| |
|
Christ… I’ve been deliberately avoiding this thread as it’s a subject quite close to my heart and I didn’t want to get involved. I’m supposed to be taking a break from magic, which includes writing about it and thinking about it. But I’m having a fairly rough night, for various reasons, and need something to distract me.
Thinking about creativity and magic in terms of “hypersigils” misses the point to some degree. It encourages us to think in terms of a specific finite working geared towards a pre-determined result or series of results, as opposed to an ongoing organic magical process that you engage with. I dunno, maybe people just aren’t describing their experiences very personally in this thread, but there seems to be a distinct lack of passion and creativity in the way that “hypersigils” are approached. All this talk of “launching” your hypersigil, forgetting about it, banishing afterwards, getting people to “charge” it with “energy” by reading it… it makes me feels physically sick… it’s as if all the fire and sexiness of the creative process has been boiled away and replaced with the arbitrary formulaic patterns of ceremonial magic.
Why are people looking for rules and regulations on how long it should be, for fucks sake? How long is a piece of string? How big is a painting? How many pages should a great novel have?
I think the point that’s being overlooked is the constant interplay between the creative process and the process of magic. To my mind, there isn’t much of a difference. All creativity is a magical act. Creativity is magic. There is little distinction. This thing about being really involved in the creative process to the extent that you feel you need to “banish” to return to normal reality. That experience is exactly what magic is, and exactly what creativity is. Navigating the weird corridors of Ideaspace and bringing stuff back. Walking between worlds. As I define it, being a good magician is about being really adept at moving seamlessly from fictional world to fictional world. Ideaspace is an integral part of our day-to-day existence. It’s as ever present as the ground we walk on and the brick wall we bang our head against in threads like this.
In Quabalistic terms, Ideaspace is YESOD, but YESOD cuts across our entire experience of reality in the same way as MALKUTH does. You can’t get away from the hard dense physicality of MALKUTH. It’s the punch in the face and the kick in the teeth, the bottle of champagne and making love till the sun rises. Similarly, you can’t get away from ideaspace. We live and breath it. Everything is stories. For instance, a friend of mine had her bank account cleaned out last week because of a twatish story that some - soon to be dealt with - thief told himself. We constantly create fictional worlds and inhabit them. I’m in one now. It’s not a nice place.
The “hypersigil” is not a shiny new technology. It’s just stories, paintings, songs and theatre. All of that is sorcery by any other name. Something like the magical journal is a hypersigil in effect. It’s your story. It is open ended. It contains all of your hopes and aspirations. It helps you to keep track of where you’ve been, where you’re at and where you’re going. It provides you with a device for slowly sharpening your life along certain lines in accordance with your will. The magic happens, as ever, when you’re not looking. The more you can get that deftness of touch in place, the more feedback you’re likely to get between fiction and reality. It’s exactly like dancing to northern soul. You need to know what you’re doing, but you come off like a twat if you’re too self-conscious.
I think “The Invisibles” may have started functioning as a hypersigil for Georgio Morricone because he had the balance spot on. On the one hand it was his living magical journal, but it was also the day job. He was paying the bills with it. It was this living, mad, ever present thing that he could feed stuff into and it would respond. Like a dialogue. If you get it to the point where you feel like a dialogue is taking place, then chances are the magic will start kicking in as well. It’s the same phenomenon where writers report characters in their books suddenly writing themselves and taking the narrative off down previously unanticipated roads, so you end up writing a different story to the one you thought you were writing.
I think magicians in general should just let the fuck go a bit more, y’know. Give the sorcery space to do what it wants, have a bit of faith in it, pay attention to what’s going on, make it more of a dialogue or living process that you engage with, and less of a big rush to make shit that you want happen.
The more heavy handed you are in your approach to moving between fictional worlds, the more rubbish your magic will be. Being a good magician is all about getting the right blend of practiced skill and instinctive rhythm. Same as being a good artist, writer or musician. It’s a mercurial deftness of touch. Expertly skipping between worlds and keeping a million possible fictional balls in the air at the same time. The magician is always a juggler.
Stupidly, I guess, I wrote something about a boy and girl and the girl admitting to the boy that their love was a lie….. A couple of weeks later she told me that she never loved me and it was a mistake…. It wasn't until I was going through some writing notes that this all hit me and after speaking to a couple of fellow magicians I really think that the hypersigil worked and little better than I thought and that I should really start paying more attention to what I'm doing.
So are you suggesting that this person acted in the way she did because you wrote it into your “hypersigil”, as opposed to your story just reflecting something that you were subconsciously very aware of but were unable to consciously admit to yourself. I think you’re overlooking one of the most magical aspects of the creative process by shoehorning it into some mechanical results magic framework. Look at the interplay going on there between your fiction and what’s actually happening to you. I think that the key to working sorcery through fiction is about being aware of these ongoing narratives that we tell ourselves, and spotting the right moment to make a selective edit. Timing is important. No time for big rewrites on press day. Writing a novel, or keeping a journal, or painting every day, or writing songs, or whatever - are all technologies for getting to grips with this sort of thing. It doesn’t matter how closely the fiction relates to your life, if it’s coming from you, then it’s already an extraordinarily intimate expression of your mind, heart and soul. Even if it’s a novel about lyricist monkeys that shag sluttish tortoises, you’d be hard pushed to write it without putting any of yourself into it. In this sense, the act of writing stories allows us to make selective edits and subtle rewrites on the stories that we tell ourselves - the internal narratives that we live by. Although it’s possible that I’ve just done too much sub-editing this week.
free writing with my left hand (I’m a righty normally) to access whatever properties it is my right brain harbors
Years ago when I used to work for the post office, processing cheques on the Bukowski shift, I taught myself how to do the entire job with my left hand out of boredom and desperation. Not sure if it was a waste of time or not in terms of unlocking areas of consciousness, but I’m partially ambidextrous now and can even draw quite well with my left hand. Go figure.
Anyway, rant over. Going to try and resume my magical abstinence again. Shouldn’t even be thinking about this stuff. |
|
|
What i SHOULD have said was that it's not worthless knowledge, I just fail to see how knowing that (just to use a minor example) y'know, the moon is associated with Yesod, it is the Foundation, Atlas, secret tunnels, Malkuth is the Gateway of Tears, it's color is brown, it's number is 10, Lilith is the qliphoth attached to it, and on and on, I fail to perceive how that is revelant to my life at this exact moment in space-time. Perhaps it will be valuable information to know one day, but at the moment I can't see myself getting any practical use out of it in my day-to-day life. This is most probably nothing more then a misunderstanding on my part, as I'm still not exactly sure what practical use the qabalah has besides it's use as a model for psychology, art or symbolism (for example, I'm well-aware that supposedly it's of value when one encounters denizens of the astral plane, but having never visited the astral plane myself I can't comment on this). Perhaps the key is figuring how it applies to the day-to-day concerns. I recall reading something Crowley wrote in "Magick Without Tears" to his correspondant about how to memorize and put the qabalah to use by applying it to everyday matters... Going for a daily walk, picking up the mail, and so on. But this is getting off subject here.