Khephra directed me to a recent episode of Greg’s Occult of Personality podcast in which he was interviewed.

It’s subject was the Occult Digital Mobilization, or Digimob for short, a community of occultists which gathers ebooks and other files for distribution in quarterly digests via BitTorrent.

While there is a selection process, its ins and outs weren’t discussed in detail, nor were copyright issues or the moral implications in a wider sense, and they displayed a superficial understanding of how the artist/writer/creator is affected and what the impact is for the larger culture.

Though danced around, arguments for piracy tend to run the same way:

The argument is that a pirated good rarely substitutes for the authentic original. Instead it allows the product to reach populations that can’t afford the original or otherwise wouldn’t have bought it.

The above excerpt is from a book I recently picked up, Chris Anderson’s Free: How Today’s Smartest Businesses Profit by Giving Something for Nothing, a marketing book on how companies are using the concept of free to build their customer base, and how it works. Continue reading »

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Over on The Great Tinines, Johnny Rapture asks “Who’s Pagan?“, inviting readers to post their definitions and lists of groups who qualify. I offered my definition, and in the course of discussion cartwheel asserted that:

No distinction between “magic” on the one hand and “religion” on the other has ever been made successfully.

This sounds like a challenge! The gauntlet has been thrown.

Back in 2008 we looked at various definitions of magick, but I still believe Crowley’s remains the most elegant:

Magick is the Art and Science of causing change in conformity with Will.

This simple statement was further clarified by an extract from Magick Without Tears:

Magick is the Science of understanding oneself and one’s conditions. It is the Art of applying that understanding in action.

This firmly places the onus of on the magus hirself. Whatever model one is using: spiritual, energetic, psychological, cybernetic or meta – it is the responsibility of the magickian to effect change.

Religion, on the other hand, relies on a relationship between the individual and some form of external supernatural power (think Wicca, Sentianism, kaballah).

It’s true, magick can be practiced within a spiritual framework, often in tandem with religion, but it is by no means necessary and conflation of the two is in no way desirable.

cartwheel raised an interesting question. This distinction works for me, what are your thoughts on this?

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The element of Uncertainty has played a significant role in several aspects of my magical development.  Specifically regarding results magic, I’ve had great trouble with divination and possession.  Reaching an appropriate state for the interpretive act and releasing personal boundaries in the context of invocation require such a light touch with the symbolic gestalt, it causes me nothing but trouble.  With practice, I have progressed a great deal with the art of invocation – through the embrace of Uncertainty.

My first successes with invocation and atavistic resurgence occurred while experimenting with chemognosis.  These experiments led to varying levels of possession, which I adopted as my gold standard for invocation.  Yet, in other ritual contexts, I found I could not approach these states, leaving me with a problem.  Excitatory techniques of gnosis, particularly dance and spinning, would bring on a light possession but required a good deal of room and were not appropriate to certain godforms or qualities I wished to work with.  Dependence on them also left open-hand magic completely out of the question.

Further exploration with invocation finally made it clear that possession was not necessary, or even desirable most of the time, for the magic to work.  In Visual Magic Jan Fries makes the penetrating point that dependence on extreme forms of gnosis leads to a poorly equipped magician, and postulates a root in overly rigid character structure.  Still, I wanted to reliably access those states of possession, for I love when qualities external to the ego sweep it away.  Perhaps I simply needed a softening.

My current techniques of practice came from my work with the t’ai chi form.  The ideal form allows each movement to arise, without force, while the practitioner remains completely present.  It takes quite a balancing act, to avoid “doing” without thoughts drifting all over the place.  Practicing in this manner, the state of possession that develops feels quite clear to me.

Generalizing this experience, I developed a new procedure for practicing possession.  First, I choose the principle to work with and evoke it.  Then I go out for a jaunt and use the Right Way of Walking to enter gnosis.  With just a light focus on the quality, possession builds easily and progressively.  The results have fascinated me.  Resistances to the invocation appear as tension within my body and relaxing into it provides the only way deeper.  I generally work with polarities, and the most difficult pairs always involve some identification one way or the other.  By freeing up these identifications and relaxing the tensions that sustain them, the appearance of novel behavior or information reliably arises.  The magic happens.

These experiments have revealed to me a more effective standard for success in invocation and possession.  When I “knew” where the process should arrive at, I increasingly limited the breadth and depth of results.  Adopting the expression of novelty as a measure opens new avenues, both for growth and for the manifestation of results.  Uncertainty appears, everywhere I look.

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Uncertainty has come to play a huge role in my life as of late. The whole process entered my awareness during the Plutonica book-club reading of Quantum Psychology. Together we explored many of the exercises that Robert Anton Wilson collected to help us think, “Maybe…” My meditations and personal work have revolved around the issue of uncertainty, as well as our personal and collective strategies for dealing with it, ever since. Continue reading »

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I can’t seem to escape Crowley. He’s everywhere and in everything. Like q-ball.

I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon‘s excellent book, The End of the Poem, which collects a series of lectures he delivered over five years at Oxford under this title. I’m only about two thirds of the way through The End of the Poem, but I’ve immensely enjoyed  what I’ve read so far.

Each lecture focuses on a specific poem, and Crowley features quite prominently in Muldoon’s reading of “Autopsychography” by Fernando Pessoa.

Pessoa first came to my attention when I heard that letters between himself and Crowley were to be auctioned off. But after reading this poem, and Muldoon’s extrapolations I really want to read more of his work, especially The Book of Disquiet, several poems of which seem to have been written shortly after Crowley’s Book of Lies first came out, and which may have been directly influenced by it.

Including the account of Pessoa’s role in assisting in the charade of Crowley’s false suicide: Continue reading »

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