Abundance as a Key to Results Magic

NKS_1867_4to,_92r,_Mead_of_PoetryMagic likes an atmosphere of luxury, or rather, a state of mind that encompasses abundance. Grasping for an outcome, for a result, with an attitude of greed and lust does not impress the warp and weft of wyrd. The Norns laugh at those who clutch in a spirit of desperation. This is not to demean those who find themselves in dire straits, but it is to say that the Norns find it hard to want to reward those who dwell in greed and doubt.

Greed and doubt are killjoys for sure. What deity, what spirit, what force of nature would reward magic cast in a spirit of meanness and faithlessness? There is nothing attractive about the bulging eyes, the sweaty palms, the clumsy gestures, the bloated, yet self-destructive, ego trip of greed and doubt.

As much as the chaos approach to magic emphasizes technique, attitude is the keystone of getting a result. All the technique in the world, indeed, all the ornate ritual pomp in the world, will fail if I cannot detach myself from my desire to achieve an effect. The problem isn’t the wanting – wanting something is powerful magic. The problem is the attachment to that desire, as though my own existence were at stake.

This desperate attitude, this misuse of desire, sends out a radiance of lack. And lack is not attractive to plenty. And plenty is what our magic is supposed to be attracting. The law of sympathy: like begets like. My magic spells need to be exercises in magnetism, or in other words, my desire is counterproductive if I do not harness it to the wagon of playfulness and non-attachment.

The emptiness of non-attachment is the vehicle of the attitude of plenty. This isn’t so much a paradox as a hand in a glove. If I fill my glove with attachment to lust for result then there will be no room for the fingers of my true will, let alone the palm of my highest destiny.

How to achieve non-attachment? Adopt a mentality of luxurious abundance. Oh look, we just traced a circle!

We live in a world that constantly tries to tell us that there is not enough. The scarcity mentality is a tool used by the tiny elites to keep the rest of us in line. It is fuel to the fire of every kind of bigotry, destructiveness, and stupidity. Ironically, it also triggers tremendous waste – witness the gratuitous squandering of modern corporations with their faith in the disposability of things and people alike.

Abundance mentality, therefore, is a kind of political subversion. Note, however, that abundance mentality is different to greed. Abundance by definition is non-attached because it does not assume any reason (e.g. scarcity) to adopt an attitude of desperation. With an abundance mindset there can be passionate desire for something, but it is free of fear of missing out. In other words, capitalism is predicated on scarcity, so abundance is inherently anti-capitalist.

Right, so anyway. An attitude of non-attachment and abundance – wrenched from the maw of this ridiculous consensus reality – makes all the difference between crap magic and wonderful magic. This is why, if you want to get good at magic, you can get a lot out of practicing by doing magic on behalf of others.

The other day my other half and I were having breakfast in our favorite restaurant. The place is amazing but rarely well patronized. Which is ridiculous! I decided to cast a little rune magic – just scrawled Isa, Fehu, and Wunjo in the window and whispered their names over and over with a self-satisfied smirk.

I hadn’t even finished the spell before a table of five walked in. In the space of 10 minutes four more tables filled up. Not bad given we were the only customers prior to casting my spell! It worked so fast that I almost didn’t realize my spell was the cause.

Now that’s a pretty trivial thing to cast a spell for, and not something I was particularly attached to, so an abundance attitude was easy. I am not sure I could so easily access an attitude of playful plenty in the midst of a personal financial crisis. But perhaps by practicing magic under low stress conditions we also begin to inoculate ourselves against scarcity mentality and make ourselves more attractive to abundance mentality.

I suspect that a master of Abundance Mind needs rituals and spells less and less (though they might like to keep doing them for the fun of it). Such practices are ultimately attempts to break the tide of scarcity and attachment and self-defeating lusts. With Abundance Mind, desire becomes unburdened by attachment, and perhaps every gesture, thought, and smile becomes an act of positive manifestation.

But don’t worry if you’re not such a master (who is?). Just set a symbolic intention to become such a being, then let it go. Does not matter, need not be…or…that or something better. Two mantras you can use to seal the deal of a magic spell…and to get closer to approximating the lightness of touch that grants the true power.

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Rune Sigils Versus Mansplaining

Guru-Guri Dhar - Nicholas Roerich, 1931I have a pet peeve against mansplaining. It doesn’t serve anyone at all, not even the men that indulge in it! Luckily it turns out to be manageable through the judicious application of sigil magic.

Last night while dining my companions and I were forced to endure the nearby mansplaining monologue of another patron. He held his audience hostage without the slightest clue that he was boring them to death. He was very proud of his love of beer – apparently a gift for which he has been praised at breweries near and far. His primary mansplaining victims were two women, although he was also using it (quite without conscious awareness) to try to impose a pecking order of manliness on another male.

Well I don’t enjoy having to listen to shallow, trivial nonsense be used as a vehicle for imposing social dominance. I suppose a more outgoing chaos magician might have just walked over and politely embarrassed the gentleman in front of his captives. Being an introvert, I did a sigil.

I just started tracing shapes in some puddles of water on my table. The rune ISA came to mind – stillness. Then he mentioned the number eleven (maybe something like “I’ve drunk eleven kinds of craft beer from Massachusetts!” or the like). Well eleven is Isa’s number in the Elder Futhark, so now I knew it was the rune of the moment.

I drew Isa over and over in the water, obscuring and reinscribing it. It was surprisingly easy to access some irritation and attach it to my intention to have his wagging tongue fall still. Then I banged the table, leaned over to my other half, and whispered “does not matter, need not be.” We had a nice little conversation about the merits of this phrase versus “that or something better” as a tool for sealing off a sigil magic episode.

Meanwhile, the loudmouth beer-bore suddenly fell silent, then had to go to the bathroom. His companions looked visibly relieved in his absence, then made up their mind to leave. Oh well. We enjoyed the rest of our meal in peace.

Mansplainers: you aren’t impressing anybody. Stop putting on a front and let your genuine qualities show. You don’t realize it but the more you push your (mostly female) victims to the margins, the more you impede your own genius from shining forth…and the more you miss out on all the wonderful things they might otherwise have shared if you’d only been able to get out of that suit of ‘manly’ armor.

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Ninety Percent Bullshit

Ninety percent of everything you’ll ever read or hear about magic is total bullshit. Only about ten percent of magic is stuff that might actually work.

Of the ten percent of magic that might actually work, ninety percent of that isn’t really supernatural at all. At least ninety percent of practical magic is made up of stuff that could easily be explained by logic, science or common sense – but which is not widely known only because it is unpleasant or taboo.

Occult and esoteric both mean “secret” or “hidden”. Remember that.

Of the ten percent of magic that might actually work, only about ten percent of that (about one percent of all occult knowledge) is actually made up of the genuinely very strange and inexplicable.

There are things about the universe that we don’t know and there do seem to be forces that we can’t explain. Anybody who tries to tell you that they’ve never experienced anything genuinely spooky is either lying or has an extremely closed mind.

On the other hand, anybody that tries to tell you that they can explain the unexplainable is generally full of shit and should be treated with extreme caution. This is where the ninety percent bullshit in magic (and religion) comes from. It’s a combination of outright fraud, willful self deception and half assed attempts to explain and control things that nobody really understands – yet.

A real magician, like a real philosopher, knows what he doesn’t know and isn’t afraid to admit it.

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I Have a Dream

By special guest contributor MichaElf Allson


The night I dreamt a dream that altered my mind forever, was a night like any other.

The young’uns were in bed and I had spent the morning at an accountant in the city, processing the contents of a brown shoebox full of my year’s worth of receipts.

Nothing odd, whatsoever. But as the years roll on, I consider it to be one of the weirdest days of my life.

I will describe most of the dream but not in its entirety.

I found myself on a dark strip of road in the bush at night. There were dim yellow lights of homes in the near distance. My daughter Freyja was standing besides me and she was holding an open shoebox with a small hare cuddled up inside on a piece of warm fabric. Its eyes were huge and black. Shining in the darkness. We both looked at it fondly and Freyja replaced the lid of the box as we walked along the path through the bush. As we were walking and talking, my parents drove past us in their sedan. Both of them saw us and acknowledged our presence but kept on driving into the night. I yelled out to them, wondering why they would have left us out here with hours of walking between us and the next township.

We finally came across a tidy brick home that was occupied by a couple in their early seventies. They were very welcoming and very soon we were all enjoying a warm conversation in addition to a light meal and some much needed drink.

Freyja opened the shoe box again to proudly show the couple her pet. The hare was in the process of changing into some kind of sea creature with stumpy tendrils or tentacles perhaps, it was squirming around in the shoebox with the same moist cow eyes staring silently back at us. Before we could utter our surprise, a small opening appeared on its underside and a stream of clear liquid pissed out of the creature, splashing onto the polished white tiles of the old couple’s kitchen floor.

The room then became filled with brightness and a washing machine appeared in full swing vibrating on a spin cycle in the middle of the room. Was it the same room?

On top of the buzzing machine was a light grey bird-like animal. It had the appearance of an owl or a hawk and I noticed that its head was turning from left to right in a kind of happy rhythm. Out of the sides of its head sprang two long feathery horns, like a kind of Muppet monster, and it was shrugging its fuzzy shoulders in a very contented fashion. The animal was vibrating at an incredibly rapid rate, and as it did so, emitted waves of what I could only describe to you as love towards me. More love than I thought I could bear. I remember almost weeping with joy and fear, as the power that this thing possessed obviously was well out of my range of experience and I could do nothing to slow the vibrations running through my heart and soul.

As I concentrated on its face, I could make out three black dots where two eyes and a mouth should have been. The dots were hollow and solid, like black plastic beads. Behind the dots, swirling in the creatures bristling grey fur was an endless streaming of beautiful women’s faces in ecstatic expression. These faces were representative of all ethnicities and they all appeared to be on the brink of orgasmic climax.

It was at this point that I asked the creature its name (standard practice I suppose).

It replied in an English speaking women’s voice with a recognizable Australian tone. Its voice was the loudest sound I had ever heard, or could ever imagine hearing.

She calmly answered my question as I asked it. Her reply completing itself simultaneously in the space of time I spent finishing my shocked enquiry. She said “My name is Chardakiel, and I’ve known you forever!”

She then held out her left hand to me. It was a petite white hand with beautiful tapered fingers. She was reaching out to me with all her love, all at once. I fell away in terror and found myself wide awake in bed with my heart about to leap out of my chest. I was drenched in sweat and very confused indeed.

I had always been in the habit of writing down as many dreams as I could. They always made for good reading at a later date, and this dream was no exception. I began at once to document everything I could recall. I was soon to discover that this dream was totally different to every dream I’d experienced before.

The next morning I made a phone call to my Beastianity band mate Richard Horner. He was a most knowledgeable chap (he still is), and I knew that he had a couple of dictionaries in his possession that listed demonic entities in alphabetical order. He told me that according to his books, the Enochian demon Chardakiel was known to be the ‘Guardian of the South Winds’ and was also described in another dictionary as ‘The spirit of Libra’.

Now I thought to myself…’I haven’t studied anything remotely Enochian since I was a child’, but then I thought…‘Australia is really about as South as it gets’ and even Richard knew that I had been born under the sign of the scales. I continued to “go hmmm”…

I went about my day off as usual, but found it difficult to organize my dream into the back of my mind with any efficacy. I received a telephone call in the late morning from the principal of Freyja’s primary school. She reported that Freyja had injured her shoulder playing silly buggers in the school grounds, and requested that I come and pick her up.

When I arrived at the school sick bay I found Freyja lying on a stretcher bed in the company of her little friend Danielle (Danielle?). She was a little upset and in a great deal of pain. We found out via an X-Ray that Freyja has broken her clavicle or ‘collar bone’.

The shrugging shoulders of the grey and vibrating hawk entity flooded back into my memory as I equated my daughters name with the symbol of the hawk in the knowing that the two were inseparable.

This was just the beginning of the journey that my children and I were to embark on. I remember speaking of this dream to many friends. Some had tears after hearing it.

The years played out in big and dangerous ways. I found myself in the process of planning a brutal homicide close to home. There were scores of sad junkies blasting away in the streets around our inner city home. The insulin syringes would crunch under my boots as I walked Freyja and Otto to their schools each morning. I experienced numerous break-ins to my home. Chasing stray teenagers out of my house in the middle of the day as they were sprung rifling through our kitchen drawers. And without going into too much detail it got much, much worse.

I escaped the city, never to return. I brought with me the kids and the dogs, and returned to my childhood home up North. We settled in a tiny beachside settlement called Blackhead Beach Village. Our daggy little wooden beach house was nestled in a thick rainforest atop a high rocky headland. To walk to the ‘back beach’, we would start down a single lane road that was only partially tarred. The road was covered by a thick canopy of shade trees and at night would silently remind me of the place where ‘the dream’ began.

We met some amazing folk in Blackhead. Wise women taught Freyja and Otto about the animals that lived in the surrounding bush.

There were Possums, Gliders, and Goannas that stretched as long as my two ton truck. There were also families of hares living there. We now dwelled within a community that knew us and respected us and would look out for Freyja and Otto at all times. The spirit of place extended it’s peace and it’s freedom to us. There were no fences dividing properties, no letter boxes and plenty of kindly couples in their 70’s (or so I guessed). No more danger, no more needles for us.

Four years passed before I met my Melinda. We found ourselves at a pact meeting for many of Australia’s underground magic groups held in a bush camp on the outskirts of Sydney. Sweyn and Kara Plowright of the Rune Net were the organizers every year I attended. It was always a very special event, and I thank my man Mark Morte for introducing me into it so many years ago. Melinda attended due to her deep knowledge of the Runes, and hoped to meet someone there who could share her magical life. When she first put her hands on my naked chest it was like receiving a shock from a defibrillator attached to a power station that had been attached to two more power stations. To me it was an unmistakable sign that I’d found a girl who truly knew about magic and that my painful wait was over.

I asked Melinda to be my bride six months down the track and Lokily for me she said “yes”.

Our first ‘date’ was on ‘Imbolg’, or The Feast of St Brigit and we though it would be a grand idea to go out dressed as the elderly. I had my grandfather’s deerstalker hat, a walking cane and a crappy old tweed jacket with fawn elbow pads. The ensemble was topped off with a pair of horn rimmed spectacles. As we discussed our ideas to surprise our friends with our ingenious disguises, we researched the feast of Imbolg only to discover that it was the ancient custom to wear old clothes for the entire day and beg for alms. Melinda donned a huge woolen cardigan that came down to her mid-calf and it was made of a mohair blend. It was light grey in colour and was shaggy and furry and reminded me again of my beautiful and terrible female guardian. We were smitten and married to each other in a beautiful private ceremony on a quiet grassy headland near the ‘back beach’ in Blackhead Beach Village not long after that.

The love I receive from Melinda is comparable to that of the spirit in my dream. The same can be said of the love and patience that my Freyja bestows on me.

I can also say that the love and support that I have received from practically all of the women in my forty odd years of living is unconditionally astonishing.

My dream continues to unfold in beautiful ways throughout my life and may it continue to do so…

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My Bookshelf

Next to my computer on my desk I keep a small selection of essential texts for my Chaos Heathen proclivities. These are the books that I find myself referring to in casual conversation about myth or history or nutrition or healing. I’m sure everyone has their favourite reference texts (and I’d love to hear what they are): here are mine.

The Art of Simple Food, Alice Waters
Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon
The Fourfold Path to Healing, Thomas Cowan

First stop: nutrition and food. I am a huge aficionado of the traditional cuisine movement. Returning to traditional cuisine has almost totally cured my once utterly crippling allergies; it has also gone a long way to improving my fitness, mental health, and immune system. It has also taught me how to love food, to really savour it, to deeply appreciate the pleasure of eating in a way that all the production line rubbish I used to eat never did.

I haven’t talked about it for a while, but I remain convinced that if you are serious about spirituality, magic, growth, healing, Heathenry, or whatever…then you have to get serious about food: its history, its ecology, the experience of eating it, the nutritional science of it. NOT out of some punitive, sin-based body-hatred or pleasure-hatred (neither of which are a part of traditional cuisine); but out of the binary joys of gustatory sensuality and making oneself more whole, more powerful, more buoyant.

This isn’t to say that I always stick to my own culinary principles, of course, but mostly I do, and I’ve never been fitter or healthier or enjoyed cooking, eating, and even the washing up so much. All of these things help me integrate myself into the flow of the waters of life (Bil Linzie) that runs throughout the roots and branches of the World Tree.

If you give a stuff about the environment or the principle that what goes around comes around then traditional cuisine is even more important…and I’d like to think that anyone interested in Chaos Heathenism would be at least curious to know what they can do to preserve the precarious equilibrium of this fragile planet.

Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales
Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson
The Poetic Edda, trans. Lee Hollander
Dictionary of Northern Mythology, Rudolph Simek

While personal gnosis is awesome, I believe that when we closely research historical belief and practice it often turns out to be far more subtle, inventive, and just plain fun than the half-baked ideas that modern folk turn out and pass off as spiritual or magical. This is no fault of ours: traditions that have had centuries to ferment, passed from hands to hands, are almost certainly going to outstrip our raw and hastily conceived insights.

Grimm’s Tales I use for divination purposes, as I’ve previously documented. It’s a font of endless free association and symbolic hilarity, often with blatant Heathen motifs and stories writhing just below a wafer-thin veneer (and just to upset the Heathen dogmatists out there [yeah, like those jerks would ever threaten their puny minds by reading Elhaz Ablaze articles]: the Christianly ones are good too).

The two Eddas are of course extremely valuable. Dipping randomly into the Poetic Edda is always fun and rewarding – not unlike the Bible, it’s actually a really weird collection of tales. When I read these texts I can’t help but think that once upon a time the only kind of Heathen around was the Chaos Heathen kind.

And finally, Simek. I bless a trillion times the day I bought this book. What an indispensable gem! Getting nastily out of date now, but still the ultimate starting place when you want to know anything about Northern mythology (and much more besides).

People think the Internet has made knowledge much more accessible, but only someone who doesn’t read books could possibly be convinced of this mediocrity-inducing illusion, which merely panders to our laziness and our vanity. If you are even marginally interested in anything even vaguely related to Heathenry…then go buy Simek right now.

Visual Magick, Jan Fries
The Rune Primer, Sweyn Plowright

Visual Magick is Jan’s first book, and I swear by it. It is so fun, inspiring, profound, playful, self-satirical…just what magic should be. It’s a slender volume, yet it contains ten to the power of infinity more wisdom and knowledge than just about any other book on magic ever written (I don’t know how he crammed it all in there, but he did). If you want to know about anything related to anything to do with the stuff we talk about on Elhaz Ablaze then this is the book.

That said…I actually like his Seidways even more, but it’s a little more specific; and his Helrunar is the best book on esoteric runes ever. No contest. I know lots of Heathens don’t like him because he isn’t Heathen, but that just underscores the point: this guy understands runes better than the best esoteric Heathen authorities and he isn’t even a Heathen. Sock that to the ideologues, dogmatists, and Master-of-the-Universe-type cult leader blow-hards.

Sweyn is of course part of the Elhaz Fellowship, so in celebrating his book I’m completely guilty of nepotism and all the rest. But the fact is, this is the best point of departure there is. His translations of the rune poems are absolutely perfect (much better, I must say, than Thorsson’s or Fries’), and the supporting documentation is extremely valuable for getting your brain sorted out before you do anything runic. Indispensable reference? Tick!

Everyday Tao, Deng Ming-Dao
The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron

Many Westerners don’t know anything about Eastern religion except that “uh, isn’t it, like, life-denying?” No, actually it isn’t: if you bothered to actually pay attention you’d realise it is all about being radically present, and the otherworldly stuff circles back into that.

Take Buddhism, for example. What’s the highest deed you can do? Escape Samsara, achieve oneness…then become a Bodhisattva and come back to the physical world even though you don’t have to in order to help the healing of others. It’s easy to be world-affirming when your dogma doesn’t really give you a choice anyway, but these guys want to be here even once they’ve overcome the bloody place!

And when we all get to Nirvana? Holy cow, who even knows how hilarious that’ll be?! One thing is for sure, and this is presaged by some recent comments on other Elhaz posts: Woden is one of those utterly furious Bodhisattva types, I’m almost certain of it.

Uh, anyway, so yeah. Pema’s book is all about having the courage to do the things that scare you, to commit to your integrity, your spirit. It’s a great tonic and soul-nourisher. Enough said.

Everyday Tao is a book that has saved my brain many times. When I am stuck, blocked, down, whatever, I open it at a random page and invariably it blows away all fetters. Deng Ming-Dao is a genius. And there are patterns in the things I get; I can’t tell you how many times that book has told me in moments of self-doubt: “we have to stick to our perceptions and our feelings.” I dare you, go on, be stupid enough to call that sentiment life-denying.

So there you have it – the indispensable books I always keep in easy reach. What are yours?

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“Everything fornicates all the time” or: Goddess, let our minds copulate with Infinity!

If I cast my eyes before me, what an infinite space, in which I do not exist, and if I look behind me, what a terrible procession of years, in which I do not exist, and how little space I occupy in this vast abyss of time.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées

All beings are buddhas … there is no being that is not enlightened, if it but knows its true nature.” Hevajra Tantra

“I have been waiting beyond the years
Now over the skyline I see you’re travelling
Brothers from all time gathering here
Come let us build the ship of the future
In an ancient pattern that journeys far
Come let us set sail for the ‘always’ island
Through seas of leaving to the summer stars

Seasons they change but with gaze unchanging
O deep eyed sisters is it you I see?
Seeds of beauty ye bear within you
Of unborn children glad and free
Within your fingers the fates are spinning
The sacred binding of the yellow grain
Scattered we were when the long night was breaking
But in the bright morning converse again.

The Incredible Stringband, “The Circle Is Unbroken”

The method to enlightenment according to Crowley, who has boiled down the Eastern teachings to its essence after having travelled to India and other places in the Orient, is very simple: Sit down, shut up, stop thinking, and Get Out! It’s simple, but not easy. Even the Tantric scholar, Hugh B. Urban, admits that Crowley had a fairly well-grounded understanding of Yoga, as his book, Eight Lectures on Yoga (a book still worth reading), proves. Let’s look closer to what Crowley meant by his formula.

Sit down: This refers to Asana, a term in Yogic literature for posture. It needs to be solid, but also comfortable. After all, you are supposed to sit in this posture for about half an hour. (You should be able to sit like this for hours. One hour is the most I reached once. However, don’t be too masochistic.)

Shut up: This one is hard. At least for people like me. I like to talk a lot. Most westerners are talking or are listening to talking people most of the time. (Here talking includes singing, making sounds, listening to the radio, watching TV etc. Even reading is talking, as whilst you read those words an internal voice is speaking to you. Isn’t it?) So, this one is really hard. But, after we have sat down we have to invite silence into our heads.

Stop Thinking: This is impossible, you say? I hear you, my friend. I know, it’s next to impossible. But hey, haven’t we began our quest for magic, myth and mystery because we strive for that which is miraculous and fills our hearts with Joy and Awe? Isn’t magic the science of the extremes and the impossible? The violation of probabilities? Haven’t they told you sigil magic doesn’t work, it cannot happen, but IT DID!!! In the same way we must push our boundaries of Achievable Reality with every breath we take. We learn slowly. Magic cannot be learned at a retreat or weekend workshop. We learn by applying our insights in daily life. This is an endless process. On this way we must accept our imperfection, stop worrying, stop wishing, yes, stop thinking! We must learn to watch our thought patterns and thus become aware of the origination of thoughts. We must not strive for anything, we must not force our minds to do anything, but just watch. „Breath in, breath out,… thoughts… breath in, breath out …“ asf. Finally, we will establish mental silence, or to be more accurate, it establishes itself. And even a few seconds of this mental silence are like a short glimpse at eternity, a foretaste of real inner peace.

Get out: This leads to profound stages of gnosis. It doesn’t make really sense to talk about it, because one gets there easier when one shuts up” and “opens up” to silence. The idea of “getting out” ultimately points to the experience of illumination. But what is illumination? Well, the short answer: I don’t know. But we can look closer to what has been said how magic and illuminated states of consciousness are linked up.

Beside Yoga another fundament of Crowley’s teachings is the modern version of Qabalah / Kabbalah. Though I respect Qabalah as a mystical current in Judaism I think that too many ‘occult masters’ turned qabalah into a rather intellectual exercise without any real spiritual value. The study of correspondences is an ancient art that belongs to the great Arts of Imagination, that was practised back in the days when Imagination was not just seen as unreal and put on a level with fantasy. One of the most influential humanist philosophers of the early Italian Renaissance and a reviver of Neoplatonism, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), rediscovered this ancient art during a time when Florence was the place to hang out for hip artists and ‘avant-garde’ intellectuals, an important centre of the ending Mediæval Ages, where cultural innovations and developments took place that led to an end of the dominance of the Church. New ideas began to spread that resulted in intellectual transformations of a grand scale. The Renaissance is viewed today as a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Modern era. The Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, as well as social and political upheaval, but what I find most fascinating is that it was inspired by the past, the classical age: Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. So it doesn’t come with a surprise that this was also a revival of Magic. Humanists asserted “the genius of man… the unique and extraordinary ability of the human mind.” In that special intellectual environment Ficino taught what he considered to be ‘Natural Magic’, and so laid the foundation for what is called ‘Ceremonial Magic’ now, known to us through such magical authors like McGregor Mathers, Dion Fortune, Aleister Crowley and Israel Regardie. This form of magic is still practiced in their occult orders all over the world today.

Ficino’s magic was grafted on to an existing tradition of medieval magic, which in turn had derived from Arabic sources such as the notorious manual of spirit evocation called Picatrix. The fundamental idea was the doctrine of correspondences, which teaches that everything in the universe corresponds to other things on higher or lower levels of being.” (Godwin 2007: The Golden Thread – The Ageless Wisdom of the Western Mystery Traditions, p. 99)

This idea is really old. It seems it never disappeared completely. With the rise of modern science in the 17th century Kepler (1571 – 1630) and Newton (1643 – 1727), both deeply into the occult, have cut through the band of nature and psyche, man and the world, the subjective and the objective universe, that has existed since the rise of human consciousness, known to the ancients as the world-soul, anima mundi. (Actually both, Kepler and Newton, saw the harmonious order of the divine creation in the physical laws they discovered, a kind of clockwork universe (instar horologii) and ‘world machine’ (machina mundi). However their physical laws made the idea of a divinely ensouled universe (instar divini animali) obsolete.) For the ancients the world-soul was the vinculum amoris, the band of love, that connected the inner world with the outer world, man and nature. Three centuries later we would come to conclusions that allowed us again to re-imagine this sacred bond between man and nature. We needed quantum physics and a swiss prophet to re-member again. This prophet was, yes you guessed it, Carl-Gustav Jung. His ideas of the archetypes and a collective unconscious made magic possible again. He wrote in 1916, after a spiritual crisis:

Man is a gateway, through which one enters from the outer world of the gods, demons, souls, into the inner world, from the greater world into the smaller world.” (Jung [1916]: Sermones ad Mortuos, in: Jung 1963: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 380)

That means that we can enter deeper, hidden realities by finding pathways through which we can communicate with our unconscious, which Jan Fries calls the “Deep Mind.” When we open up to that possibility we begin to interact magically with our environment, and a sacred psychogeography is thus created: “It is through the human unconscious that one passes from the ‘greater world’ to the ‘smaller world’ of the interior universe. The God of the ‘exterior’ universe is the sun; and the interior world is, accordingly, illuminated by the sun of man’s personal inner divinity.”(Hanegraaff 1996: New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 503)

Hence the archetypes of the collective unconscious are simultaneously part of the macrocosmos (the outer world) and the microcosmos (the inner world), which leads to the fascinating, magical conclusion that the world of the psyche and the world of “outer” reality are ultimately only reflections of a higher reality, the unus mundus, the “One world,” or to put it differently: the world and the psyche are each mirroring the one reality. This means that Jung assumed a monistic meta-level behind or beyond the subjective (psychical) and objective (physical) reality – the unus mundus, a term which refers to the concept of an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and returns to.


To me this conception is the fundament of magick. Being a modern learner on the magical path I always imagined that connection more in scientific terms. My thoughts were running along those lines: If there was a Big Bang (even if Carroll says this idea is nonsense) everything in the physical universe has the same origin. And when we then look to quantum physics we can see that it proves that two particles that have the same source behave somehow as if they were still connected, even though they are seperated by a huge distance. This means that if one of the two particles gets affected by certain events, the other is affected in the same way though it’s physically somewhere else. One must be blind, if one doesn’t see a connection between these new discoveries and the old conceptions of correspondences, even if we cannot conclude from this that science is now accomodating some of the conclusions magicians have reached millenia ago. Or can we? Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900 – 1958), an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics, who received the Nobel Prize in Physics, was examing the synchronicity principle with Jung, and he argued that there must be a psychophysical unified reality that connects the psyche and the world. He thought of it as an invisible, potentially existing reality that could only be unlocked by studying its effects on the visible world. He was looking for a new language” that could describe that reality. I think he found it in Jung’s theories. We have found it in magical systems and terminology. It’s no mere accident that Jung became so popular in magical circles. There is a sublime truth in his psychology. It points at an underlying unified reality, the unus mundus, a term Jung borrowed from the alchemist Gerardus Dorneus (1530 – 1584).

It’s also not a coincidence that when scientists (Metzner, Leary, Grof etc.) took LSD, Mescalin, asf. they entered these wyrd inner landscapes, where the ‘laws’ of the unus mundus reign. Certain drugs can lead you to the experiences of unitary consciousness. When these psychedlic drugs reveal that underlying unified reality, it happens sometimes that when an unprepared person takes LSD – has a wrong set, as Leary said (a wrong attitude, f.e. feels bad or is depressive or anxious) or is in an unappropriate environment (like a disco, a ‘wrong setting) – that such a person gets a ‘bad trip’, which mainly means paranoia: everything in the universe, strangely connected in weird ways, is a conspiracy against you. There is, however, a way of perception that inverts that process and it’s an effective method to communicate with the Universe, and experience a communion”. For that purpose you can conceptualise the Universe, like the Tantrics did, as the body of the Goddess – known to me as Eternity, or Nuit. That’s a form of gnosis that Satanists and Setians will never know: it’s called pronoia. I came across this term in Humphries’ and Vayne’s fascinating Grimoire Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick. ‘Pronoia’ is a state of consciousness that is intimately connected to the Holy Guardian Angel concept. Here the seeker experiences that the Universe is actually alive and that it cares for you and it tries to help you in any way possible to get closer to your Self that, in essence, – on a profound, meaningful and transcendent level invisible to the eye – is One with the Universe. The realization of this Oneness implies a particular attitude on the part of the adept toward cosmos, like in Ficino’s Natural Magic or in Hindu-Tantra, whereby s/he feels integrated within an all-embracing system of micro-macrocosmic correlations. The Universe here is not just a thing out there’, but Her – She, the Mysterious Universe being the Goddess Herself (for mystical monotheists it’s mostly Him, God the Father or Christ). Every attempt to conceptualize Her / Him / It leads to an anthropomorphisation of Her: the Goddess in Her various forms: Nuit, Freyja, Kali, Virgin Mary, the Holy Whore.

All our ancient ways are wrought with love of Her, lifting up Her skirts and showing off Her irresistible flesh, our flesh, all flesh… For only a real fool, the worst drudge, would ever refuse Her come-on. Even those with little wisdom know in their hearts that She has but one aim: to bring you ecstasy, to destroy the illusion of seperateness…” (Dave Lee 2006 [1997]: Choatopia!, p. 203)

I don’t know why, but I feel very attracted to the perception of the Goddess (on one level of reference) as Nuit. Probably it’s because it’s the first Goddess I encountered on my Path when I discovered The Book of the Law. Nuit has been described by Crowley in various ways. First of all he equated this Egyptian Goddess of the Night Sky with the Qabalistic concept of Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light: the Godhead, prior to Its Self-Manifestation,  before It emanates into manifestation on verious levels of existence and thus creates the world(s). This idea probably derived from Ibn Gabirol (1021 – 1058), an Andalucian Hebrew poet and Jewish philosopher, who coined the term, “the Endless One” (she-en lo tiklah). Ain Soph may be translated as “no end,” “unending,” “there is no end,” or “the Infinite.” Hence a term like Ain Soph Aur (אין סוף אוֹר) means “Endless Light.” Ain Soph is the divine origin of all created existence, which emanates out of infinite no-thing-ness (Ain). Another way to approach the Mystery of Nuit (at least in Crowley’s sense, I’m not concerned with Old Egyptian religious conceptions here) is to understand it as a certain state of being that the Buddhists called Nibbāna in Pali, known as Nirvāna (Sanskrit: निर्वाण) to most. It is a state of being free from suffering (dukkha). In Hindu philosophy, it is the union with the Supreme Being (=God) through Moksha (Sanskrit: मोक्ष) or Mukti (Sanskrit: मुक्ति), which literally means “release” in the sense of “letting go.” The concept of Nirvāna is often associated in Western minds with the false impression of a nihilistic, life-denying stance, because it means “blowing out.” However, in truth things are more complicated. It might have been a world-denying concept, but basically it refers to the blowing out of the fires of greed, hatred, and delusion. Over centuries this concept was transformed in Tantric Buddhism to the idea that Nirvana is a purified, non-dualistic “superior mind,” unclouded by any dualistic perceptions. In Western occultism we now have the confused impression that the ideas of “Self” and “No Self” are somehow contrary, and certain so-called “LHP” adepts assume that the RHP traditions lead to “self-annihilation” and that the LHP traditions lead to a “preservation of the self.” Don Webb, an initiate of the Temple of Set, writes:

Crowley believed that when one left the Adept Grade, one could either give up one’s ego or become a Babe of the Abyss, being at one with Nuit OR one could shut himself away from the universe and become a Black Brother, a follower of the Left Hand Path. These unfortunate SOBs were eventually destroyed by the universal tides acting upon them, much like stones being worn down by sea waves. We in the Left Hand Path (LHP) see this matter differently. If we didn’t we would scarcely have an interest in the First Beast [the “Second Beast” being Aquino for Setians, my remark]. Crowley believed that the Master of the Temple obtained a true Union with the objective universe and by so doing could interpret any event in that universe as a communication from its meaningful and purposeful side. Ultimately one would realize the unity of spirit and matter, and the folly of believing one’s thoughts to be seperate from the Cosmos. Crowley saw himself as a teacher of the Right Hand Path. (Webb 2005: Aleister Crowley – The Fire and the Force. p. 32)

This is just a terribly confused position (resulting from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum hypothesis, and Mr. Kepler’s and Newton’s destruction of the vinculum amoris, which I have mentioned above) that has no relation to any deeper or ancient Tradition, but is more or less a modern, neo-satanic myth that somehow developed between the antagonistic positions of Mme Blavatsky’s and LaVey’s (and his pupils’) occult ideas, who both got it all wrong, because the RHP’s and LHP’s goal is the same: the Unio Mystica, the sacred marriage of homo and deus. The aim is shared by both paths. What is different are their methodologies. The same confusion arises when Hinduistic and Buddhistic concepts are compared. Whilst Advaita Vedanta (Advaita means literally “non-duality”), a monistic school of Hindu philosophy, promotes the idea that the Self (Atman) and the Whole / “God” (Brahman) are identical, and thus presupposes a True Self, Buddhism describes exactly the same phenomenon, but calls this discovery No Self (Anātman), and thus presupposes an Emptiness (Suñyatā). The truth is that both, True Self and Emptiness, are descriptions of the same thing, but we less insightful seekers with not enough meditative experience get lost in concepts and conceptions. And, as so often, the truth gets lost in translation, too. We must keep in mind that these things are very very hard to grasp, and it’s even harder to put those experiences into words.

But to come back to Nuit: She, as a Goddess of Eternity, embodies these concepts of Ain Soph Aur and Nirvana in a beautiful and unique way, beyond words and reason. The HGA, then, is that kind of entity that tries to re-connect you with Her. Here the idea of Angels as intermediary beings, as the „messengers of God“, the Pleroma or Nous, must come from, I assume. For that concept to be of any use to a sane modern individual today, we need a very clear and grounded understanding of what the nature of that Angel is. It’s been stated by Crowley several times that he incorporated the notion of a Holy Guardian Angel into his system of magick, because he found it so ‘ridiculous’ that, he assumed, noone would ever confuse it with Angels in a literal sense, but look for the higher and deeper meaning of the necessity of that experience.

The Holy Guardian Angel is everything you are not. It is other. It cannot be described, for if it could it would be part of you. The search for it is therefore not the search for a specified goal, but a great search for other. It is the search for some kind of metaphysical experience and unity, bliss and joy. As you grow and your knowledge increases ; so the Holy Guardian Angel changes, leading you further along the path into the unknown. The magician is aiming to establish a set of ideas and images that correspond with the nature of his genius, and at the same time receive inspiration from that source. It is your purpose in existing. It is what you are here for, it is why you chose to incarnate at this time, in this place. Its goals become your goals, it cares about what you do and wants you to achieve them. To ally your desires with its desires is to enter into a divine communication … .” (Humphries & Vayne 2004: Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick, p. 141)

This idea has totally seeped into my Life a long time ago and it is connected to my deep drive to re-connect with the Divine, a hidden, deeper reality that lurks behind the outer forms of the visible, measurable world. It was exactly this mystical fire that burned in my heart, when I entered the magical path. It was just later that I came to know that such concepts as sigils, magical power, and in some contexts the exaltation of the ego, are part of what is called magick. It’s the mystic’s passion that pushes me forward on my magickal journey that I identify as the main purpose of my Life. But Life and Magick are the same, “and both can only be about a spiritual journey, a path towards a Re-Union with a Supreme Creator, with God, with the Divine.” (Genesis P-Orridge) Even if I do consider the idea of a “Creator” as an utterly useless concept that is unnecessary in my understanding of the Divine, and even if the concept of “God” sounds heavily Christian or monotheistic, it’s always been clear for me why I have entered the magical arena: to re-unite with the source of All. Nothing else is serious. And that source of all is No-Thing or Nuit , “the Boundless Light,” as modern qabalists put it. In this sense I consider the modern, neo-satanic conceptions of the LHP with their notion “Preserve the self at all costs! Resist the evil mystics!“ rather misleadinging. I do not believe that this mystical process known as Coincidentia oppositorum (“coincidence of opposites”) leads to “self-annihilation” as Aquino and other promoters of that modern form of the “LHP” formulated it. The principle of the “uniting of opposites” is an ancient one and constitutes a fundamental element of what Aldous Huxley baptized Perennial Philosophy. The experience of the Coincidentia oppositorum was used in describing an alchemical process, to be exact, its fourth stage, rubedo (“reddening”): the unification of man with God. In Thelemic mysticism this is the unification of the limited (individual consciousness), or Hadit, with the unlimited (cosmic consciousness), or Nuit , ”the Boundless Light.” In this regard the mystical experience can be seen as a revelation of the oneness of things previously believed to be different. Such insight into the unity of things is an experience of a transcendent reality, a meta-level, the unus mundus, as described above. This level of being (actually transcending being and non-being) shouldn’t be regarded as “foreign” to magic, but as its fundament – the origin and aim of all magic – that helps us to explore the metaphysics of our practice. The experience of the coincidence of opposites is known in Germanic spirituality, albeit in its Christianized version. It can be found in various descriptions of German mystics that constitutes a religious current known as German or Rhineland mysticism, which was a late medieval Christian mystical movement, that was especially prominent within the Dominican order and in Germany. Although its origins can be traced back to Hildegard von Bingen, it is mostly represented by Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, Henry Suso, Rulman Merswin and Margaretha Ebner, and the Friends of God (“Gottesfreunde”). Actually this “golden thread” (Jocelyn Godwin) can be traced back to magico-mystical traditions all over the world. The idea occurs also in the traditions of Tantric Hinduism. These mystical features are shared by the esoteric teachings of many religions. They do not seem to be just bizarre or irrelevent products of the fantasies of certain religious enthusiasts, but rather the lived and embodied knowledge of each religion that is central to its thorough understanding.

“Just as previously our deficient understanding of Christianity has been corrected by considering mysticism and such figures as Meister Eckhart and Saint John of the Cross and our understanding of Judaism has been corrected by the study of the Kabbalah and such figures as Isaac Luria, so our understanding of Hinduism will be revised when Tantrism and its key historical figures are given appropriate scholarly attention. Issues and individuals that were once considered bizarre or irrelevant must now be considered essential; without them our understanding is not merely intellectually impoverished but historically negligent.” (Douglas Renfrew Brooks 1990: The Secret of the Three Cities: An Introduction to Hindu Sakta Tantrism, p. ix)

In the same way it is true that our understanding of Islam will be transformed, when Sufism is taken into account. These essential, dare I say, eternal truths, are also known in the various Tantric schools of Mahayana Buddhism, including Zen, and in Daoism. Already in my teenage years I was aware of the significance of the mystical experience on the magical path, even if in an overtly romantic and “psychedelicized” way. This might be the reason, why in the beginning I didn’t understand what the point of Chaos Magic (CM) is, with their emphasis on “results” and why LaVeyean Satanism made me only shake my head in disgust or shrug my shoulders in apathy. The “old” systems of Western Magic (the Golden Dawn-style approach developed in the 19th century), then again, seem to loose themselves in table of correspondences and intellectual exercises for climbing up “Jacob’s Ladder” towards abstract conceptions of the Divine. (Though I know an initiate of the G.’.D.’. who is the living proof that these approaches still work and are valid today.) This is why the Chaos approach popularised by Pete Carroll became necessary and why the chaotes developed such a rigorous, “technocratic” approach to magic, where results are of main interest, not mystical mumbo-jumbo and cosmic foo-foo (with which New Age became obsessed in an unhealthy way). Over the years / decades some chaos magicians became drawn towards mystical experiences, despite Carroll’s exclusion of mysticism in the CM Current. This can be explained rather easily from my point of view. It’s because magic and mysticism are connected in profound ways. They are two sides of the same coin. If you exclude one from the other you do so at your own peril. It seems that the accumulation of gnoses, of many altered states of consciousness, leads to a mystical longing in a magician.

Repeated experience of higher states of consciousness eventually leads to some experience of the core paradox of individual being. The mind starts asking questions like: Why don’t I always feel this ecstatic? Why don’t we just get ecstatic when we finished our day’s work? What is the origin of individual consciousness? Why does the ego keep wittering on in its tedious internal monologues of past-oriented identity, and what can I do about it? How can I get to an unconditioned mind? The occasional extra bit of money, sex, personal power and healing no longer satisfy; everything is muddied by the taste of the ego. Transformation and ecstasy become urgent.” (Dave Lee 2006 [1997]: Chaotopia!, p. 151)

The Self in Ecstasy, by Austin Osman Spare

The Genius of the chaos-mystical stance is to me that all descriptions of these higher states of consciousness (all these Nirvanas, Ain Soph Aurs, Nuits, Pleromas, Shunyatas, Gods, Holy Ghosts asf.) are regarded as descriptions or “maps” invented or developed by other psychonauts, who made their journeys to the hidden chambers of the Soul before us (mystics, tantrics, yogis, senseis, magi, gurus, enlightened teachers asf.). And their “maps” are not the “territory” itself. A chaos mystic does not accept any theories about enlightenment, immortality, eternal bliss and “Big Daddy up there.” These are all theories. There are then two types of seekers if you like: those “working from a top-down / theoretical perspective (presumably because the reports they read resonate with some deep part of their own experience) and those who need to proceed from bottom up, proving the reality of the stages of higher consciousness to themselves at each stage, without assuming a pre-determined endpoint of enlightenment.“ (Dave Lee) To me this is the true difference between a LHP and a RHP initiate, if we still consider these categories to be useful. Well, I do. To me the LHP magician really is the seeker who goes out and looks for himself what is behind the curtain and afterwards develops his own psychocosm, psychogeography and magico-mystical system. In this sense I still agree with the definition of the LHP I have given in my first post one and a half year ago, namely that the best definition of the LHP to me is that one does not follow anyone or any fixed routes to enlightenment, but rather that one follows one’s own path. The Chaotick Path makes more sense. Amen.

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Óðinn and Chaos Magick

„Do I contradict myself? I embrace multitudes.” (Walt Whitman)

„Belief is the fall from the Absolute. What are you going to believe? Truth seeks its own negation. Different aspects are not the truth, nor are they necessary to truth. Of its emanations which are you to strangle at birth? Are you illegitimate? You believe in right and wrong— what punishment will you determine? Can you escape the driving ‘Must’?” (Austin Osman Spare: The Book of Pleasure (Self-Love)The Psychology of Ecstasy. For his self-portrait see above)

„We accept the proofs of Hume, Kant, Herbert Spencer, Fuller, and others of this thesis: The Ratiocinative Faculty or Reason of Man contains in its essential nature an element of self-contradiction.“ (Aleister Crowley: Equinox Vol 1 No 2)

Odin is the Chaos Magician of traditional Northern European belief who dares anything and everything in his quest for wisdom and knowledge. (Ian Read)

The magickal jouney is circular, spiral, and chaotick. Not linear, orderly and without regressions / set-backs. I looked for a Higher Order, but found thee chaotick Vision and the Void. The Voice from within the Silence that leads me on. The only answer is to ask more questions. The only truth is to become a question mark? The only path is to reject fixed systems and to create your own system – not to become trapped in the labyrinth of some other man. „I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create.“ (St. William Blake) The magickal journey can never be an easy one, because then it ceases to be an adventurous expedition into the unexpected and the Unknown. I wanted Tradition but found dead letters. Traditions are the old, empty exoskeletons of an ancient serpent that is always turning and shedding skin. People then worship the dead skin calling it „Tradition“ and do not see the breathing, beautiful serpent behind the outer forms. They do not ride the living snake to the ancient lake. This snake erupts from Ginnungagap, the Almighty Chaos – Mother of Matter and Aether. The truth of today is the lie of tomorrow. My realizations of the past are nothing I shall hang on to on my initiatory journey.

The personality, a mask of convenience, becomes stuck to the face. Eye becomes clouded by ‘I.’ The human spirit becomes a trivial mess of petty identifications. The most cherished principles are the greatest lies. ‘I think therefore I am.’ But what is ‘I’? The more you think, the more the I closes. Thinking, ‘I am alseep’; my I is blinded. The intellect is a sword, and its use is to prevent identification with any particular phenomenon encountered. The most powerful minds cling to the fewest fixed principles. The only clear view is from atop the mountain of your dead selves. “ (Carrol, Liber Null, p. 48)

All the persons I have been, all the masks I have born and all the clothes and ideologies I have worn are now torn – they are not me, but my „dead selves.“ This is a strange mystery: that the body that has been born is not the same body that will die. „This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.“ (AL I, 30) Our body cells are replaced a few times during our life. Yet there is an „I“, a feeling of self-ness all of the time (except you’re asleep or in uttermost ecstasy). Movement is a sign of SPIRITedness. We invent ourselves while we are moving through time and space. Otherwise „I“ will stagnate. But it has been written: Solve et coagula („Dissolve and Join Together“). No golden books are to be found but mystery. I wanted the answer. And I got it. Neatly boxed in perfect shape. Like a present from the devil. It looked ancient and impressive. Symbols of old were carved on it. This must be it! Do you think so? I tell you something: Wisdom is boring and costs 19.95 USD from Amazon.com.

Over the last years I have had kind of a troublesome relationship with Chaos Magick (CM). On the one hand it’s like I’ve been born for that current. Should I dare to say, I have been born by Chaos Magick? On the other hand there is an attitude of postmodern consumerism hidden in CM that I always rejected. I discarded CM a few times and like a boomerang it kept coming back to me. Not through books or the like, but from within. But I think my great antagonism has been the fact that I didn’t dare to trust mySelf in a deep sense. That’s why I always looked for some father figure“ in magick to lead me on my path. Jung called this a father imago, an inner picture, often an idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood. This was interrelated with my search for a coherent magickal system or ancient tradition. This in itself is not a bad thing when seen in the context of developmental stages of an initiatory journey. But of course the magickal arena is over-crowded with „gurus“ who would like to take over this role. In most cases not out of unselfish reasons, to say the least. However, being a hardcore sceptic and Anarch who asks too many questions I never really walked into this trap, except in a philosophical sense. This led me to call myself by such diverse names as Catholic, Nihilist, Anarchist, Aristocrat, Conservative, Thelemite, Buddhist, Gnostic, Pagan, folkish and universalist Ásatrúar, Odian, Libertarian, Tantric, Tradionalist, Futurist and so forth. The simple truth is that „I“ am „We“ and „We Are Legion“ (Carrol). Hence Anon. „This shall be your only proof. I forbid argument. Conquer! That is enough.“ (AL III, 11) Of course, I can find in all of my former positions and all the diverse worldviews I adopted something of value to me today. I learned from all these positions. They are like pieces of a puzzle to the most puzzling of all mysteries: my Self. That’s why, in hindsight, I think I’ve always been a Chaos Magician. In some sense I’ve even been a combination of an eclectic and a systematic „paradigmal pirate“, as Joshua Siddhartha Wetzel would have put it – but I haven’t been this in a conscious and deliberate way. And I don’t know if I will ever be. „In The Paradigmal Pirate, Joshua Wetzel made a distinction between eclectic and systematic paradigm piracy. Eclectic paradigm piracy is similar to religious syncretism, except that the resultant belief systems are temporary. Systematic paradigm pirates, on the other hand, tend to embrace existing belief systems as a whole, often pursuing official membership in organized religions or other groups.  Systematic paradigm pirates also often strive for strict orthodoxy in their chosen paradigms, and may appear indistinguishable from other adherents of that faith for the times that they are there. It is also not unusual for a paradigm pirate to use a combination of the two approaches.“ (Tsuzuki 26)

There are some fine chaosmagickal Grimoires out there, but true CM is your magick. Also, the situation in CM is changing and it becomes far more diverse in its approaches. And if one criticises paradigmal piracy, one has to acknowledge that not everything is bad about the current situation of being exposed to the „spiritual supermarket“ and using it to your own ends. People learn from different angles and eventually deepen their knowledge, when they stick to a tradition or they invent their own system (or both simultaneously). I tend to be a terrible fanatic whith my criticisms. Not everything in this age is bad. If you want to be a Viking today, become an astronaut and explore outer space! How many Americas, Africas and Australias are to be found there? Take of your viking clothes and don the astronaut spacesuits. Join the International Explorer’s Guild and reyn til Runa – seek the Unknown! „There is nothing new under the sun.“ (Ecclesiastes 1:9) Do you say so? Then seek out other suns in other solar systems! It’s so easy to be an anti-modernistic arsehole whilst enjoying all the freedoms of an age that is as interesting as hell! Men flying to the moon, communicating with people from all over the world by the click of a button, and a mankind that becomes slowly aware of the fact that Life is a vast and living, interdependent Intelligence System (ok, very slooowleey). Hopefully we will realize this before it’s too late for us. Billions of millions of years of evolution were necessary for us – the intelligent apes – to evolve on this planet and finally to become conscious of ourselves. Only to fuck up the whole situation and destroy ourselves by destroying our natural environment? If I may make a joke: Just consider Hegel’s Weltgeist, the world spirit, and its disappointment after billions of years of unfolding. No aim in history at all? No teleology? Really? Immanentize the Eschaton! Now!

Most amazing is this realization that everything that exists in the universe came from a common origin. The material of your body and the material of my body are intrinsically related because they emerged from and are caught up in a single energetic event. Our ancestry stretches back through the life forms and into the stars, back to the beginnings of the primeval fireball. This universe is a single multiform energetic unfolding of matter, mind, intelligence, and life. And all of this is new. None of the great figures of human history were aware of this. Not Plato, or Aristotle, or the Hebrew Prophets, or Confucius, or Thomas Aquinas, or Leibniz, or Newton, or any other world-maker. We are the first generation to live with an empirical view of the origin of the universe. We are the first humans to look into the night sky and see the birth of stars, the birth of galaxies, the birth of the cosmos as a whole. Our future as a species will be forged within this new story of the world. … To begin with, you will have to embrace your creative potential. The universe has unfolded to this point. It has poured into you the creative powers necessary for its further development. The journey of the cosmos depends on those creatures and elements existing now, you among them. For the unfolding of the universe, your creativity is as essential as the creativity inherent in the fireball. The human provides the space in which the universe feels its stupendous beauty. The universe shivers with wonder in the depths of the human. Do you see? … From the same place that everything comes from [we come from]. From the same place out of which the primeval fireball comes: an empty realm, a mysterious order of reality, a no-thing-ness that is simultaneously the ultimate source of all things.“ (Brian Swimme: The Universe is a Green Dragon)

The Germanic ancients called it Ginnungagap. But back to the matter at hand: chaos magick. Dead or alive. Devil or god. With gand or gun. Hidden or forbidden. I don’t care: just give me full gnosis tonight! It seems to me that though we can stick with a system, it’s more the attitude that’s important. Dave Lee wrote to me:

As for chaos magic, I see it as the premier critique of magical technique in the world today, and so I would unhesitatingly recommend elements of the chaos magic approach in any deep system of magical training. CM does not of course tend to adress issues outside of technique, and so there lies the need for a broader philosophy of life within which we weave our techniques.“

For me this philosophy is Chaos Heathenism. I hardly believe that one can build one’s magickal or spiritual philosophy on UPGs alone, though some do it and by doing so all too often only incorporate unknowingly the postmodern zeitgeist into their worldviews that reveals behind it a consumerist logic of late capitalism – the worst example being New Age. Considering the postmodern outlook of CM one shoud be aware that though POMO thought denies to follow the modernistic conception of „universal rules“ (of life, art, philosophy or anything else), it includes also the risk of fundamentalist relativism and an „epistemological hypochondria“ (Clifford Geertz), where „anything goes“ and where consequently real knowledge becomes impossible anymore. And as Dave Lee warns in Bright from the Well, postmodernism isn’t magic-friendly in the long run, because it doesn’t support any hierarchical levels of consciousness. Do the formulae of CM – to that I sometimes referred to as the „dark twin“ of the New Age – transcend that postmodern logic of consumerism with their battle call of Nothing is true, Everything is trance-mitted? Or do they replicate and reinforce that logic? This tension lies at the heart of many of the new forms of CM and cyberpaganism, „which in their own way reflect the ‘magical logic of late capitalism’. Are they merely reflections of an increasingly pluralistic, rapidly changing, hedonistic, and ‘chaotic’ consumer society? Or do they also offer the hope of breaking free of that culture? Does the quest for radical liberation from even the boundaries of the self really lead to any meaningful sort of freedom? Or has it simply transformed the ideas of ‘liberation’ and ‘transgression’ themselves into commodities that can be purchased for 19.95 US-Dollars from Amazon.com?“, the Tantric scholar Hugh B. Urban asks in his witty and interesting book Magia Sexualis – Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Modern Western Esotericism.

That’s why, I think, CM must become aware of this dilemma and move beyond mere spiritual consumerism (which the CM current does, I observe). We should respect the traditions we encounter, especially when they are still alive (like some shamanic cultures). We can be respectless to their dogmas and superstitions in our own magickal work. We can discard what does not work for us, but not by disrespecting the peoples and their cultures from where we have taken the symbolism / methods / tools. This applies, of couse, also to the Runic tradition and our own ancestors and their culture in which the Runes originated. To decontextualise and universalise shamanic systems is in essence what New Age ideology does, which is nothing but the internalized cultural matrix of late capitalism projected forth into the sublime realms of spirituality. (I hope you survive so much intellectual „leftism.“)

It’s good to be aware of this when one employs the Chaos approach to whatever tradition one is working with. In my case, of course, the tradition is the Runic one. The question how the approaches of Chaos Magick and the Germanic Tradition inform eachother is hard to answer and probably can only be answered or worked out individually.The contraditions between these two currents are apparent. But the deep connections are hidden – as all secret knowledge in magick. I as a Chaos Heathen unite these two different currents in a kind of Dagazian paradox. „Chaos Heathenism is our philosophy. Heathenism is the spiritual harbour from which we sail, but like chaos magicians we are creative and irreverent and are not afraid to explore all manner of strange new oceans. In this we identify with the spirit that inspired so many Viking expeditions, as well as the far-reaching web of our ancestor’s trade routes and travails.” (Henry / Harigast)

My suggestion here is that the magician can walk in Óðinn’s footsteps, but at the same time s/he dares to explore new corners of the spirit and cutting edge magick. This is in accordance with the Óðinnic example to leave no stone unturned in your quest for wisdom and knowledge. As a Rune Magician called Thomas Wade Curtis said to me three years ago on Rune-Net: „Whatever you have learned from any source – if found useful – will become a tool. You will carve your own path with that tool and the insight gained. I believe you can learn from all paths, as in Chaos, stripping the wheat from the chaff, and deriving the essential technique and goal, from said path/practice, and then apply it to your current.“ The magician who travels Óðinn’s path, to praphrase Crowley, walks
with his head in the clouds and his feet firmly on the ground… and seeks restlessly, like the Chaos Star points out, in all directions for Her – Miss Unknown. The Chaos Star itself, if imposed on Midgard (the magician’s self) on the Yggdrasil pattern as shown in Nine Doors of Midgard, could symbolise the expanding or travelling of the self into the eight directions of the other eight worlds.

A chaos magician from Berlin once told me that if the phrase Nothing is true is true, then this sentence itself is untrue. Such an interpretation opens up a completely different perspective, I think. He also told me that to him chaos magicians, if they get beyond the obvious and deeper into the mysteries, should realize at some pont that shifting paradigms (or paradigmal piracy) has the purpose to discover that all magick derives from within the psyche, not an external symbol system. It’s not an end in itself and to think otherwise is to get stuck in a postmodern illusion, he assumed. However, creating your own system seems to me to be a worthy task for every seeker on his magickal path of individuation. Interstingly only a few magicians ever dedicate to the task of developing their own system of magick in a conscious and deliberate way. Finally, I’d like to quote Frater Stokastikos 127 and thus „reveal“ my aspiration in magick beside falling in love with Miss Terry, also known as Mystery.

Chaos, the life force of the universe, is not human-hearted. Therefore the wizard cannot be human-hearted when he seeks to tap the force of the universe. He performs monstrous and arbitrary acts to loosen the hold of human limitations upon himself. The magical life demands the abandonment of comfort, conventionality, security and safety — for competition, combat, extremes, and adversity are needed to produce higher resolutions and personal evolution. An air of desperation is required in a life lived close to the edge. One must be living by one’s wits. In a stagnant environment the body-mind creates its own adversity — disease and fantasy. Only in extremes can the spirit discover itself. A fluid environment is required as a vessel for magical consciousness. Only a fluid environment can conform to beliefs about it and be subject to the subtle magic forces. Only in mutable circumstances can divination come into its own. Therefore abandon all fixed patterns of residence, employment, relationship and taste. Among the titles of Kia is Anon. Anon freely transmogrifies its arbitrary personality, refusing any identity defined by its environment. Residing in the ultimate freedom possible on the plane of illusion, it has choice of duality. Everything which exists for it is a form of desire, for this is the universe in which it willed to incarnate. If this were believed to be either heaven or hell one would feel free to do anything. It is only the fear it is neither which imprisons us. The idea of mind or ego as a fixed attribute or possession of Self is illusory. All that can be said of Kia is that the amount of meaning one experiences is proportional to Kia’s manifestation in one’s circumstances. Kia is felt as meaningfulness, power, genius, and ecstasy in action. Outside of this nothing is true. The wizard doeth as he wilt on this illusory plane, knowing that nothing is more important than anything else and that anything he does is only a gesture. He is thus free to do anything as though it mattered to him. Acting without lust of result, he achieves his will. In the arena of Anon compete numerous selves, souls, familiar spirits, demons, obsessions, and an infinity of possible experiences. Each game is short, and then the pieces are hurled through death into unrecognizable new configurations. Only the style and spirit of Anon’s play survive transmogrification, unless the aetheric body has achieved great integration. “ (Carrol, Liber Null, p. 67-68)




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Death is not an end

This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. (AL I, 30)  The Perfect and the Perfect are one Perfect and not two; nay, are none!  Nothing is a secret key of this law. (AL I, 45 – 46)

In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder! (Hubert Veðrfölnir)

Life behaves as if it were going on. The universe behaves as if Gods exist. The Psyche is not bound by the laws of time and space…

“I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full. As well might ye say anything else of nothingness, as for instance, white is it, or black, or again, it is not, or it is. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution.

CREATURA is not in the pleroma, but in itself. The pleroma is both beginning and end of the created beings. It pervadeth them, as the light of the sun everywhere pervadeth the air. Although the pleroma pervadeth altogether, yet hath created being no share thereof, just as a wholly transparent body becometh neither light nor dark through the light which pervadeth it. We are, however, the pleroma itself, for we are a part of the eternal and the infinite. But we have no share thereof, as we are from the pleroma infinitely removed; not spiritually or temporally, but essentially, since we are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence as creatura, which is confined within time and space.

Yet because we are parts of the pleroma, the pleroma is also in us. Even in the smallest point is the pleroma endless, eternal, and entire, since small and great are qualities which are contained in it. It is that nothingness which is everywhere whole and continuous. Only figuratively, therefore, do I speak of created being as part of the pleroma. Because, actually, the pleroma is nowhere divided, since it is nothingness. We are also the whole pleroma, because, figuratively, the pleroma is the smallest point (assumed only, not existing) in us and the boundless firmanent about us. But wherefore, then, do we speak of the pleroma at all, since it is thus everything and nothing?

I speak of it to make a beginning somewhere, and also to free you from the delusion that somewhere, either without or within, there standeth something fixed, or in some way established, from the beginning. Every so-called fixed and certain thing is only relative. That alone is fixed and certain which is subject to change.

What is changeable, however, is creatura. Therefore is it the one thing which is fixed and certain; because it hath qualities: it is even quality itself.

The question ariseth: How did creatura originate? Created beings came to pass, not creatura: since created being is the very quality of the pleroma, as much as non-creation which is the eternal death. In all times and places is creation, in all times and places is death. The pleroma hath all, distinctiveness and non-distinctiveness.

Distinctiveness is creatura. It is distinct. Distinctivness is its essence, and therefore it distinguisheth. Wherefore also he distinguished qualities of the pleroma which are not. He distinguisheth them out of his own nature. Therefore he must speak of qualities of the pleroma which are not.

What use, say ye, to speak of it? Saidst thou not thyself, there is no profit in thinking upon the pleroma?

That said I unto you, to free you from the delusion that we are able to think about the pleroma. When we distinguish qualities of the pleroma, we are speaking from the ground of our own distinctiveness and concerning our own distinctiveness. But we have said nothing concerning the pleroma. Concerning our own distinctiveness, however, it is needful to speak, whereby we may distinguish ourselves enough. Our very nature is distinctiveness. If we are not true to this nature we do not distinguish ourselves enough. Therefore must we make distinctions of qualities.

What is the harm, ye ask, in not distinguishing oneself? If we do not distinguish, we get beyond our own nature, away from creatura. We fall into indistinctiveness, which is the other quality of the pleroma. We fall into the pleroma itself and cease to be creatures. We are given over to dissolution in nothingness. This is the death of the creature. Therefore we die in such measure as we do not distinguish. Hence the natural striving of the creature goeth towards distinctiveness, fighteth against primeval, perilous sameness. This is called the PRINCIPIUM INDIVIDUATIONIS. This principle is the essence of the creature. From this you can see why indistictiveness and non-distinction are a great danger for the creature.

We must, therefore, distinguish the qualities of the pleroma. The qualities are PAIRS OF OPPOSITES, such as:

The Effective and the ineffective.
Fullness and Emptiness.
Living and Dead.
Difference and Sameness.
Light and Darkness.
The Hot and the Cold.
Force and Matter.
Time and Space.
Good and Evil.
Beauty and Ugliness.
The One and the Many.

The pairs of opposites are qualities of the pleroma which are not, because each balanceth each. As we are the pleroma itself, we also have all these qualities in us. Because the very ground of our nature is distinctiveness, which meaneth:

  1. These qualities are distinct and separate in us one from the other; therefore they are not balanced and void, but are effective. Thus are we the victims of the pairs of opposites. The pleroma is rent in us.
  1. The qualities belong to the pleroma, and only in the name and sign of distinctiveness can and must we possess and live them. We must distinguish ourselves from qualities. In the pleroma they are balanced and void; in us not. Being distinguished from them delivereth us.

When we strive after the good or the beautiful, we thereby forget our own nature, which is disinctiveness, and we are delivered over to the qualities of the pleroma, which are pairs of opposites. We labor to attain the good and the beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and the ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely, into nothingness and dissolution.

Thou sayest, ye object, that difference and sameness are also qualities of the pleroma. How would it be, then, if we strive after difference? Are we, in so doing, not true to our own nature? And must we none the less be given over to the sameness when we strive after difference?

Ye must not forget that the pleroma hath no qualities. We create them through thinking. If, therefore, ye strive after difference or sameness, or any qualities whatsoever, ye pursue thoughts which flow to you out of the pleroma: thoughts, namely, concerning non-existing qualities of the pleroma. Inasmuch as ye run after these thoughts, ye fall again into the pleroma, and reach difference and sameness at the same time. Not your thinking, but your being, is distinctiveness. Therefore not after difference, ye think it, must ye strive; but after YOUR OWN BEING. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely, the striving after your own being. If ye had this striving ye would not need to know anything about the pleroma and its qualities, and yet would ye come to your right goal by virtue of your own being. Since, however, thought estrangeth from being, that knowledge must I teach you wherewith ye may be able to hold your thought in leash. … God is not dead; he is as much alive as ever. God is the created world, inasmuch as he is something definite and therefore he is differentiated from the Pleroma. God is a quality of the Pleroma and everything that I have stated in reference to the created world is equally true of him.

God is distinguished from the created world, however, inasmuch as he is less definite and less definable than the created world in general. He is less differentiated than the created world, because the ground of his being is effective fullness; and only to the extent that he is definite and differentiated is he identical with the created world; and thus he is the manifestation of the effective fullness of the Pleroma.

Everything that we do not differentiate falls into the Pleroma and is cancelled out along with its opposite. Therefore if we do not discern God, then the effective fullness is cancelled out for us. God also is himself the Pleroma, even as every smallest point within the created world, as well as within the uncreated realm, is itself of the Pleroma.

The effective emptiness is the being of the Devil. God and Devil are the first manifestations of the nothingness, which we call the Pleroma. It does not matter whether the Pleroma is or is not, for it cancels itself out in all things. The created world, however, is different. Inasmuch as God and Devil are created beings, they do not cancel each other out, rather they stand against each other as active opposites. We need no proof of their being ; it is sufficient that we must always speak about them. Even if they did not exist, the created being would forever (because of its own differentiated nature) bring them for out of the Pleroma.

All things which are brought forth from the Pleroma by differentiation are pairs of opposites; therefore God always has with him the Devil.

This interrelationship is so close, as you have learned, it is so indissoluble in your own lives, that it is even as the Pleroma itself. The reason for this is that these two stand very close to the Pleroma, in which all opposites are cancelled out and unified.” (C. G. Jung 1916: The Seven Sermons to the Dead)

Listen to the message of a modern prophet: Carl Gustav Jung.

There can be many reasons and triggers that can wake you up — wake you up to that kind of awareness, where the higher and hidden levels of the spectrum of human consciousness are experienced. I can remember a week some years ago, when I fasted for five days (no food at all, but much water and juice) and I meditated a lot and did other spiritual excercises from Crowley’s curriculum. And in one moment I realized my mind was so clear that I thought to myself: “How can life be any different again? It’s so easy to attain such a clear mind. I will never loose it again.” Believe me, it’s easier to fall asleep than to wake up again. The mind is such a tricky and sneaky thing! I guess nothing is easier than to travel the road of life asleep until one dies. Hence the need for a spiritual discipline. Nothing else helps. I tried it. Pills, thrills, drills and stuff that kills. But only slow and steady wins the race. Not the extreme and radical, but the golden middle. Neither this master nor that teaching, neither this order nor that secret ritual, neither this drug nor that technique. All that is needed is Here, all the that you have is the Now, the only one who can do the Work is you. “Who is the Great Master that makes the grass green?” You, the silent Watcher, you, the Ultimate Observer.

However, some times are special, when we feel that Wyrd leads us and just everything falls into place. Such times are often characterized by unusual events, books you find or get, people you meet, things you discover, music you hear and all kinds of weird / wyrd synchronicities.

There are many songs I remember that influenced me during that time of sheer beauty and madness. (Literally one friend of mine later had a psychosis, because the things we were experiencing and ‘consuming’ were just too much and too heavy.) Two songs I remember vividly and still love are Fokstua Hall and Svartálfar by Fire + Ice (like many other songs by this magical band) and now I found out that Sweyn has written these two songs! Things like that are magical, meaningful and empowering on a personal level, because it gives one’s life a direction and purpose. They confirm on a personal level that you were and are on the right track.

The Inmost Light and This Shining Shining World (read the text below) are my favourite songs by the band Current 93, a band that was also very important on my path for some time. This Shining Shining World kind of ‘converted’ me with the help of magic mushrooms and the Tibetan Book of the Dead from nihilism to the beauty and awe of Mystery. And thus I broke on through to the other side that greeted me behind the dead end of existentialism, which I thought (in my youthful arrogance and ignorance at age 15) was the last answer to all questions. But since I could gaze at the spinning of the Wyrd Sisters on “the other side” (or behind the curtain and beneath the obvious) I decided to open up to the possibility of magic and pantheism. To put it rather roughly: I concluded that we may be — maybe — more than a chunk of meat. Since then my interest for mysticism and the Occult became a vital part of my life. I came to know, rather than to believe (like Mr. Jung, listen to his words above), that we are more than we seem. The idea that there are secrets which are eternal mysteries — that is what I am interested in. And I am still going. Still seeking…

(In this process after having been a member of a rather known occult franternity I came to be opposed to so-called occultism, because the occultists assert that there are secrets, but what they think of as mysteries are rather conventional things that I now put in my pocket. These people just make any arbitrary thing a secret and simply conceal it from you for the sake of keeping it a secret to manipulate people or to simply create a commodity and they will tell you that these “secrets” can only be revealed to you if you become a member of this group, read this book or do something along those lines. This is utter nonsense. True mystery does not belong to anyone nor can it be taught, shown, revealed or attained.)

However, since then I was touched by the Ansuz flame. And I remember that when I had my second trip and looked through the Looking-Glass I did my first Staða of Dagaz — my absolutely most beloved Rune and the central mystery of a certain God, who is said to be a great Poet, Magician and Master of ecstatic Consciousness.

“But to love me is better than all things: if under the night-stars in the desert thou presently burnest mine incense before me, invoking me with a pure heart, and the Serpent flame therein, thou shalt come a little to lie in my bosom. For one kiss wilt thou then be willing to give all; but whoso gives one particle of dust shall lose all in that hour. … Put on the wings, and arouse the coiled splendour within you: come unto me!” (AL I, 61).

Since then I had only one sincere wish: to seek for spiritual liberation. Sounds naive, probably. But who doesn’t want to be free? Free from what, one is inclined to ask? Freedom is a myth, the Buddhist Master and Tantric teacher of “Crazy Wisdom”, Chögyam Trungpa, once said (in: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism). By showing, in true Buddhist fashion, the interdependence of everything that exists, the dependence of any thing on some other thing is demonstrated (pratītyasamutpāda = „dependent origination“), including the ego, resulting in the realization that all things are ‘void’ or empty of any characteristic. So freedom in the way the usual Westerner imagines it doesn’t exist according to the philosophy of Shunyata (“Emptiness”), invented by the Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna (c. 150 – 250 CE). Though I’ve always been humbled and fascinated by Buddhist philosophy (not knowing a lot about it), I reject its world- and life-denying implications. That’s why I’m mostly interested in the Left-Hand Path manifestations of Tantric Buddhism and of the manifold sects (used here in a positive sense) of the complex religious phenomenon in India that the British colonials called rather unimaginatively “Hinduism”. Already Crowley observed:

“The essence of the Tantric cults is that by performance of certain rites of Magick, one does not only escape disaster, but obtains positive benediction. The Tantric is not obsessed with the will-to die. … [H]e implicitly denies the proposition that existence is sorrow and he formulates the postulate … that means exist by which the universal sorrow … may be unmasked.” (Crowley, in: Grant 1991 [1971]: The Magical Revival)

So freedom for an orthodox Buddhist or a Gnostic was reached when they were freed in a state of bliss (Nirvana or Heaven), delivered “from the body of Death” (Saint Paul). For a Tantric (spiritual) freedom was already here, for those who were strong, determined and courageous enough to grasp it. It is reached by developing what the chaos magician Julian Wilde once called Vajra Awareness. My brother and me had lastly a conversation and we were talking about god(s), the world(s) and all that stuff and then I misheard what he said, when a car drove by. And what I heard was: “In the centre of the cosmos there is no throne, but the sound of thunder!” Kaos Keraunos Kybernetosthe: The Chaos Thunderbolt Steers All Things. To hear the thunder and the silence at once, to see with the all-pentrating eye of the true nature of the mind, it is necessary to reach vajra awareness:


“The first necessary (and much misunderstood) stance is the need to remain ‘centred’, self-aware, to retain one’s ‘spirit’, … to seek an uninterrupted stream of consciousness/awareness whatever may happen, be it calamity, death or rebirth/becomings. It is a channelling process/tendency, an identification of the self as separate/disengaged from the rest of the universe.

The second is the need to transcend the human view-point, to realise the narrowness, arrogance and ultimate impotence of one’s present perception and to seek a re-alignment of one’s will/vision to that of the universe/void/chaos flow. It is a diffusing process, an identification with something larger than the human perspective (that can, unchecked or abused, lead to false bliss, a nirvanic torpor, a capitulation of drive/energy).

Held/practised together these two polar opposites create a third, highest stance. As usual the tantrists have a word for it. The word ‘vajra’ or ‘dorje’ can either mean a diamond ie- that which is compact/focused, symmetrical/crystalised, unbreakable, immutable, untarnishable (part of the drive to eros/control, order, possession) or a thunderbolt ie- that which is frightening, all-powerful, ego-destructive, disintegrating (part of the drive to thanatos/disorder, ego-death). ‘Vajra’ therefore may also be held to mean both stances (diamond-eros and thunderbolt-thanatos) together/simultaneously. This captures nicely the feel of the third stance so let us call it the vajra-awareness. As a bolt of lightning (the thunderbolt) strikes the earth, swift, random, brilliant (ILLUMINATING!), so too must the vajra-awareness be instantly in response, cultivated to be active/reactive to changing emotional states, rebirths, disasters and environments, being one with the lightning, being the lightning, flowing at one with all but retaining the diamond-hard yet infinitely flexible self-ness in the midst of conditions, manifestaions and becomings. The vajra-awareness is what it touches yet it retains its self-ness, wherever it alights there is totality and purity, where it is not are ignorance and eventual suffering.

The vajra-awareness, then is a conscious integration/inter-action with all that is – an eternal balance between self-knowing/posession and immersion in the ceaseless flux of the universe. (Julian Wilde 1999: The Grimoire of Chaos Magick)

This is what has to be done. One of the most important tasks of that Great Work is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. In terms of Germanic Soul-Lore this part of the Magician’s Psyche is called the Fylgja or Fetch. It can be contacted by certain methodologies like this one. The relationship to that entity (HGA, Augoides, Dæmon, Genius, “Totem”, Deep Mind or Fylgja) is a vital part of one’s initiatory process. The HGA / Fylgja is often thought of as a non-human intelligence or a seperate being that carries in it all the ancestors’ pasts and holds the individual’s fate.

“As to why such a relationship is vital to cultivate, even in early stages of one’s Rune Work, that’s perhaps easier.  I’d say that the idea of the complex, multifaceted Self — the plural Soul — is one that is absolutely key to deep understanding of and practical work with the Northern Mysteries (and Indo-European mysticism in general). It’s also one of the ideas that has been most thoroughly abolished from the modern, materialist concept of the self.  We clearly yearn for it though, and it consistently emerges in pop culture and fantasy literature (think of the daemons in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series, and I’m sure other examples will come to light).  It is a very difficult task to learn to think of ‘One’s Selves’ rather than ‘Oneself,’ but when we can do so, we come to know, rather than to believe, that we are more than we seem.  And we move farther and faster along the road of personal transformation in the Germanic Tradition.” (Ristandi)

Such a transpersonal guide is hidden in the soul-complex and to be discovered by those who travel along the Runic pathways that lead down, around and up the Tree. This part of the Soul is non-local in the sense of quantum mind. To say it more accurately: it’s here in Midgard and there in Asgard simultaneously — the ‘Realm’ of Awakened Consciousness that might be (according to “metaphysics of ‘substance'”) / do (according to “all things flow”-process philosophy) in non-local ‘hyper-space’ beyond time, connected with the other eight worlds of the map of the multiverse, f.e. as represented by the Chaos Star (the multi-directional expansion of consciousness from a central still-point). Um mik ok í mér Ásgarðr ok Miðgarðr! From the point of view of the Germanic Soul-Lore, that C. G. Jung helped to dig up, this entity, the Fylgja, does not die because it already exists in an eternal dimension not bound by the laws of time and space, like Jung already suggested. And, apparently, most cosmological and psychological maps, especially those influenced by shamanic lore, implied something along those lines. Michael Kelly, who worked a lot with the Celtic soul model, says:

“We may now gain a perspective on what may cause an active shade or ghost to linger, if an attachment is still felt toward a loved one who embodied the deceased’s Other on the physical plane. But as I considered the soul in the context of Desire, I realised that the féin does not pass from this world into the magical realms upon physical death. Why not? Because it is already there and it always has been. The sense of Self is not and has never been bound to the physical body. Even in the most dull and unimaginative of people, it indulges in daydreams, it dreams while the body sleeps and it creates new worlds within the imagination. The féin resides permanently in the magical realms and it interfaces with the physical body through the other parts of the soul that we have described. Upon death, it draws several of those parts back to itself to one degree or another.”(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis)

In Sweyn Plowright’s book True Helm Ian Read puts forth the idea (in the foreword) that upon following the guidelines in this book “you may create such a strong being (that we call hamingja) and may even, upon death, join those greatest warriors … in Valhalla.”  Ultimately, I come to understand it in such a way that the Hamingja — the life force and soul power of the magician — may become so strong in the process of individuation that even upon death it will survive.

“But exceed! exceed! Strive ever to more! and if thou art truly mine — and doubt it not, and if thou art ever joyous! — death is the crown of all. Ah! Ah! Death! Death! thou shalt long for death. Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee. The length of thy longing shall be the strength of its glory. He that lives long & desires death much is ever the King among the Kings.” (AL II, 71 – 74)

So, from a Germanic point of view, the Fylgja (unique to an individual, but nevertheless completely independent of him / her) and the Hamingja (later to become associated with one’s indwelling luck) are (semi-)autonomous ‘entities’ and yet portions of the individual’s psyche that are immune to physical death. What happens to the Self? Can it unite with the Fylgja and Hamingja? Does it continue to exist after death, like Kelly suggests in his Celtic soul model? Or is it rather an illusion as suggested in the teachings of Nagarjuna and as expressed in the idea of pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination)? I don’t know, fellow traveler. It’a Mystery hidden in your Soul. Seek it!

“Consider the lillies of the field…” (Matt. 6: 28)
Consider the carnage and massacre
Consider the love and embraces
Consider the hangingred skies
Consider the pain of your enemy
Consider the hatred of your friend
There, oh there, there is the land
All the musics shall combine
All the daughters are no longer brought low
They are araised
In brightfiregodgiven they rejoice
And those who deny this world
Is the soul of the unbroken one
Lie
This is indeed Paradise
(Come I shall show you where
The stars give birth and sleep)
And all around you is the warm bluegreen breath of heavens
Do not fear
Around you is the vast blueblack space of stars
Do not fear
This is the great ocean
On which the endless waves crash down
God is not dead
There is no death I say
(Come I shall show you where
Dreams go to when they die)
Hurry now; the sun is descending
The shadows wait to play

Current 93, Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre — The Broken Heart Of Man (1994)

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Thor Says: Invoke With Laughter

Donovan and I celebrated a truly marvellous Thorrablot yesterday. One of the most brilliant ritual experiences I’ve ever had – we’re on such a strong shared wavelength and what an honour it is to know him.

I arose early. I packed a delicious organic lunch of red beans in pasta/tomato sauce, chopped carrot, almonds, and sauerkraut. We ended up mixing these together with surprisingly delicious results when lunch time arrived.

I drove out to Donovan’s place. That morning, suddenly inspired, he had made a beautifully carved Mjolnir from wood, a hefty hammer, an offering for us to give. Armed with mead and drinking horn, we drove to a National Park by the sea.

We spent the drive talking about our hopes, desires, lives, people we know; about our creative, health, spiritual, hobby, and financial goals.

We walked for an hour or more through exquisite forest, over dizzying ocean cliffs, the sea vast and majestic, the trees all wise and all wit.

We came to our secret location, a gigantic flat rock which perches, secluded and stolidly precarious, on the cliff face, overlooking vast ocean vistas. How to find this rock? The almost-hidden trail is marked from the main path by two trees which, if seen from the correct angle, one behind the other, form an Elhaz stave shape. Elhaz: perhaps it invokes the sacred space which is open and closed all at once.

We meditated, bare feet; let the distant, epic sea song wash away our petty conscious thoughts. We knew what we wanted this ritual to be from our conversations in car and forest. To invite Thor to help us renew the momentum of spirit in our lives, to drive out the frosty barbs of negativity and boredom and renew the membrane of magic. We let this hope flow through our beings, through the rocks, the trees, the clouds, the sea.

When it felt right the ritual began, in such a way that we scarcely even noticed that we were in it. We joked and played, laughing (with compassion) about the stiffness and artificiality that some folk fall into on ceremonial occasions – so anxious to get it “right” that they cramp up and lose the spirit of the thing. Not us; we called and hollered, half serious, half in parody, but we could feel that our deities were warmly inclined to our spirit of joy.

I sang and screeched and howled and Donovan roared. We told snappy tales about Thor’s many fine qualities, of his travelling companions, of our desire to uncover the magic in our lives that makes us joyous even amid the imperfect drudgery that seems always ready to swamp our days.

Three brilliant phrases emerged as we seethed and celebrated.

Wyrd trumps Will

This gem came to me in my meditation. I have in the past (and well after I should have known better) had this idea that if I fill myself with enough magic then with my power-bloated ego I can blast the hard things in my life into halcyon dream-perfection. Clearly a notion that can lead to disappointment!

What crystallised as I meditated was something I’ve explored several times recently with brilliant people in my life – that we don’t get to live a richly magical, spirited life only after we’ve cleared away all the sources of drudge and struggle.

No, the best way is to call on the magic in the midst of life’s hard work, to have the courage and creativity and humour to find magic even amidst the awesome mundanity of dealing with the ignorant, foolish, and petty (at some level that means all of us); in dealing with the unrelenting challenges of work and money and stale repetition and I-never-have-enough-time.

So go with wyrd, don’t try to fill your will up with numinous force, you’ll just waste it in exhausting struggle. Instead work with wind, tide, and wit. Cut with the grain, dance when you are tempted to stomp grumpily. Empty yourself and you cannot be drained – be a conduit, there’s an endless supply of magic that just desperately wants to be tapped into idiosyncratic human channels. It might or might not produce what you think you need, but there is a good chance it will produce what you actually need. Let yourself be curious. Radically curious. Let yourself be bewildered and surprised.

Then in our ritual playfulness a second phrase emerged.

Invoke with Laughter

Chaos magicians tend to think that laughter is the best way to banish magical moments, spirits, spells, states of mind, anything. Yet in certain senses (not all) this could actually be a very dry, grey, boring, ugly idea. Could it potentially imply that magic has to be pompous, serious, over-stuffed, strained, redundantly effortful – in a word, insincere, in a word, dishonest – in order to be summoned? What an awful notion seems to potentially coil implicit in the notion of banish with laughter!

We, on the other hand, we invoked with laughter. We joked about ourselves, people we know, about our gods, and they joked with us and on us, and it was exquisite. Cascading joy flooded the mounting force of our ritual, which had no distinct beginning but just came into tide when it wanted, as we gave it space to do so (a nice example of wyrd trumps will in action). And Thor is one of the most mirthful figures I can think of, a truly joyous force in the world: who better to call with hilarity?

We talked about Thurisaz, its recent recurring wyrd appearances in Donovan’s life. We agreed that we like this rune, with its scary reputation and its heart of gold. Thurisaz is like Hagalaz or Nauthiz – it invites a reality check and people are afraid of that and avoid – to their cost, or more accurately, to their loss.

And Laguz kept appearing in syncronicitous ways throughout the day, the sea rune, the rune of hidden riches and mystery! Of terror, and fury, and utter confusion, and yet also of “silk and gold and reveries of graciousness” (Nietzsche).

And goats! Thor has a close connection to goats. We celebrated how knowing, collected, assured, adaptable, tricky, durable, flexible, and just plain weird goats are. Nobody messes with Goat. Goat is low key. Goat doesn’t gab his mouth when he should be silent. Goat doesn’t give away his full abilities, doesn’t show his hand out of narcissism or insecurity. Goat keeps it real. Goat is permanently, impeccably unflappable. Goat keeps the magic of its membrane in flourishing order. Goat knows that horns are to be worn, not goofily tooted. What a truly awesome role model.

Ritual, not Routine

Then the third phrase came, and it was a verbal crack of thunder as it sprang from Donovan’s lips: Ritual, not Routine. Yes! Let’s not have lives of routine: numb, stupid, clanking, ornery, dogmatic. Repetition can also be playful, flowing, artful, even creative. It can have rhythm and flow and wit. We can move through all the “must do this” tasks of life with hang-dog heads, or with halos of fire and supple limbs (in a casual/subtle/low key way if you want of course).

It’s all in how you let yourself attach meaning to the things that unfold. Change the meaning, change yourself…well, who knows what sort of brilliant consequences that might have (you might not even notice them)?

Ritual, not Routine applies literally to the art of doing ritual observance – and we were doing ritual, not empty rote motions! It was sacred play. And this goes beyond into all of life. The whole of life is potentially a ritual: improvised, filled with joy, serendipity, learning, healing, growth, courage, and patience in the face of challenge. We forget this at our peril, falling into the factory farm of our own dullness. Yet it takes so little to stay – in the dance, in the joyous.

“Love life” is not an item to be checked off on some to-do list, some roster of accomplishments. And it has nothing to do with the arbitrary turning of events. In this we aligned ourselves with a tradition that stretches from Lao Tzu (and earlier) to Cicero and even to Nietzsche, yet without any self-consciousness or reflective pomposity: that to love this life is wonder, is its own reward, is nourishment complete. That we find love for life when we give love, not when we churlishly try to force life into the shape that we ignorantly think is best for us. After all, in an infinitely complex universe, who can really be sure of what is best for them anyway?

And to those who disapprove of our light feet: perhaps you need a dose of Nietzsche’s fröhliche wissenschaft, his gay science, his dancing seriousness and courageous frivolity. Being ponderous and heavy has nothing to do with being profound. Let yourself embrace the vulnerability and power of dedication and play admixed!

We drank toasts of delicious mead, charged with lashings of chanted Thurisaz runes. We laughed and prayed and affirmed and quaffed. We drenched the hammer and offered it up, our sacrifice. We splashed mead on rock, tree, sky, sea, cloud, every hidden delight of that sacred place. We offered our gratitude liberally.

We ate our lunch happily. We talked to spirits of stone and wood on our walk back through the forest, the mead sending us into buoyant clairvoyance and exuberant inspiration.

We talked and ate into the night, and sang, and played music, and warmed ourselves in the glow of family and dogs and the full moon, and laughed at the limp literalism that sometimes haunts folk that call themselves Heathens, and marvelled at the privilege we’ve been given to flow so easily into the spirit of things (and vice versa).

And I have to re-emphasise – nothing said here takes away the reality of the challenge and difficulty that life presents. If we try to force spirituality into being a magic bullet for the ease of our burdens then chances are good it will not long tolerate our presumptuousness, our pandering to our ego’s fear of suffering (which is not a trivial thing, but nonetheless which need not be made the maxim of our actions).

The trick might be to get beyond the mole-vision of bean-counting one’s entire life into allotments of effort (lots) and ease (never enough). There is no guarantee that any of us will see out our journey in the way we’d consciously most prefer, but with our eyes fixed on the horizon (and not on our feet) our chances are that much improved, and the toil of the path might be somewhat lessened (and if not then so be it – we are here to learn, so let’s not miss whatever opportunities we are given).

All such caveats aside, I want to express my profound gratitude for these fine gifts, these three principles of religious/magical/cultural practice…and for living life, too:

Wyrd trumps Will
Invoke with Laughter
Ritual, not Routine

I pray I remember, and keep living out my remembrance, of these terrible, wonderful thoughts.

Hail Thor!

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The Mystical ‘Not’

Not [the word as such], in this case, represents Crowley’s Qabalistic Zero, defined as 0=2. It is the Fool of the Tarot. It is a condition of Being unbound and unfettered, utterly outside of time and space. Thus it is not part of the Universe as we Understand it, it is the Absolute … It can be given no coherent definition, hence it is No-Thing, Nothing. It is every potential and possibility which we have within ourselves but have not yet made manifest. Thus it is all that … implies the omnijective perspective. … [W]e ourselves contain this Absolute and are Nothing, for we our Essence is not bound by the Universe.

‘There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not’ — The declaration taken as a whole has two meanings, one obvious and one esoteric:

1. All of time and space, i.e. eternity and infinity, is imprinted with your presence and influence.

2. There exists a timeless Void in which you are All-Potential.”

(Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis, p.172/3)

 


“And if all things come from One Thing, then send your prayers to the Sun.” Boyd Rice


Everything is one, when 0=2, I pondered once, when I first grasped Crowley’s idea of the mystical Nothing, Zero or the Tarot trump The Fool. I remember that realization very vividly. My friend Henrik and me were on a trip, on shroooms, in the woods and he quoted a sentence from a Current 93 song: “Nothing shall fresh spring again.” And I said: “Isn’t that rather heavily pessimistic?” And he went: “No, don’t you get it? It’s about Nothing of which All springs.” Well, I’m quiet sure that the band was talking about apocalyptic visions and meant literally what they said. But with an overdose of Crowley and magic mushrooms things can connect quiet differently in your brain. However, it’s also encoded in the Qabalistic Ain and I think it’s behind the Germanic idea of the “magically charged Void”, Ginnungagap. The equation of the mystic then might be 2=0, changing duality into No-Thing, uniting duality, transcending the whole show (of duality and thus illusion), as it were, by returning to the source of all, to the primordial state of being (or non-being?). God to some (monists and monotheists), shunyata (’emptiness’) to others (Buddhists). In Qabalistic terms it means to return to the Abode of the Nous, the higher triad of the Tree of Life (‘City of the Pyramids’), where the spiritual world, the Real, which is ideal, is seperated from the material one, the Unreal, which is actual (in neo-platonic thought). Hence the world-denying tendency in mystical currents (not all currents). The magician, in turn, plays with duality, with Maya, with Ginnung, or Chaos — an undifferentiated ether that longs to be formed into substance by the will of the magician. (Of course, this division between the mystic and the magician is arbitrary and unnecessary.)

“Ginnung or Ginning becomes a word for ‘delusion’ at a certain point in Old Norse. One of the sections of the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson is called the Gylfa-ginning, usually translated Gylfi’s Delusion. But in the Rig Veda we see that Maya is the creative power wielded by Varuna, who with his pashas [bonds] can bind or loosen, destroy or create anything he can imagine. In both cases what we are dealing with is the idea that this is ‘powerful stuff — and power can equal mortal danger. In essence Ginnung is the undifferentiated energy/matter which preexists creation, and which underlies the forms of all phenomena. What had been ‘magical power’ to the trained elite, became ‘bad ju-ju’ as its practices drifted down to the masses. The amount of training and discipline necessary to wield Ginnung in a reliable way is so great that the vast majority of humanity, when they try to ‘use’ it, simply end up confusing themselves and devolving into a morass of illusion. Hence the use of the substance becomes more or less taboo.” (Edred Thorsson)

This is an interesting explanation of what this ‘stuff of Chaos’, this Ether, Maya or Ginning might be. Anyway, when I began to write this article today I thought of writing a short persiflage of the Lord’s Prayer, using the image of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but my poem, including the whole article, turned into something completely different and took a strange direction in the last few hours. It’s rather weird to write poetry in your non-native language, similar to playing an instrument you can’t play. But also, it opens new angles and one can use words differently, create word-plays that don’t exist in one’s own language and new meanings emerge. That’s one of the many reasons why learning Old Norse will be very rewarding to any true Runer, I guess. And why learning new languages in general is a rewarding activity. “To learn another language is to possess another soul”, said Karl the Frank. After the poem I quote one of my absolute favourite passages from Hakim Bey’s famous Temporary Autonomous Zone that puts his idea of ontological anarchism across. He was also, like some of our contributors, inspired by Sufism.


The Mystical (K)Not

Primal Chaos permeating Heaven and Hell,
Shape wisdom erupting from Urðr‘s Well,
As above, so below,
Eternal Mystery I strive to know.

Eagle King, spread thy wings,
Thou art the Shaper of all things,
Thou who art No-Thing and have no Name,
Inventor and Player of the Master Game,
Thy Intelligence come, thy Word be done,
I am thy Son of the the Black Sun.

Let feverish dreams rain down from the skies,
Teaching false truths and true lies,
Give us frenzy, make us divine or insane,
Push us to change ourSelves and to unchain
us from false divisions and Single Vision.

Lead us into temptation with Her Runa,
I came to court Her, She’s my Fortuna.
And deliver us from mere Beliefs,
They are for priests and other thieves.

Death is the Warrior’s Wife and ultimate Bliss
The bloody Knife and the Valkyrie’s kiss,
And Life is Power, Beauty and Desire
We are the Dragon’s Eye, arosen from Fire.

For thine is Intelligent Chaos and Noetic Gnosis,
I don’t care, if you teach by thorns or by roses,
Thou art God’s Golden Shower
Magic is Love and Will to Power,
Thy Glory is the Cosmos’ Story
Of the Eternal Copulation of Kia and Zos,
Pulsating in Dagaz and the Elhaz Cross!

Blessed be their Child that dances and sees
Eternal Forms ascending in Ecstasies.
With formless Fire I create from mud,
I know I’m drunk on Kvasir’s blood.
Thou exhaled wisdom and divinity,
Now I bathe in thy Eternity,
For what is Thine is also Mine,
I Am as Thee and thou Art as Me.

Thou gave me Life-Breath, thou gave me Form,
Holy Madness pours from thy Horm,
Thou art the violent, upcoming storm
That tears all apart to again be reborn.

And to grow and to dance and to love and to fight
To rise in thy Might, seek for Darkness and Light
Is to love Mystery and to wear Her Sign
Man’s  incomplete, but man is Divine,
Do not fear, Eternity is here,
The only crime is not to notice Her,
And I think to myself, lying dead on the floor
Oh Life, oh Death, you are but one Door
Man cannot cut this Gordion Knot
There Is Never A Moment Which You Are Not


Hakim Bey, ontological anarchist and prophet of Chaos

CHAOS NEVER DIED. Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology (like the shadows before Babylon), the original undifferentiated oneness-of-being still radiates serene as the black pennants of Assassins, random & perpetually intoxicated. Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.

Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there’s absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard.

No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you’re the monarch of your own skin–your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.

To shed all the illusory rights & hesitations of history demands the economy of some legendary Stone Age–shamans not priests, bards not lords, hunters not police, gatherers of paleolithic laziness, gentle as blood, going naked for a sign or painted as birds, poised on the wave of explicit presence, the clockless nowever.

Agents of chaos cast burning glances at anything or anyone capable of bearing witness to their condition, their fever of lux et voluptas. I am awake only in what I love & desire to the point of terror–everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain.

Avatars of chaos act as spies, saboteurs, criminals of amour fou, neither selfless nor selfish, accessible as children, mannered as barbarians, chafed with obsessions, unemployed, sensually deranged, wolfangels, mirrors for contemplation, eyes like flowers, pirates of all signs & meanings.

Here we are crawling the cracks between walls of church state school & factory, all the paranoid monoliths. Cut off from the tribe by feral nostalgia we tunnel after lost words, imaginary bombs.

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden cord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. If I were to kiss you here they’d call it an act of terrorism–so let’s take our pistols to bed & wake up the city at midnight like drunken bandits celebrating with a fusillade, the message of the taste of chaos.”

Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.


 

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