It should hardly seem surprising that something called “chaos magick” is constantly in flux, both in terms of what gets classed as chaos magick, and in who it attracts.

I was first introduced to the subject by some English bloke on IRC in a random Wicca chatroom who later, through a series of unlikely circumstances, became my husband. He introduced names I’d never heard of before: Austin Osman Spare, Peter J Carroll, Robert Anton Wilson – people with three names writing weird stuff.

It was refreshing. I was young, and apart from a few friends in high school, I didn’t know anyone else who was interested in magick. Until I found the chaotes, all I knew were religious Pagans who left me empty, or pedantic ceremonialists who bickered over trivia that seemed unnecessary.

From there I devoured everything I could find: Ray Sherwin, Phil Hine, Stephen Mace, Jan Fries, Steve Wilson, Ramsey Dukes, Jaq Hawkins, Hakim Bey, ye gods even Adrian Savage, simply because the word “chaos” was in the title. The books were difficult to find, expensive and experimental; the websites were raw and their authors approachable. Continue reading »

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Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.

This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the third and final piece of a three part interview.

Start with [cref 75], and follow with [cref 76] to conclude with this third and final part of the interview.

P: Were you concerned when you realized Fotamecus had transitioned from a viral servitor to an egregore in such a short period of (linear) time?

FKR: Concerned? Not really, I think I was too fascinated with it. There wasn’t any reason to be afraid. The whole process was endlessly fascinating; all we were trying to do was to see how far we could push the little sigil we’d started out with.

P: It was fairly unprecedented

FKR: It’s been modeled since, though. A few folks have used the same methods to over-empower a sigil to servitorhood and then push it the same way to egregorehood.

It works remarkably well for generating a purposeful group gestalt for things like intentional communities. Starting with sigils that represent the goals of the community, you overcharge, get servitors who act as guides you should listen to, and then eventually become overcharged to egregorehood where they steer the energies/fates/whatevers that surround the group. Those are somewhat limited in scope, though, and not likely to pass to godform. Continue reading »

Popularity: 3%

Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.

This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the second of a three part interview.

Start with [cref 75].

P: When Fotamecus first began to spread, where did it go?

FKR: To whoever used it, which were mostly the folks we spoke to via the Internet. Primarily through the z-list of the Z(Cluster) and essays written for Chaos Matrix. Within a year we had at least 200 known individual magicians around the globe using him on a regular basis. As a servitor he fulfilled a useful niche, just about everyone can use expanded and compressed time.

The idea with the network was that whenever you needed expansion and someone else needed compression – even if you were two isolated mages on opposite sides of the globe – the Fotamecus network would pass the balance off.

The idea behind a viral servitor is that it’s a servitor that can spawn copies of itself. Now they can either go their separate ways, or you can tie them together somehow; picture each one becoming a cell in a much larger body, connected by magickal links that form a sort of network. Continue reading »

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Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen is a chaos magickian best known for his encyclopedic website Chaos Matrix and the creation Fotamecus, a sigil which evolved into a godform which manipulates the experience of time.

This interview was conducted on August 16th, 2006 for issue 4 of RazorSmile, a print-based chaos magick magazine. This is the first of a three part interview.

Psyche: First of all, do you pronounce it Fota-mee-kus, or Fota-meh-kus?

Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen: Foh-Tuh-Meh-Kuss, but I’ve heard every variant you could imagine. I don’t think it matters much. For me, it was a good four-syllable mantra to hum with most 3/4 and 4/4 songs on the radio while driving.

P: Fotamecus began with a sigil, could you talk a bit about how it came about?

FKR: I wrote an essay shortly before the millennium with all the details, but the short of it was that my Discordian friend Quinn the Mad Prophet asked me one day, “What’s a sigil?”

I’d created a mantric sigil while driving somewhere the night before for the statement of intent, “Force Time Into Compression” and came up with “Fotamecus” as a four-syllable sigilic mantra. Using that I showed him how to create a graphic sigil, which was the original star-inside-box-inside-circle-with-arms Fotamecus sigil; later on we added a squiggly tail with a triangle on the end, when we turned it into a viral servitor, but I’m getting ahead of myself… Continue reading »

Popularity: 5%