The 7 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Learning Magic

January 19, 2016 by Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila in Hermetic Alchemy, House of RA, Lessons, Newsletter, The Mysteries | Leave a comment

Avoid these common pitfalls when studying magic, meditation or mysticism

hooded Magic is a very strange hobby. If you’re like me, you’ve probably been drawn to it for lofty reasons: You want to understand the universe and your place in it. You want answers to the questions of life, the universe and everything—not just second-hand faith in somebody else’s proclamations. You want a heightened sense of personal dignity, integrity and power to achieve the goals that matter to you the most. And—most of all—you want enchantment. You want to live an enchanted life—one in which you can immerse yourself in wonders and mysteries, and experience intensity that people who are checked out in front of their phones or TV screens never will. You want a heightened reality, or even to quest for absolute reality itself.

So, for any of these reasons or more, you step into the Circus of Magic. You might spend some time browsing occult Web sites, or visit a New Age bookstore. You might buy a workbook or two, and try the exercises. You might join a society like Freemasonry, a Wiccan coven, or even a Meetup group, and begin to meet others in your community with similar questions.

As you do this, you will slowly be leaving the “consensus trance,” the one created by the daily ritual of Commute-Job/School-Consume-Television. And you will find yourself in a new “trance,” one defined by ideas of magic, personal possibility, awakening, new group dynamics, alternative life paths. You will likely encounter a lot of incredibly inspiring ideas, and also, unfortunately, a lot of disempowering ideas and beliefs.

Here’s a useful way to think about it: Mainstream society is a program designed to work the best it can for the widest number of people possible. Generally speaking, that means good, decent people who are happy to live quiet, decent lives, and content themselves with the victories of career, family, health, happiness and making it through another day. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Outside of mainstream society, however, you will find a very different reality—the “wildlands” of modern civilization. Its denizens, for one reason or another, don’t feel satisfied by consensus reality. That could be because they’re ahead of the curve, or it could be because they’re far behind the curve. That makes the “wildlands” an exciting, and dangerous, place. The “wildlands” are where society puts the ideas that are too disruptive of its daily activities, for better or worse. The strange ideas, the discredited ideas, the untested ideas, the potentially liberating ideas.

Magic is one of those ideas—or, rather, a gigantic cluster of ideas (a memeplex). Many of those ideas are really cool, and many should stay in the trash-heap.

But let’s be clear: To engage with magic is to begin to sort through society’s trash, looking for anything of value. Glamorous, no? Remember, alchemy is the art of turning shit into gold. “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone…”

Well, if you’re going to go looking for gold out there, at least allow me to guide you through the territory, so that you can avoid the seven biggest mistakes that people make when learning magic (we’ve made them all!).

1. Poorly Defined Goals

What do you want?

It’s a simple question, but most who enter the world of magick and alternative spirituality never ask it, or never fully define the answer. As a result, they’re caught up in the “dazzling lights” of the New Age Pinball Machine, and bounced around between experiences, groups and teachers, never finding themselves or getting to their core issues and drives.

You need to ask this question up front: What do you want? Do you want greater creative skill and power? Do you want to fix a trauma or personal challenge? Are you willing to give up everything and seek enlightenment? Whatever it is, define it now, and then ask yourself if magical means are really the answer, or if more mundane means would be a lot easier. Be clear on this, or you risk getting caught up in the glamour of magick, and forgetting that it’s just a tool, and only one tool of many available to you right now.

2. Staying in the Shallows

Magic is a giant buffet table. Thanks to the shrinking of the world by global communications, you’ll find material from every world faith and esoteric path readily available to you. Hermeticism/Golden Dawn/Thelema; Yoga; Vedanta; Vajrayana Buddhism; Sufism; NLP … the list is limited only by the demand of the New Age marketplace for the next big kick. Just a hundred years ago—in some cases, just a few decades ago—all of these subjects would have been incredibly hard to discover information on. You wouldn’t have been able to just pop down to Barnes & Noble or go on Amazon and have it all handed to you. And in all cases, once you discovered the entry to a path, you would be confronted with a teacher who would explain that the path was the work of a lifetime.

That puts modern seekers in a unique position. We don’t lack access—but what we do often lack is commitment to a path. Most likely, students will browse here and there, reading on a wide variety of paths, or even joining several groups in sequence. This is an incredible way to learn quickly; however, if the buffet table approach takes the place of deep, committed learning in one path or tradition, what happens is you stop making progress. You just get to the edge of your comfort zone in one path before starting over in another, never taking that crucial jump into the unknown. Ironically, this probably takesmore time than sticking to one path, at least until you reach that path’s completion stages.

However, if you go in the complete opposite direction, and become a “Path Zealot,” you will make the third mistake:

3. Thinking There is One True Path

Once you’ve experienced peak states or personal breakthroughs in a system, it’s easy to generalize: “This is absolutely incredible … everybody should experience this!”

If you’re not careful, you soon become a missionary, talking non-stop about what you’ve experienced, trying to get your friends or family into whatever practice caused the peak state or breakthrough, or even, at the high registers of “Kool-Aid Intoxication,” thinking that you have found the One True Path, and that all other paths are lesser or deluded.

People can stay stuck in this state for days, weeks, months, or years—even their whole life. It tends to be a blockage to progress. It’s a classic behavior of an individual with a weak sense of self: Deep down, they feel themselves to be inferior or lesser than others, so they place all their focus on an all-consuming ideology or charismatic leader that they derive strength and self-worth from serving. If this sounds like an obvious trap, and one you would never fall for, think again: The “One True Path” disease has been responsible for many of history’s greatest tragedies, including the Third Reich or the many historical genocides committed by overzealous religious missionaries that worked to “convert by sword.”

If your path is the One True Path, it’s time to leave your cloistered room or insular community and experience what life is like for others of different faiths and life backgrounds. Make some new friends.

4. Us vs. Them Mentality

Because people who are into magic and alternative spirituality are often on the fringes, it’s easy to adopt belief systems that reinforce an oppressed identity or “us vs. them” story. This becomes a particularly acute problem when the magic that people are doing isn’t working, or not producing a good quality of life, and instead of changing the behaviors or beliefs that aren’t working, people create a narrative in which some “other” individual or group is keeping them down. These stories about why failure is OK quickly blossom and cross-pollinate, becoming wide-scale conspiracy theories potent enough to infect whole cultures, leaving disempowerment, misery and even genocide in their wake (again see the Third Reich). Examples of this include:

• “The Illuminati are out to get me because I have secret knowledge.”

• “Shapeshifting reptilians/Archons/evil spirits/Satan/etc. are controlling reality and don’t like me.”

• “I’m way too enlightened/edgy/intense/real for mainstream society to handle.”

• “I am a lightworker charged with battling the dark forces, and the dark forces are in control.”

Do you have any of these beliefs, or any similar ones? Let’s take a look at them—what’s the underlying message of all of them? Personal significance. Me me me. All of these scripts allow for personal significance through failure. They all allow you to be a complete fuckup and to simultaneously have the illusion of “winning.”

They are all poison. Jettison them immediately, and instead focus on your personal growth and happiness, and how you can be of service to the people around you.

5. Substance Abuse

Drugs and magic have been linked since the very first prehistoric shaman chewed some strange bark or fungus that let her talk to the spirits of the forest, and the spirits of the forest turned out to have some pretty useful stuff to say.

In recent times, magicians like Aleister Crowley, William S. Burroughs, Terence McKenna, Carlos Castaneda and others have hyped the spiritual potential of psychedelics and even harder substances. Some of them have also fallen prey to addiction, and the destructive behaviors that come with the disease of addiction. This is one of the major reasons why magic has been so discredited—it allows people to say “Yeah, but you were just high,” or to look at the addiction behaviors of people like Crowley and attribute them to magic instead of their true source, the drug addiction itself.

Drugs may be a fast route to altered states, but they are not a sustainable one. In our current moment—world economic crisis, instability and uncertainty—I suggest that magicians don’t have the time or luxury of drug use. We need to be sharp, frosty—Navy SEALs, not Deadheads. Remember: The Baby Boomer generation could burn decades with drug experimentation because it was the richest, most financially secure generation in history. That is not the case for Millenials or those younger. The world reality is a live-fire situation, a war zone, and you don’t dull your edge or disorient yourself in a war zone.

(It’s not an “Us vs. Them” war zone, by the way. It’s a free-for-all, as everybody scrambles to survive the challenges created by the acceleration of technology and growth of the human population.)

6. Trying to Be the “Best Magician” Instead of the “Best You”

When overachiever types get into magic, they try to learn every single aspect of it and become a Total and Formidable Master. There is no mastery; leave this archetype in the Saturday morning cartoons it came from. Remember: Magic is just a tool. Know your goal, and use the tool to achieve your goal.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be so linear: You may simply be seeking the regular, sustainable spiritual growth that comes from a regular practice of meditation, dreamwork, journalling, yoga, ritual and any other tool you have chosen to use. Wonderful.

The key here is: It’s not a competition. There is no prize, other than becoming more yourself.

7. Giving Your Power Away

Particularly as a young and untested magician, you will likely be confronted with situations or people that tempt you to surrender your power. Whether it’s an autocratic or abusive guru, a regimented and controlling magical order, or even a tightly controlling ideology, you might be tempted or even frightened into surrendering control of your life in exchange for some tangible or intangible reward.

If you do this, get ready for a painful learning experience!

Though it can sometimes be easy to forget, you are the true magician, the true master of your reality. To fully illustrate this point, I’d like to include a story from the author John Fowles, who kindled my early teenage interest in testing the nature of reality. It’s from his 1965 novel The Magus:

Once upon a time there was a young prince who believed in all things but three. He did not believe in princesses, he did not believe in islands, he did not believe in God. His father, the king, told him that such things did not exist. As there were no princesses or islands in his father’s domains, and no sign of God, the prince believed his father.

But then, one day, the prince ran away from his palace and came to the next land. There, to his astonishment, from every coast he saw islands, and on these islands, strange and troubling, creatures whom he dared not name. As he was searching for a boat, a man in full evening dress approached him along the shore.

“Are those real islands?” asked the young prince.

“Of course they are real islands,” said the man in evening dress.

“And those strange and troubling creatures?”

“They are all genuine and authentic princesses.”

“Then God must also exist!” cried the prince.

“I am God,” replied the man in evening dress, with a bow.

The young prince returned home as quickly as he could.

“So, you are back,” said his father, the king.

“I have seen islands, I have seen princesses, I have seen God,” said the prince reproachfully.

The king was unmoved.

“Neither real islands, nor real princesses, nor a real God exist.”

“I saw them!”

“Tell me how God was dressed.”

“God was in full evening dress.”

“Were the sleeves of his coat rolled back?”

The prince remembered that they had been. The king smiled.

“That is the uniform of a magician. You have been deceived.”

At this, the prince returned to the next land and went to the same shore, where once again he came upon the man in full evening dress.

“My father, the king, has told me who you are,” said the prince indignantly. “You deceived me last time, but not again. Now I know that those are not real islands and real princesses, because you are a magician.”

The man on the shore smiled.

“It is you who are deceived, my boy. In your father’s kingdom, there are many islands and many princesses. But you are under your father’s spell, so you cannot see them.”

The prince pensively returned home. When he saw his father, he looked him in the eye.

“Father, is it true that you are not a real king, but only a magician?”

The king smiled and rolled back his sleeves.

“Yes, my son, I’m only a magician.”

“Then the man on the other shore was God.”

“The man on the other shore was another magician.”

“I must know the truth, the truth beyond magic.”

“There is no truth beyond magic,” said the king.

The prince was full of sadness. He said, “I will kill myself.”

The king by magic caused death to appear. Death stood in the door and beckoned to the prince. The prince shuddered. He remembered the beautiful but unreal islands and the unreal but beautiful princesses.

“Very well,” he said, “I can bear it.”

“You see, my son,” said the king, “you, too, now begin to be a magician.”

The Magdalene’s Alchemy Exposed, by Jude Warren

January 15, 2016 by Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila in Hermetic Alchemy, Newsletter, Rituals, The Mysteries | Leave a comment

Magdalene1

There is a process in nature that, when unlocked can give longevity and perfect animal, vegetable and mineral. Disguised in present day society as the philosopher’s stone myth, it is based on the Isis and Osiris story from ancient Egypt. I am convinced the elite Egyptians knew about this stone and worshipped nature and nature Gods for giving it to them. Furthermore, present day Christianity is also based on the making of it.

The making of the stone, which is rooted in much earlier myth, is a 16 month process and follows the path of the sun. It is made using what you might call the ‘nothings: A glass pyramid (pi Ra mid), dew or rain (mercury – murkunos – spirit), sun (sulphur – sol fire) time, and a little matter in the form of an egg, or the Great Cackler: Geb. This is also the divided waters of Genesis. The shell of the egg here is likened to the firmament, also containing pi and being hermetically sealed. I believe the Egyptians used ostrich and crocodile eggs.

This knowledge has been kept secret for a long time and confined only to the elite mystery schools and secret societies of the enlightened ones – denigrated to fairy story so that people dismiss it altogether. The alchemists of Europe later sought it and a few actually found it, including the great Nicolas Flamel. I would like as many people as possible to start understanding that it is real and super undefined matter like a human compost for growth. It is the universal medicine and can set us free from bondage.

magdalene2

The process in the Northern hemisphere starts on the 21st of December – sol invictus (saturnalia, the birth of the sun), when you prepare the dew for the work. On the 21st January, the egg is rotted with the dew for 4 months and kept in darkness (Set).

From the 21st May until the 21st August, dew is added, like Osiris in the coffin and it is kept in the sunlight, locked away. It becomes androgynous matter.

In september, the matter is moved to the top of the pyramid and it is dry for one month in moonlight only. It turns pure white under the constellation virgo – the virgin. Isis brings forth Osiris as a new baby. This is the origin of the virgin birth. It is linked to the making of the stone and gives eternal life.
From this primary white material, stripped bare the stone will be birthed.

From the 21st September until December 21st (12 months so far) it needs strong sun if going for a red stone. It is connected to Horus in December. Keep it wet with dew, work it in the eye of the pyramid towards the top. The moisture in the sealed pyramid rises and falls (ouroboros) this is the water that does not wet the hands, as the alchemists called it. I think at this time in Egypt, the Tit and lion cloth was tied to the djed pilar. The following Easter it has a full resurrection and is finished. It turns brilliant red or purple, the colours of royalty. This is now crowned matter. The Easter egg of Mary Magdalene – and in my version of the Da Vinci code, the Louvre pyramid at the end of the book is not where she is buried – it is the oven of her work……and rooted in the land of Khem.

— Jude Warren

alchemy-pyramid1

Theosophy – “Mythology Based On History”, excerpted from The Secret Doctrine, by HP Blavatsky

January 12, 2016 by Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila in Newsletter, The Mysteries, Theosophy and tagged HP Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, theology | Leave a comment

It is, of course, evident that it is neither the Hyperboreans, nor the Cimmerians, the Arimaspes, nor even the Scyths — known to and communicating with the Greeks — who were our Atlanteans. But they were all the descendants of their last sub-races. The Pelasgians were certainly one of the root-races of future Greece, and were a remnant of a sub-race of Atlantis. Plato hints as much in speaking of the latter, whose name it is averred came from pelagus, the great sea. Noah’s Deluge is astronomical and allegorical, but it is not mythical, for the story is based upon the same archaic tradition of men — or rather of nations — which were saved during the cataclysms, in canoes, arks, and ships. No one would presume to say that the Chaldean Xisuthrus, the Hindu Vaivasvata, the Chinese Peirun — the “beloved of the gods,” who rescued him from the flood in a canoe — or the Swedish Belgamer, for whom the gods did the same in the north, are all identical as a personage. But their legends have all sprung from the catastrophe which involved both the continent and the island of Atlantis.

—
The allegory about the antediluvian giants and their achievements in Sorcery is no myth. Biblical events are revealed indeed. But it is neither by the voice of God amid thunder and lightning on Mount Sinai, nor by a divine finger tracing the record on tablets of stone, but simply through tradition via pagan sources. It was not surely the Pentateuch that Diodorus was repeating when he wrote upon the Titans — the giants born of Heaven and Earth, or, rather, born of the Sons of God who took to themselves for wives the daughters of men who were fair. Nor was Pherecydes quoting from Genesis when giving details on those giants which are not to be found in the Jewish Scriptures. He says that the Hyperboreans were of the race of the Titans, which race descended from the earliest giants, and that it was that Hyperborean region which was the birth-place of the first giants. The Commentaries on the sacred books explain that the said region was the far north, the polar lands now, the pre-Lemurian earliest continent, embracing once upon a time the present Greenland, Spitzbergen, Sweden, Norway, etc.

But who were the Nephilim of Genesis vi. 4? There were Palæolithic and Neolithic men in Palestine ages before the events recorded in the book of the Beginnings. The theological tradition identifies these Nephilim with hairy men or Satyrs, the latter being mythical in the Fifth Race and the former historical in both the Fourth and Fifth Races. We have stated elsewhere what the prototypes of these Satyrs were, and have spoken of the bestiality of the early and later Atlantean race. What is the meaning of Poseidon’s amours under such a variety of animal forms? He became a dolphin to win Amphitrite; a horse, to seduce Ceres; a ram, to deceive Theophane, etc., etc. Poseidon is not only the personation of the Spirit and Race of Atlantis, but also of the vices of these giants. Gesenius and others devote an enormous space to the meaning of the wordNephilim and explain very little. But Esoteric records show these hairy creatures to be the last descendants of thos

e Lemuro-Atlantean races, which begot children on female animals, of species now long extinct; thus producing dumb men, “monsters,” as the Stanzas have it.

Now mythology, built upon Hesiod’s Theogony, which is but a poetised record of actual traditions, or oral history, speaks of three giants, called Briareus, Kottos, and Gyges, living in a dark country where they were imprisoned by Kronos for their rebellion against him. All the three are endowed by myth with an hundred arms and fifty heads, the latter standing for races, the former for sub-races and tribes. Bearing in mind that in mythology every personage almost is a god or demi-god, and also a king or simple mortal in his second aspect; ¹ and that both stand as symbols for lands, islands, powers of nature, elements, nations, races and sub-races, the esoteric Commentary will become comprehensible. It says that the three giants are three polar lands which have changed form several times, at each new cataclysm, or disappearance of one continent to make room for another. The whole globe is convulsed periodically; and has been so convulsed, since the appearance of the First Race, four times. Yet, though the whole face of the earth was transformed thereby each time, the conformation of the arctic and antarctic poles has but little altered. The polar lands unite and break off from each other into islands and peninsulas, yet remain ever the same. Therefore northern Asia is called the “eternal or perpetual land,” and the Antarctic the “ever living” and “the concealed”; while the Mediterranean, Atlantic, Pacific and other regions disappear and reappear in turn, into and above the great waters.

From the first appearance of the great continent of Lemuria, the three polar giants had been imprisoned in their circle by Kronos. Their gaol is surrounded by a wall of bronze, and the exit is through gates fabricated by Poseidon (or Neptune, hence by the seas), which they cannot cross; and it is in that damp region, where eternal darkness reigns, that the three brothers languish. TheIliad (viii., 13) makes of it the Tartaros. When the gods and Titans rebelled in their turn against Zeus — the deity of the Fourth Race — the father of the gods bethought himself of the imprisoned giants in order to conquer the gods and Titans, and to precipitate the latter into Hades; or, in clearer words, to have Lemuria hurled amid thunder and lightning to the bottom of the seas, so as to make room for Atlantis, which was to be submerged and perish in its turn. ²The geological upheaval and deluge of Thessaly was a repetition on a small scale of the great cataclysm; and, remaining impressed on the memory of the Greeks, was merged by them into, and confused with, the general fate of Atlantis. So, also, the war between the Râkshasas of Lanka and the Bharateans, the melee of the Atlanteans and Aryans in their supreme struggle, or the conflict between the Devs and Izeds (or Peris), became, ages later, the struggle of Titans, separated into two inimical camps, and still later the war between the angels of God and the angels of Satan. Historical facts became theological dogmas. Ambitious scholiasts, men of a small sub-race born but yesterday, and one of the latest issues of the Aryan stock, took upon themselves to overturn the religious thought of the world, and succeeded. For nearly two thousand years they impressed thinking Humanity with the belief in the existence of Satan.

But as it is now the conviction of more than one Greek scholar — as it was that of Bailly and Voltaire — that Hesiod’s theogony was based upon historical facts (see Decharme‘s Mythol. de la Grèce Antique), it becomes easier for the occult teachings to find their way into the minds of thoughtful men, and therefore are these passages from mythology brought forward in our discussion upon modern learning in this Addendum.

Such symbolisms as are found in all the exoteric creeds, are so many landmarks of prehistoric truths. The sunny, happy land, the primitive cradle of the earliest human races, has become several times since then hyperborean and Saturnine ³, thus showing the Golden Age and reign of Saturn from multiform aspects. It was many-sided in its character indeed — climatically, ethnologically and morally. For, the Third, Lemurian Race must be physiologically divided into the early androgynous and the later bi-sexual race; and the climate of its dwelling places and continents into that of an eternal spring and eternal winter, into life and death, purity and impurity. The Cycle of legends is ever being transformed on its journey by popular fancy. Yet it may be cleansed from the dross it has picked up on its way through many nations and through the countless minds which have added their own exuberant additions to the original facts. Leaving for a while the Greek interpretations we may seek for some more corroborations of the latter in the scientific and geological proofs.

—–

¹ Thus, for instance, Gyges is a hundred-armed and fifty-headed monster, a demi-god in one case, and a Lydian, the successor of Candaules, king of the country, in another version. The same is found in the Indian Pantheon, where Rishis and the Sons of Brahmâ are reborn as mortals.

—
² The continents perish in turn by fire and water: either through earthquakes and volcanic THEOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY eruptions, or by sinking and the great displacement of waters. Our continents have to perish owing to the former cataclysmal process. The incessant earthquakes of this and the past years may be a warning.

—
³ Denis, the geographer, tells us that the great sea North of Asia was called glacial, or Saturnine (v. 35). Orpheus (v. 1077) and Pliny (Book IV., c. 16) corroborate the statement by showing that it is its giant inhabitants who gave it the name. And the Secret Doctrine explains both assertions by telling us that all the continents were formed from North to South; and that as the sudden change of climate dwarfed the race that had been born on it, arresting its growth, so, several degrees southward, various conditions had always produced the tallest men in every new humanity, or race. We see it to this day. The tallest men now found are those in Northern countries, while the smallest are Southern Asiatics, Hindus, Chinamen, Japanese, etc. Compare the tall Sikhs and Punjabees, the Afghans, Norwegians, Russians, Northern Germans, Scotchmen, and the English, with the inhabitants of central India and the average European on the continent. Thus also the giants of Atlantis, and hence the Titans of Hesiod, are all Northerners.

The Secret Doctrine, ii 774–777

THEOLOGY BUILT ON HISTORY
H. P. Blavatsky

Famous Personages Practicing Magic?

December 30, 2015 by Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila in Energywork, Enochian Magic, Newsletter, The Mysteries | Leave a comment

Which famous people are practicing Magic?

If you’re like me, you probably think that 99% of the imagery around magic is … Silly. Embarrassing. Just downright tacky.

When I first got into magick, this was the first hurdle I encountered. The word “magic” itself is silly. The books are poorly designed, with airbrushed images of crystals and dragons and that kind of thing. Nine times out of ten, people who claim to be into magic dress like they’re at a Renaissance Fair, and behave just as foolishly.

PPFFTTT!!

Well, since the 80s and 90s, magic has become a lot more fashionable. It’s become popular in youth culture to call yourself a witch, talk about energy, etc. But still, in polite company, “magic” isn’t exactly a subject that’s taken seriously.

But it works. It works almost too well. Everybody from heads of state to business leaders to top celebrities are using it—they might call it magick, or they might call it something else. But this stuff is out there. It shows up in the most unexpected places. And all the tacky New Age aesthetics? As far as I’m concerned, that serves as a distraction from the real stuff.

Ask yourself: If magic has helped rocket these people to such prominence, what can it do for you?

For example, take chaos Magic, a postmodern system that emerged during the late 20th century in England. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, occult thinkers Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin were looking to define a system of magic that didn’t accept the dogma of the traditions that came before it, and instead sought results based on performing the magical operations of given system. Chaos magic values an eclectic approach toward belief—and its practitioners will adopt new beliefs and identities as they see fit to match the results they’re looking to get. Influenced by the writings of early-20th century painter and sorcerer Austin Osman Spare, as well as taking inspiration for the ideas of countercultural figures like Robert Anton Wilson and William S. Burroughs, the early chaos magicians suffused a core system based on the individual practitioner’s achievement of gnosis, a state of altered consciousness that exists beyond reason and the senses.

While not exactly attracting such celebrities such as Tom Cruise or John Travolta, chaos magick does have its notable practitioners. Below is a list of seven of them.

1. William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs was the author of classic countercultural works like Naked Lunch,The Soft Machine and Nova Express. Burroughs was fascinated by altered states of consciousness, and it shows in his hallucinatory writings—as well as his life-long drug habit. His interest in altered states of consciousness led him to a more schooled interest in magick, with a particular interest in Hassan i-Sabbah, whose dictum “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted” was of particular influence on the system of chaos magick. Along with Bryon Gysin, Burroughs was one of the originators of the cut-up technique of writing.

Below, Burroughs lectures on the using power of magical states of consciousness to inspire the creative faculty.

2. Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson’s books—like The Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger—were early influences on the development of chaos magic. You could say that his suffusion of Sufism, Taoism, Zen, General Semantics, Thelema and a host of other philosophical and mystical traditions made him an early adopter of chaos magick.

Below, Wilson talks about his experiences channeling a higher intelligence from the star system Sirius.

3. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is a highly celebrated artist and founding member of influential musical acts Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. With Throbbing Gristle, Genesis was instrumental in the creation of industrial music—and with Psychic TV, helped to spearhead the burgeoning rave scene in the 1980s. In 1981, Genesis founded Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, an informal international occult order.

4. Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison is the author of the The Invisibles, an epic comic series designed as a hypersigil inspired by a UFO abduction/mystical experience Morrison had in Kathmandu.

Morrison has been very vocal about his practice of chaos magic. Below is the talk that launched a thousand sigils.

https://vimeo.com/120765919

Bonus: Morrison, along with Invisibles artist Frank Quitely, designed the sigil-heavy album art for Robbie Williams’ 2005 album Intensive Care. Williams was allegedly heavily influenced by Grant’s version of chaos magick at the time.

5. Alan McGee

Alan McGee is the founder of Creation Records, the label responsible for launching the careers of the Jesus and Mary Chain, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine and Oasis. Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null was of particular interest to McGee, who said in an interview:

“I’m more into… the chaos magicians like Peter J. Carroll, Austin Osman Spare and the films of Kenneth Anger and stuff like that. And Grant Morrison… Liber Null was a massive learning curve for me… It was a life changer for me, that book Liber Null.”

6. Die Antwoord

Ultraculture previously did a deep dive on the occult symbolism in Die Antwoord’s music video for “Pitbull Terrier”—and the South African rap duo, consisting of Ninja and Yolandi, have been revealing more and more of their interest in chaos magic. Their latest record, Donker Mag, features an androgynous, nude Yolandi covered with sigils on the cover. Their latest music video, “Ugly Boy” heavily features imagery associated with chaos magic, such as the eight-pointed chaosphere.

7. Aphex Twin

The enigmatic and reclusive electronic music legend Aphex Twin (real name Richard D. James) recently spoke about the influence of chaos magick on his artistic output. In aGuardian article about his new album Syro, James stated that he “pretty much believes” in magic:

“Even if none of it’s true, it’s just a thousand times better than any science fiction film that’s ever been written,” he said. “You can’t only believe things which can be proven. It’s boring.”

He also opened up about the mysterious origins of his logo:

“You think of something that you want to happen, then you turn it into something that looks like a magic symbol, and then you put it out in the world, and it works,” James said. “It does … But if you tell anyone what the symbol means, then it will stop working. I’ve got a new [sigil] that’s been in development for ages but it’s not looking right yet.”

8. Damon Albarn

While not a chaos magician in a strict sense, Albarn is yet another celebrity who has recently “come clean” about his interest in the occult. A few years ago, Albarn released a concept album and opera about 16th century mystic and alchemist John Dee, entitled, simply, “Dr. Dee.” A 2011 piece in The Guardian reports:

Albarn is particularly fascinated by Dee’s “horrible” final years in ruined exile in Manchester after dabbling with the occult. “Magic and the occult are part of my life. I’ve got to come out of the closet with this,” admits Albarn. As well as spending time in Chetham’s Library, where Dee used to study and, legend has it, once summoned up the devil (there’s a burn mark on a table there supposedly from Satan’s hoof), Albarn reveals that he has actually tried to contact the “old man” spiritually to find out what went wrong. “He hasn’t told me anything,” he adds, dryly.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. Since chaos magic is among the more trickstery traditions of magic, a celebrity chaote just might be hiding in plain sight.

Exploring Magic

December 29, 2015 by Hālau ʻĀha Hūi Lanakila in House of RA, Lessons, Newsletter, The Mysteries | Leave a comment

Since the beginning, brave seekers have aspired to touch the unknown—to reach out for something greater than themselves, to transcend the world of the five senses and grasp the numinous.

This primal, undefined impulse gave birth to both religion and science—one seeking to control humans by limiting the spiritual (and sexual) instinct; the other constraining exploration merely to the material plane.

Magic—a catch-all term denoting humanity’s efforts to grasp eternal truths and remold itself by the light of those truths—will not be circumscribed by the ultimately limited goals of either of its children. It merges the aim of religion with the method of science in an esoterically artful approach. Thus, we can say that magic is the art and science of manifesting your will into your reality.

The phrase “magic” is deliberately absurd. It immediately offends the ideologues of both religion and materialist scientism, turning them away from the Temple, a temple not owned by any specific religious sect, philosophical school or otherwise definable dogma, though symbols and ideas from all branches of world knowledge may be found therein.

And this is a key: We have inherited an incredible wealth of knowledge and technique from the world’s religious, philosophical, logical, mathematical and scientific modes of inquiry. What if all of this could be put to use, not in the service of dogma, but as a set of experimental tools for assessing the development of human consciousness, with all of the empirical rigor of the scientific method to keep us from falling into sentimental delusion or sectarian bias along the way?

This has been the goal of the Western secret societies since at least the Age of Enlightenment, clandestine associations of free-thinkers who maintained silence, mystery and misdirection at the peril of their own lives. But, we live in a different time now, a more free time, one not so afraid of an Inquisition.

What is needed is a reliable set of tools for altering consciousness. We have access to some of those tools today. Higher yoga, for instance, can produce physical ecstasy and liberation from conditioned identity, on demand, for free. It takes considerable training, but it’s possible. “Magic” itself, the historical and technical term for the techniques of applied Kaballah and consciousness-altering ritual, can immensely improve one’s concentration, focus and intellectual ability.

In decades past, this information was largely inaccessible outside of covert groups, private collections and university libraries; simply finding it was a major hurdle to surmount. Now, with all of the secrets out and easily accessible via the Internet, we have a new problem: identifying the truly important information in the vast sea of utter nonsense. Magic is a complex subject, and in its more vulgar forms appeal to, shall we say, the not particularly intellectually clear. That means that there’s just a lot of wrong information out there. For every set of The Equinoxes, we have ten thousand New Age books, edgy faux-grimoires and trumped-up, absurd individuals claiming “special” knowledge and powers. Even the most sincere teachers of mysticism or meditation may be marred by their own incomplete understanding, cultural baggage or the all-too-common temptation to patch holes in technical instruction with sentimentality and truisms.

What’s needed is a proper presentation of this material, with the central instructions isolated and offered in a clear, no-nonsense fashion so that students can quickly absorb and apply the experimental techniques in their own lives. No spookiness, obfuscation, dress-up, pretentiousness or imposed hierarchy. If something is truly to be kept secret, it can easily be hidden in plain sight, as the genuinely secret information in magic cannot be understood except by those who are ready to understand it and who are, therefore, already fit to receive it. Ignorance and ineptitude provide their own blinds.

GDTemple

The clear and immediate benefits of magic are:

The clarification of one’s life Path.
The improvement of analytical Reason.
The development of the Intuition.
The strengthening of the Will.
The hard-won ability to transcend the individual Ego.

These correspond, in sequence, to the elements Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Spirit.

Subsidiary benefits include:

The ability to master the body and mind through Yoga, and produce states of ecstasy.
The cultural and intellectual benefits of a classical education.
The ability to make substantial changes in one’s personal reality through ceremony and ritual.

In a profoundly meaningless culture, it can come as an even more profound shock that not only does a system to attain higher consciousness exist, but that it can be methodically and precisely taught. Spirituality should not be the realm of accepted dogmas and priesthoods, nor should it be the realm of predatory snake-oil salesmen, nor should it be defined as an aberrant chemical spasm of the brain. It should be the domain of exploration, experiment and empiricism, just like every other branch of the human intellectual project.

Unfortunately, this (as of yet) hasn’t happened, because:

A major portion of the mainstream religions want a monopoly on consciousness and the spiritual dimension of life, and they have fought each other for this monopoly for thousands of years. It was a miracle that science ever escaped their persecution. The magicians have been far less lucky, and have always been too low in number and too disorganized to resist the pogroms, Inquisitions and Crusades of religious despots.
Science, even though it was born out of magic and alchemy, has limited itself to the purely material, and tends to deny the existence of that which cannot be objectively measured. While this is absolutely necessary to maintain the integrity of the scientific discipline itself, it unfortunately leaves out the wholly subjective phenomena of consciousness, which is assumed to be merely the product of an incalculable equation of conditioning and chemicals, to be understood only as much as it can be influenced towards consumer or political decisions.
Magic takes far too much study and discipline for it to be of any appeal whatsoever to the average first world consumer, who wants her or his desires satisfied in the same time it takes to order Chips and Salsa.
The groups of practitioners that have guarded the Western Esoteric Tradition have kept a veil of secrecy on their work to secure themselves from persecution and misunderstanding by the agents of religion, science and consumerism. While I will not so much as question the choices of my elders, who carried magic through conditions of unbelievably punishing hardship that I will never understand, I will also point out that we are left with a tradition that has progressed far more slowly than it might have, and which continues to operate on major breakthroughs made in the Renaissance by magicians like Trithemius and Dr. John Dee. Later developments, from Crowley to Chaos to Whare Ra, have been far more eclectic, building on consolidated Renaissance and Enlightenment knowledge by adding new insights and porting in techniques from other cultures. Yet we are still left with an endangered, non-funded body of knowledge with no cultural or institutional support, and certainly none of the peer review that characterizes the rest of the sciences. We inherit a well-preserved but dying field—simply because our culture does not recognize or care about magic (or, truly, anything that cannot be quantified in immediate monetary reward … but I digress).

In our society, the only place that magick is given space to exist tends to be in the arts, where it can be written off as a harmless eccentricity or matter of style. Unfortunately, a matter of style is generally what it remains. Beyond that, the public feeds off of techniques cribbed from the notebooks of magicians and taken out of context to suit the quick fix and the quick buck—corporate mindfulness seminars, NLP, commercialized yoga, and the like.

We have no great hopes of rehabilitating the image of magic in the public eye. However, we can rehabilitate the way it is perceived by a small group of truly committed people prepared to do the work and reap the benefits. We can teach it, and teach it clearly.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—let the new order spring from those capable to assess the work, no longer constrained by non-access to instruction, or by elitism, exclusivity or prejudice. Let the pressures of the work and the nigh-insurmountable labor of overcoming the mind itself be the only hurdle, for it is hurdle enough.