Tag: magick

New Occult Podcast

I’m looking for 1-3 co-hosts to start a new podcast about occult counter culture. Serious volunteers must possess or be willing to purchase some respectable audio equipment (under $200.00) and have interest in the following subjects:

Magick

Paganism

Wicca

Anarchism

Left Politics

Pschology

Esoteric Studies

Activism

Indie Media

Be aware I will be using this podcast to help shill my upcoming self-published books. Not saying that the podcast will be an infomercial by any stretch, but they will get mentioned.

Please use my Ask box if you’re interested.

All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. – F.S. Fitzgerald

In honor of NaNoWriMo, I started a new novel. I am seriously considering self-publishing electronically. The stigma is fading, and the publishing industry is changing the way the music industry did. Like it or not, itunes sells 64% of the music. They say by the end of 2012, Amazon will sell 50% of all books. I don’t like it, but I accept it as the current reality (which we all should work on changing). Ebooks account for 31% of all books sold and that number is growing exponentially. 

Amazon is a corporation that exists to make money and is therefore destructive by nature. But there are positive side-effects of their current business plan. They don’t give a shit about publishers and agents. They would much rather get material straight from the author and share a bigger percentage with them.

The biggest bonus though, is that it frees me from worrying about the artificial constraints put in place by publishers – genre books should be 90,000 words, fantasy should not have profanity, you can’t mix sex with serious plots and characters, etc….

The downside, I have to pimp myself and my wares. Alas, dear tumblr follower, I intend to do that here. Don’t unfollow yet. My current book centers on matters esoteric in nature. 

I used to run a separate blog for writing, and will probably go back to that, but for now I’ll use this blog, and expand the themes to magick, change, and writing. I do this in hopes just a few of my current 281 followers might enjoy and spread the word. Would you read a book about a magician that actually used some real world magick theory?

Cosmology

Despite my suspicion of cosmological certainty, I do believe a good magus should have some kind of basic understanding of worlds beyond our own. Without building or borrowing your own cosmology you may run into difficulty with certain forms of spellcraft.

Necromancy comes to mind as a prime example. If you have some sound ideas on where the dead spend their time, you’re better equipped to contact them. Even if you come to the conclusion that the dead are just kind of hanging around, that in itself is a kind of cosmology.

But building a worlds structure willy-nilly may cause some inconsistencies that could end up being a barrier when you need to add on some new practice. It begs to question why entities of widely varying degrees of power and temperament would all be swirling around some meta-otherworld together. We divide ourselves up by countries and states, cities and neighborhoods. It may be helpful to know an entities address before you go looking for it.

It also makes one of the easier forms of magick, astral travel, much less useful. Much can be learned by travelling to these alternate worlds and speaking with the entities there. My wiccan friend goes as far as saying that it’s the only good way to learn magick. While some may argue that astral travel is nothing more than advanced daydreaming, a good magus knows that the difference between musing and moving is gnosis. If you build a good head of altered consciousness, then the rational mind can relinquish control, and you can truly go somewhere new, unfettered by the guidance of your conscious mind and enter into the uncharted realms of the unconscious.

Certainty

To fulfill my yearning for group practice I joined a wiccan group recently formed in my area. The leader comes from a well established circle on the East Coast (Novices of the Old Ways), and much of what they do is based on the teachings of the trio Janet & Stewart Farrar, and Gavin Bone. I like their work, and anyone interested in where modern wicca is heading should pick up their book, “The Inner Mysteries: Progressive Witchcraft and Connection to the Divine.”

As a chaos magician, I also thought that throwing myself into a belief system would do me some good. For the most part, it’s a good fit. The group is open to a variety of practices. Yet….

It chafes me sometimes how sure they are of themselves. For them, the cosmology is set, the worlds are where they are and there is one path through them. There are gods and there are spirits and the lines do not blur. I can’t help but ask, “are you sure?” My own magical practices and beliefs have shifted so much that this kind of resolute belief makes me call bullshit.

The worst part, I can’t tell if this makes me a good magus or a shitty one. My rebellious, critical thinking nature always rails against anyone who tries to tell me there’s only one way. I pride myself in the ability to critically assess anything. Yet, as a chaos magician, shouldn’t I, must I, not throw myself into belief with reckless abandon in order to produce results?

THIS. This conflict holds me back. Well, that and a lack of willpower to practice on a regular basis.

Marvel all magus at the works of Thoth! All words are his domain. The global network of information is his gift. The power of the word is the power of creation. The great scribe has taught us to bind the word and have it do our bidding.

Hail Thoth! His time is nigh.

Xaos wrote:

For some reason Tumblr won’t let me reblog this so I had to cut and paste. Too good not to spread around.

I’ve been trying to get back on track lately on doing things like banishing rituals, meditation and even basic sigils, but I’m not succeeding. I think that I’m having some kind of “psychological auto-sabotage”, do you have any suggestions of what I could do ?

What are you not succeeding in? Are you failing to practice and perfect your banishing ritual, or are you practicing it but just not feeling it?

Are you failing to sit down every day or two, or are you failing to achieve a sufficiently altered state of consciousness to satisfy your desire for meditation? Try zazen, which (AFAIK) is free-form and without so many rules. Yeah, it’s hard to ‘stop thoughts’, so don’t worry, just don’t dwell on a thought. Try zazen before you seek ‘deeper’ med. I believe we can sabotage ourselves.

A part of us is saying ‘no’. We have to use all our selves, all our balanced selves, to work out if this is our higher Self trying desperately to guide us (when the higher Self should have a better route to your selves) of if it’s the ego screaming for more attention and control over your selves. The squeaking wheel gets the oil, so the ego will scream and scream. Mine breaks things.

With your wisdom, you’ll need to decide how to satisfy or close down your saboteur. Sometimes it’s wise to distract the saboteur with other shiny things; other times it’s wise to enter into a deal (I’ll give you a little sugar if you’ll buy more fruit and proteins) and some times it’s time to master it, and say ‘no, absolutely not under any circumstances’.

Sometimes you have to go through the motions of what you want even if you don’t get the results. If you’re self-sabotaging then you have to work hard to overcome the blocks. Sit down every day, even if you don’t meditate yet. Design a sigil every other day, even if you don’t charge and fire it. After a few days, your selves will realise that you’re serious and that the practice ain’t so bad, and you’ll be able to achieve meditation and start casting sigils and designing greater magicks.

I speak from some success and failure. I’ve sworn to meditate (and perform some astral rituals) every day for the next year or so. I’m doing it too. I have some days when I’ll actually do *anything* (like cleaning) rather than start my ritual, but I find that if I say to myself ‘hey, just get the candles out and sit down, that’s all’ then I overcome the inertia and have a good session. Some sessions are poor and I shame myself, but at least I didn’t skip a day. I promise, one bad session is better than a skipped session.

Here’s an idea; name and shame the ‘demon’ that is sabotaging you. Have a word with hir and find out what zhe’s afraid of and what zhe wants.

Here’s an idea; stop everything. Do some art, read some books. Do not do anything. Set a date for when you’re allowed to start up your magick. Look forward to it. Do not dare do any magick afore this date.

Xaos wrote #2

For some reason Tumblr won’t let me reblog this so I had to cut and paste. Too good not to spread around.
xaos: 
2012-07-12 08:48
Hi what exactly is gnosis and do you need it for magic to work? Thanks
 Anonymous

Gnosis in the chaos magick sense is a trance state or mind state / experience.  In chaos magick, we use the word gnosis (which otherwise means ‘knowledge’) to mean that we have reached a state of vacuity where one is no longer aware of the body and surroundings – one has shed the restrictions of the conscious mind and let go of ego. There is no ‘I want’, there is no ‘I’, there is only direct experience. This is simply because, for a second or twenty, we have bypassed the conscious mind and accessed the subconscious mind, so we let go of words, and accept symbols and their wealth of meaning and power. A chaote achieves this state of gnosis by way of inhibition, excitation or drugs. I try to match the method with my required result.

Restricted diet, sleeplessness, holding breath, near drowning, meditation, staring, boredom, repetition, a brilliant novel ritual, orgasm, drumming, whirling, rage, panic, fear, shock, can all be used to move past the ego and the conscious mind and penetrate the unconscious.

Have you ever worked really hard on a physical task that is pretty dull but makes you sweat, and you find yourself in a rythm of sinew and breath to such an extent that ‘you’ are not needed. This is beyond but very much related to the ‘automatic pilot’ that people find themselves using when driving home from work.

Personally, I seek gnosis through meditation every day (at the moment) and I suppose there are other words for taking yourself from zazen to samadhi.

You get out what you put in, so sometimes I really ‘go for it’ and choose my diet and waking patterns carefully. I can create fear in myself quite violently, and as long as I’m not in a hurry, I can find ways to surprise myself over periods of weeks. This is sleight of mind.

Some say that you can achieve gnosis for a few milleseconds by training the the body’s muscles to spasm, and so as long as you have the symbol of your magick (mantra, mudra, sigil et cetera) in place, that’s enough.

There are times when I really want to get my gnosis on and do some fucking magick and I just can’t. There are other times (on trains, in parks, as I wake) when I find gnosis overcomes me, and so I create magick without thought.

Most chaote authors I have read (and I have read a lot) clearly state that gnosis is required for chaos magick (which is magick of deep-seated beliefs [however temporary] and the subconscious). Were I talking to a self-proclaimed chaos mage and they told me they didn’t ever bother with altered states of consciousness I would ask them if they believe that rituals (repeated actions as per a recipe) without conscious and subconscious alignment are enough.

Ever read out aloud one of those ‘rhyming spells’ from a book? Did you wonder how some poetry from a paperback might make something happen for you? Why would a poem alone be magick? I don’t have much time for Recipe Witches.

You can believe what you wish about magick, and I encourage you to experiment; I only speak from my personal perspective as a chaos mage. Try asking other chaotes and see the variety of views and ‘rules’, but I exhort you to do some magick.

Detachment. Dislocation. Vacuity. Neither Here Nor Not Here. Does Not Matter, Need Not Be. Free Belief.

Magick is mind. What are you doing with yours?

Answering more questions about magick

I am not an expert, but I am happy to share what I have learned.

A follower asked:Yes, thank you. That’s very interesting. I have the same sort of troubles with the Judeo-Christian flavor of Qabalah. Would you be willing to describe the process you go through to build correspondences after you’ve decided on an effect? I’m sorry for bothering you with so many questions!


Here’s an example. A while back I created a muse. Take a look at the description from my old blog.

I wanted her to not only be my servant, but a servant of the goddess Babalon. So when I created her sigil it included the Star of Babalon. As mentioned in the blog post, there were also lots of roses involved. The cigar I included to make her part Loa.

It’s pretty easy to build up plenty of correspondences in a ritual with a little research. The hard part is when you try to create something more abstract, like Qabalah, where all of those traits become linked. I am only beginning to do that work myself. For me, that required a long examination of my current beliefs and trying to distill them down into their most basic parts.

I wanted to use Egyptian philosophy and beliefs as a basis, to match the use of an Ankh as the base symbol, but found it to be difficult to find ideas to work with, without learning ancient Egyptian and going to the source material. But as I looked more into Greek philosophy and terminology, it seemed better suited to the task. They were what some consider the greatest pagan thinkers, plus, Greek has had a direct influence on our language and thought in Western culture.

This is what I came up with:

I could go into what all of that means if you like. As a magus I would like nothing better than to have others adding fuel to my belief system. The point is, now that I have basic ideas to associate symbols and objects with, I can start building my own version of 777.

Logos = 1 = The Sun = White = Candle

Binary = 2 = Sirius = Thoth = Logic = Blue = Pen & Scroll

Khaos = 3 = Earth = Khepra = Potential = Black = Robe

And so on. The important part is never to become moribund in the system. Binary things may be associated with the stars Sirius, but Thoth is a Moon god and should be associated with that body. Also, don’t worry about building out too far. Only when you need a correspondence and you can’t find one through research that makes sense, look at your base concept and use what you associate with it.