Chaos Magic

Runa Hides where the Paradox Resides

The Runic Seed was planted into my Soul

I have no need for a religious creed

My spirit ascends and is free, without a goal

I heed the Old Man’s advice, who moves with speed


When the world’s veil is pushed aside

Mystery plays with me Hide-and-Seek

Where Her Eternal Forms give birth at night

Attracting the strong, but frightening the weak


We all are Learners on the Runic Path no matter how far we get, Rune Master Ian Read recently wrote in a course he gave at Arcanorium College. I’m not a great fan of online-learning, but Clint pointed me into that direction recently (thanks, bro!) and I joined it for three months. Magical luminaries like Peter Carrol, Dave Lee, Ian Read and many other magicians from the Chaos Magic Current give courses there about all kinds of interesting things: courses on Mind Money & Magick, Following Spare’s Footprints, Galdrastafir, Sorcery & Alternative Science, Kitchen Magic, Aloha Huna Shamanism, Magickal Trance and many other interesting things can be found there. Seekers could learn directly from Pete Carrol to „pursue a bracing and invigorating program of martial magic to empower the inner warrior and to immanentise the eschaton in whatever way participants choose“ in a course he called the Jihad of Chaos. So should you be interested in practical magic and if you need some new approaches or inspiration, that’s the place to go. Ok, enough advertisement. Suffice it to say that the ‘Jihad’ Carrol is talking about is the real one. The Holy War here isn’t about killing, but is a „war of consciousness against conformity“ (Michael Kelly), which means „to stand against ignorance or tyranny“ (Sweyn Plowright) – fighting „against the inertia of the cosmos“ (Don Webb), against the stupidity of man, if you will.

However, recently I heard some people asking for introductory books on Runes. This really made me ponder, because I don’t think this is an easy question to answer. Sure, I have my favourite books. But at a deeper level I believe it doesn’t really matter what kind of books one reads in the beginning, because those dedicated to the Path will find their way ‘any-way’. Further the true meaning of the Runes cannot be found in books, no matter how knowledgable such an author seems to be. But even if this is the case we shouldn’t let people run into the wrong direction just because we somehow found our way inside (wherever that is where we are now). First of all, I should say that I hardly talk about Runes or magic with other persons, because it seems to be a waste of time and energy. (I look back at my teenager years/ early twenties with amusement, when I began to become nervous after five minutes when a conversation moved into a different direction than magic.) Most so-called occultists somehow seem to think that they know better what Runes are all about and that it’s ‘just another system’ and after all it doesn’t matter what kind of system one uses, because all of them lead to the same aim anyway. Really?

If I’d be asked by someone what kind of books I recommend for him  or her for learning about the Runes, I had to decide depending on the person. The ‘shamanic type’ should probably begin with Jan Fries’ Helrunar. Those more into a traditional use of Runes should read Thorsson’s Futhark and Runelore. But all would get a copy of Sweyn Plowright’s Rune Primer. However, honestly said I do not think that Runes can be learned from books. It should also be noted that though I’m not absolutely new to Runes, I am considering myself a beginner and am still in the process of becoming familiar with the fundamental literature. (This stement is no wrongly understood modesty. It implies also that I haven’t read through or studied thoroughly every book I recommend. For example, I haven’t read most of the sagas.) It seems to me that in the beginning it makes sense to become familiar with a few academic books like Klaus Düwel’s Runenkunde and R. I. Page’s Runes. Especially the esoteric buff and occultnik should become familiar with the objective facts, regardless of how ‘dry’ or ‘boring’ they seem to be to him or her. Then a certain knowledge of the way our ancestors thought and what they believed could be helpful. The sagas and Hilda Ellis Davidson’s books come to my mind. The dedicated German speaking seeker should study Jan de Vries’ Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte. First then the esoteric works should be taken into account. How to practice ‘Rune Magic’ is next to impossible to explain as everyone will develop his or her own methods over the years, but Thorsson’s, Carrol’s and Fries’ magical methods are a good pointer how to enter this wyrd realm. At this stage subjective meanings will appear that will very likely contradict with (some of) the interpretations of other magical authors. My take on this is: follow your intuition. Noone can help you here except your ‘Deep Mind’ (Jan Fries) or, to say it in a more traditional way, your Fylgja. The only rule is: don’t universalise your own intuitive realisations. It is this subjective stage most of us are engaged in. Some say, there is no other stage to reach (than a subjective one), others are convinced that there is a level of meaning that is reflecting a traditional, objective knowledge. It’s not for me here to decide for you what take is the right one. But I recommend to think about the fact that a purely subjective knowledge will leave us with nothing more than a ‘NiTEiP ‘-attitude that we Chaos Heathens do not subscribe to (please correct me Elhaz fellows, if you disagree). To me this is one of the huge differences between Chaos Heathendom and Chaos Magic.

Let me exemplify how my chaos-magical approach to Runes (rooted in a ‘NiTEiP ‘-attitude) moved from a ‘Personal Gnosis Above All’-belief (PGAA – thanks, Henry!) – that considered my UPG [Unverified Personal Gnosis] as the most important one – towards a traditional approach to the meaning of the Runes (of course always supplemented and deepened by UPGs). When I worked with the ‘astral projection’-method Jan Fries suggests in Helrunar I somehow got to the conclusion that the Ingwaz-Rune – on one level of reference – is an entrance and symbolizes a vagina. I imagined Isa as the penis in this context. (Yes, Mr. Freud, I know it’s all suppressed sexuality, right? Or did I just read too much about Crowley’s sex magick? :-) Ingwaz – seen here as two united Kenaz-Runes – would symbolize fire and heat (sexual arousal) to me. On another, deeper level I saw an ‘alchemical’ process behind these three Runes (Isa, Kenaz, Ingwaz) and thought of the Isa-Rune also as the ‘I’, the ego. The ‘ice’ of the ego – its rigidity and illusory solidity – could be molten by the heat of Kenaz (‘gnosis’ in a CM sense) and so being transformed into ‘Ing’, an enlightened state of being, its essence or true Self. „Man finds his Ing“ has been a beautiful expression for this interpretation that caught my attention in Osborn’s inspiring (albeit rather untraditional) book Rune Games at that time. All this might look quiet weird and exremely subjective to you. Well, it is. But this is somehow the way things work (on a subjective level). And if you ‘feed your mind’ with accurate (traditional) data, better results will come out of your Runic Work. However, at some point I was made aware of the fact at Rune-Net that the traditional meaning of Ingwaz was the opposite of what I came to consider as one layer of its meaning: Ingwaz in no way does represent a vagina or female fertility (the latter meaning being encoded in Berkano amongst others), but rather male fertility manifested in the God Ing. Also the ideographic interpretation of Ingwaz proposed by Thorsson in Futhark is of an erected penis. (Oh yes, there exists Germanic sex magic. And Spare’s method of sigils – as original as it might look at first glance – has been known to our ancestors since centuries in the form of Bind-Runes etc. Always look to tradition first. Never underestimate the wisdom of the ‘ancients in your brain’ [John Balance].) I couldn’t agree more with what Henry has to say about the importance of tradition in his last article:

„I find that the more I research actual magical traditions the more I realise that the average modern occultist or Heathen has far inferior ideas to those that mythological or occult traditions have left behind. We really need tradition as a source of material for our creative, spiritual, and unconscious aspects to weave into reality. The depth and texture of a whole magical ideology cannot possibly be replicated in the half hearted attempts of individual seekers of whatever sort to invent their own. How can one person compete with centuries of people organically and indirectly collaborating across the ages?“

The same has been recently said by my brother, Hubert, who wondered how shallow Crowley’s Thelemic ‘mythology’ appears when it is compared to the richness, profundity and subtlety of the ancient Lore of our forefathers and foremothers. So I started to explore the traditional meaning of this Rune (Ingwaz) and, after that one, of all other Runes of the Elder Futhark. It’s not easy to let go of subjective ‘insights’ or visions and your own UPGs in favour of an ‘objective tradition’. But looking back, I think, this is exactly the point where I began to discover the far richer and greater worlds of ‘Runic Magic’ than before. All modern occultisms appear to me today as totally artificial, deficient and illusory ivory towers lacking the power and tested ‘down-to-earth’ approach of tradition. (Again, as said in another post, read Flowers’ The Northern Dawn before saying that our tradition is lost and unaccessible to us anymore.) I think that I knew intuitively about this intrinsic constructional flaw of western occultism, that’s why I always peered to the East until my Eye has been attracted by the strangely shining, northern Noxia-Licht [night-light] of Thule. The difference between the occult systems of the modern age and the Runic system of old is that in the latter there is no ‘final aim’, ‘last explanation of everything’, ‘final revelation of God’ or final state of consciousness like ‘Nirvana‘, ‘Eternal Bliss‘, ‘Samadhi‘ or ‘Heaven‘. If anything, there is the will to power, to continuance and enjoyment of life and the expansion of consciousness. I find these aims are of great importance today.

“The joy of life consists in the exercise of one’s energies, continual growth, constant change, the enjoyment of every new experience. To stop means simply to die. The eternal mistake of mankind is to set up an attainable ideal.” (Aleister Crowley)

The expansion of consciousness and continuation of life can be seen as the sole dictums of evolution itself. That’s why the attempt of some Ásatrú groups today to deny this evolutionary aspect of our tradition – like its contribution to the development of modern science – is not only historically wrong, but also dangerous in the sense that only science and traditional wisdom can prevent humankind from the ecological desaster we’re facing now and not hiding in the woods while dreaming up a romantic utopia in the past. Sweyn stresses the connection between our Heathen Germanic Tradition and modern ideas and ideals in his article ‘Heathenry and Modernity’:

„In many ways, the values developed by the Enlightenment thinkers can be seen as a real renaissance of the Heathen Germanic culture of freedom, law, pragmatic reasonableness, and individual rights. The success of this culture is obvious in the way it has become that basis of the values of the free world. The English language spread along with it, and has become the language of international trade, science, and politics to a large degree. So, while it is worthwhile connecting with nature and our ancestors, camping out and dressing in Viking gear at feasts, it is not necessary or productive to make that the major focus of one’s life. In the larger modern world, a world of our own making, we need to be participants. We need to be there to safeguard and carry forward the legacy and values of our Heathen ancestors as they have come down to us in the form of modern democratic freedoms. Something our ancestors were always prepared to fight for.“

In modern science the will to power is demonstrated by its attempt to control the environment. In the Heathen Germanic system of magic this will to power manifests differently and it shouldn’t be understood solely in a Nietzschen superman fashion (though everyone who knows me, knows that I love this aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy). It is rather a power of the soul that is sought here and the ability to let the different ‘parts’ of the soul communicate with eachother and to enable them to work harmoniously. The work of the Rune Master then, perhaps, is the immortalization of those parts of the soul that make up the magician’s individuated personality (in a Jungian sense, not its persona) and to strengthen them to gain Sovereignty.

„[T]he power that Initiates seek is not the same as the power that politicians seek. We seek Sovereignty, not control.“ (Michael Kelly 2009: Apophis, p. 216)

This quest for meaning, transcendence and power is encoded in the Runic system. In this age the will to power manifests (amongst others) in an existential way as the need of modern man to find meaning in life. I think the worst consequence of the modern age is that it has isolated man from the world around him, that it has obscured  his ‘transpersonal will’ (Assagioli) or ‘spiritual need’ (‘transcendent self-actualisation’ in Maslow’s model of the hierarchy of needs) and thrown him into a universe devoid of any meaning. This led finally to an emptiness and ‘inner desert’ – an existential vacuum – that existentialists felt so deeply inside them and that Tolstoi described in A Confession. To overcome that emptiness, that feeling of senselessness and „absurdity of one’s own existence“ (Camus) is only possible by the individual effort of each man by an act of (‘transporsonal’) will. Thus ‘the will to power’ is also a will to meaning, as Frankl has put it, who survived the horror of the concentration camp in Nazi Germany. There he observed that those who saw a meaning in life or believed in a ‘higher power’ or fate were stronger in spirit and were more likely to survive these inhuman conditions.

„… the striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. That is why I speak of a will to meaning in contrast to the pleasure principle (or, as we could also term it, the will to pleasure) on which Freudian psychoanalysis is centered, as well as in contrast to the will to power stressed by Adlerian psychology [deduced from the Nietzschean concept, my remark].“ (Viktor E. Frankl)

By immersing oneself in the Runic worldview this will to meaning is manifested in the pursuit of power, knowledge and wisdom. But the meanings that are thus experienced are not created by man or his ego, but are uncovered and rediscovered by a transpersonal power and guidance that opens up and leads us on to greater deeds and mightier thoughts, where „one word leads to another word, and one work leads to another work“ as Fjölsviðr envisioned in the Hávamál. By delving deeper and deeper into the Runic realms we learn that behind the Runes – their actual shapes, sounds and meanings – greater Runes exist that man’s mind will never pervade completely. Layer after layer new meanings emerge and we are „approaching an infinite succession of veils, each of which parts to reveal another behind it“ (Dave Lee). This is how Runa is hiding and sought after eternally. This terrific, tremendous, sacred dance of consciousness and mystery, Óðinn and his Runakóna Freyja, Shiva and Shakti, spirit and matter, life and death and on and on ad infinitum, is where the meaning of Life Everlasting is created from moment to moment – and inbetween, where time collapses back upon itself like the waves of the ocean subside at the shore, Eternity gushes endlessly from no-where to ‘now-here’…  …from Ásgarðr to Miðgarðr. Um mik ok í mér Ásgarðr ok Miðgarðr!

„Everything copulates around me“, Spare laughed in ecstasy and hurled himself into this violent flame erupting from the creative Chaos we call rather unimaginatively ‘being alive’.

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Chaos and Mystery

...it is easier to sail many thousand miles through cold and storm and cannibals, in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to assist one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being alone.

Henry David Thoreau, „Walden“


In such a union „each element achieves completeness, not directly in a seperate consummation, but by incorporation in a higher pole of consciousness in which alone it can enter into contact with all others.“ (Teilhard de Chardin) Tillich was expressing the same thought when he denied that union with the Ground of Being means a loss of self in a larger whole. „If the self participates in the power of being-itself,“ said Tillich, „it receives itself back. For the power of being acts through the power of the individual selves. It does not swollow them as every limited whole, every collectivism, and every conformism does.“

Braden, „The Private Sea – LSD and the Search for God“


There are two souls living in my breast. Goethe said that. And I often feel the same way. On the one hand there is the „Anarch“ (Ernst Jünger), the free spirit („Freigeist“), the one, who dares to live without certainty and follows his own path… …and then there is the one, who follows more systematic approches to Mystery by more experienced magicians, the one, who needs some guarantee that he’s on the right track, someone who believes that someone ‘out there’ might have THE answers. Ironically these antagonistic forces in my soul led me once into the arms of the OTO. They promise freedom of speech and individualism, but practice dogma, rigidity, hierarchies and, ultimately, the subordination of the individual under certain ‘truths’ (read DOGMA=AMGOD). The fine line where freedom of speech ends and dogma begins is not easily seen, especially when you’re a 19 years old occultist, who believes in the Great White Brotherhood (I know why cynics exist). However, when I study the magical systems of others and try to follow their approaches to the Mystery, I always get stuck at some point where I begin to question some (or all) of their basic premises. This always leads me to the same conclusion: that I’m not a follower type, that I want to create my own philosophy and that there are Masters and Magicians who can help along the way, but there are no guarantees. If I may just quote a quote that resonated deeply with my being:

„Theoretical loyalty provides clear direction but is inherently limiting; theoretical anarchy enables flexibility but also inserts uncertainty…there are no fixed and correct ideas or methods…and therefore no inherently right ways…“ 

Just think about it: Theoretical Anarchy enables flexibility but also inserts Uncertainty! Don’t we all just yearn for that absolute certainty? But with absolute certainty Mystery ceases to exist. Hasn’t the world reached that point already? The way of the world is not my way… Uncertainty means freedom, certainty means dogma.

To trust my own instincts is the hard part of the equation. I do, but not all the time. However, doubts and conflicts have always been an important part of my path. They have often created a Need-Fire (Nauthiz), which led me to new horizons beyond what any magical model can describe as every model is „a map, not the reality“ (RAW). This dynamic of ‘friction-resistence-breakthrough’ was also behind the process to go beyond Crowley’s Thelemic model that finally culminated in the termination of my OTO membership in 2006 (and that dynamic is behind many other important processes that led to inner development). I regard this step as one of my most important ones towards an independent magical path.

In Occultism there is the tendency to explain everything, to package the Mystery in a formulae. Crowley’s teachings are full of such formulas and they explain a lot, but ultimately mean nothing. They may be used, but after all they cloth the Mystery in some costume. But this costume is not the Mystery itself. The Mystery is sensed in a certain state of consciousness (usually a kind of gnosis in a CM sense) and fills the seeker with awe. (Rudolf Otto described this awe in his work about The Holy and called the two emotions of man when he encounters the Divine mysterium tremendum and mysterium fascinans.) And after such an experience the seeker tries to rationalize what he experienced by creating certain correspondences between his experience and the system he’s using. He does this by assigning certain concrete elements of his experience to certain abstract qualities of his system-in-use. Too abstract? Ok, I give you an example:

Let’s say I invoke my Genius / HGA / Augoides / Wode-Self / Fylgja (what ever you want to call it – I’m not saying it’s all the same thing; the HGA seems to represent a combination of Wode-Self and Fylgja) and I’m deeply rooted in the Kabbalistic Psychocosm. If you invoke that part of your psyche in that system you will do it with surrender and love and, maybe, with submission. After you have established a rapport with your Deep Mind a voice starts speaking (not necessarily verbally, but visually or otherwise) that seems to come out of the core of your very existence (one-dimensional, uneducated and spiritually underdeveloped primates often think they met „God“). After this mysterious experience you turn towards your Tree of Life and assign that experience to Tiphareth. This corresponds to the Sun and the Heart. This again is connected to the Anahatha-Chakra, which leads to another chain of correspondences. In modern QBL these can be connected to the Hebrew aphabet and Tarot cards, so that finally a psychocosm full of correspondences is created. Too many are obsessed with the symbols, signs, correspondences, colours etc., so that they forget what the initial intention was behind to use them in the first place. And that’s basically to allow the mind to focus and use all those tools as keys for opening the doors of perception and thus to reach higher states of conciousness. BUT, once you are there, as Isreal Regardie never stopped emphasising, throw away the ladder, because you don’t need it anymore! All too often from such correspondences predetermined routes to „enlightenment“ (also known under its mysterious name „delusion“) are created that alienate the true seeker from the goal.

So, what is the goal? In my experience the first and foremost aim is to experience reality directly, without immediately conceptualising and contexualising the experience itself. Though I don’t deny the usefulness of certain concepts I realize that it’s all to easy to take the package for the content. Honestly said, I believe that my path has often revolved around CONCEPTS (package) explaining some of my (hardly to explain and hardly to accept) mystical and/or magical experiences (content). This, I believe, is the reason why Jan Fries said in my interview that „I believe that the individual is a lot more important than any system, religion, cult or school. And if you have to stick a label to yourself to do your thing you ain’t good enough yet.“

Labels, they give certainty, don’t they? Words are more real than reality – for most of us. But in truth we’re caught in our own prison of concepts most of the time.

Ludwig Feuerbach, the first real atheist we know of (maybe the Greeks had also some examples of what we think of as ‘atheists’ today) showed how to free man from the concept of a transcendental being called „God“. He was a German philosopher, who declared that God was nothing but the projection of human qualities in their perfected form. He argued that the superhuman deities of religion are involuntary projections of the essential attributes of human nature, and this projection, in turn, is explained by him by using a theory of human consciousness that is heavily indepted to Hegel. Feuerbach is really the unrecognised father of the criticism of religion, because whatever was interesting in Feuerbach has been taken up by Marx and Freud (I’m not saying they’re right), who formulated their theses in a more logical, coherent and systematic fashion. However, Feuerbach proved that ‘God’ is just a WORD (label). But wait, words are more real than reality, right? In the beginning was the word… and the word was God. (By negating the existence of God – after his daughter has died at a very early age – Feuerbach has been prohibited to publish his works.) But those of us who experienced the Divine (content) cannot believe in the explanations of religion (package). And isn’t it strange that those Christians, who encountered the Divine in mystical experiences (like Meister Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, Paracelsus, Giordano Bruno, Blaise Pascal etc.) were doomed by the Church and that the Fathers of Dogma (who are the fathers of fear) became the patrons of this alien creed called Christianity? Before they imposed their dogmas on our forefathers and foremothers we had no conception of THE Divine (as the “One God”), but experienced that quality of reality (or consciousness – after all, I don’t know, if it has an objective reality) in different forms (thus polytheism). So, if Feuerbach is right (albeit a materialist), then he is confirming the mystical premise that the Gods live in our breasts. Thus the projections of “the superhuman deities of religion” that man has created aren’t mere illusions of human consciousness, but become an essential expression of the divine nature of Consciousness itself (Óðr).

In this way the label “God” degenerated into a concept that man has to believe in, instead of being the vision of each man realizing the core of his very existence. (I finally have to read Emerson. I know that he had a lot to say about that.) This imprisonment to labels is the hypnotising effect of language itself and due to an “evolutionary error” in our brains to ceaselessly create meaning. Zen Masters and other Masters of Meditation developed all kinds of techniques –including shock techniques, gazing at walls for hours, silence, sensory deprivation, mantras, mudras, yantras etc. – to overcome that miserable condition, also known as the conditio humana.

What I learn from this is that being a chaos mystic – doing your own research, experiments, rituals, meditations asf., and trusting your own experiences and your own perception, asking any premise and any dogma, system or preacher – is the only way to go. We can learn from those who walked the Path before us (magicians and mystics), we can learn to read their sign posts (symbol systems) and explanations (philosophies), but after everything is said and done, whom will you trust when you’re in danger or when death approaches? Your guru, your system, your God?

My answer is: “No, I will trust mySelf.”

This Self, I believe, is part of the Divine energy of godhead that creates and maintains the universe, who is the Alföðr and whom the Einherjar called Óðinn.

Persistence is all. Search continues…

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Deconditioning Reflux

After my last post on this theme I suffered a difficult reversal. A bout of intense hay fever struck me down with the one-two punch of overwhelming headache and severe lethargy. In that state my eating habits tend to suffer, which is a problem because nasty processed carbohydrates are exactly what exacerbate my allergic reactions!

Somehow, though, I fought through the discouragement that goes with these states, looked after myself, and pulled clear of the allergy. I decided to seek out a sales job in earnest. I pursued a few leads aggressively, and within the week I had me a potentially very exciting and lucrative job in sales.

After a week, I quit. Why? I discovered something. You see, a week in this job proved to me that I had totally overcome my fear of attempting the kind of inter-personal imposition that cold telephone sales involves. I discovered I could handle the numbers game of the process, accepting 100 “no thanks” responses for every one “yes please”.

What I found though, is that the company I was working for ran things on a short term, strip mining kind of model. No networking, no relationship building, no attempts at cultivating repeat business. Consequently many of my sales calls failed because of the irritable person on the other end who had been repeatedly pestered by my co-workers in recent weeks.

Furthermore, I quickly discovered that, desperate for the whiff of money, sales people are willing to say all kinds of rubbish. One gentleman (I use the term loosely) in particular would attempt to invoke a battery of racist stereotypes in order to induce fear in his mark as a motivator to buy.  After a few days of endless racial slurs wafting through the room I found myself very repelled by a work culture willing to consider such behaviour to be acceptable.

The breakthrough happened on my last day. I figured out “how to do it” that morning, and voila – a slew of sales. That one morning was very lucrative for me personally. And then? I felt the gears shift inside me and I couldn’t do it any more. So I walked out.

What I realised is that there is a difference between fear and aversion. If you fear to do something you are less able to sense how you actually feel about doing the thing you fear. You might feel adverse to it, but that aversion seems like excuse making to justify fear, that is, weakness, and this makes it hard to trust your own feelings.

The other thing I hadn’t expected with a sales job was the boredom. SO boring. Hour after hour of having many almost identical interactions, staring at the same cubicle wall. Seeing as how I recently got my results back from this year’s studies (GPA of 4.0, thanks very much), I felt especially, well, wasted on such a role.

Having conquered my fear and proved I could do the job well, I found a knot of intense aversion. Not necessarily to sales, but to the short-sighted and destructive business model my employer utilised. And so, no longer with anything to prove, I heeded the ethical sense that I could now cleanly hear, and quit.

A couple of days earlier I had met with Donovan and we performed a beautiful blot in honour of Midsummer. All the good stuff that can happen with ritual happened – the environment around us responded to our calls, brilliant poetry came to us both, we chanted and swayed like loonies, and the mead took on that extra-special-delicious flavour that ritual mead sometimes gets.

I invited the “way” to open before me at that ritual, and from the moment I walked out of my sales job it did just that, spreading like a blossoming flower.

Having walked out of my job, I decided to go to the art gallery and take  in some of the Hindu devotional statuary there (I like paying my respects to Vishnu and Ganesh).

On the way, I get a call for a job interview.

Next day, I do the interview. It is a very sweet job.

And today I get the news that the job is mine! It doesn’t involve sales or anything like that, but it is interesting, the hours are good, it is close to home, and it is well paid. Perfect!

Lessons about deconditioning:

The most important thing I have learned from this experiment is that even when you consciously construct a plan for doing some deconditioning, you have to be open to the unexpected. A program of conscious deconditioning can confuse you into thinking that your way – your limited understanding of how things “should” unfold – is the way.

I suspect that if one gets too caught up in such a mentality one risks not having the necessary sensitivity for distinguishing between fatuous fear and appropriate aversion. I’ve known people who have bent themselves into ugly shapes by trying to force themselves to fit self-images that run contrary to their true natures.

Having the self-honesty to be able to separate out fear from aversion is a valuable skill and if deconditioning exercises can lead you to blur the distinction, my own experiment shows that they can also help you to refine that distinction.

I have also learned about the importance of being open to the unexpected when deconditioning: witness my growing public-singing habit. This has been the best discovery I have made in the process, and it is reaping all sorts of obvious and non-obvious rewards. I am determined now to maintain this habit and explore it. Curiously, after a day of telesales I found myself unable to sing: a strong message from my unconscious!

So I think I can conclude this deconditioning exercise on a note of cautious triumph (caution being adopted so that I do not devolve into tilting at windmills). This experiment has expanded my idea of what is possible, of what kinds of action and ways of being I can comfortably include within the domain of my personality. It has also given me more trust in my practical commitment to growth and  magic, and underscored the value of documenting one’s personal/magical experiments, since these articles have definitely helped refine my focus and bolster my motivation.

We are headed now into 2010: and perhaps onto bigger and better magical evolutionary efforts! Tonight I will make another sacrifice in thanks for my good fortune and my victories.

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Deconditioning Redux

Well I’ve been busy folks and have been learning a great deal since my first post on Deconditioning.

Firstly, I’ve been singing in public a lot. So much that I don’t even notice if I am doing it or not. At first it found it very threatening. Then I pushed through that and I realised that often no one else is even paying attention anyway. We think we’re exposing ourselves and then when we make the vulnerable step we discover it was totally safe after all! It is pretty hilarious to be a human being.

The singing has caused me to have a much better baseline mood, too. We’re made to sing, it is what our bodies are for, so to sing as much as I have been is really good. I’ve come up with various interesting musical ideas, and my singing skill is increasing a lot too.

I’ve found that singing in public causes me to feel more present, and I seem to naturally have more interactions with people, too. Short conversations, whatever. I’m not always the initiator either. Simply singing has already made me much more present in the world around me as my own true self it seems. Or something along those lines.

Seeing as how I am looking for a job I decided, purely as an experimental exercise, to go to a local shopping centre with a bunch of resumes and try to get rid of them all by going into shops and enquiring for work. I’m not actually looking for retail work, but I decided this is a lot more demanding than the usual thing of writing job applications.

I’ve done this sort of thing before, but always viewed it as an onerous misery to be gotten done as soon as possible. This time I decided to take it as an experiment and try to detach from outcomes.

Before I started I spent quite a while journaling in a café, trying to uncover and counter all of the protective but unhelpful thought processes that might interfere with the task. The biggest one was fear of failure or fear of success – and I had to work hard to dismantle this with the view that the whole exercise was an experiment in trying out proactive behaviour without reticence: outcome was irrelevant. In fact, I decided that my objective would be to fail to get anywhere.

Even with this armoury, I still felt myself assailed by fear when I started – fear of failure. I found that it was easier to consider approaching shops that sold things I was interested in than not, despite the “aim to fail” attitude which meant I wasn’t planning on getting a job at any of these places anyway. I decide to work with my resistance, and let it steer me towards places that seemed more interesting. After a few of those I was more able to approach places I was less interested in.

I also worked hard to not have the attitude of “I have to tough this out”, as that has been my attitude in the past and it doesn’t help me. Armoured will power is a finite thing. I wanted to sufficiently jam my beliefs about proactive behaviour that I would not feel threatened by it. Oh, and I found a mantra of Elhaz, Ehwaz, Gebo, Sowilo to be helpful too.

As it happened it did take a bit of willpower to get started, as well as repeating the “aim to fail” objective to myself over and over like a mantra. But once the flow got going I didn’t need willpower, my natural spontaneity took over. Not without some fetters still, but mostly free. That was awesome.

So after all this prevarication, self-debate, and the rest, I nerve myself up to walk into a shop, a health food store. I walk in, say “do you have any jobs?” “Yes”, comes the reply, “got a resume?” I did and I handed it over. Voila. Instant job in a context that I’d actually enjoy: talking to customers all day about why they should have cod liver oil or organic sea salt or half a hundred other cool things that I’m interested in anyway. And the staff discounts are very generous too.

I still canvassed a bunch of other places. Most didn’t have anything, but one place took my resume.

As you can imagine, though, the smashing success of the experiment really bolstered me. In fact I was on a total high. It felt so good to “put myself out there” as it were, to take an experimental course of action like that. My new job is just one day a week, but that actually suits me as I can get a full time job as well, using my health store job as a tool to learn more about food, nutrition, and natural remedies…as well as generate more much needed cash after a year of being an impoverished student.

So far, then, I’ve been very successful with the deconditioning process. Curiously, though, the list of tasks I set myself has not proved helpful other than as a tool to get me started. For example some of the tasks, such as having interactions with people, being a difficult customer, and so forth, have been just happening naturally as my public singing unlocks my courage to be in the world. Since I am spending a lot of time asserting my identity in public space I just don’t think it anything special to do so in specific interpersonal contexts.

I am now actively looking for a job in sales, too. The dare of being able, as someone who used to be so damn shy and socially anxious, to make a living out of sales is just too enticing. It is a bit of a digression in the map of my career perhaps, but as Clint pointed out, sales skills are relevant to anything. For me, though, this is about discovering just how much I can expand the field of actions that I believe I can succeed at.

I’ve never applied the whole chaos magic deconditioning thing to my life in such an organised way (the closest example I can think of would be the way in which I learned to ride a bike), but it is really bearing fruit. It is important for me not to get lazy or rest on my laurels though, I have to keep upping the challenge level: hence seeking a sales job.

I really hope this experiment inspires others to get off their rears and challenge their limitations. I’m feeling very positive about life: my success in breaking down self-imposed limitations so quickly is making me feel a lot more capable and able to direct my own life. I’m not sure what happens next, but I am confident I am equal to the challenge. A-Viking we go! As I explore further experiments in this vein you can be sure to read about them right here…

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Loko Sex Magick

Heimlich’s latest post has struck a deep chord for me. The particular blockages discussed also represent trouble points in my own personality. The task Heimlich outlines is something I’ve also been working on since puberty, though never in a way so carefully planned and detailed.

Regarding the specific study areas of sales and social interaction, I believe these deserve special emphasis from all students of the Occult. Knowing the rest of the Heathen and Neo-Pagan community to be just as big a bunch of geeks as I am, I cannot recommend the utility of these particular skill sets highly enough.

While I’m pretty far from considering myself a master of these technologies, I have been working on this area for some time and have achieved some success. With that in mind, there is a related sub-specialization of occult study that I would like to recommend; The Art of Seduction.

The Art of Seduction is “Occult” by virtue of its status as a subject that is taboo and forbidden…at least for men. Socially, for some reason, it seems completely acceptable for women to study Glamour and Seduction (read Cosmo lately?) but any man known to study these subjects is regarded as creep and a potentially dangerous weirdo. By writing this article I am actually violating rule number one of the Art of Seduction; Seduction is an Art which must be studied in secret.

As a faithfully married man, my study of the Art takes on a slightly different focus than it did it my younger years…

Firstly: I make the effort to seduce my own wife anew every day. I see skill in Seduction as a pre-requisite to successful relationship building and healthy relationship building as an advanced level of the Art of Seduction.

Secondly: I must retain sufficient confidence in my skills to know that, should everything one day go horribly wrong, I’ll always have other options. It’s been proven to me many times over that to become dependant on another person is dangerous and unhealthy. Ironically, it seems that it is only by retaining this sense of aloofness and independence that a man is able to maintain his status as a “good catch”. Again; Seduction is a pre-requisite to successful relationship building.

Third: Knowing how and when to flirt is still an essential skill for socializing and in sales (and if you’re in business, then you are in sales). Political correctness and sexual harassment laws aside, flirtation is a big part of how socially functional people interact.

In retrospect, things were a whole lot simpler when I was still single (though I wouldn’t trade being married for anything).

Considering what’s at stake, it hardly seems reasonable not to make a serious study of the Art of Seduction. Unfortunately, the cultural expectation that we ought to intuitively understand this subject without study cripples the romantic opportunities of many men. It is thus, contrary to all social norms, that I insist that Glamour and Seduction are subjects that demand research, practice and deep contemplation.

I will not share my own methodology with you here. (Seduction is an Art which must be studied in secret.) Instead, I offer for your consideration a short list of recommended introductory reading. Make of it what you will.

The Satanic Witch by Anton Szandor LaVey; explores some interesting concepts in Glamour Magic.

The Mystery Method by Mystery; provides an excellent breakdown of the process of seduction and the best explanation I’ve yet seen on how to start a conversation with a complete stranger.

The Game by Neil Strauss; is a hilarious autobiographical sketch of one man’s journey into the world of the Pick-Up Artists.

The Guide to Getting It On, 6th Edition
by Paul Joannides; So you’ll know what you’re doing when you get there.

Hail Eros and Aphrodite!
Hail Freya!
Happy hunting, boys and girls!

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Deconditioning

I have decided that I want to engage in some deconditioning, to eliminate some specific limits within my personality that really bother me. I’ve been researching the psychological technique of systematic desensitisation, but that doesn’t seem quite right for what I need (and tends to rely far too much on teamwork and imagination for what I intend).

Trawling through my limited selection of chaos magic books, and through the web, proved similarly unhelpful. Folks love to talk about the subject of transgressing one’s boundaries from an armchair, and they love telling lurid stories of (mostly other people’s) weird misadventures when doing so, but I cannot seem to find a decent template or framework for doing this myself.

So of course I am going to invent one.

One of the great things about having a blog is that it can be used as a tool: specifically, a tool for compelling honesty with myself, since if I publicly announce something I intend to do in this journal and then do not do it…well, yes, I can lie on the internet, but I will know that I am lying. That in and of itself is a powerful stimulus for honesty.

Ok, so first I am going to outline a very simple deconditioning methodology which borrows from half a dozen magical and psychological techniques. Then I am going to plan out the use of this method with some specific aspects of my own life. Then I am going to apply that method.

Before I get started though, I would like to indicate that all of this involves a lot of fear. Why? Well, transgressing one’s limitations is scary. Anything could happen. Especially when they involve other people, as my specific focus does.

Ok, so here is how the system works.

First of all, you need to define exactly what it is that you want to ‘decondition’. In my case it is a set of rules I impose on myself about my behaviour, but it could be anything. You might want to decondition your emotional reactivity to a given trigger (something I’ve been working on this year); you might want to decondition a tendency to leap to a negative interpretations of events; you might want to decondition a story you live out such as ‘I will always be poor’; you might want to decondition even a physical mannerism that might arise in response to some situations.

The thing(s) you are seeking to decondition might be quite superficial or they might have deep roots. It is impossible to know exactly until you start messing with them – sometimes serious problems prove to be largely due to habit, other times trivial problems turn out to be deeply rooted in the psyche.

I suggest that avoiding entertaining too many expectations is helpful, since these are basically empirical questions and if you presuppose an answer then you risk getting into trouble.

Also, often our theories for our negative aspects are quite thin and one-dimensional and very easily obscure our ability to notice all the other possible interpretations that could also be true. Human beings are very vulnerable to confirmation bias – we tend to notice evidence for what we already believe and ignore evidence that contradicts our beliefs.

Hence it might be safer to uproot and avoid an particular explanation for the psychological pattern you intend to shift and just get on with shifting it.

So how do we do that? First of all, you need to work out a hierarchy of intensity. Brainstorm a whole bunch of situations that might set off the pattern that you wish to decondition. They might be actual experiences you have had, or imagined ones that could happen. Try to sort them into a ranking of extremity. You’re going to work through these so the ranking is reasonably important. I will give you an example in a moment.

Once you have your hierarchy of conditioned thoughts/feelings/behaviours, you need to work out some alternative responses to what you’d normally do. So if a particular provocation would normally throw you into a rage, you might prepare a plan involving slapping yourself in the face to break the anger circuit. The idea is simply to transgress whatever your habitual response is (it might take a bit of reflection to work out what the habit is that you are trying to break).

Of course, remembering to do this interrupter might take a few tries and a bit of effort. And it needn’t be dramatic – even just consciously reminding yourself that your response is arbitrary and open to transformation might be enough.

Once you have managed to master the first rung on the hierarchy – that is, you have exposed yourself to the provocation enough that you can reliably exercise choice in your response – you can proceed to the second, third, fourth, etc. With luck you’ll soon have shed a whole load of psychological armour and be much less encumbered.

Be wary of doing harm to yourself, however. The objective is not to force yourself. You need to be able to do the new response without discomfort or displeasure. Otherwise all you are doing is pitting conscious will against unconscious habit, and we all know where that battle usually ends up.

I’m not sure how well I have explained the idea (and bear in mind that this may well be a load of rubbish that won’t work, not even for me), but here is my example of me.

What I would like to be is less concerned about taking social risks. I would love to be so confident that I could be a sales guy, specifically. Not that I ever want to ‘go into sales’, but I would love to have that much social confidence. I would love to talk to strangers in the street without fear. I would love to happily make a fool out of myself, cause offence, or stick my nose into business where it might not belong. I would love to see strangers as potential new friends rather than anonymous robots.

This is all the more relevant because right now I am looking for a job. So these kinds of social confidence skills would be very handy. My reclusive nature has flared up however (predictably) and so I find the process much more stressful than really I would like it to be.

I realise that looking for work is not fun for most people most of the time, but I would like to think that if I am any sort of well-adjusted person then I should be able to learn to handle the process with aplomb.  Instead I find it rather anxiety provoking, and that really has to go.

Oh yes, things are not totally one dimensional. I have started to get into a habit of singing reasonably loudly to myself when in public. It utterly terrifies me to do this (what a transgression of public robot-space)! But I think I might gradually be learning that if you sing in public people just ignore you and nothing bad happens at all…and this might be a nice little microcosm for the whole process that I intend to explore.

Ok, my personal list of exercises (not quite in a hierarchical order) for reducing social fear:

Singing in Public

This is where I am currently working. I will know I have it mastered when I spontaneously sing in public and don’t even think about it.

Greeting People

I would like to walk down a street (preferably a reasonably busy one) and happily greet each person as I walk by them. This is quite a transgression, it seems, in a built up urban environment (whereas when I lived in a more rural setting it became much more habitual). I might even be singing between greetings!

Striking up Conversations

At this stage I would like to feel so confident that any time I am standing in someone’s proximity for any length of time (e.g. waiting for a pedestrian light to change) I try to start up a conversation. Woah, scary! It doesn’t matter if they are not interested (I do not have to try to force them or anything silly). The point is just to discover that I will survive the experience.

Asking for a Favour

At this point I have to be able to approach someone and ask them to help me, say, ask them directions to something, making it a bit difficult for them (that is, I have to play a bit dumb). Then I have to try to get them into a conversation. Sort of an elaboration on Stage Three, but one with more artifice and more of an attempt to irritate the other person a bit (not too much, I hope).

Complaining

This is a tricky one, something I have often struggled with in more benign forms. The idea is to go to a café or restaurant, make an order, and then when it comes say that I have been served the wrong thing. Holy cow, this is getting scary. The complaining is not to be done in an aggressive, jerk kind of way, and I am allowed to let them off the hook (that is, I don’t have to make them take it back). I am sure I could think of other situations where complaining is warranted too…

Cold Job Lead Hunting

Since I am looking for a job, what about cold calling a few companies and asking if they have jobs going, if I could have an interview anyway, and all that sort of thing? Likewise dropping in resumes off the street. Oh, scary. I mean, I have done this sort of thing before, but how cool would it be to be able to do it all day, every day, without raising a sweat?

Selling Stuff on the Phone

What about inuring myself to cold calling random people and trying to sell them stuff? That’s got to be close to the ultimate in scary for me. Maybe I could sell copies of my Ein Skopudhr Galdra CD, which I would love to shift a few copies of (hint, hint, dear reader).

Selling Stuff in Person

Same as above…except doing it door to door or on the street like those charity collector folks. I’d love to actually get, and thrive in, a sales job like that…just because it would represent a total victory over my social fears and anxieties.

These items are more or less in a hierarchy, although I struggle to get it into a perfect linear structure. Maybe it does not matter so long as the general hierarchy holds. Some of them I have actually done before, but not enough that I feel at all comfortable with them.

What sort of time frame should I adopt for this experiment? Well, that really depends on the number of opportunities I have (a lot of this relies on me wandering around in public), how brave I am, and how long it takes for me to acclimatise.

Setting a definite deadline is no good, therefore, and there’s no point hurting myself with unrealistic expectations. By the same token, I need to be honest with myself so that I am not, as we say in Australia, just ‘copping out’. I will have to refine this aspect of the process as I go.

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The Pagan Prophet: Remembering Jhonn Balance

Dedicated to the Great Heart and Great Soul of the Great Shaman Jhonn Balance
16 February 1962 to 13 November 2004 :

I don’t expect I’ll ever understand
How life just trickled through my hand

Jhonn Balance

Jhonn dead dead dead. May he be blessed by all horned animals. IO PAN IO PAN IO PAN PAN PAN! “Death knows, death goes, death blows, death shows… Does death come alone or with eager reinforcements? Holy Holy Holy”

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

I

IT IS WRITTEN in The Book of the Law: Every man and every woman is a Star. It is Our Lady of the Stars that speaketh to thee, O thou that art a star, a member of the Body of Nuith! Listen, for thine ears become dulled to the mean noises of the earth; the infinite silence of the Stars woos thee with subtile musick. Behold her bending down above thee, a flame of blue, all-touching, all-penetrant, her lovely hands upon the black earth, and her lithe body arched for love, and her soft feet not hurting the little flowers, and think that all thy grossness shall presently fall from thee as thou leapest to her embrace, caught up into her love as a dewdrop into the kisses of the sunrise. Is not the ecstasy of Nuit the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of her body? All that hath hurt thee was that thou knewest it not, and as that fadeth from thee thou shalt know as never yet how all is one. Again She saith: I give unimaginable joys upon earth, certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death. This thou hast known. Time that eateth his children hath not power on them that would not be children of Time. To them that think themselves immortal, that dwell alway in eternity, conscious of Nuit, throned upon the chariot of the sun, there is no death that men call death. In all the universe darkness is only to be found in the shadow of a gross and opaque planet, as it were for a moment; the universe itself is a flood of light eternal. So also death is but through accident; thou hast hidden thyself in the shadow of thy gross body, and taking it for reality, thou hast trembled. But the orb revolveth anon; the shadow passeth away from thee. There is the dissolution, and the eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu! For inasmuch as thou hast made the Law of Freedom thine, as thou hast lived in Light and Liberty and Love, thou hast become a Free-man of the City of the Stars.

II

LISTEN AGAIN to thine own voice within thee. Is not Hadit the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star? Is not He Life, and the giver of Life? And is not therefore the knowledge of Him the knowledge of Death? For it hath been shown unto thee in many other places how Death and Love be twins. Now art thou the hunter, and Death rideth beside thee with his horse and spear as thou chasest thy Will through the forests of Eternity, whose trees are the hair of Nuit thy mistress! Thrill with the joy of life and death! Know, hunter mighty and swift, the quarry turns to bay! Thou hast but to make one sharp thrust, and thou hast won. The Virgin of Eternity lies supine at thy mercy, and thou art Pan! Thy death shall be the seal of the promise of our agelong love. Hast thou not striven to the inmost in thee? Death is the crown of all. Harden! Hold up thyself! Lift thine head! breathe not so deep–die!

III

OR ART THOU STILL ENTANGLED with the thorny plaits of wild briar rose that thou hast woven in thy magick dance on earth? Art not thine eyes strong enough to bear the starlight? Must thou linger yet awhile in the valley? Must thou dally with the shadows in the dusk? Then if it be Thy Will, thou hast no right but to do Thy Will! Love still these phantoms of the earth; thou hast made thyself a King; if it please thee to play with toys of matter, were they not made to serve thy pleasure? Then follow in thy mind the wondrous word of the Steele of Revealing itself. Return if thou wilt from the abode of the Stars; dwell with mortality, and feast thereon. For thou art this day Lord of Heaven and of Earth.

Love is the law, love under will.

The Benediction of the All-Begetter, All-Devourer be upon thee.”

(Aleister Crowley, Liber CVI: Concerning Death, Copyright OTO)


Today five years ago, John Balance died in a tragic accident. Goeffrey Rushton, better known under the name Jhonn Balance, is an artist whose art, life and magick has inspired me in many ways, when I was a teenager. John has started out as a fan of the infamous ‘Wreckers of Civilization’, Throbbing Gristle, where he met Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, his life partner and co-founder of their band Coil. They founded the band Psychic TV and Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth with Genesis P-Orridge in 1981 (as far as I remember). After arguements they both left TOPY and Psychick TV to follow their own creative spark and to break free from TOPY that seemed to turn into a trap of a cult, as they said.

“Genesis is definitely, concretising ideas from various traditions, but we assumed the mantle of organised religion, copying aspects of The Process Church, Jim Jones and actual clerical stuff, and we came across as a cult, but we were in fact individually practicing sexual magic. So that was a camouflage, which eventually became a trap that we had to break away from. I felt very strongly that we had to get away from that.”

Their first mini-album has become How to Destroy Angels, ‘music(k) for the accumulation of male sexual energy’, which is to say that men could use it for homosexual magic(k) (though they said that women could use it, too). Their following albums Scatology and Horse Rotovator are a testimony to their brilliance and that they have always been ahead of their time (like with most albums that followed). John Balance was responsible for vocals, lyrics, chants, synthetics and various esoteric sound-making instruments and devices. Outside of Coil he collaborated with Nurse With Wound, Death In June, Psychic TV, Current 93 and Thighpaulsandra, and produced a couple of Nine Inch Nails remixes. His early work and wide-ranging collaborations made him one of the most influential figures in the industrial, experimental minimalist and neofolk music scenes. Peter Christopherson is the ‘unseen’genius behind the inimitable sounds and ‘styles’ that Coil has invented. He wasone of the original members of the band that invented the genre of Industrial Music, Throbbing Gristle, co-founded Psychic TV and Coil. Christopherson has participated in the reuniting of Throbbing Gristle (I think in 2004) as well as composed an album for his current solo endeavour The Threshold HouseBoys Choir (now SoiSong).John and ‘Sleazy’ have nurtured the entity called Coil for 23 years.

John Balance has influenced me on many levels. First of all, Coil helped me in times of isolation in ways I hardly can describe. They helped me to come to terms with the fact that I am an outsider and that I’m neither mad nor alone. (In fact Sleazy once told me in Berlin that “it’s very important to be an outsider”!) The music of Coil displayed an orginality and a creativity that showed that ‘occult experiences’ are real and can be ‘translated’ into sound. John was initially influenced by Max Ernst and the surrealists. Later P-Orridge and Burroughs introduced him to the general concept of magic as a practicality in everyday life. After having been asked how magic has sweeped into his work, he answered:

“Well it has, totally. I’ve always been into magic, with Crowley’s ‘k’, and studied it. I tried to buy stuff by Crowley when I was young, but my parents absolutely refused to have anything to do with it and actively discouraged me. I wrote to Alex Sanders (King of the Witches), when I was 14, and he wrote back to me saying thanks for writing, I’m very pleased that you want to do this, but can you write back when you’re 18. He wouldn’t accept anyone so young into his coven. I used to worship the moon too, I’d encourage other boys at school to do it, too. I just instinctivelydid things like that. It once got me into trouble. I was at school with the son of David Tomlinson, who was in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (a Disney comedy about witches). The two of us were taught astral projection by a teacher and there was a scandal because they thought there was some homosexual relationship going on with the three of us, but there wasn’t. I went to school one day and there was David Tomlinson’s limousine outside -he grabbed me as I was coming off the school bus and asked whether his son and I had a sexual relationship with this teacher. From then on, all the teachers were watching me!”

Asked at which point he started to practice magick, he said:

“…even as a kid I used to do it. I was an only child, always talking to animals, fantasy creatures and spirits. I would make little plasticine gods and make offerings to them. I was just born with a pagan sensibility. I’m an animal, I’ve never been a human – there’s no difference between animals and humans to me. I think that’s one of the signs of a true pagan. Some life experiences can just jolt you into it. I had German measles really badly, twice I think, and wasn’t allowed contact with the light in case I went blind. Shut in this dark room, that was like my initiation, I imagine.”

Ossian Brown, Thighpaulsandra, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and Jhonn Balance

However, it was really Spare who got him into a way of magick that was truely his. “As soon as I discovered Austin Spare I realised that we were loners, we practiced magick on our. That’s my style of magic, the shamanic way – and Spare was definitely a shaman.” Like Spare did paint pictures in a sidereal fashion, where images and gestalts are infused into the realm of Midgard, Coil did a sidereal sound, where ‘the Other’ – the Mystery – (Runa?)pours into mundane reality.

“What Spare did in art, we try to do through music. This is why we do sidereal sound. The way he twisted his pictures, so that the geometry appears warped, we try to do that, to produce strange geometries through sound, so that it comes out sideways. We do it with technology, with 3D devices, phasers, out-of-phasers, all sorts of gizmos. There’s no one particular box that does it, we all do it any possible way that we can. … Spare used to do speaker battles, where he would project sound into the aether – which I think is a real physical thing, some kind of cosmic glue, a genuine substance, or non-substance – that connects everything and allows unexplained things and ideas to be transmitted.”

Austin Osman Spare painting you

John Balance had a very intimate relationship with Spare. He did sigils to ‘contact’ Spare and his Current of the Zos Kia Cultus. After that Coil were in touch with Crowley’s and Spare’s art forever. In many ways Balance was overwhelmed by the results of his magical workings. They collected many artifacts from these two artists and magicians. Balance claimed that you can commune with the pictures of Spare and that they would change.

“Some of the chaotic ones, you look at them with one person and see certain  hings, and you look at them with another person and you see a completely different set of things. Every piece he did was magical. There were some that were done for other people specifically as magical spells, such as the stele or the magical alphabet. But he lived his life as a magician and a stoic. He could survive for a week on a kipper… Austin Spare had people who came through for him, spirit guides, and there are magical currents. He may have opened up a gateway or whatever, but now it’s flowing in trickles, rivulets, even streams. That’s why it’s very important that we flash Zos Kia Cultus – Spare’s magical philosophy or code – and his images onto the screen at our performances, to energise Spare’s current and put our own energies into it. To make it a living, breathing, energising, wonderful thing. By Cultus I don’t mean a cult, but a way of life, a philosophy, a code, which puts me in touch with what I really, truly should be doing onthis planet.”

Existence, by Austion Osman Spare

And this means really – albeit in a different context – what Ódhinn meant by the saying that “I Give myself to mySelf”: that you would totally dedicate yourself to the divine current you come in touch with. Everything you do becomes you. There is no difference between your everyday life as Joe and your magical persona. You do not only do, but you become magick. “Like Burroughs, or Spare, there’s no difference between our philosophy, our lifestyle and our art. This is what we do. We are what we do.” Well, my friends, and this is what I call Chaos Heathenism in action. However, there is a dark side to all of this. Jhonn (as he later spelled himself) suffered from two demons: depression and alcoholism. He struggled with both of them his whole life. And as Peter has told me, his alcoholism started when they were doing E’s (MDMA) in the mid-80s and Jhonn began to use alcohol for ‘coming down’ from them. On November 11th 2004 Jhonn fell down the stairs in his house after having been drunk for weeks. He never again regained consciousness and died on November 13th 2004. Lost Balance

This has been one of the saddest days of my life. I was to perform my duty in a Gnostic Mass as a Deacon in OTO (now I left the order, as you know). My friend Maarten e-mailed me to tell me these terrible news. I was hardly able to perform the ritual, but I did and prayed for Balance and lit a candle for him (as I do every year). For days I was in shock and my girl friend (though not being a ‘fan’, but knowing my pain) cried. I will never forget the pain and grief I felt for weeks, if not months, after this shaman died. It was as if a brother has gone away.

When I interviewed ‘Sleazy’ on December 30th 2005 in Berlin with my friend Henrik, when Throbbing Gristle were doing an exhibition in Berlin, he told me many times things like this: “You should’ve asked Jhonn”, “Jhonn was the expert”, “Jhonn was into the Occult”. I’ve seen Jhonn performing in Amsterdam in the year 2000 and in Berlin a few years later. I’ve never spoken to him out of shyness. There’s nothing I regret more nowadays, but it seems to me that this was necessary. There were those who had the key to Coil (an elite or minority), and then there have been the ‘fans’. I’ve certainly belonged to the minority of those, who knew what Jhonn was talking about. In many ways his life has been an example of a prophet in a Blakean sense. “Why be bleak, when you can be Blake?”, he once said. We have seen a few of such seers. One example has been Allen Ginsberg. But at the same time you could fill in the gap by saying Jhonn Balance:

“He considered his role of poet-prophet as part of the miraculous tradition of his creator, William Blake … He recognized that the Latin conception of the poet as vates, the prophetic seer, fitted his own identity as a divinely inspired poet who could now see below the surface of reality into the very essence of existence. … When Ginsberg started searching through Blake’s writing for a model for his role as poet-prophet, he was startled by Blake’s insistence that … the art of the role of the poet was to help his fellow men perceive the depths of reality. … Blake’s prophet is not a person who predicts the future; rather, the prophet sees deeper into the meanings of things.” (Portugés 1978: 65/66)“

Jhonn Balance was just such a man. I admire the work he has created with Sleazy and I will never forget all the special moments, inspirations and revelations I experienced whilst listening to Coil. “When you listen to Coil, do you think of music?” was one of Coil’s slogans. Well, when I listen to Coil I think of magic(k). But Jhonn Balance’s tragic death meant also a departing for me on a magical level. In the past when I got ‘into’ magic(k)’ I entered the same chaotic place into which Jhonn has immersed himself totally: the derangement of the senses, as Rimbaud called it. But after I have stared into the abyss a few times – drug abuse like and otherwise – I knew that Jhonn’s sudden death was also a warning for me. Though his death had more to do with his alcoholism than magic, I also believe that approaching magic like Jhonn did (and many of us did probably) has certain dangers:

“Experience has shown that one’s life is a reflection of spiritual processes, and a magician’s desire may be counter to his or her soul’s necessity, unless backed up by the order of the sacred world (echoed in the soul) has temporary effects and often conspires to undo the fertile areas of one’s life. Therefore, magic is by no means the sole answer in the face of life’s greatest hardships (…)” (Travers 2008: The Serpent and the Eagle, p. 8f)

I also think that approaching magic without certain inner developments is a very dangerous thing. Development of Self ahead of the development of sorcery techniques (like casting sigils etc.) ensures that you will have the wisdom to seek what you need more than what you merely think you want. My path is now more towards a balance – a harmonious and more ordered way of approaching the initiatory process even if I still consider thee Chaotick Path to be my approach to the Mysteries. But in a certain way, Jhonn’s death was also a marking point for me to leave the path I’ve been walking on and to turn away from the restless seeking of drug-induced visions, extraordinary experiences and self-destructive invocations “under my unquiet skull”. Such realizations were hard lessons for me to learn and to accept and you will hardly find them in ‘occult books’ (and I read more than a few). Freeing mySelf from such fetters on my path by researching the traditions of the ancients and learning to use the consciousness technologies of the ritual and chaos magicians of today, I believe to discover a more holistic and integral vision of mySelf /selves. This means that I had to look very critically on my initiatory process and on the path(s) I’ve been walking on until now. “O Silver Goddess, keep us from single vision.” (Coil)

However, Jhonn Balance is a hero in my personal ‘pantheon’ of great individuals. May he find his way back to Midgard in a transformed form.

May the Gods Bless Thee,
Matt Anon.

Jhonn’s two friends, and the exceptional artists, David Tibet (Current 93) and Steven Stapleton (Nurse With Wound) say:
“With burning sadness and with burning sorrow we remember You as:
kindest of men, funniest of men, most intuitive of men, most incisive of men, most generous of men, a great artist, a great voice, a great visionary, a great Soul and a great Heart. Finally you were overwhelmed by it all: by all the beauty and by all the pain. You perhaps never knew how much you were loved. Till we meet again as we know we will, our dearest friend, with love always to you dearest Geff, John, Jhonn, shape-shifter and joker, in angelic form now, playing with stars in the love of God.   David Tibet and Steven Stapleton”

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Liber OZ

Aleister Crowley is an interesting subject of study to magicians. He is both: a failure and a success. Those who strive for the Divine within know that ‘Homo est Deus’. I hereby declare that EVERY HUMAN IS FREE, if (s)he accepts the resposibilty of being a human. But then again, Man is God, as it were. Affix this to every church and every governmental building. Absorb this ‘Zen Dogma’: YOU ARE FREE!

“the law of
the strong:
this is our law
and the joy
of the world.” AL. II. 2

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” –AL. I. 40

“thou hast no right but to do thy will. Do that, and no other shall say nay.” –AL. I. 42-3

“Every man and every woman is a star.” –AL. I. 3

There is no god but man.

1. Man has the right to live by his own law– to live in the way that he wills to do:
to work as he will:
to play as he will:
to rest as he will:
to die when and how he will.

2. Man has the right to eat what he will: to drink what he will:
to dwell where he will:
to move as he will on the face of the earth.

3. Man has the right to think what he will: to speak what he will:
to write what he will:
to draw, paint, carve, etch, mould, build as he will:
to dress as he will.

4. Man has the right to love as he will:– “take your fill and will of love as ye will,
when, where, and with whom ye will.” –AL. I. 51 5. Man has the right to kill those who would thwart these rights. “the slaves shall serve.” –AL. II. 58 “Love is the law, love under will.” –AL. I. 57

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Galdra Logic

“It takes only the acceptance of a single belief to make someone a magician. It is the meta –belief that belief is a tool for achieving effects. This effect is often far easier to observe in others than in oneself. It is usually quite easy to see how other people, and indeed entire cultures, are both enabled and disabled by the beliefs they hold. Beliefs tend to lead to activities which tend to reconfirm belief in a circle they call virtuous rather than vicious, even if the results are not amusing. The first stage of seeing through the game can be a shocking enlightenment that leads to either a weary cynicism or Buddhism. The second stage of actually applying the insight to oneself can destroy the illusion of a soul and create a magician. The realization that belief is a tool rather than an end in itself has immense consequences if fully accepted. Within the limits set by physical possibility, and these limits are wider and more malleable than most people believe, one can make real any beliefs one chooses, including contradictory beliefs. The magician is not one striving for any particular identity goal, rather one who wants the meta-identity of being able to be anything.”

– Peter J. Carroll, Liber Kaos

If it is possible to effect changes in reality simply by changing one’s beliefs, then it logically follows that words must be powerful tools of magic.

Putting it another way…you can make things true simply by stating them as fact, provided that your statement is convincing.

It further follows, then, that the most basic foundational skill of magic is to speak and write convincingly and with authority. To develop this talent, one should study oratory, rhetoric, acting, art, poetry, hypnosis, psychology and propaganda. Practice telling stories, anecdotes and jokes as a means of making a point. In order to develop the glamour of authority, the magician requires a broad general knowledge. Study history, philosophy, mythology, religion and languages.

The ability to speak multiple languages carries with it the glamour of the world-traveller and renaissance-man. In the US, a facility with French will make one appear cultured. Spanish, streetwise. To speak and read in archaic and forgotten tongues is especially impressive as this taps simultaneously into the archetypes of priest, scholar and mystic.

It should be clear by now that it really doesn’t matter much which particular languages one chooses to study. Each has a slightly different, though equally positive effect. Much more important are the foundational skills and the conviction with which you speak. No-one’s going to think you streetwise as you stutter through your basic, overly formal high-school Spanish. Likewise, no-one’s going to mistake you for wise and powerful Magus if your command of the Elder Tongue extends no further than chanting the Futhark in your deepest D&D voice. On the other hand…maybe they will. There’s a sucker born every minute.

Hail Chaos! Viva Loki! Aum Wotan!

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Storytelling as the Weaving of the Self

We moderns have nothing whatsoever of our own; only by replenishing and cramming ourselves with the ages, customs, arts, philosophies, religions, discoveries of others do we become anything worthy of notice.
Friederich Nietzsche

Exit all legends, enter the laws of magick.
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

“You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”, an Aborigine says to the hero in a movie called ‘Australia’ (the movie is crap, but I’m used to look for gold in shit). The aborigines have a very mysterious concept that they call dream time, this is the mythical & magical time, where the ancestors still live & sing and every thing has a ‘song’ attached to it: rocks, trees, bushes asf. – all have a ‘song’. And the initiated sorcerer of the Australian natives can communicate with these ‘things’ by singing their songs (a form of verbal magic, in Norse magic represented by Galdor). Here we are once again confronted with the holistic vision of a sacred landscape, where everything is interconnected & alive – a worldview that was also common to our European ancestors (or wherever your ancestors come from). This vision is contrary to the modern myths created by the visions of Descartes & ‘Newton’s sleep‘ (William Blake). Both of them had literally visions. Descartes’ thinking has been influenced, for example, by his dreams & Newton has been an occultist, who has received his vision of the mechanistic ‘clockwork universe’ from an ‘Angel’ of the Enochian system of magick ‘invented’ by Dr. John Dee.

Their visions are the stories about the universe we are brought up with. (If you have really bad karma you have been brought up with Kristjan stories about the universe :-). They do not stem from dream time, but from the modern myth of linear time. (‘Our enemies are material. Our enemies are direction and fact. Our enemies are Because.’ GP-O)

Anyway, what really strikes me is the idea how much power a story has over our lives and that – since nobody owes the absolute truth, if such a mysterious thing exists at all – all religions, philosophies, myths, histories, fictions and movies are essentially stories, stories we tell ourselves or that are told to us. Of course, this is a postmodern attitude that I am extremely wary of as it includes the risk of fundamentalist relativism and an ‘epistemological hypochondria’ (Geertz), where ‘anything goes’ and thus real knowledge becomes impossible anymore. But everything has two faces and there are also great advantages, when one uses POMO thought in a critical & self-conscious fashion.

“Post-modern research … embodies a critique of the conventional logical positivist discourse derived from rationalist Enlightenment philosophy, which privileges the European, male, individual subject and the indisputable authority of scientific explanatory frameworks.” (Robert J. Wallis 2003: Shamans/Neo-Shamans: Ecstasies, Alternative Archaeologies and Contemporary Pagans, p. 2).

I think this critique is a necessary step, if one really wants to understand the local knowledge of a native people, like the Aboriginal tradition (or our Heathen tradition). This means, too, that to select carefully a few essential tenets of postmodern philosophy can bring about changes in attitudes, values, perceptions, and worldviews that help us to heal the wounds between ‘whites’ and the peoples we have hurt (see Henry’s article Culture, Genocide and Whingers). More generally speaking, such a ‘paradaigm shift’ on a grand scale can help us to heal the wounds between humanity and the Earth Spirit (Anima Mundi).

Further, the positive effects of postmodernism can be, if used wisely, that we deny to follow ‘universal rules’ (of life, art, philosophy, or anything else). And those who have the will and determination can choose pathways to individual fulfilment & self-empowerment based on the story (‘paradigm’) chosen or created by themselves, instead of following the universal appeal or supposed authority of a story they were told to believe (be it religious metaphysics or scientific materialism, or whatever your favourite mental prison is). If something feels internally authentic & right, it’s the way to go. For us Chaos Heathens / Pagans this attitude makes it possible to liberate us to return to the trú traditions of our ancestors in new, exciting, and creative ways, in ways that adapt and apply the ancient wisdom to the circumstances and the Need – in the sense of :ᚾ: – of our times.

However, to me storytelling is a form of magick and a form of knowledge. Imagine a tribe 10,000 years ago in a dark forest at night. You can hear the wolves howl, and you hear the strange sounds of other dangerous animals, above you the stars and a full moon. Only a little bonfire enlightens the night and you sit there in a circle with your comrades, the shaman of your tribe – a miraculous man with special powers, who is treated with awe by all men of the tribe – sits with you there and tells wyrd stories of cosmic, uncontrollable and daunting forces, of Fire and Ice generating the events that created the universe. He tells you about Ymir, the bipolar Giant, dismembered by the mighty Gods, Odhinn (Master of Ecstasy), Vili (Sacred Will) & Vé (Hollowed Space), who made order (Futhark) out of the totality of existence (Ginnung) and shaped the first man & woman, Askr and Embla, out of trees (!), giving them the triple Gift (Gebo) of human shape (Lík), life-breath (Önd = Prana, Chi, Libido) and (divine) consciousness (Ódhr). His stories tell you about the adventurous journeys and brave deeds of heroes that are your direct ancestors, whom maybe your dead great-grandfather met personally, when he was a child. These journeys of those heroes turn into ordeals & initiations, where they gain insights into the mysteries and cycles of birth, life, death & rebirth. These stories are strange allegories that illumine your understanding of the world surrounding you. They give you heroic models of behaviour that help you to live in an honourable way. Our shaman from 10,000 years ago is a storyteller. He creates a sense of self, of who and where you are. He gives codes of meaning & an intelligence to your life that makes you aware of the interconnectedness that the Web (Wyrd) woven by the Three Norns originates. Magick is possible here – you are not alone, disconnected and alienated from the world!

But 10,000 years later these stories of old are not told to us anymore. They became myths in a negative sense, fantasies of stupid, uneducated, brutish barbarians. The modern stories describe such states of consciousness (as mentioned above) as being ‘primitive’, ‘infantile’ and ‘wishful thinking’. They are something that must be ‘overcome’ by logical & scientific thinking. The French ethnologist Lévy-Bruhl interprets such a healing and wholesome state of unitary consciousness in a negative sense as participation mystique and the Austrian psychoanalyst Freud called this ‘magical thinking’ (based on his idea of primary narcissism). ‘Magical thinking’ is the belief that a person can impact reality by wishing or willpower. Such a belief demonstrates a belief in the self as powerful and able to change external realities. To put it shortly, magical thinking is in many ways what I strive for! For many years now, I try to decondition myself from this vision of ‘flatland’ logic by psychedelic drugs, meditation and magick (more or less successfully until now :-). Though in the long run POMO thinking is not at all ‘magic-friendly’ and, though the whole POMO current has created in many areas a body of knowledge of rather dubious value, I still believe that on a philosophical level some POMO ideas are useful to regain ‘magical thinking’ in a positive, ‘enlightened’ way, namely by creating new stories. Don’t get me wrong, science is invaluable! But the scientific story – if not balanced by wisdom, if not shown where its authority ends, and if not shown where it failed (!) – has not much (interesting) to say about the most important questions of life: What is the purpose of life? What happens after death? What is wisdom? Or, if I may quote again my ‘Aboriginal friend’ (from Hollywood:-), his answer to science would be the same as to the white man: “You got no love in your heart. When you got no dreaming, no story, you got nothing”. This is not completely true, of course. Science has a story: it dreams of ‘eternal progress’ and a condition where all disease, probably even death, is cured. For those who haven’t been so optimistic, it has created nihilism. And what is the story of nihilism? It goes: “The story is pointless. It all makes no sense. End of story.” But we Need a story. A brighter story, a greater story, a hopeful story!

But what can a story do on an individual level? Isn’t a story just a story? Well, yes and no. For example, what is the ego? From a meditative point of view, my ego is just the stories I tell myself about myself. But some stories are charged with a very high emotive energy. So, before my ego would give up its ‘core’ stories, it would probably run mad & defend them from extinction like a religious fundamentalist would protect his belief in God, just because the ego consists of these stories. Probably that’s why it’s so hard to ‘Cross the Abyss’, as Crowley has put it. Probably that’s why most humans fear death! Probably that’s why it’s hard to change at all! Because, you know, ‘that’s just the way I am!’, so I won’t give up this-or-that habit or such-and-such a way of thinking or repetitive emotional pattern, even if it’s bad for ‘me’. Because ‘that’s me’! You get the picture… The ego will all-ways convince you with its stories, why you shouldn’t change, why meditating is boring, or why you have the right to behave angry, feel depressed or be xenophobic. So, in a fundamental way, it’s of great importance what story dominates you, what story you tell yourself about yourself. This, probably, is the reason, why meditative systems of the East have only little use for ‘developing a strong personality’ etc. and focus very much on developing ‘egolessness’, developing equanimity towards life, pain & death and fostering devotion towards the God/dess or the guru, who represents the God/dess and, ideally, works as a ‘mirror’ for the apprentice. Our Northern Tradition fosters instead the development of a strong Hamingja (cp. Sweyn’s True Helm) and of courage towards life, pain and death (cp. Dave Lee’s Bright from the Well: Northern Tales in the Modern World).

On a more profane level just consider what psychotherapy basically does to people. It just gives them a story, a meta-narrative, that makes sense out of all the shit that went wrong and by explaining why this shit has led the individual to feel ‘so-and-so’ about himself. By giving sense to that which seems senseless, by explaining the pain and giving it a meaning, and by telling the person that s/he is not defined by its past and that s/he can now choose to do better. Basically, it creates a better story and thus a better ‘self’ – the stories, of which the ego consits, are changed! (‘Change all memory. And change your ways to perceive.’ TOPY proverb) In a way, the therapist is a modern echo of the storyteller, as is, of course, the priest. But finally that’s not enough, because today, if you are a genuine member of the holiest of all holy orders, the COT (= Club Of Truth-seekers :-), the truth of someone else won’t suffice. The shamanic storyteller from 10,000 years ago is dead and gone. The only one who can ‘replace’ him today is not a politician, priest, psychotherapist or some self-proclaimed guru, but it is you. 

Remember You Are Made Of Star Dust

So creating your own story is a good starting point. The chaos magician Andrieh Vitimus suggests:

“The imagination is more powerful than merely the facts. An idea backed by emotional responses can be seductive enough to enslave many to its cause, whether the idea is a spirit, a piece of art, a cause, or a concept. The majority of people seem content to give away their imagination and creative power. Often, this manifests in letting other forces (advertising, religion, ideas, spirits, whatever) decide what they should do and what they can have and be. This is the power of imagination. It can free us or be our worst prison.” (Andrieh Vitimus 2009: Hands-On Chaos Magic , p. 365, my accentuation)

In days of yore Imagination was a natural part of daily life and regarded as valid as any other human faculty. Walliam Blake, whose Poetic Genius has created a unique poetry (see ‘The Proverbs of Hell’), embraced Imagination as ‘the Body of God’. Today our Imagination, our visualising asf., is ‘stolen’ by the story-sellers, who created the ‘Body of (Pavlov’s) Dog‘.  Advertising is a good example. It sells ‘imagination’. So you buy the ‘myth’ surrounding the package, not the content itself. You don’t buy a perfume, but the ‘imagination’ that it makes you more erotic, attractive, seductive asf. Today we have no genuine storyteller except, probably, the artist. For example, artists who sing about the way they experience truth, like this one: “Waking sleep, cocooned within a veil of fog, Sight no further than my hand, Tearing at this web spun through reality … Through the sacred dance I Awaken, Through faith in myself and my rhythm, Conscious for the first time…” (Ironwood – here’s a fantastic German review). But today such artists are rare. Because in these modern days even the artist has become a whore of capitalism and thus he turned from a genuine storyteller to a storyseller – a faker, a peacock, a good-for-nothing. Mehr Schein als Sein (‘More Appearance than Being’). And stories they sell, packaged in a ‘consumer-friendly’ form, devoid of meaning and any real depth. A true storyteller, shaman & madman, Jhonn Balance (now dead dead dead – may he be blessed by all horned animals!), has warned our culture by proclaiming that Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil! The German artist and shaman (of sorts), Joseph Beuys, has said once: Every human is an artist. I would like to add: …and a storyteller. At least s/he should be. POMO theory started out when it proclaimed that there is no ‘grand narrative’ anymore (that the ‘scientific myth’ of modernity of eternal progress & secularization has kind of come to an end – that’s why post-modern). So, after Nietztsche proclaimed that ‘God is dead’, now the ‘grand narrative’ is dead, too. But I believe that we, as individuals and as a folk, need a narrative again, a story. And, in this globalized world, we need also a story for the earth community – a story that makes us aware of the interconnectedness of everything on this green-blue and fragile planet. Because when I poison the air over here in Europe, your air will be finally poised over there in Australia, too. So what could this story be about? Well, I’m not wise enough to answer this question, but we can silence our minds and listen to what the voice of our hearts has to say (what our ancestors called ‘High Rede’). And surely we can look with confidence to the wisdom of our ancestors and apply it. If the climate catastrophe shall be anticipated in time, science must be part of the solution, I believe. As the Permaculture slogan goes: ‘The problem is the solution.’ Mid-gard – Middle-Earth must be guarded, and it can only be guarded by us humans.


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