THE ART OF THE UNIVERSE (part 2)

Title page and frontispiece to Natural magick... wherein are set forth all the riches and delights of the natural sciences by Giambattista della Porta (1535-1615) with a portrait of the author, 1658

And what if you’re not a cybernetician or scientist?  What if you’re into, say… magick?  Well, let’s change our language, and see how a new description changes this new paradigm of which we speak.  Magick is merely another analogy—another tool—we can use to envision and describe a new paradigm.  We needn’t “believe” in magick any more than we should feel a need to “believe” in cybernetics or strictly rational thinking.  These domains are merely lenses through which we view our experiences.  They grant us language that allow us to describe our perceptions to others.  Belief is irrelevant.

Magick is the transformation of imagination into reality.  This certainly brings back to mind Barbara Max Hubbard’s maxim:  “Reality exists, first in imagination, then in will, then in reality”.  Bringing a new paradigm into existence is the ultimate sleight-of-life magick trick.  It’s a performance like none other: imagining a system worth living in, and acting as though we already do.  It’s a sideways step through the veil of Maya, into a world constructed of human desires, designed with human desires as the foundation.  Magick is the art of changing consciousness at will.  Logick is the art and language of human endeavor.  There in our collective blind spot reside many things we have forgotten we ever knew were possible.  Learning is remembering what we know.  Action is showing what we know.  Teaching is reminding others that they know too.

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LEVITATING OVER THE PRISON WALLS: It can be done (sections 1 and 2)

1.

We must trust ourselves. We’ve been filled with a lot of bullshit (time, money, religion, government, morals, etc.) while at the same time denied acknowledgment of vitally important and real phenomena (our experiences, for example). It drives us crazy, being born into and raised by the “Deranged Mind” (a term coined by Philip K. Dick). We must be honest with ourselves about what we experience—all manners of experience. We must communicate and share these experiences, so we can collectively remember what is “real.” We need to experience rather than be told. It’s human nature, our Will. Right and wrong merely contain all possibilities. It is among the possibilities we find the key ring to the gates of the Black Iron Prison.

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TO YOU, THE MOST BELOVED: Misunderstandings of “crazy” (part 2)

Yup'ik shaman exorcising evil spirits from a sick boy, Nushagak, Alaska, 1890s

Traditionally, a culture’s shaman is the neurotechnician of a tribe. A shaman is the bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world, the psychopomp of mystical journeys. Often a shaman will induce a trance, either through the use of psychoactive drugs (traditionally this means anything from ayahuasca, to marijuana, to DMT, and to the many fungal avenues of pharmakognosis such peyote, amanita muscaria, ergot, etc.) or physical methods such as throat singing, fasting, dancing, flagellation, etc. In some traditional cultures, the entire tribe goes on a vision quest together, everyone from babies to the elderly. As the shaman Bear Heart asserts, “Peyote is used for healing. Our people say we don’t hallucinate with peyote; rather we see visions that teach us.”

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LITTLE BITS ON CHAOS MAGICK: “Prime Chaos” gets an updated intro by Phil Hine

All that is currently pagan blog, The Wild Hunt, posted a nice piece on Chaos Magick by writer, anthropologist, and esotericist Amy Hale, which takes an honest look at some updated critiques of the DIY anarcho-magickal movement started in the 1980s. For those who may be unfamiliar with the movement:

“When Chaos Magick sprung forth in Britain in the 1980s, it styled itself as the naughty child of magickal movements. Inspired by a combination of punk and DIY culture, the work of Austin Osman Spare, Thelema, Robert Anton Wilson, and popular culture, Chaotes like Ray Sherwin and Peter Carroll proposed a rejection of ‘orders’ and ‘traditions’ and ‘lineages’ and advocated an emphasis on the perfection of magickal technique for the purposes of getting results by concentrating on the universals of magickal technology.”

When I first came across Chaos Magick I, like many others before me, felt as if I had stumbled upon the Holy Grail of contemporary esotericism. Anarchistic, pagan, DIY, fuck you, magickal, homo-friendly, Chaos Magick seemed to have it all. Everywhere that neo-paganism failed for me (think: ubiquitously pony-tailed Druid impersonators) CM seemed to pick up the loose ends. For me, CM came as a necessary assault on the preciousness of privileged long ago mysteries. It was an attack on everything that held the old ways to be better than new ones. In short, for me, Chaos Magick was the kick in the ass paganism needed in order to get off the “doth thou” and “wilst ye” train.

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