Chaos Magick – Journey Through The Obsidian Dream

In scholarship, Uncategorized, witchcraft

Lust of Results is Not Your Problem

Satyr Magos28/09/20162 Comments

I’ve been reading and talking magical technique a lot, lately, so I’ve been re-exposed to the notion of “lust for results” and it’s been driving me up the wall.

Let me lay it down like this: I was once a presumed-male 16 year old with even more lust in my heart than I possess today. I know precisely how wanting something too much can screw it up for you, and I honestly believe that it’s this memory that Carrol and Spare and even less douchy chaotes are holding in their hearts when they speak of lust of results. But here’s the thing: it’s not the wanting that’s the problem, it’s the being an inconsiderate and creepy fuckwit part that screws it up. As a magical principle, the destructive power of lust of results just doesn’t hold water.

Historically and socially minded magicians talk about this a lot: there are three things that people turn to for magic before all others: money, sex, revenge. As such, folk magic, the grimoires, and even the PGM are all thick with spells to bring you those things. They are things that people want desperately, things that people can’t think rationally about. They are results that people lust over. And, quite frankly, if they were things that magic couldn’t bring people just because they wanted them too badly, books of magic would be a lot thinner, and the pockets of magicians and sorcerers across time would be a lot dustier. More to the point, the desires for money, sex, and revenge, are the things that get people into magic in the first place, and if wanting them bad enough to enchant for them were a guaranteed failure, then no one would keep practicing magic long enough to pursue more enlightened goals.

Put another way: blaming magical failure on “lust of results” is a fucking cop-out. Although I can think of a couple notable exceptions, most of us aren’t calling upon the Gods Above and Below to protect and grow our existing wealth.

You don’t call upon the forces of the cosmos to bring you things you can get just by walking out your door. By the time you’re enchanting for money, you’ve probably been stuck in your shit job (or unemployed) for a while, and you’ve already probably put out a hundred or so resumes and applications. By the time you’re enchanting for sex and love, you’ve probably got a few failed relationships under your belt and some serious emotional baggage on your back. By the time you’re enchanting for revenge, you’re probably up against forces that you cannot face on an even field of battle.

That is to say, for the most part you don’t enchant unless you’re lusting for results. Also, take some time to talk to some witches: we know what great spell-fuel lust and fear and hate can be. Thus, we must look for another, more meaningful explanation for spell failure.

Generally speaking, modern Chaos Magick operates under the assumption of a probabilistic universe. (I single out Chaos Magick, here, because Chaotes are the ones having interesting conversations about how magic works behind the curtain, and because Peter Carrol and Gordon White and Andrieh Vitimus are the people I’ve seen talking about this in print). So, to reframe the debate in those terms, it turns out that most of us don’t start enchanting for results until the odds are already stacked against us. Again: we lust for results when our magical goal is objectively more difficult to achieve.

From this probabilistic perspective, then, the “lust for results” argument is completely non-sequiter. Lusting for results is only a problem if causes you to act against your own interests.

Why then, can a skilled magician, witch, or sorcerer find themselves in a position where they can happily enchant their friends and clients into new carreers but cannot do so for themselves? Frankly, I would turn to non-magical explanations, first. Stress and trauma reduce cognitive function and creative capacity: it’s harder to come up with good magical solutions to your own problems. Moreover, speaking now only of American mages, thanks to the poison of prosperity theology in the cultural waters, we may well blame ourselves for our circumstances, further reducing our ability to see solutions to our problems.

If we must find a magical explanation for the failure of a skilled magician to adequately alter the probabilities of their situation, I propose a different metaphor: leverage and angles. It is easier to do prosperity magic (or many kinds of magic, for that matter) for another than for ourselves because we do not have the best angle of attack on our own problems. Although I cannot explain why this may be, based on my own observations I believe that this is particularly true of sympathetic magics.

In summary, I believe that “lust for results” is rarely if ever a satisfactory magical explanation for failure to manifest one’s desire. I believe that it has survived so long by playing into the worst parts of where mainstream and magical cultures overlap – victim blaming, “u mad bro?”, caring isn’t cool – and by virtue of its pedigree. I propose that any time we are tempted to use “lust for results” as an explanation for a failed enchantment, we reassess the actual probability of success on the one hand, and the material action nesscessary (vs. taken) to back up the enchantment on the other.

In Uncategorized, witchcraft

Moments in Time

Satyr Magos26/09/2016

When I first began seriously studying ceremonial magic in August of 2011, it was with a lifetime of energywork and witchcraft already under my belt. I grew up surrounded by reports of astral time-travellers, and rituals aimed at undoing the injustices of past and future… at least in theory. Books on witchcraft were always talking about advantageous days and moon phases, but everyone I knew had successfully manifested most of what they wanted with no regard to those things (Friday seemed so far away in my late teens…). So when I created my first electional talisman, the notion of using that moment again, some time in the future, had already occured to me.

Last night I finally put that theory to the test.

Aradia and I constructed an altar explicitly for the spell in the livingroom, frankincense burning in a brazer at the top beside the paper Jupiter talisman I made at that first election. We prepared the three-part maeteria: the candle to be annointed, the paper talisman for our client’s altar, and the bottle of Scotch whiskey for the client to drink in the company of Jupiter. We banished and cast our elemental circle and called to the powers of Jupiter by means of the Orphic hymn and libations and fumigation.

Then I called upon the spirit of the talisman to open up a window in time to the moment of its creation. Light shined through the talisman and into our circle, and Aradia and I wound that energy up using memory-evocation techniques from Andrieh Vitimus’ Hands On Chaos Magic: revelling in the sensory details of the day upon which I first called the spirits of Jupiter to aid me in my collegiate duel with Authority. We drank our toast to Jupiter, and while Aradia dressed the candle and the bottle, I channelled sigils to augment those we had created by the Carol/Spare method. Then, together, Aradia and I performed the Picatrix invocation by which I had first blessed the talisman, the final recreation of that first election, and poured all the power we had raised into the triparte maeteria.

We closed the ritual with an offering to the spirit of the talisman, which had performed so far above and beyond its original purpose, and a final repetition of the Orphic hymn to Jupiter before releasing the spirits and the elements.

The spell, as I mentioned above, was for someone else, so I cannot speak more to the purpose until it has manifested, but I believe that we have applied as large and well-placed a lever to the situation as could be managed with our combined skill-set. The candle will burn on our altar and the other elements will be delivered to the client today. Even now, the morning after and no longer entranced, I can feel the magic reaching out into the future.

Further testing is, of course, required, but these preliminary results are amazingly positive. Time travel magick appears to work in conjunction with electional astrology. The next tests will be achieving similar results with my Venusian and Solar electional talismans, and then with an election I have no direct connection to — perhaps one of the Martial elections from this last year. Then maybe evoking multiple points in time toward the same end. Go big or go home, right?

In witchcraft

Chaos Protocols

Satyr Magos18/05/2016

As I mentioned the other day, I’ve been crying into my beer a little lately over the swiftly growing number of people I know or follow who have recently joined the ranks of published authors. In particular, I’m weeping over the prodigious and prestigious one-two punch delivered by Gordon White of Rune Soup. The second of two books he has published this year is The Chaos Protocols, via Llewellyn.

The Chaos Protocols, simply put, is the magic book I wish I’d had ten years ago. Of course, ten years ago it couldn’t have been written: half the calamities and fewer than a third of the innovations (technological, cultural, and magical) that produced the world today had not yet happened.

Where Star.Ships is theoretical, meandering, and academic, The Chaos Protocols is pragmatic, to the point, and actionable. Amusingly, it is the latter that has footnotes on almost every page. The book begins with a brutal crash-course in economics and ends with a miniature grimoire. In between, it provides magical theory, economic reality, and practical techniques by turn.

Economic highlights include a sober discussion of the probable medium-terms effects of crony capitalism; advocating for the return to multi-family and multi-generational housing; a realistic assessment of the value of formal education and property ownership; and a discussion of the meaning of value and the value of meaning.

Magical highlights include Gordon’s own variation on the Stele of Jeu; the print publication of his masterwork on sigils; necromancy and ancestor worship; a discussion of divination mechanics and strategies; and magical strategies ranging from personal syncretisms to the Greek Magical Papyri to street-corner Hoodoo.

The most important parts of the book, though, can be summed up in three quotations:

One does not meet the devil at the crossroads to build a life that looks like everyone else’s.

and

Even if this is the apocalypse, that is no call to avoid making things interesting.

and, finally,

Become invincible and have adventures. The rest is detail.

Let’s have at it, shall we?

In witchcraft

Project Null: Satyr’s First Servitor

Satyr Magos24/04/2013

I have been planning to experiment in servitor creation since I first set out to study Chaos Magick. Unfortunately, none of my major sources treat the subject in any real detail. So I went that vast repository of knowledge, madness, and wisdom which I we all know and love: the Internet. My hope was that a variety of perspectives would allow me to identify the core techniques by triangulation, and from there come up with my rite.

Here are the sources I found most useful:

* Servitor Creation at Atreus World of Wierdness

* Pope Michae’s Basic Servitor Creation

* Servitor Creation at Spiralnation

CAVE CANEM

Between native talent and practice bordering on paranoid, protective magic has always been one of the things I am best at. Thus, it was always my intention for my first servitor to be a household guardian. Because I’m an asshat, I ignored all suggestions to start simple. I chose the form of a dog in order to tap into the “guard dog” egregore, and in order to use a foo-dog shaped teapot, which I happened to have, as a vessel. I named him for one of the great guards of myth, in order to tap into that stream as well. Hereafter I will refer to him as Cave Canem[1], or CC for short.

I wrote and sigilized ten lines of “code”, and chose its master sigil from a number of glyphs which I had produced through automatic drawing last semester. I wrote a incantation containing the servitor’s name, the instructions I had sigilized, and the terms of the contract between us. I then drew a stele-image of CC bearing his name and all his sigils.

I placed that penciled image and the vessel on an improvised altar in the middle of my temple. I banished and purified everything. I got out my Abramelin oil and the brush I use for sigils. I raised the power, declaimed the incantation, inked the sigils on the drawing, and painted the vessel with the master sigil. Then I called down an amount of power that easily put this in the top ten most powerful rites I have ever performed, possibly the top five. I anointed the vessel with the Oil of Abramelin, and the dog awoke.

His presence was immediate, almost tactile. He responded warmly to my attention. The next several times I drove, CC sat in the back seat behind me with his nose on the back of my head. When I drove to Kansas City for Spring Break, he made much of the drive with me, though he grew … thin across Illinois. Even in Kansas City, though, he appeared instantly when I spoke his name.

I would consider this an unqualified success, except that I haven’t actually seen much of him since I got back from Spring Break. But I came back from Spring Break ill enough that I probably shouldn’t have driven. I missed (another) two days of class, and ultimately ended Break even further behind than I started. So I haven’t really had time for more than a bare minimum maintenance of my spiritual obligations; I hadn’t seen much of any of my Friends Upstairs, actually, for that reason, until last Wednesday when I received instructions on how best to rearrange my altar. So one is uncertain if he didn’t “last” or if one’s head is merely stuffed up one’s own ass.

Still, I’m pleased enough with the outcome of this attempt that I’m planning a second, more ambitious servitor project: an army of flying monkeys.

1 – Classical Latin: “Kah-way ka-nem”, trans: “Beware the Dog”.

In witchcraft

Weekly Sigils Shoals

Satyr Magos14/02/2013

Since coming back to Indiana for the Spring semester, I have fired a shoal of sigils every week. The idea is that doing practical, results-oriented magic on a regular basis will, a) improve my mad magic skilz in a practice-makes-perfect sort of way; b) force me to be more creative with my sigil-making and sigil-launching techniques lest boredom undo my Will; c) proivide me with raw data for deterring which desires and which techniques go well together; and, finally, d) result in improved efficacy of any technique I might employ, as the universe becomes accustomed to bending to my will.

So far, the project has been going well. My “target” is a shoal of three to six sigils every Sunday morning, as part of my regular offering schedule. So far I have not actually made that target: half my launches have been Sunday afternoon or evening, the other half on Monday nights. Still: that’s progress.

The first week’s sigils were all aimed at personal outcomes: memory and discipline. The second were social: still trying to engineer myself a new lover here in Indiana. (High standards, highly specific notions of consent, a complicated life story, and an overabundance of undesirable near-misses make that more difficult than it might otherwise be.). The third were aimed at memory and discipline again: being where and when I say I’ll be, and getting my assignments done on time. The first two sets were done in what has become my most frequently employed method: drawing the sigils on a notecard and chanting “It is my will” at them until they get fuzzy. The third week was done using a freshly-consecrated mirror as a launching platform. That seemed to work very well, actually.

This week’s Work, however, had a different target which required an entirely different approach. My parents are embroiled in an inheritance dispute. Frankly, I should have intervened months ago, but it’s an adequately messy situation that, without any real brilliant inspiration as to how to intervene, I was more than a little afraid of collateral damage. Having been struck by a bit of that much-needed inspiration, though, what you see to the right are sigils drawn with planetary Kamea and empowered at the appropriate planetary hours this past Sunday. Basically, I dropped Saturn and Jupiter on the matter, by the logic that the two celestial god-kings were the best way to bring a legal dispute to a close.

Results, so far, have been mixed. My social and discipline sigils have been slow to manifest. Perhaps my chaos sigilization technique needs work. Perhaps it’s my launch technique. Or maybe I just need a bigger lever to fight my own nature. This Sunday’s planetary sigils, however, have already manifested: the situation has shifted from the lawyer saying “they should sign the paperwork soon” to the bank saying “the check is in the mail”.

In hedonism, witchcraft

After-Action Report for Enchantments of Fall 2012

Satyr Magos18/01/2013

When I came back to school in the fall of last year, I enchanted heavily for a few things. Some of those I doubled down on over the course of the semester. I mostly used sigils, though there were also a few planetary rituals, and a few projects that started over the course of the semester.

Sigils for Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll

These results were mixed.

One sigil was specifically aimed at getting people to give me weed for free, and that worked splendidly: I was given some smoke to bring back to the temple with me from KC, and when that ran out I was able to make it through the rest of the semester on the generosity of friends when I visited their homes and on shake and roaches provided to me by my neighbors. Hell, I’ve still got some of that left. That sigil is DEFINITELY getting recharged.

Another sigil was targeted at convincing people to give me booze. This, too, worked like a champ: people brought booze to my house and abandoned it, they bought me drinks at bars (even when they didn’t know me), and I was even able to get a couple commissions for my homebrew operation. The effects even continued over winter break, with two different people handing me large quantities of honey to ferment. Another sigil for the permanent collection.l

Finally, and this may be part of the problem, I had several sigils aimed at getting laid. I took several different tactics: my sexual needs are met, people feel comfortable approaching me for sex, I have generous and intelligent lovers … all to no avail. The only people to grace my sheets last semester were my partners Aradia and Sannafrid. Unfortunately, they were each only there for a week at a time (not the same week; my life isn’t quite that awesome) out of the eighteen week semester. I was getting a little desperate by the end, and as things stand I have no new prospects for this coming semester. (Anyone reading this blog is, of course, welcome to volunteer.)

Sigils for Health and Happiness

Again, results were mixed. I specifically enchanted that I be “sound of body and mind”. Perhaps that wasn’t clear enough. I also enchanted for the solidification of old friendships and the establishment of new.

Physically, I was healthy for most of the semester. I was laid up with a fever for a couple days, once, but it wasn’t that bad. What really fucked with me, though, was the bouts of insomnia.

Mentally, things were much worse. Maybe it was the Chaos Magic. Maybe it was the absence of friends on campus. Maybe it was Saturn in Scorpio, combined with the psychic backlash of Aradia’s Saturn Return. Whatever. I spent the majority of the semester depressed, neurotic, and struggling with paranoia.

I didn’t make many new friends this semester, but I did make one or two, and I was able to really solidify some existing acquaintances. These are good things.

Sigils for Wealth and Prosperity

These enchantments were utter failure, at least in the short term. I tapped every resource I had and called in every favor owed me, and I still had to beg for money from friends and family to make it back to KC for winter break. The school actually threatened to not let me come back next semester unless I paid them part of what I owed them before the start of this semester.

Now, that’s all been worked out. In fact, I may actually end this semester ahead rather than behind. But it took a lot of enchantment—some of it by friends of mine—and more than a little hard work in the material world to get there. And I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Sigil for Academic Excellence

I haven’t been invited to Phi Beta Kappa yet, but I did earn an honors GPA this last semester, despite being on the verge of mental collapse. 3.69 for the semester is nothing to sneeze at, particularly given that I was doing two dead languages at the same time.

Shielding Talismans

These, made toward the end of the semester, were a resounding success. Coming back to classes this semester, in fact, it’s been a little bit of a shock to me to realize that I actually need them at school more than I needed them in the mall. Apparently, at least right now, I find the psychic miasma of adolescent angst and the occasional authority-abusing professor to be more toxic than the capitalist nihilist malaise of the indoor mall environment.

Conclusion

So, overall mixed results for manifesting my will last semester. I got most of what I needed, but not everything I wanted. Two sigils, though, proved so effective that I’m going to turn them into semi-permanent talismans, which is a definite win.

This semester, I have set myself a challenge of launching a shoal of sigils every Sunday. For myself. For my friends. For politics. For the world. For whatever. Three to five sigils every seven days.

Let’s see how this goes.

In witchcraft

Getting One’s Hands Dirty

Satyr Magos08/11/2012

On Sunday, the fifth of November, I cast my first curse. In the Hour of Saturn, I called upon the forces of Saturn to empower a sigil aimed at securing Todd Akin’s defeat in Missouri, and asked them to see to it that the election brought Todd Akin’s political career to an end. While the latter point has yet to be seen, Clair McCaskil took the congressional seat last night.

The following hour, that of Jupiter, I called upon the forces of Jupiter to empower a sigil aimed at securing the presidential election for Barrak Obama. He won the presidency by an electoral landslide: 332 to 206.

Obviously, I cannot claim sole responsibility for these events. But I think that myself and those others enchanting for these outcomes definitely had an influence.

The inspiration for these rites came to me as I was performing my weekend devotions, after my very successful invocation of the Sun. I drew up the sigils, drafted them onto note cards and duplicated them on my maps (the state and world maps, respectively), and waited for the appropriate hour. At that hour, I painted the appropriate sigil, and called on the Planetary Powers using the Circle of Art I had drawn up the day before. I then chanted “it is my will” over the sigil and lit a candle. Upon so charging the sigils, I lit them in the candle, burned them in my cauldron, and pushed the energy out into the world through the sigils on the maps.

My first political enchantment and my first curse all in one. And plans to Hot-Foot Powder a professor I hate, but who teaches a class required for my major.

Yeah, this is my brain on Chaos Magic.

Much like the one time I stole from an employer, there’s a certain cold liberation in giving up the moral high ground. When you can never again make a claim to ethical purity, you have more freedom to decide what standards you want to live up to.

I describe myself as a “witch” in part because of the ambiguity of it. A witch is neither good nor evil, but somewhere in the middle … or both, simultaneously. And yet I hold myself to these insane ideals of ethical absolutism.

Don’t I keep saying that anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for?

RO is always going on about how magicians are beyond ethics, beyond good and evil, because we can see further down the chains of events than mere mortals. On the one hand, this sounds like a lovely monotheist cop-out: “god is on my side, motherfuckers!” On the other hand, my Scorpio shadows whisper, “You do know you know better than they do. Do what must be done.”

I can’t decide if I feel dirty or powerful. Maybe a little bit of both.

In witchcraft

Listening to the Voices: Planetary Shenanigans

Satyr Magos28/10/2012

Since I escalated my devotional/spirit-work practice by incorporating Jason Miller’s Rite of General Offering and getting back on top of my meditation practice, the spirits who hang around my life have had a lot to say to me. “Do this with your altar.” “Do that.” “That looks like a tasty offering.” Nothing mind-blowing, but definitely more than I used to get. My astral “hearing” is still pretty sketchy—everything comes to me as a sort of knowing, rather than something my language-centers process—but it’s getting better. Most interesting and timely of the various instructions I have received was the Sunday-morning admonition to add a daily component to my seasonal altar.

I did so faithfully Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. It was pretty neat, the talismans that made up most of my daily altar definitely got a boost, and Wednessday my memory and linguistic abilities were through the fucking roof.

Thursday, though, was a perfect storm of insomnia, oversleeping, and discouragement. It was the second night that week that my sleep was insufficient and marked by bizarre dreams that I could not remember in the morning. I came across RO’s fabulous challenge/invitation … and was (oddly, in retrospect) so bummed that I hadn’t seen it the day before that A) spaced out that there were going to be more Jupiter hours that day, and B) almost gave up on the daily planetary magic altogether. Which is silly in all sorts of ways. I should have taken it as encouragement/an omen to get back on track, with everyone else doing the deal. I don’t have the Gates Rites (and missed the part about how to go about it without them in the second post), but fuck: I’d already been told to do the damn thing.

Then something happened that never happens: the clue phone rang AGAIN. Literally, this time. My friend Sthenno, whom I had thought I had somehow offended when she stopped returning my calls over the summer, called me up out of the blue, thirty minutes short of the (Nightly) Hour of Jupiter, to ask if I were doing the RO rites. “I am, now,” I said.

The ritual got me high. It was amazing. Even the election when I first charged my Jupiter talisman wasn’t that awesome in terms of visceral experience.

Friday morning I was back on track. Again, the ritual—consisting of no more than the arrangement of my altar, the lighting of a candle and stick of incense, and the pouring of a libation—got me super high … which was a bit of a problem, as I used the dawn Hour, and had to go to class. What was even more of a problem was the potent influence of Venus. Prior to that invocation, I had almost managed to put a lid on my haven’t-been-fucked-in-two-months libido. Ooops, there’s that out the window: all day Friday I was too horny to think. And I dropped a Venusian glamour bomb on some poor fellow students in the English office outside my Latin class, because I was too high on Venusian power not to pore breathe it into the atmosphere around me.

Despite the fact that I still hadn’t found the for-non-Gates-Rites-participants instructions, I was definitely tapped into the current. I could feel it. Can feel it still, for that matter.

Saturday morning, I was a little nervous about. I didn’t get to Saturnine work in last year’s ceremonial experiment, but I know that Saturn in Scorpio is fucking with many of my dearest loves in a pretty hardcore fashion. And while the ritual got me high, it definitely wasn’t the kind of fun the previous two rituals had produced. As a matter of fact, I was pretty reserved for the rest of the day, despite my attempt to turn a party I went to into a Bacchanal. But that was later: something much more interesting happened first. I didn’t just tap into the current of the ritual group: I saw it, stretching across the sky in a dark rainbow moving west to east. And it showed me what I need to do to tap into the current and participate more fully.

Let me say that again: the magical current Rufus Opus has set up for these weeks of planetary invocations showed me how to make more effective use of itself.

Unfortunately, because of homework and my Full Moon obligations (night two of three will start as soon as I finish this post), I was not able to fully implement the instructions I was given. At this point in the week, I will probably not do so before Thursday starts the second week cycle (for the sake of symmetry). But I have the Circles I’m going to use for the invocations. They’ve been stamped in my brain.

This morning was not quite as impressive, but damn that Solar high was nice. And today has been super, super productive in its wake.

This week’s rituals have definitely helped me level out some of the instability I’ve incurred by my interaction with the Chaos Current. In turn, I feel absolutely certain that without my Chaos Magick work I would not have gotten as much out of these planetary rites as I have. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to see the current of the workgroup the way I have.

For clarity’s sake: all my rites have been at the dawn hour, excepting the Jupiter Rite which I did at an hour of night. They have involved the construction of a mini-altar consisting mostly of talismans charged on previous occasions, the recitation of the appropriate Orphic Hymn from my Book of Art (which is picking up quite a charge of its own), and offerings of candle, port, and sandalwood incense. The summoning circle I was shown and the contemplation of the Seal will be added Thursday … hopefully I’ll have time to actually make those in the near future.

So let’s take that lesson to heart, folks: when the spirits talk, listen. Don’t be my fool ass and make them call you back twice. And if they actually bother to do so, be fucking grateful.

In witchcraft

This is My Brain on Chaos Magick

Satyr Magos21/10/2012

I was an arrogant, ignorant ass way back in the day. At seventeen I was already trying to write manuals of what little I knew about magic. I didn’t know shit, not that I could put into words, but I tried anyway. But I was also a little precocious: the very first book was subtitled “A Path to Madness”. Yeah. I was also pompous … even more than I am today. That said, however, there does seem to be a strong correlation between the practice of magic and the appearance or experience of insanity.

For myself, that correlation predates my study and practice of the occult. Although many, even in the United States, had it much worse than I, my childhood was far from idyllic. The living hell that most people experience in Junior High was my experience of elementary school; in retrospect, I was always a little queer, and I imagine that the other children knew before I did that I was Other than they. As I’ve mentioned before, some years of my magical practice—age twenty-one through twenty-five, in particular—revolved around getting a grasp on my sanity more than anything else, but the more Project Null brings my early experiments back to conscious recollection, the more I wonder if the first two or three years of my practice didn’t destabilize me more than I realize.

Although I cannot help but think that there is a certain amount of self-aggrandizement in the framing of it, Chaos Magick, in particular, has a reputation for shaking the foundations of one’s sanity. Stephen Mace, Peter Carroll, and Phill Hine all mention it[1]. The good master Jack Faust had some things to say about it, as well, which resonated with me deeply[2].

I’ve mentioned in greater and lesser detail that over the last few weeks, my paranoia and social anxiety have been off the rails. I’ve been so out of sorts that I dedicated the Dark Moon to banishing more than anything else: performing the Stele of Jeu two days in a row, and three days in a row of my LBRP variant. I felt fabulous … until I encountered people. There’s a lot of astrological garbage going on right now, but a lot of it’s kinda where I live, anyway, and it doesn’t seem to be affecting everyone else as badly. You, my readers, are clever people: you already see where this is going.

Somewhere last week, I started entertaining the idea that I might be under magical attack. And yesterday I was almost certain that was what was going on.

Now, it fifteen years of magical practice, I’ve been attacked (not counting the whole B situation) maybe three times, tops. Probably only twice. But shit’s been exploding in my brain for almost a month, now. Still, I exercised appropriate caution with that idea. I asked ZG about it during my Dark Moon journeywork … unfortunately, her answer was unintelligible. Yesterday, when I was about ready to unleash the hounds on whoever or whatever was coming after me … I sat down with my tarot deck, got a little gnostic with my pipe and my porto, and laid down some cards.

Hahah. Oops.

No. I’m not under attack. I’m short-circuiting myself and suffering from psychic weather. College campuses are not healthy places, psychically speaking, and my shields aren’t strong enough for my increasing sensitivity. There may or may not be a particular person or persons who are exacerbating the problem (Immediate trigger: Princesss of Disks), but the root cause is my own magical work (Early cause: 2W)—possibly my get-laid enchantment, or even the Chaos Magick project as a whole. Interestingly, the solution seems to be blazing forward at full tilt boogie (Conclusion: Queen of Wands) until I achieve some sort of balance (Next step, surprising experiences: VI the Lovers, XIV Art). Sadly, the result (8D) will not be as epic as the process. The spread, for those unfamiliar with it, is the Ankh layout from Hajo Banzhaf and Brigitte Theler’s Keywords for the Crowley Tarot[3].

So, in the spirit of charging ahead, I finished up the first of several talismanic enchantments I have in the works: turning my bi-pride triangles into a protective talisman which doubles as a giant neon-flashing sign, “Hey, I’m fucking queer,” since so many people seem to miss the point. In the next weeks, I plan to lay some sort of sigilized enchantment on every piece of jewelry I wear on a regular basis.

I’m also escalating my meditative practice and my daily devotionals. This morning it was suggested to me, as I performed the Rite of General Offering, that I add a small daily shrine to my seasonal altar. That seems like a good place to start.

1 – Mace in Stealing the Fire From Heaven; Carroll in Liber Null and Psychonaut; Hine in Condensed Chaos. Probably more people elsewhere, as well.

2 – Yeah, Jack: I been creeping’ yer blog, cruizin’ yer archives.

3 – pp.35-6

In witchcraft

Project Null is Going Off The Rails

Satyr Magos14/10/2012

It’s amazing how productive you can be while not sticking to the plan. My formal daily practice has basically fallen apart in the last weeks, even as my various experiments have increased in breadth and depth.

I have been re-re-reading Liber Lux and am working on several write-ups therefrom. I have almost finished Jason Miller’s Sorcerer’s Secrets and am in the process of incorporating some of his excellent suggestions into my practice. Mr. Miller might be slightly annoyed to see him work included in my Chaos experiment—that’s not how he self-identifies—but, really, where is the line between innovative syncretism and Chaos Magick?

Meditation and Dreaming

As I mentioned above, my formal meditation and dream work have basically fallen apart.

Although I have not sat down to meditate deliberately in over a week, I have actually spent hours in trance. Sitting outside in the cold one day, waiting for a friend, as a trance settled lazily over me for nearly thirty minutes. I spent five hours at the loom the following day, not even half of which I can remember. These meditations certainly don’t qualify as the concentrations Peter Carroll (and many other occultists like him) prescribe, but I refuse to concede that they don’t count. I actually have a whole rant about this planned for the near future.

While my sleep schedule has been restored to the point where I no longer drug myself with chamomile and valerian at 10 o’clock every night, my ability to recall my dreams in the morning is spotty at best. This is something I have always struggled with, and will probably continue to struggle with for years to come. Most of my dreams, though—what little I can recall of them—have been clearly mundane: fragmentary remains of my bout with super-hero obsession a couple weeks ago, and my increasing state of holy-fuck-i-need-someone-to-sit-on-my-face.

Shielding

My shielding experiments continue, and I’m fine-tuning a protection talisman. At the suggestion of Chirotus Infinitum in the comments to my last shielding post, I attempted to use the image of a ladybug as shield. The visceral experience was indescribable. And it brought back a series of shape-shifting experiments from my high-school days that I’m in the middle of writing up, and will probably share after I have finished my write-up of Peter Carroll’s chapters on Evocation and Invocation, because they’re highly relevant.

Manifesting My Desires.

While none of last week’s sigils have quite manifested, my experience so far says to wait two weeks before getting antsy. Also, those are socially complex endeavors, and while I haven’t actually found any new lovers, yet, the value of my social capital (to abuse a metaphor) seems to be rising.

I have another batch, this time aimed just at boosting my social situation, in the works to fire off this afternoon.

In the mean time, I have also been tinkering with my Web of Influence, again: drifting into a trance to tend the threads and make certain that things are moving down the pipeline (to deploy a cliché). Interestingly, though I had not yet consciously begun to incorporate my Web of Influence into my sigil work, I could see my manifesting sigils on the web as glittering lights.

Visionary Practice

I went on a pair of highly fruitful visionary journeys at the Dark and Full Moons that I still haven’t quite parsed. In the first, I re-established contact with my my chief familiar spirits and discovered, as I had discovered when I was doing some of my work with Elemental Fire, that a portal to Chaos had opened in my Inner Temple. I didn’t have the nerve to explore it the first night, but I did the second. Beyond the door was a vast void: not the swirling mass of potentiality I had assumed the Chaos current would appear to me as, but the gaping void of Χαος. I could barely sense an intelligence to it, it was so vast and alien, but it was definitely aware.

At first, there was nothing there that I could perceive, an I thought that I was walking through a black void like the astral fragment I use to access the Otherworlds. Slowly, though, the vastness of the space in which I was moving began to dawn on me. I began to perceive fling things moving through the void at almost unimaginable speed. There were countless multitudes of them, but the scale Chaos made them seem few and far between. At that point, Sue, ZG, and SKM joined me, forming a protective triangle, and helping me keep track of where I had come from for when the time came to leave.

We drifted until we came to a lone floating chunk of rock, which we landed on essentially out of my mortal, terrestrial instincts. Faster than I could think, an insect/crustacean-like creature (I never saw the whole of it), whipped around from the other side of the boulder and impaled me through the heart with a many-jointed limb. Although we were able to overpower it and reclaim the “blood” that had stuck to its talon, we took that moment to flee back to the Inner Temple.

Gods and Spirits

Since the conclusion of the ceremonial experiment and the Invocation of Baphomet, I now have ten gods and spirits living on my altar. I speak to fewer than half of them on a regular basis, and I don’t think that’s appropriate.

A few weeks ago, even the gods on my altar demanded a portion of my weekend coffee offerings. I was happy to oblige, of course: I had only not included them because they had not asked, before, and coffee is such a non-traditional offering that I didn’t wish to offend. Yesterday, I began incorporating Jason Miller’s Rite of General Offering* into the ritual, and today I will bring back fruit from the cafeteria to add to the offering.

So far, I have rarely asked the spirits I work with for much in the way of manifesting the world I desire. When I have, though, the results have been spectacular. When one friend was at risk of being evicted, I got Sue to change the landlord’s mind. When another needed a specific job, I asked Sue to make sure it happened. When I was wallowing in a crushing pit of despair last week, I dedicated an evening’s festivities to Dionysus, asking him to purge me of the negativity and obsessive behaviors in which I was engaging; I have since heard that it was the best such party in some time for everyone else there, and I have been pulling out of my emotional morass much more quickly than usual, and am now struggling against a new, but less self-destructive so far, set of obsessive behaviors.

Although I do still intent to built my home defense servitor, and ideally do so before the end of the semester, I think it best that I tend to these relationships before adding anyone or anything else to my altar.

a Change in Plans

Although it might not seem so from my previous weekly reports, my experiment in Chaos Magick has been more productive that I would have anticipated at this early stage. It has also been productive in ways I ever could have imagined, many of which are exceptionally difficult to articulate—a dilemma with which I imagine all my mage-blogging peers can identify. Some of them have come to light today, some I may never be able to talk about.

I originally conceptualized Project Null as a simple follow-up to the ceremonial experiment: a way of continuing my formal study of the Western magical tradition and of not loosing the momentum I had built up over the course of the previous year. I set the time frame for the ceremonial experiment at a year because I was originally using Penczak’s year-and-a-day system as a map. I set a year time frame for Project Null because that was how long the ceremonial experiment had lasted.

It seems, however, that Chaos Magick is even less suited for such a survey than ceremonial magic was. And I haven’t finished processing or internalizing a number of the lessons from that experiment yet. And this semester is much, much busier than I had anticipated. And Project Null is digging things up from my youth that I haven’t though of in a decade or more. And each and every one of these things deserves my full attention.

Project Null is not being cancelled. But the deadlines are. This shit is way too interesting to not let the phenomenal organic growth I’m experiencing progress at its own rate. Hopefully y’all will understand that this is a carefully considered tactical decision, not just a drunken satyr flaking out.

——

* – Miller, Jason. The Sorcerer’s Secrets. Pompton Plains, NJ: New Page Books (2009). pp53-5

ETA: Jason Miller reference clarified and cited properly.