Rude Interruption

Imaginary polygons and dead sorcerers.

I’m still figuring out how I want to use this platform, so expect some inconsistency and trying things out. I think ‘Blazing Fire’ will be more like a magazine format, containing more substantial content and completed writing, and will eventually be the paid subscription tier at some point. And alongside that ‘Rude Interruption’ will remain the free tier for less content heavy bits and pieces, such as reposts of threads I’ve already written on twitter, reviews, etc. So here is my effort at something in that format.

Think of a Green Triangle

This is a repost of something I wrote on twitter a couple of weeks ago trying to challenge the common assertion that visualisation exercises are a fundamental, unavoidable cornerstone for establishing a magical practice. I spent years doing all those “imagine a green triangle in your mind’s eye” meditations when I was a western magic-leaning chaos magician, but I don’t honestly think that intersects with my later spirit-based practice whatsoever. Not sure that Protestant work ethic belligerent picturing of geometric shapes that gets passed from book to book is really the best method for cultivating visualisation either. Anyway, here’s the thread and some further commentary, which I thought of at the time but didn’t get into.

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I don't really like visualisation exercises in magic as it feels like putting the cart before the horse. It implicitly suggests that you're just making it up, rather than perceiving something subtle yet vividly real. Perception exercises might be a better reframing?

It's another alleged "pillar of magic" that people uncritically take on board, but I don't think pre-Golden Dawn grimoire magicians were doing a regimen of daily visualisation exercises before conjuring the Seven Sisters of Fairy or whatever. It's not really a historical practice.

And it's OK if you get something out of it, but we can be objective about where ideas come from and try to unpack their relative value without feeling like we're betraying the occult football team or occult fandom that we support. Magic benefits from being understood in context.

My own experience has been that "otherworldly perception" is something that develops organically through the process of interacting with spirits and other invisible terrain. You learn it on the job by doing it, and the more you move in this space, the better you start to get at it.

I think an emphasis on visualisation possibly situates you consciously in the driving seat of the process too much, and people falter at it because it's not a very organic method of interacting with any invisible terrain and comes with the built-in premise that you’re making it up.

I'm also not sure that the 19th century (and later) occultists who contributed to these exercises becoming embedded in the repertoire of popular occultism necessarily had the same aims in mind as many contemporary occultists who pitch this practice as fundamental to all magic.

So the issue for me is less about the practice itself - which can have value within its specific sphere - but about practices such as this being exported from their context and uncritically promoted as a baseline working necessity for ALL occult practice, which you can't do without.

Because that isn't really true - and we can point to many other cultural versions of magic that vividly deal in spirit but don't have anything equivalent to visualisation exercises. Yet still, it gets rolled out as this essential building block in all manner of different contexts.

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When I posted this, despite dedicating two-out-of-eight tweets to trying to assure defensive occultists that I’m not bashing the practice within its own specific sphere, so much as criticising the tendency for it to be promoted as if it were essential to every context of magic, I still got a few defensive occultists in my mentions.

One of the comments argued that visualisation is a useful tool for “manipulating energy, putting up shields, healing, grounding” - but that really just unfolds into further questions for me. What do you consider to be the energy that you are manipulating through visualisation? How do the shields work and what are they shielding you from? Is a visualisation method that occurs principally in your imagination really the best approach for grounding? And most pertinently, where would you say that the magic itself is located here? Are these outlined effects being driven by the visualisation itself or by something else that the visualisation assists?

I know this sort of dynamic is a frequent trope in popular magic, but I’ve never really been satisfied with the idea of magical effects being primarily driven by visualisation of those effects. It feels more akin to the sort of New Age ideas that you would find in things like The Secret or the Prosperity Gospel. If you just imagine a thing hard enough it will come to pass, and if it doesn’t, then you obviously weren’t visualising it sufficiently. Go back and concentrate on the green triangle.

I’ve never been able to buy into versions of magic like that. If I want to protect myself against something, I would want more in my corner than an imagined forcefield that someone has told me would function like a real forcefield on some level just because I am picturing it. If I’m trying to heal myself or someone else, then I can see how imagining the subject being healthy might be a supplementary component, but if your framing has the visualisation doing the heavy lifting here, it seems a little close to odious narratives where peoples’ sicknesses or misfortune are attributed to insufficient positive thinking.

In my own practice - the operative component of the magic is really not located in my ability to mentally visualise it happening, and that creative visualisation then becoming “real” as a result of this imaginal effort. Not even “energy work” behaves like that for me. I’m not really an “energy work” person, but I have some experience of it within my Pencack Silat and Tai Chi practices, and even there - it is not a process that is driven by visualisation. My experiences of Chi or Tenaga Dalam arise out of the movements and breathing exercises of those practices, and are very physical, embodied and multi-sensory. If there is a visual component at all, then the dynamic is again closer to what I experience in spirit work, and it’s more about becoming better at perceiving something that is subtly yet tangibly present as a result of the practice, rather than a dynamic where I’m vividly picturing something in my minds eye with my visualisation skills and thereby willing it into manifestation.

Lastly, I get that we all have different propensities, and visualisation might well come easier to me, as someone inclined towards drawing, than it does to other practitioners. Even in this circumstance though, I would advocate for a gentler and more organic approach to cultivating better visualisation. For instance, attending a weekly life-drawing class, and attempting to map what you see onto paper using a variety of art supplies, is likely going to build those skills with more depth and range than the sort of tedious visualisation homework that gets emphasised in certain books.

Jake Stratton Kent (RIP)

Fucks sake though. This was horrible news to receive this week. I only met Jake a couple of time in real life, but I used to talk with him all the time on Facebook, so it feels like I knew him a lot better than I really did. There was a period (which I would put at around 2012-17 or so) where the comments section under his FB posts was genuinely one of the best places you could find on the internet for lively discussion of magic.

The first time I met Jake was at a Scarlet Imprint event in Brighton where he was speaking, and I was doing a DJ set based on the sorts of records that I write about here. Despite it being Brighton, and Jake being an avowed Rocker, no switchblades or bicycle chains featured in our beachfront dialogue. I think we got along pretty quickly, with us both being working class anarcho-punk occultists at heart, and in our shared appreciation of rockabilly and psychobilly tunes.

This event, along with meeting Jake in person and getting myself a copy of his True Grimoire, were really game changers for me - and more than I realised at the time. I had thought I was probably done with “western occultism” altogether - and had entirely stepped away from it to focus on my interest in Vodou and other ATRs. Yet looking through his edition of Grimorium Verum in the following weeks - it occurred to me that this was the sort of magic that had originally spoke to me when I was a teenager getting whatever occult books I could find out of North Shields Library.

It had all seemed fragmentary and unworkable to me at the time. There wasn’t much in print, and I was reliant on the local library, high street and secondhand bookshops for my occult education. Yet it was these little fragments of spells, extracts from spirit catalogues, and evocative woodcut art - found in the sort of 1970s Encyclopedias of Witchcraft that I would routinely devour - that grabbed my imagination the most.

But since it was only broken shards and splinters of this magic scattered here and there, and not enough to assemble a whole practice upon, I eventually gravitated towards a Golden Dawn-derived practice, Thelema, and then chaos magic. This was magic that seemed more workable, accessible, less fragmentary, and seemingly something that more people did in the present day. In my head - like many people - I also conflated these things, because after all, this later mode of ritual magic did draw upon and incorporate some of the older grimoire material and reframe it according to its own narratives.

Looking at the complete text of Verum for the first time though - and hearing Jake and others speak on it in terms of a “Grimoire Revival” - I realised… hold up - this was the thing that had moved me towards magic to begin with, and there really does seem to be this whole other semi-forgotten version of magic portrayed in these manuscripts that sits beneath the later retelling and reversioning that has flooded the space for more than a century.

The more I looked into this, the more clearly I could see it. Jake’s work was a huge component of this, and I think his personality and online presence conjured some vectors of it into being, but it was also an ongoing culture-wide process of recovery and recapitulation of older magic that had been simmering for some time and was beginning to attain critical mass.

This unfolding process was perhaps in part assisted by these previously difficult to track down texts now being downloadable in seconds onto your phone in PDF format, as well as online communication greatly facilitating note-swapping and dialogue between people translating these works and implementing their magic all over the world. This seemed pretty ironic to me, as someone who had listened to countless “techno-pagans” in the 90s harping on about how the wand has now been replaced by the mobile phone, and trying to organize rituals in “cyberspace” - which at the time only really existed as pre-social media message boards. I never would have guessed that the most tangible impact of communications technology on occultism that I would see in my lifetime would be in the recovery of lost magic from centuries ago.

As well as practitioner translations of a wealth of occult manuscripts that Victorian occultists such as Mathers and Waite did not have access to, this Grimoire Revival also crossed several language barriers and included new practitioner translations of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Scandinavian grimoire texts, which had not previously been available in English language editions. Looked at all together and taken on its own terms, this seemed to present a window on magic that was quite unlike the 19th century lens that it had heretofore been popularly viewed through.

This new reappraisal of grimoire magic was also frequently in dialogue with practitioners of African Diaspora Traditions, where grimoire texts are also sometimes employed around the sorcerous edges of various traditions or have some overlap or entwined history. Le Dragon Rouge and Petit Albert are not unknown in Haitian Vodou and New Orleans Voodoo; Grimorium Verum and the Cyprianic grimoires have history with Brazilian Quimbanda; and editions of the grimoires published by L.W. Lauron DeLaurence factor in Jamaican Obeah. In all these instances, the traditions are not mixed, and the manuscripts are pretty much followed to the letter and taken in the spirit that they are written, versus the more modern tendency to decide that the “demons” are really aspects of your own psyche to be integrated, or some other distancing mechanism or reinterpretation.

The next time I met Jake was at another event that we were both booked to speak at, this time in Brooklyn at the occult bookshop Catland. The theme of the event was Old World and New World Conjure, and it attempted to trace these same lines and overlaps, featuring several speakers who had a foot in both worlds as practicing grimoire magicians as well as initiates in ATRs that also employed grimoires (and it also incongruously included me going on about various cemetery misadventures in South London to a likely perplexed audience of New Yorkers).

My abiding memory of that event though was the night before where I went round to the AirB&B where Jake was staying and had some drinks. We were drinking some superb caipirinhas that had been made by the grimoire magician Julio Cesar Ody (author of the book Magister Officiorum) but there were no glasses in this AirB&B, just all these cracked and chipped mugs with missing handles. I sincerely wish that had not been the last time I would get to have a drink with Jake and chat about magic, but that’s a nice memory to have of Jake all the same I think. Discussing the intricacies of grimoire magic with him while drinking excellent cocktails out of chipped mugs in Brooklyn.

Spell: Unsolicited Decay Pics

I started my current @spaceweather9 twitter account in 2018, and this suggestion for something that can be done with unwanted photography of penises sent by horrible men remains far and away the tweet that has received the most engagement and retweets since then. I’ll probably include a regular spells section in this newsletter so this seemed like a good place to start.

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Why do men still send dick pics when they know they can be printed out and put inside a hollowed out courgette (zuchini) with crushed insects, dog shit, rotting meat & alum powder, and then buried under a poisonous tree in the cemetery while reading psalm 37:2. It makes no sense.

Events

Crossing into Spirit: A Bootcamp for Espiritismo Cruzado

I think there is still time to register for Tata Eoghan Ballard's four week mini-course on Espiritismo Cruzado, which I would highly recommend to anyone interested in ancestor practices or spirit work. The course is largely asynchronous and consists of recorded lectures, text components and online interactions with both the instructor and other students. It includes an in-depth history of Cuban Espiritismo Cruzado, and its relation to other Espiritismos and religions; information on the structure and pantheon of Espiritismo Cruzado; how to set up a boveda and begin a practice; and strategies for cultivating ongoing spiritual development and mediumship within the tradition. The course is priced at $250 and you need to contact Eoghan to register via his Facebook page here.

Exploring the Oracle: An Introduction to the I Ching

Interintellect are hosting a salon by Dan Lowe on the I Ching on Saturday, 4 February, looking at the history of the text and its practical application in your life. Here’s the blurb:

The I Ching (or Yi Jing) is one of the world’s oldest books, dating back to Bronze Age China (over 3000 years ago). The I Ching is not just a text to be read, but one to be lived. It’s a book of divination – a text that people can use as a source of wisdom and practical advice about their daily lives. Alongside its cultural significance in East Asia, the I Ching has been a source of fascination for Carl Jung, Herman Hesse, John Cage, and many other intellectuals and creators. In this salon, Dan will give the historical background of the I Ching, its underlying philosophy, explain the language and symbolism, and demonstrate its use, as well as opening a discussion on how to best use the book today.

The two-hour interactive salon is priced at $10 and the page to register is here.

You can also listen to Dan speaking on the life and ideas of Wilhelm Reich on the What Magic is This podcast here.

Tune: Point & Kill

As news reports from Tory Britain increasingly start to read like the Scouring of the Shire, this collision of UK Grime and Afrobeat is like a medicine countering these visions of the blasted gammon wasteland and reminding me how London still generates amazing music out of its cultural overlaps, despite certain parties trying to turn the entire UK cultural space over to ghastly floppy-haired posh boys for the past decade.