The Paradigmal Pirate - Wetzel J., Ellwood T., Heilmann T. 2006
Foreword
A new book in an established current begs for context. The published side of the Chaos Current has evolved in some fairly distinct phases in the last 27 years. In 1978 Peter Carroll's Uber Null set down in a practically-usable form a simple and powerful approach to doing successful sorcery. The core technologies involved are gnosis and belief-shifting: all successful magic is performed in an altered state of consciousness (gnosis), and belief itself is a tool in the working of magic, rather than an unchanging envelope around the operation. The theoretical basis of this approach, which later became known as Chaos Magic{k), can be traced to the work of Austin Osman Spare in the early decades of the 20th century and Lionel Snell in the early 1970's.
Some experience of group working in this new approach had been gained by the first Chaos Magic groups by the early 80's. This was transmitted in the next crop of books — Peter Carroll's Psychonaut and Ray Sherwins The Theatre of Magic began to deal with group magical work. As the Chaos approach spread in the following years, the next wave of writers supplied accounts, ideas, excellent short technical manuals like Phil
Hine's Chaos Servitors and even personal grimoires of the their own journeys through the Pandaemonaeon. From 1986 the magazine "Chaos International" supplied a new forum for a breathtaking expansion of Chaos Magic, which was centered around the organization of most of the original small IOT network into an effective magical Order for teaching magical technique and working innovative group magic. In 1991 Pete Carroll, in Uber Kaos, set down a materialistic theory of how magic works, and a Chaos-shaped system of practical magical attributions, the Psychonomicon. By the mid-90's there were enough working Chaos Magic groups in operation, particularly within the IOT, that a considerable base of innovative experience existed which drew on all sorts of esoteric and exotic fields. Against this background I wrote Chaotopia!, which incorporated a pragmatic Chaos Magic approach to models of consciousness.
In the book you have in front of you Josh Wetzel takes up the plot from the Psychonomicon, and extends it to its logical boundaries in all eight directions. His passion is for effective magic, and his rigorous dismissal of anything that gets in the way of that aim will not appeal to every magician. Chaos Magic only ever needed the most minimal theory to support a relatively rigorous exploration of practical sorcery. Josh allies himself with that stream of Chaos Magic thought, rejecting with almost Puritanical disdain any ill-defined goal relation to self
actualization, celebrating and supplying good technique that will (probably) yield results here in Midgard.
However, there is more: those who have had the privilege of working with Frater Ratatosk know of his extraordinary skills and experience in Invocation and Evocation. This knowledge shines (darkly) through in this book, especially in the daring, Shamanic style of transacting business with Goetic spirits, and in the radically Left Hand Path approach to the use of deities in Invocation. This level of work places The Paradigmal Pirate beyond the Psychonomcon model, and connects to the theme of pragmatic exploration of working methods that are based on new models of magical group consciousness.
This is a book of skills that you can use to take yourself to wherever you Will.
Dave Lee, May 2001 c.e., London, England
Liber LU
Introduction, Lucid Dreaming, Gnosis, Weapons/fools,
Ri^tuals, and Metamorphosis.
Introduction
The magical standard for the IOT Neophyte is a continuation of the work started in Uber MMM, and prepares the Neophyte to work with Uber ^KK and the 2° syllabus. Uber LLL is broken down into five subsections, each one covering an aspect of magical practice begun in Uber MMM. Rather than presenting the Neophyte with a broad set of categories to develop into separate magical systems, Uber LLL provides a metaparadigmal outline of techniques that can be applied to any existing magical paradigm.
Though Uber Lux and Nox have stood for years as a viable method for Neophytes to work with, it is my estimation that the responsibility of every IOT Adept is to ensure that the magicians who follow her will progress beyond the levels of proficiency that she herself has achieved. Each subsequent generation of chaos magicians should be better magicians than their predecessors; pushing new envelopes, breaking new barriers, achieving better results, doing greater magics — these are all hallmarks of magical excellence.
As we discover and incorporate new techniques and practices
into chaos magic we should thus translate them into vehicles to teach and strengthen the magicians who follow us. A revolution in our methodology should occur every ten years or so until what we know as chaos magic today becomes a history lesson for the chaos magicians of tomorrow.
With this in mind, 1 set before the Neophytes of the IOT this work of magic that is the culmination of my insights into the essentials that create a highly skilled practitioner of chaos magic theory. My ultimate goal is to provide the necessary training to ensure that the IOT remains the best and most cutting-edge magical organization in the world. This aim can only be achieved through a concerted effort to progressively raise the bar of our standards higher.
Using the framework of Uber MMM as my starting point, l have broken down the skills you will acquire into six basic categories. These are Lucid Dreaming, Gnosis, Weapons/Tools, Rituals and Metamorphosis. Each section is done sequentially, with the exception of Lucid Dreaming, which can be done simultaneously with any of the other sections. Depending on your level of expertise, the entire program can be finished anywhere from six months and onward.
The exercises presented in the following sections are only guidelines. If the Neophyte possesses knowledge of additional
techniques and practices, or possesses the capacity to create her own, she is encouraged to do so. The IOT considers every candidate on his or her individual merits and qualifications. No single approach could possibly fit every individual aspirant to either the Pact or to the 3rd degree within the Pact. However, there is a need to set down some guidelines for those who would like some indication of what is expected of them.
^Section 1:
The first section is a continuation of the dream work begun in Liber MMM. However, if it has been awhile since the magician performed her Liber MMM or if the practice of lucid dreaming is new to the magician, there is no obstacle to beginning here. The magician will learn the techniques of lucid dreaming and experiment with it in the field of applied magic. Practitioners will practice utilizing the dream state as a field for enchantment and the extension of perception in the present, past and future probabilities of their lives. The Neophyte will come to utilize what for many of us is a wasted portion of the day and should develop a natural edge over other magicians who have neglected this avenue to power.
^Section 2:
In the second section the Neophyte will explore forms of gnosis covering the full potential range of altered states of consciousness, from the inhibitory to the excitatory to the chemically induced (which for reasons of legality must remain optional). Alongside with trance work, this is the final methodology for obtaining supernatural control over the body/mind and using it to alter the field of probability through which we constantly swim.
^Section 3:
As an extension of Uber MMM, the practitioner will master the techniques of creating a useful set of magical tools and then consecrate them for the great work of magic. A thorough understanding of these techniques will not only create a set of instruments for ritual practice, but also will engrain the practices of investing belief, creating and manipulating taboos and lay the basis for developing skilled paradigm shifting.
^Section 4:
In the fourth section the Neophyte will be presented with a series of techniques for the creation of rituals regardless of paradigm. She will also acquire the skill to distill the essential
elements from rituals that are not up to a chaos magician's standards, reworking them to suit her needs. The supermarket of beliefs becomes our own personal shopping center, and we should take what we need from it at all times.
^Section 5:
In the fifth section the magician will go through a radical series of metamorphoses, demonstrating the ability to upset her own prejudices and proclivities and achieve a degree of liberation necessary for permanent IOT membership. Without the ability to transcend our own limitations we gain nothing from the practice of magic.
Additional Requir^^nts:
In addition to the above skills, the IOT America Section also requires that the Neophyte mentor at least one Novice all the way through to the 4th degree — if there is the availability for this; perform a greater monasticism for two weeks (as outlined in Peter Carroll's Uber KaoS; demonstrate a commitment to self, their temple or study group and the IOT as a whole; be capable of performing a Mass of Chaos B on demand; and possess an awareness of IOT protocol.
The gaining of proficiency in these six areas encompasses the
Neophyte's preparation for work as an Initiate within the IOT. When completed with the program, she shall have expanded her arsenal of magical weapons and skills to an extent that makes her a formidable chaos magician. She will possess more tools and techniques than her predecessors and will be in a position to raise the bar again in the future. Only those willing lo push beyond the goals and accomplishments of those who came before can pursue technical excellence in magic.
Fr. Ratatosk, September 23, 2000
Pre^^^^ Ground Work
Exercise 1: Meditative trance
If you have the time to perform a daily meditation it is recommended that you do not discontinue the work of Uber MMM while performing the exercises of Uber LLL. The work of meditative trance is very helpful in keeping focused and assists the magician in maintaining peak form. However it is also time consuming, and some practitioners cannot reasonably be expected to set aside an hour a day to meditate in addition to time set aside for other magical practices. Instead I recommend that the Neophyte occasionally meditate in order to stay "up to speed" so to speak, without overdoing it and risking burning out entirely.
To remain at the level of proficiency gained during the practice of Uber MMM it is only necessary to meditate two or three successive days a week. Your edge is maintained without an undue amount of stress or pressure (which would ultimately be counterproductive). Those with heavy work or administrative burdens, however, should refrain from even this level of commitment. The Neophyte should remember that it is better to set reasonable goals and achieve them rather than set lofty ones and fail. There is a lot of truth in the cliche "slow and steady wins the race" — no one profits from an individual burning out.
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Section 1 Lucid Dr^^ng
(Based on working with Stephen LaBerge, Ph.D. and Howard Rheingold's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming)
The process of mastering the art of lucid dreaming is conducted in several stages. It is not as easy as one would suppose. However, keeping a dream journal is usually a good place to start, as well as re-reading or re-visualizing your dreams in order to be able to consciously attain awareness of your dreamscape. It frequently proves to be a precursory method of eventually taking conscious control of your dreams and using them for magical purposes. There are several ways that can be employed over a period of time, and the Neophyte will explore and master these techniques.
This section of Uber LLL is unique because you can practice it concurrently with another section. After all, all the work is taking place either while you are sleeping or immediately before you go to sleep or immediately after you wake up. However, it does involve a change of normal observational habits, and this too has a benefit when it comes to being a magician in consensus reality.
One: Ob^^&tional
The first exercise for mastering lucid dreaming is actually to be entirely aware of your waking state. Conduct this exercise on the first day of your lucid dreaming program and then move right on to exercise two. The complete and total awareness of all external-waking stimuli is crucial to increasing the probability of realizing when a dream state is occurring, thus increasing the probability of becoming lucid.
^Lok: Pay special attention to all the objects, shapes and motion occurring around you.
^^en: Become aware of the myriad of sounds that assail your senses during a normal day.
Feel: Run your hands over a number of surfaces, from tacky to soft and slippery to hard, cold, hot.
Taste: Focus on a wide variety of substances or the memory of tasting them.
Smel: Inhale the odors of your body, the room, incense, perfume, any pets, other people, your breath.
Breathing: Turn your attention to your breathing and note its rhythm without trying to control it.
Feel: Briefly induce feeling of hatred, love, fear, joy, sorrow, lust.
Thoughts: Reflect on your thoughts — What are you thinking right now? What were you thinking during this exercise? What random thoughts arose?
Ego: Become aware that your sense of the world always includes you, the observer. Realize that we change events simply through observation. Keep in mind that there is no separation between you and your subjective experience. Be aware of being conscious.
Awaren^: Finmal, be of being aware of ^)OUl" consciousness.
Exercise Two: Catal^ogue Your Dr^eams (dr^eam sign location)
Keep a dream journal (if you don't have one already). Once you have collected twelve dreams, begin looking for and categorizing dream signs. Dream signs are distinctive moments in dreams that betray the fact that we are dreaming. They can range from unusual thoughts to weird objects or to extreme non sequiturs. Some examples to look out for:
I thought that I didn't want the car to crash and it suddenly swerved back on the road.
When I found the door locked, I wished it open.
I could see perfectly without my glasses or contact lenses. People at work threw tomatoes at me.
The hairdresser shot one of the customers.
My wife was cooking the dogs.
The tuna in the refrigerator lit up.
Dreaming of being a member of the opposite sex.
Dreaming of being someone famous.
Someone/thing morphs in front of you.
A giant walked by.
Everyone's hair was blue.
I got lost because the streets in my hometown were different. There were buildings missing in the skyline of downtown.
I saw a tiny purple kitten.
This is just a short list of potential dream signs. You might also notice radical place differences (being in another city/country) or be a radically different person (James Bond). It can be as simple as your pet being a different color or as complex as being a miner on Mars.
While continuing to record dreams, also begin to keep a list of dream signs. Underline them as you record the dreams from
that evening, then list them at the bottom of the page after the dream. Note any patterns that occur in your dream signs. Note which ones occur the most. You could, for example, frequently find yourself in a different country or back in grade school. You may frequently see someone in your dreams do something odd.
Once you pick a set or type of dream sign that occurs most frequently, look for it's normal equivalent during your waking hours. Note how someone/something normally acts in real life during the day. This observation will better prepare you for becoming lucid in your dream.
Once you have your dream signs to trigger lucidity in dreams, you will go on to utilize the following techniques for inducing a lucid dreaming state. These states can be realized without dream signs, but the dream signs act as the perfect catalyst to sudden lucidity within dreams.
F.xercise 3: M^D Technique
Before you go to bed, resolve to wake after each dream cycle and record any dreams that you might have. If that is a bit steep, resolve to wake after the first dream period after dawn (usually the one immediately before the last dream cycle).
When you awaken from any dream period during the night, do not allow yourself to drift back asleep. Record as many details
from the dreams that night as possible.
While reining to sleep after each and every dream cycle that you have, concentrate on your intention of remembering to recognize that you are dreaming. Repeat silently "The next time I'm dreaming I will know that I'm dreaming" as a mantra as you fall asleep.
Fake it till you make it. While you are falling asleep and repeating your mantra, think about the last dream that you had, recall the dream signs and picture yourself becoming lucid in that dream. Go through the motions of being lucid and act out some fantastic action.
Allow yourself to fall back to sleep.
During the next sleep cycle the odds become very high that you will have a lucid dream after doing the technique outlined in step 4.
Ex^^ 4: Tec^hnique
While lying in bed, completely relax and let go of all muscular tension in your body. Deepen and lengthen your breathing. Let go of all thoughts, worries, and concerns. Become completely placid and serene, with no stress whatsoever and no disturbances.
Gradually you will notice visual images begin to arise. These can start out as simple shapes but will evolve into more complex forms as time passes. Try to observe these shapes in as passive
a manner as possible. Do not attempt to capture or retain these images. Just let them float in and out of your conscious awareness.
When the images eventually evolve into an entire scene, you can enter the dream lucidly and perform whatever action you desire. The trick in this technique is to recall that you are dreaming. You must maintain a balance between lucidity and the dream world. Too much control and the dream collapses into conscious fantasy. Too little control and you simply fall into a deep sleep.
Once you have achieved a lucid dreaming state, there are three types of magical activity that you may choose to engage in:
You may choose to perform enchantments with pre-drawn sigils.
You may choose to extend your perception by going to a location beyond your normal awareness to gain the answers to various questions.
Finally, you may attempt some sort of astral working — effecting change in another location without physically being there.
With any of the above techniques it is most important to have what you are planning to do in mind before you begin and to record thoroughly what you did while dreaming, scrupulously keeping track of your successes and failures. Once you are in a
lucid dreaming state, the potential to do magic is as wide as your imagination; being in a dream state, you are in a state of gnosis, period. You have bypassed the psychic censor and are capable of doing whatever fantastic act you can imagine. Magic done while lucid dreaming fulfills several aspects of the magical equation {gnosis is mentioned above), as all conscious resistance to doing magic is abrogated. The only factors that remain are subconscious resistance and an effective magical link to the target of your working.
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Section 2 Gnosis
There are three distinctive types of gnosis that the magician should master. These are usually categorized as inhibitory, excitatory and chemical. The first type, inhibitory, is considered the most time-consuming and difficult to obtain and maintain. The IOT expects proficiency in this type of gnosis because it requires discipline and focus. Inhibitory gnosis also has the added benefit of demonstrating the state of no-mind in such a way that the magician will be able to spot its recurrence during the use of other types of gnostic states.
Excitatory gnosis usually takes less time, but requires a great deal of physical exertion or emotional currency. The normal wanderings of the mind are short-circuited by whipping the body, mind, emotions, or any combination of the above, into a frenzy. The primary drawback to excitatory forms of gnosis is that the body-mind builds up a tolerance for every type of excitatory gnosis if the magician utilizes them too frequently. The only way around this is to NEVER rely on just one type of gnosis repeated, for any reason, and to change your preferred method of gnosis as often as possible.
Chemical gnosis is by far the easiest type to reach. However,
the downside to drug-induced states of consciousness is that there frequently is a distinctive lack of focus or control. Being high is a wonderful thing, but if you don't do any magic while there you are nothing more than a pothead with delusions of being a magician. It is important to reach identical states of consciousness with all three types of gnosis. The goal of the Neophyte should be the purest possible state of no-mind during ritual work, regardless of the choice of gnosis used to reach that state.
The magician should master as many states of gnosis as possible and explore those that normally would be strange and foreign. Maintaining a comprehensive journal that records all you observe from a state of post-gnosis is crucial. Each state of gnosis can be mastered in any order, and the listing below is arbitrary. Unless otherwise specified, each gnosis section should take about a week to complete, or the magician should experiment with each variety listed for a week to obtain a thorough understanding of each type of gnosis. The following are examples of gnosis that the Neophyte may wish to use; he or she can also substitute other known varieties of gnosis for the ones listed below if so desired.
Inhibitory Forms of Gnosis
S/ee^^OTes
One of the best ways of shattering the blinders daily placed on us by the psychic censor is to overload its capacity for filtering and editing information coming into our system. While sleeplessness is certainly the most time-consuming of gnostic techniques (taking up to three or four days), it can also be the most productive. I recommend doing it while taking a week off from work in order to prevent any negative ramifications arising from inattentiveness at the office.
Interestingly enough, this form of gnosis will occur when you are at the point when you should be in deepest sleep. Studies on sleep deprivation have shown that our brains continue to function normally during the hours of the day that we are normally awake. It is only on the second and third nights of sleeplessness that altered states of consciousness will occur. Four nights of sleeplessness sequentially is all that I recommend; beyond that point you risk mental damage. Plan any magical workings to take place between the hours of 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. if you keep a "normal" schedule. Otherwise schedule workings for the time between the last five and seven hours you would normally be asleep.
Signs of success with sleep deprivation include, but are not limited to, the following observed phenomenon:
the physical distortion of objects and shadows;
divinatory questions being answered by disembodied voices; a rapid multiplication of observed synchronicities and deja vu; time distortion.
Feasting
The human body-mind can survive from six to eight weeks existing only on water. However, the gnostic state of fasting can usually be obtained in a time frame of one to two weeks, during which time the magician subsists wholly on water alone. It is important that you at least drink water if you are going to fast in this fashion to obtain a state of gnosis. Two weeks without water will kil you, so you need to drink water constantly during a fast — eight glasses a day to be precise. You will still obtain a state of gnosis, and you will avoid any risk of death.
I have found that it is also a good idea to ease into fasting. The magician switches from normal meals to just water and something light like a couple of slices of buttered bread for a few days beforehand. I personally discovered that taking multivitamins along with the water reduced the risk of illness but didn •t affect the sensation of fasting. Staying clean and focused,
you can also still manage to do things like go to work, but extracurricular activities should be reduced to just doing magic. Your energy level will drop off tremendously when doing this exercise, so don't tax yourself in other activities — fainting at odd limes is an inherent risk.
The time to conduct rituals of magic while in this state of gnosis begins when the pain of fasting becomes a dull continuous ache. As it persists as a throbbing, pulsing need for sustenance you will find yourself easily entering into a state of no-mind during any magical working that you might attempt. This is due to the total focus that your body feels on the need for food, driving all other trivial thoughts from the brain and making your focus on a single point of consciousness easier.
There is a tendency towards hostility while attempting this form of gnosis and others have noted that it is an ideal time to curse people. You may wish to come up with a short list of targets and do destructive sigils at this time. However, there isn't a reason why you can't do positive workings or simply note the side effects and byproduct states that accompany this form of gnosis.
^^sory Deprivation
Isolation chambers are hard to come by nowadays. So the
magician must resort to several tricks to place herself in a complete isolation of the senses. There are two ways of doing this: overload and solitude.
[n the first instance, the magician looses all cognitive functions through bombarding all the senses simultaneously until it is impossible to rely on any one sense to maintain her bearing. The best method of bombardment that I've found works on sight, sound and smell. It's cheap and can be done quite easily with a stereo, a strobe light and some rancid incense (Asafoetida or a sulfur compound). If possible, use a room without any decoration or furniture.
The magician should cloy the room with the incense, find a white noise portion of the dial and turn on the strobe light. Maximum yield for all three stimuli should produce disorientation as long as the eyes remain open. Keep them open; the idea is to move into a state of gnosis via transcending the reliance on your most popular organs of sight, smell and sound. This form of gnosis often works best if it is a surprise — like during an initiation — and works best if it is a shock to the system. However, it can be entered into willingly by discovering your threshold for equilibrium and then crushing it.
There is a risk of vomiting and falling down if you are unprepared for this type of gnosis, so start out in a seated
posture. The magician can still charge a sigil, if desired, through intense image concentration despite the visual distortion. I Iowever, it is only necessary to note the point at which this form of gnosis occurs and ifs side effects.
Solitude is another method of achieving total deprivation. The magician should acquire blinders, earplugs (preferably of industrial strength). Fill a bathtub with water to the point at which you can submerge yourself entirely, except for the nostrils, and then get in. Note that this technique overloads the sense of touch while cutting off sight and sound. This methodology works best for visionary trance activities.
The magician may also wish to experiment with combining the two techniques. Cloy a bathroom with foul smelling incense. Bring in a strobe and stereo for white noise and light and then submerge yourself in the tub, and follow the earlier procedure.
Excitatory Forms of Gnosis
Simple orgasm is not enough to reach a state of altered consciousness. The Neophyte should instead practice techniques of karezza if male and multiple orgasmic overload if a female. In addition, sexual states of gnosis are generated
through severe acts of sexual blasphemy by violating taboos. These taboos are entirely based upon your natural sexual preference, and each individual should come up with a list of "nasty" things that he or she WOULDN'T do. These are usually perfect actions to trigger whole-body orgasms that should push you into a state of altered consciousness.
There are many extant works on sex and magic, so there is no need to go into detail here. Find what works best for you. In addition to works specifically dealing with sex and magic, there are also useful guides to aberrant sexual behavior: Anal Pleasure & Health, The Ultimate Guide to Strap on Sex, or A Hand in the Bush: The Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting, to name a few. These works are important in that they maintain the focus on achieving pleasure from these activities (pleasure that will push you into a state of gnosis), specifically WITHOUT damaging yourself physically during the activity.
Maintaining or deepening an orgasmic state depends upon the mastery of several activities that were encountered as a Novice. The first of these is regulation of breathing. Prolonging and deepening the breath before orgasm will increase its intensity when it does occur. Combined with a taboo act and some form of karezza, this will usually be sufficient to push the practitioner over the edge. The magician should also consider engaging herself in some school of tantric activity. No matter how fluffy
these may seem on the outside, they are dealing with sex and sexual practice. The results of experimentation with one of these schools can often be surprisingly intense.
Rage
This method for achieving gnosis is well known and is usually the first type of single-pointed consciousness that most people encounter. The experience (often described as "seeing red"), upon closer examination, readily identifies itself as a state of gnosis. The individual "seeing red" has all the classic symptoms of someone in a state of gnosis: tunnel vision, time distortions, gaps in memory and feeling drained afterward. Neophytes should master this state, as it is an ideal excitatory state of gnosis.
Rage can be triggered in a number of ways but, generally speaking, these are entirely individualistic. The best way to do so is to repeatedly remember past slights that were sufficient at the time to put you into such a state. Some people have to go as far back as childhood, but there are usually enough instances of humiliation and frustration and hostility to form a solid battery of recollections in anyone's life, both during and after childhood.
It can be fun to have symbolic things to destroy as part of a
ritual while in this state. Don't have anything you might want the next day close to you when doing this type of gnosis. Stay away from any children or pets.
P^anic
Apart from its use in ritual work, there are two added benefits to mastering a state of fear that becomes the gnostic state of panic. The first is the ability to resist the feeling of fear when you need to and, secondly, is the ability to orchestrate the proper atmosphere for creating panic in others. The best way to induce panic is to place oneself in a position where you must confront your fear of the unknown (which is the root of fear gnosis).
This gnosis arises from the "fight or flight'' reaction. Specifically, it is the instinct that urges us to flee a hostile predator. In the wild, predators are often sensed before they are seen, and when an animal senses an unknown quantity, the "fight or flight" reaction occurs. This primal response is also the root of rage gnosis, as both are adrenaline-based.
The best time to induce this state is alone in the dark, late at night or in the very early hours of the morning. As the psychic censor is worn down, the realm of the Other creeps in and the boundaries around the world of accepted truth begins to fray.
Fear of what others might do to you may also cause panic, but lhis generally works only with strangers, and they're unlikely to volunteer assistance.
Conversely, when focused on what strangers or semi-strangers might do to you in say, an initiatory situation, this technique is a good way to cause panic. However, there is a risk of trauma and severe emotional scarring, so it isn't recommended. Initiations should have some risk but should never result in permanent mental damage.
Pain
Self-flagellation may bring one to state of gnosis quickly, or take a long time if you are an experienced masochist or possess a high tolerance for pain. Those who utilize painful exercises for pleasurable purposes should skip this type of gnosis on the grounds that you may risk injuring yourself in an attempt to enter this altered state of consciousness.
Piercing is an excellent way to induce pain gnosis. Again the risk is injury if you already participate in this type of activity. People tend to build up tolerance to pain so it helps the achievement of gnosis if the pain is shocking or unexpected. You might want to enlist someone's help with this, as other people can readily beat you with an irregular rhythm that will
keep you guessing when the next blow will fall. It is recommended that you use an experienced sadist, however, as you don't want to be injured by someone else's incompetence.
There are also simpler methods for entering into a state of pain gnosis on your own, involving just a small sewing needle and a little knowledge of anatomy. The Jesuits taught me this trick; it's called "stigmata" (after the spontaneous bleeding from the ankles, wrists and side experienced by the extremely religious in imitation of a crucified Jewish rebel), and they use it to form a sympathetic link with Christ. Stigmata are done by locating the main nerve entering either hand at the wrist. The magician places a needle into this bundle of nerves. The pain will be instantaneous and overwhelming. This connection is responsible for the wonderful dexterity and mobility of the human thumb. During an actual crucifixion, this nerve is severed.
This method could also be termed "exhaustion gnosis." The magician engages in continuous movement until a trance-like state of gnosis occurs. Dance gnosis is particularly good for visions and divinatory sorts of workings, or at least that is the history of its use. However, it is apparent how it could be used in any type of magical activity. The effort to maintain
continuous motion eventually forces the mind to a single point of concentration, the motions themselves become automatic and there is a feeling of disassociation from the mind. It is at this point that the magician performs rituals, fire sigils and various other magical acts.
This is also a great form of "open handed magic." You can do it in a club full of people, with dozens watching, and no one has a clue. It takes a lot longer than one might think, though onset can be quick if you've never tried it before. Normal times to reach gnosis range from fifteen to forty minutes of continuous dancing. You can also obtain this type of gnosis by treading water for a long period of time.
Drumming
The auditory and the physical activity of drumming combine to place the magician into an altered state of consciousness. It also takes a rather long period of time to do so. However, it has the benefit of being one of the easiest forms of gnosis to maintain. Just keep banging away. Both dancing and drumming produce the classic "runner's high" which affects marathon racers. This is what you are seeking, along with a disassociation between the body and the mind.
Certain drum rhythms have also been known to directly impact
emotional states, depending on tone and pace. There are some styles of drumming that can apparently cause sexual arousal or intense feelings of anger. Extensive work with drumming will probably reveal these patterns, but the magician's primary concern should be on entering a state of gnosis through the physical medium of this type of gnosis.
Drumming works well with visionary trance (in terms of divination), invocation of various godforms that are associated with the drum (or thunder) and can be used very well in group ritual settings.
C^m^ting/Gl^osylia
The process of repeating a simple phrase or a random collection of syllables for an extended period of time will also produce single-pointed consciousness. While chanting can be conducted in a subdued fashion during a meditative session, it functions better when allowed to increase in tempo and rhythm until a crescendo is reached and the magician hits a state of gnosis.
Glossalaylia works in a similar fashion, but has no set formula to follow. The magician calls out letters, sounds or numbers in a rapid-fire fashion, letting go of mental control through a verbal avalanche of nonsense. As the magician works the pace
faster and faster, there will arrive a feeling of detachment that proceeds the onset of gnosis.
The chant itself used in this exercise can be a sigilized desire rendered in mantric form. The same desire can also be empowered via glossalaylia. Glossalaylia sometimes gives way lo an organized speech other than any known by the practitioner. If recorded and recognized by someone who knows the language, it can often be translated at a later date. This practice has been known to produce prophetic bits of insight.
Chemical Forms of Gnosis
It is necessary to mention several substances in this section that are currently illegal. The author under no circumstances recommends that the practitioner break the law in any way, shape or form. The obtaining of illicit substances, their possession and sale may result in arrest, detention and long jail sentences in some countries. Public abuse of some legal chemical substances may also result in similar punishment. However, to exclude this section would be to deny that chemically-altered states of consciousness exist and can be obtained through the use of these substances.
The skilled practitioner also recognizes that there exists a difference between use and abuse of a chemical substance. The former is a state in which you are in control, the latter a state in which you have surrendered your control to addiction. In the authors estimation, "addiction" is nothing more than a personal demon run amuck. It isn't a "disease" or a "tragedy. ” It is a personal failing that can be corrected through the direct application of will.
Chemical dependency (addiction) to any substance listed below is considered a disqualifying factor to an aspirant seeking the 3rd degree. The JOT desires individuals who are proactive and in control of their own Will.
^pr^^mts
Barbiturates and alcohol. The kind of stuff that just knocks you silly. But in society's estimation, that's good. If used properly they may result in some interesting dream states that lend themselves to divinatory interpretation. The primary risk of "downers" is passing out and choking on your own vomit. Depressants are toxic to your system and overindulgence in them will eventually cause various organs to fail.
Halucin^ens
Since the beginning of time magicians, shamans and sorcerers have been using substances that cause hallucinations in order to achieve visions and interact with divine forces. With the advent of modern chemistry, there has been the addition of synthetic drugs that cause similar and/or greater effects. The altered state produced will cause distortion of objects, time, distances and spaces, and will abrogate the ability to form focused thought. They have also been known to increase all sensory input, from sights and sounds to sexual stimulation. Though fun, it can be difficult to stick to a prearranged magical program while under the influence of any drug. But note, the magician may find herself in NEED of magic while in such a state and should be prepared to do rituals cold while most people are completely incoherent.
Visionary guided pathworkings with a non-influenced control guiding the practitioner(s) are the most effective form of magic performed while under the influence of hallucinogens, though the magician who is able to at least partially focus can attempt any type of magical activity.
Stimulants
Coke ^bu, large ^^wts of cafeinee. In a ^bui^uctiw society’ this ^type of drug is not only ^gel but ^marketed. It stakes A LOT
of coffee, ^^^^, to hit a state of (Ktwo to three pots one
^^^, but it can be done. Do not attempt this f^rn of gnosis It >OlJ haw a h^t condition.
Focus while under the influence of stimulants is intense, just the opposite of being under the influence of hallucinogens. Intense mental stimulation can easily change into a single point of consciousness. Done properly, these substances can enhance or quicken excitatory states of gnosis that do not involve exhaustion.
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Section 3
Weapons/fools
F^sh, ^^^rnent of Direct Wil, Divinatory Tools, ^Servitors and Egregores
Ultimately, the only tools a magician needs are her will and some sigils. However, there is something to be said for the magician who can utilize a wide variety of instruments to great effect. Tools allow the magician to increase the diversity of the rituals created, as well as add color and drama to a magical working (part of the glamour of being a magician is the possession of objects d'art). By mastering magical tools the magician prepares herself to work in any magical paradigm from sorcery to high magic, all of which require the ability to create/obtain and charge a set of working implements as a prerequisite. It is not necessary to craft the tools herself, though it does strengthen the bond between magician and weapon to do so. The tools themselves obtain their true power through the method of their concentration.
Fetish
This icon represents the ideal goal the magician wishes to achieve with her magic. As such it should be a symbol that
represents your goals as well as your fears. Most chaos magicians construct a chaosphere. As a symbol of chaos — that which is unknowable but which expresses itself through a dualistic medium in this reality — the chaosphere stands as a symbol of the expanding/contracting-creating/destroying-positive/negative-manifesting joke of existence.
While other symbols with similar dualistic qualities make great fetishes (yin/yang or the bisexual hermaphrodite creator/destroyer god/goddess), nothing quite captures the folly of the universe like a symbol representing the ultimate absence of meaning that anything and everything possesses. Thus, I will describe here the creation, consecration and employment of just such a fetish. Read carefully; the same methodology can be applied to other fetish symbols as well.
The first step is simply creating the fetish. Acquire the necessary tools. In the case of my own chaosphere, I needed a knife, some clay, arrowheads (the razor-tipped ones are best), black spray paint, a safety deposit box and a hollow plastic ball. I cut the ball in half, used it to mold two halves of the clay so that I had a good sphere and then put the arrowheads in. I baked the clay until it was hard and then sprayed it all black. I then destroyed all the tools that remained and hid the chaosphere until it dried.
Once the fetish is completed, the magician should go through an elaborate process of consecrating it. This process not only empowers the fetish but also should employ a methodology whereby it is made sacred. When consecrating a fetish you should keep in mind the following things:
a list of goals you wish to achieve with your magic;
the process of opening a rift in the universe in order to allow energy (in this case chaos) in;
the fact that you are dealing with a device that is no longer in the same category of things mundane.
Constructing the fetish first will allow you to include it in all subsequent consecrations of the other tools and also in any future ritual that you may choose to perform. Rituals of consecration can be as complex or as simple as you desire. Keeping in mind that the ritual section follows next, these examples of rendering a fetish sacred and potent are kept as simple and direct as possible.
Layered ^ftbitory Method
The magician spends a week fasting and without sleep. Each night she meditates on the fetish, concentrating a different sigilized intent into it. These sigils should include not only statements that empower the fetish but also what you intend to
get out of it as well. The intents can be mantras, sigils drawn on the surface of the fetish or images projected into it. Several hours should be taken up each night directing these intentions into the fetish. The magician concludes on the final night by binding herself to the fetish with her own blood and then breaks her fast and gets a day's sleep.
Layered Excitatory Method
Each night for a week the magician can combine several forms of excitatory gnosis: drumming and dancing/dancing and pain/rage and sex, etc. Use whatever gnosis work well together. Each time the magician hits a state of gnosis during the evening of work, she focuses her sigilized intent into the fetish. The more often a state of gnosis is hit during these activities the better; in each instance all the force gathered is directed into the fetish. On the final night of a series of such workings, the magician consecrates the fetish and binds it to her with her own sexual fluids.
In both methods, where you go from there is up to you. Some magicians keep their fetishes in a prominent location, an altar of some sort that is plainly visible. Others choose to consider their fetish a private, sacred reserve of power that the eyes of others are not fit to see, so the fetish is secured away somewhere secretive, only removed for rituals if and when it is
needed. Either way the magician can take it out or have it nearby to utilize during subsequent rituals or during the creation of the other magical tools.
^^^rnent of Direct Wil
Swords, daggers, wands and staves are all popular instruments of the magician's will. Each one has several characteristics in common which make them good instruments for directing your will. Each instrument is also distinctly different enough to appeal to various types of people. What they share in common is a phallic nature that evokes both the concept of penetrative/creation and the destructive violation of a target upon impact. The differences lie along the lines of whether they are blunt and direct (like a wand or staff) or slicing and analytical (like a sword or dagger), obvious and pronounced (like a staff or sword) or secretive and cunning (like a wand or dagger).
The magician should choose which one most appeals to her. The instrument itself can and will serve a multitude of purposes during ritual performance:
It can define a boundary at the beginning of a rite.
It can direct force to a target during the height of gnosis.
It can smash or destroy a symbolic target at the climax of a ritual.
It can cut one's own flesh to draw blood to consecrate an object (if sword or dagger, obviously).
It can cow unruly entities that possess fellow temple members.
The list of functional uses for an instrument of direct will is fairly long.
It is more likely that you will construct a wand or staff and purchase a sword or dagger. I know of few magicians who have the tools to construct their own swords, but if you are such a person, then obviously this is the recommended route to take. The advantage to creating a wand or buying a dagger are obvious in that the magician can easily keep them on her person at all times without causing too much suspicion. I personally prefer these tools myself, as it helps to consider them as an extension of yourself if they are always on your person. The consecration of a magical instrument of this nature is the same as used for a fetish or any other tool. The magician should enter into a state of gnosis and focus her will, in sigilized form, to have the weapon represent a conduit for that will. She may choose to accomplish this over a series of nights and conclude the consecration by binding the tool to herself with blood and/or sexual fluid. Once consecrated, the tool then can either be carried on the magician or displayed in a prominent location in her temple and used frequently during ritual work.
Dilatory Tools
Building or acquiring a set of divinatory tools can be as easy or as difficult as the magician chooses to make it. You can do anything from cutting down a small sapling and cutting runes out of the trunk or branches {staining them with your own blood under a gibbous moon) to running out to buy a deck of tarot cards. As with all other tools used by the magician, they should first and foremost possess significance to you. Do not pick or construct a tool that you consider facile. I also recommend that if you choose to go the route of something fairly complex, say tarot cards, that you consider modifying the system in a manner that greatly simplifies the system. The magician seeking an accurate answer to a divination does not need to muddy the water with dozens of potential interpretations.
Once you've selected a divination system, then it becomes necessary to consecrate it to your pursuit of magic. This can be done in one or more simple rituals designed along the following lines:
Prepare a sigil that represents the intent to consecrate the divinatory tool. Make it into both a pictorial symbol and a mantric chant.
Statement of Intent: "I consecrate these X for the great work of magic. May they always produce an accurate answer.”
.Ii niliii.i Wvlzel
Introduce the dualistic nature of the universe into the consecration by employing a mix of excitatory and inhibitory states. You may wish to begin by meditating until reaching a state of no-mind, then when in a state of gnosis through object concentration, burn the sigil made in step 1. Follow that by chanting the sigil that you created in mantra form until you reach a fevered pitch, pass into a state of gnosis and direct that energy into the divinatory tool.
After that, simply end in laughter or go immediately to another task.
The act of using a divinatory tool should still adhere to the strict magical formula introduced in Uber Kaos. I've found that simple divinations work best in the following fashion:
Write down eight separate things that you wish to divine for in the day/week ahead.
Make them into pictorial sigils. Number each sigil and record it's meaning in another location.
Mix these sigils up. Have them lying on the floor in front of you, flipped over so you can't see the sigil designs.
Start a tape recorder.
Enter into a state of gnosis by any preferred method.
Flip a sigil over, call out its number and then draw a card/rune/I-Ching stick/whatever.
Still in a state of gnosis, interpret the meaning as quickly as
possible without any conscious deliberation. If you come down from gnosis during this process, resume the practice of step 5 and then proceed to the next sigil.
If you stay in a state of gnosis then you want to —
Repeat steps 6 & 7 for the remaining sigils.
Stop the tape recorder and end in laughter, wait a few minutes, rewind the tape and check the interpretations against what was associated with the corresponding number.
Conducting divination in this way has several advantages. The first is that it removes the problem of going to some half-baked tarot reader and spending your money and time watching them figure out what you want to hear and then trying to put the reading in the best possible light; the second is that it removes your own tendency to color your interpretation in terms of what you want to hear, was hoping to get; the third is that since it only relates what is the most probable outcome of any given sigil, you can quickly design a sigil/ritual with the intent of changing that outcome right there and then to something that you do desire; the fourth is that it demonstrates the mind's relation to symbol systems while in an altered state of consciousness — which can be totally at odds with our waking interpretation.
^Servitors
Nowadays these can come in many forms, but basically still hold to the same premise that they did a century ago and longer. Servitors are semi-autonomous entities primarily designed to get you what you want. What type of servitor you use or create is irrelevant. What is relevant is the methodology used to create, direct, maintain and dispose of your servitors.
You are free to choose whatever paradigmal model you like for the servitors origin. They can be demons from grimoires, they can be repressed energy lurking in your subconscious, they can be collections of protoplasm floating in the aether just waiting for your will to imbue them with a sense of purpose. Whatever turns your crank.
Every servitor has several things in common:
Limited range of action: It is designed for, or traditionally exists to complete, one or a limited number of tasks that generally aren't all that complex.
A physical base: Either a sigil, talisman, amulet or engraving, some sort of symbol or marking, a doll perhaps; the base is inconsequential as long as it is always within easy reach and represents the entity entirely or by proxy.
Limited duration of existence: Whether lifespan or utilization
time, every servitor has a beginning and an end as determined by the magician.
A specific method of contacting and/or interacting and/or directing the servitor to complete its task.
The magician should become familiar with all the types of servitors mentioned here and the methodologies for summoning and utilizing them.
Demons/Elementals/Daemons
The benefits of this first class of entity are that you don't have to create them. They already exist and have some symbol that represents them. In addition, they usually have a list of talents or abilities that sum up what you can hope to accomplish with the entity in question. Unfortunately, many of these creatures have proclivities that limit their usefulness for a modern magician. Not many of us really need a tower constructed or a bishopric granted to us any time soon. Moreover, the extant rituals employed for contacting these beings and binding them to your service are heavily laced with the paradigmal slop and fears from a time when people jumped at their own shadows and thought that spirits were expelled every time you sneezed.
In addition to the complexity and repetitive nature of the rituals designed to contact them, the magician must also play the role
of slave driver over a potentially unruly pack of servants who will backstab and betray the magician at the first opportunity. This sort of mentality is out of place in a corporate co-operative culture of win-win scenarios and ducks-in-a-row strategizing. It is far more appealing to network with demons in a synergistic attempt to reach maximum customer satisfaction.
If you choose to work with a pre-existing demonic entity of some sort, here are some suggestions for interacting with them in a manner that is preferred over the flawed methodology of medieval monks. The first is to do away with the vast majority of paraphernalia involved. Depending on how you want to interact with the demon in question, you only need the demon's sigil, a tape recorder, yourself and possibly one other magician that you might want to have help. . , '
Option One: Doing it by Yo^urself
In this method of creating/contacting the servitor/demon, the magician brings the entity into herself in the same manner that one would do an invocation. The magician "summons" the demon from its present location into herself. If you so choose, you can even sit in a triangle for that added bit of authenticity. Demons are summoned in this manner the same way that egregores or gods are summoned: the magician enters into a state of gnosis through a process of chanting/calling up the
entity in question, with a recitation of its deeds, characteristics and qualities. This is accompanied by requests and exhortations for the being to come and possess the invocant's body.
When you achieve a successful possession, you offer the demon something in exchange for doing something for you in a limited period of time. Once the deal is struck, you simply ask the demon to leave and then come down from the state of gnosis that you were in. Using excitatory gnosis in any possession work is beneficial because, as the rite progresses, it is very easy to just stop exerting yourself and fall out of the state of singlepointed consciousness. If you choose an inhibitory method, you might require some distraction to exit a state of gnosis and break possession. This can be difficult when done alone.
Option Two: Playing With a Friend
In this case either you (preferable) or your fellow magician plays the role of the servitor while the other plays the role of the summoner. This method has the benefit of open communication between the magician and the demon, and you might not need a tape recorder (though they are damn handy to have around). In either case, BOTH of you should be in a state of gnosis during the summoning, the summoner for the purpose of having her will properly directed and the possessed for the obvious reason of obtaining possession.
The nice thing about suumno ning a demon this way is that the methods of gnosis selection are wider. You can attempt a possession/summoning using inhibitory means. There is another person there to distract you/banish the demon once the rite is complete. There's no need to hop around or make a lot of noise. If going this route, you should both play each role of summoner and possessed demonic, one after the other on different occasions.
In the above methodology, the demon is treated no differently than a servitor created by the magician herself. Rather than being a rebellious slave summoned to do the bidding of a cruel master, the demon is instead treated as a partner in a mutually beneficial undertaking. This is conveyed not only through the exchange of a task for a reward but in the way that the demon is placed into the servitor role. The magician demonstrates trust and respect and gets, if done properly, the task(s) accomplished in exchange, without any fear of backstabbing or betrayal.
Protopl^lasms
In the energy model of the universe, there is a large amount of semi-sentient energy floating about in the aether. Choosing this model in which to work allows the magician to focus a segment of that energy as a servitor and direct it for a limited time to the
completion of some task. Imprinting your will on a bunch of energy becomes a matter of drawing it in, concentrating it into a physical base and directing it to some task or series of tasks.
The magician should keep in mind the following things when utilizing this approach:
You need to figure out what you want AND what the servitor will need to possess in order to gain it for you. It doesn't do any good to construct a servitor for divination that doesn't have a way of relating what it perceives to you.
The more specific and direct you are the better. Nebulous design, tasks or duration will produce half-baked results.
When the servitor is done doing its task, dissolve it. Do not use it for additional activities or add processes to it. It is better to design a new one than to use an old one.
The physical base for a protoplasmic servitor can be as basic as a sigil drawn on a piece of paper or as complex as a painted clay figurine. The creation, charging and tasking of the servitor can be done in one evening during one ritual with several distinctive states of gnosis. With the objectives and attributes in mind beforehand represented by either several pictorial sigils or a number of sigilized words or mantras (or a combination of both), the magician enters into a state of gnosis through meditative trance, followed by whichever type of gnosis is
chosen to obtain the name of the servitor being created.
Often magicians use glossalaylia until a pattern occurs and then write down that pattern as the name of the servitor being created. Another way to obtain the name is to chant the desire to discover the name until you enter into a deep meditative state and the name occurs to you. A third way is to meditate until you reach a state of gnosis and then begin automatic drawing until a name is perceivable or an image that denotes a name occurs.
The naming of the servitor is merely the second step. Once the servitor is created, the magician ascribes the attributes to it and charges it with a task or tasks to perform. The attributes can be part and parcel of the naming process or they can be directed into the servitor through another round of chapting, an ecstatic activity with active visualization of the servitor fulfilling its functions (i.e. projecting the images mentally into the servitor while engaged in dancing, drumming, sex, hyperventilating, a state or rage, fear or pain).
The best and quickest way to task a servitor is to simply visualize it utilizing its attributes to complete the function(s) required of it. The magician may think this is repeating the third step, but the ability to run a marathon is far different than running 26 miles somewhere to do something. The objective is and should be kept distinct from the ability to perform it. Another trick the
magician should consider using is making the visualization of a symbolic nature. If the servitor is designed to attract wealth, for example, the magician visualizes it bringing in sigils that are the word "wealth" rendered in pictorial form. This will circumvent a lust for result when using the servitor.
When the servitor has successfully completed its task, the magician decommissions it. This process involves either the release or the destruction of the servitor by the magician. This will prevent it from mutating into something that is detrimental to the magician. Ultimately, each servitor needs to be dealt with in this fashion and it is often enough to destroy the physical base for the servitor. Without a material focus, it dissipates. Otherwise, you may have to not only banish it but also have it consumed in some fashion, perhaps by your fetish.
Thou^tforms
Human beings are a wonderful collection of repressed urges, needs, desires and fantasies. Rather than just letting these things fester in our subconscious or pay a psychiatrist lots of money to help us dig them out and deal with them, we can address our personal angst by turning it into useful magical gremlins.
Puritanical western society creates several categories of
repression that it is safe to say many of us have internalized. The primary one deals with sex and its accompany feelings of lust, perversion, jealousy and regret. Secondary emotional traumas can be linked to fears of inadequacy, guilt or obsession with one or more types of need that humanity possesses. It is ironic that the magician can harness these servitors. In some instances we owe our parents a debt of gratitude for doing such a callously bad job in raising us.
Once you've identified a collection or pattern of negativity lurking in your subconscious, summon it, define it and put it to some use. A good example of this is so prevalent it is even called a "demon" in and of itself. Jealousy. Human beings in social systems with massive inequalities will have tons of jealousy to go around. Not only will it be linked to sexual need but to physical comfort as well. However, we learn to repress and maintain our covetousness, tightly controlled and bound in our psyches, in order maintain a facade of civility.
Mirrors are convenient physical bases that are cheap to procure and have a certain degree of appropriateness when it comes to this type of servitor. The magician can divine the name of her repressed feelings of jealousy in any way desired. Visualizing a repeated string of situations in which jealousy was felt, she then comes up with a name after prolonged meditation or through a vigorous round of Glossalaylia or chanting (much like the
creation of a protoplasmic servitor).
This name is written down and then sigilized in pictorial form on the back of a mirror. The magician, desiring some outcome, summons the servitor with its name. This can be done either through chanting with the same series of visualizations or through a series of exhortations with the same visualizations while staring into the mirror. The magician will perceive the servitor arrive when noticing a consistent distortion of her face in the reflecting surface. At that point, the servitor can be tasked by drawing the pictorial sigil of the task onto the mirror or by chanting the mantra of the task to the mirror.
When you've peaked during this rite, the mirror is then concealed in some type of bag or sheet and promptly forgotten — it will complete its task without your further conscious attention. Unlike other servitors, these cannot be dismissed or destroyed per se. The thoughtform servitors are allowed to drift back into our subconscious until such time as they are removed through therapy.
As with servitors, the most important thing to consider when utilizing egregores is not so much where they come from or whether or not they are "real," but instead how we summon
them, interact with them, get what we want from them and then move on to something else. Methodology here is key; without sincere belief and effort this undertaking would be pointless. Invocation done without force of will is religion. Even the most sincere X-tians don't consider actually summoning Christ into themselves to possess them, now do they? The most ecstatic of ecstatic monotheistic sects either conceives of clinging to the divine (devekut), submitting blindly to it (Mohammedism) or contacting that nebulous ghostly holy thingy.
The systems that get it right are the primitive ones. The point of the divine lies in its ability to interact with the mundane. The magician should master possession by a multiplicity of egregores from a diversity of sources ancient, modern and fictional, done in a proper voudonic/shamanic fashion. This will involve moving through a series of paradigms on an exceptionally temporary basis. There are benefits to staying within a paradigm for a prolonged period of time but for this level of working it is only necessary to develop a thorough, though cursory, commitment to the beings with which you are working.
The magician should experience being "ridden" by the entity in question, act as a hollow vessel through which the force of the egregore flows. Invocations should be forceful and reverent,
persistent and sincere. Above all, they should never be boring, monotonous recitations. Sometimes it can take a few minutes to be possessed — this is usually when the invocation is layered with another form of gnosis (like fear or pain) — or it can take hours through repetitious exhortations for the being to come.
The best and only sincere indicator of possession comes with the memory blackout. During possession you may feel in control or aware of your surroundings. However, when done successfully, this is rarely the case. Magicians who have done work of this sort and have done it well note entire conversations and periods of time that the main invocant does not remember at all. This is what you're aiming for. If working alone, have a tape recorder nearby that can record at least 45 minutes per side, or is voice activated so that it can get everything that you will miss.
Once you have managed to obtain a state of being ridden/possessed by an egregore of some sort, the option exists to direct it to some task. As egregores are considered to be "larger than life" forms of metaconsciousness, the magician is potentially tapping into something that has the capacity to upset the status quo dramatically in your favor. Take advantage of it.
With egregores it is necessary to pay attention to the rules of
the paradigm from which you are working in order to summon the godform. The tricks and techniques of some cultures are, in fact, ways that the magically inclined members of that society have found to reach a state of altered consciousness and interact with these beings. If there are no helpful hints from the paradigm itself, then the magician should just stick to the techniques that work best for her when entering a state of gnosis to achieve possession.
If the Neophyte has the advantage of working with a group of other magicians, she should use them to assist in the creation of a group egregore. This process cements the group and provides it with direction and a source of inspiration and power. While smaller groups can utilize pre-existing egregores, it is important at some point to participate in the acfual creation of one from scratch.
Co^^^tog a Group Egregore
Members of the group get together and decide what goals they wish to accomplish over an extended period of time — a year is the best measure. They then discuss what qualities they wish the egregore to possess so that it can assist them in accomplishing their task(s) (like a mega-servitor). Finally, they build a physical base for the egregore and design a ritual to both name it and bring their collective energy into it.
The physical base can be an idol constructed by the artisticaJly inclined among the temple members. It can also be constructed from composite material, each member contributing an item of magical significance to themselves, and then having that placed with items contributed by the other members into a collective receptacle which then acts as the egregore.
The group members "discover" the name of the entity they have created. This can be accomplished through an astral or dream working — through prolonged guided meditations or pathworkings — or by choosing the quick and dirty method of Glossalaylia to uncover its identity. The resulting name acts as a focal point for future rites and activities and is secret, known only to the group that has created it. The name itself will have power due to its sacrosanct nature arising from it being hidden (i.e. "occult").
Empowering the entity should incorporate an activity that not only gives the egregore power but also binds the magician(s) to it. Ancient cultures often performed blood sacrifices to the fetishes/idols at the center of their societies. This form of worship would involve offering up either animals to the deity (which were THE measure of wealth in the ancient world, apart from land) or human sacrifice (in the form of slaves and prisoners of war). Modern magicians should consider using
small amounts of their own blood to consecrate the egregore and bind themselves to it. Semen or other excretions obtained in orgasmic release during a ritual are also potent substances when empowering an egregore for your temple.
When empowering an egregore, gnosis is the key to effective tasking of the entity. So long as the physical base is incorporated into the egregore while the magician doing so is in the height of gnosis and communing with the force that is the egregore, even a seemingly non-magical substance such as saliva can be chosen for consecration of the entity and binding to the magician. This brings up the point that simply cutting oneself open or whacking off over an idol are insufficient ways of consecrating it. The magician engaged in the process MUST be in a state of ecstasy when the point of •consecration is reached. Anything less would be a half-hearted effort that shall be rewarded with half-hearted results in future workings.
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Section 4 Ri^tuals
The magician takes the tools created in the previous section, combined with the ability to achieve numerous states of gnosis, and designs rituals in order to achieve any number of objectives in each of the eight rays of magic. Rituals should be original creations specifically constructed for personal growth, enlightenment or aggrandizement, though the magician should feel free to draw upon the extant resources available to provide the raw material for her creations. (You have to be original but you don't have to reinvent the wheel, if you catch my meaning.)
Keep in mind that there are a large number of useful previously existing paradigms. The Neophyte should choose one of them to thoroughly investigate. Research it fully, with the ultimate goal of being an expert on at least one magical topic (the person to go to regarding that paradigm}. This will enable you to act as a resource to other Pact members and will safeguard you from running the risk of just being a passive receptacle of rituals and information. Additionally, you ’ll be a font of knowledge at tea parties.
Ritual success is based on five determining factors:
the probability of the event occurring;
the quality of the state of gnosis achieved;
the magical link between yourself and your objective; your conscious desire to achieve the objective;
your subconscious resistance to getting what you want.
In designing our rituals we wish to strengthen the first three and reduce the last two.
The step at which most magicians who are using magic as a shortcut to doing actual work tend to stumble is the first one. Without the probability of an event occurring, it usually doesn't. Though the occasional dark horse wins, the majority of events in anyone's life are a collection of the highest probabilities manifesting sequentially. Magic is the most useful tool for bending the odds to our favor in any given circumstance, but it does not go beyond the scope of being a tool concurrently aiding your mundane efforts.
A magician can construct a flawless ritual, perform it beautifully, take painstaking efforts to ensure that it's all done to perfection and then marvel that it failed to produce the desired result. The best example of this phenomenon is, of course, the "masters of the 10 x 10 room." These well-read magicians know every kabalistic, astrological and numerological association and sympathy. Such masters also unerringly know the right times, incenses and lighting to use, the right names to call and the
powers to motivate them to appear and do as they're told. Yet they seem to consistently live out of their parents^ basements, have no dates and work at the local fast food joint.
The reason they so often fail to achieve high and lofty goals is that they do not create the circumstances in which the best probabilities can come to pass. They don't lack ambition, but you can't get a date unless you go out, you can't have lots of money unless you acquire the skills to get a high paying job and you won't be rich and powerful unless you put forth a great deal of initial effort.
I once knew a magician — highly intelligent — who was in medical school. He had failed a recent exam twice and couldn't determine why. He had done several rituals, his sigils were precise and his will clear, but he kept failing. I asked him: "Have you been studying?" He looked at me and blinked. Finally he replied "Um ...no.’’
The mundane effort factor is more controllable than some other factors, and we should take advantage of it under every circumstance. There exists plenty of written material on how to get ahead in life. Get money, get sex and get even: all of that. But it all requires work. Create the circumstances surrounding your success first and then do the magic to increase the chances of it happening.
After personal effort, the second factor we can control is the state of gnosis to be achieved, the aspects and types of which I have covered in section two. Suffice it to say that the magician should be aware that achieving a state of no-mind or single pointed consciousness is sometimes quick, sometimes slow but usually requires bloodthirsty determination. The exception being control freaks; in that case, a major obstacle to overcome is the inhibition to "letting go" of the conscious, controlling mindset.
The effort to achieve gnosis occurs during your rituals. Do not hesitate to take as long as you need to get there. Don't cut yourself off for the sake of saving time. Go overboard consistently — over the top. Push your limits and your expectations past the breaking point time and again and you will not be disappointed with the results. And if it doesn't seem like you're hitting gnosis, remember to "fake it till you make it;" keep up the internal pressure until the breakthrough occurs. Sometimes the ritual will work even if you don't succeed in hitting absolute no-mind.
As the far five determining factors necessary for a successful ritual, the easiest of them to obtain is a magical link. So, the objectives of our rites often involve individuals close at hand. Regardless of whether the magical effort is beneficial or
detrimental to them, keep in mind that people are constantly leaving remnants of themselves and their personal belongings EVERYWHERE. These can be easily obtained and utilized during the rite.
When the objective of a ritual is distant (or abstract), the magician still relies on elements that bind them to the target: a distant adversary's face blazing in the mind; a remembered smell, sight or taste of a past encounter; the logo of a company; the emotions that arise when you think upon them/it. All of these are viable magical links.
The magician then seeks to translate these links into a symbolic form for use during ritual. Why? For several reasons. The first is that deeper aspects of our minds don't think in concrete terms; they think in symbols and allegory. The more primitive aspects of the brain don't even rise to that level; they simply feel — fight — fear — hunger — need, etc. The conscious mind handles the direct action and doesn't require symbolic discourse. You dont like Frank, you punch Frank in the nose. The parts of the mind that handle magic, however, function on a more symbolic, metaphorical plane.
The other reason for turning these magical links into a symbolic form focuses on the forth factor that we are trying to control: the magicians lust for result. The energy of that lust is needed
for the magic to work. However, directing that energy into fantasy regarding the outcome siphons off power into wish fulfillment, which doesn't contribute to the effectiveness of the ritual. Conscious fantasy is within the realm of the mind responsible for punching Frank. If the mind doesn't go through with the action, nothing happens. The part of the mind responsible for Frank getting run over by a bus can't be fed that energy through fantasy. It needs that energy fed to it through symbol and metaphor.
The final factor to be controlled for magic to work comes from without, but is entrenched within us. It is the internalized voice of materialistic, non-magical society. It is also our doubts regarding our selves. From insecurities to rationalizations for failure, all of them combined can be a potent force to keep us weak, ineffectual and powerless. The magician must conquer these inner demons through a process of doing successful magic, not just once or twice, but many times. As you begin to experience magical successes, these voices will retreat.
This final factor dovetails with the first. If you seek to do improbable things with your magic and fail, then your inner selfdoubt regarding magic will grow and do the I-told-you-so dance all over your ego. If you start with what is probable, within reason and then constantly push back the envelope of the achievable, you'll discover that voice waning and becoming
more shrill and ridiculous. Eventually you 31 be able to impartially judge your successes and failures. You will know what occurred through your magic, what by chance and what didn't occur because either the probability was too remote or your technique not good enough.
The Eight Colore of Magic
Listed below in this subsection is each of the eight colors of magic. The eight colors can be taken in any order. The number of rituals is up to the magician, however it is recommended that you achieve at least three solid successes in each of the colors before considering yourself adequate in any of them. For each color I have provided three recommended exercises. These exercises are a guide for what you may wish to do with each color. You do not have to stick to the exercises as a hard and fast guide, but should depart from them as your creativity sees fit, designing ritual exercises to do yourself. As long as the rituals manage to keep the five factors in mind — Probability, Gnosis, Link, Awareness and Resistance — then you are on the right track.
Keep in mind that extensive or long-term workings (as opposed to one-off efforts) usually will include elements from more than one color of magic. A good example would be the goal of securing a partner or mate. Though it may initially seem to
simply be a matter of having regular sex (purple), the goal also encompasses friendship {green) and the evolution of self (yellow), along with combined finances (blue). So, a working to attract a prospective partner in a relationship that would last for a while would be more than just a purple working.
Gr^m
As the frog said, "It ain't easy being green," and it's impossible to start off this section without that horrible joke. To chaos magic this color represents "love," but more in the classic understanding of friendship and fraternity rather than in an erotic sense. For some it also covers acts of healing magic. Neophytes within the IOT have to comport themselves with a wide range of individuals; from their own families, to social circles of friends, to co-workers, to non-IOT magicians, occultists and finally to fellow IOT members from Novices up to Mages. Possessing a solid cadre of friends and allies in all of these environments cannot but help the magician. Within this color of magic, the magician will also find great benefit in being able to heal herself and others.
Mastering green magic means being able to move fluidly and successfully through all these groups and find yourself popular and in possession of all the resources that a large swath of friends puts at your disposal. Failure with this section will
probably mean you are in irredeemable misanthrope that doesn't belong in any group, let alone one comprised of antinomian magicians.
Some chaos magicians make the mistake of actually trying to be the dark, loner and scary, misanthropic occultist. As a glamour it has it's uses, but for the Neophyte engaged in the process of becoming an Initiate, it can be a handicap. While the practice of magic may make you feel like you're a breed apart, you're actually not. You still belong to various cliques, social circles and economic groupings — the only difference is that by trying to be a loner you're more apt to be labeled than to freely define who you are for yourself.
Human beings are, by our very nature, social creatures. Unless you live in a mountain cabin or are a paraplegic shut-in, you are going to run into other people the moment you get up and step out the front door. It is better to have the advantage over others (not to mention being able to take advantage of them) than it is to be at their mercy mentally, emotionally and socially.
Avenues of manifestation for this color range from our physical appearance to our emotional bearing and mental agility. Chaos magicians who can vary their appearance the most have a distinctive advantage. Human beings will instinctively trust people who look like them. Resemble the group whose trust
you are trying to engender. Maintaining an open posture and smiling a lot (but not inanely) will also cause similar positive feelings in other people.
Positive emotions and being what is classified as "gregarious" (but not obnoxious), will also get you ahead in life — combining these facets with an ability to rapidly judge moods and switch yours accordingly will make you well liked. Listening to people for a longer time and being attentive to them is another way to engender trust. If you interested in them they will seek, on some level, to reciprocate that concern. In addition, you can also build trust through acts such as disclosure and participation in group activities and events. Gregarious people are often at the center of what's going on.
While much of this may seem facile at first (because it is), human psychology is really not all that complicated. The people around you all have the same weaknesses (if you view them as such): they want to be liked, respected, feel important and needed. Fitting yourself into this scheme can get you what you want with very little capital expended on your part in either money or resources. All that you really need with any individual or group is time.
Green rituals should center on increasing your appeal to specific groups and individuals that will give you a return on
your investment in them. Begin by delineating what groups and individuals exist in your life and then decide what you get out of them. Discover which individuals are linked to people or groups that are better situated than your own circle of friends. In general, a successful magician wants to engage in a process of social self-promotion. You want to progressively move up the food chain of influence, power and wealth.
It is important to realize that some people are not a resource but a liability. Acquaintance with these persons needs to be reduced and eliminated. As callous as it may seem, you need to limit contact with individuals that drain your time, energy and resources while offering nothing in return. Some of them may be old friends engaged in a process of downward social mobility. Others might be relatives that are either trash or engage in some sort of twisted emotional game playing. Don't let past attachments ruin your future progress.
Enchantments to make yourself more appealing should be combined with the non-verbal cues and personal habits listed above. Divinations should be geared towards the discovery of information that is relevant when fitting in with a specific group of individuals that will assist your progress. Useful egregores for green workings are archetypes that encapsulate fraternal and filial ideals (the Japanese and Roman mythologies include good examples, along with the Sumerian demi-gods Enkidu and
Gilgamesh). Servitors can cover any number of required jobs, from augmenting the divination objective listed above to bringing you that required useful bit of gossip.
In the area of healing magic, the magician gains control over her internal energy and can direct it to any point within the body to fight off illness or to strengthen constitution. The magician does this most effectively from deep trance exercises. When you have obtained a state of no-mind you bring focus to your diaphragm and visualize a ball of light energy there. This can be green or another color of your choosing. With each breath you visualize it slowly moving to a spot in your body that requires healing or energy. Once it is there, you should feel an itching or slight tingling sensation.
Exerc^s
Invoke an egregore of "love" that will represent your patron godform for these exercises. Unto this entity will be given your supplications to possess the qualities that win friends and influence people.
Construct a servitor whose primary task is to acquire useful information. This information will be a resource to increasing your influence. You may also wish to construct one whose primary function is to "make you look good" as it were.
Draw up a list of your known associates and friends; note which are assets, which are neutral and which are liabilities. If some of your associates move in circles that contain people that are potential resources, list them as well. Cease to associate with the ones that are liabilities and concentrate on the ones who have resources that may benefit you. Note their appearance and modify yours accordingly. Cultivate the friendships of those that wil assist your growing popularity.
yYeOow
The universe revolves around you. It can't help it. Without you perceiving the universe it would not exist...well, at least not from your perspective. However, many spiritual and quasi-magical groups have a rather nasty tendency to run around trying to get everyone to destroy their egos. This is primarily done for the simple reason that creatures that perceive themselves as having no egos are far more likely to open their wallets to other people. Egotists by their very nature are selfish and like to spend their cash on themselves and things that bring them pleasure. So some groups exert all their efforts towards convincing you that your ego is bad and should be destroyed.
Please note that I've yet to meet a person without an ego, outside of an insane asylum. I've met people with severely
repressed egos that came out in passive-aggressive behavior, but at least there was still some ego present. It doesn't just turn off like a light bulb and no amount of effort will make it go away. Like your foot, your ego can be removed, but at the cost of your sanity.
Conversely, a grossly inflated ego can also prove a handicap. People with an unrealistically large, pumped-up idea of their worth constantly get blind-sided by the rest of us whom they've taken great pains to underestimate. To be unusually pleased with yourself most of the time will additionally result in a loss of friends and influence.
The trick is to naturally strike a progressive balance. The ego exists as a fluid aspect of your selves and is as mutable as any of your other internal personalities and tendencies. It is subject to modification, reduction and growth, inflation and deflation. Much of the "Metamorphosis" section is geared towards this process, so I won't go into it here. Rather, I will discuss the types of rituals you may wish to construct to progressively grow your ego, your confidence and will to power without becoming a cocky bastard that no one likes.
Ego is often expressed through non-verbal cues like posture (straight, not hunched) and stance (open and confident). Walk like you know where you're going, even when you don't (This
is easier for men I've found; we never get lost). You may also wish to deepen your tone of voice and speak clearly and decisively. Look people in the eye when you talk to them. There are whole books devoted to this subject, so 1 won't go into further detail. Research along these lines wil yield material that may prove helpful.
Gods that are equated with/representative of the ego are usually of the solar variety. While having a period of growth and ascendancy, they also have a period of sacrifice or decline. Ra of the Egyptian mythos eventually grows old and senile. Osiris (also a solar deity) of the same mythos gets chopped up annually by his rival Set. The list continues through a multiplicity of paradigms. In many cases, egregores you may wish to use sacrifice themselves for the greater whole at some point. While I don't suggest you martyr yourself, the point is that we function with social groupings that sometimes require the ego itself to step aside for the sake of others. It must periodically relax and deflate a little.
Magicians doing yellow magic may wish to begin with a rite focused towards death and rebirth, and then follow this with a divination or two to explore potential regions for growth. This can be followed by rites designed to obtain a number of probable goals and have the added outcome of increasing confidence, to say nothing of designing rituals to increase
confidence itself.
Neophytes can consult the world archives for material. Not only are there excellent extant ego orientated rites, but there are also inflated ego busting rites as well. You may wish to create a rite designed to allow yourself to poke fun at your own pomposity. This deflationary exercise can be effectual in keeping your ego growth balanced. Steady growth, NOT out-of-control look-at-me-mom-r m-a-master-of-the-universe growth.
Ex^c^^
Death and rebirth. Perceive the eclipse of your old ego by the birth of the one that you are creating. Perform a ritual that marks this slaying of your old self and the creation of a new self.
The magician will build a healthy confidence by enchanting for probable items and, with each success, increase her belief in her ability to effect change through her magic.
Reflect this change by carrying yourself in a manner that demonstrates your self-confidence through non-verbal means. Master situations in your social environment through this new confidence. Perform enchantments that reflect this.
Black
Within each biological entity there is a time bomb that ultimately leads to it's destruction. Once you have reproduced, you have served the purpose for which you were constructed. Past reproductive age, without medical assistance, most creatures die quickly. Many primitive (and some complex organisms) even do so immediately after mating and laying eggs; done with spawning the next generation, they die.
Chaos magicians can gain much by a thorough understanding of their own internal self-destruct mechanism. Our urge to destroy ourselves is a fundamental part of our nature that can be turned into a tool for our advantage and progress. This understanding gives rise to the two reasons to do black magic: the external and the internal.
Basically, external reasons are other people and internal ones are dysfunctional internal personalities. Too much ink has been spilled on the former subject and not enough on the latter. It is quite possible to find yourself in a position in which the only option left is to kill. It is the position of battered wives, abused children and enslaved people: the severely wronged and the ultimate victim. However, I sincerely hope that most magicians would not find themselves in such situations to begin with or, if they are, will get out of it as soon as possible. Sometimes it's
just rotten luck, but other times it's your own stupidity — just try to avoid getting into that wretched state.
What most consider "black magic" actually is, in a chaos magic definition, red magic — the magic used to gain an advantage over a rival and/or to win a resource from her and/or to temporarily disable her so this can be done. Black magic is about killing. Cold, reptilian murder, calculated and executed with precision, done without pity or remorse. It is a scalpel, used to remove cancerous tissue, not a battle-axe casually swung at someone who cut you off on the freeway.
It's greatest uses for the magician are to understand death by coming close to it and to remove aspects of your personality that are detrimental to your progress, such as the capacity to kill, the least useful trait unless it is to save your own life. Buddhist monks who meditate on death by viewing corpses for long periods of time grasp it to a certain extent. So do morticians and those who have had near-death experiences.
There are many egregores that represent death, from hag-goddesses to demons of disease and pestilence. The grim reaper is positively comical compared to beings like Kali or Sekhmet. These can be invoked into oneself, possession by which will provide some idea of what death is about.
The magician may also draw up a list of aspects, habits and failings that you wish to eliminate about yourself and conduct rituals to destroy these one at a time. There are also types of gnosis that can lead to a greater understanding of death. Fasting for prolonged periods of time is one example. However, if you attempt various near death-inducing states, please be advised that you do so at your own risk.
Exerc^s
Familiarize yourself with death. Invoke various egregores that represent death. Understand how it feels physically to be dying through some type of death process (fasting or sensory depravation).
List personalities within yourself that would be better off dead.
Keep in mind that these can range from habits to internalized personalities of parents or past authority figures. Kill these off one by one.
(Optional) If there exists an individual that would be better off dead, design a ritual to cause their extinction. Use your own familiarity with death to increase the probability that you will cause their death.
BBlue
The mark of a good magician is to find herself in a position to acquire a constantly widening variety of experiences. This will, after a certain amount of time, require more money than you are currently making. We live in a world where just about every experience has a price tag; sometimes it is as glaringly obvious as the sticker tag on a new car, other times it is a far more subtle cost extracted in time and resources and money. Either way, in order to make things better the magician needs to increased the flow. This is done in incremental stages. The magician usually begins in a state where she earns money at a job that she doesn't particularly like (but which pays the bills and provides some level of comfort) and ends when the magician is producing wealth through a practice that she already finds enjoyable. When your fun produces wealth, then you have arrived.
On another level, the magician will also want to expand what she does with the wealth that is produced, regardless of whether or not she enjoys the source of that wealth. Write down what makes you happy now. Next to that write down what you can conceive of as making you even happier in future. Frequently these things will have a correlation. If you travel now and that makes you happy, then traveling even farther abroad or oftener will probably make you even happier. Many of our fantasies are not so wild when we realize that they have some basis in what
we can already achieve, to become our realities.
The next step in wealth generation is to plot how you will get from point A to point B, from the list of things you currently enjoy to this list of things that you want to enjoy in a reasonable amount of time. The requirements that must be met before the second list is achieved are the obstacles over which many people stumble and fail. Everyone wants the nice car, the nice clothes, the trips to Bermuda (or wherever), the nice wine, the great sex with multiple partners, the enlightenment, the fame, the popularity, etc., but will balk when they realize that step three is working for it.
The magician is assisted greatly in moving towards that second list of objectives through the use of her magic. However, magic alone will not suffice. If you require a certain salary to have the necessary cash to do various things, then you must acquire the skill set that will enable you to have the job that pays the requisite salary. The enchantments and divinations which will aid you in getting to that point will ensure that the break will be there when you need it, but they cannot substitute for doing the actual work of learning the skill set or taking the risk.
Blue magic is about expansion. The egregores that are primarily associated with wealth and money are of an expansive and sometimes risky disposition. They are very handy for
priming the pump, but you have to work the handle to get the wealth out. These archetypes favor the aggressive ones and, frankly speaking, the assholes who put themselves first regardless of the consequences.
The magician must be aware, moreover, that there exist in many of us internal doubts regarding our own worth. must be hunte: dCM1Ti ^arx:l d^^^d. H are in a constant state of f^eeling
urrl^^^^ when ft co^” to ^^^, it wil amid you like the |^^^.
The last thing we need is self-sabotage on the road to success. So list any bocl f^^^ you ha^ aboutft ^rn^, a^bout ^^to, a^bout why don't d^^w to be ^^^y ^arx:l ^^ lots of fun arx:l lots of ^i (this wil be an exercise — see below).
The Neophyte, once finished with these exercises, will find herself in a better position than when she started. That is the goal, plain and simple. Success is achieved when you can obtain today what you could not yesterday. Substantial mastery of items on your second list should be your focus. After these goals have been achieved, you will be able to expand that second list even further when you wish to increase your wealth at any point in the future.
Exerc^s
List the negative attitudes that you have regarding wealth and reasons why you think you don't deserve to be wealthy. These
thoughts and attitudes must be summoned up and destroyed. Replace them with positive attitudes towards wealth.
List the things that currently give you pleasure and are obtainable. Write a second list of things that would give you even more pleasure. Figure out what it would take to get from list one to list two.
Engage in the processes that will get you to list two. These should be assisted by enchantments, invocations, servitors or whatever is necessary to give you that edge and force the probabilities to your advantage. (2 & 3 are really the first and second half of one exercise; the point is to achieve at least two or three wealth objectives).
Octarintarin
This color of magic represents our drive toward the oeuvre and the occult, the thing that makes magicians, magicians. It is the understanding that all the explanations for reality that we were taught while growing up were a little too pat, a little too absolute. The fact that every explanation in existence for the universe is full of holes has produced some interesting reactions. Some retreat into the ignorant simplicity of fundamentalism. Whether that fundamentalism is religious or scientific is irrelevant. Each chooses to ignore any data that
doesn't fit their model. Whether that information is called "satanic" or "not provable" is of no concern.
Others go the route of the relativist: this and this are true for me and that is true for you, and we should all just try and get along. Their model of "everything is true" falls apart when two items utterly contradict each other. If one is "yes" and the other is "no," then it has to be one or the other. "Maybe" satisfies no one. They just shake their heads when fundamentalists go at each other's throats. They never understand that Truth has no flexibility. Their pantheist approach to reality and the inclusiveness it attempts to foster must wither in the face of fanaticism or dissolve in the fog of its own obfuscation.
The chaos magician takes the opposite tact: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted.', From this perspective, neither group of fundamentalists is right, nor is the relativist in the middle correct. Everyone is equally wrong (including the chaos magician). From this perspective it doesn't matter if equally false statements contradict; they were wrong to begin with. Nor does it make any sense to attempt some sort of rectification. Any attempt to steer a middle ground will eventually just end up in either ditch.
Another octarine observation is that the fundamentalists plowing along in the ditches tend to get results while those
attempting to make everything fit equally achieve nothing new or shocking. This leads us to the conclusion that determination and single-minded persistence must have some worth. The mental discipline of fanaticism produces results.
The magical personality is not the negation of the ego (as some hold), nor is it necessarily your "higher self" (as others theorize). It is rather the aspect of you most attuned to the peculiar nature of the observed universe. It is also your personality closest to the underlying chaos beneath reality; a final metaphor being that it is one of your masks least like a mask.
The direction in which your octarine magic travels is entirely subjective and dependent upon the individual magician. Some are drawn towards complex systems of increasing order while others tend towards practices closest to inhuman, primordial, raw power. Still others find their octarine direction to a combination of other personal drives, like towards sex and death. Still other magicians find it is a future projection of their combined selves capable of sending a retroactive echo back to our current moment.
Egregores of magic that the magician may wish to utilize when working with octarine magic will encompass dualistic and contradictory functions like 1 and 0, light and dark, creation and destruction, beginning and end, male and female — any and
all the arbitrary dualistic concepts which are destroyed in their own contradiction.
Servitors created for octarine magic tend towards discovery of theoretical goals and models of explanation. In essence, they combine the functions of both enchantment and divination. The use of this color of magic for the magician? Within a viable framework (paradigm) we can hang our hats of expectation and direction on octarine magic.
As a magician you should be able to develop a working magical paradigm for further exploration regardless of the direction your octarine exercises take you. The paradigm becomes useful only with subsequent practice. The model will not fit reality perfectly, but then no model ever has.
Create a servitor designed to retrieve information regarding your magical purpose and the process by which you can obtain it. The answers received can shape the subsequent exercises.
Design a ritual to draw your future magical self back to the present time to assist your progress. This exercise is especially effective utilizing lucid dreaming techniques. Record any exchange and take direction from it.
Invent a personal magical program. This can be used to complete the other sections or used at a future time. Alternatively, you can design a working magical paradigm and test it via the other workings in this section.
^Purple
Sexual magic — and things that have grown from it, like Tantra — ultimately attempt to recapture the true essence of what sex can be rather than the hollow shell which it has been reduced to in western societies. Many who experiment with sex magic are shocked at what they previously accepted as being "good" sex. Those who never push their boundaries in this area will never know the bliss they are missing and, therefore, will not comprehend what they could have had. Ultimately, sex magic boils down to allowing yourself to experience as much pleasure as possible and to utilize the energy that is produced to obtain measurable magical results.
There is also the added psychological side benefit of becoming more understanding vis-a-vis other people and their sexual orientation once you begin to push your own limits. lt' s hard to remain a narrow-minded bigot when you've done just about everything. Though some sex magic can be initiated without a partner, it is advisable to acquire one during this process. One might even go so far as to add that magicians incapable of
attracting sexual partners are pretty crap magicians.
The confidence and the gregarious nature obtained through the green and yellow workings will probably greatly assist in the purple ones. You have to be sexually interested in yourself on some level before others will find you attractive enough to be likewise interested. Knowing that you are attractive and sexy will go a long way to obtaining a mate if you don't already have one.
So, obtaining a partner may be a good place to start your sexual magic workings. Since invoking egregores of a naturally seductive nature is a good way to start, there are in fact a host of feminine and masculine godforms from a number a paradigms (though I recommend Hindu mythology as a good place to start), that will suffice. Bringing them into yourself will give you the perspective of one that is accustomed to being the seducer who is never refused.
If you already have a partner, hopefuJly they will be willing to assist you in the expansion of your sexual repertoire. Personally, I can't think of a past relationship in which the woman I was involved with didn't want to have progressively better sex. Too often women in our society are cheated out of the sexual satisfaction they can (and should) have by men who simply don't understand how to give it to them or by women's
own internalized shame regarding a woman's capacity to be a sexual being. Sometimes men are basically intimidated by a woman's ability to have sex continuously long after he has petered out. And often, men are drawn only to fulfilling outcomes of ejaculation, and are devoid of any deep, prolonged, sensory experience involving trust and fidelity throughout the lovemaking experience.
The extant material on sexual magic tends to focus on you and your partner mastering your internal energy, heightening your sexual release and channeling that into magical outcomes. While this can be as fundamental as coming to orgasm while your partner has a sigil on their forehead, it can be as innovative as summoning demons into your companion and then engaging in sex with them while they are possessed (naturally directing the demon to some task, but that should be evident).
After some preliminary research your approach should attempt to utilize your sexual activity towards the creative goal that it ultimately represents. By robbing the reproductive process of creation we are, in essence, stealing the fire from heaven and using it to manipulate our reality. The objectives of sexual workings need not be limited to just furthering your own psycho/sexual development. Sex can be used for initiating just about any activity or project that you might conceive.
For the first exercise, I recommend discovering any negative attitudes, feelings and fears you might have regarding sex. These can be encapsulated as personal demons or thoughtforms and destroyed/countered. Take stock of your current sexual routine and look for ways to either improve it or, if it is already good, ways to introduce elements of magic into it. If you already know Tantra or have experience along these lines, begin by exploring alternative sexual activities to ones you have previously tried and push the envelope, damnit.
The next step, if you are without a sexual partner, is to attract one. If you have one and have begun to introduce magical elements into your — like sigils — you can continue to experiment by jacking it up a notch. Try taking turns invoking various gods whose primary function is sexual. ..and fuck them. Naturally you should have some magical goal of a creative nature in mind when engaging in sex.
Use your sexual mastery to create servitors, demons, psychopomps and other entities to further magical goals. Play and have some fun.
Red
Much of what is considered "black magic" is more properly defined as red or war magic. Some people believe that this magic is designed to hurt people and that's ail. This belief is only partially correct and is a simple assumption made by simple people. The true purpose of red magic is to disable an antagonist in order to either prevent them from obtaining a resource that you desire or to win a resource from them.
For neophytes there will probably be a lot of bigger fish in the sea. These fish probably have something that you want. Learning effective red magic techniques will help you to get it from them. Naturally, you'll have to figure out what you want to get first and then go after it, but that's an individualistic determination. Red magic is the grease that moves the skid to get results.
Red magic can also be used from the perspective of getting revenge on someone that has won a confrontation with you. This sours their victory and robs them of long term pleasure from it. While you probably don't want to have to do this too often (seeing as doing it means that you've lost somehow), everybody loses sometime and it's good to be able to fire a parting shot.
They are several ways of approaching offensive war magic operations:
The first is some manner of classic cursing designed to bring misfortune down onto the head of your opponent.
The second is a sustained, draining type of attack, designed to rob them of their will to fight for what you both mutually want.
What the third type does is almost the reverse of the second. The magician deliberately energizes the negative traits of her antagonist, thus causing the opponent to self-destruct.
The fourth type is rather new and is the toxic approach of destroying your adversary by giving them what A:hey want. This tactic grew out of the obsetvation that many people either want the wrong things (due to societal conditioning) or want things that are bad for them.
In any event, red magic is sometimes useful during other aspects of magical operations like purple magic or blue magic, when you are trying to achieve an objective but have discovered an obstacle. The magician switches gears into a red magic mode, eliminates the obstacle and achieves the objective. In the eight rays of magic section, you may wish to work on other colors of magic and then interject red magic when necessary.
Otherwise, you can work up a list of objectives, determine what obstacles are in the way and sideline them through magical attack. You may naturally wish to build a servitor for magical defense if you are going up against fellow magicians, but I certainly don't recommend taking on someone with massive amounts of experience. Odds are they have more than one magical defense up their sleeves, and the older they get the more cunning they can be. So stick to achievable goals.
Success, however, will find you in a better position and with more resources than when you began. Mastery of these skills for war magic will allow you to swiftly and effectively gain the upper hand in most confrontations that you encounter. Not only will you have your mundane attributes, but you will also possess the skill of an occultist not afraid to release the dogs.
Exerc^s
For a first exercise, I recommend constructing a servitor of defense, responsible for repelling all magical and mundane misfortunes. These can be created while possessed by a god of war. Personifying war during rituals designed to achieve victory from an adversary gives you a nice edge.
Take stock of what you wish to take from adversaries around
you. There might be any number of things that others possess that you want. Or there may exist something you want that others are in competition for; it doesn't hurt to look for objectives along these lines.
Once you have them, create sigils to disable them or perhaps a vampiric servitor to drain them.
As a final exercise you can direct energy towards your opponent's negative qualities in order to inflate them and/or push them towards goals which will destroy them. (2 & 3 are pretty much the same — the goal should be to have a couple of solid victories regardless of objective or method).
&^ge
An often-overlooked aspect of magic is that pertaining to the intellect: wit, intelligence and guile being the prerogative of thieves, con artists, salesmen and politicians. However, cultivating the magical aspect of lightning thought can make a crucial difference to the magician when she may need it most. Situations where thinking on your feet is crucial to success are many. Job interviews, personal interactions or business scenarios may all require the ability to think without thinking.
The mind's ability to heal the body is also under the auspice of
Ihis type of magic. The mental attitudes that can be detrimental or beneficial stem from the intellect's capacity to make our biology match our psychology. Consider this fact when designing working around orange magic.
Tapping this potent energy can provide the magician with the right mindset to adapt to circumstances which may change instantly. The best laid plans of war magic or sex magic or wealth magic can suddenly go awry when the unexpected strikes. Having the capacity to perform orange magic in open handed (on the spot without preparation) fashion can quickly redress and readjust the balance.
Egregores associated with this type of magic are the controllers of information and the godforms of healing. Workings in this milieu of magic cultivate their speed and healing aspects. Mastery means having the putty of your own mentality well in hand to mold as you wish for future undertakings.
Workings of orange magic can be done simultaneously in concert with other colors, but the magician usually benefits by first training her mind to work in this mode beforehand. The gnosis of intellect magic is rooted in two distinct — but connected — areas. The first is the capacity to rely on instinct. ..snap judgments made without relying on plodding details and careful analysis. The second is the ability to tap your
internal energy through the control of your body/mind via your perception of it. Our perception of something tends to arrive faster than our assessment of all the facts surrounding it. Modify your understanding and you can manipulate your chemistry in whatever way is most beneficial.
The ways to reach this mental state involve answering complex puzzles rapidly without pondering. Divination interpretations of involved card spreads done multiple times in extremely short periods are one method. Adding up large columns of numbers quickly until the answers precede your ability to do the mental arithmetic is another. Answering questions on flash cards in the instant you see them, etc.
Controlling the internal function of healing involves maintaining a positive mindset; the fact that happy people are healthier people is not a coincidence. It also involves sensing the energy within your body, containing it and moving at will to desired locations. This energy is frequently viewed as a ball of light in the midsection of the body. It pulses, radiates, glows. The magician becomes adept at moving and directing it to whatever part of her body needs attention or healing and focuses on making that ball of energy more defined and more powerful.
Exerc^S
Summon a mercurial godform associated with healing. Create a ritual that involves obtaining gnosis through rapidity of thought. Gnosis associated with this type of magic are Glossalaylia and hyperventilation.
Create one servitor for healing and one to discover information; these can work as twin aspects of the orange energy.
Develop an open handed ritual technique. This is something that you can utilize in tight spaces, in public, without disturbing any witnesses. This is often initiated through a prior ritual that relates a magical result to a physical cue of some sort.
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Section 5 Me^morphosis
Remaining in a state of constant flux serves a chaos magician well. That which is stagnant or entrenched is at the mercy of more powerful fluid things. To hold to one set of beliefs for too long will impoverish the magician and limit her ability to act. Worse still, a mind frozen into one unyielding set of truths folds or cracks when confronted with change or refutation. The penultimate form of this folly is to adopt a mistaken air of righteousness; there is nothing more tragically funny than someone convinced that she is somehow enlightened or liberated because she does x rather than y and everyone else is on some imaginary level lower than herself.
The following exercises are meant to be open-ended and done constantly for as long as desired. The longer these are performed, the better and hopefully the magician will choose to keep up these exercises indefinitely. The end goal is to keep the magician's mind nimble and flexible, capable of understanding the broadest possible collection of views, presenting her with the tools to adapt to any social situation quickly and turn it to her advantage. Through the demonstration that no matter how much she changes there is always a set of people already there before her, these exercises will also have the side benefit of short-circuiting any hubris that might be developing in her ego.
Exercise 1 ^^wvior Modification)
Select three to five habits, trivial practices or preferences, delete them and then replace them with three to five new ones. This can include anything from brushing your teeth with the opposite hand, to the route you take to work in the morning, to how many cups of coffee you drink or even changing your favorite catch phrases and speech patterns. After a week of change it will become apparent how arbitrary your habits are, as you will be capable of adding or deleting as many of them as you like. Continue to conduct this exercise for a least a month, changing three to five habits each week of that month.
&^cise 2 (Metamorphosis)
The next stage beyond the adding or deleting of simple habits is the level of learned preferences and behavior. This includes everything from music, to style of dress, to friends and associates. These elements are harder to change, but can be overcome by reinforcing the desired new activity or preference with rituals designed to morph the aspect of yourself that you want to modify.
Select three to five preferences and change them to something different. As the month progresses, up the ante in terms of the modifications you make. Starting with the easy learned
preferences, progress to more challenging ones: change which handedness you prefer, delete one addictive substance from your life (caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, etc.) or change your sexual orientation "one over" (if straight bi, if bi gay/straight, if gay bi). Once you can make several major changes and maintain them for one month each, you'll realize how each was based on a set of false assumptions. The more of these changes that you make, the more you'll realize that there really is no underlying absolute (other than societal structure) to support your activity and experience of the universe. You will discover that arbitrary manifestation and action define the individual and not the other way around.
Exercise 3 (fransm^ogrilication}
This is the state in which you achieve complete fluidity of consciousness and personality. You can adapt to any situation or role that is necessary. To succeed in this exercise, you should develop at least two distinct personalities that are radically different or diametrically opposed. Base both off of changes made in the earlier exercises. Maintain two distinct circles of friends, hold two equally opposing political viewpoints (or two that are significantly different), have two sets of preferences right down the line — one set belonging to one personality and the other to the newer, secondary one.
You can keep up this exercise for as long as you like: change your name, move to a different city, take on a new job (or two new jobs if you're feeling like really pushing it) — but remember to leave time to play in several social arenas. A magician with a high degree of adaptability in this area is said to be living a pure magic existence or manifesting the masks of their kia directly unto the world stage. The key understanding derived from this exercise is that there is nothing underneath those masks, nothing which is you that cannot be modified, deleted, changed, reordered or resurrected at any time.
Exercise 4 (Personal Demon Control))
Part of effective behavior modification is recognizing factors within our own tendencies that hinder our development and growth as magicians. Once these factors are recognized they can be controlled, regulated and the damage that they do minimized. It is almost impossible to permanently get rid of our internal "demons" but we can gain control of them and succeed in spite of them.
First the magician should identify the internal patterns and habits which have prevented success in the past. This requires a degree of honest self evaluation that is difficult for some to achieve. Critical self-analysis, after all, involves tearing down the precious self image that we have become attached to over the years.
Once we have a list of these behaviors we are presented with several alternatives. Some minor behaviors can be deleted, like any neutral habit as part of a selection of things you wish to change. Otherwise the magician should consider summoning them as if they were goetic demons; and banishing them, modifying them through reprogramming, or binding them in order to prevent them from negatively impacting your !ife any further.
5 (CCentric Trance States — optional exmercise
(Based on working with Dennis R. Wier's Trance)
Here lies the realm of monomania internally and of extreme charisma externally. In this state, the individual can radically adjust her own social/physical/mental and emotional habits, and can also easily modify those of people around her.
Form a group or action committee, or join an existing one with some cause. It doesn ^t matter the cause of the group with which you choose to ally yourself, though environmental and political organizations can be quite popular. Develop a series of embedded commands and self-modifying mantras to form the nucleus of your centric trance. Signs of success with this working will be the continued use of your methodology by the other participants when you have moved on, or the ability of
your group to function without your active involvement.
Centric trance is a concept based on the observation that most severely driven individuals act as if they were in some sort of altered mental state (because they are). The most notable examples of this are televangelists and demagogues of any political persuasion. Conviction in their own righteousness or the self-evident nature of their cause produces a complete collapse of any rational faculty in favor of complete devotion to the ideal to which they ascribe. Often this hysterical devotion is described as contagious — again, because it is infectious. People close to charismatic leaders sublimate their egos into that of their superior who can, in turn, rely on total unquestioning loyalty.
Producing centric trance states involves reducing the logical choices in any given situation down to one. Note that this is similar to what a salesperson does. They offer to sell you a blue or a red car; the option of NOT buying a car isn't mentioned. An individual capable of generating centric trances reduces the choices of those around them to one: that the leader is right (or the cause she embodies) and that there is no other choice (such as not following the leader).
Magicians engaged in this exercise should be aware that they are forming a cult of sorts. The Neophyte should avoid
becoming intoxicated by the ability of someone with drive and intense focus to manipulate and direct others. The direction you choose is, after all, an arbitrary one and ultimately meaningless. Instead use the group's activity to have fun with this exercise. Introduce slogans that actually have a hidden magical intent; these are the mantras mentioned in the preceding paragraph. In essence, they are core statements that reflect a fanatic's direction, such as "There is no god but Allah" or "I like Ike." The crafty magician creates these to influence the decisionmaking abilities of other people.
Uber Ven^m
Paradigmal Piracy (A User's Guide), Childhood Games and Activities as the ^Basis for Rituals, ^^red Rituals, Open Handed Magic, The Double: Ka as Protective Device -a Series of Methodologies, Introducing the Factor of Risk, The Black Monasticism
Introduction to Uber Ventium
While creating a working magical program for Neophytes who wished to work towards Initiate status within the IOT, I was also engaged in other magical activities. As each one was finished, I produced an article to summarize my work. I have included those articles for those interested in pursuing magic along similar lines.
Some of the projects included here were done in the context of a group; others were solo ventures. All of them include techniques and suggestions for the "do it yourself" magician interested in experimentation. As an author, I welcome any results or feedback coming from the use of his material, and my email address is appended at the end of the book.
Modern occultists should be in a constant state of discovery and personal evolution. To be otherwise is to allow the practice of magic to degenerate into meaningless spiritual practice devoid of real purpose. Without continued growth there is only stagnation and atrophy. There are defined limits that need to be tested and re-examined. Our self-imposed limits will otherwise
strangle the meaning out of our lives if we cease our constant creative dance.
While there are refereeces to specific entities ^and ^^^es in
many of the rites pr^esentoo in the following ^^es, the ^magician feel free to use the ^ones that suit her our temi^fyneet and ^d^^^. To repeat the ^work of another (^magician u^thual
interpretation is to be nothinglothing ^re tfthan a foU^ve'. I have JXoovrlOO ^^es that the depth of ^personal interpretation to ^produce
^^^, and I hath an^ne my techniq^techniques the hert of results.
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Chapter 1 Paradigmal Piracy (A User's Guide)
Since chaos magic is nothing more than a series of techniques designed to produce magical results, and since it gets really boring staring at a sigil taped to the wall day in and day out, the chaos magician chooses readily enough to either fully explore the range and depth of a viable belief structure or rip it off for everything she can get out of it, then move on to something else new and exciting.
It all comes down to a matter of approach and choosing the approach that works best for you. For example, you might be the type of individual who thrives in social situations, a politician skilled at the art of manipulating your friends and family for fun and profit. If this is you, then there are a host of magical, spiritual and occult fraternities with a wealth of extant material, waiting patiently to be plundered by the avant-garde chaos magician.
Or you might be the more solitary and studious type. Not keen on outdoor activities? Would you rather stay home with the curtains drawn reading a good book than go out sea bass
fishing? Smart but awkward in social situations, you are withdrawn, introspective, a tad queer perhaps? For you there exists not only the published material of astute authors on every topic from Animism to Zoroastrian devil worship, but whole organizations of magicians who are happy to correspond via email or post without every meeting you in person.
Either way your options are open. I personally recommend seeking an affiliation with the practitioners of the paradigms you plunder; you may even accidentally manage to make a few friends that you can exploit, I mean, rely upon in the future. Human beings are the font and source of all occult knowledge and material and whether you encounter them in print or in the flesh, you can get something out of them.
An important consideration when determining what sort of chaos magician you are revolves around the question of how you round out the aspect of what approach you're going to take. Specifically, for the sake of piracy, how do you handle the information that comes your way? Are you eclectic, taking a little bit here and little bit there, whatever works, regardless of the source? Or are you a methodical systems magician, going from point A to point Z in a paradigm before moving on to the next one, exploring all aspects of the magical system in which you work? Maybe a little bit of both? I will outline all of these approaches and more, and provide a list of resources at the
conclusion of this work in order to make one aspect of your life a little easier.
^What is a Paradigm? (^ad why do I ^wan to ^shift it?)
The universe is full of individuals and groups that have a nice, neat way of explaining everything for the rest of us morons. They cover all the bases from where did the universe come from to what happens to you when you die, from why does looking at a naked woman make me feel all funny (but in a good way) to why do bad things happen to good people and bad guys have all the fun?
Now what these individuals and groups have come up with over the ages of recorded and prerecorded history amounts to an ever-changing collection of beliefs that attempt to explain everything. When you clump together a particular set of explanations to all of life's questions, you get what is called a paradigm. A fancy term abused routinely by scientists and businessmen alike, it means nothing more than an individual's or a groups way of explaining the universe to themselves and to other people. In short, a paradigm is a way of thinking about the universe we all perceive.
However, there are several factors that constantly interfere with any one group's packaged comprehension of life, the universe
and everything becoming the accepted paradigm for everyone everywhere. The first factor is information itself. There is a lot of it. In fact, there is so much information currently extant on this planet that you could not possible learn it all even if you had as much free time as you could spare to vainly try and learn it. The second factor is that this pile of information is not static but growing. The third is that this information is compiled by human beings. The forth is that human beings function under several handicaps which make even agreeing upon the simplest things nearly impossible. The fifth is that the information itself tends to contradict itself, even under the best circumstances and, finally, every conceivable explanation of the universe tends to leave a LOT of stuff unexplained.
The result is nothing short of pandemonium at all times and in all places. Nirvana for the chaos magician, peptic ulcers for true believers everywhere! Chaos magicians realize that each and every paradigm is ultimately inadequate when it comes to explaining the universe, but that each one also has something to offer the chaos magician in terms of tools and beliefs that make life either easier or more fun (or both!).
The only thing the chaos magician needs to avoid in all of this is stagnation. To stagnate is to die internally, if not to selfdestruct physically, and that would be undesirable. Unless you are pathetic, you want to continue changing enjoying yourself.
So we keep on moving from one paradigm to another or keep on adding and dropping aspects from various paradigms to our own belief structure. It is in this way that we avoid finding that ultimate killer of all joy — the illusion of objective truth.
There is nothing sadder and ultimately pathetic than the individual who has swallowed someone else's set of notions whole and stopped thinking for themselves. You see them everyday on TV giving testimonials of one type or another. Their happiness is artificial, their truth ultimately devoid of meaning and their lives empty of any spark or color. They are left with the options to work or breed until they dry up and are blown away on the winds of change they cannot hope to ever understand.
As chaos magicians, we erect our sails into this wind and plow ahead into the great unknown sea of new information sets and sensations concocted every day by the imaginative people of the world who are determined to avoid boredom and stagnation at all costs. With minds ever expanding and ripe for each and every fresh set of changes, it gives you a boundless optimism; change is the only constant.
Eclectics Versus Systematics
Two distinct schools of thoughts exist among paradigmal
pirates (well — actually no, I'm just making this up as I go along so there are going to be two distinct schools of thought regarding how to be a paradigmal pirate). The first consists of the individuals who choose to take the buffet and the other is comprised of those people who buy the groceries, cook the food and eat the meal themselves. The middle ground between them is akin to ordering something different from the menu each time you go to the restaurant.
The buffet people are called Eclectic Chaos Magicians. (Being an acronym freak myself, I like to call the ChEM 's). These are the type that get together in their little temples or on their own and do something from every belief structure, real or imagined, from the beginning of time to now. Experimentation is key here, as well as the ability to rapidly get your’ head around someone else's belief structure quickly and just as quickly turn it off and move into someone else's.
The upside of taking this approach is that you can skim the surface of a paradigm and take dips in only when you need to take something out of it that you find useful. Commitment to the paradigm that you are exploiting is minimal at best and cavalier at worst. The risk of discovering the illusion of absolute truth remains low and the probability that you will take yourself too seriously stays within reasonable limits.
The downside is that ChEM's seldom stay within a paradigm long enough to get to the really juicy bits and must always worry about the specters of irrational doubts flickering around in the back of dusty thoughts and cobwebbed superstitions that lurk in the subconscious. (These are fun things like "What if (insert name here) really exists?" or "This is all a bunch of hooey so it won't work.") All the tools of the psychic censor come roaring out full force to dull the impact of whatever temporary belief you erected.
The key to avoiding this is solid chaos magic technique. Successful rituals would incorporate a good magical link, a solid state of gnosis, a minimum amount of subconscious resistance and a reduced awareness of what the final target objective of the ritual happens to be.
Why it works: Most chaos magicians don't specifically know why the techniques that they use work but are very happy that they do anyway. There are actual reasons why they work, but we wouldn't want them to detract from having fun doing our magic. But for those of you keen to understand why it works, I've decided to help you out.
The magical link — A picture, image or thing that is a symbolic representation of the target. The magical link fulfills it's one and only purpose easily enough: it reminds us of the target without
reminding us of the target. It acts as a surrogate for the individual towards which the magic is targeted, without the inconvenience of having them physically present. Since most magic involves either modifying oneself or other people, most magical links are connected to some human being. Since humans shape their realities based on interpretation of information rather than on information itself, the magical link is the perfect model of another person for us to work with. The magical link is a type of map, and we work well with maps.
Gnosis — The altered state of consciousness. The mystery of doing magic since time immemorial. The big secret is that gnosis is nothing more than the successful limiting of conscious choice down to only one option. When your choices are reduced to that one option though the achievement of gnosis, your mind will modify your reality to conform to the only option presented. Gnosis also plays a trick on our methodology for gathering information called selective attention. If we do a ritual for the purpose of hurting someone, we pay especial attention for any information that bad things have happened to them. Conversely, if we do magic to help someone, we look for good things to happen. I won't go to far down this road, except to say that reality for people is a matter of perspective. What we see is what we get.
Subconscious Resistance and the minimization of it — The point
is to kill off that nagging little voice in your head that says you can't do it. Not just for magic, but anything else for that matter. A magician who manages to do this actually gets a lot accomplished in many areas, not only magic, and looks like a damn successful magician I must say. As I mentioned above, it boils down to how we perceive everything, including ourselves and how we interpret information. Thus, leave no obstacles in your own path and erect no barriers to your own success.
Conscious awareness and why we draw those annoying little sigils everywhere to reduce it — Sigils help us to get around several major obstacles. Do you ever remember learning that just because you think something bad about someone it doesn't mean that something bad will happen to them? Sigils are the first step in unlearning the notion that just because we think something is true doesn"t make it true. Quite the contrary. Things are only true because we believe them to be. Or more correctly, they are perceived to be true. However, the barrier is still in place and sigils help you go around it by disguising the exact nature of what you so furiously are focusing on in your ritual. Additionally, don"t fantasize about the result, because your mind knows that its doing the wish fulfillment trick and won "t continue to work on getting the result that you wanted.
Systematic Chaos Magicians (that's right, SCuM) completely live the paradigm that they are pirating and eventually move
into another one once they have drained it of any and all useful items. Systematics are different from Eclectics in that they LOOK LIKE a member of the paradigm that they are pirating. They would normally be indistinguishable from other members of that paradigm if not for the really great way their rituals and magic happen to turn out most of the time ...and the fact that everyone eventually wonders what ever happened to him.
Systematic Chaos Magicians are the reason that people have conversations like: "Hey, whatever happened to George?" I "Oh, George? He left the temple and is now a Tantric Sex Master"— comments like this occur in varying degrees of simplicity or severity. Not every person who undergoes a conversion of one sort or another is a chaos magician, but some of those people who do so regularly definitely are.
The upside to being SCuM comes from the thorough expertise that can be acquired from squeezing every last useful bit of knowledge from a paradigm. The Systematics begin by researching their target, learning as much about it from the outside before going in and then approach the host group with as much sincerity and honest appreciation as possible. Once engaged with a host group, she can then freely interact as one of those present, engender trust and come away with all their darkest secrets for free {or for whatever ridiculous fee they are charging for membership}.
There are several downsides to this approach that can best be described as pitfalls, which are: Permanent conversion — This happens when the chaos magician ceases to be a chaos magician and is, instead, a true believer of whatever bullshit the group she's bought into is selling. You know you're in danger of crossing this line when the illogical or paradoxical things about the group you're pirating begin to make sense. So, if you start to think that bad magic will bounce back on you three times or Set is hiding under your bed or you'!! be a horse in your next life, it's time to consider moving on.
Another pitfall is the risk of monomania — This is an obsession with doing things just one way or of doing just one paradigm. It defeats the purpose of having a universe of choices if you order the same damn thing every time you go up to the counter. A monomaniacal chaos magician usually gets really good results because they are capable of doing a couple of things REALLY well, but change the scenery and they get lost faster than an American Tourist without a guide in the city of Bath (thanks a lot morn). You ever wander around a tourist trap for two hours? If you have then you know how it feels to be unable to cope with change, and a chaos magician who can't cope with change is a crap chaos magician.
The final risk has to do with extraction from the paradigm in
question — Though people join and leave groups all the time, it really helps if you can do this with a degree of class. The good systematic chaos magician has all sorts of friends from all sorts of paradigms willing to help them out at any time. The bad SCuM have various groups begging their local, non-corporal entities to come and make all your hair fall out and do other nasty things to you.
^xial Versus Isolated (How do I get in, get out get away Mwith it?}
So you want to be a paradigm pirate though aren't sure of the best way to go about it. The first question you should probably ask yourself is — "Do I want to work with others or go it alone?" Should you choose to work alone, your options are still as plentiful as those who choose to work in groups. However, social paradigmal pirates have a couple of extra permutations to consider before beginning their work.
The concern for social types is whether their approach is going to be insurgent or co-operative. In other words, are they going to join a group practicing the target paradigm as one of them or are they going to work in a paradigm with a group of chaos magicians. Each take has it upsides and downsides, and you should use the one that works best for you as an individual or works best for your group.
Insurgency, The Lone Magician
Insurgents play the fun game of passing themselves off as a "true believer" in whatever paradigm it is they have chosen to work. They also must possess the ability to snow an entire group of sincere people that they also truly think that there is only one way, it's the right way and that the right way is their way. It really isn't all that hard to do. Most people look for some sort of validation of their beliefs and the easiest way of getting that sense of validity is having other people around you that believe exactly what you believe.
Thus, most groups are new-user friendly; they are more than happy to acquire new members and new resources for their Temple/Church/Coven/Cult. A lot of individuals join these groups for the sense of belonging that the group provides, they work hard to win the approval of the group in order to feel like they belong. These two factors, validation and a sense of belonging, make the infiltration of just about any occult fraternity, secret sect or cult child's play.
The length of your stay should be directly proportionate to the amount of additional material that remains hidden to you. In other words, leave when they have nothing more to teach you. For some groups, this may be right away — pay your membership dues and whoomp!, you get all their occult
material. Other groups hide certain rituals and practices from lower degreed members, so you might have to climb up the ladder of progress a few rungs to get at it. Other groups have no material per se but it is still useful to remain with them for a while if their assets exist in the experience and techniques of the members themselves, which may not necessarily be written down.
Getting out — Once you've gotten what you need from any particular group, or have decided that staying in longer might run the risk of permanent conversion, it is time to leave. You must choose an exit strategy. These range from the very simple — resigning, to the very complex — relocation and changing your name. The severity of the strategy will depend on the nature of some occult groups. Depending on whom you just got done exploiting, you may have to take some drastic measures to be able to move on. For some, you just have to stop paying your dues and viola!, you're no longer a member.
As I've said above, with the "easy" groups you just have to move on. In most cases you can even maintain friendly contact with your ex-associates. Simply resign and go on to something else. Explain that you've had a change of heart or have developed an interest in something not covered by their rituals and techniques. The easy, professional groups will understand and let you move on.
Then there is what I like to call the "medium'' groups. These groups are not keen to let members go once they are in, but won't take any extra-legal steps to prevent your exodus from them. Ways of leaving these groups include, but are not limited to the following:
faking a crisis of conscious;
having a breakdown of belief and then suddenly getting into something bizarre but harmless, like Zen Buddhism. They'll understand and leave you alone.;
or going through a sudden conversion to something that is a polar opposite to what they believe, if such a practice exists. That should alienate them from you; they'll not like you, but they will not bother you either.
Don't plan on hanging out with these folks again, as medium groups are likely to try and drag you back into their circle and will take any interaction as a sign of interest (Well, any action apart from spitting on them in a public place and screaming "Die Heretic!'').
Finally, there are the "hard" groups. These are the kind that sometimes have lots of nifty stuff to share but would rather terminate you with extreme prejudice than let you go on and live a normal life. The only effective way to get out of these groups is through a relocation of several hundred miles away
from the individuals with which you had direct association. For example, if you join a cult in Chicago, move to Philadelphia. They might have members in Philly, but those members probably can't be bothered to hunt you down and do you in. If they are EXTREME enough to locate or attack you wherever you live, I recommend a relocation and a name change.
Hard groups also have the highest risk of permanent conversion, and I recommend avoiding them if at all possible. But hey, you've got to go where the mojo is and if that means taking a big chance, do it.
As a final note regarding insurgency, you may think the organization is an easy group but if it turns out that it is a medium group, there is no reason to panic. So you've resigned and, much to your surprise, they're not leaving you alone. Just follow one of the suggestions in the medium section. That ought to diffuse the situation. Odds are you'll never confuse an easy group with a hard one but hey, in case you do, pack up your troubles in an old bag, put your resume on the internet and get out of there.
^^o^ra^e, With Fri^ends
The easiest way to do the insurgency thing is with a group of friends who will share your travails with you. This activity can
range from starting a new coven, temple or lodge in the host organization to simply sharing research and activities with your co-conspirators.
Group insurgency lowers the probability of the host organization doing anything nasty to you once you've left. It's one thing to leave a group that has members in your town and another thing entirely when you ARE the entire group's membership in your town. This approach also lowers the probability of permanent conversion. If only one member thinks the rest are beginning to fall for the BS of the host paradigm, she can prevent all of them from converting simply by pointing out the organization s flaws and inconsistencies.
Now the option of one member being able to put the brakes on the entire experiment can also be a detriment, not just a saving grace. For if things are moving along just fine and you're getting really good results, but one member has a problem with it, then that puts the kibosh on the project right there. I've seen it happen.
The way to safeguard against this happening is to start with paradigms with a low risk factor for permanent conversion. In other words, the only way that it could go too far is if you all were trying really hard to go off the deep end, in which case the original intention may have been to convert to that paradigm
anyway. Thus, there will be no reason for anyone in the group experiencing the paradigm to think that everyone is taking it too seriously.
to ^ate, Groups ^^ef S^^^es That Have
Some^thing to Ofer
Regardless of which approach you choose to take (social or isolated) or which methodology you employ (eclectic or systematic), you will have to pi!Jage material from the extant paradigms out there or make up material based on those paradigmal models. Either way, I have decided to distill a brief list of paradigms that might be a good place to start. This list is by no means complete or even very thorough, but it should provide a good starting point of reference.
Setianism, http://www.xeper.org/
Satanism, hnpy/^^.churchofl
Thelema, http ://^w. Qtohq.org/oto/otobody hlmI
Typhonian OTO,
http; //www. cyberlin k. chZ__koenig/staley. htm
Cthulhu,
www.angelfire.coni/extreme/kengage/cthulhu/crittOL html
Tantra, http: //www, tantra. org/ Discordianism,
http:^^^w^^or^^^
Santeria & Palo Mayombe, http://wyvw4I
http;/ywuw,palQ.Oig
Neo-Paganism & Witchcraft,
http; //www, ng-wageinfo. com/resZ
Shamanism, http;/Zwww.shamanism.co,.uk
Norse, http://wwwhrmlnsuLQrg/ot/otinter.html
Hinduism, http://vAvw.hindunet.org
Druidism (Celtic StufO,
http: //^uw.eW com/df >cig( it/m^h/ceits/
Tibetan Buddhism.
http;//^^.kag^. or^uddhismAudOO.hhtml
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Chapter 2 Childh^ood ^Games and Activities as the ^Basis for Rituals
There are several obvious advantages to using childhood games or activities as the basis for magical rituals. The first is the simplicity of these activities, the second is the universal knowledge of these games (i.e. you don't have to learn them) and the third is that they are fun in an elementary way. There are other advantages that are not so obvious. By engaging in these activities we place our minds into a state that existed before adult concerns and restrictions on reality were firmly in place. This regression is as potentially powerful as a full-blown atavistic resurgence. The threshold for belief in a childlike mental state is also lower, so metamorphosis can also be accessed via this medium.
You will immediately notice that the following rituals are all designed to be done in groups, and for several reasons. Childhood games are designed to be social activities as well as entertainment. They are one of the ways in which we learned to interact with our peers both as friends and as competitors. While as adults we play different games, we can find the roots of our current strategy having been tested and tried out while we were all a lot younger. In addition to a discovery of social behaviorism and tactics, these rituals will hopefully encourage a degree of solidarity among magicians. Too often we become
wrapped up in the mystique of being the loner or the outcast, a role that has its advantages, but also it's drawbacks.
Too often rituals are designed to be artificially complex and arcane. While this inaccessibility keeps out the casual practitioner, it attracts the socially awkward individuals who fail to thrive in the real world. A joke among chaos magicians is "when others buy your drinks for thee, a magus you shall be"— many a valuable thing is said in jest. All of the most successful magicians I know are not only adept with arcana, but are also adept social animals as well. They have friends falling over each other trying to do them favors, helping them whenever they need it. Some have entire temples that function both as magical allies and as a social circle of supporters.
A magician with this sort of arrangement is not only happier for it, but also reaps another benefit from the larger group: magicians with large temples are almost impossible to destroy. The collective egregore that they form together is inherently stronger than any one of them as individuals and the only way to truly destroy another magician is to first isolate her. Thus, the social circle acts as a natural defense against the hostility of other practitioners.
Play with the rituals, have fun, relax, and enjoy yourself. The results obtained from them are secondary to their primary function of entertaining the temple and creating a social cohesion. Which reminds me...if magic is all work, sooner or
later you'll try and avoid it. Magic should be an activity that we can't wait to dive into rather than a chore that we seek to avoid. Magicians should never find themselves dreading the concept of HAVING to do magic (the thought is a foreign one to me) but, then again, we live in a day and age where many people dread the idea of HAVING to have sex with their spouse/significant other, so this isn't too surprising.
Ri^tual #l:
Musical (Layered In^vocation of C^^les D^^m)
tafreduedon — This simple ritual is designed to ensure that work doesn't become a hassle. In the highly charged political environments of some companies, it is necessary to have a decided edge. So, in the interests of having selectivity work for us in making sure we always win any infighting that may occur, we are summoning Charles Darwin in order to assist us.
Tools: One picture of Charles Darwin
Banishlsh: IAO
Statement of Intent: "It is our will to gain an edge in the workplace."
One person begins the Evocation of Charles Darwin into themselves above the sigil being consecrated. Another starts the
music for the game of musical chairs or spaces. The remaining participants circle and spin around the chairs or spaces (one les than the number of participants to begin with).
For Darwin evocant:
Bane of the creationists I summon thee,
Author of Origin of Species, I reach out to your grave, Destroyer of faith, champion of reason I call on you, From across the sea, I draw you out.
Galapagos explorer, Scientist I call on you!
You who broke the grip of ignorance,
Darwin, I call on thee, Rise up and consecrate! This our intended purpose.
(Repeat until possession occurs).
Everyone will take up a chant of "MUT PHORK NIW" as they fail to obtain a spot or a chair, moving to surround Charles Darwin. One person will have to remain out of the ritual in order to remove the spots or the chairs from the center one at a time, and also stop the music in order to queue the people to go for the remaining spots on the floor.
Each person who fails to obtain a spot up until the last one joins the person evoking Charles Darwin in the other part of the
room and circles chanting "MUT PHORK NIW" until the last person remains. He or She (the last person) then takes up their chair/spot and comes over — slams the chair down on the sigil, consecrating it and ending the rite. Banish with laughter.
Gnosis employed — Excitatory Dancing and Chanting, Possession
— Enchantment
Ritual #2:
Ring aro^und the Roses
Participants divide into two groups of equal size. Both groups hold hands and begin to move around in a circle on opposite sides of the room. “s'
The first group is chanting:
Ring around the Roses,
Pocket full of Posies,
Ashes! Ashes!
We al fall down!
Each time they complete a chant they fall down (or if you have a bad back, squat).
The second group is chanting the Mantra: WEP LANT DAS, NIG ROH TUC
(This mantra simply means, "We plant in our pasts the seed of success." Use whatever mantra you like).
Unlike' the first group, the second one keeps circling and doesn't fall down. As members of the second group enter into a state of gnosis, they spin off and join the first group, which is still chanting "Ring around the Roses.”
Each time a member of group two goes to group one, he or she displaces a member of group one who then joins group two and takes up their mantric chant. This continues until all the members of both groups have been switched and everyone who began in group one is now in group two, and everyone in group two is now in group one.
After everyone has been switched, the people in the group chanting the mantra begin moving over, one at a time, to the group chanting "Ring around the Rosies," until everyone is in one group chanting "Ring around the Rosies." At that point, the group circles around one more time and collapses on the final "We all fall down!"
Gnosis employed — Excitatory Dancing and Chanting — Enchantment
^^ondary — (Optionally a retroactive enchantment)
Ri^tual #3:
Red Rover
Pre^^^^ work — Participants divide into two groups. Both groups decide together upon a list of entities that at least one person in each of the two groups can invoke. The list should equal the number in both groups together. So, if you have two groups of four, you should have a list of eight egregores. Then Group A gets the four entities for Group B and vice versa. (In other words, Group A has a list of entities that they know can be invoked by the individuals in Group B and Group B has a list of entities that they know can be invoked by the individuals in Group A).
Each group should also arrive at an intention along these lines: "We break the chain of causality with our magic in order to (result)." Each group should also have a power word that represents their group's desire that is shouted by the entity as it hits the opposing group's line of causality. Optionally, both groups can have the same power word and a unified purpose. In fact, I think that's preferable. But feel free to use a more competitive model.
Group A and Group B then go to opposite sides of the room and form a line holding hands and facing each other. You may choose to do a statement of intent at this time. Otherwise, Group A calls over the first entity from Group B.
Example:
"Red Rover! Red Rover!
Let Loki come over!"
Participants in Group B then invoke Loki into one of their members. When a participant of Group B is fully invoked with Loki, she then rushes the line of Group A and tries to break the handhold between two of the members of Group A.
While Group B is invoking Loki, Group A is collectively invoking a chain of causality. If the chain holds after the first rush, you banish the entity summoned and she returns to her group. Group B then calls out the first entity from Group A.
^^mple:
"Red Rover! Red Rover!
Let Yog-Sothoth come over!"
Participants in Group A then invoke Yog-Sothoth into one of their members until fully invoked and she rushes Group B, who has been busy invoking a chain of Causality.
This continues until one of the chains is broken. For the purpose of maintaining a good ritual, you should start with the lightest members of the temple and work your way up to the strongest and heaviest (you probably don't want the ritual to end after the first invocation).
When the chain of causality is broken, you end the ritual in laughter.
Gn^osis emplo^d — Excitatory, Invocation — ^xhantment
Ritual #4:
(Saaed) ^g of the Hil
This ritual requires the use of a comfy chair that is unlikely to tip over or one that is too squat to matter if it tips over, as well as a lot of cushions to prevent any serious injuries. Participants should also have a statement of intent that has been changed into a mantra or a power word that encapsulates your intent.
The MT 1 of the ritual sits on the highest point of the comfy chair and invokes a Sacred King into himself. This can be any of the dying and rising gods from mythology — Hercules, Tammuz, Liew Liaw, Jesus, Osiris and others. You should have a list ready beforehand and have invocations for each. You're
going to need them.
Participants play the role of the Sacred King's companions and assist in the invocation. However, at the height of the invocation, instead of responding with adoration, they rush the Sacred King and topple him from his throne (metaphoricalJy killing him, if they can). During this rush, they should be chanting the statement of intent for the rite (which has been turned into a mantra) or the purpose of the rite as a power word.
If the king survives this rush, he must be prepared to invoke another sacred king of a different sort. If he falls, one of the companions must struggle to take his place on the throne. This altercation should last only a few seconds and other participants should give up as soon as the first of them is on the top of the chair.
The process then repeats itself with either the first MT invoking another Sacred King or the new MT invoking a Sacred King. You then repeat the process of toppling.
This can go on for as long as you like, but as a general rule I recommend three rushes. Either three on the first MT, or if you topple him, one on the first MT and two on the second. (And, of course, if you topple him, one on the first, one on the second and one on the third.)
The purpose of the rite is metaphorical but can be spelled out in the following fashion:
The Sacred King, during the rite, represents a social convention or morale that is being broken. The primary purpose of the rite is liberation of some sort. Participants choose which taboo they want to break or convention they want to destroy or overturn.
Gn^osis employed — Excitatory, Invocation — Liberation
^^ondary — ^xhantment
RRitual #5:
Hide Go Seek
Participants should each determine a one or two-word statement of intent for themselves. These words should be sigilized into a mantra word that can be easily chanted.
If this rite is done in a house, participants can actually go hide. If this is done in a smaller location, such as a temple space, then participants can "hide" in the open and the MT goes blind and deaf to find them (i.e. with eyes and ears covered).
While hiding, participants should be chanting their word internally while they are plugging their eyes and ears, curled up
in the fetal position, breathing slowly and in a shallow fashion through the nose. If you have a stereo that can play white noise for this rite, that would be a good idea as well.
The MT of the rite counts down from an arbitrary number, most likely one hundred, but it can be higher. Enough time is required to allow participants to enter into an inhibitory state of gnosis. Once the MT is done counting, he or she begins to chant their power word/mantra word out loud and searches for the other participants. Their eyes will be open if the ritual is done in a house, closed (with ears also covered) if in a temple space.
When the MT finds a person, she taps them on the shoulder. The participant then uncovers their ears and listens for the MT's word while chanting their own internally. He or she then chants his or her word out loud and the MT adds his or her word to their own. Both now chant the combined mantra and go on to find the next person. The process repeats itself until all participants are found and move in a string back to the starting point of the ritual.
Participants then move in a circle, increasing the volume and speed of the long chant until they reach a peak and fall down laughing. If the process degenerates into glossolalia, fine. If not, that is fine as well, so long as everyone has a good time.
Gn^osis emplo^ri — Inhibitory Chanting^^citatory Chanting — ^^hantmentmen
^^o^^ry desired^
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Chapter 3 Layered Ri^tuals
Part 1, Obstacles
The primary purpose of all rituals is to obtain results.
1 lowever, rote practice, poor technique, ill defined goals and self doubt often go a long way to ensure that the magician doesn't achieve anything resembling real progress through the use of her magic. In the decade or so that I have done magic well, I have picked up a few tricks and observed methodologies that are effective for me. In addition to that, I've also found a great way to structure rituals to ensure maximum results.
Rote Practices
Once a malaise strictly confined within the walls of suburban churches, the phenomenon of rote practice has spread to the magical community as well. Fortunately, it is mostly confined to several groups of magic practitioners — those with paradigms that are primarily religious in nature (i.e. Wicca, Setianism, Satanism, etc.) or those with a bad case of "creeping Golden Dawnism" (e.g. magical groups with set formulaic rituals that require hours of memorization).
Chaos magicians are not immune from its effects, due to the mind's ability to adjust to radical stimuli until it becomes blase. No matter how innovative a technique or practice, do it ten times and it becomes passe. The chaos magician should be vigilant and eliminate this problem by constantly changing either their paradigm of practice or their ritual methodology (or both) after mastering the technique or practice in question.
Through a constant series of metamorphoses, the magician will not only be confronted by the challenge of doing magic in a shifting environment of temporary paradigms and ritual technique, but also will be able to approach older material with a fresh perspective. Ritual habits acquired over time should also be assessed and shed on a regular basis; they can be utilized again at a later date, but whenever they are allowed to become stratified and rigid, they become a hindrance.
Chaos magicians also frequently have to change the type of gnosis they use, for the simple reason that the body/mind builds up a resistance to it. As drug addicts have to take progressively larger doses to get high, so chaos magicians also find themselves requiring progressively more time and energy to reach a state of gnosis using the same technique over and over again.
Fortunately, there are many methods for achieving gnosis and the magician can vary these as often as she changes paradigms or ritual style. By rapidly making these changes, she can never be at a loss for a unique method of doing a ritual for whatever purpose she desires at any given time.
Poor Tec^que
Another stumbling block to effective ritual practice is the tendency to get sloppy. Magicians who have been lulled into a sense of complacency by rote practice will usually pour liberal amounts of poor technique on top for a totally banal ritualistic style. Poor techniques will also creep in when we stop testing our limits or drop the maintenance of a strict practice.
Poor technique manifests itself in several ways that can be easily spotted and remedied by breaking down the ritual into its key components:
Does the ritual have a clear objective? While engaging in the ritual, are we overly reminded of our goal?
Does the ritual have several stages and, if so, is it clear when we are supposed to be moving from one stage to the next?
What type of gnosis is employed?
Is sufficient time allotted for everyone/the magician to hit a state of gnosis?
Is there an element of risk involved? If no, then why?
Does the ritual have anything unique in it or is it a copy of another similar ritual?
Being precise in the goal of the ritual is often key to producing the results you seek. I've found that magic will often flow like water through the paths of least resistance. If there is anything remotely similar to what you are trying to achieve, but easier to obtain, then that is what the result will be. A lack of precision has caused more screwed-up results than I can count, and a careful review of all statements of intent and/or purposes should be done before beginning any ritual.
Too often a ritual is constructed too simplistically. Our desire for direct, powerful, concise magic can easily be warped into a lazy quest to put the minimum amount of effort into ritual creation. This will often lead to rituals that are easy to do but lacking in quality and style. The memorable rituals are the creative ones. One aspect of the creativity is burying the intent deep within the ritual, without tickling the conscious mind and producing a lust of result. Too often we desire something and then make repetitive calls to egregores or servitors, which essentially
amounts to a form of simplistic wish fulfillment. Our energy is burned up in this effort and is not properly suppressed in the subconscious where it will force reality to bend in conformity with will.
Obviously sigils, mantras and mudras can go a long way to circumventing this problem when used effectively. These, along with a determined effort to focus on the tasks within a ritual rather than the ritual objective, will produce the best results when combined properly. The magician using an existentialist approach of the task being the goal will produce the highest rate of success, in my experience.
Ritual structure can be a major stumbling block when we perform them in groups. Often we take for granted that others will understand our own sense of timing and intent within the rite. This can be eluded by simply explaining the ritual as carefully as possible beforehand, up to and including doing a dry run-through of the rite. In most cases, it is helpful to have an active insubordinate who constantly seeks clarification regarding a ritual, to ensure that the maximum number of participants will understand it clearly. If you have any doubts, do not hesitate to explain things again.
The magician who employs one type of gnosis well is easily tempted to abandon other types in order to secure success.
Instead, what occurs is that either the time required for achieving gnosis becomes ridiculously long or the magician stops reaching a state of gnosis when doing rites, thus damaging the potential for success due to her own lackadaisical attitude. You should also avoid becoming one-dimensional in your ability to achieve gnosis; it can rapidly lead to overall incompetence.
While just about every ritual can contain an element of chance in it for the practitioner who has never done it before and lacks overall experience, most IOT members have a substantially impressive amount of time spent engaged in magical activity. Sucking the element of risk out of ritual often is a side effect of experience. In order to maintain our edge, it is necessary to put that risk back in. Why? Without pressing the physical/mental envelope we also atrophy in other areas as well.
Elements of risk can be introduced into ritual through several avenues. One way is through the invoking of so-called "dangerous" entities or egregores. (If you ever hear a group of Wiccans say "Don't summon so-and-so! It's dangerous!'', plan on doing it that very night). The use of intense forms of gnosis that are unfamiliar to you is another effective way to introduce risk into ritual. It can include anything from pain gnosis if you are not a masochist to doing lots of workings involving physical exhaustion techniques or extreme forms of emotional release.
Risk can be introduced into just about any ritual this way. I've mentioned invocation above but how about evocation? Evoke a demon into your partner or yourself while fucking. Or divination — divine when and how you're going to die. The approach is to do things that mediocre people say you're not supposed to do.
Once you've got these ideas in mind, the final step to avoid crappy rituals is to avoid copying other people's ritual styles. While it is necessary in a learning process to adopt someone else's methodology (and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery), it is incompetent to never grow beyond their style. Just because it works for one thing doesn't mean that it will hold true for everything else. Also, someone's style of ritual tends to develop along the lines of what works best for them. Ifs unlikely that you.re so similar to someone else that the exact same techniques will appeal to you/be effective for you.
The way around pointles imiation is ex^r.mentation with and variation of set ritual designs. Play with, ^^modify and evolve that
have been done to death until they are no longer recognizable as the original hand. Older ritrituals should be sketched, ^^warped ^ld ^twisted inside out, but never reduced to the comedy of theatrical interpretation. They should always be pushing the envelope of the possible.
m-delined ^^s
Avoid being vague. That's my best advice here. The most colossal magical fuckups I've seen have come from the magician having avoided stating what they really want. My own personal tact on handling this is to make your own goals fit into a strict, well-defined framework. For me that's "Get laid, get rich and get even'' — and I'm happy to say that it's working out rather swimmingly at the moment. I'm rolling over the opposition, having lots of new and interesting sex and sexual partners and making more money than I ever had before.
So, cut out any extraneous wants or needs from your life, magically speaking, and focus on the stuff that makes you happy. Set up a series of goals to achieve and then stick to them. If you fail in your goals, re-examine whether they were either too lofty or you were too lazy to get them. If they were too lofty, then scale them down a bit. You can set higher goals later; life is a marathon, not a sprint (and other cliches). If you were too lazy, then work harder, damn it!
If you want something from you magic, then say it. Write it down and come up with the magic to back it up. I wouldn't worry about any higher or so-called noble concerns regarding the impact of your wants and needs on the lives of others; their lives are their concern and not yours. Take care of yourself first
as, ultimately, only you are responsible for you. The moralistic whining usually comes from life's losers, those frustrated at the success of others and unwilling to let them enjoy their success. I always say that life is sweetened by their complaints. It makes the fun that much more juicy.
The things to really watch out for are the feel-good, meaningless and ultimately pointless desires for illumination or spiritual awareness or some other white-light claptrap BS that involves hugging trees and trying to save whales. Human beings are animals with specific needs. Once those needs are met, we move on to things that give us pleasure. Some would argue that once we have pleasure, we go on to discover that which gives life meaning. Unfortunately for chaos magicians, "Nothing is True” — therefore anyone's idea of meaning is just as valid (or invalid) as anyone else's. So, stick to the pleasure of manifesting your desires in a multitude of experiences and experiments. Don't worry about the meaning. That will come after you're dead.
Self-doubt
The final major obstacle to obtaining solid results is our own learned beliefs that state the impossibility of magic working. We have, as a society, largely accepted the materialistic paradigm without any critical thought whatsoever. Whereas we vigorously
question spiritual paradigms and understand intuitively that belief systems are completely relativistic, we have a reluctance to place science in the same category despite the gaping holes in scientific materialism.
ln fact, we tend to dismiss these flaws and holes as things which science will someday manage to fill, a conclusion that, if it was expressed by any religious group, we would laugh at as being "blind fundamentalism." The flaw that scientific materialism shares with spiritualistic paradigms is that, ultimately, it is based on observation (a collection of electrical signals interpreted by the brain) and experience (the proverbial worst teacher). All of this stimuli gets skewed through our own myopic preconceptions and expectations.
Naturally, scientific materialism has the benefit of being a paradigm with a of bullshit, but it achieves this through the dism^il
of an awful lot of material thatt doesn't conform to its expectations. Magic, specifically the ability to ca^ direct, quantifiable change in accordance with desire, is one of those things.
The best methodology to deal with our indoctrination into this paradigm is to dismantle it using its own tools. I found that the following exercise worked well to remove the bias that it plants in both the conscious and unconscious parts of our minds.
Q^uantified Sigil
o onstruct eight to ten sigils grouped into three or more Cdlegories. The categories should be defined based on the probability of the events you are enchanting for occurring naturally. In other words, have three sigils for things you want that are very likely to happen, four sigils for desirable events that are relatively unlikely to happen and three sigils for things you want that are highly improbable of occurring.
Use basic, quick gnostic techniques to consecrate these sigils and then forget about them. Do one or two a day in any order. After the last one is done, wait two weeks and then go back and check your success rate.
Again, construct eight to ten sigils grouped in the same way as the first set (they can even be variations of the same desires).
Begin a chaos monastic program, making sure you can do a typical Uber MMM meditation [i.e. 10 minutes motionlessness, 15 minutes regulation of breathing, 10 minutes of some concentration (object, sound or image)]. Do this for one lunar cycle (28 days}.
Engage in the meditative practice before consecrating the sigils and, in fact, use the meditations for the consecration of the
sigils (i.e. the concentrations should either be for the sigil or immediately proceed the sigil's consecration by some excitatory method).
After the last sigil is fired off, wait two weeks and check your results.
I've found that initially with a group of about eight to ten sigils, the first round's success rate was consistently along the following lines: 33% complete success, 33% partial success, 33% complete failure (usually a combination of the highly probable and semi-probable came to pass, or part of the sigil happened, with all of the highly improbable not happening at all). The second round produces the following results with a startling frequency: 70% complete success, 15% partial success and 15% complete failure. (All of the highly probable, all of the semi-probable and one of the highly unlikely came to pass; one of the highly unlikely was partially successful and one didn't happen at all).
The above basically uses the scientific method against itself. If magic doesn't work, then your success rate between two groups of sigils should either stay the same, get a little better or get a little worse. You should NOT be able to begin a magical program and then improve your results drastically. After all, magic is a form of psychosis and can't be real. Feel free to do
the above as often as you like to the dismay of your internal scientist. You can also stop the magical program, do a group of eight to ten sigils a month later the first way and then check your results; they should be back around the first sets.
Part Two, The Layered Ri^tual T^^que
Working within a number of paradigms and enchanting for similar things over a number of years created a set of results that revealed a pattern. When utilizing an egregore, a godform or other device of mass-consciousness, the results tended to be rather immediate, rather profound but rather short lived. It was as if a massive force had temporarily changed direction, nudged probability along the lines I desired and then went back about it's business. This was frustrating when I needed something to not only change but continue along a path which I desired.
Attempting to achieve something using servitors alone also had mixed results. Often reality would shift to give me what I desired in a fashion that was less profound than the egregoric shift, but which endured longer (usually for the life of the servitor). The impact was less but the persistence was stronger. The servitor had no additional concerns but also did not have overwhelming force to address the problem. I was usually happy with the results but not as happy as I would like to have been.
Sigils alone had the rather vexing habit of working VERY well a long while after I really cared about the results. I no longer desired the result, but still it came to pass ...as if the internal lust-for-result meter ran out and the reality parking checker came by to make the desired change. However, I was happy to get what I wanted after I no longer really wanted it because my tastes generally maintain a certain degree of consistency.
Since the purpose of every ritual should be to create change in accordance with will it stood to reason that, as a magician, I would want to have the quickest, biggest, longest lasting and most profound results as often as possible. One possible way to ensure these qualities of results craved would be to do three separate rituals for every objective: one involving an egregore, one a servitor and one a sigil. This proved to be a bit cumbersome and I didn't really feel like essentially repeating myself three times every time I wanted something. The solution would be to incorporate aspects of invocation, evocation and enchantment within a single rite.
The structure of my rituals in the past also played a role in the decision to create a layered technique within an individual ritual. Energy built up through one ritual often would not translate well into the next; the momentum would be lost and the participants started the new ritual at ground zero. One potential solution would be to rush blindly from one ritual to the next until
everyone is panting and coughing on the floor, completely exhausted and begging to stop. That would be feasible if the gnosis employed in every ritual was excitatory in nature, but it usually isn't. The logical solution was to incorporate more than one climatic event within a single ritual.
There are various types of gnosis that can be employed in any given ritual, and a magician should be skilled enough to move freely between one type to the next in rapid succession. As a result, the impact is greater and the ritual more moving. The layering of rituals also ensures that in group settings everyone can potentially have a crucial role in the rite. The number of layers in a ritual is completely open. There can be as little as two or as many as imagination and necessity dictate. There can be multiple invocations, evocations, trances, possessions, divinations, whatever.
Following are several examples of layered rituals that I have constructed in the past. Each one approaches the concept of a layered rite in a different manner. The first two were done in group settings and the last one was a solitary undertaking. As you will see, the first ritual involves multiple invocations and two distinct enchantments (Red Rover, which is found in the preceding chapter on Childhood Rituals), the second one involves an enchantment and an evocation (The Hurricane of Dagdagiel and the final one has an invocation, servitor and sigil
for the final enchantment (A Touch of Purple, A Touch of Nighfi.
The H^ricanne of Dagdagiel
^^^^: To find oneself with a great financial opportunity.
Statement of intent is the same as the purpose.
Participants should kneel in a circle, facing the person who is creating the servitor, with arms locked. The people in the circle perform a chant that escalates in speed, slowly rise and continue the chant with locked arms while circling the main evocant. The hurricane of Mammon2 then "births" the servitor that flies to the sigil and destroys it.
C^hant: "Mammon Zohl Desi I Mammon Hura Neci"' "Mammon Nor Tipy/ Mammon Moc Esin"
Note: The chant should be thoroughly memorized beforehand and may be simplified to just the first two lines.
The Ri^tual:
While the other participants summon the storm, the person in the center of the hurricane will be creating a spider servitor of
wealth, the main focus of which is Dagdagiel, and reciting the following:
"It is my will to summon the Qliphoth of Dagdagiel'' which is summoned by repeating this rhyme: "The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout. Down came the rain and washed the spider out. Out came the sun and dried up all the rain.
Now the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again!”
The participants that are summoning the storm continue circling the evocant. When fully possessed, the evocant destroys the sigil.
End in laughter.
We found that it makes sense to start the rite on one end of the room and have the target sigil hanging on the other side of the room. Participants whirl around in a circle around the evocant, and the whole group migrates across the room during the rite. The climax comes when the hurricane peaks and falls apart or the servitor breaks the spinning chain of people in order to get to the sigil.
A Touch of P^ple, A Touch of Night
Statement of Intent: "It is my will to obtain a female lover who is intelligent, into chaos magic, beautiful and obsessed with me. "
In^vocation to Apollo & Art^emis:
"Lord of the Sun, Mistress of the Moon!
God of Poets, Queen of Hunters!
Lord of Healing, Lady of Beasts!
Golden One and White Goddess!
Help me find my perfect mate!
My anima! My twin-self!
May she possess all that I desire in a partner!
Self-assured and confident as the Golden Sun!
Passionate and Bold! Intelligent and Sexual!
Pursuer and Pursued! Feminine and Masculine!
Strong and Emotional!
Answer my call! Bring her unto me!"
(The Gnosis employed in this first section is Excitatory Dancing. Once fully in trance from dancing, the magician moves to the second part and summons the servitor).
E^vocation of Lilith:
"Into my triangle I summon the Queen of Night, Mistress of Demons! Patroness of Feminists!
First made when the world was new!
Prideful and Unbending, first among women hear my request!
Bring unto me a worthy woman!
To share my bed and my thoughts!
A companion equal and unbowed!
A woman strong and willful!
By your sigil I charge you to assist me!
A request, not a command, I denounce the spawn of Eve!''
Gnoosis — ^Hbitory Chan^ting of Mantra:
"Thrum aid Gef Bons le Vy" — till the presence of Lilith is felt.
{Special note: When [ did this ritual I was standing IN the triangle. It was comprised of only three candles in a triangle formation with me in the center. Thus, Lilith could enter and leave of her own volition but was aware that I was not afraid of her.)
Firing of Sigil ^d its De^^ction:
Visualize the chi or energy flowing from the chest into the arms as they make tight sweeping motions towards the sigil. Hyperventilation accompanies the motion, repeated until a state of gnosis is reached and the sigil is destroyed.
The sigil of Lilith is kept on the magician's person or it is displayed in a prominent location until the result is achieved.
(Concluding note: The ritual worked EXTREMELY well — the proof is in the pudding).
/
Chapter 4 Open Handed Magic
Within primitive cultures, the primary reason that shamans and sorcerers were held in such dread was due in part to their ability lo utilize their magic right there, on the spot in the marketplace or village or anywhere they happened to be. In short, their power was not confined to their sweat lodges or temple rooms. Sadly, many modern magicians keep their magic as a divorced aspect of their lives, sequestered into a 10 x 10 space during the limited time they attempt anything out the ordinary. Caught in the open, they are as helpless as the average human being.
Part of this weakness is built into the type of magic that most magicians do. The first and last thing a majority of occultists do before beginning or concluding work is to banish. Whether thafs a Star Ruby or GPR or even a simple IAO, magicians essentially state: "I am now doing magic. This space is magical"' or "I am now ending my magical activity. This space is no longer magical."
This seems practical enough until we understand what is NOT being said:
"I am now banishing to mark the beginning and ending of my magical activity. When it is done and before it begins I am just
an average putz. ''/"This magic is limited to this time and this place and ends when I'm done. "/"I need to protect myself from the magic that I am doing. "Ietc. , etc. The magician essentially creates a separate personality in order to do magic and divorces that personality from the ones that exist in the mundane world with the rest of us.
In primitive, more magical cultures, that division did not exist. The shaman/sorcerer was an integral part of the community. This integration of the magician with the population at large is not possible in modern times, but what is possible is a recapturing of the techniques used by these earlier practitioners. The magician can use the same tools as the shaman to give her an edge when necessary, even if it does not mean that she is acting out a social role within the larger context of society.
Ritual work is central to magical practice and, when it is done well and done consistently, there are few things that can't be accomplished. However, it would be negligent for modern magicians to overlook the tools of effective magic practiced as an integral part of living — especially when they work. Th^ tools are the open handed techniques presented in this chapter. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it should suffice to give the magician a point of reference from which to begin.
Alphabet of Desire (AOD)
Whether coming from Spare, existing magical alphabets or of the magician's own devising, AODs are great, previously prepared sigils that can be used on the spot. The magician should either choose or create an alphabet that covers several primary contingencies and a few minor ones. Stay away from obnoxiously complex or convoluted systems that attempt to cover every possible situation. It simply isn't feasible to create or use a system that broad and complex. It is better to construct or utilize a system that meets our primary need to win or gain a personal advantage in various situations.
The best sources for pre-existing AODs are sacred alphabets. Runes, Hebrew characters (remember, they were sacred picture-glyphs before they were letters), Andrew Chumbley's collection of sigils, A.O. Spare's, Enochian glyphs, cuneiform, Aztec pictographs — whatever you choose or make your own.
The simplest way I found to design an AOD was to break it down into two or three simple concepts and then picture what sort of situation that I would want them to occur in. In other words: what did I want?/when did I want it? It was then an easy task to encapsulate these desires and instances into letters and symbols by creating representative sigils out of them:
Co^nso^nante: |
Vowels: |
||
ToWil |
% |
In the |
?-< |
To^w: |
ffi |
^Now: |
^ |
To FFuck: |
& |
In the |
'3 |
ToHurt |
£ |
Jn the |
5 |
ToGee |
cJ |
||
Tu (^Destroy: |
(rt |
||
TuTTake: |
ef |
Other magicians may choose to add objectives touching upon knowledge and enlightenment, but I've found these to be overrated. I'm a much happier camper if I can get laid in a wide variety of ways and places, get money to fund a life full of experiences and get even with people who piss me off. Though I should note that this is a strictly personal point of view, I have found that people are happiest when they are having a good time, having great sex and watching their enemies suffer.
Another way to create an AOD is to do it via a trance medium, such as scrying in a pool of black liquid or utilizing automatic drawing. There is also the option of performing a ritual each night before going to bed and then "receiving'' the symbols in
dream form. This can be done in the normal course of sleeping, 01 the magician can go to various extremes. In Norse mylhology, Odin received the runes after hanging himself on the world tree for nine days. I really don't recommend that you crucify yourself to the neighbor's willow tree, but if you find this upproach appealing, there is always the option of doing a rite involving a death posture.
The ritual approach kills two birds with one stone: you get the letters and have them consecrated all in one shot. When I devised my own AOD I had to perform a ritual for each letter AFfER it was created. While this simplified the creation of the letter, it was a bit taxing to come up with a new ritual for each letter. If you utilize one ritual for the entire alphabet the process is streamlined.
To design a ritual for the receiving of your AOD, you first should determine which egregore you wish to utilize as a sponsoring entity for the creation of your alphabet. It adds a degree of psychological weight if you can say with confidence: ••1 summoned Nyarlathotep and produced these talismans; he gave them to me in a dream and they were concealed in the heads of monkeys. I cracked each skull open in turn and the disembodied heads told me what each one meant and what each was for." I recommend choosing an egregore that specifically relates to alphabets, writing, language or wisdom.
Most often these are the "messengers" of the gods — so the AOD itself isn't just coming from entity X — it is coming from a whole paradigm of egregores.
When summoning the egregore in question before sleep, it is important to already be in the habit of recording your dreams each and every morning and whenever you wake during the night and recall them. Don't waste all the energy of an invocation only to find that you vaguely recall the dream the next day. If summoning the egregore for the purpose of producing the AOD in a trance state, it is helpful to have an assistant or a tape recorder running during the whole rite so that anything is recorded which might be forgotten from the moment of being possessed. ...
Don't count on remembering every detail of a possession when you come out of one; you'll forget more than you think you wiJI. If doing the trance in order to perform automatic drawing, remember to still have the tape recorder running and also remember to write down EVERY little detail you can recall afterwards. The paper wilJ record your impressions but the tape will probably catch the MEANING of all the symbols as related by the egregore to you. Make sure you have multiple sheets when doing automatic drawing, as the first few may just come out total gibberish unless you are well practiced at it.
Regardless of the origin of the AOD the magician is using, there 1s slill the question of investing the energy in it. All AODs work Iwsl if they are "front loaded" and then used at a later time. When the magician needs the result produced by the individual Idler of the alphabet, she merely focuses on the letter itself 1,\ther than the desired outcome. The first reason this practice is effective is because the magician still wants to avoid any lust of result even when doing extemporaneous magic. Results are specifically possible because the magician has switched her focus from the objective to the letter itself. Attention can be returned to the situation once the result has been obtained.
A letter in an AOD is just a symbol. As such it bypasses the conscious awareness that we are, in fact, doing magic. You are only concentrating/projecting a symbol in your mind onto a person, thing or location. The energy to produce the result will come from that energy invested during the letter's consecration/creation and is triggered by the concentration on the symbol during the present need for its effect. In short, the immediate focus on the letter is priming the pump to access the well of reserved subconscious energy invested in the symbol.
Which brings me to the second reason why the practice of focusing on the symbolism of a desire is so effective. The magician should not consciously recall the event surrounding the symbol's consecration/creation when calling it up. Instead
she should just concentrate on the glyph itself, knowing it to possess power. This little trick bypasses our subconscious resistance to having the magic work right then and there in "the real world."
There are as many ways to consecrate a magical alphabet as there are ways to enter into a state of gnosis. Any form of gnosis can be used to charge the symbols, though it is recommended that the magician also bind herself to her alphabet, especially if she creates it. The magician should employ some sort bodily connection to the symbols. Whether that's blood, semen or another fluid, or energy from your system — the link is entirely up to the individual.
If the magician utilized one of the trance techniques mentioned above, the alphabet can still be consecrated via the transference of physical fluids and psychic energy. I recommend doing each symbol individually and then utilizing the AOD after all of them are done.
As a concluding note, if you create your own AOD keep it private and hidden from as many people as possible. By hiding objects from the view of others, we give them power. This is especially true if the objects are magical in nature. By creating a barrier between the "sacred" and the "profane," we channel the energy of not only our own subconscious into the object but
the energy of those that know about the object(s) in question but whom have never seen them.
Object and Image Concentration {The Evil Eye and Moon Glance)
Reality itself is a matter of perspective. Imposing our will on that reality may come down to changing our perspective on it or, more precisely, how we look on the world will change our place in it. One leftover aspect of our nature from the time of being non-human primates is the expression of dominance through the practice of staring. What non-magicians have often noted is that people who stare intently, or are extremely focused, make them feel uncomfortable.
These individuals upset the balance of power in any given social situation by taking the psychological edge and staring people down. The only thing that works in order to gain ascendancy is to beat them at their own game and maintain eye contact consistently for periods longer than they do. For the magician, still being in practice from doing object concentration, this is not a difficult thing to accomplish. The magician who masters this technique can engage in the practice of subconsciously dominating any group of people in just about any normal social situation.
The evil eye and the moon glance are extensions of this staring down technique, but practiced with a deliberate intent to either cause harm or to attract a mate by sending non-verbal cues to the target to fluster or to entice the target. Either way the target is affected on a level below that of conscious dialogue. These two feats have been absorbed into popular consciousness as the "evil eye" and "love at first sight," respectively.
The evil eye is performed by unfocusing one eye and staring intently with the other, during which time the magician pictures a stream of malicious energy extending from her own eye to the head of the target. The act of concentration required to do this molds the face into a set mask of malice. The evil •eye works whether the target is consciously aware of it or not. We consistently edit out tons of visual information every second in order to continue to function normally and, while being aware that you are getting the evil eye can be disturbing, seeing it occurring without consciously registering it can be equally, if not more, devastating.
The moon glance is the flip side of this technique and is used to attract someone specifically with the intention that they will become a sexual partner. The magician stares at the target while visualizing a half moon forming behind her own eyes and streams of energy flowing out of her eyes to the target. This
<■ oncentration causes an unconscious smile to form (which is .mother non-verbal cue, in this case a positive "approach me"’ t ip).
Posture can also be important in both cases of the evil eye and the moon glance. An upright but relaxed carriage works best in either case. Good posture sends a signal of confidence that again will be registered by the target's mind beneath the radar of conscious thought. Combining these two techniques, with lhe AOD as an active form of image concentration, will also produce the desired results.
T^^^ra
Portable aspects of ritual magic carried into the mundane world are often in the form of talismans or amulets. Carried or worn on our person, they can function both as a subconscious reminder of the energy placed into them and also a tool to adjust the odds of any given situation to our favor. The important factor in chaos magic is to actually invest energy in a talisman or amulet, preferably one of your own creation, and then utilize it to achieve the desired result.
Talismans and amulets have been used in the past to attract mates, heal or hurt the wearer or ward off "evil" in the form of misfortunate occurrences or hostile non-corporeal entities. Sufficient belief in the power of the item itself will often produce the desired results. Triggering that unconscious reserve is the goal of the chaos magician when designing and empowering any wearable magical charm.
The methodologies for charging the item (as with an AOD) are as vast as the number of states of gnosis you can employ and/or the egregores/servitors you can create/summon. Suffice it to say that the selection shouJd be in tune with the objective that you have in mind by wearing the amulet.
The material base can be of any desired sturdy material: clay,
metal, beads — whatever comes to mind, appeals to you and is handy and cheap. Once the talisman is constructed, the magician sigilizes her intent for the item, the desired intent and duration (i.e. Does it work only whey you have it on? Will it work only for a day/week/month/year?) in the form of a mantra, a pictographic sigil or a mental image.
If you wish to have a little more fun with a talisman or amulet, you may choose to trap some type of servitor or entity within it. This will provide the magical item with a minor degree of autonomy and potentially give it more strength ...but this isn't necessary. What is necessary is to keep in mind that it isn't jewelry but a magical tool. Don't give it to someone else unless that is its purpose, even when you are finished with it. Talismans and amulets are best kept rather than destroyed once their purpose is done. Sequestered away in some dark place, you may even find use for it again.
Talismans, the evil eye, the moon glance and the alphabet of desire are all extremely portable, useful tools for the magician to possess. They break down the artificial barrier between doing magic and living life. The magician moves from a divorced perspective of magic and life being separate to one of seamless integration of the two activities. With any luck she may even come to see life as being magical in and of itself.
Chapter 5
The Double: Ka as Protective Device A ^ries of Methodologies
(Based on working with Nick Hall's Chaos & Sorcer^
I was very happy when I first came across Nick Hall's creation of a fetish doll as a method for magical protection. It was a singularly brilliant device. A surrogate target (i.e. the doll) would simply absorb any negativity created through our own magical actions or a destructive force directed at us by another magician. The doll would, for all intents and purposes, be the magician who created it.
The creation of the doll was a uncomplicated affair as well. Simply get some clay or wax — or whatever base material you prefer — and make it into a doll that resembles you at least vaguely. Attach to it bodily leavings like your hair, nail clippings, etc. Consecrate it with blood, semen and other fluids, pack it in earth and hide it where no one will find it.
The only drawback turned out to be the lack of feedback from the doll. It plainly remained an inerl object that fulfilled its one function. Though effective in doing so, it seemed a waste to construct what amounted to another you, only to have her
silling in a box of dirt all day doing nothing but absorbing "bad vibes.'' What if that double could be altered in some fashion? Made autonomous or semi-autonomous? Perform tasks that you were unable to accomplish due to constraints like time or distance?
A truly useful astral/aetheric double would not only absorb any curses or negative energy spiraling in on the magician but would move through the realm of probability itself. It would exist both in its physical form (allowing the magician to control it) and also in shadow space/shadow time. It would have the capacity to effect things past, present and to come. The double would also divine more thoroughly than a servitor would, have a wider range of activity and the capacity to be modified by the magician both proactively and retroactively.
A subsequent working by Hall seemed to offer more promise. Not only did it contain a more complex method for the creation of a double, but was also designed around getting it to do things autonomously. Basically, it worked under the premise that it would be possible to create an astral double, as well as a physical double, of oneself and then graft them together.
Hall's ritual used the lunar cycle as a time clock for incubation and utilized the imagery of the natural world to complete the picture.The doll was consecrated as before but instead buried
at the base of a tree. Then, for one lunar cycle, the magician worked on building up a concentrated image of an astral double that was then nightly directed into the doll. At the full moon the magician "births" the doll by digging it up, then begins to direct it to some task as verification that the rite worked.
I personally ran into problems with the "natural setting'' that he suggested. For one, being an urban magician, the sources for countrified areas were rather limited and making a drive to the sticks seemed a waste of time. For another, working in a park at night during the summer has its drawbacks. Privacy is tentative at best and impossible to achieve at worst. Police tend to be suspicious of people digging in parks. Finally, there were the damn mosquitoes. Couldn't get away from them.
The other conclusion that I drew from it was that it seemed rather odd to put the doll at a distance while working up an astral double for it. Why can't I have it in my basement or closet or attic? Why can't it be on my altar? I understood the symbolic nature behind burying it and digging it up from the base of a tree, but knew that the same or greater effect can be achieved without any outdoor physical labor in the dead of night.
It seemed to me that the whole thing needed to be reworked in some fashion, pared down and made into a ready tool for other chaos magicians. This could be done with reinterpretation by
utilizing a different approach, combining additional techniques like lucid dreaming, astral projection and pathworkings — with the original doll creation as a basis to start from.
The process also wouldn ' t be a rush job done in one lunar cycle either. Unlike a servitor of modest design and limited scope, the creation of a full blown magical twin means increasing the amount of power and latitude your creation has while not letting it grow beyond your control. This takes some time and effort. Fortunately, since the twin's ultimate purpose is to accomplish the goals you set for it, any time and energy invested is rewarded with a return fairly quickly.
Before beginning, sit down and decide what you want to accomplish with your double, how it will do what you want (i.e. what abilities/powers will it possess) and how you will communicate with it and it with you. Finally, decide in advance what its true name will be, the name that you give it which allows you to control it.
Your objectives for the double should be sigilized in advance by whatever method you prefer. l usually turn my goals into both pictographic sigils and mantras. This allows the picture form of the sigil to be destroyed while it is also being chanted (and chanting is a way to obtain gnosis). Naturally, if you run out you can invent more as you go along, but it is nice to have some
handy when you start.
The process of creation takes three months. During that time the magician is engaged in a monastic exercise that involves three concurrent practices: an hourly visualization, a lucid dreaming program and a daily pathworking.
Visualize the astral double within the body of the doll every waking hour on the hour. It helps to have a wristwatch with an alarm on it. The visualization functions to reinforce the presence of the alternate self within the doll. Incorporate as much detail as you can into each visualization. Hold it firmly in your mind for at least a minute or as long is as reasonable, depending on your circumstances.
Every lucid dream you have during this time is directed towards perceiving your astral self as the doll and acting in that capacity. This should be done from the moment that you achieve lucidity in your dream. From that point you move in the dream to the location of your doll and enter it. While you are the doll, you "exercise" it — have it perform feats with the abilities you have ascribed to it in the pathworking. You may even wish to have it conduct one of your objectives as an experiment.
Engage in a daily pathworking ritual that defines the powers, attributes and nature of the double (the pathworking is the
Summoning of the Doppelganger; see below). This should be personalized based on what you want to accomplish with the doll. The pathworking can be modified as you progress; perhaps you wish to add attributes or modify ones already subscribed. Since the doll functions in shadow space and shadow time, these changes will go into effect retroactively and impact tasks in progress.
Once the monasticism is completed, the double is activated any time you open your temple. Get its attention and give it a sigil to execute. The magician may also wish to periodically consider reinforcing the doll with a monthly consecration of some bodily fluid or recharge it with a doppelganger pathworking. If you no longer desire the doll to perform its function, just reabsorb its energy back into yourself and bury the physical components of the doll.
Personal variations on my own methodology are encouraged. If you do not currently possess a copy of Nicholas Hall's Chaos & Sorcery, here is a synopsis of his technique that I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. This exercise should be performed on the first night of your monasticism:
Construct a doll out of clay, wax or wood — whatever material appeals to you most. Make sure to clearly distinguish the gender of the doll, with exaggerated sexual organs if need be.
Attach to the doll hair from your head, nail clippings to the extremities and also pubic hair to the doll's genitalia. You may wish to include a thread or bit of material from some item of clothing that you often wear.
"Once the construction is complete, all that remains to be done is to pronounce the statement of intent...over the doll, an example being:
This doll is me, As I have life, so does this doll. It is my magickal twin, Constructed by my hand, To absorb any malicious thought or action, magickal or mundane made against me, for it is my shield and Protective veil.
This is my will.
When this statement has been completed, place the doll in a wooden box that should be made or purchased for this specific purpose." P. 51
For each subsequent night, perform the doppelganger pathworking once per day; visualize the astral double within the doll once an hour of every waking hour; and use lucid dreaming technique to actively engage the doll in its tasks. Beyond that,
> .prrzni n' and have fun. The double, if properly constructed, should prove a powerful and useful ally.
S^^moning of the Doppelganger
Sit comfortably in any asana of your choice.
Close your eyes. Sensationally, go through your body, methodically tensing and alternately relaxing each major muscle group. Start with your toes and work up to your head/face.
Then blank your mind for a while until you feel quite relaxed and devoid of thought processes.
Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth now, and maintain its position. Begin to imagine a swirl of energy slowly spinning at the location of your crown chakra. (Top of the head)
As the chakra spins into activity, imagine a shard of octarine colored energy sprouting from the swirling gates of the chakra. Imagine it is a bubbling fountain of radiant iridescence. Once you feel you have a good amount of energy bubbling above you, visualize it raining around you just like a fountain. Feel its warmth and ecstasy washing over you, bathing you; and see the sparkles of octarine cascading around your body.
The fountain of energy is an infinite fountain raining down on you, empowering you.
Begin to form a tube of energy from the bubble of energy around you. Imagine that it is worming through space and time, and begins to form a ball of energy. It builds and builds into a larger sphere. While it is building, it begins to take on features - the features of your astral double. The double can look like you if you wish it to, or you can duplicate features from your imagination into its form. Give your double a mouth and ears so that it can communicate and listen to you.
You find that you are still attached to the double through the umbilicus of energy that is attached to the fountain of energy washing over you.
Gently, begin to move your double through time and space to the location of your doll, and slowly allow the double to envelope and infiltrate the very substance of the doll. You may keep feeding your double energy until you feel it is fully formed and ready to be born.
Once you have formed all the parts and feel you have made a complete double, start to gently detach the umbilicus of energy leading to it from your body - the double screams in the throes of birth - a sound that echoes into your mind! - it is screaming
its name - can you hear it? Remember the name. The name will be used in your instructions and communication with it. Call your double by its name - talk to it. Nurture your child astrally.
Slowly, start to wind down the energy spiraling out from your crown chakra. Although the energy that was raining down around you begins to stop, it does not dissipate - it just gently ebbs and flows around you. Imagine the crown chakra slowing its spin - slowing it until it is inert and closed.
Remove your tongue from the roof of your mouth. Breathe a few deep slow breaths. Begin to be aware of your location. Move a hand or foot perhaps. Then slowly open your eyes.
Your double resides within the doll. Call it by name. Ask it to carry out a task - a task commensurate with its powers, that you can now visualize at any time it carrying out.
Chapter 6
Introducing the Factor of Risk
In the long run, magic without risk isn't really worth doing. For without risk the practitioner isn't pushing internal limits and doesn't gain from the experience. Ritual without risk is merely religion, rote practice conducted to make you feel like you're doing something good. It may even have the capacity to effect change with regard to events that had a high probability of occurring anyway. However, substantive change doesn't occur unless we push ourselves beyond the acceptable practices. The way to do this is to constantly test our own boundaries and challenge our personal limits.
There are many ways to this and any magician starting from about any level of experience can design new ways to push back the envelope of the possible. Within the framework of chaos magic theory there are several avenues of expansion that can be combined and permutated in multiple ways to introduce an ever-increasing range of personal expectations. They can be found in many forms of magic that we already do: in invocation, evocation or any type of work involving possession; in the forms of gnosis we attempt; or in the list of things we ourselves we will not do in a magic ritual.
Initially all rituals are risky for the magician. Having never done magic, the possibility exists that something bad can happen to you that would be caused by your inexperience. However, as we get progressively more skilled this risk becomes minimal and lhen laughably small. Magicians learn that magic will work even if you don't parrot back the memorized rite or do something at just the right time.
Magicians also learn that even the worst outcomes are seldom so bad that they prevent the practitioner from ever doing magic again. Only the most skittish of people balk after a magical disaster, and it's probably for the best. If you possess the inability to learn from your mistakes, have the misconception that you will one day cease to make them and/or exhibit blind intolerance for the mistakes of others, then you should refrain from ever doing magic.
Mistakes and disasters are necessary companions for individuals willing to take risks and get results. These so-called failures are fertile ground for learning how to do it right next time. Sometimes the difference between a successful magical experiment and an unsuccessful one is only a minor change or two away.
Once a fear of disaster is overcome the magician is free to begin an aggressive program of challenging their own self-imposed
limits. What I suggest herein can be taken whole or in part, combined in just about any way you imaginable (and some that you can't) and worked to death. The only certainty I have is that once a boundary is discovered it can be reached, once it can be reached it can be broken, once it can be broken our limitations melt away, revealed to be the phantoms of our own insecurities.
It's easy enough to find these limitations. Sometimes other magicians spell them out for us. Any time I read a magical book and find a "don't do that" or "you shouldn't do this" and it sounds like the author is afraid, I want to try it right away. The same goes for cautions and protections and methodologies that are safe and secure.
In invocation, the magician should always find the egregore or godform that is most intimidating ...and do it. Regardless of the mythology or the paradigm you find yourself in, there is always an aspect of it that is perhaps just beyond your current limitations. Go for deities that others are scared shitless of: Yog-Sothoth, Kali, Sekhmet, Tezcatlipoca... whatever one turns your crank. If you can find the ones where someone has written "risk of permanent po^^sion" — DO THAT ONE.
Don't just invoke an egregore. Make it do something. Master and command the very entity that thinks it is riding you during the possession. Treat them like the tools and playthings that
they are precisely because you are NOT SUPPOSED TO DO THAT. As your kia expands into the dualistic universe it should encompass these gods, as a child possesses its toys. Some of these entities have thousands if not millions of your fellow humans that grovel in the dirt before them. Usurp that power during possession and feed off others' slavish need to worship that archetype or egregore.
The results that can occur and the phenomenon observed during rituals of this nature should blow you away. If it doesn't, then you are still probably holding yourself back. This is understandable if you are a beginner in any paradigm but, as you progress, any servile attitude towards the egregores that you use should evaporate before you move on to the next weltanschauung.
The evocation of servitors and demons from a number of paradigms is thoroughly bounded, in many cases, by a long list of taboos and rules that must be obeyed in order to achieve success. Magicians are threatened with the direst consequences if they fail to observe these rules in their most minute details.
What long practice with demons and servitors of any stripe will teach is that any risk is highly overrated. Initially approaching the evocation of demons for the first time, our own fears and insecurities should make the exercise risky enough. However,
after prolonged exposure this will fail to be either intimidating or a worthwhile practice to pursue.
Evocations can be livened up in several stages. For starters, do not have an empty triangle, but have a member of your temple (or if you work alone, yourselD be in the triangle and possessed by the demon during the evocation. This has several advantages: the first is that the verbal interaction with the demon will definitely occur if possession is thorough and the second is that magicians get to experience a full frontal encounter with a demonic, malicious entity.
To begin with, you keep the person evoking the demon in the triangle and banish them when completed. This is fairly safe. As you can have quite a number of people in the circle summoning and banishing the demon, the odds are definitely in your favor. To add to the excitement you can create a number of triangles and summon more than one demon sequentially or simultaneously.
To notch up the factor of risk even further you can keep the evoked person in the triangle but violate the circle by stepping outside of it during the rite, perhaps even to the extent of removing something from the triangle with the possessed person in it, to add to the fun. You can even get rid of the circle all together.
Further violations of the laws of evocation can be done as well. Removing both the circle and triangle and confronting the demon in that fashion is the next step to take. In the right circumstances the magician(s) may even choose to summon demons directly involved with aspects of sex and sexuality and fuck the demon(s) in question during the rite or as part of making a pact with the demon. The final stage culminates in multiple demons, without triangles or circles, and lots of intercourse.
When it comes to gnosis, the magician is usually faced with something of a paradox. Some forms of gnosis are easy to achieve at first and usually become the preferred method of choice. The problem frequently arises when the magician finds herself taking longer and longer to hit a state of gnosis using her preferred method. This situation is analogous to a masochist requiring more and more pain to experience ultimate pleasure. The magician can and should constantly vary her preferred method of obtaining a state of gnosis. This will shorten the length of time required to reach gnosis. The magician will benefit from mastering as many forms of gnosis as possible. However, once he has gained proficiency in reaching a state of gnosis in a multitude of ways, regardless of the type used, the time it requires to reach gnosis will lengthen. Such is life.
Each and every chaos magician involved in experimental magic will find that there are often innovative and varied ways to enter into a state of gnosis and that the methods of getting there are the same ones for maintaining these states. The longer a state of gnosis can be maintained the greater the potential effect of the rite being performed. Never be afraid that you won't "come down" or that ifs taking "too long;" there is no hard and fast rule for precisely how long a ritual should take or how rapidly you are supposed disengage.
Liberation is also a key to consistently realizing the ultimate joke of the universe: that ultimately everything in it is devoid of meaning. Chaos magic theory is a bad idea for most people because it states, rather pointedly, that any set of truths you might cling to are arbitrary and, after all, no more relevant or irrelevant than any other set of truths. Experience is the only thing worth having and the more of it the better.
The goal of liberation is to be able to break any habit or tendency at will, not to achieve a fallacious sense of enlightenment. The magician can perceive that all personal ways of interacting with others are all learned behaviors. Thus, they can be unlearned. While it may be difficult at first to abandon the comfortable habits to which we cling, it is necessary to avoid stagnation and keep from becoming scared little children jumping at any shadow that appears "different"' or
"strange" or "perverse."
This is NOT an academic point. You can keep it as private as you like, but the magician must violate any and every sacred cow that she clings to. Break any addictions that you may have, transcend your limited sexuality, adopt new ones at will. Addictions, habits and your sexuality are changeable facets of your personality that need modification from time to time. You can start small and work your way up. Note current habits of speech and dress, and adopt new ones to replacing the old ones you are arbitrarily deleting.
After habits come tendencies and, after these (in terms of resistance to change), lifelong patterns of addiction and persuasion. All of these should be put to the torch; the more attached you are to any given pattern, the more you need to change it. Especially watch out for anything that is "natural" — "natural'" is just society's word for something that is "safe, small and scared." To be "unnatural"' is to be the "other," the "threat' and the "different."
On a final note, this process of liberation is one that is open-ended. Like an existential journey, you never reach your destination. The great lie of Buddhism is that there exists an ultimate truth of nothingness. Just like every other religion, this conclusion is no more true or untrue than concepts of heaven,
hell or reincarnation. Beware of any chaos magician who claims to be enlightened or have the one true way or is "more liberated" than the next chaos magician. They've swallowed their own lies of perfection whole.
As emphasized in the metamorphosis chapter, the only real danger for chaos magicians is to stop changing. To do so means you've accepted some conclusive truth when there is none to speak of. Do not allow yourself to be boxed in, labeled and put on a shelf. The only acceptable labels are the ones we give ourselves; we can take them off whenever we desire .
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Chapter 7 The Black Monasticism
A Short Program of Black Magic Cursing
Pre^^^^ work:
Fast and create six sigils that all point to the same intent of destroying your target. The best time for this, if you care about timing, is the last week of the waning moon. For each sigil you create, a complementary servitorlegregore pairing will be implemented during the monasticism. Described below are six servitors and the egregores employed to empower them.
The six servitors that you create attack in the following order:
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1) Silencer - he is designed to do one thing and one thing only; if the target has any servitors or divination methods in place to detect magical attack this servitor makes sure that they don't alert the target.
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2) Snuffer - after the Silencer the attack really gets underway with this entity. He is designed to smother or disable any protective servitors or charms that the magician may possess. He accomplishes this by consuming the energy that these use for defense.
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3) Stripper - she is designed to pull the focus of the disabled servitors and/or charms away from the intended target by whatever means you give her to do so.
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4) Simulator - this servitor mimics the functions of whatever servitors and charms that may have been removed, with the subtle difference that it does not recognize the final two servitors as hostile to the target.
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5) Shipper - only designed for one thing: delivering the payload to the target.
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6) Striker - the payload. This servitor mutates and empowers all six sigils that accompany it to the target.
Egregores for the creation of the individual servitors:
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1) Vidar (Norse god of silence ^and /
As with layered rituals that have been previously discussed in this book, each egregore should be appropriate for the servitor and sigil being consecrated at the time of the ritual. In this case, Vidar not only matches the intention of the first servitor that is created on his night, but the entire purpose of the Black Monasticism. Vidar, in Norse mythology, revenges the death of his father Odin after the battle of Ragnarok. Invocations of Vidar should be designed with this kinship in mind.
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2) Set
This entity is an excellent choice for empowering the second servitor, due to the ritualistic murder of his brother Osiris every autumn, according to Egyptian mythology. Any egregore that also commits fratricide would, however, be appropriate for the servitor created on his evening.
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3) LJlith
Choose her for both her seductive attributes and murderous history. The queen of demons aspect is also a nice touch when it comes to servitor administration - if the target is guarded by goetic demons, they may have made a fatal mistake if you successfully employ Lilith.
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4) Loki
Other egregores with a trickster personality might serve as well, but Loki in the Norse myth cycle always goes the extra mile to cause havoc and mayhem. Experiences with Loki also indicate that he likes maliciousness of an intellectually complex bent and ...the more baroque the cursing the better.
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5) NNyarlathotep
What better egregore to invoke for the creation of a messenger servitor then the Black God of the Egyptians and my favorite Lovecraftian entity? Nyarlathotep combines intellectual acumen with primordial viciousness — the perfect combination.
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6) ^Sekhmet
Nothing says explosive bloody murder like Sekhmet. Invocations of her can easily turn violent, even under the best of circumstances. A blood-loving kinda girl, she usually empowers the attack with a level of dissonance above and beyond the call of duty.
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Tec^hnique syno^psis
Layered rituals are a simple but effective methodology of achieving significant results. When the magician utilizes several forms of gnosis within a single rite, the impact can be truly staggering. The first step is to invoke an egregore, generally with some sort of excitatory technique. While possessed/being ridden by the egregore the magician then empowers the servitor that was created, either through sexual congress, autoeroticism or through bloodletting of some form. The final stage is the consecration of the sigil and its destruction by any preferred means.
This straightforward though sometimes lengthy activity has produced some spankingly wonderful results for yours truly.
The actual design of the rituals themselves is entirely individualistic; the monasticism itself should be loose enough to allow for any number of open interpretations. It would be frivolous to list the individual rituals I designed, as they were intended for a specific target. It wouldn't serve any purpose to spell them out since that target is destroyed. In addition, the author does not wish to bias the individual magician's development of her own rites. Rather, you benefit by using the outline but handicap yourself by following any other magician's rite to the letter of the law. Finally, as a chaos magician you should be creative enough to determine the specifics on your own. Good luck and good hunting.
Aft^ords
As magical organizations age and mature there are several possible ways they can develop. From any history of recent occultism these are fairly evident, whether or not a group ends up down a particular road is up to the members of that group and the steps they are willing to take. Of those that I have noted there seems to be only one positive, and many negative, options open to occult organizations.
Some groups degenerate into nothing more than complex social clubs. While this benefits members in the sense that they can use the order to foster business contacts and make money it has an extremely adverse affect on the state of their ritual materials. Any magical qualities they may have originally possessed is dried out and mummified. Memorized and repeated in a ceremonial fashion only, these rituals ceased years ago to serve any real purpose. These groups have nothing to offer young magicians looking for results and often they close up shop for lack of interest.
Other groups become progressively more "spiritual" in nature. The various egregores, totems and daemons of the group become progressively more abstract and useless to the magician looking to achieve results. The group itself exchanges achieving
results with their magic and rituals for something known as "spiritual attainment' (whatever that is). In the end the group is doomed to become a semi-private religion for its members who progressively are unable to produce viable work as older material begins to be considered "orthodoxy" and any form of original thinking gets labeled "heresy." While they still may attract follows looking to escape from mainstream religions they will fail to produce anything of magical value.
A third type of group is founded by a creative and charismatic leader who subsequently produces a large amount of useful (though ultimately sterile) material. ln many of these cases the founder of the group is considered "perfect" in some fashion by his followers. While the work is often, on the surface, groundbreaking and innovative it also has a built-in flaw. As the followers of the organization's founder consider him "perfect" any subsequent work cannot possible exceed (or even meet) the standard that he set. As a result these groups tend to produce no new material and often argue over which faction within the group is best capable of interpreting "the master.'' The tragedy is that these groups often attract new members inspired by the founder's work and who waste all of their energies fighting intestine political wars within the order.
The fourth fate of magical organizations stems from the certainty that many magicians are incapable of doing anything
that would compromise their own enormous and bloated egos. A number of groups have split into ridiculously small factions due to the clash of personalities and the factions that often grow up around them. Factionalism exists when one individual or group within an order places their own agenda ahead of that of the organization as a whole. The person (or persons) in this case form a faction.
The faction, inevitably, creates conflict between those who agree with them and those who do not. Sometimes the faction may even choose diplomacy in the short term, i.e. trying to persuade others to their point of view and compromising for the good of the whole. However, this invariably comes to an end. Their egos must be served. It becomes their way or the highway. If a magician joins this type of order' (or a splinter thereoO they are inevitably drawn into this fight which has a clear beginning but no foreseeable end.
Successful occultists have all of this in mind and choose the fifth alternative for magical groups. A successful magical group is started by an individual (or a group of individuals) who has no illusions that they are perfect in any way, shape, or form. This type of group places emphasis on magical technique, innovation and getting results, thus avoiding becoming either a new religion or a new social club. The material that they start with is improved and replaced by constantly new and
groundbreaking work produced by its members. Such a group does not have a proscribed orthodoxy with which to saddle the new member and in fact draws most of its strength from the innovation and creativity of the new blood coming in.
Individuals in such an order have the latitude to experiment and shatter the old standards put in place in the group's infancy. As newer members create and expand the material of the organization the bar is raised for those coming after them. Ultimately each generation within a magical cabal should by surpassed by the generation which follows it.
I wrote this book with the above specifically in mind. To provide some of the material which will help produce magicians that will propel themselves past myself and those doing magic now. Building a better chaos magician as it were. With the alternative a rather bleak collection of undesirable options, what else was I lo do?
Joshua Siddhartha Wetzel
I MT, Magister Templi is the designation of the individual leading a ritual. Other systems may use the term priest, houngan, etc.
2 Demon classically associated with wealth.
This book was scanned and edited as a labour of love by , Lithargoel -
A member ofTh^c^t.bz
EX LIBRIS
The Paradigmal Pirate is a complete grimoire of practical magical training with ritual work and exercises for either the individual, or group, pursuing their magical objectives. It includes techniques for working magic through the practice of lucid dreaming; details the use of altered states of consciousness in magic; walks the magician through the construction of magical tools; covers the designing of rituals in the eight colors of magic and the occult metamorphosis of the self.
In the 2nd half the author covers the art of paradigmal piracy. Additionally he introduces the reader to the layered ritual method, open handed magic and working with your ’double’. He turns familiar childhood games into potent rituals of practical magic.
This work provides the magician with a set of useful methodologies and rituals for effecting change with the techniques of chaos magic.