TALES OF MAGIC 3: A Busted Guru Game
Amado visited one of the group members and we had a meeting at her flat. He was a chubby, middle aged man with a goatee beard, who didn’t waste much time before trying to get me into bed. It turned out that this was standard procedure with every male in the group. His claim about the bed thing was that it had nothing to do with being gay, but was some kind of initiation. Right…
One member told a friend about his experience of Amado and the friend got quite seriously freaked out and summoned his magical mentor to deal with the ‘sticky qlipothic’ stuff they’d skried. Mentor Mike came up to Leeds and did some astral-warrior white-light magic on the ‘qlipoth’.
I wasn’t sure how much sense the white light thing made to me; it sounded like it was half way to religion, but Mike was a personable chap with a fund of interesting magical experiences. Meeting him started a whole new direction for a couple of the members in post-Dion Fortune-style astral work. That was one of the post-Amado directions group members went in. The other was Chaos Magic…
TALES OF MAGIC 4: The LUUOS
Those of us left after the breakup of the Occult Group decided to form a University Union society. In those days, this was very easy to do. You got 50 signatures and presented them to some Union official. This took just one afternoon in the Union bar. The students in that bar would have signed a petition for a Three-Legged Donkey Rehabilitation Society. The state some of them were in, that may well have been what they thought they were signing. Now we had a choice of meeting rooms and funds for presenters. We were the LUUOS, aka the Occ Soc.
Summer-autumn of 1978 I took up magic as a daily pursuit. Through the Leeds occult supply shop The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Chris, John and I met Ray Sherwin. He was one of the early speakers at the LUUOS, and spoke of the power of sigils to get you anything you desired.
Not long after, we hosted famous witch Patricia Crowther. Turnout was higher than any we’d had so far and we managed to get use of the Leeds Uni pyramid, a beautiful semi-underground structure all decked out in green, which delighted our wiccan guest.
My interest in Chaos Magic took off at this time. I’d finally found a magical model which didn’t require religious faith and didn’t try to forget how conditioned we all are by the ingrained anti-magical scepticism of the mainstream culture.
Dave Lee can be contacted via his website Chaotopia.