"Write your own aphorisms.", Frater Soror, July 1994
This essay provides an introduction to the main themes addressed in this book.1 Though it comes at its subject matter tangentially. In the main the essay is about glamours, what they are and the elements that go into their construction. It also however goes to the root of what constitutes effective magickal symbolism. It discusses the nature of the experience that was in the earlier parts of this century called psychism, and it's relationship to the presence within human psychological make-up of a cultural language. It sees how word viruses can be constructed and elucidates the alchemy of their creation. Finally it brings these parts together in a demonstration of how they nay be applied in the fields of glamours and aeonics. To introduce the ideas about cultural language and psychism I, as they say, want to tell you a story.
In Europe from the earliest pagan period up until about the 14th century there existed a common universal language that could on some level, if only the subconscious, be understood by the whole of the population. That this language was understood by the educated classes, and formed the basis of a psychological technology at least as sophisticated as the physical technology of the period, can I think be substantiated. The language did not of course remain constant over the period in question, but rather evolved with the changes that European culture experienced, in particular the rise of Christianity. That knowledge of this language stultified in about the 14th century can be easily understood by examining the attitude of the christian church. Investigation, especially of a scientific nature, would be heresy and could lead you to the stake. All that now remains of our knowledge of this language is what we call tables of correspondences. Our problem today is that these tables are about 600 or 700 years out of date.
I realise that the above, while a line of argument dear to the hearts of some occultists, may not have convinced some of my more sceptical readers. Thus I shall give an example of what I would consider part of our present day cultural language. Take a look at the following symbol:2
Now imagine further that you see this symbol on the outside of some package that is delivered to your house. You are quite obviously hesitant about opening it. The symbol is obviously a warning, you could tell that without the writing at the bottom. It is neither the nuclear nor the biohazard symbol; it is obvious that it is the symbol for some unknown hazard. In fact the symbol has been titled the Omni-hazard symbol. It is not the symbol for any hazard, or rather it is symbolic of the danger of its own anxiety causing effect. (For the Illuminatus readers out there it is in fact a fnord.) So how did you recognise it as a hazard symbol? Apart from the wording you saw that it was a triangle like other hazard symbols, it was printed in high contrast yellow and black, and it was composed of three simple joined shapes bound together by a circle. Thus you were responding to a language of which you were not necessarily consciously aware.
There are literally thousands of such signals that go to make up our cultural language, yet these have been to a large extent ignored by occultists who have preferred to concentrate on either the personal psychic language or on the transcultural archetypal symbols.
How then do the preceding, relatively urbane mutterings tie in with the subject of psychism? First I had better say exactly what I mean by psychism in this context. By psychism I mean the perception of a thought or idea in the form of an image that occurs spontaneously and is of compelling intensity. That is it is the viewing of an abstract object in a concrete form that cannot be ignored. I have on occasion had such experiences. The thing that I found interesting about them was that the image that presented itself was the only way in which the experience could be described. Even when I said for example that I saw a wave of blood I did not mean that I had had some hallucination of a torrent of gore. I proceeded to look at the works of others who had had similar experiences and, to the extent that I could empathise with them, I concluded that this was also the case with them. In particular it seemed to me that the writings of those who had such experiences in earlier times were better understood in what they were saying by their contemporaries. This led me to considering cultural language. Visionary experiences were obviously nested in terms of this, although the relative primitiveness of modern psychology, coupled with the vast diversity of the current language caused by cultural fragmentation made modern reading of the language difficult. What then was the function of this language in a more closed culture than our present one? Well one use of it has been for others to read the accounts of visionaries in an attempt to enter the state they entered. This makes the cultural language a magickal tool, that is a tool for changing consciousness. That it is an effective tool can easily be seen: just ponder for a moment the anxiety that the Omni-hazard sign can cause. If one had a correct knowledge of the language then one ought to be able to communicate any state that one wished. The language is not however open to direct final codification in the present day due both to its size and fluidity. Some other method must thus be found of gaining access to it.
What is happening when I am preparing a cut/up? I am attempting to synthesise the essence of a passage in terms which will appeal directly to the deeper levels of the mind. I am reorganising the passage and extracting those bits that seem right, then I am repeating the process. What I am doing is performing a computational process which attempts to isolate the essence of the passage, as evinced by the feeling of "rightness", from out of its context. The iterative nature of this process is important, it represents a standard method of extracting information. For example imagine that I asked you to think of a whole number between 1 and 100, and that you agreed to answer any questions that I asked you, yes or no. Then I could extract the number from you by asking firstly if the number was greater than 50. If you said no then I would ask you if it was greater than 25, if yes then if it was more than 75. By repeating such questions I could eventually arrive at the knowledge of the number you had chosen. In the same way then a cut/up is an attempt to extract the essence of a text by a repeated process. The same process of evolution can be seen at work in the design of a sigil, in which repeated drafts are prepared until an irreducible image is found. The question in both of these cases though is what test are we applying to obtain what we want at each stage and to allow us to discard the chaff? In other words what constitutes the elusive quality of "rightness"?
It is my contention that when we obtain this feeling of rightness, what we are doing is responding to our own subconscious knowledge of our cultural, personal, and archetypal language levels. Thus we are gaining access to our own internal system of correspondences. This is not of course the only factor, particularly in sigil design, there is also a process by which an image becomes as it were "energised", that is given obsessive potency. This will be discussed in a later essay. The question for us now is how we may apply our knowledge of the presence of a cultural language, and of the use of recursive processes to extract elements from it, to the problem of creating magickal effects?
A glamour is a combination of ideas and sensory cues designed to evoke a particular image in the mind of an observer, thus causing him to act towards the object of the glamour in a particular way. My discussion here will confine itself to personal glamours, although all the techniques are applicable to glamours created for groups, magickal systems, or other multifarious entities. In my time I have taken on a number of glamours for, as they say, both pleasure and profit. I have been a 1930's intellectual; a figure combining elements of the renaissance with elements of the 60's; a messianic figure clad in white, and many others. In all these cases, as with most personal glamours, clothing has played a large part in defining and fixing the glamour, though it is not to be supposed that this constituted the only element in their creation. A glamour is a gestalt, a totality that impresses some definite concept of you on those you meet. How then did I create these glamours?
Well let us take for an example my white clad messianic projection. This started with an idea that it would be fun to present a rather messianic image (plus the vague notion that I might put it to some profitable use at an unspecified future date). The first thing that presented itself to me was the idea of myself clad in white, this being arrived at by a rather at the time fumbling application of a technique described in a later essay. To simply have dressed in white would not however been enough, instead I allowed the mental image of myself to become mildly obsessive, dwelling upon it in occasional periods before sleep and adding refinements as they presented themselves. Then I would proceed to obtain those things whether physical articles or mannerisms, or to discard those which no longer fitted the image. In every case I was guided by the general intuitive sense of rightness that an alteration presented. Success finally came when an individual unprompted, and without knowing of the experiment, commented on how I looked and appeared almost Christ like. It is to be noted that in using a glamour such as this you have to take the rough with the smooth, appearing to others as pure and unapproachable, may make them to some extent treat you well but it ruins your sex life. Also there is always an accompanying risk of obsession, i.e. you start to believe that the image you are projecting is the "real" you, and there may be some feedback from the associations of the target image. The 30's intellectual for example engendered the depression of 30's existence even as it made me appear radical and committed and had to be quickly dropped.
Let us analyse what I was doing in the above instances. Firstly I started with a seed image, in this case dressing in white, (please note this is NOT the same as the seed referred to in the essay on "Alchemy, Creativity, and Magick"3) and proceeded to add to and modify it in line with my intention. This was accomplished by the repetition of workings at the edge of sleep. Each modification was tested for it's feeling of "rightness" and then was incorporated into the glamour. The whole glamour existed as a visualised image of myself similar to a magickal personality and it was this that was worked on before the glamour was given tangible form. In other words I fulfilled the formula of taking a starting image and then altering it recursively using at each stage the test of the images resonance with my symbolic cultural language as a test for how to proceed. Thus we may give the formula for creating any glamour as follows:
So now we can use the cultural language for the creation of glamours. Can we then do other things with it? Can we for example use it in it's own sphere, can we add as it were new phrases to the language?
In many ways magickal currents can be seen as glamours writ large. They are vast complexes of ideas and images that embed themselves in the cultural and planetary psyches. Where they differ from glamours is that they are total rather than partial, that is to say that they are not attempts to get individuals to perceive one particular thing in a given way, rather they get the person that is aligned with them to view everything in a particular way. The art of aeonics is the art of developing and transmitting magickal currents within the mass psyche so as to cause changes in mass population behaviour and perception. This can be achieved by both crude psychological techniques and by powerful ritual. In practice both techniques are employed. There are obvious problems with aeonic techniques, as the magickian assisting in the evolution and dissemination of a current themselves participates in that current it is difficult to say whether any action they perform is altering the current or is simply an expression of a change in the current. In practice it is always better to assume the latter so as to prevent inflation of the ego. Having now said that you should assume that what I am about to talk about cannot be done I had better tell you how to do (or not do?) it.
Suppose I wish to place a new idea in the collective psyche, how can I do it? Well firstly in essence it is not a new idea after all it exists in me and I participate in the levels of collective psyche. Rather it is an idea whose time has not yet come and I wish to hasten its arrival. Then what I must do is to find a way to link it into the current dialect of the cultural language in the same way as I did for a glamour. At this point though I am in far greater danger, being at risk both of obsession by the idea and at risk of delusions of grandeur. Assuming that I survive the process with my sanity intact then I proceed to disseminate my product. I do this by enacting rituals that embody the product, it usually contains a central myth somewhere, by writing about it, talking about it, living it (cautiously), and by trying to persuade everyone I know to do the same. (Has the process turned me into an awful bore by this point? If so then I've probably succumbed to obsession).
The best example of the process of transmitting new currents into the mass psyche that I can find is Dion Fortune's novel Moon Magic. It is interesting to note that as well as the book describing a working to create such an effect; the book itself might be seen as composing such a working. Of course here it is just as likely that Fortune was manifesting the emergent new attitude towards male, female, sexual polarity that was current at the time of the books writing. A more common example of how divination and enchantment become hopelessly confused in this type of work is given by the way in which 5 or 6 people in different places can all come up with the same good idea simultaneously. Who then can say who spawned the new idea and who merely picked it up, any, all, or none of the apparent creators?
I hope I have provided the reader with a good understanding of how recursive processes can be employed to gain maximal benefit from the general symbolic language of a culture in which one is immersed. I will leave you with what may be considered a small exercise for the reader. It is a seed phrase which someone muttered to me recently and which I feel has sufficient resonance with our cultural language to be of use. Make from it what you will. The phrase is "The fields of fire and the whispering table."
Editor's notes
3: May appear here at a later date.
© John Tindsley; used with permission. HTML coding by Frater T.S. for Nu Isis Working Group.