ALL HAIL ERIS!
Back when we were whippersnapper wizards, knee high to an incubus, the feared and fabulous Churche of Random Ethicz (COREZ) convened in desolate spots and dirty squats to perform ancient rites with a punk twist. We set up the Chaos Crche, situated on this earthly plane in a Manchester basement. There was an elemental symbol on each wall, a gnarled fetish-staff hung with charms in the corner, and a homemade Baphomet sitting on the altar, with a greedy pot belly and tiny red eyes glaring out from his black face. Lord Mungdungus was the driving force behind our devilry, a voodooist with a passion for astral fiddling, who spent magickal evenings inviting Kali-ma into his body to feel up hir knockers.
For our first rite in the new space, to christen it (so to speak), we began with the I.A.O. banishing ritual, a no-frills version of an exercise which traditionally involves the invocation of archangels, the recitation of sutras, or something else to clear the space of unclean spirits, hungry ghosts and other denizens of the astral plane. We were very flippant magi, too lazy even to take the Lord's name in vain properly, so we contracted the sacred names. We began with iiiiiiiiiih, sung high, with the hands above the head to energise the third eye, and next we intoned aaaaaaaaah with arms out to the side to warm up the heart and chest. Finally we dropped our arms and our attention to the guts to sing oooooh.[i] It sounds like oooooh, youre in trouble now!, which in fact we were. Someone traced a few pentagrams in the air with an antique Nepalese blade, and Beelze-Bob's your uncle, temple cleared!
At least that was the theory according to Mr. B, who did magick by sheer bloody mindedness, staring at a sigil for bliss for hours at a stretch until he was damn well good and blissful. He was all bare bones, figure and philosophy, and he wanted our rites the same way, so we stripped the banishing rite of angels and drama, incense and nonsense, leaving only vowels.
My ex-girlfriend sang oooooh for longer than the rest of us, instinctively aware perhaps that our opening was incomplete. She was the most unbalanced and most powerful of all of us, a witch from Tring (the site of the last English witch-drowning), who rode her ketamine-fuelled broomstick across the astral sky, leaving a trail of sneezes. The final joker in the pack was the Nealist, a no-holds-barred reality-wrestler, who began The Churche as a video art project. This featured himself standing alongside genuine street evangelists, distributing instructions on how to buy your way into heaven, and filming the inevitable row. He was the agent selected to interrupt and irritate the Archbishop of Canterbury during a ritual at his public address. The idea was to collect the anger of the earthly mouthpiece of God in a specially adapted bong Lord M was surreptitiously sucking on. I fear this bottle of unholy water is still in his possession.
We announced our intention to consecrate the crche, and tied a button that had spent the day in my mouth onto the fetish-staff. The energy raising began. Linking arms in the shape of a pentagram, talking in tongues, shaking as we incanted, we built up gradually to a high-paced cacophony of mock-Latin shouting: dominu, infanto perterburantor rectibus rectum, nunc sordat frustus omniemnes et cetera, gets betterer. When we were suitably wired, we exorcised the place in the manner of the priest from The Exorcist, flicking holy water stolen from a church around with toothbrushes. When we felt we had the place covered, we untraced the pentagrams, dashed through the I.A.O., and went our separate ways to bed.
Back in the real world the following morning, I was in excellent spirits, blissing out on my bike up the Oxford Road, floating up the stairs of the Maths Tower, and giggling my way through my first lecture, but during the second lecture I developed a headache, which rapidly progressed to nausea and dizziness. By the bell I was feeling positively sick and disorientated, and my groans were disturbing the class. A friend from my Buddhist group was sitting next to me. She had attended the ritual humiliation of the Archbishop, and knew what antics I got up to whilst out of lotus, so she walked me down the stairs, helped me locate my bicycle, and because there was no way I could ride it, she took my arm and we stumbled slowly through the streets of Longsight to my house, where she left me in the care of my witch. The rest of the day is a complete blur as I drifted in and out of consciousness; I only remember the pain. It was like nothing I had ever experienced, a migraine localized to a point above one eye, with nausea, loss of balance, and a feeling like millions of microscopic insects were crawling around under my skin. My witch spent the day looking after me, and told me afterwards that I was babbling in tongues and moaning. I had barely suffered even slight headaches before, but this was absolute agony. By the evening it had began to subside, but I felt occasional electric twinges in that spot for months.[ii]
The moral of the story is, of course, don't be a fuckwit. Electricians take precautions to avoid shocks, and sorcerers, black, white, and all shades of grey should do the same when working with energy. Incant, invoke, do what thou wilt, but clear your space and your head, with as much intent as you put into your intention, before and after, and whenever you feel the need, even silently on the night bus. Golden Dawn novices spend their first year practicing banishing on a daily basis for good reason. Untrace the pentagrams, thank the archangels, say your Hail Marys, bang your gong, do what needs to be done, but close your work and lock the door.
If you want magick in your life, it is yours, but start carefully with a tarot reading, a course at a psychic college, or a Daime session.[1] If you feel an overwhelming pull to the left, there are instructions in Appendix Chaos, but master a proper banishing first, and steer clear of Ouija boards and Enochian until you know exactly what you are working with. My granny traced the goblins in her loo and the voices in her head back to a youthful Ouija board. There are all sorts in the astral, from glorious archangels to horribly boring grey shades shuffling along like commuters on station platforms, and there are also plenty of mosquitoes, flies, and worms doing their various jobs. Some entities love flesh, the way some of us love spirit, and they may exploit any opening you offer. They are not evil, but neither are hungry tigers; wise explorers take care in the jungle all the same.
Like psychedelicks, magick opens you up, so dabble with respect, with experienced people. There is no need to be scared or paranoid, but no need to be silly either. Group work is much more unpredictable, because a group, especially a group of nutters, can easily raise enough energy collectively to frazzle someones circuitry, whereas one person usually raises only a safe amount. We precocious sorcerers had no doubts about the efficacy of magick, but we didnt appreciate the dangers, and we were too punk to care. I don't think I permanently flipped my lid, and I stopped doing group Chaos works after that rite, but reality has never been the same since.
Magick works. It works wonders, but the most surprising thing to come out of the hat is the revelation that there is more to the universe than we are lead to believe. Magick can also teach a young punk to take responsibility for his reality, which he makes up as he goes along, as he likes, and as he deserves. In this blurry plane, you get what you ask for. I spent hours one night catching a mosquito alive for a blood sacrifice to bring me ganja, which I was craving after a few dry weeks in Mexico. The following morning, wandering lost in the streets of Cuernavaca, I saw a man with a tattoo of a Chaos star, the symbol of my magickal line. A magician stays alert for potential pathways, and I recognised an angel of Chaos disguised as a punk. When I stopped him, the first thing he said to me, even before hello, was do you want a smoke?
It was great to have a confirmation so quickly, and a welcome mash-up, but in retrospect, all it did was reinforce a habit. A magick wand can be a crowbar to bust out of your cage, but pursuing earthly desires reinforces the cage with magickal metal. Living life in a magickal mode, you dont need to do magick; it does you. Once you are done peeking up the skirt of the goddess, once you are done trying to penetrate the goddess, you let magick penetrate you, and you become the goddess. Coincidences abound. Whatever you need falls in your lap at exactly the right time, without effort, and without incantation. But first you need to believe - or not even believe; you just need to try.
Evil eyes, Cupid's arrows, and ghosts, holy and otherwise, were consensus reality for aeons, and everything from a broken arm to a successful hunt was a manifestation of spirit. We are in the midst of a coup. A godless clergy has ousted the sorcerers, rainmakers, and wyrd sisters, but it is a very recent, very local scrap. Reality used to be far more fluid. In Saint Mdard in the early eighteenth century, for example, many thousands of preciously sceptical eyewitnesses attested that they had seen miraculous healings and convulsions, during which people were impervious to torture and invincible to blows with sharp objects.[2] This kind of thing is rare today. The scientistic faction stormed the field with brilliant gadgets and weapons, and a new set of theories to dominate the mindscape. For astrologers, the flu was an influence from the stars (hence influenza). Shamans saw malignant spirits, and for vaidias it was imbalance between the chakras, but science shows us a bug, and who can argue with a bug? It is not the root of the problem. Like everything else, it is a shadow of something invisible, but it is a shadow anyone can see under the electron microscope.
With science, we live in a world of highly pervasive shadows. In a pre-scientific world, everyone can keep their local gods, their magicks and beliefs, and the world remains fractured, but science provides a truth that cant be denied, and a language in which we can all communicate. Like Christianity, which provided thousands of dispersed peoples with a book to discuss and interpret the world with, science elevates us beyond our tribal cosmologies, and brings us together. Also like Christianity, it confuses itself for the one true truth when it is only one of many, neither the most interesting, nor the best for achieving certain ends. This truth is, however, potentially universal. It is capable of embracing even the magicks it ousted, if only the Scientistic Inquisition would stop applying the brain-screws, and bishops would obey their own commandments, to look without prejudice, to experiment rather than opine, to explain as simply as possible. Science works. But magick plays as well. A mage incants, and within twelve hours he is rewarded with a bag of weed or a horrendous migraine. Sounds like a coincidence? Magick is the art of manipulating coincidence. It is also action at a distance, immediate transfer of information, hidden pathways, the memory of water; goblins pounding on the heavily stained-glass windows of the Churche of Scyense.
One big difference between magick today and in times past is that a working group can be much larger. The largest gathering in the history of humanity was a religious event, Kumbha Mela 2001, with 70 million souls avin it large in India. An estimated 2.5 billion tuned into the necromancy of Princess Dianas memorial service,[3] and she was already making appearances and healing miraculously within days of her death.[4] There is no technical obstacle to stop a group e-mail going to the entire wired world to organise a rite. We are limited by neither technology nor reality, only politics and lack of imagination. If we stopped squabbling and synchronised our wills and watches, nothing would be beyond us, not even the refreezing of icecaps. The science of magick can dig us out of the hole we have made. Magick is on its way back, new and improved, post-scientific, post-modern, post-punk, and just in the nick of time.
So what are we waiting for
the bleedin Messiah?
End of Part the First