Table Of ContentMagick on the Edge
Adventures in Experimental Magick
Editor: Taylor Ellwood
Stafford, England
Magick on the Edge: Adventures in Experimental Magick
Edited by Taylor Ellwood
© 2007 First edition
Smashwords edition 2010
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Why do You Practice Magic, Anyway?
Experimentation as a Magical Path
The Butterfly Effect
Out Here on the Edge, We're Ready to Jump
Evoking Lupa
Quantum Selves
Beyond the Sigil
Memetic Infection and the Viral Language
The NLP Magician
Emerging from the Age of the Chalice and the Wand
What is Cyberspace?
Fractal Meditations
Elemental Workings for Personal Balance
Constructing Super-Sigils
Fifteen Minute Magick
Hillbilly Tantra
More than Skin Deep
Experiments in Dynamic Body Magick
Have Mind, Will Change
Psychological Shapeshifting
Not a Bogus Pile of Nails
The Making of Metaphysical Kinship
Sliding Down the Face of the Ego Complex
Biography
Introduction
Why Do You Practice Magic, Anyway?
Taylor Ellwood
I was once asked by a reviewer, (who billed himself as an “occult investigator”), the
question of why he should do ritual magic. The problem was that he had reviewed Pop
Culture Magick and had made some valid arguments, but he hadn’t done any of the
exercises. I argued that for his review to be completely valid, he should actually try the
exercises and get some experiences with the concepts, instead of just reading the book.
His question in response to my critique was this: Why should he do ritual magic? Now,
first off I wouldn’t even typify my approach to pop culture magic as ritual magic, though
it can draw on some aspects of ritual. Perhaps I should have asked him, in turn, how he
defines ritual magic, but instead I focused on trying to answer his question.
My answer to him, one that he had heard many times, was that the experience of doing
magic was essential to understanding what magic is. But for him, it still didn’t answer the
question of why he should do “ritual” magic. In the end his question boiled down to what
if doing magic didn’t work, what it if was a distraction, in a life full of other distractions?
What benefits did doing magic confer on people…why did they do it, in a life full of
distractions?
My answer to him was twofold in this case. Whether it’s “ritual” magic or some other
form of magic, people practice it for a variety of reasons, and often it’s personal. For
some people, practicing magic is an avenue toward personal gain, toward manifesting
those results that make everyday life easier. For some people, magic is a spiritual path,
whether it’s used for spiritual discipline or for the reassuring contact with Deity. And for
some people (including myself) the thrill of experimentation is why magic is practiced.
Ultimately, the reason why any person practices magic is because s/he wants to and
finds some benefit in the practice of it, whether that benefit is spiritual, material,
experimental or all of the above, or another reason all together. The choice to practice
magic, the motivation behind it, also isn’t static. It changes. I initially got into magic
because I was unsatisfied with my life and wanted answers and the big guy in the sky
wasn’t supplying any. I wanted satisfaction. Later, my reason for practicing changed
toward the more practical. I was tired of suffering from manic depression. My family has
a genetic predisposition and I had dealt with depression to varying degrees for the
majority of my life. I wanted to change that. I wanted to be free of being depressed, and
so I worked on researching and developing a magical technique that would allow me to
change the electrochemistry of my brain.
Even after I was successful with that operation, my reasons for doing magic changed. I
wanted to know more about Quabala and ceremonial magic; later I wanted to explore
chaos magic. Finally I came across what motivates me currently: I wanted to experiment
with magic, push the edges past what other people had done, and see what I could come
up with that was innovative and new for other people to use. I would argue that every
person’s reason for doing magic shifts as each person changes and matures, has
experiences and learns from them.
My second answer was short and flippant. Sometimes to answer your doubts and your
“what ifs”, you just have to go out and get some experience. Sometimes what other
people tell you magic is and what it does cannot even begin to quantify the experience of
actually doing it. And the reason, again, is because each person has different reasons for
doing magic. Ultimately the “what ifs” about magic will never be answered if you never
do anything. You may end up finding it is a distraction, but the question that arises then is
whether you learned something from actually doing magic. The answer is that even if you
learned it was just another distraction, you learned something. And if the magic that you
did failed, well now is the time to question why it failed and what you need to do to
change your technique to manifest the results. And of course, I’ll also say that magic is
subtle. Just because loud fireworks don’t go off, doesn’t mean magic isn’t manifesting.
It’s often when the results are unlooked-for and forgotten that magic manifests. So then,
the question is whether doing magic is even a distraction. In the end, the answer is it all
depends on what you take out of it.
Magic isn’t about a universal truth. It’s about how a magician navigates reality, makes
sense of it, and otherwise deals with it through whatever tools and technology are
available to him/her. Magic doesn’t necessarily make life less distracting, but it does give
you a lot of experiences that you’ll likely not find somewhere else. And the only way to
understand magic, to investigate it, is in the end to actually do it and see what happens.
No results are guaranteed, and magic takes hard work, lots of discipline, and persistent
practice. However, in the end why you or anyone else does it is because the benefits of
magic are not written in stone. They are found through the work, through the persistence
you choose to apply to magic; those same benefits are fluid and adaptable to whatever
situation you find yourself in. The benefits are also found through innovation and
creativity. The willingness to push the edge, to do something new, and to test your limits
is also essential to developing a relationship with magic.
Still, even if I have answered the question as to why a person who investigates the
occult should do magic, I haven’t necessarily explained why experimental magic is so
important. And from both outside the community (via this “occult investigator”) and
from within the community I have been critiqued for daring to do pop culture magic.
What are the benefits of doing pop culture magic, space/time magic, or inner alchemy, or
however many other experimental approaches someone comes up with? What if you can
use more traditional forms of magic that get results every time? There’s a saying that
goes, “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” I’ve been told I’m reinventing the wheel by choosing
to come up with “new” approaches to magic. And if all of my work really is a
“reinventing of the wheel”, then what’s the point? For that matter, what’s the benefit of
having these other writers write about their experimental approaches to magic? After all,
all they’re really doing is reinventing a wheel, fixing something that ain’t broke, right?
Wrong. The experimentation that occurs in magic is very valuable and needed. Many
people have the notion that occultism represents a radical view of reality, which it can.
But occultism also has its conservatism; with a focus on only doing what Aleister
Crowley did or following a “spellbook” to the T, and never really coming up with
anything new. This is consequently why I have justified time and again (even as I am
now) my approaches to magic. It’s not enough to simply tell a person about those
approaches, especially when you have a strong current toward conservatism within
occultism. Unfortunately, to get people to consider new approaches to magic you must
also being able to explain why using those approaches are justified. To change the
discourse of occultism, the social conventions which bind it, involves being able to
address the arguments of the conservatives (and I imagine some of you are shuddering at
the concept that conservatism can be associated with occultism). In doing so, you would
also explain the benefit of actually trying out a new approach to magic. Then you can
show your techniques to people, and they might actually consider implementing those
techniques into their magical lives.
I was once told, by a very dear friend of mine, advice that he was given by another
magician: “Two weeks of meditation is more valuable than five books you could read.” I
thought over this advice carefully, reflecting as well that I meditate every day and that (at
the time) I rarely got to read the actual books any more due to academic and writing
obligations. And yet something struck me as odd about that bit of advice. I could see how
two weeks of meditation could be useful, but I didn’t see the need to compare those two
weeks to the five books. Did there even need to be such a conflict, a duality? The
implications of that question can lead you to two very different answers, depending on
how you felt the situation ought to be defined.
If you defined it as a versus situation, which is what is overtly implied in the sentence
above, then you really end up losing out in the end. Sure, meditation is great as a
discipline tool and you’ll go some places, but without external experiences and reception
of new ideas all you are really committing yourself to is a form of mental masturbation.
After a while, doing the same meditation to get a state of no-mind doesn’t get you very
far in terms of achieving anything beyond a delusional sense of enlightenment. This is
ultimately suspect, especially if all you’re doing is meditating, day in and day out,
without really going out and having other experiences.
However, if you define the situation differently and change the sentence, then the
advice is rather good. So let’s change the sentence, and the meaning invested into it:
“Two weeks of meditation is valuable, especially when you add five books that you could
read into the mix.” You could also add five new experiences into the mix, or anything
else to the definition that you like. The point here, though, is that those five books
represent something. They represent new experiences, concepts, and ideas that you didn’t
have before. But to get those experiences you have to do more than read the books. You
have to actively apply the concepts. In other words, you need to do magic. With those
new experiences, concepts, and ideas comes new projects with your meditation. Instead
of focusing on reaching no-mind, you’re trying out a pathworking exercise to liberate
your inner self, or you’re getting to know your totem spirits, or even working with neuro-
linguistic programming to reprogram how you approach the world. By combining those
five books, experiences, etc. with the meditation, you can get far more out of all of them,
than by artificially dividing the meditation from the books. It’s no longer mental
masturbation, but instead there is a focus and a process to manifest reality into existence.
The books are complements to, or augmentations of, the meditation, and yet they provide
new ideas to explore.
The point, in the end, is that how you choose to approach magic (or anything else)
determines what you get out of the experience. Perhaps just two weeks of meditation is
enough for some people. The key is being open to all perspectives, including just two
weeks of meditation without five books and then two weeks of meditation, whilst reading
five books. Keep a journal of the experiences of the two periods and then decide which
experience you got the most out of.
Being open to new perspectives and experiences, but also rigorously testing them is
essential to doing experimental magic. In a lot of the latest literature on the occult, there
is a new tendency to advocate just “doing” magic. It is a postmodern approach that
essentially stresses that the process doesn’t matter as long as you get the result you want
(Morrison 2003, Dunn 2005). Whether magic works or not (though ideally it should) this
attitude essentially advocates ignorance on the part of the magician. And ignorance does
not ultimately lead to ease of magic practice. I find it extremely ironic that writers now
advocate this approach of just doing magic, especially as they are still writing books on
magical techniques and practices. It seems odd that such books would be written, if
anyone can just go out and do magic. Of course, in the end, the reason why such books,
such technical manuals on magic, are written is so that the writer can explain how and
why magic works and how to go about doing it effectively. The advocacy of just doing
magic is contradicted by the very writing of a book: to sell that book to people who
seemingly can’t go out and do magic without the words of advice that the author has
written.
The problem with such a view being advocated is that in the end it does little to help a
magician. And yet the reason for this view, I suspect, lies in the probable reality that the
author has begun to take magic for granted, assuming that it will always work and that
you don’t need to know HOW to do it. The knowledge has become unconscious for the
magician, something which is in the back of the mind, and yet as we all know the
subconscious does like to play tricks. Can we ever take magic for granted so easily as to
just do it, without understanding the fundamental dynamics involved?
Magic can be playful and fun, but it also requires dedication and discipline. A balance
between playfulness and discipline is essential. While anyone can get a result, not just
any person is going to necessarily have some of the experiences that s/he would
otherwise have by taking an approach to magic that balances the intuition with discipline.
We learn to rely on our intuition to see how to make changes, to have fun with magic; but
we rely in turn on discipline to focus the intent and achieve experiences that enrich our
lives. In other words, being curious as to why magic works is perhaps the best attitude
you can take toward magic, particularly experimental magic.
Experimental magic isn’t about getting a result one time, but instead being able to
replicate the result and then share the technique with other people so that they can use it
as well. Nor is it about just doing magic, without understanding the underlying process at
work. More importantly, experimental magic is about knowing how to do what you’re
doing, understanding the fundamental dynamic process that is occurring. It’s not enough
to just experiment with no understanding of what’s occurring. The problem with not
knowing how your approach works is that if you don’t know how something works, how
will you effectively do the work? Applied magic needs methodology and structure and all
of that is provided by learning how magic works. You learn that through experience, and
through mistakes, and also from reading and studying and agreeing or disagreeing with
what it is your reading and studying. Sure, you can wank off to a sigil and you might get
results (Morrison 2003), but if you actually know the process underlying the work (i.e.
how something is done), you’ll definitely get results. It’s a sloppy magician who can’t
explain how his/her experiments work so others can replicate those experiments. But it’s
not enough either to record the results. Results are only signs, but are not the roads; roads
are the processes that bring you to those signs. The magician can’t just record the results;
s/he must also record the processes–the practice–which creates the circumstance that
enables the result to happen. And to do that, you need to know how you did what you did;
in other words, how the process works. This is not theorizing, but actually is the full
dynamic of applied magic.
So why do experimental magic? What is the benefit of doing it? The answer is to
challenge yourself, to challenge everything you were and could be, and of course
everything magic is, was, and could be. Another reason is to expand the disciplines of
magic, providing new forums for thoughts, ideas and practices, as well as challenging
what other people do. Yet another reason, avoiding the TRUE reinvention of the wheel, is
summed up as follows:
Magicians forget that variation and deviation from repetitive measures are what provide
consciousness with new avenues to explore. Experimentation is a positive and productive
means for encouraging the mind and spirit to develop strong attributes of adaptability. If
you always take the same route walking somewhere, how will you learn about the rest of
your surrounds; the part of you that extends beyond your routine? How will you learn
about the things you have not yet seen? Magicians know that it is foolish to assume that
the limits of our universe are within our personal horizon of experience; in fact, many
agree that it’s foolish to postulate that there are limits at all, and will agree that their
reasons for pursuing a spiritual path are really to discover those hidden places around and
inside us all. (Fabbro 2006, p. 140)
And the final reason to do it is because, until you do something, you’ll never know what
you could really do. Will you walk in the footsteps of others, doing what they did and
only that? Or will you learn from them, but then move on and challenge everything
you’ve held sacred to find your own limits and push past them?
There is an unfortunate tendency in the occult to never really critique what other
people have done. It is thought, perhaps, that if you critique the spiritual paths of others
you are directly attacking the person. This, in fact, is quite wrong. A critique is not an
attack on the person, but is a dialogue with the practices the person is using. A critique is
focused on analyzing why something does or doesn’t work, with the goal being to
improve the process and efficiency of the magic a person does. When I critique other
approaches, it is not to attack the individual, but rather to highlight what I feel is
ultimately a problematic and sloppy approach to magic, namely, as an example, the idea
that you don’t really need to know how to do magic, but should just go ahead and do it.
In the end, it’s my opinion and I’m sure others have and will someday critique some of
my own work, though if I can I will respond to their critiques, in the interest of dialogue,
improving my own understanding of magic and improving the efficacy of magic overall.
Part of successful experimentation isn’t just going and doing magic randomly, though.
Instead what makes or breaks experimentation is the ability to find an issue: a problem
that hasn’t been solved. Sometimes this problem is found in the work of others, in the
“gap” that the other magician hasn’t addressed effectively and sometimes it is found in
your own personal situation or in the world at large. Wherever you find the gap,
remember that the critique, the raising of awareness is not an attack, but rather an
explanation for why you’ve chosen to work and write about your particular approach to
magic. It is also your explanation of how and why it will benefit others to try this
approach to magic. Without explaining the how and the why, most people won’t care and
will just look at you as if you’re a crazy flake. That may not matter to you, but speaking
for myself, I like sharing my ideas and getting people to experiment with them. And to
me, it’s the highest compliment when a person critiques my own methods and offers
his/her own version on how it could be done better. I learn from people such as them, and
they honor me greatly by teaching me. Still as author Venecia Rauls once told me,
“There‘s a fine line between answering criticism and arguing with your critics as well as
between useful exposition and needless justification. Define, don’t defend. Explain,
don’t excuse.”
One final aspect to touch on with experimental magic, is that it’s not limited to a
specific group or category of magician. The experimental magician is any magician
who’s testing the limits, testing the boundaries, pushing magic in new directions instead
of settling for following the footsteps of someone else. The experimenter is anyone who’s
willing to test the limits and go beyond those limits. And how we go further is to either
extend the work of other magicians in new directions or come up with original
approaches to magical practice. Either way we are not reinventing the wheel, so much as
providing a new direction to go in. It is my hope that through the broad representation of
different magicians published in this anthology, you will find inspiration to do some
experimenting of your own.
The answer for why you do anything is your own answer, one you find through time
and trial, through experience, and willingness to learn. Magic is not a distraction, but
instead is a focus. I end this introduction with something Franz Bardon once said:
Magic is the most difficult knowledge on Earth, which must not only be mastered in
theory, but above all in practice. It is easier by far and much more possible to gain
intellectual knowledge than to become a true magician (2001, p. 352).
The practice of magic demands far more than just intellectual theorizing. It demands the
focus of a person, the perseverance to follow through on a path of your choice, and the
willingness to be responsible for the consequences for your actions. Magic demands that
if you want to get something out of it, you must be willing to put something into it. And
so it is true with experimental magic. To truly get something out of magic, you make
your own style of magic, put your soul into it and consequently reap from it what you
have manifested. Nothing less will do.
Works Cited
Bardon, Franz. (2001). Initiation into hermetics. Salt Lake City: Merkur Publishing, Inc.
Dunn, Patrick. (2005). Postmodern magic. St. Paul: Llewellyn Publications.
Fabbro, Angelina. (2006). Your lucky hand. In Jason Louv (ed.). Generation Hex. New
York: Disinformation ltd.
Morrison, Grant. (2003). Pop! magic. In Richard Metzger (ed.). Book of lies: The
disinformation guide to magic. New York: Disinformation ltd.
Bridging the Gap
The Importance of Experimentation
Experimentation as a Magical Path
Nick Farrell
There is a mistaken belief that somewhere there exists a body of teaching that will give
you all the answers to everything you want to know about the universe. This teaching is
often believed to exist in a magical school, a long lost book, or in some astral university. I
have met countless occultists who overtly or covertly believe this myth. Maybe it comes
with the romantic character that the esoteric world seems to attract.
However, it encourages a literalness among occultists, who usually fall into a pattern
of studying various magic systems too hard with the sole aim of pronouncing them
“correct” or “true.” The numbers of pontificators stating that Aleister Crowley meant
this, or you need to wave a wand in this direction to be accurate are legion. Then you
have the polar opposite of these types, who tell you that “intent is everything”. You don’t
need all that intellectual baggage; just do a simple ritual and you will uncover a secret
angel that will teach you how to manufacture strawberry jam.
And now at right angles
I was a fundamentalist Christian. I am not proud of that fact. I took the tablets and got
better. To be fair I was only a kid. A good evangelist managed to convince me that I was
responsible for the painful death of a man who would have been my friend. They told me
that, although he was dead, this bloke still wanted to be my friend. I was a bit short on
friends at the time and I felt really sorry for crucifying this Jesus in the first place. I was
10 years old.
For the next seven years I was one of the best Christians you could find. I read my
bible and studied it hard. I attended lots of youth camps, prayed a lot and above all did
what I was told.
Doing what you were told was really important. The happiest fundamentalists are
those who listen to what they are told, even when it was contradictory. One of my
girlfriend’s mums was like that. She warned me that all rock musicians took drugs and
worshipped Satan. It must be true, her pastor told her so.
But I wasn’t happy. The reason was that I had studied the Bible and liked to ask
questions. I asked one preacher: “The Bible does not mention premarital sex, yet you
seem to think it is wrong. Why do you think the world of God doesn’t mention such an
important thing?”
His reply was that the Bible mentioned fornication, but I was 16 and was in love; I
didn’t want to fornicate, I wanted to “make love”.
Other questions that started to come up were answered by the phrase, “you should not
test God.” So finally when I was 17, it was time to test God. I was surprised to find out
that he was very good about it. We chatted. I said I wanted to find him. Not in this
Christian world of rules, but inside something that was a little closer to who I was. He
said fine, there was nothing to forgive and get to it.
There was no fundamentalist way you could approach God.
It is all hidden
Find yourself an occult teacher. They will give you the rules, the teaching, and all the
secret wisdom which has been handed down since Adam cleaned his toenails in the
Garden of Eden. Right?
It took me a long time to realize that a lot of esoteric orders are similar to
fundamentalist churches. They might be a little more liberal, but generally there is a
belief that anything that proceedeth from the teacher or guru, comes from the mouth of
God itself.
If you hang around such groups long enough, soaking up teaching like a sponge, you
reach a certain point where it is not enough. I sat at the feet of so many teachers that I had
their shoelaces symbolically embossed in my bottom, but I was still no closer to God.
However, I did learn a lot of information.
Then it isn’t
The secret to making all this teaching real is to do it; to perform rituals, rather than just
talking about it. This seems fairly obvious, but a lot of schools frown on their students
going off and playing with Magic. The word “dangerous” is often bandied about with
special bandy bats until the student reverts back to pontificating with the rest of the
students. One person in my school had a teacher who was terrified of him performing the
lesser banishing ritual of the pentagram, because she was karmically responsible for any
fall out.
Well I played with the various systems and I got some experience. I also had my share
of accidents and pain. But I worked out how to do ritual.
And then it hides again
You reach a plateau, which is like a Plato, in that it usually involves the death of your
most important teacher. My teacher didn’t die, but I haven’t heard from him for a while,
so he might well have. I had reached the point where my teaching, ritual and everything
else had leveled and there was no where else to go. My teacher and I had a disagreement
and parted ways.
A plateau followed.
Sure, I could do all sorts of rituals, chat to all sorts of inner plane beings, get an Angel
to physical manifestation, but it was not enough.
It took a while, but I realized that at some point you need to have your own beliefs,
your own system to make occultism work. Heresy? Yep, sort of; it flies in the face of this
Secret Mystery tradition that everyone speaks of.
What is the Secret Tradition?
I was taught that there was a secret magical tradition that went back to the dawn of time.
This tradition runs parallel to ordinary religion and sometimes becomes public. In
Ancient Greece and Thrace there was a mystery tradition and they told the Egyptians that
their religion was a mystery tradition too, so it must have been.
Yet when you look closely at what this mystery tradition was, it was stating a couple
of ideas in a dramatic form. Most of these mysteries were that the soul is immortal. This
was a big idea at the time, since many were not sure on this theological point, and giving
the person a dramatic reminder of it was pretty cool. But it was not a body of teaching in
the way that modern occultists understand it.
Other flowerings of this Mystery Tradition seem to be any mysterious group that had a
different idea from everyone else. It started with the Christians who started out life as a
mystery school, much like the Greeks or the Romans and grew. Later there were the
Rosicrucians, who were so secret that no-one was sure if they existed or were an allegory.
Then we get into modern magical groups, who claimed to be descended from all these
ancient groups and are heirs to their “mysteries”.
So, history does not seem to back any claim for a “golden thread” of esoteric teaching
that goes back to the year dot.
So what are we left with?
If there is no secret tradition and yet occultism works and provides you with experiences,
then there still must be something there. In amongst all the symbolic bits of occultism
there has to be a system that you can use to ascend.
I have said in my book Gathering the Magic that an esoteric group teaches you an
alphabet of symbols which you can use to forge into your own belief pattern. I decided to
use the symbolic language of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, not because it was
the oldest, but because it offered a complete interlocking symbolic language. Next it was
a matter of drawing that language into my life and starting to work with it.
Someone has given you a car. You have a choice. You can sit in a bar and talk about
your car. You can guess what its top speed is, what its handling is like, how easy it is to
park. Or you can get out and test each aspect of it, until you know it backwards. You can
then use it to go somewhere.
I had to develop my own philosophy, experiment with everything I had learnt and
prove it to myself or chuck it on the esoteric scrap heap.
Experiment
So how do you experiment? It is a matter of having an idea first and then seeing if you
can get a practical result from it by using magical techniques. This is not a scientific test,
by any means. Science has very specific methods for testing and duplicating results.
Description:experimental or all of the above, or another reason all together. people tell you magic is and what it does cannot even begin to quantify the
