The Judas Priests or: Making the Law!

Don’t worry, I’m not going to give every post two titles from now on, but I just thought this one was kinda funny. It’s okay if you don’t get it…

Anyway, it seems to be my cross to fire out ideas in such half assed fashion that people easily misunderstand what I’m trying to say. Sometimes they get it fine, but superficially, sometimes they seem not to get it at all. Which perhaps only shows a disparity in underlying epistemic and ontological assumptions.

Now, by the nature of AB I talk about magick a lot, and also by the nature of AB I tend to talk about extremely unconventional forms of magick, if there can be said to be such a thing, and further still I talk about them in large part to people with little or no background in magickal or traditional spiritual practice. So that creates three possible sources of confusion: first I’m talking about magick and people don’t know what I mean when I use terms they also use. Second I talk about forms of magick that have no relation to what other people do or practice in the field of magick, which tends to lead them to thinking what I’m talking about is impossible. And lastly, I run up against assumptions about the world and the things and people in it that preclude the holders of those assumptions from entertaining something contradictory to those concepts, or at least outside the safely defined boundaries of those concepts.

Let’s take my last post for instance: Some people accepted it because it confirmed their worst fears about occultists, others rejected it because it contradicted their understanding of occult practice, and others still failed to see how I was talking about magick at all, as it seemed to be nothing beyond what we normally might think of as the working of the ‘national security state’. What this tells me for starters is that I need to make a better distinction between kinds of occultists, because just calling them good or bad or black or white is not only trite but misleading. So just as I made what seemed to me a useful distinction between Lucifer and Ahriman ( which seems to at last be gaining some traction), I want to make another set of distinctions in the group of occult practicioners.

Keeping in mind that these are fuzzy and overlap to some extent, let’s proceed: The first set I will call the Visionaries. These are the ones who receive the initial paradigm shift, divine revelation, angelic contact, gnosis, or alien abduction. Regardless of how it happens these are the creative geniuses and prophets who supply the impetus for everything that follows. These are the people who usually end up the legendary founder of a religion or tradition. People who try to hew as closely as possible to the spirit or inspiration of the tradition will also be in this model under the category of ‘visionary’. The important thing to remember is the focus is first and foremost on transcendent revelatory experience. Examples would include Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, the Buddha, Hermes Trismegistus, and inspired followers in their footsteps who have the creativity to discriminate while preserving the essential spirit. Relatively recent visionaries would be William Blake, Aliester Crowley, Terrence McKenna, and Phillip K Dick. Those who rest firmly within an established visionary tradition would be the Dalai Lama, Ramana Maharshi, or Mother Teresa. You could think of someone like Marshall McLuhan or Alan Turing as a kind of visionary in the worldly sense as well.

The second category would be the Magi or Technicians. These folks are the ones who do the grunt work of taking the initial impetus of the founder or teacher and unfolding that into a skill set, and using that skill set to achieve results in this world. It’s important to remember that while some ecstatic shaman had a vision of the spirit world, it was the technical innovators who took that visionary knowledge which would in that era have been magick, and invented cave painting, or tool creation, or language, or chemistry, metalworking, divination, healing or whathaveyou. They could well be the same person initially, but chances are they weren’t, and in any event long after the founder is dead the technicians are still tinkering with new magickal applications. Pretty much everyone who thinks of themself as practicing ‘magick’ these days is a technician, with the odd exception looking past the skill set to further visionary experience. Crowley is a good example of a gifted technician who struggled to be a visionary without a lot of success, at least in his life. Peter Carroll and William Burroughs would probably be the last two biggest magickal innovators of the 20th century, laying the groundwork for much of what passes as magick today. Things like NLP and media theory as practiced by Douglas Rushkoff would be excellent examples of technical innovations that occupy that twilight border of the magickal as they still have not been broken down and codified sufficiently to kill the relatively fresh creative spirit.

Our final category, and the ones who tend to cause most of the problems for us today, is the Priesthood. Once the visionary spirit has begun to falter, once technical innovations are sufficiently codified and creativity has migrated elsewhere, the would-be priesthood moves to consolidate control and monopolize knowledge, power, and influence. The name of the game for the priesthood is obfuscation. The reason is, once things have gotten to the level where anyone can use the skills or quote the book, you need to make sure that only the appropriate people can actually learn the skills, or read the book. The interesting thing is, the systems of doing this, what we might call ‘priestcraft’ represent a skill set in and of themselves, subject to technical innovation, even the odd visionary revelation I’m sure. As long as there has been knowledge and resources to monopolize there have been priests refining the means to do so, and cultivating a social structure to educate and indoctrinate the priests.

So when I was talking about how ‘black magicians’ are shepherding the public mind, these are not spiritual visionaries I’m talking about or technical magickal innovators, but the same secretive clique of priests, gatekeepers and obfuscators that have always told people what to think. Their practices are not the practices of the visionary although they may borrow the lingo, their practices are not those of the technician, although they may hire a few, and use the tools they create, and the systems they develop. Their magickal practices are codified languages, obscure rituals, deception, social influence, outright lies and their most powerful magick: the ability to determine the boundaries of acceptable discourse. They have and have always had the power to decide what is speakable truth, and what is taboo, within their sphere.

So when we talk about the black magicians who seem to be running the show, or perhaps calling them archons, or counter initiates, what we’re talking about is a very old and very real branch of the occult, which has been around at least since Sumeria and probably before that. And as usual there will be the denials: that’s not magick, that’s just the powerful keeping people down like they always have… Yeah okay. But how did they do that in the first place, do you think?

Wake up and smell the coffee. It’s ALL magick. It always has been.

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The Reduction Procedure or: Fucked Up Satanism ver3.0

Junk is the ideal product…the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy…The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. His does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client. He pays his staff in junk.

William Burroughs- Naked Lunch

Man… y’know, I love Rigorous Intuition, and I love what Jeff does over there, but everytime he starts talking about ‘ooohh scary magick’, I just have to start shaking my head. It seems like the usual rigor goes right out the window.

It’s not like the literature is a secret or anything. The principles are easy enough to understand if you take the time. The core mechanisms of the practice are not that complex.

I can understand how people go into paroxysms of confusion though. It’s hard to look at some of the strange fucked up shit people are doing these days and understand the logic behind it. I think Jeff actually is a lot closer to the truth than he realizes.

Sometimes he’ll talk about ritual abuse, or Abu Ghraib, or elite black lodges as engaged in a project of ‘horrification’. To brutalize the public mind, to coarsen and desensitise us into passivity and apathy. I think there’s some truth to that.

Where Jeff and some others go wrong is when they start stacking suppositions on top of that: what are they doing this for, who are they really working for, what does this imply about the universe, are we deer in the headlights of ‘oooh scary black magicians’?

I’m afraid the truth behind this is rather simpler than anyone is likely to admit to themselves: there is no higher project. They’ve already got you. What’s the point of ritual torture, spectacles of degradation and perversion, creating sinkholes of chaos and despair?

Guess what? Those things are the point. Do you suppose they’re trying to call down some slimy alien octopus to eat all the liberals or something? Maybe they are, but by the time they could pull that off, the act itself would be superfluous.

Too many people think of magick as a gun. As in, freaky black magician does X and makes Y come out and smack you in the head. It doesn’t work that way. At least it doesn’t work nearly as well as what they’re really doing.

If you come at this from the normal assumptions about our material universe, about causality and perception and reality, then it sure looks like they’re trying to pull the rug out from under you, makes you cling to that rug so much harder doesn’t it? And what you overlook is that the big scary trick that you’ve never actually seen is not the magick. The magick is the rug you’re sitting on.

If you think about it for a few minutes, you’ll recall that the postmodern materialist , scientific worldview is not some kind of objective truth out there somewhere, which is under assault by howling demonic pagans or something.
The worldview is in your head. You are inhabiting a specific kind of psychocosmos, or what Robert Anton Wilson would call a reality tunnel.

There have been many many versions of the psychocosmos. The animistic shamanic psychocosmos, the fractal resonance of the pagan psychocosmos, the creationist psychocosmos. So on so forth.

While theorists and researchers whirl around in confusion the real trick has been pulled on you: the worldview you perceive as being under attack is the one they want you to stay in. More than likely it’s some middle variant of the mythic creationist and scientific materialist psychocosmos, which either makes you sheep in the flock of Christ, or a biological robot created by material accidents in a random cosmos. And everyday, the pendulum swings closer to the latter.

Everytime they can jolt you with a horror show image of Abu Ghraib, or systematic child rape, every time they can get their hooks into you and convince you that you are not the actor in this cosmos, that you are acted upon. You are not the autonomous being with all the same capabilities to mold and shift your views that ‘they’ are. As long as they can keep you on the defensive you never look at the ground you’re standing on.

Do you realize that the prevailing worldview didn’t just happen? It didn’t fall from the sky. It was built, a piece at a time. Just as the first shamans and alchemists created the crafts and science we take for granted, every single presupposition about the world and the things in it, is somebody’s invention. Is it that hard to believe some of those inventions were intentional? It’s always magick. Changing one’s psychocosmos is one of the best magickal tricks there is, and it’s so old and well worn that people forget that it’s always been an act of sorcery, whether you know it or not. So isn’t it likely some of our current mental lockdown was intentional magick?

As long as you’re wondering what they’re going to take from you next, you’re overlooking the fact that they’ve already taken everything that matters. The reduction procedure: the reducing of free and illuminated beings to victims, witnesses, accomplices, survivors.

It’s all so shocking and compelling and urgent: you need to do something! And maybe you do, but if all you do is react to the stimulus, you’re being conditioned all the same.

While you’re looking around for the ‘real magick’ while you’re ducking what you think is the gun. The real magick is a forgone conclusion. It’s been done. They’ve got you.

But why you might ask? Why is reducing people to hobbled robotic caricatures an end in itself? Because the people who do these things are only afraid of one thing: accountability. If they can turn the earth into a gutted fully conditioned Orwellian horrorscape, a feeding ground for the decadent and powerful with no consequences and no moral rudder, then no one will ever hold them responsible. If they can sell us the worldview that moral consistency, objective truth, evidence and personal conviction are outdated concepts, the black magicians have well and truly won the day, after such a long time trying. If they can reduce us from morality to moralism, from souls to bodies, from choices to reactions, then there’s no chance they’ll ever be called to account.

And maybe you’re asking: how is that magick? You just described stuff I know they’ve been doing all along. What’s magickal about that?

Exactly. And that’s why they’ve got you.

Hi. An Angel told me to give you this acid…

“He blew in with that uniform…Laying down the most incredible atmosphere of mystery and flamboyance, and really impressive bullshit!” Leary recalls. “He was pissed off. His Rolls Royce had broken down on the freeway, so he went to a pay phone and called the company in London. That’s what kind of guy he was. He started name-dropping like you wouldn’t believe…Claimed he was friends with the Pope.”“The thing that impressed me,” Leary remembers, “is on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most-impressive people in the world on his lap, basically backing him.”
Meet ‘Captain’ Al Hubbard, the latest seminal CC figure we’re going to treat. I’d have to say, after looking at Al a little more closely, I had one of those moments where as they say, ‘the penny dropped’.

In the context of the some of the research I’ve done in the past, and will do in the future, and especially in light of some the ambiguous roots of the so-called counter culture, Captain Al raises some troubling and inspiring questions about our human destiny and whether there really is a clear line between the magnanimous and the malignant.

When I talked about Lilly earlier I sort of discussed how I thought the drug approach to illumination is a kind of mixed blessing. It certainly helps to open people up in a way that may have been impossible otherwise, but it does that in a way that, if you never outgrow the drugs, subtly erodes your ability to achieve your own innate capacities.

What makes this somewhat more disturbing, and fascinating, is that Captain Al, who was about as ideal a vehicle to bring the acid revelation to the people as you can imagine, was apparently selected and motivated to do so by some kind of otherworldly presence.

This man who started out a ‘barefoot’, dirt poor, Kentucky hick, at the age of 18 was instructed ‘by a pair of angels’ on how to construct a simple kind of radioactive battery, which patent netted him a small fortune, and was never seen again.

He then goes on to storied career in covert operations, pre wwII, which lent him the support of no less a political figure than the president himself, followed by entrepreneurial ventures in the uranium business which made him a millionaire.

To his credit, Captain AL wanted more a purpose than to live as one of the idle rich. Another angelic revelation kicked off his search for the ‘sacrament’ of LSD which became his lifelong quest to pass on to the world.

Now one estimate of the number of people Captain Al turned on ranges into the thousands. And Al was not like Leary, throwing the stuff onto the winds to whoever cared to try it. He was very selective. In many cases he administered it to alcoholics and depressives of various stripes, and apparently had a great deal of success with that, mostly through skilled use of what Leary would later term ‘set and setting’. I think Captain Al was very aware of the sensitivity of a person in a state of drug induced boundary dissolution and how important it was to orchestrate the experience carefully. But I digress…

The larger part of his recipients were what you might call ‘the elite’. Scientists, artists, academics, celebrities, even a politician or two. Thousands of them. And because he was working on his own, with no real oversight, protected by his contacts and money, we may never know how many people Captain Al actually turned on.

And here’s the thing: he had even bigger plans. He wanted to expand the use of LSD into the medical establishment full speed ahead. But he knew he had to be careful. He deeply resented Timothy Leary for invoking the panic that brought his work to an end. How many more politicians, scientists and businessmen would he have turned on, if he had been able to finish his life’s work? We know about Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary. We know the impact they’ve had on our culture. Imagine that ten fold, twenty fold, a hundred fold. Where would we be now?

We can theorize about whether or not the counter culture was co-opted from the outset. We can argue that the co-opters were themselves co-opted. Tim has covered that ground before in some detail. But, what if the whole thing has been co-opted by a source that isn’t even human?

It wouldn’t be the first time. Rene Descartes. Buckminster Fuller. Jack Sarfatti. Aliester Crowley. And on and on…. All touched by voices from beyond the human realm, or so we are told. And if we add the latter day UFO ‘revelations’ how many more is that?

We tend to circumscribe artificial lines around ‘counter culture’. We want to believe that it is populist, egalitarian, spiritual, non materialistic, peace loving, democratic. So what are we to make of the ‘Johnny Appleseed’ of LSD? This undereducated military veteran, covert operator, staunch Christian, uranium millionaire, and psychedelic elitist. Who just so happened to be taking pointers from something that crosses all our arbitrary political fences without a care in the world. We know Captain Al was protected by his contacts and money, but it seems like he had even bigger backers than that, doesn’t it?

This is a dolphin. This is a dolphin on drugs. Any questions?

JOHN: If you stay around me long enough you’re going to get a whole new language. Some people stay around me for a while and run away. I can’t keep a woman here. They all get frightened sooner or later. I’m crazier than hell.

Whoo boy. I thought I’d spend a little more time on the counter-culture thing. When I spent a little time looking at it, it seems there are tons of little connections and mysterious characters waiting to be brought forth.

It seems like the most efficient way of doing this is to start as close to the beginning as possible and work forward from there. I’ve already touched on Burroughs, and he comes back into it a bit later, but I really wanted to do someone else first.

Chances are if you’re reasonably familiar with Timothy Leary, you know the work of John C Lilly. If you’ve seen the movie Altered States, that’s pretty much based on Lilly. If you’ve every used or read the term ‘metaprogramming’ applied to human brains, that’s Lilly. If you’ve every been fascinated by the conscious nature of dolphins and their communication with us, that’s Lilly too. If you ever know anyone who’s every slipped into serious drug addiction and paranoid insanity, well…. that’s Lilly too.

John Lilly is a perfect and seminal example of the strengths and weaknesses of human consciousness research. On the one hand he came up with brilliant pioneering, visionary discoveries, made huge strides in the ethical and humane treatment of dolphins, and laid the foundations for so many of the counter cultural tropes that we take for granted today.

On the other hand, he also is a perfect example of a scientist who clung obsessively to the delusion of objectivity, even when he went on three week ketamine binges where he was injecting himself once every hour and eventually decided earth was under threat from ‘solid state’ artificial life forms that were going to exterminate organic life and go elsewhere. He even tried to warn the president. Even towards the end of his life he insisted on measuring everything quantitatively, to the point he claims not to know what ‘qualitative’ even means.

And, I shit you not, he gave acid to dolphins:

DJB: Have you ever given ketamine to a dolphin?
JOHN: No. I gave them acid to see if it would knock out their respiration. It didn’t. I couldn’t understand what was happening to them on LSD except for one thing they did. They turned around along the tank at the same time, and suddenly they turned their beaks down and turned on their sonar straight downwards. I remember on my first acid trip that suddenly the floor disappeared and I saw the stars on the other side of the earth, so I stamped my foot on the floor to find it. That’s what they were doing.

when you’ve looked at a few interviews you’ll notice a pattern. Lilly will be talking extremely rationally about something, and then he’ll say ‘ this morning when I did ketamine’ or ‘ the other day when I was on on LSD’.

Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that, mind you, but I feel it typifies a certain instrumental approach that has bent the counter culture (CC)spiritual project in a lasting way.

One of the key skills in spiritual practice is learning to control attention. In yoga they call it pratyahara or withdrawing attachment to the senses. Partly as a way of achieving clarity but also to cultivate strength of mind to master one’s states.

The use of drugs and isolation tanks lets you get all kinds of amazing experiences, but at the cost of actually developing the discipline to control your sense experiences independent of drugs or machines. I’ve heard it said that the difference between a shaman and a schizophrenic is, that the shaman controls the window to other dimensions, but the schizophrenic has had his window kicked in, he has no control, and must rely on medication to reestablish boundaries. ( incidentally you could make a case that a lot of conspiracy thinking is a case of people who’ve had some or all of their windows kicked in )

A common misconception among drug advocates is that the experiences they have on drugs are not attainable any other way. Perhaps in terms of chemically specific side effects this is true. But in terms of the profound states of consciousness that mirror religious revelations of various types, this is categorically wrong. I have done plenty of drugs and plenty of meditation, and in my experience, drugs give a sneak peek at a profound state that takes long years of work to acclimate to everyday life. It’s much easier to pop a pill, inject something or eat a mushroom. So I can see why drug advocates would think that way, but it’s not correct.

One of the questions I’ve heard about ‘the sixties’ is a kind of bewilderment that the social changes that seemed to be in the air never took root and altered things permanently. The simple answer is that they did, but not in an obvious way. The complex answer is that so much of that energy was based on a quick fix. Absent the discipline to master a different state of being, that energy vanishes, leaving disillusion, or the temptation of addiction.

Lilly’s story also sheds some light on the relationship between CC and intelligence agencies. You’ll see it again and again: the CIA or whoever provides the money and lets the crazy eccentric genius run wild. Lilly thought he was getting out from under when he swore off putting electrodes on the brains of animals, to go study dolphins peacefully, but that project was still funded by the establishment, they had just learned to give John his space. The illusion of independence. The spooks, archons and counter initiates are perfectly happy to let the freaks get crazy and come up with new ideas because they know they’ll end up owning the applications anyway. And it’s hard not to see shocking parallels between Lilly’s early work in behavioral modeling and invasive manipulation of the brain and the latter accounts of mind control. Even his work on the self as metaprogrammer is readily applicable to conditioning others. Perhaps even more readily than it is applicable to oneself, for the reasons I stated above.

A few freaks want to self-program? So what? While they’re busy shooting ketamine and dropping acid to attain fake enlightenment, the control system will happily implement those same principles on prime time television to keep everyone else docile the rest of the time. It’s a win/win situation.

I sort of made light of Lilly’s paranoia that mechanized life forms were going to wipe us all out and migrate to other worlds to do it all over. But maybe he saw a metaphor for what really is happening . Maybe he saw the spreading stain of alienated mechanistic Ahrimanic consciousness, striving to turn humans into ruthless amoral machines, serial killers and paedophiles dressed in silicon and steel, ready to rape the world and walk away?

Lilly made a distinction between what he called ‘insane’ and ‘outsane’. There’s things you keep inside and there’s things you call tell others. I wonder which one that theory would be?

The Revolution Will Not Be Spiritualised

Well golly. First chance I get to join the fun. Tim’s really good at stirring up shit isn’t he? This time it’s socially conscious occultists who want a piece of his hide.

The whole thing seems to revolve around several related topics:
-is evangelism a valid tactic for political change?
-is spirituality/magick a valid topic for evangelism?
-is it spiritual or ‘adept’ to work for political change/evangelise?

Let’s break this down for starters and establish our terms. I will obviously be coming at this from my own idiosyncratic perspective, but I’m trying to honor the traditional wisdom in this matter.

So:

What is spirituality?

– The spirit is that which transcends the manifest world. It is essence within the substance. It is the timeless, deathless, and unchanging. Spirituality in it’s quintessential form is the path to full realization of the eternal, infinite and unchanging. A still more sophisticated conception is to regard the whole manifest universe as eternal unchanging spirit, but traditionally it is taught to achieve the first before realistically understanding the latter.

What is magick?

-Magick is a skill set. It is typically a toolbox designed to use internal states to induce change in accordance with the will. Yes it’s fuzzy. If everyone does it or acknowledges it’s efficacy it’s not magick anymore, it’s science. Magick is science that doesn’t have the blessing of the consensus yet. There is a lot of overlap with spiritual practices largely because the same skills are applicable in both areas. ie; getting what you want, and transcending desire altogether. Yes that’s a paradox. Life sucks, get a helmet.

What is politics?

-‘Politics is the process and method of making decisions for groups. Although it is generally applied to government, politics is also observed in all human group interactions including corporate, academic, and religious.’

What is evangelism?

– Evangelism is the act or attempt to change the views of others, usually through active procedures of debate, media saturation, and peer pressure. Evangelism may also refer to any form of recruitment or spreading-the-word for a group or movement seen as ideological or committed.

Close enough? Okay then…

How does spirituality relate to magick?

– Tricky but fairly clear. Spirituality is an end, magick is a means. Magick is useful for getting things you want, it could be getting laid or knowing god. ‘this technology is morally neutral’. You can be a magician without a whiff of spiritual understanding, but it’s pretty likely a spiritual person will have some magickal skills, even if they tend not to use them. Why? Magick works partly as a result of broadening one’s views of reality. Achieving spiritual insight is necessarily a broadening of views by quite a bit. Magickal skills are frequently a byproduct of this process. As I’ve said elsewhere undertaking spirituality as a way of gaining powers is regarded as a perversion of the path. Undertaking magick as a way of gaining powers is just like any other way of gaining powers. Your ego with superpowers is still your ego, and you still have to deal with it.

How does spirituality relate to politics?

-Here the rub isn’t it? Most traditions are in agreement that a fixation on any doings in the material world is an obstacle to spiritual growth. Action is appropriate insofar as it reflects an eternal or timeless perspective. Doing it because of genuine love and devotion to truth is different than wanting to be famous or change something in life you dislike. If your motivations are hopelessly intertwined with some external outcome, or idealized result, you’re probably feeding your ego again. You inevitably become trapped in craving, mundane becoming and suffering. Outcomes are like the carrot on the stick you never quite reach. I talked a bit more about this here. Doing things because they are worthwhile for their own sake is the way to go. Politics is all about compromise and short term gains. Not easily conducive to perfected action, or selfless detatchment.

On a related note, it’s frequently pointed out that one’s own liberation is tied into the liberation of others. Meaning, if you help yourself you’ll be helping others by being around them and associating with them. This doesn’t mean you have to save everyone. You’ll have your hands full with your own shit. It does mean, work on yourself is inherently political insofar as it will change others you contact with whether you like it or not, and this is probably the best way to go, long term.

How does magick relate to politics?

-Again, magick is a skill, like bodybuilding. Is bodybuilding inherently political? It is if you use it that way. Worked for Arnold. Doing magick has historically been a political scapegoat and a whipping post for the orthodoxy. Nobody likes to hear about all the shit you can do that they can’t. Persecution makes you political automatically. Don’t expect a mass exodus into your land of persecution and idiosyncratic psychosis. Few people have the energy or ambition to learn any skill, let alone one that calls into question their ontological categories.

How does evangelism relate to politics?

Cough! moving right along….

Is spirituality a valid topic for evangelisation?

-Generally speaking, no. Spirituality requires critical thinking and self examination. Being evangelised tends not require either one very much. If you’re capable of being evangelised, your hold on whatever reality set you had before was probably pretty weak, which implies you weren’t using your critical thinking before, and probably aren’t now.

The important thing to remember is that spiritual practice is not based on changing your concepts. It is based on changing your expeirence of life, beyond the reach of conceptualisation. Evangelism doesn’t touch this area, and tends to deal entirely in the change of opinions and viewpoints. Most traditions council to let potential converts come to you. If you go to them, it’s not really their idea or intiative, and that will cost them later on in the practice.

Is magick a valid topic for evangelisation?

-Again, it’s a skill set. Is body building a valid topic for evangelisation? Maybe so, but you’ll look pretty strange doing it. Advertsing works on creating a perceived need for a product. Most people already have a percieved need for spirituality, and when people try to ‘evangelise’ magick they’re usually talking about spiritual practices that are intertwined into magickal practice. It’s hard to convince somone who isn’t already leaning that way that you can do supernatural things, and the aforementioned lack of critical thinking is just as much an obstacle to magickal practice as it is to spiritual. If you build it , they will come. The last thing you want is a bunch of people playing with your tools who haven’t got a fucking clue how they actually work. It’s just embarrassing for all of us. trying to convince the average person that supernatural skills are an integral part of everyday life they’ve been missing is not likely to come to anything good. That’s where ‘crossing over’ and psychic hotline come from…

‘ someone here has a dead male relative named bill or steve or matt or john….’

yeah right. shut the fuck up.

el Hombre Invisible

_____

29. “Don’t let them see us ! Don’t tell them what we are doing !”
30. Are these the words of the all powerful boards, syndicates, cartels of the earth ?
31. The great banking families of the world
32. French, English, American ?
33. Like Burroughs, that proud American name ?
34. Proud of what exactly ? Would you all like to see exactly what Burroughs has to be proud of ?

_____

the last words of hassan sabbah

In the interest of lightening things up a bit, and since Tim had a good idea to sort of plumb the roots of what we call counter culture, I thought I’d play a little bit.

And ya know, if you’re gonna do it, do it properly. If you want counter culture, look no further than Old Bull Lee, The High Priest of Junk, William S. Burroughs.

 

Everyone with even passing familiarity knows the writer aspect of Uncle Bill, but did you know that he was a pioneer of psychedelic fiction? Not only did he write about yage ( ayuhausca ) long before Terrence Mckenna, but he wrote Naked Lunch while tripping on a cannabis/hash jam native to Morocco, where he was living at the time. In fact, he hardly remembered writing any of it. You could almost consider Naked Lunch channeled prophecy, certainly on the par of the Book of the Law.

Is that a bold statement? It might be if you didn’t know Burroughs was a magician too. Probably the formative magickal pioneer of the latter half of the 20th century. He was introduced to sorcery by Brion Gysin in Tangiers who was himself educated by the natives of morocco. Pretty much all of his work after Naked Lunch is undertaken with some kind of social mutation or subversive intent in mind. His methods were as occult as occult gets. The agenda with Uncle Bill was always escape from the systems of control.

And why? Well maybe because he was a gay man, persecuted and ostracised by his family. A family where his uncle, Ivy Ledbetter Lee, was a publicist for the Third Reich, and who is considered the father of modern ‘public relations’. And we all know the Nazis were into ‘public relations’ don’t we? Burroughs later married a Jewish woman to help her escape the Nazis. That’s a fairly extraordinary step for a gay man. His shame in his family is quite evident later in life.

It’s hard to underestimate Burroughs’s influence. He was a formative mentor to the Beat Generation authors, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who seeded the sixties counter culture to a large degree. He developed a satirical, horrific, highly sexual aesthetic which achieved that highest of artistic goals: non-commercial. Lots of people have ripped Uncle Bill, but no one has translated his vision with any degree of success into a commercial medium, with the possible exception of David Cronenberg‘s adaptation of naked lunch.

Through his life, Burroughs was obsessed with freedom from control. He despised ‘narcs’ of all kinds, and his personal cosmology was populated with authoritarian horrors that make the archons look weak. He spent most of the sixties in London publishing underground screeds such as the ‘revised boy scout manual’ which is semi satirical treatise on guerilla warfare which ranges from biological terrorism, to overthrowing cultures and assassination by list. He walked around armed at all times and was not at all shy about using his weapons.

His magickal methods were innovative and by all accounts highly effective. He experimented with his famous ‘cut-up’ methods to the point were he was using sampled sounds at ambient volumes to influence what he called the ‘reality film’ He could cause riots or accidents on the street, or change the mood of a crowd.

Much of his magickal knowledge was passed onto Genesis P-Orridge of the pioneer industrial band Throbbing Gristle, who went on to form postmodern magick collective Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth , who are generally attributed with inventing the sigil method which is the backbone of modern chaos magick. Indeed, Burroughs postmodern sensibilities and collage aesthetic were instrumental in the current movements of the occult community.

He took pretty much every drug there was, experimented with Wilhelm Riech’s orgone accumulator, joined the church of scientology, and then told them to fuck off.

Burroughs and Gysin modeled themselves on the historical/mythical Hassan Sabbah, old man of the mountain, head of the order of assassins, and the two of them used the pseudonym interchangeably. The hashishshin were fanatical mystics who held their sanctified fortress against all comers with a campaign of terror and blackmail, safe to pursue occult knowledge and absolute freedom.

So am I saving Uncle bill intentionally seeded an occult counterculture to subvert the system of ‘narcs’, to wage a guerrilla war for human freedom? No, I kind of doubt it. Do I think he would’ve been pleased to see just such a thing unfold?

63. Are these the words of the all powerful boards and syndicates of the earth ?
64. And you want the name of Hassan Sabbah on your filth deals
65. To sell out the unborn ?
66. “Protect us from our gooks, our dogs, our human animals !”
67. Are these the words of the all powerful boards, your powerful syndicates
68. Your powerful governments and nations of the earth ?
69. Liars ! Liars! Liars! Cowards! Cowards ! Cowards!
70. Who cannot even face your own dogs !
71. Traitors to all souls everywhere ! Sold out to shit forever :
72. You, miserable collaborators,
73. Now ask protection of Hassan Sabbah ?
74. “Protect us from our gooks, our human animals ?”
75. No, no, no, I will not protect you,
76. And you will never use the name of Hassan Sabbah – William Burroughs to cover your green shit deals with crab-men.

-what do you think?

 

Bought and Paid For

Anyway… While I was plumbing the depth of Lucifer and Ahriman, Tim was as usual blowing the fucking roof off with all kind of great questions, and as usual convincing people to do all his work for him. I’m telling you. Bastard. But at least I don’t have Chaos magicians burning pictures of me on altars dedicated to Cthulhu…

I was especially fascinated by a strand related to ‘meta’ conspiracies. Who creates them, who co-opts them, and who co-opts the co-opters, and in particular, which ones are played out, boring and stupid.

That’s a really fascinating question: the idea that some conspiracies are ‘played out’. To me, if it’s possible that a conspiracy theory can be played out, implies that it never existed in the first place. If people don’t care enough to see it through to the end, then how important was it? Makes those of us who play in the field look like dilettantes, don’t it?

Which is fine. Nobody said it had to be life and death. Who did what to who and why and who hid the evidence for such and such can get pretty fucking tedious. To me, the exact way a murder is committed isn’t all that important, or even the why. What matters in that there was a murder. What matters is that was somebody’s life. And if you take that logic to another level, does it really matter how or why our world has been deeply twisted, the things we hold dear violated? Not really. What matters is that it did happen. It’s still happening. It’s not somebody else’s life. It’s all of our lives.

I think it’s easy to forget history. It’s easy to dismiss something as ‘theory’. Let’s take something like the trilateral/bilderberg/rockefeller/international bankers. I’m going to assume you’ve seen the money masters, and you’ll have noticed that 150, 100 , even 75 years ago, this was not a theory at all. It was a fact of life. It was a hard fought struggle to keep central banks from solidifying control of the monetary system for as long as possible. The average person suffered through engineered currency shortages to influence public opinion. Presidents, and public figures talked plenty about this, at the time, and there are long quotes in the program to that effect. Not a theory. It’s our history. Is that played out? Is it played out because it doesn’t matter anymore, because we’ve given up, or because we don’t know anything different? Is it just old enough that everyone left to talk about it today is bought and paid for?

Listen to some Noam Chomsky, where he talks about the history of the labor movement. We tend to talk about corporate corruption and abuse as if it were something new, but it’s not. If anything it used to be worse. Do you see union organizers being beaten to death in the street these days? Nope. Is it because business is kinder, people are happier, or is it that there’s no one worth beating to death anymore? At least in North America, anyhow.

Which brings me to Haiti, and a talk by Stan Goff, who writes great stuff for From the Wilderness. The things I’m talking about are not a theory to the people in Haiti, and it’s not a different kind of thug calling the shots over there. It’s the same thugs running things right here. So why aren’t there death squads on my street? Are Haitians really that different than me? It’s tempting to think so. If you listen to nothing else, listen to Stan say this:

Everyone talks about Haiti: the poorest nation in the western hemisphere…We had an electoral coup d’etat in this country, in the year 2000, and we complained for about three days, and then everybody went to the mall. When they had a coup d’etat in Haiti, they set things on FIRE. Who’s the poorest nation? The people who go to the mall, when their soveriegnty is snatched from them and their constitution is thrown in the trash, or the people who fall out in the streets? Who’s the poorest nation?

I know this is the third time I’ve mentioned it, but you really should listen to this Cornell West talk if you haven’t already. In this case I recommend it not just because of his invocation of Socratic questioning which I think is indispensable in this game, but also for his passionate dedication to justice. To what he calls the prophetic, to not just question, but to stand alongside those who suffer and shed tears. To recognize in our actions and our thoughts that if we will not stand for justice, then there will be none. If we will not stand for truth, then we dishonor the powers that created us.

He talks about Socrates himself, and how it is never recorded that he ever shed a tear. Never cried. The man who argues but never cries. Are we in danger of becoming those who argue so much, but forget to cry? And if so then why?

Maybe it’s because we’re bought and paid for, so we have the luxury to treat our history as if it were a theory.