A Narrative In Several Parts (pt. III)

Columbine - Doug Nox

De profúndis clamávi ad te, Dómine: Dómine, exáudi vocem meam.

Sometimes I get lost, my thoughts turning in Escher stairwells and the endless reflections of mirrors facing mirrors.  Sometimes I get lost.  It’s alright, I think sometimes to have nowhere in particular to go, somewhere in the deep down of human memory is a time of endless wandering.  It bubbles up, that need to see something I have never seen before, a flower, a beast, to hear a new music or puzzle out a new language.  I can’t get lost in Toronto anymore, I can sleep walk here and still catch every train just as it’s pulling into the station.  It is a trap most cunning, the ennui of familiarity, escape from which requires feats of daring; one can never know the effusive joy of coming home if you never leave to begin with.  You have settled for half a life.  You have let the clothes make the man.

Fiant aures tuae intendéntes: in vocem deprecationis meae.

Columbine wears no mask.  She is the secret you keep, that you are always pretending.  Pretending to be human, pretending to care, hiding your prejudice, your fear, the amoral fire of your desire.  That piece of ass, that bit of acknowledgement that you can humbly disregard. 

Si iniquitátes observaveris, Dómine: Dómine, quis sustinébit.

For a long time I got lost in the endless shanty.  That place in my mind that went on forever.  That crowd of gods.   That denial of permanence, no mind palaces or astral temples over which I might stand as some lord or master, just shanties and lean-to’s, dusted red rust on corrugated aluminium and shit floating in the river.  I found there a girl in pristine white, dress and skin and hair luminous but eyes like crimson.  Like a cartoon vampire or a drunk deep into his cups.  She vibrated with a desire so dark and absolute that the gods of that place cowered before her.  As though getting too close to that absolute hunger would lock them into her gravity and they would be eaten whole by her, like a black hole consuming time and space.  Forever, by definition, cannot have a center and yet there she was, the center of forever, eating it whole.  The gods hide like remorseful children from the penitent soul.

Quia apud te propitiátio est: et propter legem tuam sustinui te, Dómine.

The Anima Sola became an icon for a number of obscure figures.  Clarissa, the adolescent god of the Obeah clothed in the gossamer web of the Spider.  Klemezin Klemay, the child bride of Agwe and sister-wife of Freda and La Siren.  The icon is originally Catholic in origin, the penitential soul of a woman surrounded by the flames of Purgatory, seemingly in an ecstasy.  The icon was often utilized in workings of sexual compulsion or seduction, still is to this day.

Sustinuit ánima mea in verbo ejus: sperávit ánima mea in Dómino.

Not long after that vision Elliot Rodger killed nine people in Santa Barbara.  He was quite clear in his memoir that this monstrous action was rooted in a pervasive and relentless hatred of women that had grown out of their refusal to validate his culturally reinforced sense of entitlement.  The inevitable and depressing debate broke out between feminists and frankly just about everyone else over whether or not this event was symptomatic of a greater widespread form of institutional misogyny.  I thought a lot about that red eyed devil at the center of forever, the fires of the burlesque enshrining her, the god-men hiding their shame from her.  I thought a lot about Columbine’s secret, about my secrets.    

A custodia matutina usque ad noctem: speret Israel in Dómino.

I saw the truth of my desire in her blood red eyes, how it was colored by violence and jealousy and possessiveness.  I was that hellish fire or a part of it at least.  The best man I can be is in truth not a good enough man, I will spend my whole life unmaking the entitlement I was conditioned with and I will fail.  All men, no matter how well-intentioned will fail at some point and in some regard. 

Quia apud Dóminum misericordia: et copiósa apud eum redémptio.

Penitence is forever, it is the center of it.  A black hole eating up time and space.  You have to own it or the gods will have you, better to burn than cherish your pride.    

Et ipse redimet Israel, ex ómnibus iniquitátibus ejus.

A Brief and Terrible Intermission

Pantaloon - Doug Nox

Oh blood and bone and clocks and trains

My coat will keep you from the rain

Alas our love is all in vain

The briar and the rose

I will not wait, I cannot thread

The tenor of the things you've said

My love is true and we must wed

The briar and the rose

I don't know how, I don't know why

I never meant to make you cry

My love is blind and so I chose

The briar and the rose

- the Briar and the Rose

Occasionally, if you want to call yourself a sorcerer and not a ‘student of magic’ you have to let it all hang out there.  And I don’t mean endless cascades of words you found in books and your opinions on them, though that certainly isn’t the worst thing you could do.  I mean you have to give up the safety of convention and see how far your juju can carry you.  You have to test the model of the world you have unconsciously constructed in that meat machine against the chaos of the world as it is.  I miss the heady days of dangerous magic and dangerous magicians.  Crowley with his drug use and experimental sex.  Parsons with his polyamoury and crazy science.  Burroughs with his renegade philosophy and blatant homosexuality.  When the mad cabalist Charlie Jones returned to Canada after his falling out with Crowley he stripped naked and ran around the airport until he was arrested for indecent exposure, all to get the ‘UK out his system’.  Spare, even P. B. Randolph all have possessed what can only be described as idea’s which were a clear and present danger to the status quo.  They were fucking rock stars.

If some aspect of your sorcerous model exists solely to validate that false construct then it will break against the world as it is.  I call this ‘finding the handle’.  After many years of mercenarial work I can safely say that I have been burned a lot, certainly more than the average student of magic, devout Wiccan or pious neophyte.  As my old friend Mr. VI told me when I complained about it in the early years, “you can’t spend all day wandering around a battlefield and then complain when you get shot.”  The sheer volume of burns and nails flying about porn valley at any given moment is pretty ridiculous.  I think that has to be one of the most heavily ensorcelled pieces of real estate in the world and perhaps history.  A great many of those nixes just roll right off because they are really meant for me at all, they are meant for someone’s idea of me.  A burn meant to punish me for being the devil incarnate will not be terribly effective because I am not actually the devil incarnate (a devil perhaps but certainly not the devil).  Much more problematic are burns getting slung without any personal malice (the ‘it’s just business’ burn) or my own work getting efficiently cycled back to me (I call this ‘going Frankenstein’).

Besides an enthusiastic and regimented cleansing and clearing routine the best way I learned to keep the fallout from becoming unbearable was to become largely indestructible.  Also known as, learning some esoteric Buddhism.  I am not talking shallow appropriation here either; I would like to emphasize here how little good a stature of Buddha will do on your altar.  If there is a deity (wrong word for a Buddha but if you are thinking a statue on your altar is the way to go, it’s how you are thinking about it) that cares less about the fact that you are getting burned I don’t know what it would be.  I mean the spiritual mechanics at work under the hood.  Especially, the ideas of ‘attachment’ and the ‘poisons’.  Namely, that as conscious beings we place an undue amount of significance and emotional validity on particular by-products of our sensory organs.  The notion that time and space are inherently illusory, insofar as we perceive them with our eye’s and ear’s and hand’s and what-not is obviously logical, western philosophers have been riding that meal ticket for centuries but it breaks down on the rocks of personal experience.  We get attached, to pleasure, to fear, to love and through these attachments we accrue karma because we are invested in an illusion.  Karma is the scrunched up newspaper to the bonfire of any magical working.  So being ‘indestructible’ in a magical sense is to be without attachment.  Without the accumulation of karma the burn can’t ‘find a handle’.

The key here however, is realizing that being impervious to the fallout does not equate to feeling no pain.  It is embracing the pain, the sense of loss, inhabiting it and allowing it to pass through you.  In this way the karma is cleansed and a more meaningful perspective is achieved.  Sometimes of the ways you yourself have contributed to your problems, sometimes that the thing which you feared was not the end of the world, sometimes that the catharsis of grief and loss is the way to beauty.  The black Buddha-sage Dharmaraja is a refuge in times of turmoil like that, during the Ordeals and Pilgrimages of our sort, wandering peregrine about the hellscapes gathering his devotee’s from among the devils and fox spirits.  I count myself among that number, no less a child of the nail because of it, perhaps in a sense more truly a child always a child because of it.  In this sense, an effective burn is a gift of the Buddha’s that reveals to us some hitherto secret accumulation of karma.

Crowley and Burroughs and the others I mentioned at the outset, they didn’t just come into this world capable of seeing through the veil of social convention and morality.  For most of them in fact, it was quite the opposite.  They obtained to a perspective beyond the social norm because of a willingness to examine the fallout of the illusions that hold those conventions in place and evaluate their true value in their own lives.  Among the figures of the Burlesque, normative social mores are embodied by Pantaloon or as we have come to call him, ‘the Idiot’.  In the old plays he embodies the limitations of the status quo, of class and income disparity, of honor and obligation, of sexual roles and dynamics.  He always represents the obstacle which must be surmounted by the lovers to achieve union but he is not so easily defeated.  He is always both sides of the coin of conventional morality.  The old Pastor demanding pious chastity while lecherously lusting after Columbine, the old Father demanding familial piety while he defies the wishes of his son or daughter.  Regardless of the story, it is his presence that necessitates the involvement of the devil Harlequin, only a trickster can negotiate the self-validating dualisms of the cultural norm because as a liminal figure he can observe them from beyond their borders as a complete thing which can be objectified and manipulated.

Honoring the Idiot is a tricksy business because he/she is always both ends of a dualism.  Every honorific is simultaneously an insult, every gift he might bestow simultaneously a curse.  At the most basic and profound levels the spirit which fills this mask is akin to Azathoth, mad beyond reason.  It cannot be contained in a narrative arc because it defies grammar and syntax, remakes them over and over into endless cascades of meaning.  I had contemplated writing this entire piece without any grammatical structure whatsoever but decided in the end that would be a bit too hipster douche bag of me.  There is a real value in this figure and it serves nothing to cloud it with clever misdirection.  That is a bag of tricks best left to Harlequin.  The Idiot is best honored in the absence of pomp and circumstance, in the acceptance of the good with the bad, the sad with the happy, the gain with the loss, his presence is automatic in action in which we challenge the comfort of our cultural norms or the safety of the status quo.  The spirit that fills that mask is the spirit of the world and he can only embrace it by giving ourselves over to it.  To be manhandled and molested and challenged in our preconceived notions.  To love bravely, most importantly that, to love bravely in the face of loss and grief knowing that one’s heart cannot break before it has been filled to bursting.

A Narrative In Several Parts

Harlequin - Doug Nox

There's blood upon the bridal wreath

The bridal wreath, the bridal wreath

The Devil shows his shiny teeth

His shiny teeth, his shiny teeth, all shiny teeth

Now take a seat there by the door

He'll leave you on the killing floor

He's gonna set the clouds on fire

They're burning there forever more

- Chase the Clouds, verse 1

That first black breath we take all full up with lust and drugs is the beginning of the end.  This is the secret truth of the deal at the cross roads.  Death is the beginning and not the end.  True autonomy is hidden here, is the occulted relevance of the cross roads deal.  The only choice you will ever really get to make is what you will suffer for, is how you will submit, is to whom you shall bargain your soul.  Surrender is the only victory to be had for a sorcerer, a real one anyway.

Counter-intuitive I guess.  We are collectively drawn to magic because of a sense of the greater universe, the realization of our fleeting smallness in the timelessness of existence.  We seek control over our destinies when in fact there is no destiny.  It is a profound vanity to believe the universe has a plan for you because it does not.  You are the manifestation of a natural biological imperative, you are an accidental masterpiece of evolution and when creation is done with you it will portion you out at the molecular level in service of something greater and more profound.  There is no pure state of being; enlightenment was the Buddha’s mischievous talk.  The black ink of my tattoos, the poisons in my blood, none of it worse for me than breathing in the living death of my existence.

I have been set to a pilgrimage and I am unsure of where it is taking me.  In my dreams I have come back to the Nails of my youth but Qemetiel is no longer a purity of burning fields.  Now I see a ramshackle of shanties hobbled together along the banks of anti-freeze rivers, darkly haunted by inhabitants without a connection to their Other.  Beneath that endless expanse of poverty and suffering is a temple city much older than the Old Victorian that used to inhabit that space, still the colours of rust and sunset yellows but now Corinthian and Ionic pillars hold up its iron sky. 

I have wandered since December, from luxury condo to luxury condo in the ever-increasing number of sky-scrappers in Toronto.  A blur of swimming pools and hot tubs and impossible vista’s, staring out over the urban sprawl of Canada’s largest city from its center point downtown.  Cut free of the whole of an old incarnation, the woman I have loved the whole of my adult life clings to my hand, my fat cock, we are two people but one demon.  What new forms will have us?  We orbit the core of this city like a satellite picking up escape velocity. 

Qemetiel is an endless shanty town and the crowd of impoverished gods huddle about their oil drum fires, rubbing their hands together and telling stories of their lives before the fall.  Mostly lies I suspect.  I tuned up my 12-string guitar so that I could sing along with the howling winds buffeting the austere heights of the Neptune Tower on Queens Quay.  The Invisibles love the lyrical purity of a lonely musician.  I gave up the first part of my soul for all the world's magic, the second to sing like the devil himself, the third to fuck like a satyr.  Worth every penny.  Of the four mortal parts, I got one left to bargain with.  As for the three immortal parts, well they were never really mine to sell.  So I am making my way to that Black Buddha to strike my final bargain, across the endless shanties and anti-freeze rivers.  Through the poverty of your Gods, their oil-drum fires and tall tales, past the dark silhouettes of the Ha’wiyah who praise the Tetragrammaton while they jerk off to clockwork hookers and sacrifice their children in pursuit of self-deification. 

Just a crusty sorcerer with a bit of soul to sell and a knack for the hard bargain.  It is has been more than a decade since I last undertook the ordeal of the Pilgrimage and I am the wiser for them.  I will burn incense before the mask of Harlequin and let the God-who-is-Not fill it up.  I will spill blood and semen and cheap whiskey upon an altar for the Circus-Burlesque because that is what your religion is to me.  A cock-tease and a wondrous spectacle.  I will sing songs with the four winds until the Tower falls down in its joyous destruction.

And this time, I will write the whole damned thing down.

Economy of Desire

“The universe contains a ‘Maybe’.” – Robert Anton Wilson

In the end, when it comes time for you to make something, all you will have is your grasp of the strange mechanics.  Your Gods, your old ghosts will come on like furies and muses but in the end it is what you can make out of that inspiration.  From a love of function comes grace.  When I need to make something I like to write or tinker on machines, my relative adeptness at either of those things is contingent on my embracing the limitations which define their respective arenas.  English as a descriptive language is an abstraction of an abstraction of a phantom of a thing, and engineering is locked within the iron prison of Newtonian physics.  Those are the limitations which define those two expressions of the human genius.  I think of Chaos Magic and the Discordians as a system of sorcery, belonging to the grand history of humanity probing the darkness and the invisible for deeper understandings, which unselfconsciously preoccupies itself with the strange mechanics which invisibly govern the innumerable expressions of the human genius.  That’s why an old rock-a-billy from Canada with his veve’s in his skin avidly reads Runesoup and follows the weaponized art of the Foolish People. 

My name is Ryan Valentine and I lay tricks and drive hot rods.  Cars in particular, are machines I am fond of but that affection extends to all kinds of vehicles.  Give me your beaters, junkers and econoboxes and I will make race cars and slut magnets out of them.  Give me an actual sports car and I will evoke a tyrant that will most likely destroy itself and perhaps you with it.    A car (or any machine really) exists in the abstract as a collection of realizable potentialities.  When I put my hands to a car that’s what I see, like a gardener in the spring time.  Some people don’t like that analogy, a machine to a garden but I think it fits.  I sow my acid-seed and reap flowers of electric fire.      

A good written piece, a blog or an essay or a bit of fiction is like a machine if we think of machines as I have described them, as a collection of realizable potentials.  I have a collection of discreet values, etymological, grammatical, lyrical and semantic and these can be arranged in some manner to which the causal mechanisms of the observer are sensitive.  It is syntax which conjures identity and not the descriptive.  When I read the old Chan and Zen scriptures it gradually dawned on me that those old monks were real sticklers when it came to grammar.  They never cared what it was you were describing, only how you described it. 

“Venerable Master, why does Buddha say dharma is like the blossoming of a flower?”

“You’re a dick.”

That isn’t as counter-intuitive as it at first sounds, every aspiring karcist under the age of 30 wishing to affect an air of philosophical depth has trotted out the words-are-meaningless argument.  We have established that those discreet values I mentioned above are arbitrary, determined by time, place and social reinforcement and also that this isn’t really all that relevant to an examination of the mechanics of communication.  To illustrate, the cat pictures and pornography which take up most of the memory on your hard disc are entirely irrelevant to how the machine functions.

Language itself exists codependently within a greater affective array along with gesture, facial expression and non-verbal vocal calls (as well as innumerable other subtleties).  Neurobiologists and cognitive psychologists describe this array as a tree, as do mystics of virtually every time period in human history.  Science currently contends that the whole of the mind works like that, a collective of interdependent faculties arranged in some logical array, allowing for analogue, heuristic, parallel, and fuzzy logic and an uncanny grasp of probability.  This also jives with archaic animist models for the functions (or Parts) of the Soul and in some senses redeems the more contemporary concept of Atavism in its implicit validation of natural selection.    

This is not to suggest that science has answers to all the questions, rather that it is inexorably closing the gap on animist thought (which does have all the answers).  Those old shaman were as obtuse as their counter-parts among the Zen, only for them it is the story telling devices of allegory, metaphor and abstraction.

“Grandfather, where does the rain come from?”

“The Sky-Lady is crying because her sister the Corn-Lady gave her husband the Sky-Phallus a handy at last year’s Christmas party.”

“What? .. Really?”

“Yeah man, who can resist a handy, amiright?”

This suggests that human consciousness is a sort of approximation engine and that our approximations are refined and developed not only across the arc of our individual lifetimes but also the grander collective arc of our species.  This is evidenced by numerous inconsistencies in our natural responses which are seemingly irrational until viewed in an evolutionary framework, like an innate fear of heights or dark water but a casual disregard for strapping yourself into 2 tons of glass and metal and then hurling yourself about the face of the earth at preposterous speeds.  We experience the pre-imminence of the mechanics of communication over the discreet, compositional values when we are deeply and inexplicably moved by a lyrical chorus even though the words which comprise them are most usually barely sensible, over-wrought platitudes.  In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was Song. 

And verily the Lord did say; “this Song is fuckin’ awesome.”

Perhaps most profoundly this model illuminates why we invest these internal approximations with a sense of eternity, they are the touchstones we use to negotiate creation and the human experience of it.  When we strip contemporary monotheism’s aggressive proselytizing and Noam Chomsky’s academic crusade against opponents of his Universal Grammar of their ‘discreet, compositional values’ all you are left with is a fanatical devotion to an intangible object.   As these approximations calcify into certainties they delineate themselves with existential horror because beyond the boundary line of certainty is confusion and madness.  We will reflexively perceive all things beyond the scope of our certainties as inherently unnatural, evil and threatening.  This point can be quite effortlessly defended with the whole of our conflict fraught existence on this planet or the intellectual impairment which arises from cognitive dissonance.

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” – Hassan I Sabbah, Master of the Hashashin

Here everything has its nexus; the cranky old monk and the irreverent shaman are sat at the same table.   The old monk saying that discriminating between things, establishing one thing as separate from another is the root of karma whilst the irreverent shaman nods sagely and chews on mushrooms wrapped in coca-leaf.  Then they swap war stories about the Lord of Death and his zeal for dismemberment.  These two individuals understand each other perfectly, without need for semantic absolutes because the exchange describes a shared experience.  This suggests an economy of idea’s, of desire and belief.  I describe the ongoing exchange as an ‘economy’ because of the essentially finite nature of the human experience, the value of a thing is collectively established via its mutual necessity.

That singular weight of our disparate perspectives on a word or an image or a sound compresses it into meaning, like coal into diamond.  Obviously, I am not suggesting that your internal process is a simple as a computer OS, rather that when we make a thing we make it in our own image, as a reflection of our individual understanding.  We hear a lot of talk about how our historically simple lives were somehow better and truer and more fulfilling than these complex lives we now live all divorced from nature.  This simply does not jive with my own approximations.  Does the wind blow harder through the woods or city streets?  Is gravity somehow less exacting when you hang 300 feet up from a face of glass and steel than it is at the same elevation on a face of granite?  In the humble experience of this unlearned farm-boy, the wind is the Wind regardless of where it blows and gravity is possessed of a Newtonian reliability.  The Wind is a good example of how we work through approximations actually because it’s so hard to accurately model with math and yet so easy to intuitively read.  Don’t blame contemporary humanity for twisting Newtonian absolutes up into chaos; we learned it from the Wind.

Have you ever flown a kite? How about dangle off a skyscraper?  You make use of the same approximation and the more informed it becomes the better you get at it.  I learned everything I know about narrative from a Boatswains’ Chair at roughly 200 ft. from the ground.  You would think that gravity would be my great nemesis under the aforementioned circumstances but you would be wrong.  Gravity is reliable; a plank of wood, 400 ft. of rope and a strange aluminum cylinder with a cork screw inside it and gravity is my best friend.  Up there it is the chaos of the wind that will have you shitting your pants.  Before I had done industrial work on the Boatswains’ Chair I had climbed around on rocks and felt that by comparison the Scotia Bank Tower would be a piece of cake.  Unlike a rock face you start at the top, the Boatswains’ Chair only goes down.  You double up the rope and then run it through the corkscrew and then hook the chair to the screw, so when you descend you pull the screw against the rope.  Friction does the rest, gravity is reliable.  The more turns around the screw the slower the rate of descent.  Now for a second think about what the wind can do with 200 feet of dangling rope.

I had never before felt as though a gentle breeze was going to end me.  So when it happened I was immensely afraid even though it was just a gentle breeze and nothing untoward happened.  It imposed itself very clearly on me, on my approximation.  Unlike climbing, wherein you seek to maximize the amount of friction between you and the face, in the chair you are trying to minimize it.  Just bouncing off the wall on the tips of your toes if you’re doing it right.  You have tools and shit hanging off the rig so you want a comfortable arms-length distance from whatever you’re descending and when the wind gets into that space it can do some pretty freaky shit.  I developed two new(ish) forms of sensory anticipation, the first came on quick and made a new and practical use of the fine hair on the back of my neck.  That one was for when the wind was going to work on me and my rig, it warned me of the air curling into a whip behind/around me.  The second took longer, it was a whole body sort of thing as though I was learning to make use of a new limb and it preoccupied itself with what the rope was trying to tell me.  Being a simple sort of dude, this process fascinated me.  Sensation is the beginning of fortune-telling; all of us can see into the future, it is how our minds work. 

“The enlightened mind is nowhere attached.” – Takuan Soho

You take this great load of information about what has just happened, discard any information which isn’t relevant to the approximation and use it to create the immediate future.  The mind exists simultaneously in the past and the future, the ‘present’ is an emergent narrative arising from the mind perceiving itself at the beginning/end.  The little hairs on the back of my neck had always been telling me what the air around me was doing; the information had just not possessed a great deal of relevance to the Approximate-World of Approximate-Ryan.  You are always working with a temporal narrative, like how a good fast ball or a left jab both move faster than the eye can actually see, your mind shows you where they will be.  Depending on how well informed your approximation is you either strike out or knock it out of the park, you either bob and hook or get punched in the face.

Like all crusty shaman I am probably mixing too many metaphors.  To recap, language is a vehicle that can be hot-rodded and subjective narrative codependently arises between any two objective points.  Sensible, right?  I am going to write more about this, narrative in particular and the Cut-Up technique but the fascinating history of cocaine isn’t just going to write itself. 

 

Freud Pops Cherry

or the Mysteries of the Dirty Saints

The two concepts that I remember dominating the Chaos Magic communities in the late nineties were the dynamics of invocation and evocation and whether the prescribed limitations as laid down by Peter Carroll for the Illuminates Of Thanateros (henceforth, IOT) still held any value.  Among that number were a group of hard-core and resourceful practitioners who invested themselves completely in a given paradigm to explore the system of thought which underlay the system of magic, this sort of immersion was held in particularly high regard by the Discordian Saints because it was often hilarious.

A core principle among the Saints was the idea that belief itself was simply a tool of the conscious process.  The Discordian motto; either your religion is a joke or your joke is a religion, was often cited in debates between the Saints regarding the role of faith or belief in the individual process.  So there was an ever present undercurrent wherein legitimate attempts were made to understand many of the traditional ceremonial paradigms.  Dope smoking punk rockers spending three to six months reading the bible every day, morally judging everyone around them and wailing and repenting for their lives of unending sin, all to meet Abramelin’s guardian angel.  Those practitioners who were willing to extend themselves beyond the confines of personal or popular convention, even at the cost of personal embarrassment were widely held to have the best juju.

This practice was one of the main reasons for the emphasis on ego-death among the Saints.  After locking oneself into a system of belief there is only one way out and it’s the hard way, catastrophic deconstruction or the 16^th Arcana.  Upon which the individual would apply what they had learned to their own paradigm.  Ego-death was also a popular concept among the more traditional Chaos Magicians, elevated in importance by Carroll’s assertion that it was the ego which the sorcerer had to set aside to truly empower an act of magic and that this took place only at the moment of death or sexual rapture.  Hence his pseudo-deity Thanateros (Thanatos/Death-Eros/Sex) commonly identified with Chaos Magic in the late nineties.  In this regard many of Carroll’s thoughts could be considered a sort of post-Freudian paradigm, a mechanical realization of Freud’s contention that it was the desire for sex and death which underlay our conscious actions.  

The Saints took an increasingly fluid perspective on the ego, realizing that no matter how many times you kill that thing it comes back.  That after a few immersions and subsequent ritualized ego-death’s the whole thing got pretty ephemeral.  I had the great privilege of gaining my Sainthood through the infamous collective known as the Children of the Nails, who were provided with an invisible hub on the now defunct chaosmagic.com forums from which to concoct our mad schemes.  In that space the Saints had room to experiment and explore without fear of censure, which the public boards would often explode into.  They took on some pretty risky concepts (at the time) like personality fragmentation, demonic possession and the chemically augmented extremes of animist shamanic ordeals.  The noise was the same back then; working with the spirits like that is suicide, working with consciousness like that will turn you into a psychotic schizoid, I know a guy who knows a guy who had a friend that said Papa Gede’s name backwards and his ass fell out and his dog exploded.

By the end of the nineties even the initiates of the IOT emphasized offerings and sacrifices as immensely practical in any work with personal servitors (akin to the Buddhist concept of a tulpa) and egregores (which was thought of as a metaphysical reflection of something that many individuals believe in, somewhat clumsily and occasionally offensively lumping together conceptual objects like an animist deity and Coca-Cola’s brand identity).  Even the least superstitious Chaos magicians most of which had evolved past the simplicities of Carroll and Freud into more fertile ideologies like those of Brian Gyson and C.G. Jung, had retained their emphasis on animist ritual practices (mantra, offerings or sacrifice, sigilization, devotion, talisman etc.) over western ceremonialism.   Also in an effort to distance themselves from conventional western ceremonialism, many of the Discordian collectives focused on the overlap between their ideologies and those of the eastern spiritual disciplines with a particular emphasis on Zen and the twisted Buddhism of the Beats.  

It pleases me immensely to learn that a trend for creating altars for the dead and the ancestors has broken out among young chaos magicians, a most empowering and profound observance.  Many have gravitated towards more traditional Hoodoo because of the realization that that’s how they have been working it all along and that a great untapped wealth of information lay there.  Ultimately, the allure of these practices for young Chaos Magicians lay in their obvious capacity to liberate the practitioner from the contrivances of questionable gurus and mentors out begging for change among the neophytes and the barbarous autism of contemporary academia.  While the caution that meaningful investment in Los Muertos or the Palo can have legal ramifications is not without merit (in America and Mexico, notable Christian enclaves,) the concern should be placed within its greater context.

The FBI profile of ritual criminals I cited in Obscene Promises nevertheless gives top-slot to Satanism and associated forms of diabolism, not the Paleros and Santeros.  The profiler explicitly states that while a practitioner of Palo or a devotee of Los Muertos might engage in an activity that they know to be illegal (prostitution, illegal immigration, drug trafficking, etc.) they do so because they do not believe it to be inherently wrong.  On the other hand the Satanic antinomianism more readily idolizes actions deemed morally or socially reprehensible, so they still get top slot in America as far as legally questionable belief systems go.  Don’t murder pets, other people’s livestock or people and I am pretty sure you’re good regardless.  The fuzz is solid like that, a lot of law enforcement are just as superstitious as their criminal counter-parts and from what I hear you could do worse than have the veve of one of the Orisha out on the day they finally show up. 

This is twice now I have referenced that FBI profile in this blog and I would like to again state for the sake of my readers that I am not in any way advocating or endorsing the judgments of the profiler.  I just think it is important to clarify the discussion regarding this point.  Any of us that have opted to hang out the shingle will at some point encounter the fuzz, it’s an uncomfortable yet strangely liberating initiatory ordeal like getting your cherry popped.


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