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 (pt. II)

Clown - Doug Nox

When you hear sweet syncopation

And the music softly moans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When it gets too hot for comfort

And you can't get ice cream cones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around your bones

- T'Ain't No Sin

She said, don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.  She said, oh god oh god.  She said, oh yes oh yes oh yes.  She said, don’t stop, oh god, oh yes.  She sings this devil’s chorus and oh no, oh god, I won’t stop.  All lovers perform the black mass; it is a secret ritual the body remembers with something down deep in the meat of us that is unlocked with prolonged eye contact.  Useless words cast off, lips mashed together we breathe each other’s breath, we taste each other’s water, we excite each other to greater frenzies.  Old Frimost knew the secret, that the furies were always just there beneath the skin hidden in the meat waiting just waiting to tear apart your Apollonian mores.  Christ was hardly the first mask worn to lead the Horribles in their triumph.  That thorny crown painting his face with the red mask of Mezzetino while he dragged his gallows through town.  Damn right he fucked that hooker, I mean just look at the signs.  Dude led the Night Circus through Jerusalem wearing the red mask.  She said, fuck .. god .. fuck.

Way back, before Mr. Lucky ran the night roads through the eastern Provinces he made acrobats and prostitutes at the back country crossroads of the old country.  Harlequin and Columbine, Mezzetino and Pantaloon.  In the beginning the circus and the brothel were intertwined inextricably with the fortune-tellers and story-tellers of Europe.  Columbine wore no mask (or top most usually) and engaged directly with the audience, be it on the cobblestone streets or in the marble halls of Kings and it was the audience who excited the performers into blasphemy.  Unlike contemporary media the audience was an innate part of every story, every performance of the commedie dell’arte and it was the job of Harlequin to drawn them into in the narrative and Columbine to hold them there.  It is not possible to casually incorporate the old mummer and mystery plays of the commedie dell’arte into contemporary western ceremonialism because they were largely unscripted and that says a lot about how far we have gotten from our roots.  All the sex and wonder gone right out of the thing.  Well, your thing anyway. 

Yet the connection is overt.  Janus Bifrons, the very ancient two-faced god of liminal spaces was widely used as an emblem for the early troupes and alongside Frimost (Dionysius Brimos) lord of the pimps is one of the few Greco-Roman deities to earn the dubious honour of being enshrined within the demonic catalogues of the rogue exorcists and pious inquisitors  of the Catholic Empire.  And if Mr. Lucky could ever be said to belong to anything it would be the liminal space so it should come as no surprise that old Janus and Brimos were ultimately counted among his cadre.  I don’t know as much as some about the old Greco-Roman stuff mind you but I figure there is a learning curve before me if the city beneath the city is all pillars and courtyards.  I am not yet done though with the limitless shanties, there are symbols here I have yet to grasp and I will stay with this first part of the dream until I have unmade them into something that works.  Fuck god I won’t stop oh yes oh yes.  You don’t listen to the stories they tell you, the gods are an untrustworthy lot and they’ll have you frothing at the mouth at Yonge and Dundas if you let them.  Yet, there is sometimes small treasures to be had rooting through their things when their backs are turned.  The current rash of demonolaters and Satanists don’t seem to have grasped that it is not the details of the story but the syntax and grammar used to tell it.

For days now the incense has burned for Harlequin and the Burlesque, several empty bottles tossed aside emptied of their spirits.  I can feel them gathering loosely behind me, the Dead of Winter, my striking party.  All Whiskey-Jacks and Tommy-Knockers, come to see this crusty phooka beat his big stick against the walls of the clapboard shanties and demand more cheap whiskey for the dead.  A Clown before a crowd of Horribles and behind his silent mask.  When I have them good and red-faced I shall lead them up the mountain and then you’ll be right for it. 

Oh yes oh yes oh yes, she said, oh god don’t stop. 

And oh no oh god I won't stop.

Here There Be Dragons

The world is changing.  It is doing it at such an accelerated pace that a huge portion of the populace is actually willfully retreating into Dark Age levels of ignorance.  A recent poll showed that more Americans hold firm to the belief that the world is six thousand years old and that God created humanity out of a man who got tired of fucking the sheep and one of his ribs then did ten years ago.  Young western women are campaigning for ‘women’s rights’ like the Hijab and an end to fast legal access to abortions.  That is so fucked up I can’t even begin to wrap my head around it.

In the last two years the Peterman Glacier in Greenland has calved ice islands several times larger than Manhattan Island, more than a third of its floating ice.  When they calculate sea-level rise it is based on the waters rate of expansion due to the incremental rising of global average temperatures.  That’s why the number is always so small; it totally doesn’t factor in water being added due to glacial melt.   That’s because when something like the Peterman Glacier calving takes place it is the loss of ‘floating ice’, which doesn’t actually change the amount of water in the world’s oceans.  Ice is water you see and it matters not what state it is in, global ocean volume remains the same.  It is the miles and miles of inland glacial mass that can change the sea-level in more dramatic and catastrophic ways because it sits on the land and is not a factor on sea-level.  Unless it melts.

The scientific community hasn’t worried over much about the implications of the loss of land-bound glacial mass because they are far more resilient in the face of our planets climate mood-swings.  There is no warm liquid mass beneath them to weaken their resolve, there are no rising and falling tides to fracture and corrupt them.  They are titans, unshakeable.

Except, it turns out what happens to one end of a glacial mass (the floating end) has a pronounced impact on the other end.  The Arctic’s land-bound glacial masses are literally running into the sea, buoyed on hidden rivers of melt-water that have borrowed themselves through the glacier to the rock beneath.  Apparently, scientists totally didn’t see that one coming.  If glacial ice loss continues at its current rate than every drop of melt water by the end of this decade will contribute directly to sea-level rise. 

This deeply excites me, in an almost sexual way.  The apocalypse will not just be a thing of commerce and politics exclusively; it will remake the surface of the planet.  The Northwest Passage has been clear for two years running; the ice bridge between Canada and Greenland is officially no more.  Sea’s now exist where before there was only ice, the old maps now lie and must be re-charted, dragons now haunt their false outlines.  The planet is being renewed, we as a species have pushed it too far and it will compensate by fucking shit up, trying some new stuff out.  And the brave among us will get to be explorers again, not just in blossoming scientific fields like genetics or micro-processing or elaborate industrial fabrication techniques, in the old sense of standing on a boat and staring into black uncharted waters.  It is an age meant for someone like me and I intend to fucking ball.

The present climate-change denial is really just the most current iteration of the science-denial that has made the established monotheist religions look stupid since the Renaissance.  I am not even going to go there, really what’s the point?  If you subscribe to their dogma, you’re an idiot.  There will be no trotting out of archaic morality and the ‘it’s helpful to not be an ass’ arguments so common to these discussions (which cannot be dignified with the term ‘debate’ as that term suggests both sides have a valid point,) because that position is disingenuous at best and self-deceptive the rest (and most) of the time.  Christianity/Judaism/Islamic world views do not make the world better and they do not make you better.  They make you an idiot and a willful one at that. 

The old animists had it right, if there is a singular creative force in the universe it doesn’t give a rats ass how often you masturbate, how many abortions you have had or if you feel bad for hurting my feelings.  The world is possessed of a spirit of its own and when that spirit is not respected it beats your ass silly.  So I congratulate you on your abortion/gay-sex/stem-cell research, you are a child of the new world and you are right, deeply and pervasively correct.  Anyone that tells you otherwise is a demonstrable fool.  I am writing for you, to you because real debate is only possible when we have kicked the morons out of the room.

It had to be said.

Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. III

Astrology for Whore and Hustlers

( 5:45 pm, March 6^th, 2011)

Now that Venus has moved into Aquarius and heads towards her trine with Saturn and the Moon has gotten through Pisces some of you have most likely found the inspiration to get up off the couch, put down the mixing bowl full of chocolate-chip cookie dough and do something.  Others however are lost in their haze of refined sugar, alcohol and fat and stand at risk perhaps of missing out on the tremendous growth possible beneath our Jupiter ruled skies.  To these latter I say; STOP EATING THE CHOCOLATE-CHIP COOKIE DOUGH, YO.  THAT SHIT IS FUCKIN’ GROSS.  At least masturbate or something.

If your still recovering from gun wounds received during last month’s all Saturn gang-bang extravaganza then please, disregard the first paragraph of this entry. 

While it is true that the whole of this March will not be negotiable without varying degrees of intoxication and sexual indiscretion this is not to be misconstrued with a free-pass to lay in your water-bed until you get sores.  You totally can do that for most of March if want but your pass isn’t free, your ass will get dumped in April.  I am glad to find that for many the increasing pressures of the last couple months terminated in bottles of Jack Daniels and enough weed you could stuff a mattress with it and so are really just to fucking hung-over at this point to go hard.  Saved from your feeble self-control by your complete lack of motivation, it’s the Piscean way.           

The bright clear inspirations of February already begin to tarnish beneath the weight of practical execution, if you have even managed to act yet.  Pisces will happily reward a less-than-Herculean effort, you really don’t have to work that hard for the universe to take notice of you right now but it is your efforts it will notice.  If last month brought legal problems for you prepare to be confronted with them, Venus makes her pass through Aquarius behind the rest of the gang and her trine to Saturn will likely initiate the legal proceedings.  The truly unlucky still sitting in jail will probably get out over the next couple of days while the Moon makes its pass through Aries and transits Jupiter.

As I mentioned in the last Doom Fairy entry, this is also an excellent time to find out who stabbed you in the back last month.  Back-biting, slanderous gossip, complete fabrications slung in the name of character assassinations and unconscionable seductions are pretty much par for the course over the next couple of weeks so you might as well get in on the action.  Be forewarned however that if you’re not careful with your confidences they might catch up with you in April when that chick you slammed while you were dishing with your girlfriends punches you in the tit because it got back to her from her brother’s cousin’s ex-girlfriend. 

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Free-Thinkers, Living-Gods and New-Genders

or Chaos Never Died

'Transformation' Nina Arsenault
by Bruce LaBruce

"In fact, I don’t always even see this as an image of me. I believe it is an icon of a triple goddess: Aphrodite (the Goddess of Beauty) who was born of the sea foam that rose from the blood of Cronus’ testicles when they were thrown into the sea, Artemis (Goddess of the Hunt and Phases of the Moon) whose Amazonian worshipper’s removed a single breast to better fire a bow and Hecate (Goddess of Magic and Divination) whose face is forever cloaked in darkness. These three forces –beauty, the hunt and the power of magic– have compelled my radical transformation." - from, Nina Arsenault

Jack Faust asked me 'what I felt the lost roots of chaos magic were' on facebook a week ago and I have found myself thinking about that question off and on ever since. I never answered him.  The whole conversation arose from a tongue-in-cheek exchange regarding the release of the latest book by Peter Carroll.  In this esteemed tome Carroll proceeds to educate the reader in the fine art of becoming a cliché (namely, a cartoon evil scientist).  Most such recollections as the one I am about to write begin with a quip about how cool 'chaos magic' sounds.  I'm not going to do that, it's been around for more than 30 years and it hasn't aged well.  We all know chaos magic isn't cool anymore.

I think that sucks balls.

Carroll sought to redefine sorcery in logical and mathematical terms, while severing it from its superstitious and religious origins.  Carroll’s particular brand of science was uniquely accommodating of magic, mainly because it was largely nonsense and as reverently superstitious as anything that preceded it but in the late 80’s and 90’s at least no one really seemed to have caught on to that.  Most of chaos magic’s adherents were in their teens back in those days or renegades hoping to escape the tedium of the Orders and the Wiccan covens.  Though the attempt to redefine sorcery obviously failed (because it was silly) Carroll did ultimately identify and brand a hitherto widely ignored thread of magical tradition.  Almost single-handedly, Carroll re-introduced the technique of sigilization (A. O. Spares to be exact) and the business of actually doing sorcery back into western ceremonialism.

That’s Carroll though, and not the history of chaos magic.  I place Carroll back into his superstitious and religious origins in the 80’s.  The IOT’s great ideological rival the Church of Eris Discordia is enjoying widespread activity, a notable counter-point to Carroll’s stance that magic is hard science was the Discordian’s belief that all hard certainties were the beginning of a hilarious joke.  Between the two polarities live cultural phenomenon like TOPY, a collection of counter-culturalists revering art and fiction before gods and men, pouring through the sorcerous memoirs of Huxley, Burroughs and Gyson in search of new modes of expression. 

TOPY fractured in the 90’s when Genesis P-Orridge left to establish the Process, in 2008 the remaining TOPY network re-established itself as the Autonomous Individuals Network.  The sheer degree of occult symbolism in contemporary fiction owes this movement some modicum of credit. 

TOPY, the Discordians and Carroll also turned the spotlight on some of the more widely ignored practitioners of the last century.  Though Spare has retained his popularity among the occulture, the more controversial writers of the early 20^th century like Gyson and Burroughs and the new mystics and sexual revolutionaries of the 50’s and 60’s have not.  As the aesthetics of the scene shifted from what could be cobbled together out of art and ill-defined sources (namely, an experiential approach) to the ever increasing volume of occult texts available throughout the internet (namely, a scholarly approach) occulture as a whole turned its eye on the reverently old and complete and in some ways this made it easy for us to turn away from the actual evolutionary prospects being confronted in the 90’s.

I think the collective discomfort felt in addressing the shallow and contextual nature of sexual and racial identification was what ultimately relegated these luminaries to the underworld because it was in those minefields that Burroughs and his ilk made their playgrounds. 

Last year at Pantheacon (largest gathering of magical and neo-pagan folks in America) trans-women were bounced out of a rite for Lilith for not being woman enough.   Out of this year’s line-up of roughly 240 presentations (including a repeat of the aforementioned rite and a presentation by Z. Budapest, who more or less claimed trans-women were just men attempting to infiltrate her coven,) only two represent one of the actual pagan religions of the America’s.  One devotional to Pomba Gira (which is where any self-respecting woman ‘trans’ or otherwise, foolish enough to attend this thing in the first place should go) and a Haitian ceremony for Damballah. 

Two out of 240!

There are about a million neo-pagans and wiccans in America according to current standards.  The number of South American, Mexican and Caribbean practitioners of dynamic alternative faiths far exceeds that of the white non-Christian minority faiths.  Santeria, the most prevalent of the Creole faiths in America right now most likely outnumbers all of the neo-pagans and wiccans and new-agers put together and yet not one of these practitioners (most likely Mexican or Hispanic) numbered among Pantheacon presenters.

That’s how I think we lost our roots. We were seduced by the baroque ornaments of the necromancers and the absolute certainties of Order and Coven and now the free-thinkers, new-genders and living religions are all stuck outside the doors.


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Prophecies of the Doom Fairy, pt. II

Astrology for Whores and Hustlers

(Written, 12:30 am, February 24^th, 2011. )  

For the last two days hustlers and whores everywhere have rejoiced.  Finally that epic 4 planet stellium in Aquarius has moved on to Pisces, and rulership has passed from Saturn (who just turned retrograde and mean) to Jupiter.  Finally we can go back to be rewarded for our charm and craftiness instead of how hard we work.  That shit was getting tedious.  I am reaching back about a month here.

Saturn and Jupiter are opposing each other and that is creating some high weirdness.  Our relationships are being tested at every turn, (is this guy in the dashing khaki’s a narc? do I really have to tell you again to stop jizzing in my ear?).  Keep in mind that you are being simultaneously just as annoying as everyone else is, (what does this shithead have against khakis? whats the big deal if I jizz in your ear?).  The imposition of rules was what that was all about, a sort of generalized ‘this is how it’s going to be’. 

Some of you are probably up on charges already or crashing and burning.  You got a month or so for recuperation.

If you didn’t get popped and you didn’t freak out then you’re in pretty good standing.  Even if that meant being regrettably confrontational over things that were previously non-issues, Saturn the planet that loves rules was on your side ($500 extra to jizz in my ear, never ever wear khakis in my sight ever again). 

Who knows, maybe that khaki-wearing, ear-jizzing freak was a narc or something and those that didn’t bounce his ass are most likely the same as those that got popped.  That brings us up to now roughly.

I am relieved to say, that part is over.  Those of you left standing after the bombs finished falling are in for a prosperous time one way or the other because half of your rivals went down in the crossfire, so there is some business to be had and vacuums to be filled.  The caveat to this new found plenty is that half your allies also got taken out in the crossfire so you’re likely a bit more vulnerable then you were in January. 

For now however, the battle has ceased and some dangerously ambiguous espionage is going to happen. This many planets in Pisces means some accentuated 12^th house action … you might want to find out who invited the khaki-wearing ear-jizzer.  Careful observation over the next couple of weeks will reveal where your new alliances should lay and who you should avoid (this might surprise you).

If you got popped or freaked out, stop freaking out now.  If you can sort the wreckage in the next couple of weeks then you’re golden, no permanent damage done.  Most likely anyone popped over the last month won’t see a court date until April at the soonest so lay low this month and obscure your trail, they’ll have a mess of new problems to deal with by the end of March and you’ll be long forgotten by then.   

For the next month, make your very presence in the room a gift.  Do not ask to be accepted for your horribly flawed secret self (which everything being in Pisces is going to make you want to do,) instead radiate only your best and most seductively charming persona.  Defer to the emotional and egoic needs of others and Jupiter will see you properly rewarded with something other than the long-suffering of your friends, like an extra 500 bones for ear jizz at the very least. 

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