Carcosa Bound

We can do our biggest magic when we have our biggest problems.

I’ve heard those exercising this tendency pejoratively labelled “crisis magicians” – those only doing magic when in desperate need – but I gently push back on this as an immature perspective.

Everyone needs. Most – and especially those playing all out, and playing for keeps – fall on extremely tough circumstances, at one time or another.

It's hard to be generous when you're poor. Like, generous in a way that actually does anything.

Most modern media output is forgettable, timewasting garbage.

Baited Hooks for the eye and mind; there is no nourishment to be had there, and no small risk for open, inquiring minds.

With the torn lips from getting caught too many times recently, I worked up a little exercise to navigate our treacherous, infohazardous landscape.

Can we access other-than-conscious processes, reprogram the personality, and achieve mystical states using a combination of flotation tanks and hypnotic inductions?

Sounds completely plausible, exciting, big if true. A few years ago, I gave it a shot. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

Did it work?

Short version: Sort of; inconclusive but promising; more experimentation and testing needed.

I've been listening to, and transcribing, the most excellent, heady and oddly nostalgic Technopagans at the End of History talks, led by Terence McKenna and Mark Pesce at the Esalen Institute, California, USA in August 1998.

It's a total blast – before social media, let alone talk of banning teenagers from it; even before the parabolic acceleration of Dotcom boom.

This is a glimpse of the glorious dawn of this strange day of digital revolution that we're now living amid the ruins of.

The metaphors we choose matter. When the lines between symbolic and actual start to blur and no longer become so mutually exclusive, the more powerful the way we frame things becomes.

In Eustance Mandeville Wetenhall Tillyard's tightly written 1959 classic The Elizabethan World Picture, the master scholar lays out three visions of the English Renaissance world, as experienced in the time of Shakespeare, Dee, Donne and Milton.

These visions, in short: the Chain of Being, the distributed-but-mediated correspondences, and the Cosmic Dance. I find the Dance the most useful.

Today, 19 April, is St Expedite’s Feast Day.

So, we take home from the house altar in the spirit room, move him into the lounge, and set his statue up in a good place. Give him a good view, and a good open space.

My lovely wife has made him an inspired, bespoke vermouth, and we serve him cake and coffee, and fresh, cool water; present fresh flowers, candles, incense, a new beaded necklace; treat him special. We sit with him, talk about our projects, plans, wins, negotiations of challenges, and stories of getting things done.

Intrinsically, we know we can just take things we have written down, and if written well and right, they can happen, more or less.

The latest recension of the concept has been made popular by American technologists, using digital and, increasingly, precision engineered physical machinery as ritual tools to bring about the world they want to see.

This world is heavily inflected with Lord of the Rings themes, in particular.

Recently I've been incorporating 3D printing as a spiritual tool. The hardest part, really, was getting my head out of Ye Olden Times Larpspace with its attendant phobia of anything plastic in ritual spaces, and just fucking doing stuff.

A provisional, lightly-conspiratorial observation: making allows escape from the alienating mindtrap of consumerism – and significantly enhances capability to build one's own truly unique practice and aesthetic.

We've lost some beautiful avenues for enspiriting matter and expressing spirit through the simple convenience of marketing magic. Consumers consume; creators create.

Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. Published by Bloomsbury, 2020

In a line – Piranese is a charming fantasy, as light and satisfying as a dream in the mid-afternoon. It’s well-written, too, and easily digested in few hours, leaving a fresh, expansive aftertaste.

I’d put it alongside that particularly English style of occult-inflected fictional classics like Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, Dion Fortune’s Sea Priestess and Moon Magic, and others.