Tagmagick

A New Moon Birthday Ritual

The next time your birthday falls on a new moon (preferably on a Wednesday), try this neat trick:

In front of a mirror, surrounded by things that mean the world to you, layer sheets of paper and cloth soaked or spotted with your blood, under your shorn hair, all shredded and cut with a sharpened piece of million-year-old volcanic glass, and mix in the shards of your former lives (melted silver, raven stone shards, chunks of quartz and tigers eye, obsidian and onyx and garnets…); then sprinkle on the dust and sand from a 4575 year-old necropolis, and drip with the melted ice and snow of 34 million years ago.

Take the mixture and carefully collect it, layers intact, into a receptacle, and take gather some matches and a liquid deemed sacred to a deity of your choosing (or choosing you; wine, rum, rosewater, etc…), and move to a place where you can easily make a fire.

Read to yourself our aloud a meditation on life, impermanence, loss, death, time, change, adaptation, becoming, memory, and creation. Perhaps this http://tinyletter.com/Technoccult/letters/meditation-on-32-33 will work for you. Then pour the sacred liquid into the mixture, set the whole mix into the fire place, with the receptacle in a place to catch the ashes, and light the fire. Tend it, carefully, rendering it all to ashes.

After the fire, collect the ashes and as many offerings as you need and walk to the nearest crossroads (best if it can somehow manage to be both three AND four ways, at once). Remembering what each offering means, place all of your offerings (more rum; a trick. like a turkey sausage coated in ashes, to make it smell like Flame Cooked Meat; a contemplative day; and the whole working done under the Moon’s darkest face) in the center of crossroads. Place and pour, each on each.

Thank yourself and whatever or whomever else for whatever gets done, and exit the crossroads. Walk home, wash your hands, arrange your work, and think about what you’ve done and what you’ve become.

Happy Birthday.

On Magick, Technology, Philosophy, and Pop-Culture

Those are my main areas of interest. It may not sound like a whole lot, but you’d honestly be surprised at the kind of mileage you can get out of recombining them and applying them as lenses through which to look at the world.

Hello. I’m Damien Williams, known by many of you as Wolven. Klint did a pretty fantastic job of introducing me, last time, so I’m not going to rehash any of that. What I want to do, right now, is to point you at a few places where you can get a decent sense for the kinds of plans I have for what we’re going to be doing, around here.

First, there is, of course, the Mindful Cyborgs interview I did with Klint.

Then there’s my presentation from Magick.Codes.

My Master’s Thesis.

My article “Fairytales Of Slavery: Societal Distinctions, Technoshamanism, and Nonhuman Personhood.

And this atemporal conversation between myself and M1K3y, over at the Cosmic Anthropology Podcast.

What I want to be doing here is taking the time to engage in conversations with multiple thinkers about philosophical, religious, political, and occult perspectives on our science fictional present, and posting the audio, video, or transcriptions of either of those. I want to do this with some major frequency, but that requires the time and space to do so.

Which brings me to my next point: A discussion of an overarching framework of where A Future Worth Thinking About and Technoccult are headed. “Protected: Thinking About the Worth of the Future: Logistics.”

To be frank, it’s a money conversation. As I say, there, “I know we’re usually encouraged to not discuss anything as gauche as cash, in Western Society, but since we’re somehow still using a system of psychologically transferred and collectively-agreed-upon value to determine who gets to eat food, I say fuck it. Let’s talk it out.”

So please take a look, there, then tell your friends.

The Technoccult Tumblr is here.

Twitter handles are @Wolven and @Techn0ccult

The Perfunctory Facebook Page is here.

You can sign up for the newsletter here.

And as always, the Patreon is here.

That’s enough, for now. I need to go get back to work on some more substantive posts. See you next time. And thanks.

Mindful Cyborgs: Magick & the Occult within the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams

This week:

Damien Williams back on the show. This week is more about the religious and occult aspects of the information society we currently inhabit. Fresh definitions and understandings of magick and the occult, musings on the type of future we actually want to live in, and on the practice of magick and the will.

Download and Show Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Magick & the Occult within the Internet and Corporations with Damien Williams, PT 2

For more on technology and magic, check out Damien on the “Under Its Spell: Magic, Machines, and Metaphors” panel at Theorizing the Web.

Plus, All the talks from the Haunted Machines event.

Grant Morrison is on Twitter

Grant Morrison

The unofficial Grant Morrison Twitter account has been turned over to Grant Morrison and his wife Kristan. Or at least that’s what’s been tweeted from the account. There’s no confirmation on the official Grant Morrison web page, but that site hasn’t been updated in a couple years. Arthur Magazine tweeted about the new account, so it seems legit. Let’s just hope they keep the Twitter account updated!

And via that Twitter account, there’s a new interview with Mr. Morrison up on Wired now.

Update: Bleeding Cool also reported this.

Interesting living as magic

This is an old article I wrote for the now defunct Key 23/Key 64 web site. It’s old piece of writing that I don’t stand by any more, but it does provide some background for the concepts I’ll be exploring here. The archive.org version contains the original comments, which are also worth reading.

From hypersigils to hyperstition or even Michael Moore’s claim that we’re living in fictitious times, the life as fiction meme seems stronger than ever.

Grant Morrison often talks about hypersigils, which to him seem to represent one of the highest workings of magic. In his “Pop Magic!” chapter of the Disinfo Book of Lies, he writes “The hypersigil can take the form of a poem, a story, a dance or any other extended artistic activity you wish to try.” His own famous hypersigil, the Invisibles, came in the form of a comic book serialized over six years. He’s been inconsistent about the intent and the effects of this hypersigil, but I think he sums it up when he says it “enveloped me in a shiny, global sci-fi lifestyle I was really only dreaming of when I started writing the book in 1994” (CBR interview).

In other words, it made his life more exciting. For Morrison this is one of the most important aspects of magic (though he also says “… if you’re going to be a magician at all it’s not about wanting to be scary and wearing a robe or something, what you have to do is you have to do things for people” [Disinfo interview]).

R.U. Sirius describes a rather easier method of achieving a “narrative lifestyle”:

In terms of social engineering, I think that, you know, you think of yourself as being in a story, and life will start to have the kind of dynamics that you would have if you were in a story, rather than if you were part of some dire laborious mechanism, you know… ( Better Propaganda interview)

And, actually, Morrison sort of backs this up:

I’d say to myself or whoever I was with, ‘It’ll look good in the biography.’ and then I’d go ahead and do whatever daft thing it was – like taking acid on the sacred mesa or doing the bungee-jump, getting the haircut, dancing with the stranger, talking to the crowd – whatever I was ’scared’ of mostly, or fancied doing, or never dared before, I’d try it on the basis that it would make for a more interesting read one day. (Pop Image interview)

At the other extreme, hyperstition, a confusing theory getting a thorough discussion on the Hyperstition blog, is more work than hypersigilization. Although loosely defined as “fictions that make themselves real” hyperstitions have more complex characteristics than hypersigils. Anna Greenspan elucidates this in several posts on the blog, but a good starting point is here.

As a completely lazy writer, I’ve had more luck with R.U.’s method. There was a thread on Barbelith a while back asking if your life was written and drawn by comics creators, who would do it? I determined that my life was currently being written and drawn by Peter Bagge, but that I’d like it to be written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Philip Bond, and have a soundtrack by Gold Chains. But I never did any ritual to invoke a creative change in my life. But I did eventually write a statement of intent on my blog, and it seems to have worked. Since then my life’s been a bit more exciting. Among other things I’ve traveled across Europe, taken up rock climbing, and joined this elite band of occulture thinkers.

I’m curious to hear personal experiences of hypersigilization, hyperstition creation, and fiction as life, as well as ideas for furthering the process.

Fucking Towards Freedom

Our intrepid comrades at Fleshbot report that sex magick-cum-activism-cum-cum civic service project, Votergasm, threatens to bow under the forces of sex-negative empire and Rush Limbaugh’s minions:

Rush Limbaugh called the folks at Votergasm a bunch of “depraved lunatics” on his radio broadcast this afternoon and called for his minions to take action: “Let’s shut down this site, folks.” (Sounds like an incitement to a DOS attack to us – isn’t that illegal or something?) The bumptious pill-popper also instructed listeners to flood site director Michelle Collins’ inbox with emails saying “If Kerry wins, we’ll all get screwed” – despite the fact that Votergasm is emphatically non-partisan (though pro-naked partying). So far, the site’s still up – if crawling – but if you manage to get through, now’s the perfect time to sign their pledge and help get young voters to the polls (and the bedroom) this November.

You heard it. Now, just lie back and do it for your country.

Follow the Green Dragon

First in a (belated) series of practical magick and the upcoming opportunity to dethrone George II, let us visit The Green Dragon for some inspiration, straight outta those chaotic days of good old August 2004:

Starhawk recounts:

Our friends with the dragon had offered to help us if we wanted to do a spiral dance in front of the Garden, so as we got near I began drawing the cluster together, speaking to our friends in the Rhythm Workers? Union to coordinate some drumming of a rhythm we could chant to, looking for an open space. We found it, around 33rd St. We dropped back behind the dragon, because the sound system inside it was too loud for our ears. The police are rumored to have a sound weapon that will disperse crowds with painful levels of noise, but this was friendly fire that drove us back. Where the crowd thinned just slightly, we grabbed the opportunity, formed our circle and began to spiral in, chanting,

No army can hold back a thought, No fence can chain the sea, The earth cannot be sold or bought, All life shall be free.

The spiral stopped the already slow march, and I felt guilty about that, but the march had been stopping anyway for hours and we felt another five minutes or so wouldn’t kill anyone. Then some energy roared through me like a freight train, and I stopped feeling anything else. Some of it was horrible, nauseating energy that needed to be released and cleansed. Some of it was powerful, earth energy, a kind of raw life force that pulsed and thundered and rose up into a great, focused cone of power. Someone told me to look behind, and in the relatively empty space between us and the line of cops at 34th St., the dragon was burning.

The flames rose up and in that moment, it seemed a perfect icon of our magic, a powerful spell, although I can?t rationally explain why. Later Delight said the dragon is luck and the Republicans? luck was burning. Of course, it had tactical repercussions…

(… continue with her entire account of witchjamming the RNC.)

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