The Chaos Protocols: Magical Techniques for Navigating the New Economic Reality

by Gordon White

According to José Leitão, the devil’s capacity to intervene in people’s lives comes not from some inherent evil power, but from his great age.

Conjure then, for needs if must, but preferably for opportunity and quality of experience, but never merely for more of the same. Conjure not for wealth, but for the experiences that you would spend the wealth on if you had it. Any necessary wealth will then materialise as a side effect.53

The Devil at the Crossroads

Other Allies There is something quite crude about trying to fit overviews of gods into one or two chapters of occult books. If divine concepts could so easily be apprehended then there would be no need for occult books in the first place. It becomes even more difficult when attempting to convey some notion of Trickster beings or those that preside over High Strangeness and synchronicity. As such, the following beings are representative. Much can be gained from further study of any or all of them. Not everything you read about needs to end up on your altar. Anansi Our Lady of Fatima Manu Loki Rabbit

Always, always have a go-to propitiation for Fortune/Isis Fortuna/Tyche, etc.

Johns Hopkins University Press translation of the Orphic Hymns.55

If you want to get better at divination—and who doesn’t?—keep this in mind. Providing feedback is lifting barbells.

Secondly, contemporary magicians should consider what is known as “analytical overlay.”

Attempting interpretation during the precognitive part of a session leads to the imposition—the overlay—of the reader’s personal opinions of what are going on rather than the clearest possible view of a future event.

From personal experience cartomancy has an inbuilt capacity to short- circuit analytical overlay. As long as you merely look at the images on the cards as you turn them over and resist leaping to an interpretation until you have overturned them all, you largely avoid getting in your own way.

oblique strategies are nevertheless highly instructive for the improved performance of cartomancy, particularly for beginners. The general idea, so deliciously and repeatedly skewered in the 1991 film Slacker, is that randomised and typically counterintuitive suggestions can lead to breakthroughs in creative thinking’.

Consider an individual tarot reading to be a brainstorming session for one.

Often the layout or interpretation of the cards will suggest an approach that can unstick the magician regardless of whether the reading was accurate or not. In these situations, note the prediction nonetheless (for feedback, yeah?) but lend more credence to the unsticking suggestion that has just appeared in your mind.

Unless your life goal is to become the world’s most gifted psychic, what you actually want from a divination is not to envision your preferred outcome, but to actually get to it.

Astrology

astrologyzone.com,

Firstly, start a Google doc or similar that will be used for your monthly forecast. Over time you will end up with a reverse chronology of the year. Then make some notes under the following headings.

Cartomancy

Florence … a city that was famous for magic, cartomancy, and printing for centuries.)

#BucketList

a game based on medieval courtly life filled with pitfalls and deception, zero opportunity for upward mobility that isn’t assigned via destiny where you begin with absolutely nothing and hopefully end with nothing more than a good death more closely matches today’s economic situation than I think most of us would care to admit.

Calibration

Cartomancy

Nested Divination

In situations where a card spread—typically one thrown using your most-used set—surfaces a card that you know has a very specific meaning such as malicious office gossip or family health problems you can “jump” up or down into another oracle system that is better matched to the challenge.

In the modern world, whether you achieve your goals or not depends on how you navigate the intervening complexity between where you are and where you want to be.

The practical implications of this for magicians working principally via manipulation of their own consciousness is to put some effort into the aesthetics of your spellwork so as not to trigger an “ick” reaction from your unconscious.

Classic Sigil Construction

atavism

#NewWord

Shoaling and Probability

Right away you see how shoaling works in concert with divination: divine for the pitfalls and shoal sigils to nudge for beneficial probabilistic outcomes that avoid or skirt around them.

This is the life’s work of a chaos magician: fine-tuning probabilistic dials for fun and profit.

Robofish

in every shoal be sure to include a sigil for an event that is happening or is guaranteed to happen, such as “I eat spaghetti tonight” or “I am in my house.” This sigil is the robofish.

Sigil Activation

Find a being or beings in your preferred pantheon who are universally regarded for magical prowess. You do not need to select one based on rulership of your main goal; you need one who is all about the magic.

Odin, duh.

A Recommended Life

Consider what life was like for the wandering sorcerer during the collapse of the Roman empire or the Pembrokeshire cunning man during the industrial revolution and let them be your inspiration.

“big dreams start with small, unreasonable acts.”

For any of these unreasonable acts to appear palatable, something needs to break in the magician’s mind. It typically happens sometime after having that first inciting incident or initiation.

A defining characteristic of the most prominent magicians of fiction and reality is that they meddle. Dee, Crowley, Merlin, Gandalf, Morgan Le Fay, Bruno. Whatever the weather, they went out to remake the universe in a way that suited them better. We must do the same. Whatever the macroeconomic conditions, the magician must always heed the advice of Firefly’s Captain Mal Reynolds: aim to misbehave.

Be Brave, Not Reckless

Your advantage is knowledge, and no one can take that from you.

An object or person can be defined as fragile if it responds negatively to volatility.

The goal of the magician, particularly the chaos magician, is to position his or her life so that it responds positively to volatility rather than negatively.

Consider the following. You may think these strategies are a bit too extreme, a bit too risky, and decide that getting massively into debt to buy an inflation hedge you can live in on the outskirts of your home town is “more you.” You don’t want to be doing anything with all these risky strategies. The thing about how economies work is that not taking a position is still taking a position. By refusing to adjust your strategy from the recommended life offered to the baby boomers forty years ago, what you are saying is that you have every confidence in the system; the current challenges are just temporary, and someone will come and sort it all out for us. That strikes me as extremely risky, riskier than putting it all on black. Is toeing the line being brave or is it being reckless? You cannot duck risk. There are no civilians in a mind war.

If you are not taking risks, you are failing to find the opportunities you are looking for, you are denying yourself optionality.

Trial and error is the intelligence of chaos because your mistakes are information. The more of them you make, the more information you have to make the next round. Aim for as many mistakes as possible that cost you the least amount possible. Almost any situation you find yourself in can be improved and even turned around with a combination of persistence and increased information.

Consider instead multi-generational or multi-family ownership.

Learn about, grow, and eat your own food. No space is too small.

panacea

#NewWord

As Charles Hugh-Smith notes, tertiary education functions in an identical fashion to any other cartel: colleges maintain a monopoly on accreditation.71 There is no accountability for a poor product because you cannot buy it anywhere else.