Rethinking Chaos Magic (ii)

Aside from some unique experimental work, Chaos Magic serves best as a method
for extracting useful elements from other magical forms. It's a set of working
criteria for analyzing magical technique and to help in structuring rests.

The emphasis on a magical materialism, though not always convincing, is a
useful destroyer of unneeded mysticisms and religious overlays to magic. It
has also opened up many of the avenues in the general magical community that
Satanism opened ten years previous to Chaos Magic's development, particularly
Freedom of Belief and the dismissal of inessentials in magical practice.

On Alphabets of Desire

To produce an Alphabet of Desire you create a series of semi-perminant sigils to represent aspects of your self-complex and your primary drives and desires. These act as the "colors" available to you for use on your pallette in magical Work. Once you've done this you can use these letters to mix and match the different aspects of your self and your understanding of the cosmos to magical effect. This could involve having certain sonic aspects to each Letter so that you could construct sonic sigils out of the Alphabet, certain shapes to the letters to form words or simple groupings, or figuring out a way to abstract them to pictorial forms.

The same approach can be used for already established magical letter systems, with some difference. Rather then just tacking an idea to an image you use the tradition surrounding the alphabet to determine the kinds of anchors that will be set to them. Things like Edred Thorsson's _The Nine Doors of Midgard_ is an excellent framework for how one could do something like this and while attached to the Elder Futhark the methodology there could be used for other letter based systems as well.

You're probably best off getting to grips with the basics of sigil magic before trying something like this. It will give you a chance to find your particular sigilization style, something which will vastly improve any Alphabet of Desire you might construct.

Rethinking Chaos Magic (i)

Chaos magic is not about letting people do it their way.

It is about people doing magic in a way that gets results.

If you cannot tell the difference please send me a check for $333.00 and I will send you a diagram.

An Observation

People have always paid for religion, whether by the blood of their animals or the lining of their wallets.

Contrasts

The difference between Magicians and "occultniks" is the difference between structural engineers working on building next generation space craft and flik singing Trekkies arguing over which Captain was the best.

On Holy Guardian Angels

The highly personalized "DIY" approach that Mace and Fries give, both of whom share a certain notion of the "Holy Guardian Angel" being the mediator within consciousness that folks like Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin termed "The Psychic Censor", can be a very effective way to learn more about yourself. Basically you're learning to make feedback loops within your self-complex, thereby opening up new modes for communication. How long that is going to take is going to vary significantly from person to person but you'll sense some headway when the symbolic language of your dreams begins to seem more coherent and meaningful to you. See if you can find anything on the Semiotic Theory of Magic, since it might help to make sense of what's taking place.

This sort of thing does not make a good "this way only" approach since it is far too easy to master something you've created yourself in contrast to a traditional or neo-traditional approach. It does make a good "backdoor" methodology while you are engaged in learning and mastering such a system and can ever teach important lessons in how to better enliven such a system.

There are a number of other metaphors for essentially the same idea as the "Holy Guardian Angel"...the Atman, the fylgia, etc...but I tend to prefer the slightly less sectarian "Daemonic Self." The Deamonic Self refering to the idea that somewhere within your overall Self-complex there is an aspect which is attempting to get into communication with you to help unify your Self-complex and make it more effective. What I find interested is that however one approaches this part of the Self-complex they'll get experiences that match their metaphors.

People looking for their Holy Guardian Angels get Holy Guardian Angel experiences. People who see it as the Atman get Atman like responses. People who posit the Daemonic Self as a supercomputer from the future get experiences that match it. People who see it as aliens from Sirius get Sirian messages.

Some folks will go so far as to try a bunch of different metaphors to get into the experience: Space Bunny at one phase, Ancient Chinese Sages at another and Irish mischief spirits at still another. Their experiences tend to match whichever metaphor they're using. It is almost as if these metaphors acted like languages or maps, providing orientation to the same territory, only with different flavors.

Note: Personally I've never gone in too much for the "Holy Guardian Angel" metaphor. I can understand why it was continued by Crowley as a legacy from the Golden Dawn system, especially his hope that no one would take it literally, but he left the door open for a lot of misunderstanding and a few generations of literalism.

On Self-Divinity

I gave up the "divine model" a few years back upon reflecting on the unchanging characteristic of deity, etc. In favor of that I prefer to look at the process of Transcended Left-hand Path Initiation as being the ongoing unfolding and enfolding of the totally of your being, becoming "yourself, only moreso" until you have become "yourself to the utmost." In the course of this process a lot of strange things tend to happen, from siddhas to and awareness of odd coincidences to the ability, real or imagined, to enact magical change increasingly by will and intent alone.

I wouldn't say any of these things qualify one as a "god" but they can be seen as "god-like" by those with a rather narrow view of human capacity.

An Observation

Most "Satanists" wouldn't know Undefiled Wisdom if it showed up in their living room with neon signs and a Vegas floorshow.

An Old Line

If you want to get really fancy learn how to conjure that darkest of all entities and most dangerous of all servitors...learn how to form a corporation. It might even make you rich beyond your wildest dreams.

Future Jacket Blurb

I wish more Crowley worshipers would go the "record setting mountain climber" or "tremendous concentration enabled chess players" route in their emulation rather then the "junky whose bad with women" or "bald chubby guy."

No One Expects the American Inquisition

This would make a fantastic cartoon

If the cycle is Chaos, Order, Confusion, Bureaucracy (Paralysis) and Aftermath (Paresis) we're clearly on our way to the start of a new cycle.

Pondering Islam

Here are a two of my replies to Danesh D'Souza's "Letting Bin Laden Define Islam."

The ignorance level among the comments, both on Islamic history and increasingly on the Ismaeli astounds me but I know it shouldn't. World History is an unknown subject and few people consider checking references to insure that their off the cuff comments and half-remembered factoids have even a shred of truth to them.

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29. The problem is not Islam, it is the entire spectrum of concrete (in contrast to contemplative) relgion. The concrete forms of Islam have been the subject to extended critique by the contemplative Islamic tradition of Sufism, where in concrete Islam's more extreme adherents have been refered to as "Donkeys with Turbins" to show their stubborness and stupidity in their beliefs.

Foolish consistency, inability to adapt to changes and concrete faith in all faiths world wide, particularly in Islam and Christinaity, can be seen as the greatest overall danger to human survival at this moment in time. They transform powerful visions of transcendence into clubs to batter those who disagree and sword to kill those not subdued.

With regard to the original article your characterization of the Moghul Empire's attitude towards the Hindu inhabitants of their region seems more then a little rose tinted. The destruction and desecration of Hindu religious sites under the Islamic invasion was staggering. One of the holiest Shivalinga of the area was cut into bricks and transformed into pavement so that it might be desecrated at all times by those who walked upon it. Yet the Moghul from the time of Akbar and his "Din-i-Ilahi" in 1581 CE onwards hardly qualified as Islamic in the strict sense as their faith combined elements of Islam, Sufism, Zoroastorianism, Christianity and Hinduism.
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52. Dale Freeman's comments regarding the Assassins is incorrect. There was no "Guild of Assassins" but rather the Naziri Ishmaeli, an Islamic sect that split from the Shi'i over sucession issues resolving around the Sixth Imam. Their 12th Century leader, Hassan i Sabah, chose to establish mountain fortifications in Afghanistan and used some revolutionary espionage methods, including the first known incidents of "Sleeper Agents" in the West. They were not hired killers but acted to preserve their faith's way of life against Christian and Musilm attempts to supress them.

For those interested in learning more about the group _The Assassin Legends: Myths of the Isma'ilis _ by Farhad Daftary is a good place to start.