Next Wednesday we will continue our conversation about Steve Wilson’s Chaos Ritual. Some perverse whim has bidden us to go backward and discuss the beginning of the book, pages 19-67.
April 26th: Chaos Ritual
At the suggestion of our faithful AVDIERVNT, this week we will discuss Steve Wilson’s Chaos Ritual. Last week Wilson was characterized as “The one chaos magician who is not a wimp about spirits.” We will focus on the book’s last section, “The Chaoetia,” pages 115-137.
April 19th: The Psychonaut Field Manual
This week, Frater/Soror Hermafetes recommends The Psychonaut Field Manual by Arch-Traitor Bluefluke. (What’s in a name?)
We will discuss pages 15-16 and 20-44. Additional forays into other parts of the book are welcome.
April 12th: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley
This week we’ll be reading a few selections from Crowley’s infamous Autohagiography, touching upon his fraught relationship with Liber AL vel Legis.
Please read pages (by number printed on page): 372-373; 393-404; 408-409; 541; 595-601
Further: a Facebook discussion of great relevance to our topic.
April 5: Liber AL vel Legis
Ok, ok! This week we’re discussing Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law! By popular demand!
Here’s the book on Sacred Texts: https://www.sacred-texts.com/oto/engccxx.htm
Here’s the best scan of the manuscript I’ve ever seen – in accord with the demands of the book’s author(s): Behold!
March 29: Hecate’s Fountain
This week we return to Kenneth Grant, with impressive and bizarre magical anecdotes from Hecate’s Fountain. We will discuss the foreword and the first two chapters – from the beginning of the book through page 20.
March 22nd: Advanced Magick for Beginners
Another Saint Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Friday suggestion this week: Alan Chapman’s Advanced Magick for Beginners, pages 9-22 and pages 29-49.
Other recommended sections (optional):
Pages 57-63 and 89-105 (“What’s in a Name,” “The Dirty F-Word” and “God Bothering”) if you want some spicy takes about magical names and oaths, working with spirits, gods, and demons, some choice conspiracy theories about mystic experiences in Christianity, and how to go about Regular Wizard Shit™ like creating familiars and getting possessed.
or
Pages 107-119 and then 135-149 (“One Portion of Death, Please,” “Hover Boards and Silver Lycra” and “Abseiling”) for Chapman’s views on contacting your Holy Guardian Angel and (in the opinion of your Saint) a couple of really beautiful and snarky meditations on finding your Will and initiation being a never-ending process.
Their Holiness offers the following commentary upon the text:
Advanced Magick for Beginners is Alan Chapman’s attempt to chronicle the Western tradition(s) of magick, and the introduction and bibliography cite texts that will be familiar to veteran Magical Bastards (Liber Null) as well as those Bastards more recently on-scene (The Invisibles.) Chapman is a Magus of the A.’.A.’., and his goal is to rescue the occult revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from what he perceives as “the rot of extreme postmodernism.”
Now, I’m just a simple country Saint Shut-the-Fuck-Up-Friday. I spent enough time in grad school that I feel an instinctive need to glove up before getting within 10 feet of the word “postmodern,” so I’ll say this:
I really, really enjoy Chapman’s sense of humor, warmth, and snark. Advanced Magick for Beginners is one of the more accessible texts of its ilk that I’ve found in my (admittedly limited!) course of study. Chapman’s paradigm for how to do magick is only 42 words long—I counted—so at least where brevity is concerned he’s got an advantage over Ida Benedetto. However, the text’s simplicity belies the profundity of attempting to put its ideas into practice.
March 15th: Patterns of Transformation
This week at the behest of Saint Shut-the-Fuck-up Friday, we will be reading Patterns of Transformation by Ida C. Benedetto.
It exists here as a website: https://patternsoftransformation.com
Their Holiness, in their infinite assiduity, has also created a printable version.
They have these comments to offer upon the text:
Magical Bastards has read a few different texts at this point that offer schemas and vocabulary to describe various aspects of magical practices. Patterns of Transformation is in a similar vein, but the taxonomies Benedetto articulates are ostensibly for secular ritual design. Your mileage may vary on whether this results in a watered-down schema or whether it provides a convenient tabula rasa on which to stamp your own serial numbers, godforms, ritual tools, etc.
My own work as a Humanist Celebrant has shown me that it can be difficult to convince a grab-bag of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics to fully give themselves over to an experience without at some point needing to go into extensive detail about the Entrails of Logistics that (may) result in the Sausage of Transcendence. Benedetto’s model has provided a pretty solid framework for those conversations over the past five or six years of my practice, and increasingly—while I am not yet certain whether I mean this cynically or earnestly—feels like a great way to persuade atheists into doing magic with intent if not comprehension (where “comprehension” means we both would describe what they’re doing as the M-word.)
March 8th: Theses Against Occultism
Next week, our Princess Dysnomia will have us read the “Theses Against Occultism” from Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia. And perhaps we’ll even enjoy them!
March 1st: Complete Book of Demonolatry
This week, at the suggestion of AVDIERVNT, we’ll be discussing the context-establishing chapters, pages 8-23 and pages 93-107, from S. Connolly’s Complete Book of Demonolatry. In addition, feel free to make a foray into some other part of the book and tell us about it. I personally cannot endorse its “History” sections.
This system – dare I call it a form of postmodern folk magic? – may appear cavalier in its appropriation of various methods to its own use, but it represents an important strain in the larger body of theistic Satanisms.