A processing heuristic that seems to work across scales, that I’ve found useful so far, is:

• What value does it create?
• Does it add friction? If so, where and for what purpose?
• Where is the obstruction?

Most things seem to have these dimensions.

If it’s mostly value-adding stuff (especially short term – the first 90 days are all about stacking wins) – make it happen.

If it adds friction, it gets acknowledged.

If obstruction – noted, and avoided.

In a way, these almost offer responses to the positions outlined in Albert O. Hirshman’s short and elegantly scripted 1970 book, Exit, Voice and Loyalty.

Add value to “Trust” interactions. Add friction – noise, mess, deferral – to “Voice” interactions. Obstruct those operating in the “Exit” mode – whether they’re trying to break up your tribe, clan, constituency, whatever – or leave themselves.

Caveats and considerations

Does the friction add value? Sometimes. Measure twice, cut once.

Can obstruction add value? Being told you cannot do something often incites a creative frustration, the rage filled declaration of “over, under, round or through”: a hardening of the heart and mind and will.

Can the relentless creation of value create friction, or obstruction? Fundamentally, it certainly can devalue and debase itself – for instance, too much value, that is too accessible, leads to the cheapening of it.

Or – alternatively, value creates the opposite of friction: vacuum. All limit withdraws, allowing the flame to burn ever brighter – without adding more fuel. Then it goes out.

But this is the transformation game; its nature is to be a tricky, mercurial business.
And, played right, we can play anywhere.

#tech #theory

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.

The idea of creation as a dance implies “degree,” but degree in motion. The Static battalions of the earthly, celestial, and divine hierarchies are sped on a varied but controlled peregrination to the accompaniment of music. The paths of each is different, yet all paths together make up a perfect whole.

– EMW Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture

The more experience and experiments I pursue following paths back into the past, the more apparent the process of de-alienation from a profoundly living Cosmos – and my unique place within it. There is joyful work to be done.

Dance instruction from the Black Dragon

When examining the Sigil of Solomon from the mighty grimoire, Black Dragon (published in Crossed Keys, this almost could be read as a top-down view of dance steps.

This is also one of the infrequently expressed benefits of actually reproducing these, with one’s own hand; the act of trying to replicate the figures, letters and line, spending precious time and focus, this opens the floor for all sorts of oblique insight.

In particular, I really got the sense of the three worlds – the natural, the celestial, and the philosophical – as well as a fourth. To me – this is where the Operator stands. At once, the Operation, the identification with the virtue of the Creator, and the realisation that, in the words of Sassy the Sasquatch, the Universe begins with You.

All points in delicately balance and utterly polarised, across each circle – with the three outer circles revolving around the centre, the hexagram, the union of opposite.

In my reading, to my current understanding, the Event, and its two composite parts – the endlessly repeating schema of how things are, and the Potential for anything, something, everything, to change.

If the world is some sort of Gurjieffian pain machine, or the perpetual path of atonement for some fundamental failing of first forebears, this limits the possibilities to a certain range of usually dour outcomes.

But – when the world is a giant, beautiful, baffling and wild dance, and you’re at the centre, the interactions that happen between dancers in the eternal night become something quite different indeed.

#grimoires #theory

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.

This tendency has a few names, and has been recurring through less-reputable areas of “literature” for centuries.

I've been fascinated by this for years, in various guises. I think it's a key vector for understanding and operating within a sorcerous world. Make no mistake, our shared world is ruled by sorcerers, though they may not have this on their business cards.

Hyperstition is one name for it. As far as I can tell, this was labeled as such by the CCRU, the fascinating renegade philosophy cult formed at (then disavowed by) Warwick University in the UK in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Their various writings – both collected, and of the individuals involved – provide a snapshot into this fascinating time.

Amid all these superlative antics, there also arose the not-unrelated Chaos magic Hypersigil concept, stunningly demonstrated in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles comic series.

The idea has deeper roots, tested techniques and record of other experiments though. William S. Burroughs, for example, was obsessed with this intertextuality, regarding time and space as just another type of that can be edited, rewritten, interpolated. His influence can be found in both the CCRU and the work of the Chaos magicians.

In particular, using narrative to rewrite and fundamentally reimagine phenomenal reality was a key concern of Burroughs' 1981 novel Cities of the Red Night.

Shatter Day – from the 8-Circuit Mind tarot I made as part of Antero Alli's magnificent course

Shatter Day always closer: this enigmatic, apocalyptic utterance lands like a perfect strike at critical point of Red Night, right where the story is getting really out of control. My reading on this – it reflects the point where the fiction you have written, or are engaging with, collides with what you perceive as local reality.

That point where your script becomes the movie, and you're the leading actor in it.

It's a really strange feeling; my own initial experiments with this led to specifically getting what I wanted – but generally not experiencing great outcomes. I put this down to “conjuring blowback”. Certainly, there was also a failure of aspiration, of wanting to see if it works; seeking verification before trust.

Basically – once conjuring to get what you want – the essential challenge of handling the displacement and dissonance of actually getting it.

Asking and getting. If you're not used to getting – I was not, at this stage – this was a personally apocalyptic event.

I'm not sure how widespread these phenomena are. Joseph C. Lisiewski mentions a similar phenomenon, referring to this as “the slingshot effect” in both Ceremonial Magic & The Power of Evocation and Howlings from the Pit. As an aside, both of these are interesting, practical texts that certainly contributed working knowledge to the Grimoire Revival.

In light of these technical and media-oriented framing perhaps could be regarded more as feedback – which can be managed, if you know the equipment you're working with.

“Gnōthi seauton” – “Know thyself”, the lintel above the entrance to the Temple of Apollo in Delphi allegedly read.

More contemporarily, and perhaps more suited for some in these more ambiguous and accelerated times, is Hefner's notorious doorway maxim: “Si Non Oscillas, Noli Tintinare” – “If you don’t swing, don’t ring”.

The necessity of Promethian endeavours.

Nothing of value will be created from small, limiting myths. If a mythic pantheon has no room for aspiration, it becomes the sacred duty of those who burn with fire of the mind to amend it.

The self-selected, self-appointed ones who decide there is in fact (though first, in fiction) another way, that they disagree, and have a better plan.

This pen is held with an attitude of divine insouciance. It's yours for taking, though – as befits the tradition – it's better stolen, and you'll likely upset some people.

Authors exercise authority.

They authorise the whole damn show.

Shatter Day always closer.

Make it so.

#literature #theory #myth

I think of this when I sit at a keyboard, for my dayjob, hammering out and sharpening key lines and messages crafted to take on a life of their own, and delivering them through digital channels.

I try to think about this, every time I sit at a keyboard – the input feeder to these engines of attention and distraction. These are a most beautiful tool and, potentially, a most terrible weapon.

Weird fiction, applied across scale

Sticks and stones will break your bones But words can bind forever.

We've taken tools initially developed for religion or warfare, and applied them in every aspect of our modern life.

Few have more accurately or succinctly expressed and explored this than comics author and magician Grant Morrison, in his late-90s epic The Invisibles.

The scope of this psychedelic romp – and his magnificent follow-up and Qlippothic bardo, The Filth – utterly blew my mind at time of reading.

Morrison's heroically autobiographical work articulates the sentiment, and provides worked case studies of translation through scale and narrative worlds.

Morrison openly built The Invisibles as a participatory hypersigil – an extended magically charged act of “writing into being” – and I certainly got pulled into its vortex. Since, this has stuck with me.

Using information effectively is a technology, and communication operative, and all of them are as much a science as an art. Public relations and stakeholder engagement is socially-applied cybernetics.

All these disciplines are the mutant grandchildren of Natural Philosophy; the courtly practitioners of this were once called Intelligenciers, after all. I respect this tradition.

What is violence, anyway?

Taking the maximal possible view – it's a form of communication. I read something about this in Slavoj Zizek's book, On Violence, as I was trying to make sense of the world. It was in the introduction, which was about as far as I could get through it.

So, the violence, as a form of communication – sending a message, shaping the context so things proceed a certain way.

Whether enacted directly, physically, kinetically – as on the organisations of a cell, a human body, a village. The realm of Elemental interactions, for the Agrippaphiliac PlatoBros.

Or on procedural, function level – the spaces in between – in the firing of a synapse, by blocking a sight from view, the metabolism of a food into nutrients, or the collapse of a supply chain. The Celestial Realm.

Finally, and most esoterically, by symbol – an offensive image, a confronting issue, an entirely, initially abhorrent worldview. The Super-Celestial – the realm of the Ideals. Of the Gods.

Overcoming pencil-necked geekhood

Theory is Divine – but what can we actually do with this?

There is joy, knowledge, and furious and frenzied potential in the translation – or transgression – across scale.

So, the practice of taking it up a notch. The escalation of apotheosis, or dramatic, Luciferian descent. The Upwards-Downwards Path Heraclitus mentioned in Fragment 61 of his immortal work.

In practice, we see this, as the notable exception to the rule: The streetkid who becomes the CEO, or the obsessive dreamer who becomes the movie director. The weekend where you took a risk, things got out of hand, and the most wonderful consequences changed your life in a way you can never undo.

Or – the downwards path, the lightening bolt: The meteoric iron that falls to earth, and forged into a blade. The uncle who takes the time to work through the basics of mathematics with you, and you just “get it”. The chance meeting with an exceptional individual in an unlikely situation, who shows you a way of doing something mundane, that becomes transformative.

How you do anything is how you do everything.

Intent makes a tool a weapon.

#tech #theory