The L.A. Diaries, pt. I

[The LA Diaries are excerpts from the working journal I kept while living and working in Los Angeles a few years ago. The entries are raw, often unintelligible, with literally no regard for convention (neither literary or social) or mass appeal. I have decided to publish parts of this journal without regard for grammar or presentation for regular readers of this blog seeking a window into the destinationless spiritual wanderings of a practicing karcist.]

[Written after undertaking the consecration of a solid gold demonic seal of Baal. A demon-king of some renown featured in both the Old Testament and most of the old Grimoires with which I had little experience previous to the contracted work. While I realize some aspects of this text may seem disturbing it is a true relation of my experience of the spirit.]

Baal is the unformed stuff of magic. The black empty spirit of the witches’ Sabbath. Strong stuff, goes straight to the head. The arbitrary meting out of karma is what keeps it fair. Sometimes it’s the Internet going out, sometimes it’s falling off a roof. If it was all so transparent that you could anticipate its execution it would sort of invalidate the whole thing, wouldn’t it. To Baal we are just a bunch of hungry ghosts that got a body. For the most part I am inclined to agree …but what a body.

Baal is the naked mechanic of the magical exchange. A process which seems darkly joyous in its ambivalence toward human suffering. We embrace it as sorcerers or we are haunted by it, as we are haunted by so many of our revelations. He is there in that process too. Here among the fires of creation he is everywhere. Ellison’s Paingod. Stirring the pot of karma, Baal is some long dead God-king whose ghost outlasted his gods. They took a great deal of care preserving the old god-kings in death back in the day, they were total pros. Shax got his talon's on the gall bladders of some of those old Egyptian geezers back when they raided their tombs like they were 7-Elevens but I digress.

In his purest form he illustrates the manner in which you unknowingly generate conflict with your actions. The subtle undertone of ‘you’ beneath everything that you do, the very basic expression of your being. He is that pure hunger in the roots of desire. Baal is not headless, he is just deaf, blind and dumb. There is a difference.  You got to seal a body up to preserve it in death, you got to cover those holes, man. All the death will run out everywhere. He is still out there beneath the earth somewhere waiting for the world to end. The god-mans hunger turned all up on itself and gone M. C. Escher on your ass. 

On some level the sorcerer must concede that if he can manipulate the process, then the process is not sacred. Or conversely, that the actions of the sorcerer profane the process. Baal reveals sudden death by bus is an available karmic outcome to nearly every problem because you deserve it. Your human birth anchored you to death through the vehicle of karma. Baal reveals that all the sorcerer does is stir the pot.  That none of it actually matters to God, that suffering is a human concept which has never occurred in the mind of the Great Almighty. You can live your dreams or die a crack addled failure, Baal doesn’t care. He knows you started an ignorant moron, you can hardly be blamed for ending up one. The path was so clear.

When one man is raised above others, Baal is there. When a 3 year old chokes to death on it's blanket, Baal is there. In both cases, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Baal is always fair, it’s you that is being unreasonable, reading meaning into shit where there is none. Baal is there from the beginning to the end, for the lot of us.  He is the secret truth of our human body and its animation, the inexpressible dark hunger. It’s killing us. We hunger for suffering. 

That’s Baal, our collective hunger for suffering and death. Karma is a bitch. They say we fed him babies once. It’s possible I guess, at the most basic level that’s what we do, feed babies to karma.

That’s what Baal’s arrival meant for me. It’s all fucking arbitrary. If anyone is crazy enough to hire a witch-doctor then the path is laid, paved and lit with the corpses of dead Christians like the streets of old Roma.  Morality has no place in the mojo. Morality is meaningless, it’s the sorcerers sacrificial lamb. If Christ died on the cross for me then I killed him, I murdered God. It wasn’t hard, he was asking for it. Like the rest of us, his human birth made it karma. Nothing unfair about it, when he raised his eyes to heaven and asked why he had been forsaken he got the same answer we all do ..none. If that’s true for Old Glory himself then it is most assuredly the end to which you are destined. Baal don’t care, so why should I?

I won’t be haunted by it. Baal’s old ghost is just too ugly and self-important. There is no such thing as ‘bad karma’. There is only karma. I say, fuck that bitch. Baal can suffer with the rest of us, it’s what he gets for keeping his spleen in a jar. Baal may have been the dark sun once but now he is a pair of old shoes. Angry, malevolent old shoes. I’ll keep them handy for when I have to paint or traipse through the mud or some shit and old Baal will be grateful for it. The sister fucking, murderous tyrant loves the dirt, lives for it. Even now, all but forgotten Baal plays in the shit and loves it. It’s why the Egyptians saw him as a demon-pig. Dirty corpse-eating fucker can’t get enough of our morals. 

Them’s good eating.

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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