Pieces of Eight: Chaos Magic Essays and Enchantments

by Gordon White

there is no vision quite so monolithic as that of the Facebook newsfeed. We thought that replacing the singular, authoritative voice of the twentieth century newscaster with the digitally-enabled vox populi of the internet would forever change the narrative. All it did was ruin the spelling.

the practice and goal of magic is the building (rediscovery?) of metaphoric pan-dimensional sense organs that allow you to perceive and participate in a much larger world: A world you gradually come to consider home. A world of wonders. A ‘true’ magic circle is the growing of ears to hear the stars and voices to speak the language of the dead. It is building nerve endings that let you caress the spines of demons. It is opening eyes that can see angels dancing between subatomic particles. It is having a portable research lab and postal address in this world and the next. Divination, enchantment, malefica, prayer. These all blur into the right action in the opportune moment.

Dark energy and dark matter are placeholder ideas that violate physicists’ own laws about conservation of energy; around 80% of theoretical physics is based on string theory that yields no observable or testable results; distant observations of changes in redshift don’t match the purported timelines of the Big Bang; and –in a supreme violation of Ockham’s Razor- quadrillions of universes are invented out of thin air to banish the very possibility that subatomic particles only appear when we look at them.

The Big Bang hypothesis itself was first proposed by a Catholic priest, George Lemaître, which he described as ‘a Creation-like event’, specifically referencing previous myths of the Cosmic Egg. The Pope at the time went on to declare he had ‘proved’ Catholicism. But even this ‘scientific’ hypothesis did not last long before the mathematics had to be fudged to get the priest-created article of faith to ‘work’: in 1979, it was suggested that the universe underwent a period of exponential growth known as ‘inflation’ before slowing back down to its apparent, currently expanding state. The physics behind how this might work are entirely unknown because –stay with me now- they violate everything we do know about physics.

science asks “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” That miracle is the instantaneous arrival of all the laws of nature and all the matter and energy in the universe, appearing out of nowhere at the moment of the Big ...

Science in the twentieth century is largely the story of stealing ideas that may have some strategic military value and whisking them away into black projects where they are then fed on unlimited funding for decades, the results of which occasionally show in up in the real world as buildings turning to dust mid-air, gnomic pronouncements from Russian prime ministers, planet-wide surveillance systems running off your own phone’s battery or Raytheon-branded flying saucers buzzing hiking groups in national parks. For the magician, competence is required not only in science’s theories or belief systems but also in its inextricably entwined politics. It is the only competing school of wizardry you need have any concern over.

The facts of science are real enough; so are the techniques that scientists use, and the technologies based on them. But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology.

Materialism, it must be understood, is a premise of science, not a finding. That premise is defended above all else. Science as a method of enquiry has been captured by this embarrassingly naïve belief system. It deserves better and so do we.

Particularly in physics, science’s fifty-year drift into the unscientific has recently reached a surreal apogee. String theory is widely considered ‘the only game in town’ when it comes to cosmology yet it has not made a single testable prediction about the universe. Ever. This has led some string theorists to suggest that if a theory is ‘elegant’ and ‘explanatory’ enough, it need not be tested experimentally! To put it another way, scientists’ science no longer needs to be scientific but you should still listen to them when they tell you what is true and what is not. And these are the guys telling us magic is irrational?

It used to be that magicians would play a defensive game against Scientific Materialism, scurrying away from the Sauron eye-beams of supposed Rationalism. We hid first with the priests, claiming that science only explains the physical while magic is of God. Then we hid in the truth of science’s adolescence: it had yet to explain magic. Then we hid in the mind, claiming ‘it’s just psychology’ as our cover. The time has come to play an offensive game. Turn and face these fools. Magic is real and Materialism is fraud. We must crush the material of Materialism into dust for our philtres and phylacteries. We must never cede the ground of truth to these clowns. NASA’s EmDrive violates the Second Law of Motion, nevertheless it is being built and the Second Law is still being taught. This is the kind of idiocy that stands opposed to us. You could knock it over with one breath, even if the mallet is far more satisfying.

Every wizard needs to build rather than rent a metaphysics. And such a metaphysics needs to not only improve the success of your practical enchantments but also allow you to interrogate reality in an increasingly sophisticated way. This is the prize beyond price held out at the end of chaos magic’s trademark method of belief shifting. One must goldilocks one’s way to the optimal, personal metaphysics. An understanding of genuine science is a cornerstone of this process.

The noble goal of unifying observations of the universe with an improved view of spirit’s role within it needs to be reinvigorated. It is only an accident of history that split these two camps, and one that favours Scientific Materialism a lot more than it deserves.

From [1], there is that which experiences, since experience entails an experiencer. A person’s experiences are private, in the sense that other people do not have direct access to them (under non-magical circumstances). Measurable electrochemical activity in a person’s nervous system correlates with the person’s private experiences. Nervous systems have the same essential nature -that is, they belong to the same ontological class- as the rest of the physical universe. After all, nervous systems are physical systems. They are composed of the same types of fundamental subatomic particles and force fields that make up the universe as a whole. We all inhabit the same universe, despite the different points-of-view from which each person observes it and the different ways in which each person interacts with it. The universe unfolds according to patterns and regularities independent of our personal volition. In other words, human beings cannot change the laws of nature by wishing them to be different. Or at least not commonly or in predictable ways. (Pro tip: Always leave the door open for a once-every-five-millennia appearance of a superhuman or demi-god.)

The reality of telepathy: Telepathy is not only regularly demonstrated, it is actually on the increase in the modern world as more and more people are using phones. More specifically verified instances of telepathy are on the increase. In previous centuries you would have no way of knowing if someone was writing you a letter at the very moment you thought of them. (Although there are dozens of famous accounts of letter telepathy, such as those experienced by Mark Twain.) Mentally seeing things separated from you by distance and/or time is both possible and commonly achieved. Again, these have been regularly and convincingly demonstrated under laboratory conditions. In the case of remote viewing, accuracy is improved when ‘feedback’ –which is the subsequent confirmation of the viewing target- is received. This needs to be modelled. NDEs and UFO phenomena have some sort of discrete reality: It is no longer worth anyone’s time to debate the ‘reality’ of these phenomena. Buy any would-be detractors a bottle of wine, sit them down in front of the internet and go out for the evening. As far as postulates go, the reality of these phenomena needs to be incorporated into a consciousness model, particularly as those who experience them very often also experience long-term paranormal or psi effects.

You are still left with the challenge of molecules having inner experiences except that this time it is saying that the complexity of their arrangement somehow magically creates them.

Our inability to consciously experience this distributed universal mind is likened to Dissociative Identity Disorder. This is a westernised version of an eastern Idealist perspective that the illusion of reality needs to be overcome with some sort of dissolution or enlightenment.