Rant 32: Off the Deep End

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

Rant 32
Off the Deep End: Two Parts

Part One

,ÄúEvery man and woman is a star.,Äù
-Aleister Crowley

,ÄúTruth!Truth!Truth! crieth the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations.,Äù
-Aleister Crowley

,ÄúThis Reason and Law is the Bond of the Great Lie.,Äù
-Aleister Crowley

,ÄúIn this book it is spoken of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.,Äù
-Aleister Crowley

,ÄúLaugh and come Unto Me.,Äù
-Eris

,ÄúThose who think themselves apart or above the herd are themselves part of the herd.,Äù
-Tequilarius Malignatus


Enochian Apocalypse? The Immanentizing of the Eschaton? Bringing forth the New Aeon? Some of you may be wondering just what in the hell some of us weird occultists are talking about. Well, I'll tell you...are you ready for it? We are talking about absolutely nothing that concerns you. So just forget about it and move on.

But before I move onto my main idea, a few words about magic,Ķ

Have you ever thought about the fact that witchcraft and magic to get things you want is socially acceptable so long as you don't practice rituals to try to change reality? It's the reason why Aleister Crowley was shunned, discredited, and branded a lunatic by society. (Aleister Crowley never exhibited outer behaviours that deviated from the standard bourgeois excesses of his times, much as he tried cultivating a beastly image. And considering the changes in consensus moralities since then, it would be patently stupid to reject his works because of the lack of morality he seemed to exhibit.) He was shunned precisely because he was trying to bring something new into existence. That is also precisely why practitioners of magic give him so much homage.

The thing that irks most of the neo-Pagan practitioners of magic today about Crowley is that Crowley had little patience for philosophizing about magic. It is much like sex...you can talk about it, and come up with theories and traditions and styles...but it is much better to actually do it. Many people today who call themselves 'witches', 'druids', or 'mages' are hard pressed to actually accomplish magic that has results in the material world, so they refer to all sorts of grandiose schematics, traditions, conceptions, and explanations as to why they should use magic only occasionally. Crowley, as if hinting at the later Chaos Magic movement, basically withered such pretentious people away by doing magic and getting results. His life arc pretty much states "walk the walk you talk about".

For me, when someone I just met tells me they are a witch, et cetera, I read them immediately to see whether they are bullshitting. A good majority of such 'witches' wouldn't be able to cast a spell without a book if their life depended on it. And anyone can do that. Casting a spell from a book does not make you a witch, et cetera. I don't care what anyone thinks. The witches in my life who were practicing magic often times never called themselves anything until I got to know them better. Likewise for the 'druids' and the 'mages'. Since I practice magic myself, almost everyday, and have been doing so for years, and enjoy doing so, I consider myself a 'witch'. Although I wonder if I would have considered the term if not for my early contact with Wicca. And while you don't have to be born a magic practitioner, much like being a musician, if you do not practice heavily, you can not claim to be anything of the sort. I don't care whether you have innate talents or not. Anyone can pick up an instrument, and a song book, and figure out how to play a few songs. Does that make them a musician? Anyone can pick up a spell book and cast a few spells. That does not mean everyone will become proficient in magic, nor should they. That is why we have so many different arts in human culture.

The thing that really bothers me about the present metaphysical community (besides the New Age meme viruses) is the insistence that regular magical practitioners are in danger of obsession or insanity, (Yeah, as if yoga-fanatics, SUV drivers, or blissed-out post-hippie New Agers who pose as Wiccans can really say they have no obsessions or insanities), and thus magic should only be done after all other options are exhausted. While I can understand the sentiment of having more than one recourse to action, why leave magic until the last option? Wouldn't it increase your chances for results if you use as many options as you can simultaneously? And really, the idea of a 'witch' or 'mage' not practicing magic on a regular basis, is like a musician who never plays. Give me a fucking break! How in the hell is someone supposed to learn what works and what is dangerous if they don't practice?

The other thing that irks me about the metaphysical community is the avoidance of any talk about using magic to change the structures of society or our world. It is okay to use propaganda, advertising (a very potent form of mass ensigilization, by-the-way), or techno-toys to change structures, but not magic? The few people who do use magic for change are blasted by others. It's as if people using magic for what they wish is not allowed...one must only use it within traditional ways. Or one must always be aware of the law of karma, or threefold-rule, or some other such nonsense that remains unproven in the lives of those who do not accept it. I hate the sniveling insistence on karma people fall into to explain all sorts of phenomena that could be explained better without it. (Long parenthetical digression: Practicing a potent form of Buddhism for years allowed me to glimpse what people were getting at with karma. The pop-understanding of it so wholly absorbed by the New Age and by most Neo-Pagans is blatantly false. There is no cosmic accounting system, nor is there some great God-like parent in the sky who punishes and rewards, nor is there a blind force of balance. Karma means action, plain and simple, and the term is used to refer to an idea that if you do the same thing over and over again you will develop an attachment to doing it. Likewise, if you think about something, you open up the chance of doing it. That,Äôs all.)

Well,Ķthat said about magic, let me get on with the rant. (WARNING: The following words actually make up a sigil whose secondary purpose is to open up the reader/listener to magical change. The primary purpose is to effectively rip a hole in the fabric of achievable reality. By reading/listening you are taking part in the ritual. The changes will take effect in about 3 days, three months, or three years. Your unconscious or conscious resistance to such a thing has been factored in and will only further the sigil,Äôs potency.)

Part Two

Annihilate the present reality by dissolving the strictures of past and future in an alchemy of ecstatic gnosis. The one who calls for and then claims insanity in an act of consummate sex magic is one who practices utter chaos,Ķand thousands of new forms are created out of the vast womb of abysses that is the otherworld, the astral plane, the realm of faeries, the dream-time, hyper-space, Gaia-mind, and whatever else you may know it as. Paint all flags black and red! Black for the unity of desires. Red for their explosive separation. All nations are wholesale corrupters of youth and a grand youthful corruption of immature minds. Nothing is real and everything is transmitted in this half-false mediated civilization of never-to-be-fulfilled desires held at bay by chemical ecstasies that pose as chemignosis or some other such aneristic crap which still must be digested in order to fertilize our gardens. If there are a thousand, a million Christs, the dried-boned bastard children of hatred can never crucify us all. Who is the messiah? You are the messiah! All Hail The Messiah! All Hail Discordia!

You have been lied to. You have lied to yourself. Forgive all but never put down your sword unless it,Äôs to make room for a gun. Give me the stunted revelations of the back alley crack whores which make more sense than the fetid halitosis that passes for wisdom in this society of dreams sacrificed on the altar of profit. Even the Satans will help the Christs in the fight for Buddha-hood. Faced with a multiplicity of options in any direction the most effective magic is to explode, rant, and rave in a state of drunkenness that would drive Pan crazy. Io Pan! Io Chaos! Io Eris! Stop lying to yourself with the truth! Laugh and cry and come unto yourself!

Look at the red eye of Choronzon and please pass the tequila. I will still be here when you stop shivering and crying. You can try to run and hide but you will only die exhausted, having to face the fact that you only ran around in a big circle. You want magic and yet you refuse to rip it from the sky? The one who is afraid to drop the atomic bomb over the city of their ego is liar and a fool. Learn not from their mistakes. Download that virus into your machine-like brain and maybe your soul will learn to become free. But be suspicious of those who can not handle love, for they have rejected life. And it is an absurd proposition to reject life while yet existing enough to think such a thing. Is this hard to understand? It is not pre-digested baby words? Will you actually have to absorb something and think for a change? Are you insane enough to choose life? Are you crazy enough to know that you have no choice but to live freely? Are you still lying to yourself with the truth as that lusty weapon of obfuscation?

Wisdom can be found in a bottle of vodka as easily as it can be found in the Bible, through meditating, or through sex, or by walking in a thunderstorm. But illumination comes through effort and the rejection of all effort. I don,Äôt care. All the stones are being overturned. All the abysses are being ransacked. Search high and low, whether high or sober. Or maybe you have and done nothing but explode. Have you had it with having it? Are you healthy and tired yet sick and excited about the new aeon you see coming from your hands? Have you learned the lie that is implied in the very word ,Äòauthenticity,Äô? Do you throw golden apples in your daydreams only to find them manifesting everywhere in consensus reality?

You believe you exist and try to prove it by referring to all sorts of observations and philosophies. Even nihilism is the attempt at such a proof for if you really had no meaning what would be the point of even thinking? And why would you even care? Nothing implies something, if only a possibility. But possibility implies nothing and something engaged in a romping rough sex coupling that gives rise to all sorts of unexplainable things whether you can explain them or not.

Behold! I have nothing to show you but you are still looking for the bottled air. I have something to show you but you refuse to look. And in this conundrum you will deny yourself into a new existence which will be shattered by the rocks thrown by happy anarchists who keep upsetting the hermetic balance. To be able to dance magical patterns you must walk. To be able to walk in ecstasy you must stand. To stand you must grow a spine. To grow a spine you must have desires that you are unafraid to chase.

Take a sledgehammer to the streets of law and order by which your masters have you constricted! Spraypaint your most hidden and inexplicable dreams over the world wide web! Mumble an ancient-sounding prayer while on your morning commute to work! Ensigilize for the success of the labor movement at your workplace! Enchant for the ultimate destruction of all that holds humanity back in this world! Become that loose nut you hear rattling around in your skull! Learn the epistles of the Goddess from the mouths of squirrels! Call yourself one Eris,Äôs own! Be that bolt of lighting, the indestructible vajra-body, the blissful storm that repudiates the calm ignorance of the televised and mediated lives of the masses! But watch that idiotic TV to pull out psychic messages about our future, write them down, cut them up and write a new poetry of hermetic liberation!

Reject the apocalypse of loaded guns and whiny mouthed angst! Give me the cut-up and re-pasted apocalypse of bacchanalian revelry and the consummation of all desires! Listen to all the crazy voices in your head because the most wise are the most damned, feared, hated, repressed, and tortured voices you could ever imagine. If the future will pull down all the skyscrapers from my urban chaos hell-paradise then I will among the trees. But for now I will annihilate that possibility by drawing down the streetlights into my inner high-priestesses. Give a new baptism into a new religion every time I shower!

Objective reality is the worst illusion of them all. Travel through reality tunnels but don,Äôt ever get trapped in one. Writing is fifty years behind painting and photography, but these latter are fifty years behind magic while being fifty years ahead. When was the last time you thought in images? Can you even do such a thing? Do you even believe it is possible? And why are you still focused on the duality of possibility and impossibility when the two are really not different at all. Everything is created out of the latent potency of maybe, or maybe not. Stop lying to yourself with the truth! Tell yourself some truths by lying! Cast a spell using cut up words from a newspaper thrown into a paper bag and left in a cemetery! Get wasted on whisky and cokes while scrying the computer screens for messages from the beyond!

You are Thoth, Hermes, Mercury, Odin, Ganesh, and the Eris, the Loki, the Coyote that laughs at the whole thing. Hey Buddha, give yourself permission to land! The earth isn,Äôt sinking away just yet, even though our reality is. To prove this, drink a six pack of cheap beer while smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Woe to the person who believes that the best place for magic is in a consecrated area on the day that magic will prove that belief wrong. Blood, sweat, sex, tobacco, tequila, punk-music, and glossy fashion magazines, or similar day to day items are the only tools one may need to create earth shattering rituals. Do you get the idea yet? There are no ideas that remain valid after a successful ritual. Nor should they be held too strongly as valid. And that is the dishonest truth contained in a nutshell of magical lies.

Give me magic to smash the State and all States that would keep me from dancing out my desires into the poetry of this life! As I will, so must it be. All forms are formless and all governments are anti-Chaos and that is why they must be destroyed in an all consuming fire of lust. Alchemy for the urban denizens exists in every smashed window, in every pasted flyer, in every rain delay, in every car horn,Äôs blare, in every siren, every snatch of conversation, and this alchemy will be the means for the hidden adepts to realize all they desire. You are each a hidden adept.

The apocalypse is an eschatological con job perpetuated by the religious tricksters who never even realized their game was up. Laughter belongs to us all. We are all trickster gods that stalk our hidden recesses looking for the unwary gray thoughts to twist and smash. Magic is the con job of getting you to no longer need con jobs. You have created a self-hood and a reality around yourself using words and yet you would still deny the power of spell casting? Ha! You are alive because of alchemy and yet you would deny the power of imagery? Hail Eris! And may She go easy on you when she proves you wrong, again. And again, sick bastards! Annihilate all thoughts and you will find every memory or dream you ever lost. Things are not as they seem nor are they otherwise. And that could be another lie.

In closing I will leave you with a quote from the White Mouse, a literary creation from a collection of thoughtforms and mediated images who became self-possessed and magical, and thus independently alive.

,ÄúThose without a magical and self-possessed vision of life are merely collections of thoughtforms and mediated images. Are they alive?,Äù
-the White Mouse

(Chaos 40th, 3170)

[chaosgraves:agentoferis]

That which duct tape can not fix, can not be fixed.

[Irreverend Hugh, KSC]

That which duct tape can not fix, can not be fixed.

There's a valid point there. Unfortunately it has been lost amidst all the general apathy mixed with all around misanthropic yearnings somewhere between my eyes and my brain.