Systems of Magick, let’s start over

There are so many systems of magick to choose from it can be overwhelming for the new comer to find their way to a system which they can work with harmoniously. This problem is compounded by the fact that a system that has an underlying philosophy that be work very well for a person may not posses a magickal system that said individual can work with easily. For example, consider hermetic kabbalism, a system whose fundamental goal is individual spiritual development through the training of magickal/psychic abilities. Astral travel, evocation, energy work, and divination have been thoroughly explored from the perspective of hermetic kabbalism. Yet this very individualistic system of development is highly structured and ritualized. Strong structural elements in a magickal system can be very valuable for the right people, but can be confining to others who prefer a more free-form practice and still desire a system of development. Other systems such as neo-paganism can have a very free-form approach to magick which may be perfect for some, but it’s philosophies concerning spirituality can be seen as wishy-washy by those who want a little more of a roadmap.

In essence it can be very difficult to find a good fit. It seems like systems need to be meshed together so that an individual can have a system which suits their needs. This can be a problem when the systems have inherent conflicts or contradictions. For example, imagine someone who is focused on the spirituality of the new age global consciousness movement, what if the magick that feels right to them happens to be Lovecraftian themed rituals… seems kinda tricky to mesh those together without ripping one system apart. And people are tricky like that, we are by no means consistent. Hypocrisy and contradictions are what make up individuality. If we didn’t contradict ourselves, we’d just be stereotypes.

In lieu of trying to piece together a system of magick from where others have tread before, why not start anew? Primitive man was fortunate in not being overburdened with the multitudes of assumptions and structures placed upon the universe that we all inherited. Our progenitors were free to explore their universe with very little preconceptions.

Imagine two people meeting without language and being attracted to each other. Having no words or prior experiences to classify the effects they have on each other. They don’t know anything about each other or the sensations they are experiencing for the first time. They would experience being drawn to each other without understanding why and yet feel it as the most natural thing in the world.

This is the same approach our proto-shaman ancestors must have taken towards what we now consider the supernatural/magickal/occult and whatnot. First not being burdened with a materialistic mindset, they would not have seen “magickal” experiences as other. They would experience it as yet another wondrous facade of existence, another mystifying experience. Magickal structures came through experimentation starting with almost no preconceptions towards what was possible and what would work.

By using the magickal system of another, you assume that those who have come before you have had the same goals as you and that these methods are universal, what works for one should work for all. Most occultists have had the experience of that very first spell working out great, thus drawing them into the work of magick. But they assume the spell worked because they saw the desired results. But really, did the spell work because it was a good spell, or because we open ourselves up to the possibility that the events could be manifested, or maybe something else happened, who knows? But from then on, most people put their faith in that magickal system because it worked.

The next mistake comes in assuming that the person who wrote the spell knows more about spirituality and stuff than you do, because they can cast spells and get results (allegedly). But just because a physicist can show you how to smash atoms and release energy, that doesn’t mean you should listen to the dating advice they give you.

My suggestion, approach magick as though you were falling in love for the first time. No preconceptions, just enjoyment of the experience without knowing where you’re headed, but trusting your instincts. Don’t approach with fear, don’t approach with expectations. You don’t have those when you first fall in love, everything is new, seen through new eyes and the experience rocks your whole life for years to come. After your first love, you’re never the same. If you trust in yourself and you trust in magick, you’ll never find yourself pouring over arcane tomes looking for the lost knowledge of another when you can be obtaining better info from the source. Why go with second hand material? Unless of course pouring through forgotten tomes is how magick really manifests for you, then you’ll find all sorts of things in there. More or less, if you do what feels natural and trust you instincts, you’re way better off than following a system that may only be hindering your magickal development.

Good luck and keep up the good work,

N.

Secrets

If you’re new to magick, or even if you’re not, you may be wondering why there’s still so much secrecy enveloping the practice of magick. Some practitioners love to surround themselves with an aura of mystery, it makes them appear mysterious and powerful to the easily impressed. You could be a total twit who’s never even performed a proper banishing, but act secretive and you’re sure to attract a few lost souls.

Just to be clear, I’m not speaking about keeping one’s magickal practice secret from the public eye, historically that practice makes sense depending on one’s environment. I speak of secrecy among practitioners. It seems like there are those who get off on claiming great magickal knowledge and then withholding it or using it as a bargaining chip to obtain… well, it’s almost always sex or money. Those people are to be avoided, they usually haven’t learned any secrets except the secret of appearing to have secrets, which can be a powerful tool, but they are charlatans, they are seeking to use those around them, pursue them at your own risk. Also avoid the braggarts, they are pretty much the same, except instead of sex or money, they are more interested in having their egos stroked.

However the tradition of secrecy among practitioners has another purpose and it is one that is seldom spoken of to the uninitiated, and that is that acquiring a magickal secret is a true initiation. Ignore group initiations for a second, those are what cement a magickal order together, but the secrets conferred by a group initiation are not true magickal secrets because a true magickal secret cannot be given by anyone else, it must be earned by the initiate. So possessing certain magickal secrets serves a a form of recognition among those who have acquire a certain level of magickal knowledge, if everyone knew of those secrets, everyone could claim those high titles and cheapen the effort of those who had actually come to earn that knowledge. But if that was all there was too it, magickal secrets would be spread, because even if they were not earned, shouldn’t learning be passed on?

The trouble is that magickal secrets cannot be passed on. To explain why, I must resort to analogy. This is pretty much the parable of the cave so just bear with me if you know your classics. Imagine that you are blind and I want to teach you about the color red, I cannot show you red, you’re blind. I can describe the color red, but without a frame a reference, you would have no way to picture it. I could explain the emotions associated with red and you’d probably think it was a pretty sultry color, and it is. But that is merely a cultural association with the color red. The real problem is that if I told you all about red, even though you were blind, you would think that you had grasped some element of what the color red is. If you were not blind but only color blind you might even think that you had now identified the color red. And if you had your eyes closed instead of being blind, you wouldn’t learn how to open your eyes because you’d already think you knew red.

That is much the same with a magickal secret, I could tell you the words that represent the magickal secret to me, but if you had grasped the secret at least slightly, you would understand the words and only think you understood the idea behind them. A true magickal secret is world shattering, it changes the world you live in. If you posses what you think is a magickal secret, it probably isn’t one. If you have a magickal secret, you know it, you’ll know it because when you obtain it, it brings you to your knees in awe, in terror, in joy, or in sorrow, but probably in a mix that ends in laughter.

So I won’t tell you my magickal secret, because you can’t hear it, I could tell you the words but I would only be doing you a disservice and lead you to chase shadows. But when you get there, not only will you know that your magick has brought you something special, but you’ll realize you’re not the only one because you have heard the secret before. Others have spoken them but you had never realized exactly what they were saying until just now. In a way, occultists have left graffiti around for those with eyes to see, a way to say to others we may never meet that we too had realized what they had. Because having a secret you can’t share is lonely, so we try to show others the way to get there, or we hold on to them jealously, it depends on the occultist and the secret I suppose.

And that concludes this chapter on magickal secrets. They are there, or at least one of them is, that I can say for sure. I get the distinct impression there are more but I’m not there yet. Oh and don’t now waste your time scanning this article for secrets, the only secret here is the one that is plainly spoken, the secret about secrets.

NITEIP

Eulogy

I’ve been thinking for some time on this matter and I’ve come to a sad conclusion; chaos magick is dead. Chaos magick went the way of punk rock, the movement is dead but it’s influence remains. What we are left with is a few old school punks or chaos magicians intermixed with a few lost souls drawn to a movement that’s already passed it’s prime and begun to decay. For you see, chaos magick had one fatal flaw that lead to it’s downfall, it was an individualistic movement, which contained at it’s core the pure selfish drive of transforming the individual into something of their own choosing, self-determinism of the soul. You can’t be a good chaos magician without first becoming a major disruption to those people in your life which would have you behave with propriety. The path a chaos magician must take is to adopt a stance where everything is put into question, deliberately examining every aspect of human behavior and belief. To accomplish this properly the magician must perform the greatest of society’s sins, which isn’t to rebel against society, rebellion is only the strengthening and reinforcement of ideologies, granted they are ideologies that differ from the ideologies of whoever the rebellion is against, but they are none the less ideologies.

To treat ideologies as clothing, things which can be put on and tossed off at whim is the very antithesis to how most people live their lives. Most people will only go through a few ideologies, who they are as children, who they are as teenagers, who they are as young adults, and who they are as they age. Throughout most of this, a few key beliefs will be held onto for an individual’s entire life or they might make one big change and be born again, but in almost all cases, that’s the end of the line. You live as a mostly consistent person with a more or less similar way of looking at the world for your whole life. So chaos magick says to hell with that, let’s have some fun and not take all this crap so seriously, it will all be disproved in less than a few centuries anyways. So chaos magick is naturally selfish, embracing that one can see how all truths are relative. It’s cheating life by society’s standards, society which has at it’s core the message saying you should care about BLANK. BLANK can be anything, but it cannot be nothing, and to treat caring about something, believing in causes and morality is an affront to the majority whose lives are constrained within the limits of their narrow world view.

And so the chaos magicians were the great cheaters in the game of life, free to don beliefs as they suited their lives, not the other way around as the rest of the world struggles to do each day. To treat everything that is from humanity as a comical theater and pick and choose which roles one wishes to act out is the key to chaos magick. Chaos magick represented being a deliberate actor in the game of life even though everyone around you didn’t know they were on stage playing a role. Of course this created hostility, because even though those caught up in the play couldn’t see the stage, they could still tell that chaos magicians weren’t playing by the same rules, they weren’t playing along or acting like they were supposed to. Even crazy people are consistent in their own crazy ways, but chaos magicians were not. Their lives appeared chaotic to those on stage who weren’t in on the act, and they represented a threat, after all, enough people on stage goofing around and the play changes, becomes something akin to improv, and the normal actors are oh so fond of their well rehearsed scripts.

And in the end chaos magick was killed by the community current. If you follow modern philosophy you get a very good picture of how the average person is feeling within modern society. And the modern philosophic current goes something like this… Ahem, we exist in a global community where all people are interconnected. We must embrace diversity and strive towards the good of all mankind. We must look at humankind as a community and be conscious of our actions and how they affect us and our environment. We must help those less fortunate than us because growing up hearing that we were privileged and hearing about starving orphans with malaria has left us feeling guilty if we are not contributing towards the GREATER GOOD. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few and everyone belongs to everyone else… you see where this is going right?

Some of the greatest proponents of this current have been in the new age and neo-pagan movements. It was their ideology that eventually got a foothold on the magickal community of the western world and the chaos magicians got invited to less and less parties, they were social pariah after all, hell even the satanists believed in something. This is not to say that chaos magicians did not find many with curious minds, just that the winds of the prevailing belief system were against them. I suppose it was inevitable, chaos magick theory would have been a threat to just about any system of organized belief which embraces consistency.

So here we are, chaos magick was not killed because the community lovers forced them out, but rather because they were the ones to pass on their sacred principles to the next generation, something harder for chaos magicians to do what with the whole desecrating everything is good for you philosophy. The myspace/facebook/twitter generation eats up that global community shit by the mouthful. Communication majors will soon plague us like lawyers… god help us, I think I was less worried about the lawyers.

Well that’s about it for now, we live in a time of self righteous, community loving, technology obsessed, self-subjugating concerned citizens.

Welcome to my world,

I may not be much of a choas magician when it comes to sigils, I hate those damn things, but I live and breath subjectivity. Maybe that’s not enough to make me a chaos magician, but the beauty of being a chaos magician is I get to decide what makes me a chaos magician, therefore I am one.