(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 1)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 2)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 3)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 4)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 5)
Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms
Sigils, servitors and god-forms
are three magickal techniques that chaos magicians use to
actualize magickal intentions. Sigils are magickal spells
developed and activated to achieve a specific, fairly well
defined and often limited end. Servitors are entities created
by a magician and charged with certain functions. Godforms
are complex belief structures, often held by a number of people,
with which a magician interacts in order to actualize fairly
broad magickal intentions. These three techniques are not
quite as distinct as these definitions would suggest, they
tend to blur into one another. The purpose of this essay is
to explain these magickal tools, indicate their ppropriateness
for different types of magickal intentions, and show how these
tools relate to the general theories of chaos magick and of
Dzog Chen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism.
Part One: Sigils
1. A Universe neither of Man
nor God
The use of the techniques
of the chaos magician presupposes a certain stance, or attitude,
towards magick that is relatively new in the history of the
occult. This stance may, for lack of a better word, be described
as postmodern, since it is neither traditional nor modern.
The differences between these three approaches to magick -
traditional, modern or postmodern can be elucidated as three
conceptions of the nature of the universe. The traditional
approach is based in Judeo-Christian metaphysics and views
the universe as anthropomorphic, in the image of the ChristianGod,
or less rarely, some other anthropomorphic form. The traditional
magician believes that the universe is understandable by human
consciousness because human beings are made in the image of
God. The modern view is essentially a reaction to this and
humanist in the extreme. Here the universe may be perceived
as Newtonian, as a machine that is ultimately understandable
by human consciousness, although humans may have to evolve
into a more powerful form to be able to do this. The postmodern
view of the chaoist denies that the universe can ever be understood
by the human mind. Influenced by modern physics, particularly
quantum mechanics and chaos theory, the chaos magician tends
to accept the universe as a series of phenomena that have
little to do with human beings. In other words traditional
magick can be said to be God centered, modern magick to be
human centered while postmodern magick eschews the very idea
of a center. A brief review of traditional and modern approaches
to ceremonial magick may help to illuminate the postmodern
stance of the freestyle chaoist.
Ceremonial magicians use ritual
magick to create effects in themselves or in the universe
that they do not feel they can as efficiently bring about
through normal means. All magicians agree that magick can
cause change, but few would argue that the change is inevitable,
completely predictable, or fully knowable by the magician.
All magicians, to a greater or lesser extent, are engaged
in an ongoing dynamic in which the issues of personal desire,
personal control and personal belief are thrust against the
strictures of the universal consensual belief structure, the
concept of will as a universal force, and the ideas of fate,
predestination, and karma. At the core of this confrontation
is the question of the nature of the universe. The question
is: is the universe human centered, designed, created and
maintained by a god force, or is it, as modern science seems
to indicate, just there?
Until recently, magicians
have tended to distinguish amongst themselves by hue, and
the colors of the magician (white, gray or black) refer precisely
to this dynamic, the confrontation between the personal wishes
of the magician and a universal standard of morality or law.
White, and to an extent, grey magicians, attempt to remove
themselves from the debate by insisting that their magickal
acts are inspired only by the highest motives of service and
self-knowledge, that, indeed, they wish only to do the will
of higher powers known as their Holy Guardian Angels. Perdition
shall blast, so they say, those who use magick for self-centered
or materialistic ends. Grey magicians may proclaim that the
use of magickal powers for materialistic ends is valid sometimes,
but rarely for selfish reasons, and in any event, is always
problematical. Donald Michael Kraig, with the breezy superficiality
of the traditional magus, in 'Modern Magick' terms white magick
the use of magick'for the purpose of obtaining the Knowledge
and Conversation of your Holy Guardian Angel'(1), grey magick
as magick used 'for the purpose of causing either physical
or non-physical good to yourself or to others (2) and black
magick as magick used 'for the purpose of causing either physical
or non-physical harm to yourself or others'(3). Kraig is influenced
by Aleister Crowley and by modern Wicca, or Gardnerian witchcraft.
Wiccans, ever concerned that their white magick might slide
through some unconscious twitch of desire through grey into
black, corrected Crowley's axiom 'Do What Thou Wilt Shall
Be the Whole of the Law' with the enervating modifier 'An
it Harm None'. Kraig, worried that readers of his treatise
might fall 'into the pit of the black magician,' encourages
neophyte mages to practice only white magick. Fortunately,
before he is two thirds of the way through his book Kraig
is happily discoursing on talismans, grimoires, and the correct
methods for disposing of recalcitrant demons. Few magicians
can resist the lure of dark magick, despite protestations
of innocence. This is because even Wiccan influenced magicians
are not, as Wiccans are, devotees of a religion. That is to
say magicians are interested in the dynamic of personal will
versus (in Crowley's term) True Will, while Wiccans have resolved
this issue. While the occasional conflict may remain, Wiccans,
like Christians, Jews, and Moslems understand that they have
agreed to submit their wills to that which they construe to
be the Will of their deities. Magicians, on the other hand,
are not so sure. This, more than any other factor, accounts
for the intense suspicion those of a religious cast view those
who practise magick.
The designation of black magician
still tends to be a term that magicians use to vilify other
magicians. Aleister Crowley, arguably the single greatest
influence on the development of magick in this century, and,
for the purposes of this essay, defined as a traditional magician,
used the term in this way. In 'Magick', for example, he asserted
'any will but that to give up the self to the Beloved is Black
Magick,'(4). That is to say, any use of magick unlike his
use of magick is black magick. Elsewhere Crowley muttered
darkly about the existence of 'Black Lodges' and 'Black Brothers',
magicians who chose to remain in the Abyss, the metaphysical
gap between the first three sephiroth and the remainder of
the Tree of Life. A magus of this hue, Crowley stated, secretes
'his elements around his Ego as if isolated from the Universe'(5),
and turns his back on the true aim of magick, which according
to Aleister, is the 'attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation
of the Holy Guardian Angel. It is the raising of the complete
man in a vertical straight line. Any deviation from this line
tends to become black magic. Any other operation is black
magick'(6).As students of mysticism will recognize, this goal
is identical with the mystic's goal of the union of the self
with God. Crowley, of course, wrote with his feet firmly planted
in the Judeo-Christian paradigm, a paradigm in which the universe
is visualized as AdamKadmon, the Great Man, and is thus wholly
anthropomorphized.
In 1969, Anton LaVey posited
the argument of the modern black magician when in'The Satanic
Bible' he asserted 'No one on earth ever pursued occult studies,
metaphysics, yoga, or any other 'white light' concept without
ego gratification or personal power as a goal '(7). Moreover,
LaVey claimed 'There is no difference between 'White' and
'Black' magic except in the smug hypocrisy, guilt ridden righteousness,
and self-deceit of the 'White' magician himself'(. Thus the
term black magician began to be associated with a style of
magick that did not distinguish between self-interest and
self-knowledge. LaVey in his organization, The Church of Satan,
and later MichaelAquino in his schismatic order, The Temple
of Set, argued that the will of the individual magician was
paramount. Both denied even the existence of a universal Will.
LaVey stated 'The Satanist realizes that man, and the action
and reaction of the universe, is responsible for everything
and doesn't mislead himself into thinking that someone cares.'
(9) MichaelAquino asserted 'The Black Magician, on the other
hand, rejects both the desirability of union with the Universe
and any self-deceptive tactics designed to create such an
illusion'(10). Unfortunately the refusal of modern black magicians
to deal with the possibility that man may not be at the center
of the universe, or may just be one in a large series of interdependent
phenomena leads to an error. Reluctant, it seems, even to
adopt completely a materialistic or mechanistic view of the
universe, LaVey and Aquino embrace the ghost in the machine
and assert that the individual ego can continue after death.
Thus LaVey stated 'If a person has been vital throughout his
life and has fought to the end for his earthly existence,
it is this ego which will refuse to die, even after the expiration
of the flesh that housed it'(11). There is, of course, not
a shred of evidence to prove that this has ever happened nor
that it can happen, but magicians of all hues, together with
the adherents of most of the world's religions, continue to
assert blandly the existence of a transpersonal, individuated
spark that somehow is exempt from the normal process of birth,
life, death, and corruption, a kind of eternal homunculus.
Apparently the notion that the universe may not actually be
human centered is too frightening for Satanists and modern
black magicians to bear, and the old chestnut of the soul
is dredged out of the Judeo-Christian quagmire, brushed off,
and presented as the 'fully gratified' ego of the modern immortal
Satanist.
Teetering on the edge of postmodern
magick, PeterCarroll, the first contemporary popularizer of
chaos magick, in 'Liber Null and Psychonaut', accepted the
idea that the universal force may not be a force that bears
much relationship to humanity. He stated:'The force which
initiates and moves the universe, and the force which lies
at the center of consciousness, is whimsical and arbitrary,
creating and destroying for no purpose beyond amusing Itself.
There is nothing spiritual or moralistic about Chaos and Kia.
We live in a universe where nothing is true...'(12). Carroll
was aware of the true nature of the ego, and stated 'developing
an ego is like building a castle against reality'(13). Moreover,
he recognized that 'the real Holy Guardian Angel is just the
force of consciousness, magic, and genius itself, nothing
more. This cannot manifest in a vacuum: it is always expressed
in some form, but its expressions are not the thing itself.'(14)
In this statement Carroll aligned himself with the quantum
mechanical view of the universe, a view that refuses to discriminate
phenomena on the basis of dualistic concepts, but stresses
the wave like nature of energy. This is also the viewpoint
of sophisticated Buddhism. The key phrase of the "PrajnaParamita",
a critical sutra in the development of Buddhist metaphysics,
states 'form is only emptiness and emptiness is only form.'
Ultimately Carroll, however,
was as reluctant as a Satanist to let go of the comforting
paradigm of the soul or spirit and despite paying lip service
to a universe in quantum flux stated 'The adept magician however
will have so strengthened his spirit by magick that it is
possible to carry it over whole into a new body'(15). This
turns out to be a crippling flaw in Carroll's approach to
magick and one that reinforces his belief in the efficacy
of hierarchical magick, a contradiction of the fundamental
principle of chaos magick, that it replicates the non-ordered
flow of phenomena in the universe. The ego, after all, is
an ordered construct that tolerates nothing so little as the
inevitability of change. Perhaps the problem lay in Carroll's
assertion that 'physical processes alone will never completely
explain the existence of the universe'(16), a statement that
eventuates from the dualistic, epistemological mindset of
Newtonian physics and Aristotelian western philosophy. Perhaps
it comes from a fear of death.
Yet concurrent with this discriminatory,
black/white, dualistic approach of western occultism, there
has always been another strain, the shamanistic, orgiastic
approach that deliberately blurrs these definitions and seeks
to confront the universe as a dynamic, and non human process.
This approach, however, has usually been the domain of art
and artists rather than occultists. Modern English poetry
since MatthewArnold's 'DoverBeach' has been obsessed with
reconciling the poetic imagination with a stark and inhuman
universe. Arnold recognized the universe in 1867 as a place
that:
Hath really neither joy, nor
love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night
By the time T.S. Eliot wrote
'The Wasteland' in 1922, he saw the universe as 'a heap of
broken mirrors', an metaphor that aptly describes the shattering
of the familiar concept of the universe as reflecting a human
face. The year before, W.B.Yeats in 'The Second Coming' concurred:
Things fall apart; the centre
cannot hold;.
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
But the fullest expression
of the awareness that the movement of energy through the universe
is absolute, interpenetrating, and neither particularly humane
nor human comes in 1934 with DylanThomas and:
The force that through the
green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
This dawning consciousness
infuses all the arts, from the movement of modern art, from
Dada and Cubism, through Abstract Expressionism, to modern
music, from the dissonance of Ravel's 'La Valse' to JohnCage
to minimalism to industrial. Artists for one hundred and fifty
years have struggled to depict the face of a chaotic universe,
and man's far from central place within it. In fact, the occult
has been one of the last areas of human intellectual endeavour
to avail itself of this perception of the universe. Not until
the development of chaos magick can it truly be said that
magick has finally started to deal with the insights of modern
art and modern science.
Chaos magick derives from
a series of magical positions articulated by AustinOsmanSpare,
a contemporary of Aleister Crowley. Spare's vision, itself
influenced by the work of WilliamBlake, is contained succinctly
in 'The Book of Pleasure'. Spare's approach to magick and
the universe has been validated by the discoveries of the
new physics, by quantum science, and by chaos mathematics.
The metaphysical basis for Spare's magick is similar to that
of DzogChen, a form of Tibetan Buddhism, and, in fact, the
reference and counter reference between Buddhism, art, science,
and chaos magick is striking and continuous. Spare wrote 'The
Book of Pleasure' between 1909 and 1913, but most of Spare's
work was ignored until Carroll began writing about it. There
are a number of reasons for this. Spare's work was printed
in small runs and he did not seek fame. His style is elliptical
and obscure. His work is difficult to understand in the absence
of his lush illustrations, and since the illustrations are
spells, or more precisely, sigils, they affect a deep level
of the mind and tend to distract one from the content of his
writing. His style is declaratory, arrogant, and uses a special
vocabulary, the definitions for which have to be teased out
of the text. But perhaps of most importance, Spare's view
of the universe is non-human, and consequently the usual god
centered or human centered context of magick is absent. Not
until contemporary metaphysical thought had changed to allow
a non anthropomorphic universe did Spare become accessible.
Even now he, together with KennethGrant, is one of the least
read and least understood among modern magickal writers.
Spare begins with the idea
of Kia, of which he says, in an echo of the Tao Te Ching,
'The Kia that can be expressed by conceivable ideas is not
the eternal Kia, which burns up all belief.'(17) Thus he does
not designate by name that which later chaos magicians would
call Chaos, but concentrates on the immediate manifestation
of the formless which he describes as 'the idea of self'.
This is precisely the viewpoint of DzogChen. DzogChen, a sorcerous
form of Buddhism developed by Padmasambhava in the eighth
century a.c.e., posits the creation of the manifest universe
as occurring at the instant that the conception of self develops.
Spare said of Kia 'Anterior to Heaven and Earth, in its aspect
that transcends these, but not intelligence, it may be regarded
as the primordial sexual principle, the idea of pleasure in
self-love.'(1 In DzogChen the initial impulse splits emptiness
from form, nirvana from samsara and develops dualistic thinking.
The multiplicity of the universe streams out of this split.
One of the central symbols
of DzogChen is the dorje. A form of magick wand, the dorje
is composed of two stylized phalluses joined by a small central
ball. The dorje is, according to DzogChen, a 'terma', or hidden
teaching. This teaching is a treasure hidden by Padmasambhava.
The whole of the dorje refers to the unlimited potentiality
of the universe, and thus, in modern terms, is an image of
chaos, or the quantum flux of the universe that is before
and beyond discriminatory thinking, inseparable, indissoluble.
The two ends of the dorje refer, respectively, to form and
emptiness, or samsara and sunyata. The small central bead
that joins the two ends of this bilaterally symmetrical object
is hollow to show the unknowable potentiality at the intersection
between form and emptiness, and also to refer back to the
chaos current. Thus the dorje is a three dimensional symbol
for the way the universe manifests itself from unity through
duality into its full, lush complexity. As Spare says 'As
unity conceived duality, it begot trinity, begot tetragrammaton.'(19)
In a statement that presages the modern understanding of the
fractal universe as an event that is essentially a complex
repetition and multiplication of a series of simple forms,
Spare wrote:
The dual principle is the
quintessence of all experience, no ram-ification has enlarged
its early simplicity, but is only its repetition, modification
or complexity, never is its evolution complete. It cannot
go further than the experience of self-so returns and unites
again and again, ever an anti-climax. For ever retrogressing
to its original simplicity by infinite complication is its
evolution. No man shall understand 'Why' by its workings.
Know it as the illusion that embraces the learning of all
existence.(19)
Recognizing the recursive
movement of the movement of energy, or consciousness, through
the universe, that is to say, of Kia, is essential to the
understanding of the form of magick that Spare developed because
it indicates the structure of the spells, sigils, and magickal
techniques of chaos magick. Refuting absolutely the notion
that this flow of energy is ever understandable by dualistic
minds, Spare stated unequivocally that the magickal energy
of the universe, the force that interpenetrates all phenomena
is non-human. Moreover Spare required the magician, in order
to avail himself of this force, to renounce his human belief
systems, his dualistic mind, to achieve a state of consciousness
that, as much as possible, mimicked the primordial. How to
do this is the subject of the next section of this essay.
(Sigils, Servitors, and Godforms Part 1)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 2)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 3)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 4)
(Sigils,
Servitors, and Godforms Part 5)
Authors Details: By
Marik (MarkDeFrates, marik[at]aol.com)
Unknown Web Site |
|
