Enhancing Your Portfolio: Facts and Fictions

A magician shares this with entrepreneurs: see the world and change the world. And just like an entrepreneur, if your endeavours are not profitable you are in the shit.

Your portfolio of investments, comprised of actions and beliefs, should serve to better you. Profit you. Develop you. Enhance your life. Improve your experience. Allow you to do more. You get the idea. Investments which do not perform should be cut.

Why the business talk? Because the world provides performance feedback: profit, loss, expense; capacity, resistance, and you will gain from using it. If your actions are not delivering desired results, change them. You owe no loyalty to weak investments and weak returns on those investments. Feedback can be grounded in what is true regardless of your opinion of it.

Example: if your eating habit neglects certain key acquisitions required for high level performance, hampering your efforts in other spheres of life, then your eating habit needs to change. Say you eat raw greens exclusively. You’re getting vitamins and minerals but no macros. Your body shrivels up. This makes you sad. Literally. And weak. Literally. You change your eating habit. You add in macros. You feel happy. You grow strong. Your portfolio has improved. Your life has improved.

However, a purely factual approach is not enough. We seem to need the addition of personal meaning. This is expressed in the artworks we create, the quests we undertake, the stories we tell with our rituals of symbolic actions, and with the narratives of our lives.

Best practice demands both facts and fictions. Without our fictions we risk living in a meaningless universe. Without facts we live in fantasy, with no anchor to the real, and suffer the consequences for it.

Reality does not care about our superstitions. Those that value falsely pay the cost and those that value truthfully reap the reward. It is incumbent then upon the magician to familiarise oneself with and engage with and put into practice both the active acquisition of new facts upon which to base decisions and the active acquisition of new and greater degrees of skill through which to better perform one’s will.

(Frater Tarod, from Chaos Streams 01)

All the Fun of the Fair

Or, how a group of magicians went to the fairground to deeper understand the nature of Illusion and to become its masters. A Bank Holiday Special for you.

The fairground is a shabby run-down permanent site left behind in the post-industrial economic catastrophe that is South Wales. The beach, though, is fabulous, and in the distance the ebb tide glitters in the grilling noonday Bank Holiday sun. August being truly … well, august.

We have an element of Metamorphosis in the choice of venue: to varying degrees we all detest the fairground and most haven’t been to one in decades. But today we shall share the illusion.

The six of us gather at the gates and ask the Opener of the Way to aid us in our intent to understand and master Illusion. The O.O.T.W. is of course Papa Legba. So we circle and chant his name and call upon him as I sign simple versions of his vévé onto the ground in our midst. At some point we agree that Papa has joined the party.

We head in to the carousel for the Banishing Rite. We climb aboard our Magic Roundabout, spreading ourselves around the rim of the circle of horses. As the merry-go-round starts off, each begins the Gnostic Pentagram Ritual, howling out the vowels against the tacky pop music of the ride and smearing pentagrams across the revolving landscape. We’re getting some funny looks, but what can anyone do to a moving carousel? I just about finish in time. The fairground is Banished. Looks it too.

In high spirits we head to the rollercoaster, called the Mighty Mouse. Now who is it that has a Mouse as His vehicle? Yes, Jai Ganesha! We get seated, ready to use the adrenaline of the ride to charge our chanted Ganesha mantra and visualization of the god as we hand him an obstacle we’d like removed from our lives. Soror Brigantia is doubling down on the Metamorphosis here, as she experiences serious vertigo.

The ride begins gently enough, hauling us to the top. Naturally on beginning a journey, I’m Aum Gam Ganapataye namaha, visualization up. Then at the top it turns seriously white-knuckle, with hugely abrupt quarter turns throwing us about the carriages. At every turn I feel like we’re going to fly off the rails and afterwards I’m somewhat disbelieving that we didn’t. The illusion of being in danger when we’re actually being tightly controlled. Lesson One of the day.

I’m keeping the mantra and visualization going, gods know how. That obstacle is fucked, I can tell you. One last violent pirouette and the carriage comes to a halt. With a final salutation we crawl out. Soror Brigantia has trouble walking and is shaking slightly, but she comes away with a lesson: she confirms that sticking to your mantra helps your concentration to the extent of taking down a panic attack.

The Un-Fair, Part One: Will The Penny Drop?

We take a break from things that move, and head for the arcade games. Our eyes were caught by the Penny Drop machine, all silvery glitter, coins and ’50’s jazz artwork. It’s a coin push: drop a coin in amongst the coins inside and see if the moving slides will shunt some coins over the Tipping Point and back to you. The goal here is to experience the difference between the promise of prizes and the reality of merely feeding your money into The Machine.

The decoration may not have been updated since the fifties but the machinery has. It’s now a Tenpence Drop. Inflation, eh? A handful of coins is gone in moments. I didn’t even win any to feed back into The Machine. Says it all, doesn’t it?

Just to nail it in though I have a go on the Claw Grab, where the claw is obviously too weak to grip the prizes to drop them down the chute to you. Penny has dropped: The Machine is Un-Fair.

The Ghost Train. We’re spooky magicians, right? This should be right up our dark alley. We prepare to salute Papa Ghede on the Ghost Train, but it’s Odin who’s running the ride. A man with indeterminate North-or-East European accent asking us if we’re ready.

“Yes!”

“Are you sure?”

Hail Odin.

Soror Brigantia assures me that the ride has not changed AT ALL since she visited it as a child. We’re chanting Papa Ghede’s name loudly enough to be heard outside, and he’s inside my head taking the piss out of it all the way through. We come back out louder than we went in, and Odin looks at us as if we’re mad.

Now for the Waltzer. We have each identified an Intention, a thing we’d like to see in our world. We’re going to do the Vortex Rite in each of the two cars we occupy. A-B-C: we use the adrenaline of the ride to open the Vortex, project our Intention through it and close. Couldn’t be simpler.

Despite the enthusiastic attention of the kid spinning the cars, I complete satisfactorily, but it was a real test of concentration. Then I get out to see that one of our number in the next car is having a full-on panic attack and is shaking as though having a fit. This was clearly a Metamorphosis too far for her. The kid had gone white and disappeared. We get our sister away from the Waltzer and a fairground staff member arrives.

“Do you need a paramedic?”

No, but do you have an exorcist on standby? Oh wait, that’s me. So I take our sister through a grounding to shed the excess energy and then a fairly lousy cup of brown. She’s made of quite stern stuff and recovers quickly. Meanwhile …

The Un-Fair, Part Two: Gaming the Sideshows.

The others take on some more rigged games, such as the get-the-rubber-ball-in-the-bucket where the ball is far too bouncy to stay in. Soror Brigantia has found a throwing things game where you get a big prize if you win but a little prize if you fail. She’s gaming The System by actually gunning for the little prize. The little prizes they all come back with are small cuddly toys which are already showing signs of magical sentience. Puppet magic.

Going to the Fun House with Eris was a disappointment, with no amusing mirrors and just a load of minor obstacles, some of which were out of order. One which was working was the Hamster Wheel, unsurprisingly. Another Lesson there. I took great pleasure in stepping smoothly off the Hamster Wheel. Non serviam. Hail Eris!

It’s been unexpectedly tiring, and the others step out of our next ride. It’s basically cars spinning across a flat trajectory, so we call it the Spider, and our objective is to visualize our chosen future and weave a web of Wyrd during the ride, charged, as usual, with the energy raised by the ride. It’s just me and Soror Brigantia bawling out incantations of the future we shall see unfold.

Spirits are high again as we all set off for the beach, half a dozen mostly middle-aged people laughing and dancing, and the younger fairgoers point and stare. But we’re on a mission.

Imagine a Star of Chaos superimposed on a map of Wales. Soror Brigantia has a long term project of burying an Arrow of the Star of Chaos at each of the extremities, and where we are is tolerably near the southernmost, Yellow Arrow point. We’ll light and bury a pointy yellow candle on the beach.

It’s a big beach. we march down it, looking for a significant spot, and we find this:

Pentagram marks the spot. We surround it, dig, light candle, and chant again to the Opener of the Way, for Papa Legba to open the crossroads of magic in Wales and to close our afternoon’s work. And we finish with the IAO banishing.

And so it is done.

Tales of Magic by Dave Lee (4th instalment)

Tales of Magic 7: The SA Coffee mornings

It was there I met Ray Sherwin and later Pete Carroll. Other luminaries include the remarkable Richard Bartle-Birtelli, a gentleman who illustrated that magicians didn’t have to be in their 20s. This was a man who’d survived the 2^nd World War and ended up living in Dewsbury in West Yorkshire and teaching art. At that time I’d never met a magician who had survived so long and was still doing magic. He came and gave a talk at the LUUOS.

Other interesting characters included a pair of young magicians from Batley. One of them told us how he’d grown out of armed robbery into Qabalistic magic, and his friend described meditations in which he saw ‘visions’ of his motorbike. We started calling them the Batley Visionary Society.

In October 1978 I started keeping a magical diary. One of my first entries described my consecration of a robe I’d made. I took the first bus to Ilkley and walked up onto the moor, along a ravine called Spicey Gill and washed the robe in a stream at first light. I was rewarded with the sight of a great big dragonfly hovering over the stream as I finished, its wings iridescing in the morning light.

Tales of Magic 8: Lucidity

Starting keeping a magical diary pushed my identity firmly into ‘magician’ mode. Things started happening. In November I met a new lover who turned my life upside down. She was a natural magician, resistant to ‘book-learning’, but with astonishingly accurate clairvoyance and an intuitive grasp of energy-magic. For some miracles I experienced with her, check out Bright From the Well and Life Force.

At this time I took on a magical idea which is popular with magical beginners: the Astral Battle. These usually occurred on the edge of sleep, and were often terrifying, but with a triumphant quality. That triumph emerged from the radical freedom of dream lucidity; the conflict had pushed me to overcome the division between waking and sleeping. Sometimes I woke up knowing I’d just uttered some magical words to overcome my assailant.

I was determined to develop this dream-lucidity, initially because I wanted out-of-body experiences. Finally, I got one. Here’s the diary entry:

“Before going to bed, smoked a little hash. Then did some cycles of pranayama. This felt very intense.

For the first time ever, I was able to keep a watch on my going to sleep, and I exteriorised! I was suddenly right out of the house, floating over the street outside, looking downwards. The shock was so great I returned to my body.

I let myself fall asleep with that watchfulness again… and managed it once more: a moment when I was hovering in the bedroom.”

The book mentioned above, Bright From the Well, is available from Mandrake Press.

Life Force is available here.

Tales of Magic by Dave Lee (2nd instalment)

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.

In the Circle with Heroes of Practice

“Personally I’m privileged to be on excellent terms with folk from many traditions; druids, Setians, native shamans, Initiates of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasons, radical Goddess feminists and others. I’ve met many fabulous people in the magical culture I inhabit, and I’ve found a very high density of fabulousness within the IOT.

When I stand in a circle with these people and look around at my Brothers, Sisters and Sators I am amazed. It’s like being in a graphic novel. Here are these heroes of practice, each one with amazing abilities. We are an assembly of archetypal forces. In part this is a consequence of my relationship, over many years, with these other magicians and I’m sure members of many other esoteric groups get a similar buzz at their gatherings. For me the people of the IOT provide a wonderful community of research, experiment, morphing ‘tradition’, fellowship, support and of course laughter.

While a few people stay with the process for many years there are many, many more who come into the IOT, benefit from that space, and who move on to pastures new. There are many occultists out there who have been members of the IOT and have encountered a new style or approach in that setting, and then go on to pursue that in more depth outside of the Pact setting. There are some who return years later to the IOT circle, bringing with them the experiences they have gained. The Pact acts as an experimental space, ideal for people who have come to some kind of spiritual and/or personal crossroads, and for many it is pivotal in their journey of Illumination.”

(Julian Vayne, Chaos Streams 01, from the Introduction)

Get the book here

The Drunken Prophet

Reading around voodoo I discovered Exu & the Quimbanda of Night and Fire by Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold (Scarlet Imprint). One working, the ritual of the drunken prophet (pp. 123-124 in the hardback edition), caught my attention.

The ritual is an oracular work that calls for lighting a candle to the spirit you wish to work with then going to a “spit and sawdust” pub, buying drinks for the person you have identified as the prophet of your spirit and putting your question to them.

As Quimbanda was not calling me I decided to work the oracle with a deity that I already have a relationship with. As a keen home brewer of wines, mead and beer, every time I make a batch various rituals are performed and the task dedicated to Dionysus, famous for his links to fermented brews. Moreover, one of his abilities is as an oracle,

So, after a ritual bath with frankincense, orange and patchouli oils I donned only the best party clothes for such a Great God as this and spoke the following words:

Hail Dionysus God of the harvest, the dual formed god of two mothers

God of life, God of death spanning the Heavens and the Underworld

Bull formed, two horned synthesis of opposites

The roaring one, the silent one, within extreme states of being

God of pandemonium and ecstatic trance

The dramatic one master of the mysteries of comedy and tragedy

God of prophesy and initiation

who travels throughout all realms of being

God of many faces who travels to all places, wanderer

God of the Starry Light

The god who holds the bees sacred

God of honey, god of wine, god of Ivy, myrtle, fennel, figs and pine

God of all natural things

Bull headed lion snake

the goat is your greatest enemy and your greatest friend.

Ivy bearer god of visions

God of the wilds god of the hunt

Great God of the nocturnal Sun, the cool one who carries flames of fire

Shape shifter, multi-dimensional one lord of necromancy

of many incarnations

The God who is the most and the least manifest.

Dionysus who was born in the cave of the leather sack

Grower of vines

The fierce one who is the source of joy to mortals

God of orgasmic rites who inspires creativity and ecstatic madness

Father of wine and mead lover of Ariadne, son of Zeus

Torch bearer, light bringing star of mysteries

God of the Earth friend of Demeter

Underworld guide

who resides in the highest mountains and in the deepest caves

Water God that dwells in the oceans

The spirit of the universe

giving shape and form to all manifest existence

Fire breather, lover of man, lover of woman

The masculine feminine one lord of the thunderbolt axe

God of fermentation and ageing, Beloved of maenads and satyrs

Lord of the goat song, who hydrates the Earth

God of transition and liberation

The serpent with a thousand heads

who eats raw meat and who is vegetarian

The womanly manly god of orgia

The furious inspirer of erotic ecstasy

Blesser of unions who rejoices at the rise of Sirius

Lover of torch light processions

He who was boiled in a cooking pot who bursts forth in a miraculous emergence of wine

God of creation, God of Destruction. God of life God of death

Hail Dionysus.

Evocation of Dionysus (video has some strobe effects)

I asked Dionysus to send me some advice for the following year, then went out and partied. And what a party it was. Some of the friends accompanying me were magicians and I think they knew that I was up to something (mostly because I’m usually up to something).

Most of my life in order to “get on” and do well I’ve needed to hide parts of myself that I considered a bit too hot to handle in certain situations. The advice from my prophet was that there was no longer any need to hide my weirdness. This was no longer serving me and that I would “get on” better if I allowed my creativity to flow.

Hail Dionysus and may your cup of Awen always flow.

Soror Brigantia

Evocation of Dionysus (without strobe effects)

Octoshaman

Purpose: to invoke each of the eight powers of magic and obtain means of invoking them more easily in future.

Perform the instructions quite briskly, before the mind has time to really fuck up the feelings with internal dialogue about the feelings.

Pick a colour of magic. Brainstorm words or phrases that express it best for you. Write them. Cross out the ones that on reflection don’t fit.

Immediately come up with a sound that expresses this power of magic for you, eg you might find ‘Mmmmmmmmm!’ expresses Blue magic best for you. Try a few sounds, however likely it seems that the one you first thought of would fit best. Note the sound or word or phrase, also its characteristic tone of voice, eg. a self-satisfied humm as opposed to a strangulated grunt. Does a particular pitch, drumbeat or music express this colour of magic for you?

Repeat, putting yourself in what seems the most fitting posture. You may even find yourself moving rather than just standing or sitting. Note it down so that you could assume the posture or movement again.

Repeat the above, noticing any peculiar body sensations. A tingling? A warmth? Something else? Where? What happens to it? What happens when you loop it? Note it down.

Immediately do all this again, noting if any pictures come to mind. In our example does the colour blue come to mind? What shade and hue? How does surrounding yourself with it affect the feeling of the Blue power? Would you prefer to visualise another colour altogether? Then do it. Note it.

Put it all together. Get into the posture, vizualise. Make the sound, say or think the words and phrases, loop the feeling. Intensify it, make it all happen faster and more powerfully. Realise that you can do this at any time, just by doing the ‘putting it all together’ stage.

Banish.

Next colour of magic …

(the Kite)

The Chaos of the Normal

One of the continuing effects of Chaos Magic on magical culture is to highlight the ubiquity of magical thinking. Three books from recent years illustrate this.

Aaron Daniels in Imaginal Reality (review HERE) shows the reader how we are all doing magic, all the time, weaving spells which imprison us in fragile castles of resistance to life’s realities. Magic is actually familiar to everyone – virtually all our thoughts are magical attempts to defend our awareness against the scary fringes of human experience. Those who call themselves magicians are simply those who are attempting to undo those dismal spells.

Stepping into the wider picture, Gordon White’s Chaos Protocols takes the reader on a magical journey through the horrors of the modern world and shows how magic is being done to us all the time, and that the only way through the reality-ripoff is to be aware of that, and do your own magic.

So how widespread is magical thinking? Psychiatrists label it as a symptom of insanity, but Lionel Snell’s new book My Years of Magical Thinking (review HERE) resumes his theme of the four basic ways we apprehend the world, the other three being Religion, Art and Science. This model reveals how commonplace magical thinking is in everyday life.

We are all magicians, whether we like it or not. With this awareness, we have realised Spare’s phrase ‘the chaos of the normal’, and Chaos Magic has come of age.

(Dave Lee)

Welcome to the IOT BIS blog.

So here is the new blog of the British Isles Section of the Pact. But in case you were asking ‘What is the Pact?’ then let’s explain: the Pact is a collection of free individuals who agree to act together in each others’ interests in an organization for facilitating Chaos Magic in groups.

That’s it.

Yes, we all work solo (as far as anyone can tell), but at least sometimes we get together to work together because it works when we do that, and as chaos magicians, we like stuff that works. And no, we’re not saying you have to be in the IOT to do this. Most of us do lots of stuff that you don’t have to be in the IOT to do, as well as what we do together. So, hope that’s sorted out.

Anyway, magic is awesome, magicians are awesome, and the blog is here to share some of the Pact awesome with the wider internet. No secrets will be revealed (magic works — what’s the bloody secret?), no IOT laundry will be aired (wash your own smeggy underrobes), but members will contribute little nuggets of magical gold mined with their own work-calloused, magic-singed hands. So watch this space. Enjoy.