One thing that has been on my mind for quite some time now is whether reading about magick can have any effects on one's psyche. I once read somewhere that everything time you read something new your brain undergoes changes (can't remember where I read this), but anyway I can't help but wonder if reading about certain "darker" threads of magic can have any potentially dangerous effects on the reader.
This particular concern of mine actually goes back to my childhood when I first became interested in magic. There was a book in my school library called "White Magic Black Magic" or something like that, and I took the book home one day and read it, and I recall there being chapters satanism and how to turn yourself into a werewolf and things like that (what such a book was doing in a children's grade school library is still something I do not understand). After reading the book I became worried that just by reading stuff like that I could become possessed by Satan (keep in mind I was very young at the time and since then I've read about things that make satan seem warm and cuddly). A similiar incident occured a few years ago when I was getting into Throbbing Gristle and they recommended Aleister Crowley and stuff. I recall thumbing through a Crowley book at Borders or something very nervously, afraid that I'd look at some weird symbol or something and demons would manifest... If only it were that easy.
Robert Anton Wilson said that many people read Crowley but never go about actually performing the rituals and techniques he writes about (of which I am a guilty party, alas). RAW's a pretty smart guy so I don't think that just reading about these darker schools of magic can have any physical danger, but I think that if any danger exists at all it's more a psychological one, ie obsession and things of that nature. A lot of my interest in magic is mostly academic, as I like reading odd things and sometimes it gives me creative ideas for my art, even though I may not actually practice it/believe in it (consider the recent thread on the Voudoun Gnostic Workbook in which I said I was chiefly interested in reading about Baron Zaraguin and the scorpian loa, not actually evoking/invoking them).
Which brings me, inevitably, here. In recent threads over the last few months I've brought up the topic about the qliphoth and my interest in them. The first time I read about them was in Dion Fortune's "Psychic Self-Defense", the first occult book I read in my self-initiation, and she seemed to view them as sinks in which all the ills of men collected, or something along those lines. The impression that I got was they were something I'd rather not investigate. However, I soon got into Grant Morrison's comic "The Filth" which awakened inside me an interest in the qabalah and the so-called "Abyss", and the notion of confronting one's dark side and incorporating it into one's self (sadly I tried to purge it, as I related in a recent thread, but this only brought it back with more fury then before!) Inevitably my paths crossed again with the qliphoth.
Before I go on here I'd like to say that very recently I've completed a nearly 400 page book that I started a year ago. This book I will not publish as it was merely practice to prove that yes, I could type a full-lenght book, and also because it was still very much influenced by my literary heroes, such as Burroughs, Wilson, Grant Morrison and others (and I'm not sure the world, at the moment, needs anymore stories about alternative occult gnostic terrorists saving the universe from archon-like deities and reptilian hybrids). However the book was also a hypersigil in textual format meant to introduce change in my life. In the book a female version of myself (a fiction suit, in other words) starts off in a boring, mind-numbing reality, working in a supermarket (like I was at the time) when one day she meets a fellow employee who is a magician and also a member of a secret occult group trying to save the universe from a reptilian invasion (I was reading a lot of David Icke at the time, leading to hysterical paranoia last May: long story). But anyway this version of me went through CHANGE: losing her virginity, becoming an accomplished magician, leading a more interesting life, shedding painful memories through NLP techniques and Reichian therapy and what not. And now, after a year of writing this thing (which grew into a really odd-ball obsession) I no longer work in a supermarket, now I work at a bookstore. Recently I've made friends on-line with OTO members and, in real life, some of my co-workers are into the occult. I've been studying NLP and using it to help myself get past painful memories, and soon plan to begin Reichian breathwork. I've also had luck with sigils, through my own methods as discussed in another thread.
You may just wonder what this has to do with the qliphoth? Well, in this book there were 10 chapters, each related to a sephiroth on the Tree of Life, chapter 1 being malkuth and working my way up (each chapter corresponded to certain attributes to the appropriate sephiroth, I should add). However, I decided there should be a chapter for the Abyss so I added an epilogue starring myself, after shedding the fiction suit. In this chapter I wrote myself traveling to the reverse of the Tree of Life, walking through the 22 tunnels of Set and witnessing the various atrocities of each one (some of which I created) before speaking to God (which in this case was a sentinent female toilet overflowing with shit and vaginal secretions) before I was "flushed" into her "digestive system" and I crossed the Abyss, dissolving at the end in a pool of static before being reborn as a phoenix at the end, then transported back to this world enlightened. I read about the 22 tunnels of Set from "The Magician's Dictionary" and added them to the epilogue to spice it up a bit, so to speak. Later on I began reading some of Kenneth Grant's stuff about them and then I read an essay (linked on here recently) in which the writer put forth the idea that certain writers/poets/artists acted as channelers who somehow picked up on the frequencies of these qliphoptic forces and manifested them into this reality, usually at the exspense of their sanity and nervous system. It was around this point where I began to think "You know, maybe writing about myself going through those tunnels wasn't the smartest thing I've ever done" (especially when one considers the fact that the things I write about very often seem to manifest into this dimension, as the whole "Punkmodernist" hypersigil experiment proved).
So now I wonder if I should be on guard against these things due to my reading/writing about them.... I wonder if these qliphoptic forces are actually a threat only if one consciously goes about evoking them through ritual means. I mean, I have enough troubles as it is without worrying about my sanity or soul being destroyed and my nervous system being attacked! maybe I shouldn't read about these things at all as they usually just make me worry unnecessarily... Just tonite I was reading through Kenneth Grant's "The Magical Revival" and, I don't know if I misread him or something, but he seems to think that the ejaculation of semen into this sphere of reality can result in the breeding of vampires or qliphoptic entities elsewhere... Great, now I need to worry about just what it is I'm bringing about during masturbation. What next, damn it?!?! Anyway, I've decided to avoid such schools of thought for the immediate future and focus on more safer stuff like NLP and things of that nature. Once I get through this chaotic period and feel more confident and comfortable with myself (to say nothing of my sanity) I can go back to reading about the slimy, tentacled thingies. |
