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Published: 21 September 2015

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Having returned from Cyberpurdah in deepest Wales I notice that Comrade Corbyn got elected as labour leader. Splendid, the labour party can now return to doing what it does best, providing opposition and nurturing grievances and introducing young people to the extremities of ideological debate. Hopefully we shall not see it in government exercising its customary economic mismanagement for some long while yet. Now that the UK conservative party has adopted social liberalism, the labour party has only fiscal fecklessness left to offer.

Anyway, to the more significant questions of Esoteric and Magical Theory.  

Some people seem to think that they basically know everything about magic now so they have nothing left to research or to teach.

I get mad at this and assert that we still don’t know a fraction of it, and so herewith a few of the things that remain unanswered or unasked.

I should point out that I consider that the whole universe runs on magic but the bits of magic that work fairly reliably we now call science; so I’ll try to confine myself to the bits of magic that work rather unreliably and which we still call magic.

The World

The Tree of Life gives a map of the solar system, so one up to the wizards for anticipating the planets beyond Saturn, but our kabala doesn’t look big enough now.

What about the geometry and topology of the whole cosmic caboodle?

Do we have room enough for the other worlds of Giordano Bruno?

Or the Mad Indifferent Demon Gods of HP Lovecraft?

Do we treat the Space Gods as incarnate, discarnate, or imaginary?

Can we communicate with them by quantum telepathy or whatever, can we specify?

The Future

Do we divine the future states of reality directly, or do we divine our future experiences of them? (We could devise tests for this.)

Should we enchant for direct effects on reality or should we enchant to enhance our mundane abilities to get those effects?

The Past

In what form does the past persist? In memory, in records, and in physical traces obviously.

But what about in the aether, in the astral, in morphic fields, in the akashic records or whatever wizards call the stuff?

What do we actually get when we try out antique gods, ancestors, and necromancy?

The Pasts Plural

The future seems to open like a garden of forking paths of various probabilities.

Does delayed choice quantum erasure and retroactive enchantment suggest many paths behind us also?

A garden has a width as well as a length. Does time have a sideways as well?

The Presents

Do we exist in and as an interference pattern between all the possible pasts and futures?

Does consciousness consist of a superposition of several states at once?

I find myselves in two minds about this.

Emergence

Stuff plainly develops properties and behaviours which don’t seem inherent in its component parts.

The Universe exhibits Imagination.

For example: -

Hydrogen consists of a colourless odourless gas that slowly turns into people, - if you leave enough of it lying around for long enough.

Emergent phenomena seem to slip out between the interface of deterministic and random behaviour, from between order and chaos, and take on a life of their own, raising BIG magical questions: -

How much top down causation (or chaos) can emergent phenomena exert on their component phenomena?

Do we inhabit a Panpsychic Universe?

Can an apparently emergent vitalism or life force have real effects?

Does Chi or Vril or Prana or whatever you call it, meaningfully correspond with anything to do with ‘Energy’, or does it correspond more to something like ‘Intent’.

Does the apparently emergent ‘Self’ have real effects, or does our emergent free will remain largely subconscious?

How far can we take the idea of Magic as The Real Effects of Imaginary Phenomena? (Imaginary in the psychological sense, and Imaginary in the sense of orthogonal time vectors.)

Ars Notoria

Does this much maligned and frequently ignored magical art actually offer the possibility of inspiration to learn all sorts of knowledge in support of a magical quest?

Style and Technique

Psychedelic autognosis can reveal the self as a contingent construct, the subconscious as a well of creativity, and the belief system as somewhat reprogrammable. Yet these things should occasion the Buddhist or the magician no surprise. Psychedelics seem unsuitably imprecise and dangerous for work in psychotherapy or psychiatry. The idea that societies have generally banned them out of fear of mass enlightenment seems undone by the observation that massive illegal use has not had this effect.

Did a whole generation get taken in by the sixties myth and marketing hype that psychedelics could confer mystical and magical powers?

Does Apophenia serve as a more suitable goddess for magicians than Eris? 

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Published: 31 August 2015

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 Magical Research

What differentiates a top world class university from a bottom class university?

Intense competition and selection operate in a top university, both for the academics and for the students, both have to work very hard and many of the students compete to stay on and become doctors and professors themselves.

On the other hand in some crummy jumped up polytechnic none of these things applies. The mediocre students just muck about, the teachers just go through the motions teaching second-hand stuff, and they usually have to cover a lot of admin duties as well.

Basically RESEARCH differentiates between a top university and a bottom one.

Prestigious institutions do the difficult research and create knowledge, and intense competition exists to either work there and to help create it, or to go there and receive it first-hand. Mediocre institutions merely recycle it. Most academics teach in institutions less prestigious than the ones they qualified in. Only outstanding research keeps you at the top.

Research can look impossibly challenging and difficult, but basically you just have to look for unanswered questions, or even more challengingly, for unasked questions.

All of the above applies to magical traditions and orders.

The magical revival which began in the 1880s came from the massive research efforts which created the Golden Dawn corpus, a great synthesis forged mainly by Macgregor Mathers, and from it flowed most of the western esoterics of the 20^th century.

However, fairly soon after it ceased to research and innovate the GD disintegrated and its alumni took its ideas and applied them elsewhere to create other traditions. Wicca, Neo-Paganism, Druidry, Thelema and most of the new age ideas derive directly from it. Aleister Crowley actually added surprisingly little to the theoretical magical paradigm he learnt in the GD but he added techniques of erotognosis and chemognosis and a dash of Islamic flavour in his creation of the OTO, but with basques replacing burqas for the ladies. Of the GD alumni perhaps only Austin Spare tried something radically different. We still find his theory impenetrable and obscure, (it seems to have some relationship to Freudian ideas of the unconscious and/or unconscious mind) but his stripped down practical techniques proved a remarkable innovation.

If everyone had settled for Mathers’ great GD synthesis as the final word on Magic the subject would have become moribund and capable only of preserving itself as a minor religion that no longer attracted the influential minds that it did in its early days.

Some groups seem to have developed the idea that Magic or Chaos Magic has become a closed art, and that we know it all now, so research and the attempt to develop new teachings have become pointless.

I believe that we have barely scratched the surface of Magic and that thousands of questions remain unanswered and unasked.

I consider it the duty of anyone aspiring to the rank of Magus, to Research, to Teach, and to promote the Great Work of Magic.

Research and Teaching drive each other.

Magi and Initiates should live in terror of each other, with the Magi forced to create to attract Initiates, and the Initiates eager to catch out their Magi and to eventually surpass them.

So do you have your own top ten list of unanswered or unasked questions in Magic?

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Published: 28 August 2015

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Discordianism seemed a major influence amongst the people I worked with from the mid-nineteen seventies till the mid- nineteen nineties and it still seems to have a big appeal for some Chaos magicians, but what at one time seemed a source of liberation, inspiration and innovation seems to have subsequently developed into a serious flaw.

This short Wiki entry summarises Discordianism fairly concisely: -  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordianism

We used a bit of Discordianism when it seemed fashionable in the early days but it got out of hand later. I think our misunderstanding of it led to a lot of problems. Discordianism does two things. Firstly and mainly it pokes sacrilegious and in-defferent fun at religions and power structures. Secondly it allows a group to poke a bit of fun at itself and to make light of its own pretensions. Unfortunately the second facility of self-parody eventually proved self-destructive.

A little self-parody can give a ritual or a hierarchy a bit of an edge, but an excess of it will undermine both eventually.

The Discordian approach led to people styling themselves things like Sorror Preposterous, groups called things like Temple Misanthropy, me getting called His Pestilence Pope Pete The First of the Zero Degree, Banishing by laughter, and spoof, surrealist, and neo-Dadaist rituals like the Eris Rite which invoked bizarre and unpredictable consequences.

Discordianism promotes a humorous lack of deference towards organised religion, monotheism, patriarchy, sexual prudery, and religious and political power structures and conspiracies.

To do this it exploits ‘Camp’ and ‘Transgressive’ themes, both by using them to parody what it seeks to provoke in-deference to, and also by using such themes to establish its own alternative subcultural cult, or in-group, or fashion as ‘A joke masquerading as a religion or a religion masquerading as a joke’.    

‘Camp’ means useless or ineffectual in a way that seems vaguely humorous or self-parodying. A Goddess who provokes creative disorder may have some value, but invoking a Goddess who merely screws things up, like Pratchett’s ‘Anoia’, seems either a parody of religion or an invocation of useless ineffectuality, or worse; an excuse for it.  

Chaos magic already had a fairly ‘Transgressive’ attitude to organised religions and towards Thelema and Crowleyanity, and it partly defined itself by its opposition to these things. In adopting the god-form of Baphomet it had followed Eliphas Levi’s blasphemous conception of a supreme deity. However transgression easily goes stale, particularly among the converted for who it becomes merely a tired in-joke, and it can descend into little more than a compulsion to annoy outsiders.

My Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos included many antinomian themes but little or no Discordianism. However Discordian practices had gradually tended to come to the fore amongst the groups I worked with and probably contributed much to the problems that developed. These days I have ceased to recommend experimentation with the Eris Rite.

The book Psybermagick that I wrote in the middle of my career whilst on extended sabbatical seems the most heavily influenced by the Discordian perspective, although it also contained the seeds of later research in other directions.

My last three books, The Apophenion, The Octavo, and The Epoch contain only minor references and appendices about Discordianism, as Apophenia began to assume far more importance for me than Eris.

Discordianism basically served to attack the old aeon paradigms. I think we should avoid it as a model for the coming Pandaemonaeon.

Discordianism seems dead or dying, having served its purpose. Any new serious currents and orders seem unlikely to use it again.

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Published: 23 July 2015

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The Shell Oil Company now starts to move its drilling equipment to the Arctic for another attempt at drilling, despite widespread condemnation of this act from all the major conservation and ecology groups. Humanity should immediately begin to curtail burning fossil fuels, and invest in renewable alternatives rather than devastate the planets remaining wildernesses. 

The environmental damage looks set to become severe, particularly if this reckless venture 'succeeds' and many other drilling operations begin as a result of it.

The Knights of Chaos will conjure for the failure of this expedition on Midnight 26th July.