emotions. The bad news is that in order to be in present time with feelings, you have to be prepared to feel pain while it is there, because it is the present-time basis of all unpleasant emotions. Reframing of immediate pain or discomfort is achieved most rapidly if bodywork techniques such as those outlined in Chapter 5 are employed.

Anchoring: Correspondences are often used by magicians to attain repeatable states of consciousness. Correspondences work by conditioned reflex linking the desired state to a symbol at a pre-conscious level. For instance, a magician may associate personal dynamism and assertiveness to Mars, via repeated work with the colour red, iron, blood, and the smell of leather. Every time these symbols are used deliberately, the Martial state is

evoked. Early NLP researchers rediscovered this technique and called it anchoring. The effects of anchors appear virtually everywhere—consider the power of a perfume or other unusual aroma to bring back a precise memory from years before. Consider also the ways in which we associate a particular task with a particular emotion; how do you feel when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning on a work day? or again, on a day when you’re about to go on holiday? At some stage in the past, you had anchored a particular state to an imagined situation; whatever went through you mind, whatever picture or voice was in your head, had had that emotion anchored to it.

Knowing that, you know that you can change any state, if you want to enough. Having a range of positive emotional resources you can draw on at any time is of inestimable value. An example is given below, in The Strength Through Joy Principle.

SOME NOTES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES

• 1. THE STRENGTH THROUGH JOY PRINCIPLE This is basically a self-hypnotic, 6^th Circuit type of technique. Its relevance is that it is enormously useful to be able to feel intensely joyous at any moment. Such a skill generates strength because you become free from the vicissitudes of external input; you are able to engage in any situation on your own terms, without being thrown off balance by your responses to someone else’s agenda.

To do this, remember a situation when you were ecstatically happy, when you were strong and full of fun.... remember what you felt, what you heard, what you saw at that time. Steep yourself in that experience... remember that the brain will produce exactly the same reaction to a situation whether it is

’real’ or ’imagined’. Go for ultimate vividness of seeing, hearing, feeling.... feel the joy of the moment sweep through you, breathe in that joy, let it fill up your heart centre... now do it again, breathe in that joy, let it overflow out of your heart centre in a giant vortex of delight.... now again.... and again.... and again.....

You now have a resource of joy... while you are in this state, make a decision you have been putting off, something you would normally regard as unpleasant... Whenever you make a difficult decision, do it in this state: you are deciding from a position of strength. When you catch yourself being overwhelmed by negative thoughts, do this exercise, and get on with what you were doing or thinking about.

As a further exploration, try moving the sensation to different bands of the body... feel what it feels like in head, throat, heart, belly, groin, feet, hands....

• 2. MAQIC AND NEURO-LINGUISTIC

programming

Some of the techniques discussed above are derived from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. Certain themes are common to all effective systems of magic. Some of these core elements have also been recognized in NLP. NLP has been described as ’an attitude and methodology which leaves behind it a trail of techniques’. It is the techniques that NLP is best known for; the TO Minute Phobia Cure’, and the Pacing and Leading techniques that are taught to salespeople are (in) famous, and tend to give the impression that all NLP is a set of techniques for doing a few tricks with the mind. This is not the case: NLP is essentially about finding out how people who are exceptionally good at something actually do it, including the parts that they may not have conscious access too. In other words, the practitioner finds a precise role-model for the skill he or she wants.

To illustrate this, imagine you want to become better at, say,

archery. The most obvious route would be to find a truly excellent archer, the best you can find, and get him to teach you. Now, your master archer will only be able to transmit to you what he knows he does when he shoots an arrow. Unless he is also an exceptionally sophisticated teacher, this will consist only of the conscious part of his skill. Under his tuition, you will no doubt progress to a much higher level of skill, but it is unlikely that you will achieve his own level unless you also absorb the unconscious strategies that hone his technique to a level of brilliance. The elicitation of these strategies comprises the core NLP technique of modelling. Some of these strategies may appear initially to have nothing to do with the skill of archery; for instance, you may find that you have imitated his stance, his breathing, his sighting... and still you miss something. By talking to him, however, you may find that he performs a particular visualization, or hears a particular voice in his head just before he releases the arrow. At an even more internal level, you may discover that he has a particular belief or set of beliefs about his archery skill. You may even find that he has beliefs about life in general, powerful generalizations that mark the difference between you and him, and which facilitate his excellence. In any case, the model is complete when you are able not only to achieve his level of excellence, but able to communicate to others the internal processes that can take a third party to a new level of proficiency.

What is it that is being studied here? In the most general sense, it is the internal language of the person being modelled. The phrase ’Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ reflects discoveries of how the brain actually represents information — in other words, the internal language of consciousness. Magicians have been ’programming’ in this sense throughout the history of magic, and many of the concepts and structures of magic have been rediscovered by NLP modellers. One of these principles is the use of willed imagination Much of basic magic consists of the controlled daydreams of

visualization and audialization (and to a lesser extent the use of imagined kinaesthesia and smell). Anybody who has tried this a few times will realise that it works, if the focus is strong enough. Much NLP work also relies heavily on imagined situations, although usually for effects on the self. (NLP practitioners will seldom admit (at least in public) that they are trying to affect consensus reality!) The point is, your brain cannot tell the difference between the ’real’ situation and the visualized/audialized one, and responds accordingly. Try this exercise: remember an emotionally-loaded situation that is past and done, and check your reactions to it. Better still, evoke one of your obsessions, a concept you can get really emotional about. Get really worked up about it. Now relax and look at what you have done: you have taken some key images, sounds and words, and created a set of feelings which are indistinguishable from the feelings you would have got if you were standing in front of a real sample of your obsession. In fact, even when you are in a ’real’ situation, you are often dealing with it through the lens of previous remembered experience. In other words, you aren’t there at all. Experiment with evoking the whole range of emotions — start off with a basic 6 or 8 — lust, tenderness, anger... proceed to more complex ones, like gratitude or jealousy... experiment with different modes of each one. Remember to banish! This is — or should be — absolutely central to basic magical training. If you cannot achieve a resourceful/useful emotional state at will, you are always vulnerable to enemies and manipulators. That is one of the differences between a magician and a non-magician.

• 3. MULTIPLE SELVES

Chaos magicians have been working with the notion of multiple selves for some time. It seems that the apparendy unitary human personality is actually the net effect of a number of subpersonalities. Some NLP practitioners also treat personality as multiple, as the following quote from Frogs into Princes by

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Bandler and Grinder shows:-

’We’re all schizophrenic... Evolurionarily, the next step, which we’re all engaged in, is multiple personality. You’re all multiple personalities. There are only 2 differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: 1) the fact that you don’t have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, 2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don’t have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

We can view a personality as a pattern of social responses. It consists of language, of external and internal signals — body language, voice tonality and language patterns that project it to other people, and internal dialogue and internal imagery that supports it and keeps it in place internally. It has an agenda, concerning social power transactions via the repetition of learned roles (or, in the case of more advanced personas, adaptation).

One feature of personalities is that they attempt to achieve (or believe they have achieved) some consistency of behaviour. They are in a sense functional clusters of wordviruses or memes which have acquired self-consciousness, and in this respect they are like deities. Chaos magicians invoke god/dess-like entities from various sources, including the archetypal/stereotypical humanoid deities of pagan pantheons, characters out of films and comics. The god/dess form Baphomet as used by Chaos magicians is a kind of reinvented gnostic entity, culled from various sources, which has come to represent magic, and the universal life-field, the planetary biogram.

When we invoke any of these entities, we are seeking to

bring into our nervous systems a perfect (or at least improved) role-model for one of our personas. Or indeed to assemble a ’new’ personality for some new function. These selves are then available so that we can access and act from whatever self is the most effective in every situation we find ourselves in. The use of samples is a kind of parallel in music to this modelling of personality traits we desire. Flexibility is one of the cornerstones of power.

As a footnote to this section, it is interesting that some evangelical Christians have singled out Multiple Personality Disorder as a feature of The Great Satanic Child Abuse Conspiracy. The fact that it may be possible that dissociated ’alters’ (as they call personas in MPD) are produced by trauma, has led some of these writers to make the equation Multiple Personalities = Disorder = Result of Satanic Abuse. It seems that religions feel threatened by the Multiple Selves model.

• 4. WELL-FORMED OUTCOMES

Effort is often wasted enchanting for inappropriate or sloppily-defined goals. One handy technique from NLP is called Well-Formed Outcomes.

Goals are more likely to be achieved if they are:

• a) Stated in the positive; - i.e.: What do I want?

• b) Placed in appropriate context; - When, where and with whom do I want this?

• c) Expressed in sensory specific form; - What will I see, hear and feel when I have achieved this outcome?

• d) Initiated and maintained by self; - Is there anything in the world that is standing in the way of my getting my goal? - Am I in charge of all the changes required?

• e) Preserving the positive aspects of the present state; - Will I lose anything I have now by gaining this goal? And if so, do I value what I lose?

• f) Of appropriate size; - Is it big enough to motivate me? (Consider making it bigger) - Is it small enough to not seem

Dave Lee completely unrealistic? (Consider breaking it down into subsidiary outcomes) - Is it worth the effort I shall need to put into it?

• g) Having positive consequences;

• - What are the consequences of achieving this goal (for me and any others I consider)?

• - How will my life be different?

• - Does it fit in with what I am and what I want to become? (values question).

FURTHER READING:

Richard Bandler & John Grinder - Frogs into Princes; pub. Real People Press, 1979. Fast-moving seminar transcripts from the original masters.

Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour - Introducing NLP; pub. Aquarian 1993. Good general introduction to NLP, including Robert Dilts’s Unified Field of neurological levels.

Anthony Robbins - Awaken The Giant Within; pub. Simon & Schuster 1992. Manic self-improvement style, excellent material on beliefs and values.

INTERLUDE:

AOFE/THE

CHRONONAUTS

This is an ’astral / virtual’ working for futurological enchantment. It works by generating a visualization of shadow time, and giving the magician an opportunity to cast enchantments deep into her own future.

PREPARATION

Before the rite (some days before, if possible) each participant considers how he or she desires their world to be at various future times. Consider both your personal desires and aims, and also what kind of a world at large you desire to live in. For the immediate future, you will probably be enchanting for personal aims. As the timescale lengthens, you might bring in more of how you would like the rest of the world to be.

The participants decide on their visualizations for various future times. Let us say for example:-

• 1. 1 month

• 2. 6 months

• 3. 1 year

• 4. 5 years

• 5. 10 years

Obviously, there is no upper limit to this.

The rite should be preceded by a gnostic technique that induces a sense of dislocation. Whirling is ideal. This serves to dislocate the etheric body in shadow time. The rite then continue with the exploration of shadow time in an inhibitory mode.

THE PATHWORKINQ

Stand still now. Calm and centre yourself. Breathe deeply and

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easily, letting your breathing slow down as your energies settle down.

Now sit or lie, gently easing yourself into a still meditation posture. Continue to be aware of your breathing until your body is becoming calm.

Now turn your attention to your etheric body. Feel the energies of your double, excited and in motion. Your etheric self is still dislocated in shadow time, and we are going to explore some more of these strange realms.

Your etheric body stands up; you slowly draw yourself up to your full height. You look around you: You are in a room (describe the room the participants are in).

You are still, with a sense of expectancy, of pleasant tension. Breathe the energy, the expectancy, the tension, into your body of light. Everything is waiting: time passes in a hushed whisper; time is unwinding with every breathing flicker of energy, with every flash of awareness....slowly, silently the future is being created, a future poised and awaiting will, desire, significance. Your will, your desire, your significance...

You are quite still. You contemplate moving, and the delicate gossamer of time threatens to break.... you feel the moments poised before you, awaiting your decision. You raise your double’s hand and look at it. Which hand did you raise? You could have raised the other. You made a tiny, insignificant decision, and one shadow future became real, one of two, creating another moment.

Now your double walks to the door of this room, opens it and steps out. You expect to see the [corridor/ stairwell/room etc.] by which you entered, but all you see is nothingness, with twinkles. A bright path is etched in the void beneath your feet. You are standing on a timeline, that runs as far as your next decision. Begin to walk it, into the shadow future.

Your timeline branches, at the points where you will make decisions in the shadow future of your present time. Your future

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is always like this — an endlessly branching, ramifying set of unmade choices, becoming mistier and more complex as you look further into the shadow future.

This is the realm of the magics of divination and enchantment: in divination, you seek to uncover the dominant, most probable pattern in your shadow future. That is why divination is best performed for the near future, before the branches of shadow time become too numerous. In enchantment, you seek to influence which timeline out of many shadow timelines will actually come about. That is why enchantment is best performed for events in the further future, where the probabilities of the vague timelines are more nearly equal.

Using this property of shadow time, it is our will to influence the future of ourselves and of this planet. We will create our own individual visions, which act as strange attractors for our own future. These attractors are known as AOFE.

Now let your double become taller, rising above the undulating plain of shimmering, branching, timelines. As you grow taller, you can see further into the shadow future. Now the plain of shadow futures is laid out before you, nothingness with twinkling lines, runnels of bright sweat on the body of a dark Goddess.

Now your double begins to move out over the timelines, drawn to the future at increasing speed. You are flying over the plain of shadow time. Suddenly, from some hidden place beyond the horizon, 6 lines of force strike out. One of them catches you, and you find yourself whirled like a stone in a slingshot, clean out of this continuum, one month into the shadow future. You land in the life that you have desired for yourself ONE MONTH from now. Visualize it clearly, what you will see, what you will hear, what you will feel....move through it in your etheric body.

[20-30 seconds pause]

Now prepare yourself for the next jump: let your visualization shrink, until it is a tiny bright pinhead of light. As you let go of it, vibrate the word AOFE, and seize the next energy line, which hurls you through shadow time, to your desired situation 6 MONTHS from now. Look around at your future world...

[pause]

Again, shrink the visualization down to a dot, breathe the word AOFE, and catch the next slingshot through shadow time to your next visualization, for ONE YEAR’S time.

[pause]

Now the ride will get rougher. Shrink your visualization, vibrate AOFE, let go, and seize the bright bar of light that will hurl you FIVE YEARS into the future.

[pause]

OK, ready yourself for the next shift. This is the final one, the limit of the present experiment. This time we will be way ahead in the timelines, to the year 2010. Shrink your picture, call AOFE and seize the line...Go !

[pause]

Now carefully collapse your final visualization, vibrate AOFE, and take the final line. You are hurtling back to the present.

You find yourself standing on the first timeline of the plain of shadow time. You shrink back in size until you stand with just one broad timeline in view, waiting to branch at your next decision. Let your etheric body fall gently back into your physical body. Breathe deeply, feel your body’s life and heat,

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feel the texture of the present moment. You are stabilized in time. You are in the present.

And remember the power that resides in a decision.

Chapter 7

ECSTASY

AND THE QUEST

THE URQE TO EVOLVE

In the Introduction I mentioned the way in which belief systems that once facilitated magic seem to wear out. There is more than one reason why this happens; it is also a mechanism by which the wizard is forced to evolve. What is it that forces this? It seems that engaging in gnosis for sorcery eventually has the effect of reprogramming the selves, even if there had only been intentions to reprogram one’s consensus reality (i.e. do sorcery) before. In other words, the magician is forced by an accumulation of transpersonal gnoses to revise his concepts of who he is and what he wants to be.

The understanding of motivation is assisted by identifying different levels of need and desire, and discovering their natural hierarchy. Abraham Maslow’s model, incorporating the concept of peak experiences, is an early example. More recently, neurolinguist Robert Dilts devised his Unified Field of neurological levels. A similar model is given in Chapter 6. Success with piecemeal reprogramming of your beliefs and

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behaviour develops confidence in your ability to change inner states. However, exposure to gnosis, deep trance and profoundly altered states will tend to accelerate and intensify your commitment to change. At the top of the hierarchy used in Chapter 6 is ’Identity’; some writers define another level, ’Spirituality’ above this. Spirituality would, in the context of this hierarchy, represent any state or preoccupation that could operate directly upon identity itself, any change that would automatically send a ripple of changes throughout all the levels, including identity.

QUANTUM MIND AND CLASSICAL MIND

Relating this spirituality-level to the quantum mind hypothesis, the individual self would be constructed out of the ’classical mind’s’ experiences and memories, which are encoded in neural circuitry. These in turn are made each time that quantum mind collapses the wave function, creating a recordable event and memory. The mechanism of how non-local mind involutes itself into individual identity is a mystery, in the grand sense of the term. Some writers (Douglas Hofstadter, in Godel, Escher, Bach-An Eternal Golden Braid, Amit Goswami in The Self-Aware Universe) have called this mystery a tangled hierarchy, but it still remains a mystery.

Repeated experience of higher states of consciousness eventually leads to some experience of the core paradox of individual being. The mind starts asking questions like: Why don’t I always feel this ecstatic? Why don’t we just get ecstatic when we’ve finished our day’s work? What is the origin of individual consciousness? Why does the ego keep wittering on in its tedious internal monologues of past-oriented identity, and what can I do about it? How can I get back to unconditioned mind? The occasional extra bit of money, sex, personal power and healing no longer satisfy; everything is muddied by the taste of the ego. Transformation and ecstasy become urgent. This chapter is about the issues around

Dave Dee transformation, ecstatic states of consciousness and mysticism. These issues are:-

1. The achievement of one-pointed will; the concept of True Will. The recognition of congruence signals.

2. The mystical experience as integral to the magical path; models of mystical experience, including the Holy Guardian Angel.

TRUE WILL AND ONE-POINTEDNESS

The magician needs to know:-

1. What he wants, and:

2. How to go about getting it

It turns out that it is easy to find the answer to the second question when you know the answer to the first. The confusion and mild panic which is one of the endemic sicknesses of the postmodern world (a world whose culture is consumption and ’freedom of choice¹) is partly a case of what has been described as option anxiety, the paralysis felt when one is confronted with choices. Therefore the real issue here is how the magician is to know his own desires, and achieve one-pointedness. This state is sometimes called true will.

A rather vague definition of true will might be: the driving force behind the grand sweep of your life. However, unless you believe in a deterministic (19^th Century) universe, there is no room for a deterministic notion of your destiny. In a world ruled by change, the mode of expression of your true will is bound to shift. The problem with this definition is that you can never articulate this grand design in any clarity, because that articulation in itself would limit your responsiveness to new situations. A useful operational definition of true will is : the vector sum of all your desires at any given moment. This definition assumes nothing about the future course of your life, and can only give you a ’snapshot’ of your Will, frozen in time. However, this will-of-the-moment is all you can know at any given time about your will, thus it is perfect for that

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moment. How can you know this true will? There are two approaches, which are complementary: -

1. Analysis of values and criteria; this deals with the conscious half of the process, and:

2. Use of congruence sensitivity, which refers everything to the unconscious/greater mind.

Values and Criteria: In order to make decisions, firstly, we need to have a basis for making the decision. In other words, we need to know our criteria. This generalizes into our values, which are more universal kinds of criteria. Secondly, we need to know the relationship of our values and criteria to the particular decision we are contemplating. These issues are outlined in Chapter 6, with references to books covering them in depth. The point is, these processes employ a combination of logic and introspection.

Recognizing Congruence Signals: The other part of the process involves some kind of internal language for accessing intuition. The usual methods are:-

• 1. Divination with symbolic systems such as Tarot, Runestaves, I Ching: this is probably the commonest use for divination among Western magicians. Essentially, one is asking for advice, and interpreting the reading accordingly. The limitation of such divination is the relative inflexibility of the systems used. However sophisticated the system is, it does not necessarily map one-to-one with your query. The art of framing the best questions is nine tenths of the art of divination.

• 2. Divination by skrying: gazing into a black mirror or a crystal, into flames or the sky or any surface which enables you to hallucinate the pictures you need. If you are not visually-oriented, you could try using white noise for audial skrying. This is a more flexible approach, because any answer is possible.

Dave Dee

However, not every magician gets on well with skrying.

• 3. Dowsing: the use of pendulum, forked twig, spring wand, angle bars or numerous other devices amplifies tiny tremors in the hands which act as signals from greater mind. This is a highly flexible technique for any kind of query, and is strongly recommended. A basic starting technique is as follows (for pendulum):-

• i. Sit quietly, holding the pendulum string at a comfortable length. Breathe easy and relax.

• ii. Ask the pendulum (i.e. your greater mind via the pendulum) if it is happy to give you a YES response. If you don’t get a response, try again later. If you do, mentally note it.

• iii. Thank the pendulum, and ask it for a NO response. Take note.

• iv. Ask the pendulum if the string is at an ideal length. If the answer is NO, adjust it and try again. (You might notice an intuitive sense of ’longer’ or ’shorter’).

• v. Proceed with your yes/no question.

The art of dowsing uses the potential of the body’s peripheral senses and languages to generate answers. It shades into the direct use of internal language:-

4. Direct use of congruence signals: This involves checking for the signals in your body and feelings when you explore each idea; your intuition, once you have learned to listen to it, will provide you with the answers. For a taste of this kind of thing, try the following exercise:

Get into a relaxed posture, and ask your ’unconscious’ if it’s listening (of course it is, but this is a useful protocol for attuning to it): you will probably get a sensation of some kind; this is a congruence signal. Now repeat to yourself a desiresentence about which you have some doubt or fear. You may experience a different sensation, which may be an incongruence signal. Experiment with different formulations of the desire-

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sentence, until you feel quite a different sensation. When you are confident that this is a congruence signal, you will have formulated a congruent desire. If you persist with such techniques, it becomes rather like dowsing.

Some form of congruence testing is a powerful tool for magic, because you have at your disposal the wisdom of all the levels beyond the conscious mind whenever you want to clarify your will.

So by a combination of awareness of your values (which can only be done effectively by taking your feelings into account — i.e . using a form of congruence recognition) and direct communication with all the selves, the conscious and unconscious desires come into alignment. The process involves a kind of positive feedback — the fact that you are inviting the unconscious totality to express itself will result in a considerable strengthening of one’s intuition. It becomes increasingly possible to steer one’s life by the ’feel’ of situations — all the information about any decision is present in the feelings of the body, if one can only learn to interpret and trust them. Once complete congruence is attained about an intention, then the magic can hardly fail. The internal voice that says “Yes, but...’, or the queasy tense feeling in the belly may be signs that the intention of the sorcery is not in line with some criterion or other. Most people, most of the time, hardly ever achieve this condition, and simply wander from one passing impulse to another. Failed attempts to break out of the cyclical world of desire-gratification-frustration and achieve one’s will often feed back to the person an increased sense of learned impotence, resulting in further entrenchment in hopeless cyclicity. A person in a one-pointed state knows what she wants, and is already in the process of achieving it, by that very fact. She can walk into a room and command attention by the slightest of gestures, or perform feats of empty-handed magic.

The above techniques solve the problem of achieving one-pointedness, and define the true will. The concept of true will

(or, in this context, True Will) is linked in more traditional magical systems with the concept of the Holy Guardian Angel. This concept sits across the traditions of Western magic, and is inadequately defined from the standpoint of the postmodern magician. How is it linked to the above-mentioned concepts of ’greater mind’ and ’unconscious totality’? This is the area I shall now examine.

THE CONCEPT OF THE HOLY QUARDIAN ANQEL

To follow the history of the concept, let us start with Crowley. The concept of the Holy Guardian Angel was borrowed by Aleister Crowley from The Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. The latter is a system of magical attainment involving a six month retirement which culminates in the ’Knowledge and Conversation of the HGA’. After this is achieved, the idea is that the Mage is able to command the Spirits/Demons of the magical squares of the system. This then gives the adept all the standard magical skills of the day — opening locks, causing dancing girls to appear, making camels fight and all the other powers that were indispensable to a civilized life in the 16th century. In this system, the Angel is seen as a Messenger (Greek: angelos) of God; the Aspirant has, basically, spent 6 months praying, in the hope that God will graciously send along the Angel specially meant for him.

Needless to say, we are deep into monotheism here. The Angel is considered to exist prior to the Aspirant’s illumination; is in a sense the essence of the Aspirant. This concept of Angelhood is similar to the Theosophical notion of the Higher Self: that each of us has a spark of Divine consciousness which incarnates in successive bodies in order to learn, to develop towards its true God-nature. These conceptions of the Angel are profoundly essenticdist — that is, they state or imply that essence precedes existence. Essentialist doctrines always contain a notion that there is a true essence which existed prior to incarnation.

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The opposite position is existentialism, which works from the position that existenceprecedes essence. In other words, one’s essence is created, or rather constructed, out of the experience of existence. Essentialist doctrines are invariably transcendentalist; that is, they posit the existence of some abstract, ideal realm or level of existence which is more real or more important than immediate material existence.

Crowley discussed the concepts of Higher Self, HGA and so forth, at some length. His basic position seems to me to be existentialist, insofar as his magical system is strongly experiential (despite the way in which many current Thelemites treat it as ineluctable holy writ). His concept of the HGA is very complex and intriguing, with some confused essentialist elements. For a start, he seemed to believe that there was no single paradigm that could successfully account for the experience of the Angel, and so he adopted the term Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel because of its absurdity. Further, he regarded AIWASS not only as his personal Angel, but also as the author of Liber Al vel Legis and the Logos of the Aeon of Horus, the voice of the Argenteum Astrum. It is conceivable that he was recommending a multi-model approach to get the best out of all the possible views of the HGA.

So what functions does the experience of the HGA perform?

• 1. Magical power, a high rate of success in sorcery; Sorcerers have tended to emphasize the powers predicted by non-local consciousness (see Chapter 4), of precognition, telepathy, enchantment, divination, remote sensing, out-of-body experiences. This includes the intuitive advice level, an ’early warning system’ or source of intuitive perception. These functions grow out of the practice of magic and the use of congruence recognition in any case.

• 2. Self transformation, Illumination, Enchantment on the selves:

From the experience, you get a meta-state from which to operate upon other levels of self-programming; the experience in any case tends to generate psychic integration at the mundane level, because of the higher level (more general) positive decisions and attitudes that are part of the experience. It is not necessary to use the concept of the HGA to achieve such peak experiences.

• 3. A source of advice about the direction of one’s life; assistance with decisions. This is a form of internal clairvoyance, and also grows out of the process of recognizing congruence/ incongruence signals.

• 4. The mystical quest, this is the only remaining area where the concept of the HGA might be of value.

ECSTASY AND THE ANQEL

Mystical ecstasy is the recovery of unitary consciousness, the experience of quantum mind, non-local consciousness. Of Thelemic writers, those in the Typhonian current emphasize mysticism above practical magic (sometimes to the virtual exclusion of the latter). There is a sense that comes through Crowley’s writings that one of the ways he saw AIWASS was as an ’extraterrestrial’ consciousness. The notion of the HGA as ’extraterrestrial’ was taken up (in one of his more lucid earlier works) by Kenneth Grant, and the theme is elaborated by Typhonian writer Michael Staley: -

The terrestrial vehicle is a refraction of a much vaster field of awareness....Eintities are apparent ranges of consciousness, equally vehicles of the cosmic self... Entities such as Lam and Aiwass are no more entities in their own right than are human beings: not remote, august beings, but equally shadows in the sweep of sentience.

Michael Staley - The Mysteries of Dam

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The author is making it clear that he regards neither the Angel, Lam, or indeed, even human beings as being ’entities in their own right’, implying that the ’sweep of sentience’ is more important. This sounds like a belief system whose function is to allow the boundaries of the self to be opened up, so that the bizarre transpersonal ecstasies of the 8^th Circuit can pour through. Grant’s preoccupation with the mysteries of dream in relation to unitary consciousness indicate a focus on 8^th Circuit trance.

THE ANQEL AS A CONSTRUCT

The Typhonian view of the Angel effectively dispenses with the original idea and deals directly with transpersonal ecstasies. Even the few who still use the HGA concept seem to view the Angel as a vehicle, maybe even a temporary convenience, for the experience of the transpersonal quantum mind. We are back with a two-phase mind: classical, individual identity, and non-local field. It seems that the experience of the HGA as a mediating vehicle between these states is a temporary construct which the magician may use to get some sort of handle on the bizarre nature of higher consciousness. In fact, each wizard who works with the HGA concept will tend to come up with anchors to those higher states, and his concept of the Angel is in a sense the sum total of these anchors.

However, it is inevitable that most of these anchors will be superseded as new and more powerful levels of trance are experienced; the form in which the magician imagines the Angel will therefore change beyond recognition. It is likely then that the use of the HGA model will actually get in the way of the attainment of mystical ecstasy, and, indeed, the concept itself will ultimately have to be abandoned in favour of a more sophisticated model of higher consciousness.

QUANTUM MIND AND KIA

The simplest model of the mystical quest is probably the best:

quantum mind (which I have referred to elsewhere as ’greater mind’) is the actual source of all consciousness; the classical mind is the consciousness that forms memory out of brain circuitry, and this produces individual identity, the centre of awareness we call the ego.

Quantum mind, as mentioned previously, is the mind that does all the magic, the mind that is allowed to act during magical gnosis. It is also the mind which is the source of all ecstasy. All the trances of Circuits 5 to 8 partake of the nature of quantum mind to varying degrees.

To extend our metaphors for what it is we are experiencing in higher dimensions, it is worth looking at Austin Spare’s concept of Kia, and Pete Carroll’s commentaries on it. Spare defined Kia as “the atmospheric I”, a formless spirit inhabiting and animating Zos, “the body considered as a whole”. This is not the easiest of definitions to understand, which immediately hints at the nature of the Kia; similar paradoxical descriptions of the most exalted trances are found in the Tao Teh Ching. Carroll identifies the innermost core of consciousness itself with the Kia:

the Kia or ’spirit’ or ’Free Will’ arises not from the presence of anything in particular, but rather from the absence of a certain thing... we can never perceive what lies at the centre or centres of our free will for these places exist only the void of causality’s absence, sparks of that chaos from which matter and aether co-evolve.

- Liber Kaos

Whilst it is true that one cannot describe this realm of consciousness, one can certainly experience it — it runs as a backdrop to all the higher trances, especially the 8^th Circuit. This Kia has no individual selfhood, and must therefore be continuous with all consciousness, or indeed, all life. Can this

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concept of Kia be identical with quantum mind? For it to be so, we have to accept that the latter is radically non-local and non-individuated.

CORE SELF, QUANTUM MIND

If the Kia represents all living entities, then the experience of it is indeed formless. In mystical ecstasy, there is an oscillation between self and non-self; consciousness dips in and out of individuality. The non-individual state appears to be completely formless, but at this close range its effect is so intense a contrast to ’ordinary’ classical-mind consciousness that it generates all sorts of exotic experiences and structures, which are shadows of its negative radiance. In this state there is a sense of completeness, as the boundaries of the self are dissolved. One of the shadows cast by this trance is the vision of the Omega Point. This feels like a pre-visioning of some cosmic perfection which will be achieved in the future; at core it is of course a symbol for the perfection felt in the experience of losing boundaries and regaining unitary consciousness. There is always a sense of familiarity about such ecstasies, a sense of rightness, as if this is where the mind has lived before, and where it is meant to be now. This gives rise to the concept of core self, or core state, the absolute ground of consciousness. This is not the same as the dialogue with the HGA, because in the core state there is no striving; all has already been accomplished. This core state underlies all consciousness, and is therefore to be identified with the quantum mind. The experience of it generates a kind of serenity which spills over into ordinary states of consciousness, a giant perspective on one’s usual trials and obsessions.

The condition required for experience of the heights of the mystical ecstasy is simple, but may not be so easy to achieve. Essentially, all the mind has to do is to let go of individual identity. This can feel like dying, so the ego tends to resist it. If the resistance is great, and the ego refuses to dissolve, then the

mind may be locked into deep existential terror until the opportunity for ego-loss passes, and familiar structures reappear. Techniques for loosening up the ego’s attachment to itself are concerned with shifting beliefs about one’s identity, the nature of quantum mind and the benignity or otherwise of the domains beyond the ego. Care is required in the selection of beliefs that are claimed to facilitate ecstasy; some are riddled with religious wordviruses, which partly explains the poor reputation mysticism has in some magical circles.

Some Chaos writers have rejected mysticism as a distraction from the path of power. I hope the above shows that mystical experience is not only an expected ’side-effect’ of repeated gnosis, but an integral part of the development of magical power in every sphere of life.

SOME EVALUATIONS

1. CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISINQ RITUALS

These include the Ritual of the Bornless One, in various versions, and Chaos Mass B. Their features are:

1. Functions: Crowley recommends the B/O as the Preliminary Invocation for the Goetia, to raise the consciousness of the Operator to the point where he feels capable of commanding the Demons: ’Hear me and make all Spirits subject unto me..’ etc. Pete Carroll recommends the CMB as the preliminary to virtually any act of magic. Crowley also adapts the Bornless One into Liber Samekh, his primary Ritual for the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

2. Structure: CMB has as its core the following elements:

i) The Invocation of Chaos, done in Enochian, ending with the barbarous Zazas mantra.

ii) The Invocation of Baphomet, an assertion in English of the assumption of the powers of the Hidden God, amongst

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The Bornless One has as its core the elements:

i) The use of Barbarous Names to invoke ’the terrible and invisible God who dwellest in the void place of the Spirit’; this is the consciousness-raising part, and;

ii) The identification with that God: ’I am He! The Bornless Spirit...’ etc. etc., ending with the assertion: ’Come thou forth and follow me, and make all Spirits subject unto me...’ etc. This is a starting point for analysing the purpose of CMB. Baphomet represents the peak of magical power attainable to the Operator, in which state he/she can :

i) consecrate a Sacrament ii) charge a magical weapon iii) empower a Servitor

• iv) summon and control a Demon, Spirit or Psybermorph v) perform a sacred sex act

In fact, CMB might be usable along similar lines to Liber Samekh, as an exploration of one’s inner significance. (Carroll hints at something similar when he writes as one of its purposes ’communion with particular domains of consciousness’).

• 2. SHADOW AND FETCH

I used the HGA paradigm over a period when I had been working with classic consciousness-raising rites, chiefly the Bornless One as a preliminary to Goetia. I moved fully into the HGA paradigm through connecting the concepts of shadow, fetch and familiar. I had previously seen the fetch as, basically, a servitor, an entity operating at a fairly low level of implementation. The old witchy notion of the familiar I had seen as an animal spirit; the shadow was a concept out of Jung, meaning the realm of the self excluded by the ego’s dominance. I began to see that the witch’s use of the fetch and familiar was not so much as aids to sorcery, but was where the sorcery

actually came from. In other words, the concepts took on much more depth for me: they hinted at an entity which is a source of magical power and guidance. When I made the connection with the Shadow, it became apparent that this ’entity’ is profoundly transpersonal, and yet available to the mundane mind.

• 3. TIME AND ETERNITY

The first clue I had to the nature of later experiences I labeled as HGA was many years before I’d even come upon that concept. In my earliest experiences of the higher ecstasies (usually through psychedelics) I had noticed that, from time to time, I had an experience that seemed to be outside of ordinary time. I would enter such a state and think: Ah! this is familiar; this is exacdy similar to such and such an occasion... I had not experienced that particular ecstatic state for some months, and during that intervening time had been unable to remember it, or even remember that it was achievable; it only existed for me when it was present. Eventually I came to recall it in the intervening times, and to think of it as ’Eternity’. After a few such experiences the focus of my life shifted, and I did not experience it again for many years. Then, as a result of entering the Holy Guardian Angel paradigm, I experienced it with full clarity and total recall, in the context of it being my HGA. In other words, the first Name I got for my Angel was Dternity. Furthermore, my Angel ’told’ me that it had been It all along — the entity whom I had contacted all those years before, but had not had the magical maturity to integrate and express fully. In short, I had identified the HGA with this curious ’out of time’ ecstatic state.

Initially, I worked within the paradigm of the HGA, but this rapidly became meaningless to me. I then took the view that the HGA was ’just’ a higher state of consciousness, some blend of 5th and 6th Circuits. However, this was not a very useful model, and it did not make use of this ’Eternity’ feature

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of the Angel. A new model grew out of these considerations.

• 4. LOOPED TIME

In this model, the effects experienced as ’HGA’ are seen as one’s own future self, perfected (or relatively so — it makes no difference, as should become apparent) in magic and ecstasis, looping back in time to change one in the present. The difference between the future self and the present self, (or the present and past selves) is that the former has more resources for dealing with problems, more wisdom, than the latter.

This model fits a number of types of experience without recourse to essentialism or transcendentalist mumbo-jumbo. For instance, the literal ’guardian’ experience — the future self may intervene to get the present-self out of danger. My experience of this kind felt as though someone with much greater resources had intervened in a crisis in my late teens.

The looped time model makes sense of some of the extraordinary effects of Timeline work in NLP, where the present-self visits the past-self and changes the decisions it makes. The effects that Timeline work can produce are genuinely magical; its originator, Tad James, has a number of cures of ’incurable’ diseases, including cancer, to his name; experiences of rapid transformation of emotional-mental conditions that have proved intractable to conventional therapies are almost commonplace. Clearly, it embodies a profound technology of mental processes regarding the nature of time. This technology is literally the looped time phenomenon.

A useful practical feature of the looped time model is that psychic integration is achieved by the intervention of the future self into past events; by definition, the future self has more sophisticated resources for dealing with knots in the psyche. Engineering any emotion, you become your own HGA in present time, in a sense. Confidence in your ability to intervene in your past and present to generate your future works well

within the looped-time model. To put it another way, the repeated exposure to higher states capable of this type of intervention generates a feedback loop of confidence in one’s own ability to do magic. Since magic is the technology of belief, confidence at this level is enormously enabling.

• 5. EQ REQ ORE FORMATION

A further context in which I have used the idea of looped time happened years before I developed it into a model. In the Chaos Circle group of the mid-eighties, we created an egregore-servitor, which proved to be enormously effective. The paradigm we used was sci-fi: each of us had to believe that our ’future perfected magical selves’ had come back through time to inhabit our bodies for one night. It was then the ’future selves’ that created the elemental. This was, at the time, the most powerful piece of magic I had ever taken part in, as judged by the results.

b. MEDITATION

Immersion in quantum mind generates serenity, as pointed out above. This state can be ’topped up’ daily by certain types of meditation. One of the easiest and simplest forms is the use of a mantra dying out into silence. Each time mental silence is achieved, thoughts arise; the mantra is vibrated again, and allowed to fade to silence. Again, thoughts arise. The cycle is repeated for, say, 20 minutes, and then normal thought patterns allowed to resume. The effect is to generate a relaxed alertness which lasts after the meditation period, and becomes more and more a feature of one’s ordinary consciousness if repeated daily. This is a form of pratyahara, or thought vigilance, and is the basis of the famous Transcendental Meditation.

FURTHER READING

Aleister Crowley - Uber Samekh (Appendix of MagicH)

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Kenneth Grant - Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God’, pub. Muller, 1974

Michael Staley - The Mysteries of Ham, in Thelemic Magic XC (Mandrake of Oxford). See also Starfire magazine, various issues.

INTERLUDE:

THE OCTOPLASM: A

DEATH/OCTARINE/

THOUQHT RITE

INTENTION

To create a Servitor consisting of raw octarine plasma, to form a reservoir of pure magic, to shatter the prisons of our magical concepts and bring about the renewal of our magics.

HOW IT WORKS

The Octoplasm will reproduce every time you pay it attention. It facilitates magical ’detoxification’, the removal of old magical concepts. Structures destroyed by it increase its sum of octarine force.

REQUIRED

Inspirational texts on magic chosen by each participant; scissors; large bowl; strobe; dictaphone; sound system; prepared tape of appropriate (or just plain weird) music.

SEQUENCE

• 1. Banishing.

• 2. Statement of Intent. Switch on dictaphone.

• 3. Each in turn reads from their text, whilst prepared tape is spun randomly on dictaphone and recorded over.

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• 4. As each finishes their text, they cut it up and put it in the bowl.

• 5. Each picks shreds of text from bowl, combining them and reading them out at random, dictaphone still recording at random.

• 6. This continues, with more and more frantic cutting of text, until glossolalia takes over.

• 7. At this point, the tape is removed from the dictaphone, rewound and played loudly on the main sound system. Strobe on. Visualization sequence read out over continued glossolalia.

VISUALIZATION SEQUENCE

Our words break down, the best words of magic, showing naked the hermetic core of speech. There are no boundaries to this monstrous language. All rituals are abrogate. Hear the speech of the demon universe, of the darkness before time, of the frozen breath before the word of creation. It is no longer words that stream from your mouths, but bright dark shreds of octarine plasma, spiralling up into the air above us, twisting together and weaving the device which is the beginning and end of all magics.

Visualize strongly these tendrils of emptiness, knitting into a plasmic being, the formless bubbles of speech. As the tendrils pour from your mouth, look up at the beast before time, the OCTOPLASM. Your attention feeds it, it reproduces, splitting into more and more bubbles, each with a single staring eye that opens onto the pit. Gaze and feed it, see it reproduce. Every time you think of it, it will divide, and feed, on nothingness becoming potential... gaze and feed it, gaze and it feeds... (reading breaks down into glossolalia, which is a signal for all to babble increasingly to climax, launching the Octoplasm).

Chapter 8

PACTS WITH SPIRITS

THE SPIRIT PARADIQM

Working with the notion of spirits as intelligences somehow shared with other wizards is a particularly powerful and convenient paradigm. It is an undeniable experiential fact that a magician can begin to work with no knowledge of an ’entity’, and end up finding out things about it which correspond exactly with the experience of others. The most reductionist explanation for this experience combines the notion of nonlocal information with telepathic access to information patterns ’somewhere else’, presumably in the brains of other sorcerers. Spirits start, at the simplest end, with the most basic servitors, popular magical vehicles for Chaos Magicians. Servitors require little commitment to a full-blown spirit paradigm, because they are invariably under the command of the wizard. The more complex pre-existing spirits produce a drawback as far as most Chaos Magicians are concerned: working with them involves

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not only listening to them but obeying their guidance. Working in the latter way is the extreme form of the spirit paradigm.

What are the common features underlying all spirits and entities? I shall describe the basic types of spirit first, then look at the features common to them.

SERVITORS are well understood, at least in practice, by Chaos magicians. A servitor is a kind of entity that is budded off from the magician’s consciousness whilst in gnosis, usually with a set of instructions embedded in its structure.

Some magicians like to think of servitors as conscious entities of a different order of life, rather like animal spirits. Cybernetic paradigms are also popular, where the magician regards the entity as a kind of ’astral machine’ with a programming facility which contains a set of instructions. Yet another view of servitors is based on a genetic model, in which the servitor is a set of instructions (like a DNA code) that replicates itself automatically under the right conditions (like a virus).

Whichever model we use, the usefulness of a servitor resides mainly in two features: i) it remains functioning in the astral/ aetheric dimensions for a prolonged period of time, working automatically when the conditions are correct, and ii) it can be called on to perform particular tasks readily, without going through an entire ritual again. Experienced users of servitors will often have a number of them ’waiting in the wings’ for different purposes. When the need arises, the magician simply visualizes the servitor (or calls it in some other way) and instructs it to act as desired.

They are generally simple entities, with a single purpose, or a restricted range of purposes. Occasionally, a magician might make a reprogrammable servitor, which is called upon whenever required and given a new temporary set of instructions to carry out. This type of servitor may take the form of an animal, real or mythic. However, most servitors

seem to me to be less complex than most animals, appearing to the spirit vision more like a small machine, or a microchip with a limited range of information processing capacity. Creating simple servitors is a bit like welding a logic circuit together.

ELEMENTALS. in many older books, you can read Servitor for Elemental. The more general use of the term is applied to nature spirits — the spirits of earth, air, fire and water. In Golden Dawn Qabalah they are ’hunted’ on the astral plane, tested by Qabalistic formulae, and then hauled back (if you’re lucky and you get a good one) for use in the privacy of one’s own temple. The excuse for this is that elementals like to associate with humans, because this association gives them a chance to evolve, a kind of unequal partnership deal. This is an important point which I’ll come back to.

TULPAS : This term is Tibetan in origin. Tulpas are usually defined as thought forms, but this is a rather weak and vague description of such powerful entities. I prefer to use the term tulpa to designate a servitor or egregore entity of exceptional power, independence and programming flexibility. These entities show a distinct tendency to want to evolve, through having attention paid to them by humans. They are capable of warping reality, often spectacularly, for the magician’s benefit, but the price they demand is an increase in their own intelligence and power. William Burroughs has said ’Tulpas can get uppity’, and anyone who has worked with them would surely agree. Essentially, tulpas are personalities; Burroughs seems to be referring on one level to the experience of writing characters in his stories. It is probable that what we call personalities in ourselves have identical levels of cybernetic organization as tulpas.

EGREGORES are group mind entities. This is quite a loose

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term, which is sometimes used to denote any group mind considered in the abstract, but is more meaningful when applied to a well-defined magical entity deliberately created by a group of magicians.

Other examples of egregore entities are the GOTOS created by the Fraternitas Saturni, and possibly the Ascended Masters of the Golden Dawn.

GODDESSES AND GODS can be viewed as egregores built up over centuries of adoration, terror, sexual sacrifice, blood and other familiar gnostic techniques. They tend to evolve from the totems, clan animals or hero-figures of tribes.

TOTEMS OR CLAN ANIMALS of tribes. When tribes fuse through war, one totem animal consumes another. When nations are built from tribes, the various totem animals become God/desses, as happened in the Nomes of the Egyptian civilization, the Deities of Khem arising from the different regions of the two Kingdoms.

ATAVISMS-. Austin Spare reintroduced the practice of atavistic resurgence into mainstream magic. In Spare’s system, an atavism is reachable by the individual magician for empowerment and sorcery, without reference to any tribe or social context. This relates the concept of animal gods to their shamanic origins, the shaman discovering his tutelary or power animal in trance, and working with it thereafter.

EVOLUTION OF DEITIES FROM HUMANS: The clearest example of the way in which people form gods out of their heroic dead is seen in voudon. Maya Deren writes of the retirer d’en bas de I’eau ritual which is performed one year or more after a death. The soul of the deceased is brought up ’from the bottom of the waters’ through the body of a trance priestess, and then placed in a pot called -igovi. The govi is kept

in the home of the deceased’s family, or by the local houngan, where it is consulted on all sorts of important matters. Eventually, no-one survives who remembers the individual, and he begins the transition from Les Morts to Les Mysteres, from being a dead man to becoming part of the loa. For instance, a man who was known for his forthrightness and strength, and maybe for his metalworking skills, might be remembered as part of Ogun, the loa of warriors and blacksmiths. If the individual was remembered as truly exceptional, he may eventually form a new aspect of a loa, a new member of the loa’s famille.

DEMONS, in the sense of the Grimoires, rather than of a psychological paradigm, seem to represent the oldest available spirit paradigm of the Western traditions. They are generally regarded as quasi-intelligent, dangerous and powerful creatures. Entry to, or communication with, this realm is often done in a gnosis of fear, since it necessarily represent alienness to the dominant self. The magician separates herself radically from these entities by the use of the Circle and Triangle.

THE PACT

The notion of the demonic pact has at its heart the principle of employing a powerful entity in a way which satisfies the magician’s feelings of having paid adequately for warping reality so greatly. To clarify this point, cast your mind back to a sigil or spell that didn’t work; you can probably remember an occasion when you knew it wasn’t going to work, despite the meticulous planning you had put into the working. You simply had not achieved one-pointedness: some part of your mind was not in agreement with the working and sabotaged it. As a result of such an experience, you may have evolved a technique for achieving magical unison in your selves, maybe by repeated automatic drawing on a sigil theme until it ’felt right’. Similarly, in employing a demon, the operator should enter into

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negotiation with it, through some system of divination or dowsing. This ensures that the final deal that is enshrined in the pact is satisfactory to both sides, that the operation is one pointed.

Similar in some ways to both demons and elementals are the Spirits of Hoodoo as oudined by Michael Bertiaux. These entities are also considered to be related to the souls of dead humans of great antiquity, perhaps in the sense that the ancient dead form heroic archetypes for the tribe, and eventually become identified with deities. The method of working with them magically is a form of prayer. Direct requests are made of the Spirits, and they are paid in the currency of bodily energy. The more powerful entities of this system delight in sexual sacrifice.

This is a procedure like a demonic pact, stripped down to its simplest elements, and employing less impressively alien demons. Of course, the necessary ingredient for success is ability to believe in the literal existence of these Spirits, to immerse oneself in the paradigm completely. This highlights one of the problems for the Chaos magician of working within off-the-peg spiritist paradigms: the spirits function only if you believe in them, and their world is highly seductive. It is seductive precisely because you are their lifeline to manifestation and evolution, and they are good at surviving and evolving. They want you — your belief, your energy, your flesh to manifest through. They don’t want you to shower off your belief in them with the sweat of the last ritual.

THE EVOLUTION OF ENTITIES

This brings us to the central theme of this chapter: that all entities seek to evolve. Evolution is development in the direction of greater complexity or, to quote Ilya Prigogine, a collapse into higher coherence. This seems to be an inherent property of all coherent information systems, or dissipative systems in Prigogine’s terminology. When a clump of

Dave Dee information can sustain its coherence by taking energy in and putting energy out, it has the kind of coherence that will take part in such an evolution. All servitors, tulpas, gods, demons, spirits and egregores must be such systems, viewed cybernetically. The tradition that elementals don’t mind being ordered around by sorcerers because they want to evolve is no mere bit of superstition, but an ancient awareness of the same principle that Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for.

So where do humans fit into this scheme? I would suggest that another parameter needs to be added to make sense of our relationship to spirits. That parameter is Chaos itself. Consider a little one-job servitor. It has few degrees of freedom; the choices that it can make are very few, and limited to finding optimum conditions for the performance of its one task. Pretty simple. Now take a reprogrammable servitor. This is called back again and again by the wizard, resulting in its becoming more intelligent and powerful. In other words, it will, if allowed to by its master, develop more degrees of freedom, become more chaotic.

The mechanism by which a servitor or tulpa succeeds in subduing a human is simple: it is our own laziness. Laziness too is an evolutionary drive, pushing us to find ways to achieve results with less effort (only a fool goes the other way as a matter of course), but it has its dangers. The third or fourth time you call back your reprogrammable servitor and give it a job to do, you may well allow it more freedom, infuse it with more chaos, so that it can make decisions for you and get the job done without pestering you for further instructions. You have promoted it from slave to undermanager. You got what your laziness wanted, and it got more complexity, more chaos. Everybody’s happy, until you do this one time too many, and find yourself in dialogue with it, with it attempting to advise you — something which was definitely not in the original deal.

It may attempt to gain more power by advising you to use it more often. For instance, I finally banished one egregore entity

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when it tried to convince me that I should use it when driving, to clear roads, protect my car, etc. Eventually I realised that I was almost continually using it to remove the most trivial obstacles, and I dismissed it and constructed some far simpler servitors for the separate tasks I still wished to perform.

Now a tulpa is a type of entity that can exist independently of the magician’s will to a large extent. Whilst created by a magician or group of magicians in the first place, its creators infused it with far more degrees of freedom, instilled more primal chaos into its structure. The working which created it may have utilized random procedures, like cut up text, action painting or collage. At core, a tulpa is highly chaotic. It may appear in the spirit vision as an entity almost bursting the limits of its form, its outer envelope shot through with cracks from which pour the black radiance of chaos. It is far more “intelligent”, powerful and dangerous than an ordinary servitor.

Fortunately for us, humans are capable of accessing even more chaotic and extreme modes of being. The human form is forgotten in moments of wild ecstasy, warping into something that can control by sheer will any human created entity, can subdue it by a vast access to chaos. In my experience, humans are more chaotic, intelligent, powerful, free and dangerous than any such being. The fact that most of our species choose not to be far from negates the experience of the sorcerer. It merely confirms magic as an elite preoccupation.

EVALUATION OF WORK WITH SPIRITS

• 1. ’LESSER’ SERVITORS

The usefulness of servitors can hardly be overstated. It is possible, with practise, to create one at a moment’s notice, and get very rapid results. Perhaps the ease and appeal is due to the quite childlike state of consciousness required to make them, rather like talking to an imaginary friend. Successes with this

Dave I^ee method are too numerous to mention.

• 2. ADVANCED SERVITORS

I constructed a series of multi-purpose fetishes over 11 years, starting out on my own. The last 2 entities were aspects of group minds, created under exceptional group conditions in both cases. The first servitor I used for 2 years, until the group that created it split up. The second servitor I used for 1 year, evoking it for all sorts of trivial inconveniences. Before the end of that year, my daily life was full of opportunities to use the servitor, full of inconveniences from which I was alienated, engaged in removing them by magic. I had become entangled in a web of trivial obsessions, driven by frustration. It took me the loss of a significant magical object to begin to understand what was going on. The object was a ring, a locus for the servitor.

These two egregore entities had the characteristics of increasing sentience, and I think of them as Tulpas. Eventually I chose to cease working with both of them.

• 3. GOETIC DEMONS

A group I was involved in experimented intensively with the Lesser Key of Solomon over a period of about 6 months. The Lesser Key, or Goetia, is part of the Lemegeton, dating in manuscript from the 17th century, but claiming to be much older..

Modus operandi: As is well known by practitioners of Goetia, the basic structures of Circle, Triangle, Seal of the Demon, Hexagram and Pentagram of Solomon (or equivalent, such as Sigil of Chaos), and Wand are irreducible minima for this work.

The other elements can be subject to some degree of personal choice. For instance, we experimented with various forms of the Bornless One Ritual, and Enochian Calls, for the Preliminary Invocation, which is the consciousness raising preliminary to the Summoning.

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The Summoning itself we found best to keep simple, and use our own words. The Charge to the Demon is necessarily couched in the operator’s own words, and must be as tight as a legal document.

For skrying, we used a Sigil of Chaos, or a large Black Mirror on different occasions, with incense burning in front of it to provide a flowing surface.

The demons were always given a time limit to fulfill their Charge. If they failed, they were summoned again and given a second chance. If they failed again, their Seals were destroyed.

Evaluation as Results Magic:

Evocations of 3 demons were performed in the full Temple. Of these, one was an outright failure, and the Seal was destroyed, one has been extraordinarily successful, and one was extremely beneficial, but not in the precise way it was Charged.

4 demons were summoned independent of the Temple’s work. Of these workings, 2 were outright failures, leading to the destruction of the Seals, 1 was an outright success, 1 a partial success. In other words, we had a rather poor rate of practical success with these entities.

Evaluation of psychic events in and around the work: This system of magic is unparalleled in our experience for producing weird effects other than those intended.

• 1. Dreams-. Three of our group noted lucid dreams, in which the demon appeared more or less exactly as given in the Grimoire. Also, a person close to C. who was not involved in the work reported a dream in which an entity appeared matching in a number of important features our own clairvoyant perception of the demon we were currently working with. The dream occurred at the time of its summoning.

A. noted lucid dreams of 3 demons. In each case, the entity appeared exactly as described in the Goetia, and attempted to escape from its Charge, or negotiate an alteration of the charge

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in some way. In all of these instances the demon failed to fulfill its Charge.

• 2. Clairvoyance in the Circle: The congruence of clairvoyant impressions during the evocations was astonishing. We came to realize that this is an extremely important aspect of the work: without a perception of these entities, they can easily leak out of their constraints and obsess the operators without their knowledge.

• 3. Apparent telekinesis: on one occasion, all four in the circle saw a magical dagger disappear from one position and reappear about six feet away.

Dangers of obsession:

The whole issue with this work is CONTROL:

• i) Leakage: It is not actually difficult to banish a demon; after all, it should be part of every sorcerer’s awareness that he or she has the ultimate and absolute right to do so. This is the Work of the Wand, of the pure will. However, the difficulty arises when you get complacent about the demon leaving a trace in your aura. The weapon of necessity here is the Sword of Discrimination — deciding what is you and what is the demon. When this is accomplished, the trace of the demon leaves. We started this work with a good deal of complacency, which was soon knocked out of us.

• ii) Indulgence in fancy clairvoyant visions is not only a waste of time, but a positive danger to the recipient and his co-workers, giving further opportunities for the demon to get attention. Just separate yourself from the entity, banish, get out of the temple, and continue to look out for each other for a while. This shades into:

• iii) Addiction: the ’buzz’ you get from working this magic is tremendous. It is actually comparable to the effects of addictive drugs, in that the demon will promise you power and pleasure, and desire you to use it more and more often. ALWAYS stay in control.

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• iv) Think very carefully before offering a human vessel to the demon. We tried this on one occasion, near the beginning of our work when we were still complacent about our ability to control the situation. Anyone who ’channels’ a demon should be prepared to live a life of extreme preparedness and watchfulness for some months afterwards. If you don’t feel you can commit that much time and energy to the work, stick to the rules: Circle for humans, Triangle for demons.

• 4. LUCKY HOODOO SPIRITS

This is an off-the-peg system, Michael Bertiaux’s Monastery of the Seven Rays Grade Papers, reprinted as the first few sections of his Condon Gnostic Workbook.. These brief chapters are distinguished by a lack of the bizarre, self-referential metaphysics which makes the rest of the book difficult to understand and use. They form a grimoire expounding methods for achieving the following results: General Requests; Love & Sex; The Contraite for Money; Gambling luck; Power over opponents; Self-energization; Working as a magical consultant. 1 worked with the Contraite, and achieved a breakthrough in my wealth magic. The sensation of working with the Spirits of lucky Hoodoo was very pleasant, easy and natural. After 3 years 1 reached my limit with the system, and found that I needed to move on. In more recent years I have worked with the Hoodoo Spirits again.

• 5. AN EVOLVING SPIRIT ?

The Healing Servitor which was created by the Pathworking at the end of Chapter 5 has manifested in a number of guises since its inception. A year after creating it, I performed an experiment in shamanic trance mode to discover a spirit for healing. An extremely vivid experience followed, the spirit identifying itself as U-UM-TZA. I passed the information on to a friend in need of healing, who performed his own investigation of the name and central image. He spontaneously

Dave Dee

that pathworking. Another friend who had not made conscious contact with the Servitor was visited by an entity which assisted her healing. It had a completely different appearance to the original form of the healing servitor, but substantially similar properties. The different forms are not surprising, in light of the fact that the Servitor was originally programmed with ’expert heuristic software’, which would enable it to learn any healing strategy it required. Obviously, this would imply it changing its shape to fit in with the personal mythology of the recipient.

The story of healing spirits continues: at a free-form Chao-Voudon ritual, a spirit called The Doctor appeared to me in the spirit vision. I attempted to take on possession by it, with disappointing results. However, weeks later my attention was drawn by a series of synchronicities to a votive Santeria statuette. The entity it depicted is known as Doctor Hernandez, or The Doctor.... Work proceeds...

• 6. BODY-SPIRITS

One of the oddest uses of a spirit paradigm I have come across involved characterizing body organs as spirits. The magician who devised this had used it in a serious medical emergency, with good effect. This kind of approach could be extended to different levels, such as spirits of cells, or proteins, or DNA. I’d be interested to hear from anyone who had followed up such a paradigm.

FURTHER READING

Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers - Order Out Of Chaos; pub. Flamingo, 1985. Scientific basis for the evolution of complexity in chaotic systems.

Phil Hine - Chaos Servitors; see Bibliography

Michael Bertiaux - The Voudon Gnostic Workbook; pub. Magical Childe, 1987

Maya Deren - Voodoo Gods; pub. Paladin, 1975

INTERLUDE:

THE QALAFRON RITE

This working was originally performed with live voice, which was then recorded, distorted, and mixed with three other tracks to form a tape.

Pathworking

You are in a deep silence, for a moment, a silence that gradually fills up with sounds, the sounds of a forest. The chirping cries and raucous songs of birds, the chittering and calling of monkeys, the whirring movements of insects. You distinguish the imitative calls of your fellow humans hunting, as you crouch silent in a patch of forest shade.

Everything about the forest is familiar, its sounds, its smells, its sights. Your senses are super sharp: You can distinguish the smells that different animals have left, tell what kind of animal, its age and sex, and how long ago it passed this way. Everything is rich to overflowing with sensory information, and not only your more obvious senses: an invisible world of spirits and ancestors, of animal spirits and intelligences, of your tribe and of the tribes of beasts. You are the shaman of your tribe, with knowledge of the secret songs of all living things, which is to say all things, because, in this world, all things are part of a pulsing, living, dying, reproducing, mutating reality, a vast sweep of embedded sentience. You speak to the spirits of animals and ancestors, singing the sacred songs and making pacts with them for the survival and growth of your tribe.

This is the beginning, the dawn of human society and culture. Consider what you have in this world, what makes up the roots of your life: You are part of a family, a tribe, whose memory runs countless generations into the past, and whose everyday experience links you with the spirits of the dead. You

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have continuity, identity with the spirits. You are embedded in an eternal world of interrelated phenomena. Yet something stirs in you, and you stand and walk away from your place in the forest.

The forest thins. You come upon a clearing. The sounds are different now. These people are working hard, sweating under a cruel sun in clothes made of fibres. You pity them, then you see how many they are, and how successful. Their lives are more complex, and the Gods and Goddesses they worship are more distant from their lives than the spirits of the Shaman’s world.

You are a priest of the Pagan Aeon, raising aloft the knife to slaughter the sacred animal for the ritual, leading a school of initiation in the esoterics of this Aeon.

What do you have in this world? Social and family standing in the city state. A well fed and stable life, a wealth of sensual existence. But something in you moves, something that urges you to move on.

Across an arid landscape, a city comes into sight. You enter the city walls, and the city grows around you. You are a black robed Priest of the One True God, leading an army of zealots to storm the city for the greater glory of your God. You are mighty in victory, entering the city in triumph in a gilded litter, raising your arms in benediction to the cowed survivors of the butchery.

What do you have in this world? Faith, the certainty that your God will reward you in Heaven to come, that you are doing your Lord’s work, and will be jusdy honoured.

But is it really a certainty? A twinge of fear enters your heart, as you reflect for a moment that all this might be pointiess... You suppress the thought, but you are restless, and must move on.

The city has grown into a metropolis, swarming with the fruits of human thought new technologies of electricity, atomic fission, scientific medicine and industry. The air is filled

CHAOTOPIA !

with the noise of machines, and the breath of their exhaust gases.

Now you are a priest scientist of the atheist Aeon, toiling towards a final rational assessment of human life. Your faith told you that the whole world, not only the world of matter, but the world of people, would be explained one day by deterministic science. That one day all human suffering would be removed by Scientific Progress. At first you believed this. Now, increasingly, you see little evidence that the human world can be explained and controlled. You have been on the brink of intellectual despair for years. You have seen into the void beyond the failure of modernism, and now you are nothing.

Yet something thrills within you; the spirit that built the old science is at work building something new. Forms swirl below the conscious level of your mind. You begin walking, gazing round at the accelerating multi-layered madness of your Metropolis. You come to the limit of the crowded streets, and there is a pulsing blackness before you. At the end of your despair waits a Black Ship, warping the streets of the city like a rubber sheet, a vast insult to the gravity of this place. As you approach the ship, matter is being warped beyond its boundaries, bending and shredding. Everything is coming apart, and you keep on walking forward. There is a tearing, ripping sound and everything is shattering in shards of shimmering blackness. You have boarded the Black Ship, which sails beyond the torn veil of matter, bearing the GALAFRON, those of the Royal Blood of Chaos. You stand with your companions on the bridge of the ship. You are sailing through a cloud of language. Babel is all around you. Language fragments and its roots appear naked to you, the roots in the first calls of hunting groups, in the descriptions of things. Your mind is a colony of word viruses. These have evolved over thousands of years to their present condition — your internal dialogue. Each of these viruses contains within its structure the history of all language, going back to the calls of hunting primates, the cries

Dave Dee

of babies, the sounds of lovers. Each wordvirus is a glittering shell welded together from many tiny pieces, ancient phonemes that go to make up memes.

Consider how you got here. At one time, you were a slave to grey robotic consciousness, when each moment of illumination and ecstasy was an isolated sample of what life could be like. Now, in the company of the Galafron, you are forging a new reality, the Pandaemonaeon. This is where the ship is heading, to the realm beyond all the other aeons, the country where we belong, the land of pure freedom. All aboard for Chaotopia!

Beyond the ship, we see a crescent of land. As we approach it, we see its plastic nature. Gaze right into it, and see its vibrating instability — it is built of molecules of pure Octarine force.

We disembark, to stand on this shore of pure potential. Before us is an edge, land growing out into the swirling chaos of a Mandelbrot set as we walk forward. This is the land of Chaotopia, and it is different for everyone here, because it is the realm of the manifestation of all desire, of the reification of your dream. And yet this is where we belong — this is the home country of the Galafron. It is the playground of your free will, manifesting every structure implied by your desires. Out beyond the edge of all consensus realities, it is us, the GALAFRON, who create the world.

Take a deep breath of dizzying freedom, and open your eyes, as you step off the edge of all worlds, into the infinite present.

Chapter 9

CHAOTOPIA?

AEONICS

To a magician, Aeonics is a study of the inner levels of history, a study of the shifts in mass consciousness that generate the succession and concurrence of the Aeons, the great principles which emerge as masks of the mystery. It is seen in the changing myths of cultures. Aeonics is useful because of the nature of the resistance experienced in magical action. It is a truism in magic that, in principle, everything is possible, but some things are highly improbable. Some of these resistances stem from the inertia of the physical world itself, and some stem from the magician’s personal limitations. He or she will work against the latter, overcoming his limiting views of himself. However, some resistances appear to be held in common with others, to be part of ’the human condition’ at this point in time. They are memes, wordviruses embedded in everyone’s psyche, and they are what gives each aeon its particular coloration.

These resistances, these wordviruses, are forms left over from previous cycles of evolution — maybe as recently as a week ago, for there is no real time in aeonic shifts. They are inertial, negative masses of the world’s past habits, solidified ideas. In the guises of gods, ideologies and institutions they are the shells left behind by the used-up creative energies of another era. They may be very powerful, but their power derives from inertia: internally, from inertia of belief caused by fear of the new; externally by their repetition as wordviruses in the mass media. In the 8-Circuit Model, these memes, would be attributed to the 7th, Neurogenetic Circuit, Racial Destiny.

Peter Carroll has delineated Aeonics from a Chaos point of view, in Liber Null. To summarize and extend the key features of each Aeon:

1ST AEON:

Social Organization: Hunter-gatherer

Spirituality: Shamanism. Totemic Animal Spirits, Ancestors. Use of ecstatic trance states, particularly psychedelic plants. Eschatology: immortality through the tribe, absorption into the memories and totem of the tribe. Cyclic time.

Features: Everything is alive. Embeddedness in interconnected phenomena; the environment provides everything; a sense of eternity via connection to the spirits of the ancestors.

2ND AEON:

Social Organization: Settled agriculture, small city states, royal families.

Spirituality: Pagan Gods and Goddesses; zoomorphic and humanoid forms; tribal totems end up as deities in a pantheon. Deities tend to become more human-like in their attributes, humans writ large.

Eschatology: Reincarnation, or immortality for the powerful and famous. Cyclic time.

Features: Land, herd animals and crops are wealth. The world

CHAOTOPIA !

seen as a living resource. Accumulation & centralization of wealth into hereditary priest/royal castes. Emphasis on fertility; reproduction, and the creation of dynasties. Wars of conquest.

3RD AEON:

Social Organization: Empire-building, cities, royal families.

Spirituality: Monotheism. Violent suppression of all religious competition.

Eschatology: Life after death for anyone who is obedient. Punishment for those who aren’t. Linear time, with an end to it — the Eschaton, the End of the World.

Features: Wealth as land, goods and money. The world seen as resources to be tamed. A philosophy of salvation for anyone who plays the game. Wars of conquest and colonization.

4TH AEON:

Social Organization: Industrial urban. Nationalism.

Spirituality: Atheistic scientism. Materialistic denigration of all religion, mysticism and magic.

Eschatology: When you’re dead, you’re dead. (So either build up wealth for your descendants or live for pleasure). Linear time with maybe a cosmological end to it — the Heat Death of the Universe, or its collapse.

Features: The Death of God. Modernism. Wealth as money. The world seen as a dead lump of matter to be plundered recklessly. General belief in Progress through science and technology. Culture considered as global: if something is considered ’right’, then it is right for everybody. Wars of competing ideologies - ’Communist’, ’Fascist’, ’Democratic’.

These are the Aeons so far. No-one has really attempted to pull together the strands of present culture and look at where our magic could go. Starting with a summary of the emerging Pandaemonaeon:

Dave Dee

5TH AEON:

Social Organization: Multinational corporations, cryptocracy. Spirituality: Multi-model, Chaoist. Conspiracy theory as a substitute for religion: people want to think that someone at least knows what is going on. Which may or may not be the case. Eschatology: Revolutionary: attempts to overcome death by medicine and technology. Time can be cyclic, but on the large scale the universe probably has an end to it; theories on how to overcome species death in this event. Time (or consciousness) may also be considered to ’loop back’ from the future.

Features: Post-Modernism. Wealth as information. Collapse of faith in progress; mass panic, ’option anxiety’, disorientation and numb alienation. Fragmentation of culture; culture regarded as ethnocentric rather than global. The resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Higher standard of mass ’wealth’ does not satisfy. Resurgence of concern with ecosystem at odds with continuing eco-plunder. War is unbounded in the form of terrorism; small groups with powerful weapons abound. UFO’s, the flying saucer vision, alien myths.

These are just a few of the features, in the broadest definitions. I shall be looking more closely at recent and current cultural trends, to identify key themes which make this time different. This is what could be called micro-aeonics. Magic works with the raw materials of the culture in which it is immersed; what kinds of future culture are on offer for us to make our magics out of?

• 1. VERSIONS OF IMMORTALITY

Life Extension: One of the features of the last century has been the massive increase in lifespan in Western culture. Magical healing teaches us that ageing is plastic: we are not victims of ageing and death; rather, people choose to die, because

CHA0T0PL4 !

it is expected of them. The frontier of active life is being pushed back more by propaganda and role-models than by medicine. Still, few people achieve what their potential true lifespan is; until much larger numbers of people attain their full span, we are not going to know what the true human limit of life is, or even if it is biologically limited at all. The brain does not seem to place any limit on further experiences; it has been estimated that the human brain can store about 10¹’ bits of information. This corresponds in the same estimate to approximately 1000 years of subjective experience, so there is plenty of opportunity for the individual’s consciousness to reprogram itself for optimum assimilation of new experiences. This, then, may represent the effective limit of life-extension without some form of downloading into some kind of post-biological hardware.

Frankenstein and Chips; Downloading the human software: Of those scientists that are seeking the holy grail of virtual immortality through machine intelligence, two writers have made it into the popular domain. Hans Moravec, in Mind Children, predicts that human-level artificial intelligences will be commonplace by 2030. He sees this happening via a meeting of the down-up technology of robotics with the top-down technology of artificial intelligence research.

Frank Tipler, in The Physics of Immortality, advances the notion that long after the human race is extinct the universe will be entirely colonized by our descendants — initially Artificial Intelligences, and eventually some kind of super-conscious entity with virtually infinite data processing capacity. This is supposed to happen shortly after our universe has reached maximum expansion and begins to contract. (He claims to ’prove’ that our universe is of the expanding-contracting variety, using a variant of the Strong Anthropic Principle coupled with the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics). This super-entity he calls the Omega Point, after the rogue Jesuit

Dave Dee philosopher Teilhard de Chardin. The Omega Point will have enough processing capacity to form a perfect simulation (i.e. an emulation) of every biological entity ever to have existed, and so will be able (and eager, because of Its infinite curiosity) to ’raise from the dead’ all humans who ever existed, plus a lot more who didn’t, and all their accompanying critters. It will also be able to control the shrinkage of the universe to provide itself with enough energy. It will also be evolving so rapidly that its ’thought processes’ will speed up exponentially, so that the amount of time left as the universe collapses will, subjectively, be infinite. The virtual reality we would inhabit in this supercomputer would have to contain a complete emulation of the experience of the flesh — kinaesthesias, emotions, all the wetness and messiness of flesh utterly intact, and improved beyond disease and ageing.

Basically, the terms of Tipler’s argument are very close to those of Christian eschatology: he believes we will create God and that God will resurrect us all in a perfect afterlife. Also, because the Omega Point God is inevitable, according to the proofs Tipler advances, It has always been guiding us towards this final epiphany.

The main problem with the Tipler-Moravec programme is the idea that human consciousness can be downloaded into computer hardware. Tipler argues the pattern-identity theory; according to this, each of us is just a pattern of information, a program running on a wetware biocomputer. If this is true, then there is no reason why that program should not run in a silicon hardware environment. This argument is absolutely based on the notion that the ’classical mind’ is all that there is to consciousness. This is the position of those who believe in the validity of the Turing test. Early cyberneticist Alan Turing theorized that there is no distinction between a system (such as a sufficiently sophisticated computer) that can do things that make it appear conscious, and a genuinely conscious system, like a human being. In other words, the consciousness of a

CHAOTOPIA!

human being is no more ’genuine’ than the ’consciousness’ of a computer that can perform the same functions. If one believes totally that consciousness is a property of complexity in information-processing systems, then the Turing test follows logically, and the evolution of Al’s is only a matter of time. If, on the other hand, one adopts the position that consciousness is the property of a non-local quantum field, then the construction of a genuinely conscious being would require that its physical base generate a Bose-Einstein condensate or something very similar, something with non-local effects. According to Amit Goswami (op. cit.):

Richard Feynman has proven mathematically that a classical computer can never simulate non-locality

If this is true, then genuine Al’s will never exist in any extension of our current technology. At the moment, there is no way of deciding between these options. When we find a scientific (as distinct from subjective) way to detect the quantum field of a conscious being, it is possible that the Turing test will turn out to be bunk.

Emulation and pattern-identity are given an ironical twist by a prophecy of William S. Burroughs:-

The Psychlotron processes image... it’s the microfilm principle — smaller and smaller, more and more images in less and less space... down to a psychlotronic crystal meal... we can take the whole fucking planet out that way up our ass in a finger stall

• - introduction to Psychlotron video

• 2. THE ABYSS OF HALLUCINATION

Situationist writer Guy Debord coined the phrase The (Consumer) Spectacle, which refers to the way in which all newness, all

Dave Dee

creativity is assimilated into the media and fed back to us in the form of images. This generates a society based on illusions which feed the relentless expansion of consumerism. How can this come about?

One helpful model for this process uses the idea of biogram and logogram. The biogram is seen as the operation of the entire genetic potential, the whole genome, of the individual or, on a wider scale, the gene-pool of the whole human race. This includes flesh, desires, atavistic levels; in short, everything that Austin Osman Spare might have implied by the definition of Zos as ’the body considered as a whole’. It appears that the biogram contains the needs for food, shelter, sex, companionship and some form of ecstasis.

On the other hand, the logogram contains the whole gamut of symbolic systems that humans use — language in all its forms, from the abstractions of mathematics through spoken and written word, semaphore, the structured visual and audial imagery of painting, TV, music, to symbolic postures and hand gestures and everything in between. Our atavistic prehistory in the stream of organic evolution provides us with the biogrammatic constants of hunger, sex, the search for shelter, and the more primitive forms of reproductive bonding. As soon as we start to construct more complex social forms, we need language. It may even be true to say that the evolution of language and the evolution of society go hand in hand. In any case, as soon as we start consciously defining and negotiating our relationships with each other and the world, we transform ourselves.

The distinction between biogram and logogram gets blurred when we consider our appetite for ecstasis, or what is usually called the ’drive to transcendence’. This whole issue is dominated and confused by religious/political exploitations of our fears of death and social ostracism. This exploitation takes the form of repressive dogmas built deep into the logogram in the course of the socialization process, along with

CHA0T0PL4 / their related reward/punishment patterns.

The function of these elements is the achievement of social conformity via co-option of the ’transcendence drives’. This pollution of the weirdest aspect of the biogram has the effect that many magicians deny the existence of any ’drive to transcendence’. This is not surprising, considering that ’transcendence’ usually (and wrongly) implies escape from the world of the senses — indeed, escape from biogrammatic realities into the cloud-cuckoo lands of religion or historical determinism. To look at civilization so far, it’s easy to get the impression that the logogram has won a decisive victory over the biogram. The contents of the logogram, under the influence of the slave-religions, have been severely anti-hedonistic and anti-bioaesthetic, crippling the ecstatic capacities of all but a few strong individuals.

However, it seems that human consciousness is, by its nature, incomplete, provisional. Our nature is permanently changed by culture; we are half genetics, half memetics, half biogram, half logogram, half biology, half culture. The wound that was dealt the so-called Golden Age by socialization is incurable by any attempt at social regression; we cannot go back to a condition of primal immediacy, ignoring all that history has created in us. We are stuck with a forward momentum, inexorably propelling us into language and culture.

Just as Baphomet can be seen as the Planetary Biogram, Choronzon can be viewed as the Logogram, or at least one of its current forms — the mass media. This has been called the Videodrome, a mindless collective on a relentless quest for sentience. This entity eats creativity, personality and rebellion and excretes control images in the form of news and entertainment. It is the most efficient system ever devised for keeping people quiet — a postmodern religion whose slogan is Shop Till You Drop, its watchwords Freedom of Choice: choice between 37 TV channels of mindless pap; choice between 2 political parties indistinguishable in their mendacity

Dave Lee

in the service of big capital. The advertising aspect of media rules through greed and status; the news aspect through fear.

Try the symbol of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse: the bringers of Death as seen on Death TV The violent images of the TV screen are imprinted in the flesh, pushing the passive viewer towards standardized thought, standardized emotional response, Image made flesh, Word made flesh. The 4 Horsemen are the riders of the endless apocalypse, stalking the world forever, barely below the conscious level. The realm of the media is the Inferno of Choronzon, the Demon of the Abyss of Hallucination. These images can be recapitulated under magical conditions, to rend the veil of illusion and plunge into the basal layer of primitive impersonal terror underlying the imagery. This is the Abyss, where the Great Old Ones or Archons of terror surge up from the depths of our being. These Archons are the primal forces of the instincts, of the first two neural circuits, corresponding to a vision of fear and greed on a cosmic scale. This type of gnosis can be used to play around with and re-imprint your responses to media nonsense.

Incidentally, most visions of ’salvation’, including some forms of the Omega Point hypothesis, seek to rescue the violence done to our organic nature by the Choronzonic processes of history. A prime example is Tipler’s Omega Point God-machine, mentioned above, which is supposed to resurrect us all and bring us to emulated heaven; this program has an element of justifying the repressions and distortions of Christian culture. In a sense, the emulation of bodyconsciousness is an attempt at a final reconciliation between logogram and biogram, an alchemical marriage between Baphomet and Choronzon. However, all such visions are visions of some future Utopia, and their effect is to distance us from living in the here and now, from liberating ourselves

CHA0T0PL4 ! to taste the eternal ecstasy of the present.

• 3. LIBERATION

The Revolt of the Superhedonists: Supersensuality is a term used by Austin Spare, referring to states beyond mere pleasure, states which collapse and renew the sexuality. It has resonances with the term polymorphous perversity, which Freud used to label the sexuality of children, an erotic response distributed over the entire body.

The emphases of Spare and Freud were of course quite different: Freud saw only the possibility of returning the adult individual to his normal wretchedness; the ecstasy of polymorphous perversity was forever lost with childhood. Spare, on the other hand, gave gnostic techniques for dissolving the focus of the self, of making the ecstasy of desire infinitely vast through the practice of the Death Posture. Decades later, the political philosopher Herbert Marcuse published ’Eros and Civilization’, in which he took Freud’s model, but, contrary to Freud, argued that civilization might give us now what we’ve always wanted — ’limitless erotics of the whole body’ — but never dared imagine we might get.

It is quite possible that hardly anyone would have understood the notion of whole-body eroticism without the appearance of psychedelic drugs onto the mass market in the late 1960s. Psychedelics are capable of generating exactly that condition — an entirely erotic experience which is not centred on the genitals. Millions of people had this experience, and that set the scene for the youth rebellions (which their protagonists viewed as a ’revolution’) of that era. Although many aspects of that subculture were rather silly, it made clear the link between work and the suppression of superhedonism. Marcuse wrote:

The distribution of time plays a fundamental role in this transformation. Man exists only part time, during

Dave Lee

his working days, as an instrument of alienated performance....free time would be potentially available for pleasure. But the pleasure principle which governs the id is ’timeless’ also in the sense that it militates against the temporal dismemberment of pleasure, against its distribution in small separated doses. A society governed by the performance principle must of necessity impose such distribution because the organism must be trained for its alienation at its very roots — the pleasure ego. It must learn to forget the claim for timeless and useless gratification, for the ’eternity of pleasure’

- Eros & Civilization

And further:

Man learns that ’it cannot last anyway’...He is resigned before society forces him to practice resignation methodically.... Eros offends against the decisive taboo that sanctions libidinal pleasure only as a temporal and controlled condition, not as a permanent fountainhead of the human existence

- ibid.

The pursuit of pleasure in a context of disobedience could release anarchic energy: -

In a repressive order... the manifestation of pleasure for its own sake must appear as fleurs de mal

- ibid.

For the best of the Superhedonists who appeared in the 1960s acid era, their Superhedonism was aimed straight at eternity, at escape from the conditions of temporary hedonic gratification, back to the primal desire and forward to the rearrangement of civilization around this imperative. This old dream could finally become reality in a technologically evolved

CHA0T0PL4 !

society: -

occurring at the height of civilization, as a consequence not of defeat but of victory in the struggle for existence, and supported by a free society, such liberation might have very different results. It would still be ...a subversion of culture — but after culture had done its work

-ibid.

How did this shift in consciousness appear to fail? The reaction of established society was similar to a persecution of religious heretics :”The image of liberation, which has become increasingly realistic, is persecuted the world over”(ibid.). However, ’the revolution’ also destroyed itself from the inside. Why? It does seem that the superhedonism ran out of steam, got re-impacted into conventional hedonism, which is basically consumerism. Hedonism is not pure ’primal Eros’, but is timebound, part of the cyclical world of Desire-Gratification-Frustration. This return to smaller gratifications occurs because the supersensuality is so hard to sustain, to keep open the original raw edge of neophilia.

The micro-aeonic reaction against this was the Punk Generation’s form of rebellion, which was to kick over precisely that hippie consumerism. Until they in turn were assimilated by the Spectacle. If the hippies had ended up living in a playpen, telling the younger people that they were free, the punks used that freedom to smash up the playpen. Ineffective educational ideas espoused by the 1960s liberals had bred a generation who were by and large less educated than their predecessors, less able to make their way in society. Essentially, liberalism betrayed them. The 1980s ultra-consumeristmaterialist culture was even more hostile to superhedonism.

The rave subculture of the 1990s has generated a resurgence of interest in ecstatic states. As in the 1960s, people first

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encounter such states through using psychedelic drugs, but the most adventurous individuals are going on to discover other routes to gnosis. Those who survived the 1960s with their supersensualist philosophy intact are resurfacing. Overall, it seems that the superhedonist tendency is stronger and more coherent than ever before. Without the naivete of the 1960s rebellion, the current resurgence of superhedonism should create more sustained effects.

A particularly coherent philosophy of liberation is Immediatism. Our desires, our biogram, our physical quality of life have been co-opted by consumerist society, and our liberation is dependent on perceiving clearly how this happens, and how to avoid it. The chief proponent of Immediatism is Hakim Bey, whose writing is an extraordinary blend of magic, mysticism and socio-political critique. His recommendations focus on unmediated relationships between individuals, avoiding the sources of mediation in society — the media, industrial time, all technology and belief systems that keep people in separate categories where they can be controlled. Immediatism is about individuals realizing their capacity for play, love (’amourfou*), ecstasy and sorcery. Bey’s philosophy draws on classic mystical ideas, but rejects out of hand any flesh-transcending or quietist approaches:-

The universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity — those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity...

-TAZ

The problem with movements for social justice and anarchism is that they have had no description of a fully-liberated human to use as a direction-pointer. Bey points the way with a superhedonist perspective, when he writes that we

need to ’assign value to pleasure rather than self-denial, not only for its own sake but as a vehicle of enhanced awareness & liberation’:-

All Ideal pasts, all futures which have not yet come to pass, simply obstruct our consciousness of total vivid presence.

-TAZ

Whatever exotic technologies we might dazzle ourselves with, it seems to me that this is the one vital notion to keep before us: ’total vivid presence’, the irreplaceable ecstasy of the Now.

FURTHER READING

Herbert Marcuse - Eros and Civilization; pub. Abacus 1973 Frank J. Tipler - The Physics of Immortality; pub. Macmillan, 1995

Hans Moravec - Mind Children; pub. unknown; 1988 Hakim Bey - TAZ; pub. Autonomedia, 1985, 1991 Hakim Bey - Radio Sermonettes; pub. Libertarian Book Club, 1992

AFTERWORD:

WHEN ALL OUR WAYS ARE WROUQHT FOR LOVE OF HER...

Emerging from the eternity of perfection, mind loses its ecstatic focus as habits of thought reassert themselves. In this pregnant void identity may reassemble itself around some obsession, taking the steam of passion and focusing it through the valve of singular and mighty belief. This energy is then put to work in the service of some vision relating to time and its progress, some vision of a self moving in alignment with a vaster perspective . At the level where this is true, individual, divided consciousness is actually structured sexually. ’Everything fornicates all the time’ — or at least flirts shamelessly... The perspectives of unitary consciousness, without the serenity that should accompany it, can generate a sense that desire is painful and tragic.... The nearer he gets to perfect resonance, to living his life by Her code of utter ecstasy, the more intense is the minute remaining separation... the beat frequencies of nearresonance become gigantic ripples, sluicing through the waves of form that in-form all newness, all creation. And of course he can never achieve this perfect resonance, or not for long. So the magical field generated out of his desire gets stronger and stronger, the radiation out from his very thoughts becomes an awesome responsibility... the intensity reaches danger levels as the power increases... She is beautiful, in the style of a refugee from a burning city....

CHA0T0PL4 !

... and yet, on this Spring day, She is all play and delicious froth, enough to build a civilization on. For what better reason might we elect to raise a city? Certainly not follies like Productivity, Morality......Masses slumber on in the palms of

dead giants, Her past lovers. We name our towns for Her holy hair.... a swathe of spring sunlight on her tresses... what better name for a city...? All our ancient ways are wrought with love of Her, lifting up Her skirts and showing off Her irresistible flesh, our flesh, all flesh... For only a real fool, the worst drudge, would ever refuse Her come-on. Even those of little wisdom know in their hearts that She has but one aim: to bring you ecstasy, to destroy the illusion of separateness.. .and yet mind in the service of obsession has already forgotten its easy playful emptiness...

APPENDIX: A CHAOS BIBLIOQRAPHY

This book draws on a corpus of Chaos Magic texts. I include these, and some that should be mentioned just for the sake of (relative) completeness. Some are out of print. In some instances I’ve placed the work in the context it issued from.

BOOKS

Peter J. Carroll - Liber Null and Psychonaut-, pub. Weiser 1987

Liber Null was published on its own by Morton Press, in 1978, in what is now known as ’the white edition’ (white cover by Andrew David). The next edition was also by MP, and had a red cover. This edition contained the first mention of Chaos Magic. Both these issues differ in some points from the Weiser edition. Psychonaut was also published by the S.A., in 1981, in a large format edition.

This is the book that started it all; UberNullis one of the few really important books on magic written in this century.

Peter J. Carroll - Liber Kaos-, pub. Weiser 1992

Uber Kaos originally appeared as Uber Kaos/ The Psychonomicon, published privately in 1991. Some alterations were made for the Weiser edition, most significantly the bowdlerization of the IOT Rites, and the inclusion of Book 5, Carroll’s treatise on Aura Magic, previously only privately circulated.

It contains Carroll’s Chaos Magic Theory, a complete materialistic theory of how magic works.

CHA0T0PL4!

Peter J. Carroll - Psybermagic-, pub. Chaos International & Asafoetida, 1995

Essays by Carroll on a variety of topics ranging from physical theories to dogs. Re-published by New Falcon, 1997.

Ramsey Dukes - SSOTBME-, pub. by The Mouse That Spins, 1974

Brilliant essays on magic. A seminal book in forming the Chaos Current.

Ramsey Dukes - Thundersqueak-, TMTS, 1979

Essays.

Ramsey Dukes - Words Made Flesh- TMTS, 1988 / 2003 Profoundly worked out essay on ’Virtual Reality, Humanity and the Cosmos’, interleaved with a story.

Ramsey Dukes - BLAST Your Way to Megabucks With My Secret Sex-Power Formula-, pub. Revelation 23 Press, 1992. Essays by Saint Lionel.

Ray Sherwin - The Book of Results-, pub. by Revelations 23 press, 1993

The Book, of Results was first published by Sherwin’s own Morton Press in 1979. It was one of the Chaos Magic classics, concentrating entirely on how to make magic work usefully. The Rev 23 edition has some additional material.

Ray Sherwin - The Theatre of Magic-, pub. by Morton Press, 1982

A book on group work, stimulated by the experiences of the original IOT group in West Yorkshire, 1980-82.

Dave Lee

Paula Pagani - The Cardinal Rites of Chaos, pub. by Sut Anubis, Northampton, 1984.

Seasonal Rites by Ray Sherwin, worked by the so-called ’Circle of Chaos’ group, West Yorkshire 1984-87.

Julian Wilde - A Grimoire of Chaos Magic-, pub. by Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1986

A kind of personal Grimoire from a solitary Chaos Magician.

Adrian Savage - An Introduction to Chaos Magic-, pub. by Magical Childe, 1986

An utterly worthless booklet.

Steven Mace - Stealing the Fire From Heaven-, self-pub. 1984, new edition 2003

An individual approach to magical initiation.

Steven Mace - Sorcery as Virtual Mechanics-, self-pub. 1984

Magical theory using Feynman particle physics.

Frater Choronzon - Liber Cyber-, self-pub. 1991

Highly original essays and reminiscences from Charles Brewster.

Phil Hine - Walking Between the Worlds, Two Worlds and In Between, Touched by Fire-, 3 booklets self-published, 1989-90. These form the Urban Shaman trilogy.

Phil Hine - Chaos Servitors - A User Guide; bklet. Pub.

Cl/Pagan News, 1991

Excellent introduction to the art of creating & using servitors.

CHAOTOPIA !

Phil Hine - Condensed Chaos-, bklet 1992; book pub. New Falcon 1995

Excellent booklet expanded into a book for New Falcon, who issued it in 1995.

Phil Hine - Prime Chaos-, pub. C.1.1993

Highly innovative book including material on group work.

Phil Hine - The Pseudonomicon-, pub. C.I. 1994

This ’Book of False Names’ is a kind of Chaos Magic approach to Cthulhu Mythos magics.

Nicholas Hall - Chaos and Sorcery, self-pub. 1992

A good practical manual on the Path of Power. Rare.

Nathaniel Xanthe - Psychodenizens-, self- published 1992 (as Nathan Satan) - Neonomicon, self-published 2001 - Witcha, self-published 2002 & Mandrake 2005

Original perspectives from a Chaos Magician and artist.

Frater U.D. - A Handbook of Practical Sigil Magic-, pub.

Llewellyn, 1993

One of the best guides to sigilization.

Steve Wilson - Chaos Ritual-, pub. Neptune Press, 1994.

Novel approach, useful techniques.

Dave Lee - The Wealth Magic Workbook-, self-published, 1994

Guide to techniques for wealth and money.

Dave Lee - Chaotopial, pub. Attractor, 1997, 2004

Jan Fries - Visual Magic-, pub. Mandrake of Oxford, 1992

Fries does not identify with the Chaos Current, and even

Dave Dee

takes a bizarrely bitchy little swipe at it, but no-one’s perfect, and this book is an excellent introduction to sigilization and magical art, with a Chaos-like approach.

Ed. by Christopher Hyatt - Rebels and Devils-, various authors in Chaos section; pub. New Falcon, 1996

Jaq D. Hawkins - Understanding Chaos Magic-, pub Capall Bann, 1996

To quote from Pete Carroll’s review in Chaos International: ’It does not tell you how to do Chaos Magic, plenty of other books do that, but as a pot-pourri of background information and associated ideas, it works quite well’.

- Chaos Monkey, 2002, no details.

Fra 717 - Handbuch der Chaos Magie-, pub. Caput Corvi, Vienna.

A topic listing and sample of this comprehensive handbook is available on the IOT Website

Joshua S. Wetzel - The Paradigmal Pirate-, self-published 2001.

Full of useful ideas. Particularly original approach to Goetic spirits.

Greg Humphries & Julian Vayne - Now That's What I Call Chaos Magick Vol 1 & 2. Pub. Mandrake, 2003.

Some unusual topics - such as HGA work — are brought to bear on Chaos theory and practice.

IOT - The Book of the PACT / Das Buch. Free download from IOT websites.

This is the lOT’s current ’manual’, replacing Uber Pactionis.

CHAOTOPIA !

MAQAZINES

Chaos International - Issue 1 August 1986 to Issue 23, Sept. 1997. Ed. Ian Read. Occasionally available from BM Sorcery, London WC1N 3XX. The ’Equinox’ of Chaos Magic.

Chaos/Kaos - Issues 3-13, plus Exorcist of Revolution and Che Sera Sera booklets. 1986-89. Ed. Joel Biroco Chaos, SubGenius, Situationism; interesting crossovers.

Peter J. Carroll’s earliest writings (pre-Liber Null) were published in The New Equinox, Ray Sherwin’s eclectic occult magazine. Other magazines that carried Chaos Magic texts in the early days include: Lamp of Thoth (Sorcerer’s Apprentice); NOX (Stephen Sennitt).

LiminalSpace e-mag: check out www.liminalspace.co.uk, 2002c.e

AUDIO

P. D. Brown - The Chaochamber; tape & booklet. 198? Ether-ship VR for enchantment. Hard to get now.

Peter J. Carroll - The Cthonos Working; 1988 Dave Lee - The Galafron Rite; 1993.

Initiatory pathworking through 5 Aeons with music and ritual cut-up.

CYBERSPACE

IOT UK - www.illuminates.org/iot-uk

IOT Austria - www.illuminates.org/iot-austria/index.htm IOT North America - http://iota.goetia.net/

IOT Brazil - www.iot.org.br/

A QLOSSARY OF CHAO-SPEAK

Aeonics: A study of the shifts in mass consciousness that generate the succession and concurrence of the Aeons, revealed in the changing myths of cultures. The lineage of this concept can be found in old myths of the Ages of Gold, Silver, Iron etc, in Crowleys’ conception of the Aeons of Isis, Osiris and Horus and in the extension of that concept into the Aeon of Maat.

Baphomet is taken by Chaos Magicians to be the Beast-God/ dess-form appropriate to magical gnosis. Can also be seen as the Planetary Biogram, then Choronzon can be viewed as the Planetary Logogram.

Biogram : Human consciousness and behaviour — certainly in its robotic state — can be considered as the product of genetic programs (the Biogram) and semiotic programs (the Logogram).

Body Alchemy can be described as the art of bending the rules of biology. The techniques usually make use of inner energy paradigms and the objectives are usually healing and physical empowerment. Chi Kung I Qi Gong and the various forms of Connected Breathwork contain core Body Alchemy techniques.

Chemognosis : the use of psychoactive plants or synthetics for magical consciousness (gnosis).

Choronzon : Called ’that mighty Divil’ by Dr John Dee, evoked by Crowley and Neuberg in the Algerian desert,

Dave Dee

adopted by Chaos Magicians as the deification of the Ego implicit in most God-forms, except those who represent Gnosis, like Baphomet.

Egregore : group mind or deity; see Chapter 8, Pacts With Spirits.

Evolution-, is development in the direction of greater complexity or, to quote Ilya Prigogine, a ’collapse into higher coherence’.

Illumination in Chaos Magic usually means transformational work done on the selves.

Logogram : see Biogram.

Lust of Result: for pure will, unassuaged of purpose,

delivered of lust of result, is every way perfect’. This quote from Crowley’s Book of the Daw declares a vital principle of practical magic: the need to let go of the desire for your goal. Austin Spare’s sigilization technique is one method of circumventing the interference of the conscious mind in magical processes.

Mandelbrot Set: the formula z a z² + c (amongst others) generates a plot known as a fractal, which is a never-repeating pattern, going on as long as the point of view ’dives into’ it, the details revealing more and more of the pattern which has the same elements repeated, but in an infinite variety of arrangements. They’re often very pretty, and the subject is called Chaos Mathematics.

Meta-belief: a belief about beliefs, like the belief that belief is a tool, rather than an end in itself

CHA0T0PL4 !

Metamorphosis : willed change in personal behaviour, beliefs and identity.

Octarine : the Eighth Colour, the Colour of Magic, according to Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. Adopted in a Discordian spirit by Pete Carroll in his Eight Rays of Magic system to mean Pure Magic.

Omega Point: Early in the 20th century the heretical Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin suggested that the whole planet was evolving towards a network of consciousness. In a sense, he was saying that we are evolving towards God, which is why the church hated him. The point we are drawn towards in future history he named the Omega Point.

In the 1970s Thelemic magician Maggie Ingalls — known at the time as Soror Andahadna and later as Nema — channeled a text, the Booh, of the Foreshadowing of the Feather. The feather is the glyph of the Egyptian Goddess Maat. Andahadna began to promote the notion that the present age of war and discord — the Aeon of Horus — was to be supplanted by the Aeon of Maat, of Truth and Justice. According to Andahadna this is to come about when 51% of the human race achieve a particular kind of illuminated consciousness. Further, when this state of collective hyperconsciousness - called N’Aton - comes into existence, it will beam back in time to us instructions for its assembly, which is therefore already happening. In the language of Chaos science, N’Aton becomes an attractor in our future time lines, drawing us inevitably towards a world integrated to a god-like degree, like Teilhard’s Omega Point.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Terence McKenna looked at the upward-reaching curve of technological innovation, the doubling of ’novelty’ in shorter and shorter periods of time, and extrapolated to a future time when the curve goes

Dave Lee infinite, suggesting the realisation of all and any possibilities. The year: 2012 of the common era. His name for this singularity: the Omega Point.

Paradigm: used by Chaos Magicians to mean an internally-coherent set of beliefs used for one or more magical workings, as in ’this ritual requires a scientific paradigm / Ancient Egyptian paradigm etc.’

Psychocosm : a map of both inner and outer worlds, on the basis of ’As above, so below’. Examples: the Qabalah, the 8 Trigrams of the I Ching, the Elder Futhark.

Selves : many Chaos Magicians embrace a multiple-selves model as an advance on the ’monotheistic’ single-self model. See especially the writings of Pete Carroll.

Sigilization : In The Book of Pleasure / The Psychology of Ecstasy A. O. Spare gives a technique for reducing a verbal or pictorial statement of intention to a single glyph which can then be magically charged without thinking of the aim of the working.

Superhedonism : Austin Spare’s The Feast of the Supersensualists’ meets Crowley’s ’Be not animal; refine thy rapture’ meets Leary’s 5th Circuit...

True Will: Aleister Crowley’s unpacking of the channeled slogan ’Do What Thou Wilt Shall Be the Whole of the Law’ is based on the existence of a unique path through life for each individual. This concept is examined in Chapter 7, Ecstasy and The Quest.

Word virus William S. Burroughs invented the concept of the wordvirus, the self-replicating set of verbal instructions

CHAOTOPIA!

that haunts our internal dialogue and controls our thoughts. This idea surfaced again in the books of biologist Richard Dawkins as the meme, the unit of cultural (paragenetic) transmission which is acted on by the selection forces of human society.

Mandrake

Other books on Chaos Magick

Kaos Hieroglyphica

Alchemy for the New Aeon

By Anton Channing

ISBN 1869928830 200pp, £20/535

special hardback, illustrated

In the year 1564, Dr John Dee published his work, Monas Hieroglyphica. Its central symbol represented the unity' which was the gnosis of the monotheistic aeon.

Now over four hundred years later, Anton Channing has published his long awaited debut work Kaos Hieroglyphica, within which he expounds a new symbol, the Kaos Hieroglyph. This symbol represents the plurality and freedom of the New Aeon. This work of magical alchemy draws on such diverse material as Thelema, the Chaos Current, the Maat Current, Timothy Leary, Witchcraft, Paganism, the Hermetic Tradition, Taoism, Shamanism and the author's own Pineal Gland.

The Kaos Hieroglyphica offers the reader interpretations of Hermetic symbolism in a way that is both insightful and relevant to New Aeon Magic.

’Mr Channing plays Trotsky to my' Lenin, and Luther to the most holy of

Chaos Orthodoxies.’ - Pete Carroll

What I did On My Holidays - Essays on Black Magic, Satanism and Devil Worship by Ramsey Dukes

(author of Thundersqeak, SSOTBME, B/ast and other classics of Discordianism and Chaos Magick) ISBN 1869928520, 420pp, £18/$35

Is it ok for a national government to negotiate with terrorists? Should we be prepared to make a pact with the demon Terrorism - or should we remain forever sworn to the demon No Compromise? Many old and new demons lurk on these pages: black magic, sexism, elitism, satanism, publishers, prejudice, suicide, liberalism, violence, slime, old age, bitterness, war and the New Age.

Now That's What I Call Chaos Magick Qreg Humphries & Julian Vayne (with foreword by Dave Lee) ISBN 1869928741 188pp £12.99

Gives the beginner and experienced practitioner alike a modern view into this powerful and often misunderstood magical current. A workbook with rituals, techniques and exercises, a window into contemporary magical thought century or simply as a rollercoaster of a good read!

*we cannot recommend this book to anybody who is

frightened of magic, of self-discovery or of adventure; to anybody who wants ritual experiences that are absolutely risk-free and have a guaranteed result; to anybody whose concept of ceremony depends on the provision of scripts for all participants, carefully typed out and enclosed in polythene wrappers; to anybody who believes that magical practices should follow set traditions,. . .; to anybody who believes that human beings are firmly subordinated to deities and must do their will; and to anybody whose favourite words of condemnation for others are ’irresponsible’ or ’self-indulgent’. Above all, I cannot recommend it to anybody without a sense of humour. Anybody else should love it: it provides an experience of ritual that is energetic, fresh, investigative, exciting and fun, in a completely individual way.’ - Ronald Hutton.

Jan Fries's Visual Magick: a manual of freestyle shamanism 196pp 1869928-571 £10.99/520.

’A practical modem grimoire.¹ The Cauldron

Order direct from Mandrake of Oxford

PO Box 250, Oxford, 0X1 1AP (UK)

Phone:01865 243671 (for credit card sales) Prices include economy postage

Visit our web site online at - www.mandrake.uk.net Email: mandrake@mandrake.uk.net

isbn 1869928-881

9 781

869 928889

SORCERY AND ECSTASY IN THE FIFTH AEON

Once one is fairly competent at practical

REMAINS TO BE SAID OR READ ABOUT THE SUBJECT; THE

MAGICIAN AT THIS

HIS WORK. It SEEMS TO ME THAT

Chaos Magic itself

HAS REACHED THIS

point; the basic ideas NEEDED FOR

ANYONE TO CONSTRUCT HIS OR HER OWN SYSTEM OF SORCERY AND TO HONE

THEIR SKILLS ARE ALREADY COAT.RED BY THE AVAILABLE BOOKS. W1IAT HAS BEEN

CHAOTOPIA! IS NEITHER UTOPIA NOR ITS OPPOSITE

Peter J. Carroll

Workbook. He has worked with the Illuminates of Thanateros for mana

RESEARCHES WHICH WILL NO DOUBT FIND THEIR

WAY INTO PRINT IN ONE FORM

OR ANOTHER

ECSTATIC STATES THAT UNDERLIE MAGICAL GNOSIS. THIS BOOK, RATHER THAN TRYING TO PROVIDE YET ANOTHER SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT FLAVOUR OF CHAOS

Mandrake.ik.net PO Box 250, Oxford, 0X11AP

THROUGH AN ILLUMINATED EYE, THE EYE OF THE SORCERER

SORCERY, THERE IS LITTLE OF IMPORTANCE THAT

LACKING SO FAR, IS A CHAOS MAGICAL APPROACH TO THE INVESTIGATION OF THE

TECHNIQUE, TAKES AS ITS STARTING POINT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ECSTASA AND MAGIC; BETWEEN CHAOS MAGIC AND CHAOS MYSTICISM, IF YOU

TRAINED IN NEUROLINGUISTICS. An EARLY EDITOR OF CHAOS INTERNATIONAL IS THE AUTHOR OF MAGICAL INCENSES AND THE WEALTH MAGE

It is what Ai stin Osman Spare called ’the chaos of the normal

contents: Wealth Magick/Conflict and Exorcism/Sex Magick/Bodx Alchemy and Healing/Magick and Physics/Chaos Illumination/ Spirits/Aeonics

LIKE.’ EXTRACT FROM PAGE 8

YEARS, AND PRESENTS WORKSHOPS AND LECTURES IN THE UK, USA AND MAINLAND Europe. Dave lives in England, and is engaged in continual magical

EX LIBRIS

This book was scanned and edited as a labour of love by Lithargoel -

A member of TheOccult.bz