Belief, Power, The Written Word and the
Magick Sigil
(an extract from
Toastar! Further adventures in Chaos Magic)
by Francis Breakspear
“ a good wine is beyond reproach…. a good man is something more
dangerous”
- The Hon. Hugo C. St. J L’Estrange (A British Satanist elder)
My writings have been criticised in various quarters for being both
evil and amoral (while others simply loved it), which, when you think
about it is quite a paradox. How can something be both evil (a moral
judgment) and amoral (beyond morality) at the same time? Now if it
really could be both, simultaneously, then that’s a great magick trick…
I concentrate in my writing on making stuff happen. It is ‘results
magick’, or sorcery, or whatever thing of that ilk you want to call it.
It is specifically not a whole lot of pontificating about what colour
and pattern of hand-woven goat-wool altar cloth is most karmically
suitable for use at a Lammas picnic, etc., If Jesus, or ‘The Goddess’ ™
of the All-Bland Broad Church of the modern nebulous new-age is your
co-pilot, we simply don’t care, and the door is over there.
If, on the other hand, you take responsibility for your own actions and
don’t scapegoat the universe or some imaginary friend for your
subjective failings, and have at least some accord with the view that
you are free to do whatever you wish (or ‘wilt’), and you are prepared
to accept the consequences of your actions, then please read on, friend…
As the Great Ramsey Dukes has written:
“chaos magic has … reacted against
the wishy-washy tendency in New Age magic and reminded us that the
impulse to make things happen is not childish, but should be respected
and restored to its place in magic”
… and as a similarly eloquent sage
from an earlier age (Shakespeare) simply wrote, “readiness is
all”.
So, be prepared…. as any Cub scouts
among us were most likely taught… It’s about getting out there
and doing stuff, and not necessarily caring about social norms, mores
and ‘doing the done thing’. As I wrote in my personal diary of
the psycho-magical changes I encountered following a near-death
experience in 2005, and which still apply:
“the usual social inhibitions are no
longer present, as I do not have to have a career, settle down, live to
old age etc., it takes as long (or as short) as it takes, and life is
now much more real and honest. And selfish… but fuck service to others,
it’s time I was just doing it for me. And I am.”
Chaos magick is about belief, and about using that belief as a tool.
For example, a boxcutter is a knife. That knife is a tool. Belief is a
far sharper and much more versatile tool. The belief that some groups
of men armed only with boxcutters and considerable ideological zeal
hijacked the two planes that took down the twin towers in New York (and
the one that hit the Pentagon, although to these eyes it looked much
more like a small missile than a plane at that location…) is also a
tool, regardless of how factually correct it may be. A dear
magical friend has suggested that a fabulous magical weapon would be a
pair of swords one each forged from steel from one each of the towers.
A more useful weapon to heal world divisions might be a Caduceus wand
made from the same two sources…. Take your pick
There were many consequent events in world history, politics, religion
and economics that sprang from that one belief being used to generate
certain actions, including the influencing of future voting patterns.
The most powerful tools are those that can be used to manipulate
beliefs; and the most powerful people are those who fully understand
just what those tools are, and exactly how to use them to their maximum
effect.
So, to continue the knife metaphor and to thoroughly maul an old
Microsoft marketing slogan at the same time, the starting point of
quite a lot of chaos magic is often: -
what part of consensus reality do you want to slash to utter fucking
ribbons today?
The whole post-Twin Towers thing is a holy war (controlling world oil
revenues is a mere sideline, however many gazillions of dollars are
involved), with God on both sides, (according to each respective side
of course). As Ramsey Dukes writes of God (in his book Blast!):
“The Aeon of Horus challenges us to become gods. That is scary because
we have for centuries insisted that god is perfect. Our sense of
perfection is the greatest monster of all, so we kill it whenever it is
likely to be realised”
But God LIES. Any faith’s Holy Book is full of contradictions, if you
just try to read it as literature, by employing any kind of joined-up
thinking and avoiding the dogma-trap of accepting anything on blind
faith alone.
Therefore, from that kind of evidence (which is often simply all that
we have) we can conclude that God is not perfect. Thus, we, being
imperfect too, are at least as good as God. So…. in one stroke we can
move on and do our stuff instead, ignoring religion completely, since
God is no better than us…
That also saves me a lot of writing on the theory of morality and
religion etc., Manipulation of belief to completely kill the power of
religion isn’t a bad paradigm to throw at you in the first few pages,
is it?
Jesus H Christ and Mohammed riding backwards uphill on a psychedelic
fucking tandem, what do I have to write to follow that?
Let’s see, shall we?
Why are Sigils So Powerful? Paper and Authority
So just why are sigils so powerful? That is a huge question, with a
stacked series of possible answers that would be longer than several
weighty books. There are many ideas to why it might be, and one brief
aspect of the debate that I find quite compelling is that it is the
‘being written down’ nature that makes sigils so powerful and
productive. Or, at least that makes them so powerful in the eyes of
those who find the written word so very authoritative.
As humans in the modern world we are so addicted to official forms and
documents that have great power, such as visas to enter or leave a
country, a driver’s licence etc. Being unable to write is a huge
handicap- in Western society at least- and can lead to the person
involved being labelled (and often actually superstitiously feared) as
some kind of retard and an un-person.
Words, when written, wield wonderful power, and when that power is
wilfully encoded into a symbolic form, the sigil, the power is
increased by the language being partly-hidden. I find it very
interesting indeed that the modern innovator of sigils, Austin Osman
Spare, was a visual artist and magician who was quite probably
dyslexic… by our 21st Century standards. He died in the 1950s before
dyslexia was really a recognised condition, so we’ll never know for
sure, which adds to the appeal, as we don’t- and won’t ever- have a
definitive answer… malleable uncertainties are such wonderful magical
tools… a fixed sure answer is rather dead by comparison.
We are also hugely visual creatures, so while verbally-spoken spells
are all well and good (and there are some herein) there is still an
element of ‘it must be true if it is written down’ (despite generations
of lies from politicians reproduced guiltlessly and endlessly by the
media), ‘history always being written by the victors’ etc., and the
tyranny of print remains.
Everything that is on paper potentially has power, or is at least the
symbol of something that has great power, like currency notes; so
sigils fall into that category.
Paper can be made powerful in a variety of creative and useful ways,
like making your own calendar, and of course the magical diary. This is
from my diary of 2006, about a magick calendar I had used:
In a little over three hours a piece of paper that has been hung on my
wall for two and a bit months will have expired… in mid-June, using a
marker pen and coloured pencils i drew up an ad-hoc magickal calendar
with all my various forthcoming events noted and highlighted, from
seeing XXX (a major rock band) in London right through comedy nights,
festivals, rituals, pujas, a magical retreat, trip to Italy, holiday in
Portugal and to the end of this week's camping party, and the (small)
recovery gaps between those happenings were filled with sigilised
doodles and vital reminders (things like "eat", "wash some clothes",
"learn some Portuguese", "phone X to tell them if you are still
alive"..... that kinda thing) and tomorrow is September, and that
little (well, not so little) piece of paper that has been my
ritual framework and guide for so long will be defunct.
I will be rather sad to see the paper go- when I drew that thing up i
had no idea how hoot-filled those days I was scribbling down were going
to be..... but I had hopes – all of which (just about) were exceeded by
one or other reality, in some cases the excess being by orders of
magnitude and there are more adventures to come!
So you can easily make any piece of paper powerful and magickal…
Perhaps a joke will help to illustrate the way that a spoken spell
might never be as powerful as a paper one, at least in a paradigm which
values print’s authority so very much:
A well-dressed, calm and seemingly respectable lady walked into a
pharmacy, strode purposefully up to the pharmacist, looked straight
into his eyes, and said, in a matter-of-fact voice; "I would like some
cyanide please"
The pharmacist asked, "why do you need cyanide, madam?"
The lady replied, "to poison my husband."
The pharmacist’s eyes widened and he gasped: "ye Gods, no! I can't give
you cyanide to kill someone! We’ll both go to prison! No way! I must
phone the police about this now, or I’ll lose my licence."
The lady calmly reached into her bag and produced a photograph,
obviously taken through a motel window from outside, of a man in bed
with a woman, and held it up for the pharmacist to see. From the
picture it was obvious that the two were not playing whist or
backgammon, but rather fucking like the proverbial rabbit…
“Hey!….that’s my wife!” exclaimed the pharmacist.
”I know… and that’s my husband,” said the woman, placing the photograph
face up on the counter and sliding it meaningfully across towards the
pharmacist.
The pharmacist picked up the photograph and looked again… then replied,
with a brief, thin smile "ahhhh…. now that's different. You didn't tell
me you had a prescription", as he scanned his shelves for a particular
bottle…
Twig?
OK, let’s get down to business…. Write it down (sigil) and get down to
some rites (charge the sigils).
Bio
Francis Breakspear is a British
magician who’s been around in the game for 25 years plus. He writes books, gardens, and
continues to practice eclectic sorceries to his great delight.
By the author: Kaostar! Modern Chaos Cunning Craft,
Hidden, 2007 If It Was Easy, Everyone Would Be
Doing It Hidden 2008 Toastar! Further Adventures in Chaos
Magic Hidden…. for imminent publication in Spring 2009 EntheoStar! (n-TheoStar): More
Dreams, Coincidences, Rituals and Psychonautic Leaps of a Chaos
Magician (forthcoming, late 2009)
