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Copyright © 2003 The Disinformation Company Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Originally published by The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2003. ISBN: 978-0-9713942-7-8. Reviewers may quote brief passages.

The opinions and statements made in this book are those of the authors concerned. The Disinformation Company Ltd. has not verified and neither confirms nor denies any of the foregoing and no warranty or fitness is implied. The reader is encouraged to keep an open mind and to independently judge the contents.

MAGICK SQUARES AND FUTURE BEATS - The Magical Processes and Methods of William ...

BEING THE SECOND PART: IN A PRE-RECORDED UNIVERSE WHO MADE THE FIRST RECORDINGS?

“FOR I AM BABALON, AND SHE MY DAUGHTER, UNIQUE AND THERE SHALL BE NO OTHER ...

THE CHARTER AND THE BOOK (BEING A RADICAL REVISIONIST HISTORY OF THE ORIGINS OF ...

To Nimrod Erez, Bradley Novicoff, Mike Backes, my beautiful angel Naomi Nelson, and my partner in Disinformation, Gary Baddeley

PREFACE

Me, I'm a hard-nosed skeptic, when all's said and done. Try as I might, I can't find any convincing evidence to support the notion that flying saucers come from other planets to visit us, I don't “believe” in reincarnation, the Loch Ness Monster, ghosts of the dead, news reports, the objectivity of Science or the literal truth of Bible stories. In an overloaded, supersaturated mediasphere, my own best compass is the evidence of my senses.

Having said that, in the course of 24 years of almost daily occult practice and exploration, some very bizarre things have manifested in front of my lovely, flaring nostrils and I've been forced to alter my view of life, death and “reality” accordingly.

Because whether you “believe” in it or not, whether you like it or not, magic WORKS (I use the devalued word “magic” precisely because I'm amused by its associations with illusion, conjuring and deception, whereas Richard Metzger prefers to use the High-spelling form “magick,” in honor of the heroic and misunderstood Aleister Crowley who broke centuries of Church-imposed silence and obscurity when he published the “secrets” and techniques of magic in his great, democratic work Magick in Theory and Practice, published in 1929). Magic has worked for all of the contributors to this book, as you will see, and it can work for everyone. Personally, I don't need to know HOW it works—although I have bucket loads of colorful theories—just as I don't seem to need to know how my TV works in order to watch it, or how a Jumbo Jet stays up when I'm dozing through in-flight entertainment at 35,000 feet. What I do know for sure, based on the evidence of my senses and on many years of skeptical enquiry, is that magic allows us to take control of our own development as human beings. Magic allows us to see the world entire in a fresh and endlessly significant light and demands of us a vital and dynamic collaboration with our environment. Magic brings coherence and structure to psychological “breakdowns,” psychedelic experiences or transpersonal encounters. Magic allows us to personify our fears and failures as demons and outlines time-honored methods of bargaining with these feelings or banishing them. Magic is the sane response to a world filled with corporate ghost-gods, roaming, mindless laws and peering surveillance lenses. Above all, magic is about achieving results. It's about manipulating real-time events, dealing with devious “spirits” and other autonomous energy sources. It's about conjuring dead pop icons to do your bidding and writing it all down so that it reads like an exciting adventure story and changes the world around it. Magic is glamorous, dark and charismatic. “Magic” is the hopelessly inadequate Standard English word for a long-established technology which permits access to the “operating codes” underlying the current physical universe. Becoming a “magician” is a developmental skill, like learning to talk, to reason, to empathize or to see perspective.

Disinformation's Book of Lies is a 21st century grimoire, a How To book designed to inspire the young magician-warriors of this new and turbulent century. In the apparent derangement of our times, this book is both a call to arms and an armory also. Read on, get tooled up, get out there... and start bending reality.

INTRODUCTION

“The best place to hide something is right out in the open. No one ever thinks to look there.”

At first this question used to really flummox me—did they expect me to do like a card trick? A little sleight of hand perhaps? What did they expect me to whip out and impress them with? By now I'm used to this line of inquiry and interestingly, the question is always asked with complete sincerity, never with sarcasm or scorn, just an open attitude to the idea of “magick.” In situations where my reputation has preceded me, I think this is kind of fun. I've even come to enjoy this question, as it sure beats making normal small talk.

So the first time I ever jerked off, it was to a picture of a butt-naked Maxine Sanders, Queen of the Witches. I think this explains a lot about me, actually...

But to answer the question, well, yes, I can teach you how to do a magick, uh, trick that will most assuredly bring you dependable results (within reason) and I can likely explain it to you within 10 minutes time. If you did what I told you, things would start happening, but before you go feeling all impressed with yourself, if you'd ask someone to teach you a song on the piano in 10 minutes, they could do so, but you'd still only be playing “Chopsticks.”

For some reason, I have always considered myself to be a warlock. Even when I was very young. I don't know why, really, but it is true. I have had this self-identity for as long as I can recall. There was never a time when I didn't feel this way. I don't remember how I gravitated towards magick in the first place, but when I was a little kid I really loved Bewitched. These were people who I could relate to and all the comics I liked had heroes who were sorcerers and warlocks: Dr. Strange, Adam Warlock, and Captain Marvel.¹ My parents even have a Super8 film of me dressed in a “wizard” costume replete with cloak and Merlin cap, reading my “grimoire” and “scrying” into a makeshift crystal ball that doubled as a funky early ’70s ashtray. I was about five years old when this was shot. Thirty some years later I look back on this and laugh at how consistent I have been. The older I get the more I see a fairly straight trajectory from there to here. It's weird to contemplate it.

One strong shove in the direction of magick might have something to do with a book called Witchcraft, Magic and the Supernatural, a full color hardback picture book that came out in the 1970s with a bloody goat head on the front cover and an Austin Spare painting of a demon on the back. Since the audience for such a book was undoubtedly on the young side, this book—like many such occult tomes published by Octopus Books—had several pictures of foxy “sky-clad” witches nestled within its pages to attract more horny young buyers. I convinced my mother to purchase this book for me at the mall. I smiled sweetly, such a good little boy.

So the first time I ever jerked off, it was to a picture of a butt-naked Maxine Sanders, Queen of the Witches.

When I was younger and first starting to read up on the occult, I was always puzzled why it all seemed to be so “ancient”—I'd read book after book looking for something to latch onto, but little of it had much relevance to my life and my interests. Latin incantations, wands, daggers, robes and the various occult “props” all seemed pointless to me and very ineffectual ways of making magick happen. I'd read about purification rituals, “casting circle,” the “Mass” of this or that, “hand fasting” and all of this stuff that magicians were supposed to do, but where was the sorcery? When does it get to the part where it explains how to make shit happen? That's the part that I was interested in and it was the only part I was ever interested in. Forget about all this hokey Dungeons and Dragons robe-wearing nonsense, I wanted results.

I recall watching Kenneth Anger's films for the first time and grasping intuitively how his films were ritual on celluloid, constructed with magical efficacy foremost in mind. Color, music, pacing and especially his choice of actors (such as Anais Nin, Marjorie Cameron, Marianne Faithful and others) who he viewed as “elementals,” all figured into making Anger's cinematic spells so potent and brilliant. There was also the angle of how, because they existed on film and could be screened over and over again all over the world, they were incantations of especial power. I was awestruck by what I was seeing and I learned a great lesson about “making” magick through a careful study of Anger's work and through this influence, in part, I continued to move towards combining my career ambitions of working in film, television and publishing with my private magical interests.

Magick—defined by Aleister Crowley as “the art and science of causing change in conformity with will”—has always been the vital core of all of the projects we undertake at The Disinformation Company. Whether via our website, publishing activities or our TV series, the idea of being able to “influence” reality in some beneficial way is what drives our activities. I've always considered The Disinformation Company Ltd. and our various activities to constitute a very complex spell. Some sorcerers use painting or music or fiction to work their magick, but I quite like the idea of having a “magick business”—both literally and figuratively—as the canvas that I perform my magick on. It works on a lot of levels, metaphorically speaking, for me to consider myself to be a magical businessman, if you see what I am saying. It's a fairly unfettered way to see your place in the world and doesn't exactly limit your imagination.

“All Cretes are liars” - Epimenides the Crete, inventor of the paradox.

For this anthology I've—quite obviously—cribbed the title from Crowley's cryptic 1913 book of the same name. I liked the irony and it dovetailing so neatly with the Disinformation brand (“Disinformation,” a term usually associated with the CIA, means “a mixture of truth and lies” used as an information smokescreen), so Book of Lies seemed a natural. A book that announces itself as a book of lies would have to have the truth hidden somewhere in it, right?² Also, since Crowley looms so large over my way of thinking, it's fitting to pay tribute. Again and again during the preparations for this volume, I've looked over copies of his occult journal, The Equinox, and I am conscious that this collection and its sequels follow in its tradition. Here, I'm interested most of all in presenting “modern” magick as opposed to “museum” magick and feel that all too often the occult books being published today are merely a rehash of what has gone on before with nary an ounce of new energy or new ideas coming into the fold. Not since the innovations of Chaos Magick in the ’80s has anyone really come along with a go at trying to redefine magick for the modern era and offer a working toolkit. This is my attempt, my version.

And if it is your first dip into occult literature, I do hope this book is like having a nuclear bomb go off behind your eyeballs or a razorblade slashed across your brain.

However, because this book is an anthology—the work of many people—and showcases so many radical belief systems, rebel biographies and “alt histories,” I get to elegantly sidestep the notion that I, personally, am trying to tell anyone “THIS is how you should practice magick” as this is certainly not my intention. No one can do that for you and I would not presume to try. How can anyone possibly know more about your magick than you do? It's about what works for you. If you get results, then it must be working. Over time you'll see your targets hit with greater accuracy, but there is NO SET WAY OF DOING ANYTHING IN MAGICK. I can assure you that I, too, am making it all up as I go along. Even as my aim gets better and better as I get older and become more creative with my spell casting, I will say it again: I am still improvising. This book endeavors to showcase strategies that work for other people and create a cookbook for subversion, but feel free to riff on the recipes.³ It's the only way forward, to discover your own true orbit in life and what works for you. The editorial selection attempts to broaden the cultural definition of what magick is—and what it is not—by including many disparate voices, some not normally viewed as working in the occult arena (painters, rock stars, comic book writers, computer programmers). Some of the names in the book will be familiar, others not, but the communal reason that they all coexist between the covers of Disinformation's Book of Lies is because they are doing something different and inspiring, bringing to light an obscure subject or else they are writing on a familiar topic and presenting a side of things not usually seen. This collection represents, for me, the strongest line up of magical thought that I could find today and presents some of the most potent magical thinkers of our time in its pages.

When you are in the book publishing business, at a certain point—hopefully early on—you need to ask yourself “Who is going to read this book? Who is it for?” This anthology is for the person who is like I was back then: searching for something, groping for something magical in their lives, but not quite finding it in the rehashed medievalism and ‘incense and affirmations’ school of what passes for occult literature. This book intends to fuel a certain kind of fire in a certain type of person. I know that I'd be happy if I stumbled upon it, so I consider that a good sign.

And if it is your first dip into occult literature, I do hope this book is like having a nuclear bomb go off behind your eyeballs or a razorblade slashed across your brain.

It's only when these sorts of thought forms can be fully externalized in the culture that we can expect to see the emergence of a mutant race. I am very interested in seeing this happen and this collection represents a nudge in that direction.

Endnotes:

1 The “cosmic” ‘70s Captain Marvel written by Jim Starlin, not “Shazam.” I hated him.

3 Listen to John Coltrane's A Love Supreme and hear the way this man prayed with his saxophone. Beatific emotion pours out of his horn. You can see a similar thing in The Mystery of Picasso film, watching him paint. Incredible. This is magick in action, but these skills were not developed overnight. You can't escape putting the work in.

Special thanks go out to Michael Moynihan for his kind help and editorial suggestions and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge for providing us with all of the amazing Burroughs and Gysin images from his personal collection as well as always being an inspiration to me since I was a teenager. It's very gratifying that he has always been so supportive to my various projects. Thanks also to Grant Morrison, and Kristan Anderson, to Tomo Makiura, Paul Pollard and Kate Bingaman for the design and layout of this book, Nimrod Erez, Bradley Novicoff, Mogg Morgan at Mandrake of Oxford, Ben Meyers at Autonomedia, Nicholas Tharcher at New Falcon Publications, Eric Simonoff, Gerry Howard, Philip Gwyn Jones, Mark McCarthy, Eva Wisten, Peter H. Gilmore, Douglas Walla at Kent Gallery, Kirsten Anderson at Roq la Rue Gallery, Fiona Horne, Dean Chamberlain and Stacy Valis, Jon Graham and Cynthia Fowles of Inner Traditions, Brian Butler, Mike Backes, Shann Dornhecker, Greg Bishop, Ina Howard, Katherine Gates, Erik Pauser, Leen Al-Bassam, Ralph Bernardo, Russ Kick, Lee Hoffman, Alex Burns, Naomi Nelson and my business partner in Disinformation, Gary Baddeley, for all of his help with this manuscript.

MAGICK IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

POP MAGIC!

POP MAGIC! is Magic! For the People. Pop Magic! is Naked Magic! Pop Magic! lifts the 7 veils and shows you the tits of the Infinite.

THINKING ABOUT IT

All you need to begin the practice of magic is concentration, imagination and the ability to laugh at yourself and learn from mistakes. Some people like to dress up as Egyptians or monks to get themselves in the mood; others wear animal masks or Barbarella costumes. The use of ritual paraphernalia functions as an aid to the imagination only.

Anything you can imagine, anything you can symbolize, can be made to produce magical changes in your environment.

FIRST STEPS ON THE PATH

Magic is easy to do. Dozens of rulebooks and instruction manuals are available in the occult or “mind, body and spirit” sections of most modern bookstores. Many of the older manuals were written during times when a powerful and vindictive Church apparatus was attempting to suppress all roads to the truth but most of them are generally so heavily coded and disguised behind arcane symbol systems that it's hardly worth the bother—except for an idea of how other people used THEIR imaginative powers to interpret non-ordinary contacts and communications.

Aleister Crowley—magic's Picasso—wrote this and I can't say it any better than he did:

This is the most important rule of all which is why it's here at the start. As you continue to learn and develop your own psychocosms and styles of magical practice, as you encounter stranger and stranger denizens of the Hellworlds and Hyperworlds, you'll come back to these words of wisdom again and again with a fresh understanding each time.

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN

Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.

Be honest about your progress, your successes and failures. Tripping on 500 mushrooms might loosen your astral sphincter a little but it will not generally confer upon you any of the benefits of the magic I'm discussing here. Magic is about what you bring BACK from the Shining Realms of the Uberconscious. The magician dives into the Immense Other in search of tips and hints and treasures s/he can bring home to enrich life in the solid world. And if necessary, Fake it till you make it.

Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 2

Read lots of books on the subject to get in the mood. Talking about magic with non-magicians is like talking to virgins about shagging. Reading about magic is like reading about sex; it will get you horny for the real thing but it won't give you nearly as much fun.

Reading will give you a feel for what's crap and what can usefully be adapted to your own style. Develop discrimination. Don't buy into cults, aliens, paranoia, or complacency. Learn whom to trust and whom to steer clear of.

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 3

MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and interacting with the real world. I experience it as what I can only describe as a “head-click,” a feeling of absolute certainty accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similar to the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali's “Paranoiac/critical” method, near death experiences, etc. Many apparently precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which tea leaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scored, poems are written.

Magical Consciousness can be practiced until it merges with and becomes everyday consciousness. Maintained at these levels it could interfere with your lifestyle unless you have one which supports long periods of richly associative thought.

EXPERIMENT:

As a first exercise in magical consciousness spend five minutes looking at everything around you as if ALL OF IT was trying to tell you something very important. How did that light bulb come to be here exactly? Why does the murder victim in the newspaper have the same unusual surname as your father-in-law? Why did the phone ring, just at that moment and what were you thinking when it did? What's that water stain on the wall of the building opposite? How does it make you feel?

Five minutes of focus during which everything is significant, everything is luminous and heavy with meaning, like the objects seen in dreams.

EXPERIMENT:

Next, relax, go for a walk and interpret everything you see on the way as a message from the Infinite to you. Watch for patterns in the flight of birds. Make oracular sentences from the letters on car number plates. Look at the way buildings move against the skyline. Pay attention to noises on the streets, graffiti sigils, voices cut into rapid, almost subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as far and for as long as you feel comfortable in this open state. The more aimless, the more you walk for the pleasure of pure experience, the further into magical consciousness you will be immersed.

Reading about magic is like reading about sex; it will get you horny for the real thing but it won't give you nearly as much fun.

Magical consciousness resembles states of light meditation, “hypnagogic” pre-sleep trance or alpha wave brain activity.

APPLIED MAGIC

Is about making things happen and performing the necessary experiments. In these endeavors we do not need to know HOW magic works, only that it does. We prove this by doing the work, recording the results and sharing our information with other magicians. Theoretical magic is all the mad ideas you come up with to explain what's happening to you. Applied magic is what makes them happen.

THE MAGICAL RECORD

Always keep a journal of your experiments. It's easy to forget things you've done or to miss interesting little connections and correspondences. Make a note of everything, from the intent to the fulfillment. Make a note of dates, times, moods, successes and failures.

Study YOURSELF the way a hunter studies prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.

BANISHING

Banishing is a way of preparing a space for ritual use. There are many elaborate banishing rituals available, ranging across the full spectrum of pomposity. Think of banishing as the installation of virus protection software. The banishing is a kind of vaccination against infection from Beyond.

Most banishings are intended to surround the magician with an impenetrable shield of will. This usually takes the form of an acknowledgment of the elemental powers at the four cardinal points of the compass. Some like to visualize themselves surrounded and protected by columns of light or by four angels. Any protective image will do—spaceships, superheroes, warrior-monks, whatever. I don't bother with any of that and usually visualize a bubble radiating outwards from my body into space all around above and below me as far as I think I'll need it.

Remember that you may be opening some part of yourself to an influx of information from “non-ordinary,” apparently “Other” sources. If you practice ceremonial magic and attempt to summon godforms or spirits things will undoubtedly happen. Your foundations will be tested. There is always the danger of obsession and madness. As magical work progresses, you will be forced into confrontation with your deepest darkest fears and desires. It's easy to become scared, paranoid and stupid. Stay fluid, cling to no one self-image and maintain your sense of humor at all times. Genuine laughter is the most effective banishing ritual available.

Study YOURSELF the way a hunter studies prey. Exploit your own weaknesses to create desired changes within yourself.

Banishing reminds you that no matter how many gods you talk to, no matter how many fluorescent realms you visit, you still have to come home, take a shit, be able to cook dinner, water the plants and, most importantly, talk to people without scaring them.

When you complete any magical work, ground yourself with a good laugh, a good meal, good shag, a run or anything else that connects you with the mundane world. Banishing after your ritual is over works as a decompression back into the normal world of bills and bus stops and job satisfaction. The magician's job is not to get lost in the Otherworld but to bring back its treasures for everyone to play with.

SIGILS

In the Pop Magic! style, the sigil (sij-ill) is the first and one of the most effective of all the weapons in the arsenal of any modern magician.

The sigil technique was reconceptualized and modernized by Austin Osman Spare in the early 20th century and popularized by Chaos Magicians and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth in the 19 hundred and 80s.

The sigil takes a magical desire or intent—let's say “IT IS MY DESIRE TO BE A GREAT ACTOR” (you can, of course, put any desire you want in there) and folds it down, creating a highly-charged symbol. The desire is then forgotten. Only the symbol remains and can then be charged to full potency when the magician chooses.

Forgetting the desire in its verbal form can be difficult if you've started too ambitiously. There's no point charging a sigil to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket. Start with stuff that's not too emotionally involving.

I usually sigilize to meet people I'm interested in, or for particular qualities I'll need in a given situation. I've also used sigils for healing, for locating lost objects and for mass global change. I've been using them for 20 years and they ALWAYS work. For me, the period between launching the sigil and its manifestation as a real world event is usually 3 days, 3 weeks or 3 months depending on the variables involved.

So. Begin your desire's transformation into pure throbbing symbol in the following fashion: First remove the vowels and the repeating letters to leave a string of consonants—TSMYDRBGC.

Now start squashing the string down, throwing out or combining lines and playing with the letters until only an appropriately witchy-looking glyph is left. When you're satisfied it's done, you may wind up with something like this:

Most homemade sigils look a little spooky or alien—like UFO writing or witchy wall-scratchings. There are no rules as to how your sigil should look as long as it WORKS for you. RESULTS ONLY are important at this stage. If something doesn't work, try something else. The point is not to BELIEVE in magic, the point is to DO it and see how it works. This is not religion and blind faith plays no part.

Charging and launching your sigil is the fun part (it's often advisable to make up a bunch of sigils and charge them up later when you've forgotten what they originally represented).

Now, most of us find it difficult at first to maintain the precise Zen-like concentration necessary to work large-scale magic. This concentration can be learned with time and effort but in the meantime, sigils make it easy to sidestep years of training and achieve instant success. To charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts.

Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various mechanisms for inducing brief “no-mind” states. Fasting, spinning, intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response; all will do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee jumping, lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse and dancing to Techno. All of these methods proved to be highly effective but for the eager beginner nothing beats the WANK TECHNIQUE.

Some non-magicians, I've noticed, convulse with nervous laughter whenever I mention the word “masturbation” (and no wonder; next to wetting the bed or shitting in your own cat's box for a laugh, it's the one thing no-one likes to admit to).

Be that as it may, magical masturbation is actually more fun and equally, more serious, than the secular hand shandy, and all it requires is this: at the moment of orgasm, you must see the image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh. The sigil can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be most effective.

At the white-hot instant of orgasm, consciousness blinks. Into this blink, this abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.

Masturbation is only ONE of countless methods you can use to bring your mental chatter to a standstill for the split-second it takes to charge and launch a sigil. I suggest masturbation because I'm kindhearted, because it's convenient and because it's fun for most of us.

However...one does not change the universe simply by masturbating (tell THAT to the millions of sperm fighting for their life and the future of the species in a balled up Kleenex). If that were true, every vague fantasy we had in our heads at the moment of orgasm would come true within months. Intent is what makes the difference here.

Forget the wanking for just one moment if you can and remember that the sigil is the important part of the magic being performed here. The moment of orgasm will clear your mind, that's all. There are numerous other ways to clear your mind and you can use any of them. Dancing or spinning to exhaustion is very effective. Meditation is effective but takes years to learn properly. Fear and shock are very good for charging sigils, so you could probably watch a scary movie and launch your sigil at the bit where the hero's head comes bouncing down the aluminum stepladder into his girlfriend's lap. A run around the block clutching a sigil might be enough to charge it, so why not experiment?

At the moment of orgasm, you must see the image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh.

Try launching your sigil while performing a Bungee jump from a bridge, perhaps, or sit naked in your local graveyard at night. Or dance until you fall over. The important thing is to find your own best method for stopping that inner chat just long enough to launch a fiercely visualized, flaming ultraviolet sigil into the gap. States of exhaustion following ANY intense arousal or deprivation are ideal.

The McDonald's Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph are all corporate viral sigils.

And if you experiment and still have trouble with sigils, try some of the other beginner exercises for a while. I've met a couple of people who've told me they can't make sigils work so maybe there are a few of you out there who genuinely have problems in this particular area. Tough luck but it doesn't mean there's no magic for you to play with. I couldn't wheeze “Twinkle twinkle little star...” out of a clarinet but I can play the guitar well enough to have written hundreds of fabulous songs. If I'd stuck with the clarinet and got nowhere would that mean there is no such thing as music? Or would it indicate simply that I have an aptitude for playing the guitar which I can't seem to replicate using a clarinet? If I want to make music I use the instrument I'm most comfortable and accomplished with. The same is true for magical practice. Don't get uptight about it. This is not about defending a belief system, this is about producing results.

SIGILS: DISPOSAL

Some people keep their sigils, some dispose of them in an element appropriate to the magician's intent (I have burned, buried, flushed away and scattered sigils to the winds, depending on how I felt about them. Love-sigils went to water—flushed down the toilet or thrown into rivers or boiled in kettles. War-sigils were burned etc.... Some of my sigils are still around because I decided they were slow-burners and worth keeping. Some are even still in print. Do what feels right and produces results.)

Soiled paper and tissues can easily be disposed of in your mum's purse or the pocket of dad's raincoat.

VIRAL SIGILS

The viral sigil also known as the BRAND or LOGO is not of recent development (see “Christianity,” “the Nazis” and any flag of any nation) but has become an inescapable global phenomenon in recent years. It's easy to see the Nazi movement as the last gasp of Imperial Age thinking; these visionary savages still thought world domination meant tramping over the “enemy” and seizing his real estate. If only they'd had the foresight to see that global domination has nothing to do with turf and everything to do with media they would have anticipated corporate stealth-violence methods and combined them with their undoubted design sense; the rejected artists who engineered the Third Reich might have created the 20th century's first global superbrand and spared the lives of many potential consumers. The McDonald's Golden Arches, the Nike swoosh and the Virgin autograph are all corporate viral sigils.

Corporate sigils are super-breeders. They attack unbranded imaginative space. They invade Red Square, they infest the cranky streets of Tibet, they etch themselves into hair-styles. They breed across clothing, turning people into advertising hoardings. They are a very powerful development in the history of sigil magic, which dates back to the first bison drawn on the first cave wall.

The logo or brand, like any sigil, is a condensation, a compressed, symbolic summing up of the world of desire which the corporation intends to represent. The logo is the only visible sign of the corporate intelligence seething behind it. Walt Disney died long ago but his sigil, that familiar, cartoonish signature, persists, carrying its own vast weight of meanings, associations, nostalgia and significance. People are born and grow up to become Disney executives, mouthing the jargon and the credo of a living corporate entity. Walt Disney the man is long dead and frozen (or so folk myth would have it) but Disney, the immense, invisible corporate egregore persists.

Corporate entities are worth studying and can teach the observant magician much about what we really mean when we use the word “magic.” They and other ghosts like them rule our world of the early 21st century.

EXPERIMENT:

Think hard about why the Coca-Cola spirit is stronger than the Dr. Pepper spirit (what great complex of ideas, longings and deficiencies has the Coke logo succeeded in condensing into two words, two colors, taking Orwell's 1984 concept of Newspeak to its logical conclusion?). Watch the habits of the world's great corporate predators like FOX, MICROSOFT or AOL TIME WARNER. Track their movements over time, observe their feeding habits and methods of predation, monitor their repeated behaviors and note how they react to change and novelty. Learn how to imitate them, steal their successful strategies and use them as your own. Form your own limited company or corporation. It's fairly easy to do with some paperwork and a small amount of money. Create your own brand, your own logo and see how quickly you can make it spread and interact with other corporate entities.

HYPERSIGILS

The “hypersigil” or “supersigil” develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking.

EXPERIMENT:

After becoming familiar with the traditional sigil method, see if you can create your own hypersigil. The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a song, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try. This is a newly developed technology so the parameters remain to be explored. It is important to become utterly absorbed in the hypersigil as it unfolds; this requires a high degree of absorption and concentration (which can lead to obsession but so what? You can always banish at the end) like most works of art. The hypersigil is a dynamic miniature model of the magician's universe, a hologram, microcosm or “voodoo doll” which can manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of “real” life.

HOW TO CHAT UP GODS

Accept this for the moment; there are Big Ideas in the world. They were Big before we were born and they'll still be big long after we're moldering. ANGER is one of those Big Ideas and LOVE is another one. Then there's FEAR or GUILT

So...to summon a god, one has only to concentrate on that god to the exclusion of all other thought. Let's just say you wish to summon the Big Idea COMMUNICATION in the form of the god Hermes, so that he will grant you a silver-tongue. Hermes is the Greek personification of quick wit, art and spelling and the qualities he represents were embodied by Classical artists in the symbol of an eternally swift and naked youth, fledged with tiny wings and dressed only in streamers of air. Hermes is a condensation into pictorial form—a sigil, in fact—of an easily recognizable default state of human consciousness. When our words and minds are nimble, when we conjure laughter from others, when we make poetry, we are in the real presence of Hermes. We are, in fact, possessed by the god.

I am not suggesting that there is a real or even a ghostly, Platonic Mount Olympus where Hollywood deities sit around a magic pool watching the affairs of mortals and pausing only to leap down whenever one of us “believes” in them hard enough. There may well be for all I know but it seems a complicated way to explain something quite simple. The truth is that there doesn't HAVE to be a Mount Olympus for you to encounter Hermes or something just like him using a different name. You don't even have to “believe” in Greek gods to summon any number of them. Hermes personifies a Big Idea and all you have to do is think him fervently and he'll appear so hard and so fast in your mind that you will know him instantly.

People tend to become possessed by gods arbitrarily because they do not recognize them as such; a man can be overwhelmed with anger (the Greek god Ares), we can all be “beside ourselves” with passion (Aphrodite) or grief (Hades). In life we encounter these Big Ideas every day but we no longer use the word “god” to describe them. The magician consciously evokes these states and renames them gods in order to separate them from his or her Self, in order to study them and learn.

You may wish to connect with Hermes if you're beginning a novel or giving a speech or simply want to entertain a new beau with your incredible repartee.

HOW MANY HERMES?

The form the Big Idea takes depends upon your tradition or desire. The beautiful electric youth of the Greeks is a well-known image in Western cultures, having been appropriated for everything from Golden Age FLASH comics to the logo of the INTERFLORA chain of florists. Other cultures personify speed, wit and illusion slightly differently but the basic complex of ideas remains the same worldwide: velocity, words, writing, magic, trickery, cleverness, are all the qualities we would associate with Hermes, but in India this Big Idea is embodied not as a tin-hatted swift runner but as a plump youth with an elephant head and a broken tusk with which he writes the ongoing story of the universe. This is Ganesh, the scribe of the Hindu pantheon.

In Egypt, the same Big Idea is called Thoth, who created the symbols on the Tarot deck. In the Icelandic tradition, Odin or Wotan is the Lord of Lightning and communications. (Like the VDUs we stare at every day, Wotan is one-eyed and on his shoulders sit the ravens Thought and Memory who bring him instantaneous data from around the world. He can be very handy in this form, if you need to discipline an unruly PC).

Hermes, Mercury, Odin, Ganesh, Thoth; all these names represent variant embodiments on themes of Communication and speed.

Reductionists may come to an understanding of magic by considering “Mount Olympus” as a metaphor for the collective Human head.

EXPERIMENT:

Pick a traditional god or demon from a book on magic or mythology and learn all you can about your chosen subject. I suggest you start with a benign deity unless you're stupid or hard and want to get into some nasty dirty psychic business, in which case pick a demon from one of the medieval grimoires and hope you're strong enough to handle the intense negative feelings “demons” embody.

However, I'd suggest starting first with Hermes, the god of Magic, in his guise as Ganesh. Ganesh is known as a smasher of obstacles and part of his complex is that he opens the way into the magical world, so it's always good to get his acquaintance first if you're serious about following a magical path.

Call fervently upon Hermes. Luxuriate in his attributes. Drink coffee or Red Bull in his name or take a line of speed, depending on your levels of drug abuse. Fill your head with speedy images of jet planes, jet cars and bullet trains. Play “Ray of Light” by Madonna and call down Hermes. Surround yourself with FLASH comics and call down Hermes.

Tell him how very wonderful he is in your own words, and then call him into yourself, building a bridge between your own ever-growing feelings of brilliance and the descending energies of the Big Idea.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

“All Cretes are liars” - Epimenides the Crete, inventor of the paradox.

Endnotes:

MAGICK IN THEORY AND PRACTICE

POP MAGIC!

THINKING ABOUT IT

FIRST STEPS ON THE PATH

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 2

HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 3

MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

EXPERIMENT:

EXPERIMENT:

APPLIED MAGIC

THE MAGICAL RECORD

BANISHING

SIGILS

SIGILS: DISPOSAL

VIRAL SIGILS

EXPERIMENT:

HYPERSIGILS

EXPERIMENT:

HOW TO CHAT UP GODS

HOW MANY HERMES?

EXPERIMENT: