Portable Shrines

by John Gillanders…

“Art is magick because art transforms consciousness”
Alan Moore

The above nugget of cosmic wisdom was culled from the documentary:  The Mindscape of Alan Moore, which was released on DVD stateside in 2008 to little fanfare. When I just checked, there were exactly two holds placed on said movie at the public library, whereas comparatively the Watchmen DVD had nearly a thousand. Which is really too bad, and kind of a reflection on how we want the body of our art and not always the mind. To be honest, I ran out and saw Watchmen on opening weekend back in March and banished Mindscape to the bottom of my ever expanding Netflix cue before just getting around to finally checking it out last month.

If I were to recommend a cogent introduction to so called magickal thought, I’d suggest this to anyone far more than actually reading anything Aleister Crowley’s written (which I’m still yet to get much out of) – which is kind of the aberrant thing with magickal writing. Whereas, people like Austin Osman Spare and Crowley are often seen as the forefathers of western magickal thought, I’ve personally found it far more beneficial to read other’s interpretation of their work rather than hearing it directly from their own mouths. In fact, it was actually attempting to read Crowley that turned me off to all things magick for years.

Despite having an interest in a multitude of odd and seemingly disparate yet arguably at least somewhat connected phenomenon ranging from things like parapsychology, shamanism, Toltec sorcery, alien phenomenon, past life regression hypnosis, near death experiences, remote viewing, and out of body exploration, magick just struck me as rather………..well, some rather stupid wannabe D and D bullshit; a bunch of old dudes in black robes drawing pentagrams in the ground and trying to summon the devil.

Attempting to read a few of Crowley’s books solidified this opinion as he intentionally wrote so cryptically, I’m not sure I’ve ever finished any of it to this day. But again and again, people I respected like the late Robert Anton Wilson kept recommending him, so in the back of my mind the curiosity continued to shine like a beacon of esoteric research I was supernaturally bound to someday collude with.

I think the final straw that broke the camel’s back was reading an interview with Grant Morrison in ARTHUR, in September of 2005. If I were to pinpoint what piqued my curiosity to such a fever pitch, I’d say that it was this exact quote:

“I spent 25 years doing magic because I didn’t believe Aleister Crowley when he said a demon would appear if I performed certain operations. And so I did the operations to prove him wrong, and a fucking demon appeared! [laughs] So, from the age of 19 I’ve had to deal with the fact that the demon had actually appeared, and that Crowley was saying something that now made sense experimentally.”

Now you see, this was something my mind, which had been raised in a western tradition and fed countless books about research into demonstrable phenomenon like remote viewing, could latch onto. This was science. This was laying down a hypothesis and then performing experiments to test said hypothesis. And much like Mr. Morrison years before, I set out to prove to myself that magick was in fact bullshit rather than the inverse. What did I have to lose exactly, other than feeling more than a little creepy? Now, I must further confess that the other secret element that intrigued me into action was not only the simplicity of Osman Spare’s sigil magick (which can be summed up, again by Mr. Morrison, rather drunkenly here) and the distinct parallels I saw between it and the more modern and scientifically validated psychic practice of remote viewing.

Well, needless to say, if I didn’t prove to myself beyond any kind of reasonable doubt the legitimacy and hyper-potency of this type of thinking, I wouldn’t be bothering to write about it now. Although it must be firmly noted, that I’ve never actually designed a sigil in the way Spare recommended. In fact, I kind of made a point of disregarding that particular methodology partially out of my own arrogance and partially in the spirit of legitimate inquiry. I suppose I figured my extensive reading into obscure parapsychology meant that I knew more about what they were doing than they did. I had my own theory about what was going on, and I’d test that one instead. Thus far I’m in a sense batting a thousand, but the results are almost obscured by the implication of the results and the effect on my overall psyche.
One of the most interesting comments I’ve ever heard regarding magick came from the movie Maybe Logic, about Robert Anton Wilson, where he said something to the effect of:

“Crowley’s trip was fucking with your own head until the impossible becomes possible. And suddenly I got to the point where things that I thought impossible started happening. Discarnate voices in my head predicting the future? Check. Visitations from dream entities showing me exotic regions of the temporal multiverse? Check. Strange robotic forms of micro intelligence rebuilding and upgrading my spiritual essence in my sleep? Check. Erotic induction of a divine transmissionary exhortation from beyond in my then girlfriend/now wife? Check….and…..Mate!”

I suppose where I differ from those who are in love with designations like sorcerer or magickian is the societal implication of those terms. The implication being that these are somehow things that we just don’t have the ability to understand as a culture due to our obsession with scientific materialism, whereas in reality, we’re essentially not even trying. These are reactionary labels that help relegate those who pursue knowledge in matters of the spirit to the fringes of society; a bunch of geeks in robes reading archaic books from the dark ages and doing some “D and D” bullshit. As far as I can tell, sigil magick is little more than a more effective way of communicating telepathically with your higher self and moreover, the larger reality of pure consciousness.

The idea that our world is in fact composed of pure consciousness rather than matter is where the whole “art is magick”, thing that I started this blog with earlier (I did do that for a reason) gets complicated. In this day and age, with the onslaught of information that we’re now constantly bombarded with, to think of art as magick gives the implication that we’re constantly battling horrible forces that we don’t understand and further implies that all artists are in fact magickians. It’s a brave new world (for some).

I’ve often opined that the majority of bands that get major label deals and weasel their way onto things like MTV, which I watch guiltily on occasion, make music that is about as artistic as say, a Home Depot. Shit has nothing to do with art at all but is rather, commerce masquerading as such. But it does in fact transform consciousness, in this case reinforcing a prevalent consensus reality in which materialism is king. If I had to sum up the magickal effect of the last ten videos for songs I’ve seen on TV, they’d pretty much fall into one of two categories. First, there’s the song that presses the listener to embolden their own ego and define themselves by material possessions and empty sexual conquests. Then there’s the other one designed to intensify the importance of and emotional response to teenage romance. As far as I can tell, this is done to promote reckless youthful breeding and enforce puritanical ideas of sexual repression and monogamy. Now, I’m admittedly simplifying things here a bit, but in general most of what you’re going to be fed sonically since the days of media deregulation if you don’t go digging, is primarily a hex designed to make the wealthiest one percent even wealthier. And if you don’t take measures to resist their relentless onslaught of evil magick, you’re going to fall into the same hypnotic consumerist trance that afflicts most of the populace.

If our scientific institutions weren’t roughly a thousand years behind where they should be by this point in our development, there would probably be studies demonstrating the blissful effects that sound patterns like washes of delay, feedback, oscillating synthesizers, and sprawling minimalist drones have on the pleasure centers of the brain under the influence of hallucinogenic and even mildly hallucinogenic compounds like marijuana. Whereas the shamanic traditions of yesteryear used calculated repetitious rhythms to summon the extravagant dimensions of beyond, we’ve got a lot more firepower at our disposal these days. The issue is intent.

As the first inaugural Escalator Fest descends upon the city, I’d like to be the first to point out that a clever sorcerer could use this insane onslaught of sonic mindfuckery as a destabilizing influence on their own consciousness; a means to combat the selfish magick of the materialist yet spiritually bankrupt elite. One of the basic tenets lurking behind sigil magick is the charging of specific imagery that the magickian has attached meaning to, or more accurately represents a plotline that they would like to see to fruition in the physical realm.

Now, whereas these images are typically charged by means of sexual excitation, I’ve found overtly psychedelic music an equally potent medium for creating just such a charge, bringing the contents of the minds eye to the forefront where it coexists directly in tandem with so called ordinary reality. A mystic or casual bystander might let this rapidly cascading imagery flow through them and enjoy the ride. A magickian or sorcerer would go the extra distance and intentionally try to mold the energy to his or her own liking by focusing their intent, which is essentially what I’m recommending here: turn the festival into your own personal means of telepathically communicating with the higher realm; your higher soul or holy guardian angel. It can understand what you’re asking of it if you ask in a language it can comprehend, and even if it doesn’t understand you per se, it will reward you just for trying.

The amount of free psychoactive energy being generated at Escalator Fest will probably be the most calculated discharge of the year, so don’t let it go to waste; lost as a cascading wall of feedback howling away into the night – an ephemeral memory of past bliss. Transform it into something magickal.

John

If you have any questions, inquiries, or about just want to bullshit about any matter of spiritual phenomenon, feel free to contact me at cerebralsubversion@gmail.com.