By Dave Lee
I’ve been using the IAO formula for about 40 years now, and in the last few years I find I’ve learned some new things about using it. If you’ve spent any time in chaos magic groups over the last few decades you’ll probably have used the IAO Banishing as a punctuation in your magical life – ‘here’s where the special stuff starts’. It’s favoured because of its simplicity, just three gestures, sounds and visualizations. So that we’re all on the same page, here’s how it’s usually done, at least in the chaos magic world. All the sounds are vibrated for one breath-length.
- Stand with your arms by your side. Raise your arms straight up and inhale. Visualize a column that joins the sky to the earth and runs through you. Vibrate I (the sound EEEEE)
- Lower your arms so they are horizontal, pointing to the sides. Visualize reaching out to the world at either side. Vibrate the sound AAAAA.
- Lower you arms and bring your hands together in front of your groin or lower belly, so that your fingers form a downward-pointing triangle or a circle. Visualize a circle or sphere which encloses you. Vibrate the sound Oh.
I first read about the IAO formula in Crowley’s Magick, where he analyses it (at length, of course!) In brief, he presents it as a formula of death and resurrection, the formula of the Osirian Aeon: ‘I’ is Isis, our unmodified nature; ‘A’ is Apophis or Apep, the destroyer; ‘O’ is Osiris, the reborn mummy-god arising from the underworld.
This formulation is useful; it is slightly more explicit than the Baphomet formula, Solve et Coagula, which is perhaps the simplest version of this universal principle of transformation. We start off in some state, then we find ourselves disrupted, our mundane selfhood broken down, dissolved. Then selfhood is reborn, reformed from chaos. This formula is central to psychedelic adventuring and healing. IAO expands on this by adding the Isis ‘I’ at the beginning, so that we get ‘I’ as our naive original state, ‘A’ as solve and ‘O’ as coagula.
At first I started using IAO because it had become the IOT’s default ‘quick banishing’, something we use when we don’t need a full Gnostic Pentagram / Gnostic Chaosphere banishing. It was during the pandemic lockdowns, when the IOT were developed new protocols for working group magic online, that IAO took on new meanings for me.
We decided that we needed to emphasize our connectedness as a group when we were in a virtual temple, so we modified the meaning of the ‘A’ gesture in IAO. We interpreted it as reaching out to all your co-workers, the members of the group you can see on the screen in their little Zoom boxes, but who are not in the same room as you.
This little tweak had quite a profound effect, and deepened our sense of being together across the miles of a Zoom call. This effect set me to thinking what it was I was doing with each of the three gestures. These are the kinds of thoughts I got for each of them.
I – we are cosmic beings, we can see ourselves as a polarity between sky and earth, ‘the perilous bridge between nature and spirit,’ as Hermann Hesse wrote.
A – I reach out my arms and embrace the world. I reach out to all the others in my circle. I embrace too all that hurts and destroys me, and therefore allows for transformation.
O – Every moment, I make a unique synthesis of those principles. I don’t know exactly what that will entail; the ‘O’ is an open mouth, a gesture of surprise.