Practical Information Magic

In the comments to my last post, Ater asks how I would go about doing practical information magic.  What, in other words, makes it different from energy work.  Ater writes:

What I’m really interested in is how one would go about doing direct/mental magic in the Information model? Why do you consider this model more useful than the others? For example, if I wanted a new camera I would sit down, relax and raise energy. I’d form this energy into a ball between my hands and I would visualize the camera I wanted inside the ball and so on. Then I would just tell the energy ball (or thoughtform) to go on its merry way and get me that camera. That’s pretty simple and straightforward. How would you go about casting this spell using the Info model?

The glib answer to your question is, you just did.   What did you imagine you were doing when you “told” the ball to do something?

The longer answer is, you have a point: my first book is not so specific about how the information model works out in practicalities.  My second book is better at that.

To see how it works, imagine that your spell failed.  You didn’t get the camera you wanted?  From an energy model perspective, the failure may have been in not raising “enough energy.”  That’s where you’d be inclined to look, if you were trained in the energy model.

From the information model perspective, you’d be more inclined to look at how you conveyed the desire.  Were you clear?  Was the channel clear?

The energy model cannot explain why we must be in a certain state of consciousness, or why we must use symbols.  But the information model can.  The state of consciousness is our channel of communication; it must be clear.  The symbols are our language; they must be shared.  Moreover, the Communicant is very good at reading us: if we don’t fully and completely want what we’re asking for, we’re less likely to get it.  None of that can be explained with the energy model.

Another place the energy model totally falls down is explaining divination.  The closest people come is talk about cards “absorbing energy” and “vibrating,” all of which strikes me as rather contrived when the obvious nature of the cards is that they’re symbols interacting in a symbol system to communicate information (well, more accurately, meaning — but that’s my next book).

The symbol of energy is a fine and dandy one.  If I wanted a camera, I’d probably do something rather similar to what you did.  But I’d think of it very, very differently.  The important bits would not be the ball of energy for me, but the symbol I used to describe the camera and my actual, real need or desire for the camera.  And if the spell didn’t work, I’d treat it as a failure in communication, not as a failure in mechanics.  (And if the spell did work, I’d say “thank you,” as one does when someone gives you something you want)

I don’t want to replace energy work or argue that those who use it are somehow not doing real magic.  I just want to point out that the information model shifts our focus to other areas of our work that we too often ignore, and it includes the energy paradigm as well.

You also mentioned that “everything is a symbol” is pretty obvious to you.  After all, you said, Aphrodite is clearly a symbol of love.  But the point I’m making is, you’re a symbol too.  Not just gods, but people, life situations, cars, music, and socks — all are symbols.  They’re all information we understand by placing into symbolic frameworks of meaning, and they all can be affected by a greater or lesser degree by magic therefore.  I don’t deny the existence of an external world: but we experience it only through symbols.  For all intents and purposes, our experience of reality is one of symbol.

I hope that clarified.  My second book goes into a bit more depth, I think, on the symbolic nature of things and stuff.  And I’m really glad that you read my book and disagreed with me.  One of my main goals is to get people talking and thinking critically about magic, not just rehashing the same old ideas.

Getting the Message

So last night I did a ritual divination to determine how I’m doing, you know, like Ed Koch but with spirits.  I invoked the HGA, then pulled out a major arcana card for each of the four worlds.  For Assiah, I got The Moon — which isn’t too terrible.  Stumbling along the path, not sure what the destination is, and potentially self-deceptive.  For Yetzirah, I got — The Moon.  Okay then.  For Briah, though, I got The Devil.  So there’s some block in the world of forms, some concept or notion chaining me down.  For Atziluth, I got Temperance, which seems pretty good, considering it’s samekh and so on, yadda yadda.

Then I went to bed and dreamed that I was lecturing my class on the City of Pyramids.  When I came home, I opened up my tool drawer and took out my wand, which split lengthwise into two pieces, both of which were soft and kind of rotten.

So, yeah.  Something’s wrong.

An Actual Survival of Witchcraft

Most “survivals of ancient Witchcraft” are nonsense.  But this looks like evidence for a real one.

Over the centuries, many in the British Isles have appealed to witches in times of need–to cure a toothache, concoct a love potion, or curse a neighbor. Witchcraft, the rituals of a number of pagan belief systems, was thought to offer control of the world through rites and incantations. Common as it has been over the past several centuries, the practice is secretive and there are few written records. It tends to be passed down through families and never revealed to outsiders. But archaeologist Jacqui Wood has unearthed evidence of more than 40 witchy rituals beneath her own front yard, bringing to light an unknown branch of witchcraft possibly still practiced today.

Grimoire for sale

Looks like everyone is blogging on this already, but I’d be remiss not to include it. A 400 year old handwritten grimoire is up for auction at Sotheby’s, projected to go for 12,000 pounds which comes to a hair over $24,000. Everyone is agog about a spell involving a frog and some ants — and the weird thing is I know this spell. I remember it. I don’t remember where I read it, but somewhere, in some book or another, I remember a spell involving a toad, an anthill, and looking through the bones of the toad’s head for a special bone or stone. But I’m pretty sure it was a toad, I don’t remember if it was a love spell, and the floating against the current thing I don’t recall either. Maybe there’s a whole genre of these.

Symbolically, the frog to these people would be a symbol of generation from nothing, since they didn’t really understand tadpoles. It’d also be a symbol of water giving forth life. The tongue might give them some notion of potency or constancy, and the bone flowing against the current ties it all back to water again. The ants are easy — it’s a simple way to deflesh an animal without introducing fire. It also invokes the chthonic powers.

Dude, I so want this book.

Natural Semantic Primitives

I find this theory that all meaning can be broken down into 61 semantic primitives — atoms of thought, if you will — intriguing.

I’m not sure this theory is about language, so much as it is about thought, however.  Could it be that we conceive of only sixty-one main ideas?

More interestingly, it’s about culture — it seems a clever tool for unpacking meaning, and whether these 61 words are the atoms of thought or not, it’s a handy algebric notation for trying to undertand a complex concept.

I’m tempted to try my hand at it.  Keeping in mind, of course, that I haven’t really read much of the theory in any formal sense, just surfed the page and glanced at a few articles at this point, so I’m probably doing it wrong.

Magic=

I want something to happen.

I do something like this thing.
This thing happened because I did something.

But something’s wrong there, I think.  Because this script could work for lots of things.  I mean, it could work for writing a letter.

I want to say something.

I cannot say something.

I do something like saying something.

Or it could work for superstition.  Or any number of other ideas.  What is it about magic that makes it not superstition and not writing a letter or acting in a play or doing some other symbolic action?

And of course each paradigm of magic would write a different script.  For example, the spirit paradigm:

I want something.

I say words to something/ something does not have a body/ something does not live/ something thinks.

Something makes something happen.

Or the energy paradigm:

I want something

I move something/ something often does something/ something does not live/ something does not think/ someone cannot touch something/ something is inside all things/ because of this, things happen.

This something makes something happen.

I’m sure I’m doing this wrong, but it is sort of revealing.  After all, the closest I can come to the energy paradigm makes me wonder if this isn’t just the same as the spirit paradigm.  I wonder if we boil down all paradigms to primitive semantic units, we might not find that they’re all the same.

I might have to pick up her books.

logofernando

logofernando

An exploration of a rather more traditional Qabalah than most people are used to. Some of this may be revolutionary; I haven’t decided yet. There does seem to be a strain of one-true-way-ism, though, in the undertow. But he’s right: this arrangement does appear more logical.

How Magic is Like Literature

W. H. Auden, I think it was, said “Poetry, after all, makes nothing happen.” Except, of course, that it does. Hemingway’s fiction shaped how a century saw masculinity and femininity, power and powerlessness, choice and weakness. People made decisions, changed their lives, and acted differently because of Hemingway, but in no way that could be quantified or predicted. Similarly, when I do a spell for — let’s say — money, I am causing change in the world, but in no way that I can predict. I only know that the outcome is likely to be that I’ll get money from an unexpected source. I don’t know how or why.

Obviously, in the case of literature, the chain of cause and effect is clear from retrospect, or at least, clear-ish.  The chain of cause and effect in magic is less clear.  Maybe I do a spell, and it makes spirits do something that causes me to get money.  Or maybe I do a spell, and it makes some sort of magical energy move and do something.  It’s always that chewy nougat center that our magical theories are trying to fill.

Ahh, relief; and DuQuette

I got a brace for my wrist, and it says on the box that I can type with it on, which is a partial truth. There’s still occasionally twinges when I reach for the t or the g, and q and shift are a bit scary, but I’ll live. Beats hunting and pecking, to which I was reduced these last two days.

Anyway, Sunday I went to see Lon Milo DuQuette speak in Des Plaines (Des Plaines is a suburb of Chicago, and much to the pain of those of us who know some French, it’s pronounced “dez plainez”). DuQuette spoke on the Qabalah, the Goetia, and Enochian. I found it stimulating and interesting, especially the talk on the Goetia.

I’ve always, as you know if you read my books, felt that browbeating spirits is bad form. But DuQuette regards it as a bit of a sine qua non. So I asked him about it, and he explained that the Goetic demons, at least, are creatures of nefesh (the animal soul) and so you need to “handshake” with them at first with the strong emotions of the nefesh before rising up and using the ruakh (the intellect) to communicate with them. This progression, he explained, also emulates the progression from their “fallen” state to their redeemed status. I found a lot to think about in his discussion. I’m not sure that anger and blame are necessarily the only ways to accomplish that nefesh connection, but I see his point.

He also said something that got me thinking a lot. He said when you evoke a goetic demon for, say, love, you’re saying “I’m not the kind of person love happens to. Make me that kind of person.” So, he says, you’re evoking an adventure designed to turn you into a different kind of person, one to whom love happens. It’s an interesting, if rather potentially solipsistic, idea.

We were rushed for the Enochian lecture because all the toilets in the building backed up (Chicago plumbing, oi). We did a group Enochian working; I hate working in groups of strangers. For me, magic is something a bit more intimate than sex. So mostly I sat there with a faint embarrassed stomach ache while everyone else chanted; I hope no one noticed that I was a party-pooper. My friend Eric who went with me got rather into the whole thing, though.

I think DuQuette’s forthcoming book on Enochian might be a worthy purchase. I intend to pick it up when I see it.

Where’d Bardon get his elemental breathing?

If you’ve read Bardon’s Initiation into Hermetics, you know two things:

1. Translating from the Czech into the German and then into English does not make clear or elegant prose.

and

2. Central to his system is a “pore breathing” method of bringing the elements into one’s body and consciousness.

If you’ve read Donald Michael Kraig’s Modern Magick, you probably also remember that pore breathing technique. But Kraig makes less of it than Bardon.

The thing is, once I got past Bardon’s horrid prose (which took me a long time to do — not his fault!), I recognize the utility of his method. Using the breath to absorb, through visualization (visual and tactile), elemental essences is a remarkably handy tool. It is more versatile than the Middle Pillar (which has other uses, though, as well) and one doesn’t have to be limited to elements. I’ve absorbed planetary essences, even spirit names, by visualizing them as colored lights or mists. But I wonder where he got this method from?

Could Bardon have read some Taoist books, and absorbed the idea of “colored mists” from Taoist magic?  I don’t know — I know the approximate dates that Taoist materials made their way into English (believe it or not, it was an important point in my dissertation), but I don’t know when they might have arrived in German or Czech.  Jan Fries details, as well as he can (it’s not easy, since translations of the relevant texts are few and far between even now) several such methods that resemble Bardon’s method. Or did Bardon get it, as might be more likely, from Hindu “Pranic” breathing? Either way, Bardon makes it something uniquely his own, and offered it to the Western Mystery Tradition. As techniques go, it’s one I like.

Windhorse

There’s an interesting eastern model of magic, popular in Buddho-shamanic syncretic religions. Windhorse is a little bit like mana, but not quite. It’s based on positive karma, and you charge it like a battery by doing good things. It’s not like “energy” in the New Age sense; more like “authority.” There are prayers and rituals to increase Windhorse, but you can also increase it by doing good deeds, or by acts of austerity. The idea appeals to me.

In my own speculations, it’s a feeling of lightness and power that centers in the solar plexus. I often feel it spike after magic, or after work (keeping in mind that I very much enjoy my job and feel as if I’m doing some good). It can also be transferred to another, it seems, and doing so actually increases it. That would imply that one could become a big burning ball of Windhorse, giving it to all and sundry. But some things kill Windhorse.

For me, negative speech saps my Windhorse, as does fear. Routine seems to take a lot out of me, as does dirt (which, since I’m not the neatest person in the world, says something). Weirdly, extended isolation also hurts my Windhorse — weird, because I’m a tested introvert and isolation is one means used by shamans to increase Windhorse.