Speaker 1: Something's going to happen?
Speaker 2: What's going to happen?
Speaker 1: Quiet?
Speaker 2: Welcome to the Occult Rejects. This episode, I got a
Speaker 2: couple of rejects with us, and I got a returning
Speaker 2: guest that I am very very excited to finally get
Speaker 2: back on. But before we get to him, we will
Speaker 2: have the other rejects plug themselves and let them know
Speaker 2: where they can find all their work. First, we'll start
Speaker 2: off with the reject mad scientist Lisa, What is going on?
Speaker 2: How are you?
Speaker 3: I'm good, Thank you for having me on, thank you
Speaker 3: for inviting me, for Toby, and thank you to all
Speaker 3: the rejects for being here. I am very excited about
Speaker 3: Tobe because after the first one I had so many
Speaker 3: other questions. So I'm glad he's back on. And the
Speaker 3: only thing I want to plug is a cult Research
Speaker 3: Institute dot org. We have some contributors that contribute to
Speaker 3: that website, and so if you like to consume your
Speaker 3: content in the literary form, please check us out at
Speaker 3: a Cold Research Institute dot org.
Speaker 2: Thanks awesome, Thank you so much. And we got the
Speaker 2: Man the Headless Giant. Oh, sorry skipping gin, I didn't
Speaker 2: have the screen up. Sorry Jin The Ninja the Man.
Speaker 2: That's probably the reason why we're having the second interview
Speaker 2: with Toby is because you had brought up the whole
Speaker 2: trapezoid thing and uh whatever, and here we are again.
Speaker 2: So thank you Jin and Jena Ninja. Let everybody know
Speaker 2: where they can find all your amazing work.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much, boss. And I have to say,
Speaker 1: we're having this conversation because you and like obviously put
Speaker 1: it together. You invite me on, and I'm really lucky
Speaker 1: that you include me in these These are my favorite
Speaker 1: kind of shows, like with Modern America. I mean, you
Speaker 1: know this, moll just my favorite thing. So and thank
Speaker 1: you so much Toby for coming on again, and thank
Speaker 1: you to the all the rejects on a Planel tonight.
Speaker 1: And so if you want to check me out, I'm
Speaker 1: at Wukar Reborn w uk and g Reborn on x
Speaker 1: Twitter and then ig is Threshold Saints as well as
Speaker 1: the show account at Threshold Saints, so serial experiments in
Speaker 1: speculative ontology. So I just dropped episode forty eight with
Speaker 1: Alex Rivera and we talked about a very in depth
Speaker 1: conversation on narcissism and Tracy Twyman. So we kind of
Speaker 1: right to the edge on that, So thank you guys.
Speaker 2: Awesome, nice, nice, I'm pretty sure it's a good guest
Speaker 2: to talk about Tracy too with good stuff. And now
Speaker 2: we're finally making it to the Headless Giant. What is
Speaker 2: going on? So please let everybody know where they can
Speaker 2: find all your amazing work.
Speaker 4: You do, and you can find me on x at
Speaker 4: the Headless Giant. You can also find me on YouTube
Speaker 4: streaming this live. You can also send your emails to me.
Speaker 4: If you've had any paranormal experiences or any kind of
Speaker 4: mysterious dreams that have stuck with you, email me at
Speaker 4: the Headless Giant Podcast at gmail dot com and I
Speaker 4: will read it on your show tomorrow with Nick. Also,
Speaker 4: if you're noticing that I wasn't on here with Toby before,
Speaker 4: that's because Ethan is having a difficult situation, So guys,
Speaker 4: send your thoughts on prayers out to Ethan. That poor
Speaker 4: guy has been through a lot and he's losing his father,
Speaker 4: so just keep eating in your prayers.
Speaker 2: Well said, so well said, Thank you, Unless, but not least,
Speaker 2: we got Ricardo from the Institute for Natural Philosophy. What
Speaker 2: is going on, sir? Thank you very much. For coming
Speaker 2: on again.
Speaker 5: Oh, thank you very much for having me. Good night
Speaker 5: to all of you. I'm eager to learn from Toby
Speaker 5: that I'm just being introduced to. So you can find
Speaker 5: me at Ricardo Calvo at X as you can see
Speaker 5: on the screen. And please check out the Institute for
Speaker 5: Natural Philosophy that is also on X and you can
Speaker 5: find it at Institute Finacial Philosophy dot org. Check out
Speaker 5: O magazine. There is Pharaoh's It's free, it's online and
Speaker 5: you can download it. The new issue is almost almost ready,
Speaker 5: perhaps one more week or so. And I, just as
Speaker 5: Headless said, I just want to share my deepest sympathies
Speaker 5: to Eton and to say that we are all well,
Speaker 5: we are all thinking about him and what he's going through.
Speaker 6: So eaten.
Speaker 5: Wherever you are, our thoughts are with you.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you very much, thank you. And finally
Speaker 2: to the guest to himself, he's returning again. We got
Speaker 2: Toby Chappell. He's author, musician and Grandmaster of the Order
Speaker 2: of the Trapezoid within the Temple of Set. Since twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: his book Infernal Geometry and the Left Hand Path has
Speaker 2: been a go to field manual for anyone who wants
Speaker 2: to push Sacred Geometry passed euclid and straight into the
Speaker 2: nine Angles, now with a brand new volume which we
Speaker 2: had them all last on the Languages of magic. Toby's
Speaker 2: doubling down on the idea that numbers, shapes, and words
Speaker 2: are tools for personal apothes pathiosis. So please tell me,
Speaker 2: let everybody know what your deal is, and let's up
Speaker 2: with this book.
Speaker 6: Hello everyone, and thanks so much for having me back.
Speaker 6: I really had a great time our last conversation and
Speaker 6: love that some questions from that conversation led to this
Speaker 6: return appearance. Since I'm talking about a book that's now
Speaker 6: hard to believe about six years old, called an Infernal
Speaker 6: Geometry and the Left Hand Path. You can find it
Speaker 6: wherever you get your books. So a little bit about
Speaker 6: myself for those who didn't see this last time. So
Speaker 6: I am a Semiititian. I'm someone that works with and
Speaker 6: analyzes and produces signs as part of not only for
Speaker 6: my magical work, but also my general way of understanding
Speaker 6: the world around me and the people within that world.
Speaker 6: I'm also a linguist. I am a dedicated student of
Speaker 6: language and a formal sense. I'm actually studying that at
Speaker 6: the university level currently. So as was mentioned, I am
Speaker 6: the author of two books at present, which are both
Speaker 6: sort of related. They both work with a specific approach
Speaker 6: to magic and a couple of different esthetics. The most
Speaker 6: recent book, The Languages of Magic, is a more general
Speaker 6: sort of extrapolation of what I call the semiotic theory
Speaker 6: of magic, the idea that whenever we do magic, we're
Speaker 6: working with signs as a process of communication with first
Speaker 6: and foremost with ourselves, but then also with the one
Speaker 6: outside of ourselves and whatever it is that we're wishing
Speaker 6: to affect. The idea that since we're in a conversation
Speaker 6: with the unmanifest, attempting to persuade it to bring forth
Speaker 6: whatever it is that we desire. Yeah, I would like
Speaker 6: to as places you can find me, and I'll maybe
Speaker 6: mention this again at the end if needed, but places
Speaker 6: you can find me online. You can find me at
Speaker 6: my older website is Infernal Geometry dot com. The one
Speaker 6: that I update more frequently these days is at simiurgist
Speaker 6: dot com. S E M I U R G I
Speaker 6: S T dot com and you can find links for
Speaker 6: me there for Facebook, X, Blue Sky and email contact link.
Speaker 6: People are welcome to email me et cetera.
Speaker 2: Awesome, and I have all of your I think I
Speaker 2: have all those links in the show right now as
Speaker 2: we're live, so hey, people can go check his stuff out.
Speaker 2: I do highly, highly suggest to go listen to the
Speaker 2: first episode he did, even if you're not so much
Speaker 2: into the cult or more of a conspiracy theorist, I
Speaker 2: would even say go listen to that episode because he's
Speaker 2: it's pretty much saying the same thing. Sound. You're getting
Speaker 2: manipulated by sound, you know the language.
Speaker 6: It's about connections. Yeah, yeah, really, So anything you can
Speaker 6: do that helps you to understand the better the connections
Speaker 6: between between people, between phenomena, between you know, the processes
Speaker 6: of the world is going to both help you to
Speaker 6: not only understand it, but also impress your will upon
Speaker 6: those things. And whether that is something you're doing for
Speaker 6: your own personal ends or whether that's because you're you're
Speaker 6: you're part of some grand conspiracy, it's still tools you
Speaker 6: may find useful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, no, I thought that was thought that was
Speaker 2: a really really interesting show. So I just want to
Speaker 2: plug it again.
Speaker 6: But Toby, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the conversation, Yeah, it really was, Toby, So what
Speaker 2: made you spend a few years to write this book.
Speaker 2: What was it that was like, you know what, I
Speaker 2: need to put passion into this idea.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so I was first exposed to the system which
Speaker 6: is called the Nine Angles, which should just clarify in
Speaker 6: case there's any confusion, that has nothing to do with
Speaker 6: a certain group that has that as part of their name.
Speaker 6: They may have taken it from Michael Aquino's writings, but
Speaker 6: it's been unclear. But what I'm referring to is work
Speaker 6: with the Nine Angles as a specific magical system that
Speaker 6: arises out of one primary source called the Ceremony of
Speaker 6: the Nine Angles, which was published in Antonine Levey's The
Speaker 6: Satanic Rituals. That was actually written by Michael Aquino, who
Speaker 6: at the time was a very close associated of LaVey.
Speaker 6: Later branched off from the Church of Satan and then
Speaker 6: became one of the founders of the Temple of Set.
Speaker 6: Now what this sort of system is. It combines things
Speaker 6: like Pythagorea and number mysticism, some of the cosmicism, theories
Speaker 6: of HP. Lovecraft, and as well as of you know,
Speaker 6: the ideas of like higher mathematics, and the idea that
Speaker 6: we can work with not only the three dimensions that
Speaker 6: we can reach out in touch, but also higher dimensions
Speaker 6: as well, in order to find certain gateways into understanding
Speaker 6: that are maybe not accessible through ordinary means. And a
Speaker 6: Quino didn't write this originally with the intent to create
Speaker 6: a magical system. He was writing a specific ritual, kind
Speaker 6: of the Lovecraft themed ritual, at LaVey's request. And it
Speaker 6: was some time later that really when Stephen Flowers, who
Speaker 6: I understand will be a guest on your show, soon
Speaker 6: became part of the Temple of Set in the mid
Speaker 6: nineteen eighties. One of things that drew him to it
Speaker 6: was finding out that a Quino wrote this originally, but
Speaker 6: also want to know more about what this thing was
Speaker 6: and seeing the operative potential within it. And I first
Speaker 6: became aware of it at the time not long after
Speaker 6: I joined the Temple of Set, which was in two
Speaker 6: thousand and there was not really a lot written about
Speaker 6: it at that time. There were bits and pieces of
Speaker 6: articles that Flowers and others had written, but no one
Speaker 6: had really made a decided attempt to pull it into
Speaker 6: like a larger system. And that was something that within
Speaker 6: the order of the Trapezoid, which is part of the
Speaker 6: Temple of set, some people began to experiment with We
Speaker 6: did a lengthy series of workings, nine years worth of
Speaker 6: magical workings related to exploring ideas around the Angles, and
Speaker 6: it was somewhere in the middle of that that I
Speaker 6: began to realize that I was finally getting my head
Speaker 6: wrapped around it, after I don't know, probably twelve or
Speaker 6: so years of exposure to it at that point. And
Speaker 6: as I was we explained some of the ideas to
Speaker 6: other people that I knew within the order, people suggested, oh,
Speaker 6: you need to write some of this down. We don't
Speaker 6: have anything that puts all these things together. It's hard
Speaker 6: to find the pieces, it's hard to kind of put
Speaker 6: them together on your own. And so I began to
Speaker 6: thinking about that. Originally just as hey, let me just
Speaker 6: kind of write down what I know and start trying
Speaker 6: to fill in the gaps on these pieces of it.
Speaker 6: And then as that developed, it became a larger scale work.
Speaker 6: And then it suddenly dawned on me that given that
Speaker 6: this is something that you know, the original ceremony the
Speaker 6: Nine Angles was from nineteen seventy two, and so we're
Speaker 6: talking about twenty fourteen at this point, so you have
Speaker 6: all these years of when people within the temple and
Speaker 6: maybe beyond as well, had been working with this, it
Speaker 6: maybe realize that, well, maybe it's time to put some
Speaker 6: of this out into the world, not all of it,
Speaker 6: because there's there's some stuff that's left out of the
Speaker 6: book on purpose, you know, and there's some stuff that's
Speaker 6: continued to be developed. The book is a snapshot in
Speaker 6: time of really the period from twenty fourteen twenty sixteen
Speaker 6: when I was the bulk of when I was writing it,
Speaker 6: so things have changed. It's a living system, so it
Speaker 6: continues to be developed. And then that's when it that's
Speaker 6: when it occurred to me that putting this out of
Speaker 6: the world in some way might make sense. And then,
Speaker 6: with some assistants from Stephen Flowers actually for whom I'm
Speaker 6: extraordinarily grateful for that many things, was able to get
Speaker 6: this picked up by Inner Traditions and then published in
Speaker 6: twenty nineteen.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. Yeah, you know, I've listened to a few
Speaker 2: interviews at Don Webben Flowers and they've both actually mentioned you,
Speaker 2: giving you a lot of credit for your intellect. So yes,
Speaker 2: let's right.
Speaker 6: I stand on the shoulders of giants. I mean, they're
Speaker 6: They're both very important to me as mentors and his friends.
Speaker 6: I've spent time in both their homes, you know, graciously
Speaker 6: on their part, and you know, have warned quite a
Speaker 6: bit from both of them, as well as from Michael
Speaker 6: Aquino himself. Who doctor Aquino did. Uh, he contributed a
Speaker 6: forward to Infernal Geometry, and he he did receive a
Speaker 6: copy before he passed in twenty nineteen, so he was
Speaker 6: very supportive of that as well.
Speaker 2: Uh. Did anybody have any questions before we continue?
Speaker 4: I got I got a quick question, So about methodology.
Speaker 4: I kind of see where you're coming from. The Greeks
Speaker 4: had something called isopsophy, where they would be equating numbers
Speaker 4: with letters because the two are the same. They had,
Speaker 4: you know, their numbers were their letters. So they had
Speaker 4: this very quick system of changing perspective from you know,
Speaker 4: the mathematical, the geometrical back to the linguistic almost you know, instantaneously.
Speaker 4: And you could see them writing isopsophy in places like, uh,
Speaker 4: the herculaneum, where they would they would have graffiti talking
Speaker 4: about a person's number and how in love with that
Speaker 4: person's number they are. And so it's a completely different
Speaker 4: kind of perspective of associations, at least within the Greek world.
Speaker 4: Is this utilizing somewhat of that shift in perspective, Not.
Speaker 6: Directly, but it's kind of tough from the same cloth
Speaker 6: in a sense, draws very heavily on the ideas from
Speaker 6: the Pythagoreans around uh what you might call their arismo
Speaker 6: arismothesy uh yeah, that or aristhmetic somebling on the word
Speaker 6: here approach to numbers where it's not about like, okay, one, two, three, four, five,
Speaker 6: I have I have six, you know, coconuts or whatever,
Speaker 6: but it's about the ideas of oneness, twoness, threeness and fourness.
Speaker 6: So when you start to look beyond just not what
Speaker 6: numbers reveal to us in the way they relate to
Speaker 6: concrete things in the real world, but when they relate
Speaker 6: to the idea of the number itself, the idea what
Speaker 6: does it mean to be a unity, what does it
Speaker 6: mean to be a duality, what does it mean to
Speaker 6: be a triad? And so forth, you start to open
Speaker 6: up beyond just what you can gain from interacting with
Speaker 6: what's in the world to now you're interacting with what
Speaker 6: we're able to proceed with mind. But depending on what
Speaker 6: relationship you think number has to the you know, the
Speaker 6: underpinnings of the universe itself. You could also see that
Speaker 6: as the kind of like gateways and understanding this in
Speaker 6: a more sort of cosmic level in a sense, the
Speaker 6: idea of the concepts behind numbers instead of just the
Speaker 6: brute force of a number of something as three of something.
Speaker 6: With the Pythagoreans that they were, you know, they had
Speaker 6: you know, the monad, the dyead, the triad, and so forth,
Speaker 6: all the way up to the deckad, and then it
Speaker 6: kind of repeats, so that the tenth was sort of
Speaker 6: the kind of perfection beyond the ninth, but also the
Speaker 6: gateway to like a new emanation of number within it.
Speaker 6: So it just kind of repeated now within the way
Speaker 6: that I tend to approach that type of working with
Speaker 6: number as a conceptual tool. I mean, I think in
Speaker 6: terms of nine, because I think partly because we use
Speaker 6: a base ten system. So that makes nine the so
Speaker 6: called kind of magic number, the one that returns to itself.
Speaker 6: As Anton Levey would say, you know, that's the idea
Speaker 6: that if you multiply some number by any number that's
Speaker 6: a multiple of nine, if you add up the digits
Speaker 6: that that that's some of those digits will also be
Speaker 6: multiple of nine, right, you know, like one and seventeen.
Speaker 6: You know, one plus one plus seven, so means it's
Speaker 6: you know, multiple of nine and and so that becomes
Speaker 6: useful to me, is like in terms of like cyclical thinking,
Speaker 6: the idea of what what has already come into being,
Speaker 6: what can now re manifest in some way, perhaps in
Speaker 6: a new version of itself or even perhaps you know,
Speaker 6: as a new creation in and of itself. And so
Speaker 6: for me, that kind of the idea that from the
Speaker 6: Pythagoreans about nine and ten of nine is sort of
Speaker 6: the culmination, and then ten is the rarefied beyond this
Speaker 6: the beginning to to new cycle. I sort of tend
Speaker 6: to combine those into one. But that's just a minor
Speaker 6: kind of modification of what they were doing. But if
Speaker 6: you read, if you read through in the Ceremony of
Speaker 6: the Nine Angles, one of the things that was Michael
Speaker 6: Aquino was very influenced by, beyond the obvious HP Lovecraft
Speaker 6: was specifically the Pythagorean number of mysticism, of the moment
Speaker 6: of that died and so forth, there's a there's a
Speaker 6: central part of the Ceremony of the Nine Angles, which
Speaker 6: which is, by the way, if someone has the book
Speaker 6: Infernal Geometry in the left hand path, this printed in
Speaker 6: its entirety at the front of the book. You don't
Speaker 6: have to have Levey's book to get a copy of it.
Speaker 6: Of course, it's all everything's online these days anyway. But anyway,
Speaker 6: there's a there's a critical there's aquittal passage in the
Speaker 6: Ceremony of the Nine Angles, which has come to be
Speaker 6: known as the Bond of the nine Angles. And this
Speaker 6: is sort of relating in Lovecraftian terms what the number
Speaker 6: is one through nine mean in that context, but if
Speaker 6: you read closely, it's also in the thagoory in terms.
Speaker 6: So for example, from the first angle was the infinite,
Speaker 6: where in the laughing one doth cry and the flutes
Speaker 6: way into the ending of time. So the laughing one
Speaker 6: is as athoth he plays the flute. That's part of Lovecraft.
Speaker 6: But that's also that idea of a unity, a oneness,
Speaker 6: that that's the seed from which everything else he expands.
Speaker 6: You know. From the second angle is the master who
Speaker 6: authorted the planes in the angles, who have conceived the
Speaker 6: world of horrors and its terror and glory, that's about
Speaker 6: yok Soothov, which is sort of a not conscious entity
Speaker 6: in Lovecraft's world, but it's sort of like that kind
Speaker 6: of bridge between uh, you know, the cosmic void of
Speaker 6: as a though into you know, the the more sentient
Speaker 6: arrangements of matter and thought that the arise out of
Speaker 6: that and so forth. If you so that that was
Speaker 6: its not an accidental kind of thing. That was a
Speaker 6: very deliberate thing that Michael Quino encoded into it. So
Speaker 6: it so it wasn't so much on them as the
Speaker 6: Greeks would use the opsocopy isopsyphy with the numbers letters
Speaker 6: represent the numbers per se, but it's still taking that
Speaker 6: idea of that there's something about counting that lets us
Speaker 6: relate ourselves to the universe in a way that we
Speaker 6: can't do without that concept, and that's what's developed in
Speaker 6: this kind of love Crafting sense. So it's a bit
Speaker 6: of kind of like ideas for Pythagoras and aesthetic and
Speaker 6: cosmology from Lovecraft and then filter through things like Antonine
Speaker 6: Leavey's law of the trapezoid and related things. So it's
Speaker 6: kind of like this kind of amalgam of a few
Speaker 6: things coming together.
Speaker 5: So if I may Toby, I'm particularly interested in everything
Speaker 5: that is related to frequency, for instance, and frequency sound.
Speaker 5: So how would you explain to those listening to us,
Speaker 5: what is the importance of the wording or how do
Speaker 5: you express yourself when you are using the linguistics to
Speaker 5: convey meaning or purpose in these magical practices.
Speaker 6: For sure. And one thing I didn't mention in my introductions.
Speaker 6: I'm a musician, been a guitarist for Ogez thirty something
Speaker 6: years at this point, so I'm a long time musician,
Speaker 6: both not only playing but also composing, recording, et cetera.
Speaker 6: And so that sort of Pythagorean musical cosmos idea is
Speaker 6: kind of it's always in the back of my mind,
Speaker 6: even when I'm not writing about that sort of thing explicitly.
Speaker 6: So things that that's worth noting, And this is something
Speaker 6: that pops up in the Greek magic of Papyri in
Speaker 6: a very real sense as well, is the idea of
Speaker 6: sort of the differences between consonants and vowels in our speech.
Speaker 6: With consonants, we're stopping the flow of air where to
Speaker 6: greater or lesser extent, and then the vowels were kind
Speaker 6: of flowing in between the consonants. They're more about the
Speaker 6: flow of breath outward, where you know, with the tongue
Speaker 6: we're shaping the vocal cavity and then and that's what
Speaker 6: is causing the the the the sound of the individual vowels. Now,
Speaker 6: that's interesting, right, because you have a you're talking about
Speaker 6: of continuity versus the discontinuity there, continuity being the vowels
Speaker 6: and the discontinuity continuity being the consonants. And my my.
Speaker 5: Definitely the silence in the music. Would that be the
Speaker 5: silence in the music for instance, because in music there
Speaker 5: is no vowels or consonants.
Speaker 6: Right right, when you expand it beyond just you know,
Speaker 6: spoken language into sound, yeah, that that becomes the silences
Speaker 6: versus versus the sound. Or you can also think of
Speaker 6: maybe like a percussive sound as more like a constant
Speaker 6: as well. But right, the same sort of dichotomy between
Speaker 6: unrestricted flow and restricted flow, right, And I think that
Speaker 6: that that interplay is very important to magical work. It's
Speaker 6: also very important to our thought processes. It's also very
Speaker 6: important to of course, it's very important to UH to
Speaker 6: speech as far as the magical part that goes, I
Speaker 6: mean as this a fairly well known. Uh. The pathegoral
Speaker 6: ideas about the music of the sphere is the idea
Speaker 6: that the different parts of the cosmos are tuned in
Speaker 6: a sense. And this was well, that was speculative for
Speaker 6: the most part in their time. We now know, of course,
Speaker 6: this is literally true. We have, for example, you know,
Speaker 6: the the orbits of the planet, you know, moving certain
Speaker 6: according to certain formulas that describe how gravity moves the
Speaker 6: planets around around the Sun. But you can also even
Speaker 6: stack stack them up and go, well, this orbit is
Speaker 6: this many times, or has this relationship this, uh, this
Speaker 6: proportion to this other orbit.
Speaker 1: Et cetera.
Speaker 6: And I've even I've heard people do this, and I've
Speaker 6: also done a bit of this myself, of kind of
Speaker 6: using those relationships and using them to create music. So
Speaker 6: you're literally kind of listening to that music, you know,
Speaker 6: take the same proportion between the nose of proportions between
Speaker 6: the frequencies. So I think that that becomes another way
Speaker 6: to relate to the universe around us, to relate our
Speaker 6: thought processes to what is the underlying of reality that
Speaker 6: is part of the physical makeup of the universe.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 5: So if I told you that for instance, there are
Speaker 5: monuments that are built to reflect architecture into sound in
Speaker 5: the four search scale. How would you relate that as
Speaker 5: important facts? They have you found that in your research?
Speaker 2: M yeah, you much something?
Speaker 6: Yeah, well it's it's I'm sorry, I shut you up
Speaker 6: till I'm thinking through a couple of you know, I
Speaker 6: have like five thoughts or to go in different directions.
Speaker 6: I'm trying to.
Speaker 2: Publish one to chase it runs away too fast.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, yeah, welcome to my world. The I think
Speaker 6: the point I want to kind of pursue a little
Speaker 6: bit of that is about relationships, about finding the way
Speaker 6: that things relate to each other. You know that there's
Speaker 6: there's different ways that you can do that. You have
Speaker 6: both you have you visual cues about about the things
Speaker 6: you encounter, but there's also like in terms of sound,
Speaker 6: you know, we find certain sounds harmonious and move as
Speaker 6: opposed to others.
Speaker 5: I mean.
Speaker 6: Pythagoras road extensively by this, of course, and this pops
Speaker 6: up a lot and Plato as well, especially the dialogue
Speaker 6: the tomas Uh where he literally describes the formation of
Speaker 6: the cosmos, where you know, a portion of the unmanifest
Speaker 6: is carved out to form part of the universe. Then
Speaker 6: this other progressive function is carved out, et cetera. And
Speaker 6: if you read what he describes as the specific portions
Speaker 6: he's they're going in Apathegorian musical scale, you know, where
Speaker 6: you have the thirds and the fifth and the octave
Speaker 6: and so forth. And then so it's all it was
Speaker 6: almost like it was they're using different languages for looking
Speaker 6: at the same thing. In a sense, let's look at
Speaker 6: this mathematically. This is that we can see these things
Speaker 6: about it. This way, look at this musically, we can
Speaker 6: see these things about it. And that's why those sciences
Speaker 6: were so closely connected, the idea that geometry and astronomy
Speaker 6: and music were all different ways of looking at the
Speaker 6: same types of relationships, the same types of of understanding,
Speaker 6: the same attempt to understand the universe.
Speaker 2: Robert, I'm pretty sure you know who that is.
Speaker 6: Oh yes, yeah. The Platonists, especially the ones that popped
Speaker 6: up in the you know, the early modern period flood,
Speaker 6: Giardano Bruno, even Kepler, Johannes Kepler, who was who worked
Speaker 6: out the mathematics behind the planets, behind the orbits of
Speaker 6: the planets. We're hugely informed by these type of this
Speaker 6: Platonic really Pythagorean, but they got it through through Plato,
Speaker 6: this way of looking at the universe as this interplay
Speaker 6: between proportions, its interplay between mathematical relationships. It was part
Speaker 6: of what Galileo would call it, that reading the Book
Speaker 6: of Nature, the idea that we can perceive nature in
Speaker 6: certain ways that are part of our part of our
Speaker 6: own natures. But through that we have to we have
Speaker 6: to read what it's trying to say. And the way
Speaker 6: we do that is we have to have to learn
Speaker 6: as language. And and for the many of those guys,
Speaker 6: that's language was mathematics. And so that's why you see
Speaker 6: such a math mathematically precise approaches to music, to the
Speaker 6: astronomy and so forth, because it was all part of
Speaker 6: the underpinning of what was what was really making up
Speaker 6: the universe was mathematics to them.
Speaker 5: Sure, so so that would be the inclusion of animism
Speaker 5: into into this process, this magical process, would you say
Speaker 5: that like conveying word, conveying life, conveying life to words
Speaker 5: into into meaning, Like when you create a spell, you
Speaker 5: have to create it's a complex, complex process of creating
Speaker 5: intention through the meaning of the language into the rhythm
Speaker 5: and the frequency of the sound itself for a desired
Speaker 5: to act, would you say that.
Speaker 6: Yes, very very much. Uh. You know, there's the idea
Speaker 6: of the logos, right, the transcendent word, that that is
Speaker 6: sort of the part of the makeup of the cosmos,
Speaker 6: and that when we work with with words, you know,
Speaker 6: we're working both with the words that we're speaking, we're
Speaker 6: also working with the deeper meaning behind those words. We're
Speaker 6: also working with the transcendent idea of what it means
Speaker 6: to speak things into being to begin with, which is
Speaker 6: a very important idea in in ancient cultures. You see that,
Speaker 6: you see it very explicitly in in ancient Egypt, with
Speaker 6: the idea that that thot or Jiujute literally writes things
Speaker 6: into reality, that that it doesn't occur until he writes
Speaker 6: it in his book. You see things like in the
Speaker 6: Babylonian world with the creation epic the unuma Elish, which
Speaker 6: starts off with the very idea that before before the
Speaker 6: sky above had a name, before the gods had names,
Speaker 6: the idea that they have to be named and into being.
Speaker 6: So there's something transcendent and foundational about the word itself
Speaker 6: that we have to you know, just like with Plato
Speaker 6: carving off parts of the cosmic describing the carbon off
Speaker 6: parts of the cosmos, we have to carve off part
Speaker 6: of the transcendent word to make it the imminent word
Speaker 6: that we actually work with. And yes, frequency is part
Speaker 6: of that as well. You know, there are the idea
Speaker 6: that the the not only the alphabet or the writing
Speaker 6: system that the words may be written with, but also
Speaker 6: the frequencies with which they were spoken and the relationships
Speaker 6: between the different words. That's such an ancient idea, and
Speaker 6: the way we language has been largely kind of subplanted
Speaker 6: Parsi because language and writing are so widespread now, we
Speaker 6: don't think of them as weird things. Even their writing.
Speaker 6: Reading and writing is extraordinarily weird. You know, we have
Speaker 6: to we have to dig big back deeper to understand,
Speaker 6: like how what we've lost about understanding through these ways
Speaker 6: of interacting with with the world. Sorry, Lisa, I didn't
Speaker 6: mean to cut you out there.
Speaker 3: No, no, I was interrupting you was would you say
Speaker 3: that the vow going back and building on what you
Speaker 3: and dicoct we were talking about, would you say that
Speaker 3: vowels shape the word inso much that it creates memory
Speaker 3: of its backbone, so that when you remove the vowels
Speaker 3: and you just see the consonant, you can still read
Speaker 3: the word. And the same thing with music. Shapes air
Speaker 3: inso much that whenever you don't hear the music anymore,
Speaker 3: you still can manipulate the brain. It has memory.
Speaker 6: Would you say, yeah, well, humans a great of finding patterns.
Speaker 6: That that's part of the weird conceptual apparatus that we have,
Speaker 6: is that we see patterns even when they're not there.
Speaker 6: I mean that helps with things like a letter is
Speaker 6: left out of a word, or some sounds left out.
Speaker 6: Even you and have I mean these days, like when
Speaker 6: you listen to like an MP three or or stream
Speaker 6: of music, it's such high resolution this is not an issue.
Speaker 6: But like in the early days of that when you
Speaker 6: had very low resolution sound files, your ears filling in
Speaker 6: gaps that aren't stuff that's not there, all right, But
Speaker 6: we're so good at finding patterns even when they're not
Speaker 6: there that you know, there's a certain amount of capacity
Speaker 6: for missfiring that's built in because it's better to think
Speaker 6: you see a pattern and react to it than to
Speaker 6: miss the pattern, right, So it's part of our kind
Speaker 6: of evolutionary conception as well our evolutionary development. The idea
Speaker 6: like if you're if you're in the grass and you
Speaker 6: think you see a snake, well it's better to just
Speaker 6: react a mealy as if the snake's there. Then when
Speaker 6: you notice later, oh that was really just just a
Speaker 6: branch or whatever, it's like, that's cool, but that's a
Speaker 6: much better situation than it wasn't a snake and you
Speaker 6: didn't notice, right, So we have this kind of built
Speaker 6: in error rate in our pattern recognition. So which can
Speaker 6: be exploited magically, can be exploited, propaganda, exploited through conspiracy.
Speaker 6: You know, there's lots of ways that that's used against us.
Speaker 6: But that's also one of our sort of magic powers,
Speaker 6: if you will, is that we can we can take
Speaker 6: from things that they're maybe missing some parts of information,
Speaker 6: and we can fill it in based off of our
Speaker 6: experience what's likely to be there. You know, it's a
Speaker 6: combination of like experience and reasoning through what may be there.
Speaker 6: I mean, one of the reasons this is not the
Speaker 6: same with all alphabets are worse usually referred to as
Speaker 6: abjods that leave out the vowels, like with Arabic and
Speaker 6: Hebrew for example, too well known examples. In a lot
Speaker 6: of cases there's only one choice for the vowel anyway,
Speaker 6: so it's not even like you have to write it
Speaker 6: down in many cases. Now there are other other places,
Speaker 6: and you see this quite a bit in the Torah
Speaker 6: where they actually play with the idea that oh, well
Speaker 6: depends on which value fill in here. It could mean this,
Speaker 6: it could mean this, it could mean this, and so
Speaker 6: it's kind of like a puzzle puzzle for the reader
Speaker 6: to figure out. And even sometimes like there is no
Speaker 6: right answer, there's different ways to interpret this because it's
Speaker 6: literally could be one or the other. So yeah, so
Speaker 6: like it's a really it's really interesting the move from
Speaker 6: a the move to like a fully a phonetic alphabet
Speaker 6: is actually a really weird move in human in human
Speaker 6: history that you know, has certain advantages because now some
Speaker 6: things are not left to guess work, but it also
Speaker 6: kind of takes away some things because like that ability
Speaker 6: to play with ambiguity of the well, it could be this,
Speaker 6: it could plausibly be this or this, and now you
Speaker 6: can read read it through different ways as a result,
Speaker 6: so you think.
Speaker 5: Passating, Yeah, you think we can use our current language
Speaker 5: to create a magic expression or spell or are the
Speaker 5: ancient language is more proper to do it, and the
Speaker 5: creation of our language is somehow to reach we remove
Speaker 5: that magical ability from that intention or expression.
Speaker 6: Well, I think you can use any symbol system whatsoever
Speaker 6: for that, you know, mean, I'm counting language as as
Speaker 6: a symbol system because in semiotics, semiotics regards itself as
Speaker 6: we regards that linguistics is actually a subset of semiotics.
Speaker 6: It's one particular system of applied signs. Now being able
Speaker 6: to use it is not the same as being the
Speaker 6: best tool, right right, I mean, and that's the same
Speaker 6: like uh, you know, like anyone that this speaks multiple languages,
Speaker 6: it knows very well that you lose certain things in translation.
Speaker 6: There's some things you can translate. It's easy to translate
Speaker 6: hard concepts. Translate the glass, You're right, translating what the
Speaker 6: glass means, like what's what significance it has in a
Speaker 6: situation that that's that's maybe some where some things get
Speaker 6: lost in translation or you can't quite express things in
Speaker 6: the in the same way. I mean, as far as
Speaker 6: there's any perfect language for magic, I my personal feeling
Speaker 6: is that there isn't. But I think that there may be.
Speaker 6: I think that you can look at some situations where
Speaker 6: the perfect language is the one for that. For example,
Speaker 6: in the Ceremony of the Nine Angles, when Michael Aquino
Speaker 6: first wrote it, he wrote it out in English, and
Speaker 6: you realized something was missing, wrote it entirely in English,
Speaker 6: and then then he started to play around with you know,
Speaker 6: Lovecraft didn't fully developed like a language in his books
Speaker 6: to the same extent that somebody like J. R. R.
Speaker 6: Tolkien did, But there are a few pieces here and
Speaker 6: there in a few of the stories, and so a
Speaker 6: Quino kind of took those kind of made up, made
Speaker 6: up some of his own words, used some things in
Speaker 6: the same kind of patterns to kind of create, well,
Speaker 6: if you had a fully flesh out language of the old,
Speaker 6: great old ones, what would it what might it be like?
Speaker 6: Including the ideas, for example, that they they don't have
Speaker 6: the same vocal apparatus as humans do, so that, you know,
Speaker 6: so maybe there's some sounds we can make it that
Speaker 6: they can't, and vice versa. And so he just decribed
Speaker 6: it as that. In the Ceremony of the Nine Angles
Speaker 6: he described it, it's an approximation as best we can
Speaker 6: do for the language. Of the Great Old Ones, because
Speaker 6: he realized that English alone didn't convey the ideas he
Speaker 6: was trying to do. And in fact, the if you
Speaker 6: read his instructions for that that ceremony, it splicitly says
Speaker 6: that you're supposed to read through the English part beforehand,
Speaker 6: but then when you actually do the ceremony itself, you
Speaker 6: do it exclusively in the youu Gothic language. This he
Speaker 6: described it. And I've been I've been part of that
Speaker 6: before where we've we've done exactly that, and it's it's weird,
Speaker 6: like at first you're you're just like hearing gibberish almost,
Speaker 6: but then you start sort of like what Lisa was saying,
Speaker 6: like you start to pick up on patterns. He started
Speaker 6: to notice repeating little bits here and there, he started
Speaker 6: to notice certain sounds go with certain other sounds. And
Speaker 6: when you start to kind of get that more sense
Speaker 6: of a flow for it, like it enhances what you're
Speaker 6: doing in a way that if I was reading the
Speaker 6: translation of this at the same time, like it just
Speaker 6: wouldn't have the same effect. So yeah, so I think
Speaker 6: that there's no universal like this is the best language
Speaker 6: we're doing magic in. But I think that they're depending
Speaker 6: on the situation. There are certainly options that are more
Speaker 6: effective in certain circumstances than others. Might be same sort
Speaker 6: of thing with you know, the Catholic Mass and Latin.
Speaker 6: A lot of people for the reason, one of the
Speaker 6: reasons there's a lot of reaction against the doing the
Speaker 6: Mass in the vernacular was that people felt they were
Speaker 6: missing something, the idea that you, even if they you
Speaker 6: understood what it meant, just the different sonorities that you
Speaker 6: were hearing from it, something felt missing when you take
Speaker 6: that out and you're just hearing the same thing in English.
Speaker 5: Sure, I ask, because when you hear we hear something,
Speaker 5: for instance, in ancient Norse, or you hear something in
Speaker 5: ancient I need help here, what's the name of it? Well,
Speaker 5: I can't remember. But for instance, in what we believe
Speaker 5: was ancient Egypt or what is to speak in tongues,
Speaker 5: there is a certain raspiness and it combines it with
Speaker 5: all kinds of tones that are different. While our language
Speaker 5: is more linear, so it can't reach everywhere, so it's
Speaker 5: it's a more neutral frequency instead of having the really
Speaker 5: deep sounds and those high pitches that you can get
Speaker 5: from these ancient languages so like the language of the
Speaker 5: Torah that I can't remember right now. I'm sorry, I
Speaker 5: can't remember the name. I'm getting a blank. And my
Speaker 5: question was exactly that, if you answered it, because in English,
Speaker 5: as in most modern languages, is like a monotonic tone,
Speaker 5: like I am speaking now, and it doesn't seem that
Speaker 5: I'm going up and down in my sounds on my
Speaker 5: on my tones, so it's it's monotonic almost like an
Speaker 5: ancient languages that are not like that. They go deep down,
Speaker 5: they go up, they vary, and they can convey meaning
Speaker 5: to that intention or even purpose to what you're saying
Speaker 5: that the companies with a self actuation that you are
Speaker 5: trying to convey through what you are speaking. And that
Speaker 5: was my question. Thank you for answering that.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well, I mean you have, in at least in
Speaker 6: what's considered sort of standard North American English, you have
Speaker 6: I think it's somewhere around fifty six sounds, give or
Speaker 6: take a variety of consonants and in vowels. But that's
Speaker 6: that's only a small number of the possible sounds that
Speaker 6: the human local aborritus can make. So if you think
Speaker 6: about it, if you're speaking any language, and there's no
Speaker 6: language that uses every possible sound that humans can use.
Speaker 6: If you think about it, you're always cutting off some
Speaker 6: of the possibilities whatever language you're using. And as well,
Speaker 6: like you're very very good good example of that is
Speaker 6: when you have like a tonal language versus a non
Speaker 6: total language. English is a non total language, something like
Speaker 6: Mandarin is a tonal language, Vietnamese, et cetera. It's very
Speaker 6: common in Asian languages. You know, the idea that you know,
Speaker 6: the same sounds spoken to a different pitch now now
Speaker 6: change meaning as well. So so yeah, so you're always
Speaker 6: you're always limiting your possibility somewhat. But just like the
Speaker 6: following on with Lisa's question, you're always fill You're always
Speaker 6: filling in some gaps too because you because you know
Speaker 6: that there's there are things that are that can be
Speaker 6: there that are maybe not as obvious, or things that
Speaker 6: you fill in. Or maybe you speak in other language
Speaker 6: that uses some different sounds from English, and like you
Speaker 6: think you hear a sound from the way that doesn't
Speaker 6: go in English because you're you're has accustomed to hearing
Speaker 6: that sound in a certain way and kind of filled
Speaker 6: in the gap there.
Speaker 2: You know it's it's interesting just from my own practices.
Speaker 2: I guess from doing like a lot of cabalistic stuff
Speaker 2: and using the Tree of Life a lot, what I
Speaker 2: would do like the Hextagram ritual or whatever. Yeah, using
Speaker 2: he Brew a lot and then switching back to like
Speaker 2: speaking English a lot. I actually noticed it. It kind
Speaker 2: of fucked me up. It kind of kind of actually
Speaker 2: like fucked me up. It's like I was realizing, like
Speaker 2: I think I was almost incorporating certain both and it
Speaker 2: just I don't know, I don't know how to explain it.
Speaker 2: But there was something else I wanted to say that
Speaker 2: I found interesting. It was a little bit farther back,
Speaker 2: and it made me think, like you were talking about
Speaker 2: I guess, like the brain kind of like getting confused
Speaker 2: and maybe lying to you. And then I was like
Speaker 2: thinking about sound and like a few weeks ago while
Speaker 2: we were podcasting, I had like the sink on and
Speaker 2: it was running water but a little bit and I
Speaker 2: didn't know. And I'm sitting here and throughout like the
Speaker 2: whole show, my brain is hearing that and I am
Speaker 2: like wondering everything that it could be. Is it's something
Speaker 2: hitting the floor. I'm looking outside thinking oh no, it
Speaker 2: sounds like it's coming from outside. Eventually, after the show's over,
Speaker 2: I'm walking around and I'm still looking and listening, and
Speaker 2: I'm like, yo, it sounds like a static TV. And
Speaker 2: I start to walk into the kitchen. And as soon
Speaker 2: as I see that water coming out of the forcet,
Speaker 2: that sound fucking changes mm hmm to sounding like water
Speaker 2: hitting the fucking sink.
Speaker 6: Yeah, he caught in the act.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So my brain was able to make sense of
Speaker 2: what it was going on now because it had thought
Speaker 2: how many other things possible be un told it saw
Speaker 2: the water falling out of the force. It did not
Speaker 2: sound like water, am I head?
Speaker 6: Do you think about it? You thinking about like you
Speaker 6: were trying to find it based off the information you
Speaker 6: had then when you saw it, now you had a
Speaker 6: piece of information that was missing and that now fills
Speaker 6: in that gap, and that was you now see it
Speaker 6: for what it really was.
Speaker 2: It was weird experience. I was like, wow, now it
Speaker 2: sounds like water. Yeah. And then one more thing I
Speaker 2: just wanted to add. I think, uh, it was something
Speaker 2: that I think maybe Ricardo was getting at. And uh,
Speaker 2: I don't know if anybody here might think, you know,
Speaker 2: maybe it's I'm onto something or maybe it's just you
Speaker 2: know whatever, an idea. And uh with old dirty bastard
Speaker 2: from Wu Tang, with his style and the stuff that
Speaker 2: he used to do, I was like, Yo, that guy
Speaker 2: knows what he's doing with those ups and downs, those
Speaker 2: ups and downs plain full. Yeah, So often wondered about
Speaker 2: like it was all dirty best to do in.
Speaker 6: That wule things. It's like Toby.
Speaker 5: For instance, in the hagar Quinn ruins, you find depictions
Speaker 5: of this very and forgive me, I'm not criticizing these
Speaker 5: very fat ladies.
Speaker 6: On these stones.
Speaker 5: They are depicted there and for many people these are
Speaker 5: considered to be the real sirens. So they would sing.
Speaker 5: Groups of these ladies would sing with their powerful voices
Speaker 5: into the temple, and the temple would reflect this sound
Speaker 5: into the sea. That can be used either to call
Speaker 5: ships into the to the rocks, or to make people
Speaker 5: mad while they are at sea and causing the mess
Speaker 5: of the sirens. Right, So, depending on what kind of
Speaker 5: magic you're trying to create, you have to use the
Speaker 5: right tool for the job. So and the right tool
Speaker 5: may include the person, the tone, the language. By with
Speaker 5: all of that, that was what I was trying to
Speaker 5: convey since the first question. M.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's that's one reason to study
Speaker 6: language as a phenomenon, is you you brought in your
Speaker 6: palette of what's what's there, and you know you haven't
Speaker 6: find new pieces that you can use to create something new.
Speaker 4: I had a question, so you were talking about the
Speaker 4: rely on language. Is that the is that the Cthulu language.
Speaker 6: That yeah, a Queeno usually called it, you Gothic, but
Speaker 6: but yes, sort of same same, same idea.
Speaker 4: It's kind of interesting because you've got the glass Alia
Speaker 4: like in the PGM, like you referenced earlier, where they
Speaker 4: have these long strings of different vowel sounds that are
Speaker 4: supposed to be doing something, but it's it's not too
Speaker 4: obvious exactly what it is that they meant in the
Speaker 4: in the translation, right, you know.
Speaker 6: Some some of those words are are borrowed and either
Speaker 6: direct or like in a corrupted way from other languages
Speaker 6: around them, because there was this this very deep idea
Speaker 6: that foreign things are magic, foreign gods, foreign words, foreign
Speaker 6: ways of writing, et cetera. And yeah, some of them
Speaker 6: is probably is glossal Aelia who are speaking in tongues
Speaker 6: and and one of things I do find fascinating is
Speaker 6: the way that they use They do use the vowels,
Speaker 6: because you'll see like strings of vowels, and sometimes you'll
Speaker 6: see them even though they'll have like ordered arrangements of vowels,
Speaker 6: like like in a pyramid or or things like this
Speaker 6: that that are not just on the written page. It's
Speaker 6: like as part of the ritual, you're supposed to write
Speaker 6: that yourself. It's part of you going back to the
Speaker 6: idea of thought writing things into reality. You're making you're
Speaker 6: you're taking something abstract, the sound, and now you're literally
Speaker 6: writing into the fabric of the universe as part of
Speaker 6: this ritual. So you're you're connecting what's within you with
Speaker 6: like the world that's outside of you as part of it.
Speaker 6: I think that, combined with the ideas like the continuous
Speaker 6: nature of vowels and the unrestricted nature of the way
Speaker 6: we articulate them, I think all those are part part
Speaker 6: of the toolkit they were drawing from when they're someone
Speaker 6: was working with one of those rituals and taking all
Speaker 6: these pieces and pulling together. Because it's a very syncretic thing,
Speaker 6: there's lots of stuff that's pulled in from different places
Speaker 6: and different different traditions, and you know, you have some
Speaker 6: things that are like seem to be different rituals that
Speaker 6: were crammed together, like the right of the Headless One,
Speaker 6: you know. So it's very it's a very kind of
Speaker 6: like kitchen sync approach to magic about wait, this works,
Speaker 6: all right. I'm using it because it's very pragmatic. It
Speaker 6: is very an around what works. But that idea that
Speaker 6: that underlying so many of the rituals and the PGM
Speaker 6: is the idea that words are magic in and of themselves,
Speaker 6: the idea that that I can make these sounds and
Speaker 6: now it carries not just the mean really like a
Speaker 6: mundane meaning of what this thing is, but it also
Speaker 6: carries this conceptual meaning that that I'm ringing to it,
Speaker 6: I'm adding as part of the meaning. That's that's what
Speaker 6: that's the core when I talk about the semiotic theory magic.
Speaker 6: That's the core of what I'm talking about is that
Speaker 6: we use the signs of any type, whether it's words
Speaker 6: or something written or sound, et cetera, and we're overloading
Speaker 6: it with meaning. We're giving more meaning beyond just what
Speaker 6: is already inherently part of it, or what is conventionally
Speaker 6: part of it, but using that to you to carry
Speaker 6: our intent.
Speaker 5: Sure. Look, I understand very little of all of this,
Speaker 5: but I always saw a language in terms of magic
Speaker 5: as a way of conveying sound and transforming to a
Speaker 5: key that will fit a hole that is cosmic and
Speaker 5: unique to that specific key that you are creating. So
Speaker 5: the more perfect the key is the closest you get
Speaker 5: to open the door that you're trying to open.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean it's really uh. I mean some of
Speaker 6: that and I talk about that in the languages of
Speaker 6: the magic. Some of that's about communication theory, you know,
Speaker 6: the how how we communicate. There's there's a there's an
Speaker 6: idea in community in different communication theories, and there are
Speaker 6: a lot of communication theories, but there's an idea that's
Speaker 6: common to a lot of them, the idea that there
Speaker 6: has to be some level of similarity between conversants. The
Speaker 6: idea like, for example, we're speaking English, right, and so
Speaker 6: like the extent to which you and your listeners are
Speaker 6: able to understand me is going to be hardly a
Speaker 6: function of their own ability to understand and speak English.
Speaker 6: So we have to have some level of similarity. If
Speaker 6: I started speaking German, you know, maybe fewer listeners understand
Speaker 6: what I'm saying because they don't speak German. So there's
Speaker 6: idea that communication doesn't have to be exact equals, but
Speaker 6: they have to be somewhat relative equals in order to
Speaker 6: even have the ability to understand. And the semiotic theory
Speaker 6: of magic of one of the parts of it is
Speaker 6: is that you know you're in communication with something, whether
Speaker 6: it's within with your with your current or future self,
Speaker 6: whether it's with the Animatama, unomathith best world, whether it's
Speaker 6: with someone that you're attempting to work some type of
Speaker 6: magic on to behave in a certain way, et cetera.
Speaker 6: But if you're not communicative effectively with them, if you're
Speaker 6: not you know, broadly following the rules of the language
Speaker 6: you're speaking and the person or the thing you're talking
Speaker 6: to is and understand it, then you're not gonna get
Speaker 6: your point across. And that's very much like what you're saying,
Speaker 6: or the idea that you have to find. You have
Speaker 6: to find the thing to which your partner communication will
Speaker 6: be responsive. And that's the case whether it's you know,
Speaker 6: ordering your coffee at Starbucks, or whether it's whether it's
Speaker 6: you know, impressing your will in the universe as part
Speaker 6: of as part of magic. So these things kind of
Speaker 6: they build on it. So like in the Languages of magic,
Speaker 6: and and really the start of Infernal Geometry, the Languages
Speaker 6: of Magic, my second book is in some ways it's
Speaker 6: an out growth and a generalization of some of the
Speaker 6: ideas in infernal Geometry. But that idea that you build
Speaker 6: on a foundation of effective communication, and then you add
Speaker 6: onto that magical intent. You add onto that ways of
Speaker 6: speaking and communicating that are peculiar to magic, that maybe
Speaker 6: don't make the same amount of sense, or maybe don't
Speaker 6: have the same effect or have the same meaning outside
Speaker 6: of a magical context. And the effectiveness of your magic
Speaker 6: will largely be a function of the effectiveness of the
Speaker 6: communication that you put the magic into. So yeah, so
Speaker 6: what you're saying is absolutely in line with the way
Speaker 6: that I've been approaching magic, and I rely absolutely with
Speaker 6: all the stuff that you're saying there.
Speaker 5: Think you So you would say that the cosmos or
Speaker 5: the fabric of reality doesn't have a specific requirement for language,
Speaker 5: but a specific requirements for a tone or a frequency
Speaker 5: or that doesn't have to be connected to a specific language,
Speaker 5: but can be adapted or does it mean that when
Speaker 5: you look at the ancient languages, they were actually looking
Speaker 5: for that exact same match to the language of a
Speaker 5: fabric of reality to break it and bend it to
Speaker 5: their own intentions.
Speaker 6: Well, one of things about communication that's always conditioned by context, right,
Speaker 6: So the context affects the meaning of what said, sort
Speaker 6: of the idea of like if you say certain words
Speaker 6: in a magical working, they don't have the same effect
Speaker 6: or the same intent as you've said them if you
Speaker 6: just stand up in the subway and say the same thing. Right,
Speaker 6: So for what you're you're saying, I would say broadly yes,
Speaker 6: but I would add the caveat that it's always going
Speaker 6: to be context specific, not just the specific thing you're
Speaker 6: trying to do that magical, but also the specific circumstances
Speaker 6: of when and how you're doing it as well. So like,
Speaker 6: for example, if I am I would not use the
Speaker 6: same words and gestures and et cetera. If I'm doing
Speaker 6: a working in the middle of the shopping mall is
Speaker 6: when I'm doing working in my apartment, right, And it's
Speaker 6: not because I care what people think or whatever, but
Speaker 6: it's because there are other parts of the situation of
Speaker 6: being out in the world that affect what I'm trying
Speaker 6: to say, the meaning to what I'm trying to say,
Speaker 6: in ways that are different than if I am, you know,
Speaker 6: underneath the night sky or whatever. So yes, So I
Speaker 6: don't think there's a single universal like you like you
Speaker 6: do this and you're always guaranteed to have success. But
Speaker 6: I think that it is. And this is part of
Speaker 6: the experimental nature of magic, is that you you have
Speaker 6: to have enough tools in your bag so that you
Speaker 6: can and figure out what tools are going to work
Speaker 6: right now in this particular situation to get the result
Speaker 6: that I'm looking for, knowing that even if you try
Speaker 6: to do the same thing tomorrow night, you may need
Speaker 6: different tools because other things may have changed around the context.
Speaker 6: Does that make sense? So so it's not like it's
Speaker 6: like it's like, Okay, I figured it out, now, let's
Speaker 6: just keep doing this and I'm set. It's you have
Speaker 6: to kind of figured it out each time. But but
Speaker 6: there will be things that you can draw on that
Speaker 6: that are perennial favorites you know that that will tend
Speaker 6: to have a have an effect. And that's part of
Speaker 6: like knowing your own style of magic, but also knowing
Speaker 6: like what works best with the type of things you're
Speaker 6: trying to work magic magic for, because like the you know,
Speaker 6: if you're trying to I don't know, just picking like
Speaker 6: stuff for the magical papyri. If if you're doing like
Speaker 6: a you know, a spell to enhance your memory, then
Speaker 6: you're going to approach that a different way than if
Speaker 6: you're doing a spell because you know, because I need
Speaker 6: a lover, right, some of those may work on both
Speaker 6: you know, not gonna judge, but but but all those
Speaker 6: things are part of the context, right, So so you know,
Speaker 6: the thing I think that people make a mistake with
Speaker 6: a magic a lot. And this is something to ask
Speaker 6: don Web about too specifically because I'm gonna blame him
Speaker 6: for this idea is the idea that that if you
Speaker 6: just have the right cookbook, then you're set right. Yeah,
Speaker 6: And it's more that the cookbook is the cookbook gives
Speaker 6: you the things to pull from to you to kind
Speaker 6: of mix it up in the pot the right way
Speaker 6: you need it tonight sort of sort of like you know,
Speaker 6: you may have like a recipe you make the same
Speaker 6: recipe a bunch you know, like like you know what
Speaker 6: tonight I want more cilantro right, So I can you
Speaker 6: have you're responding like the needs of the moment. Even
Speaker 6: if you're relying on something that you've had loss of
Speaker 6: success with that they know is a good general framework
Speaker 6: for you, you still have to kind of think about
Speaker 6: what does it mean now and what can be most
Speaker 6: effective at this point in time.
Speaker 5: Sure so, so you think that architecture was developed in
Speaker 5: terms of temple construction was developed to enhance that effect,
Speaker 5: to to to to help the lack of ability of
Speaker 5: the languages as it evolved, in order to compensate for that.
Speaker 5: And so the ambient that is created by expressing yourself
Speaker 5: within these specifically made structures that convey some resonance and harmony,
Speaker 5: it was specifically to enhance that inability of the language
Speaker 5: or the human being in itself. Why the use of
Speaker 5: a choir or or the echo or.
Speaker 6: In some cases definitely, I mean the Greeks for masters
Speaker 6: of that. They were there. The way that they constructed
Speaker 6: amphitheaters and so forth, and the masks that people wore
Speaker 6: to help their project or to help them make or
Speaker 6: not make certain sounds was very was very much part
Speaker 6: of that. I've not studied that extensively. My my my feeling,
Speaker 6: and this is just me kind of going off the
Speaker 6: top of my head. So it don't shoot me if
Speaker 6: there's an academic paper that says this is nonsense. Is
Speaker 6: that in a lot of cases that would have been
Speaker 6: part of the consideration. But the thing is, I think
Speaker 6: in a lot of cases things were built in certain
Speaker 6: ways just because that's why we build that. You know,
Speaker 6: it wasn't so much or maybe maybe they for they
Speaker 6: had forgotten at one point we did it this far
Speaker 6: away for a specific reason. But now but now I
Speaker 6: just build it that way because that's the way. That's
Speaker 6: the way we build those things. So that's what So
Speaker 6: that's what I mean when I say that like in
Speaker 6: some cases, In some cases absolutely definitely the case, and
Speaker 6: o there's maybe not so much. Like for example, one
Speaker 6: of my favorite sort of modernish examples of that is
Speaker 6: in the the underground chamber at the Bevelsburg Castle. You know,
Speaker 6: if you want to get your conspiracy uh listeners go
Speaker 6: a going big time well because because within that it
Speaker 6: is actually constructed so that the light converges in the
Speaker 6: center of the room and then converges in the center
Speaker 6: of the room, so they're like if you're staying in
Speaker 6: the in the middle, and I've been there, and I've
Speaker 6: tested this for myself. If you if you're staying in
Speaker 6: the middle, then if someone speaking in a whisper at
Speaker 6: the other end of the room, you can hear it
Speaker 6: just like they're right there in your ears, and you
Speaker 6: take you take a step off the center and the
Speaker 6: effect is gone. Yes, yeah, so so things like that
Speaker 6: that deliberate, that deliberate sound design, and is absolutely there
Speaker 6: in in many many temples.
Speaker 5: Surely any when when the person is inside the article
Speaker 5: room and and the article is on the outside way
Speaker 5: the niche, and the speaking to the niche, the persons
Speaker 5: that are inside the article room would understand perfectly what
Speaker 5: is he saying, But everyone that is outside that room
Speaker 5: would hear gibbish literally gibberish. Right, it mixes up the
Speaker 5: sounds right, exactly so and well in the case same thing, sorry,
Speaker 5: in the case of amphitheaters with or without to mask.
Speaker 5: What we can't exactly understand is how you can whisper
Speaker 5: in the stage and the person that is further from
Speaker 5: the stage on the top stair would hear that whisper
Speaker 5: as it was being said to his ear right, and
Speaker 5: it's an open space, right, so there's magic in the
Speaker 5: space itself. Let's let's put it that way.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I.
Speaker 6: Mean a lot of that. Like today today we understand
Speaker 6: enough about acoustics to explicitly, like mathematically design such spaces
Speaker 6: and and I think some of that knowledge was known,
Speaker 6: some of the mathematical how sound moves and why was known,
Speaker 6: like in ancient Greece, for example, But a lot of
Speaker 6: it would have just been experimental. I think once it
Speaker 6: may be something somebody stumbled across it by accident, and
Speaker 6: then it was like, oh, that's cool, we got to
Speaker 6: keep doing that. And then they kind of they kind
Speaker 6: of build it into the way that they do things,
Speaker 6: because that's one of one of the things about about
Speaker 6: the way humans build on the products of human culture
Speaker 6: is we kind of borrow bits and pieces and we go, oh,
Speaker 6: I like that, and I like that, let's put those
Speaker 6: together and see what happens. And so, like you know,
Speaker 6: they've become part of the architectural language, if you will,
Speaker 6: about how you build those spaces. A diffusion basically, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Would you say, Toby that where would you agree with
Speaker 1: the idea that perhaps syntax and perhaps even grammar itself
Speaker 1: arises in synthesis, like the convergence of the light and
Speaker 1: the sound, like when you were given the example of
Speaker 1: the castle.
Speaker 6: In some cases, yeah, I mean in the way most
Speaker 6: languages sort of came about. A lot of that is
Speaker 6: just you know, historical happenstance. There's not a lot. Most
Speaker 6: languages are far less designed than you might assume, especially
Speaker 6: given like you know, when say, these are the rules
Speaker 6: about how the syntax works for this. You know, there's
Speaker 6: a difference between prescriptive and descriptive linguistics. Where you're describing,
Speaker 6: you're describing this is this is how they ended up with,
Speaker 6: you know, the word order in English or whatever. And
Speaker 6: then there's prescriptive, which is like you're, you know, your
Speaker 6: third grade teacher telling you not to endscendence with the preposition. Right,
Speaker 6: there's no inherent reason why you have to say that
Speaker 6: you can't ind ascendence in English with a preposition. It'shift
Speaker 6: that somebody you know, decided that's that's what we're going
Speaker 6: to do now. Actually, in in relation of Latin, where
Speaker 6: a lot of that stuff came from same thing with
Speaker 6: splitting infinitives. But the thing is, and this goes back
Speaker 6: to some of the pattern recognition discussions we were having.
Speaker 6: I think, once once certain patterns in language like that
Speaker 6: are are understood, you can you can now start to
Speaker 6: work with them as if they were put there deliberately.
Speaker 6: And and but we forget sometimes that just because I
Speaker 6: can work with this as if this was a deliberate choice,
Speaker 6: maybe it doesn't necessarily mean that was the case. It
Speaker 6: just means that it has that effect for me in
Speaker 6: the way that I use it.
Speaker 1: No, that makes a great deal Oh sorry, Joe, I apologize, No,
Speaker 1: you're good. I just want to say, that makes a
Speaker 1: great deal of sense to me what you said, because
Speaker 1: there's an idea in contra that perhaps, like what you're saying,
Speaker 1: like this layer of consciousness, you're seeing the word order
Speaker 1: for the first time, but you're perceiving it in a
Speaker 1: subtle way, maybe a magical sense or hermoneutic sense, like
Speaker 1: you're seeing what the language means or the logos behind it,
Speaker 1: perhaps even and then you're able to remix it, You're
Speaker 1: able to change the grammar. So this is related in
Speaker 1: contra to rojas or the music like the Indian raug us.
Speaker 1: But obviously we're thinking of it in a more transgressive
Speaker 1: or contric way. So it's not like court music, but
Speaker 1: perhaps it's taking the form of court music. And then
Speaker 1: like what Don Webb talks about, he's creating like a
Speaker 1: parafiction by remixing real things in a different order, changing
Speaker 1: the syntax. And when you were giving the example of
Speaker 1: like magic, perhaps you're walking the mall. I know nobody
Speaker 1: goes to the mall anymore, but we'll go with that metaphor.
Speaker 6: It's a good But I'm also example from my youth.
Speaker 1: Right, so you would draw from the things that you know,
Speaker 1: like you were saying, like it as someone, I also
Speaker 1: pray like Nick was saying, I also pray in other
Speaker 1: languages that I don't actually speak. So it's that's interesting.
Speaker 1: And I know from other people who are interested in
Speaker 1: temple of some materials that they basically always emphasize the
Speaker 1: idea of the malleability, a kind of like flexibility, a
Speaker 1: flexibility of consciousness of like how can you I always
Speaker 1: call it the tree because I'm a little more into
Speaker 1: the traditional cabala, but I'm trying to be flexible in
Speaker 1: my articulation of the other systems as well. So but yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to be able to I'm going to use
Speaker 1: a sort of a poor metaphor but skin the tree
Speaker 1: and then also be able to kind of zip it
Speaker 1: back up and then say this is my formulation, but
Speaker 1: you're drawing from real things. So I just want to
Speaker 1: say that I thought that was very profound that you
Speaker 1: saw that, Toby. But the linguistics element, even though I
Speaker 1: am multilingual, is a little outside of my purview. But
Speaker 1: I think the semionics angle that you're bringing is really interesting.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to know if Marshall McLuhan's work. Obviously
Speaker 1: this is kind of a normy media SETI scholar, but
Speaker 1: a very interesting one for a lot of people. And
Speaker 1: I want to know what his if he influenced your
Speaker 1: work and in what ways.
Speaker 6: And so mclulan as a person is far less normally
Speaker 6: than a lot of people realize. Dude was very strange
Speaker 6: and like the most endearing inspirational why possible. So mclelan
Speaker 6: has not been a human influence of my work so far.
Speaker 6: However it's becoming a big influence. Uh you know specific,
Speaker 6: you know, the thing that's most well known from local
Speaker 6: witness his idea that the medium is the message, right
Speaker 6: and by by that what he what he means, well,
Speaker 6: one of the things he means, he means a lot
Speaker 6: of things by it because he was very he was
Speaker 6: a very multi level thinker. There's a lot of different
Speaker 6: layers to everything that he's saying. He's one of those
Speaker 6: one of those guys that was whatever he says like,
Speaker 6: he's like ten steps ahead of you when when he
Speaker 6: when he said it. But part of his idea with
Speaker 6: the medium of the mess, the medium is the message,
Speaker 6: is that the form that a communication takes, even before
Speaker 6: you put the words or the symbols or whatever into it,
Speaker 6: already has meaning that's there and you can't get rid
Speaker 6: of that's already part of what it is. And that's
Speaker 6: a that's a very powerful idea in semiotic terms because
Speaker 6: it because what that's what you would say about that
Speaker 6: in semiotic terms, is that there are some signs that
Speaker 6: are part part of this particular message, that are inherently
Speaker 6: part of the message itself. They're not added on top
Speaker 6: of it. But then you you when you add other
Speaker 6: signs into other words, et cetera, onto it, you are
Speaker 6: it becomes the base that you build on. And so
Speaker 6: that some media are better for conveying certain kinds of
Speaker 6: messages than others, you know, very you know, very broad
Speaker 6: stroke example, or that is like, think about what you
Speaker 6: can convey in a visual meeting that you can't convey
Speaker 6: just in a smoke and medium, right, you know, because
Speaker 6: I could be making a you know, we're in a
Speaker 6: visual media now, so like I'm moving my hands. You know,
Speaker 6: you can see the books on the shelf behind me,
Speaker 6: you know whatever else you know, that become part of
Speaker 6: the message, right because like you may be you know,
Speaker 6: you may have someone you're listort of squinting to see
Speaker 6: what the books are on my shelf, right, they become
Speaker 6: part of what I'm saying because you know, you know
Speaker 6: this is I'm in my apartment, right, so those are
Speaker 6: probably part of my influences, you know, behind me on
Speaker 6: the wall, so that they're you know, you know, someone
Speaker 6: may see a book and is like, oh, you read
Speaker 6: that book? Okay, Now this thing he said makes sense
Speaker 6: makes more sense to me because I know how that
Speaker 6: person that wrote that book thinks. Right. But for anybody
Speaker 6: that's listening to this, I don't know if you do
Speaker 6: an audio only version of this, but if anybody's listening
Speaker 6: to audio only, like they have no idea what I'm
Speaker 6: talking about, because I can't see any of this, right,
Speaker 6: So there are things that the I mean, this is
Speaker 6: a very broad you know example, this is not even
Speaker 6: like some of the subtlety that mcgoulan was working with,
Speaker 6: but in this very broad example, like, there are obviously
Speaker 6: some things that are part of this communication in one
Speaker 6: medium that we're not not there in another medium. Now,
Speaker 6: when you get more subtle with it, you can get
Speaker 6: down to pretty pretty finally grained ideas of what the
Speaker 6: medium is, you know, thinking about for example, like if
Speaker 6: you're looking at a web page, is like a very
Speaker 6: old kind of web design, like and you know, like
Speaker 6: what an old web page looks like, right, you know,
Speaker 6: and maybe miss certain features that we see in common
Speaker 6: on the way we communicate on the web. Now it
Speaker 6: may not be able to like, you know, hold your
Speaker 6: mouse over a link and see certain things, or maybe
Speaker 6: you know, the font the font can't show, you know,
Speaker 6: some of the letters that we're used to seeing now,
Speaker 6: so like you're literally missing part of the words because
Speaker 6: they're not showing up as opposed to like a very
Speaker 6: modern designed web page. I mean, those are kind of
Speaker 6: two variations of the same kind of medium, but they're
Speaker 6: each like their own kind of sub media in and
Speaker 6: of themselves as well. And when you get into that
Speaker 6: that level of subtlety around what exactly does this type
Speaker 6: of medium good at conveying, you can you can go
Speaker 6: pretty deep on the way. You can start with the
Speaker 6: implicit message that the medium itself conveys, and then what
Speaker 6: you have on top of that message to make something
Speaker 6: more complex on top of it. So, yeah, the other
Speaker 6: the other place where mcclulan actually does intersect with my
Speaker 6: work in a big way. And this is mclul and
Speaker 6: somebody has been aware. I've been aware of for a
Speaker 6: long time, but have not really looked at closely until
Speaker 6: fairly recently. But later in his life, the French philosopher
Speaker 6: Jean Beaudriard became very enamored with mcclulan's work. Baugurard is
Speaker 6: most well known for the idea of the simulationists of
Speaker 6: the lacrum. It's not he's not that we're living in
Speaker 6: a simulation. That's other that's other people's ideas. This is
Speaker 6: more about the idea that as we have like copies
Speaker 6: of copies of copies of copies of cultural things, eventually
Speaker 6: like we lose sight of what the original thing was,
Speaker 6: and so like we're interacting with the thing in a
Speaker 6: different way, though we think of it like it's the
Speaker 6: original thing, but it's not anymore, the kind of detached
Speaker 6: way that our culture is kind of like endlessly remixed itself.
Speaker 6: But Beaudriard Beaugurard died in like two thousand and three
Speaker 6: or so, I think, so maybe by the last five
Speaker 6: or six year he became very namorald with McLuhan's work
Speaker 6: and saw that as very McLuhan is very much a
Speaker 6: kindred spirit, and I'm very influenced by Boudrea's work. In fact,
Speaker 6: the what I what I put forth in the languages
Speaker 6: of magic as a word that I prefer instead of
Speaker 6: magic is the word semi urgy, going back to my
Speaker 6: my website semi urges dot com, et cetera. For Boudriart,
Speaker 6: semi urgy was the creation in the wielding of signs,
Speaker 6: which is a very magical thing to do, especially if
Speaker 6: you think of magic and semiotic terms. So there's definitely
Speaker 6: a bit of like McLuhan influences coming at me from
Speaker 6: different like different angles, both directly and indirectly, which is
Speaker 6: which is kind of interesting right now. I've also been
Speaker 6: I can't remember we were recording when we started this
Speaker 6: or not, someone mentioned, uh, I think it was Nick
Speaker 6: actually mentioned me being on the Hermitics podcast. One of
Speaker 6: the frequent guests on the Hermetics podcast the last several
Speaker 6: years has been a guy named Bob Dobbs. Not the
Speaker 6: SubGenius guy, although the name that's funny coincidence in the name,
Speaker 6: but Dobbs was uh, basically a close associate of McLuhan.
Speaker 6: Dobbs is in his eighties at this point, but has
Speaker 6: fantastic stories to tell about mccluan, but also has a
Speaker 6: very deep, deep, deep understanding of mccluan's work, and it's
Speaker 6: probably one of the more even though he brings himself
Speaker 6: as a renegade mcclulan scholar, he's probably one of the
Speaker 6: more astute people on the scene now talking about McLuhan's work.
Speaker 6: Definitely somebody worth looking into, just as it was side, Well,
Speaker 6: that's where you want to go to any of that,
Speaker 6: But that's that's kind of my that's kind of my
Speaker 6: might wind me up on McClue and let me go
Speaker 6: for a little bit idea.
Speaker 1: No, that was that was amazing, and Toby, thank you
Speaker 1: so much for that. I just want to say that
Speaker 1: I don't just talk to myself, but I did study
Speaker 1: under myself the Nazy so I'm I'm quite familiar with
Speaker 1: Mark like McLuhan's work and his like sort of looks
Speaker 1: and media studies perspective and and bobbed up was obviously
Speaker 1: I've actually seen him live. I believe that the oh great,
Speaker 1: so yeah, so it's definitely something that like when I
Speaker 1: I remember being an undergrad undergrad and he sorry about that,
Speaker 1: and he said, this is like semiotics is magic. I
Speaker 1: remember being in an introductory class and we opened our
Speaker 1: textbooks and he said, yeah, semiotics and magic, like what
Speaker 1: is your name?
Speaker 6: Well, well they both work. They both work in a
Speaker 6: similar way. You know, the differences are subtle, but they
Speaker 6: are there. But they both wear a very similar way.
Speaker 6: Is that both semiotics and magic are not designed to
Speaker 6: compel something to happen in a certain way. If if
Speaker 6: I want to turn on if I want to turn
Speaker 6: on the light, the most straightful way to turn it
Speaker 6: on is to get out of my chair and go
Speaker 6: turn on the damn light. I don't need magic to
Speaker 6: go turn the light on or magic to help me
Speaker 6: out of the chair so that I can make it
Speaker 6: across the room.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 6: So there there are things that things that can be
Speaker 6: controlled through strict cause and effect. Go deal with their
Speaker 6: group cause and effect. Don't waste magic time doing that
Speaker 6: kind of stuff. But semiotics and magic both work by
Speaker 6: tilting the balance towards certain things happening. Like in semiotics,
Speaker 6: you're you're you're conveying a certain network of signs that
Speaker 6: contain your intent, and you may have one or more
Speaker 6: signs that are very salient within that web, that are
Speaker 6: kind of like the dominant ones within that that are like, hey,
Speaker 6: pay attention to me, those kind of signs. But you
Speaker 6: can't make anybody do anything with a sign. You can,
Speaker 6: basically you can plant the idea that that they'll go
Speaker 6: do this with a sign. But the more effectively you
Speaker 6: do that, the more likely it is that you will
Speaker 6: get the result that you're looking for by putting signs
Speaker 6: out there. That's basically how magic works in a in
Speaker 6: a b all sense as well, is that you're you're
Speaker 6: working with cracks in reality that where reality is not
Speaker 6: quite set and soone yet, because if it's too rigid,
Speaker 6: you know then you don't need magic. You need a
Speaker 6: slash hammer if it's if it's too loose, you got
Speaker 6: to get it in a more stable configuration force if
Speaker 6: you look for the places where things are almost but
Speaker 6: not quite set the way they need to be, and
Speaker 6: then you give that last bit bit of nudge and
Speaker 6: let things work themselves into the configuration you desire them
Speaker 6: to be. So yeah, so that that semiotics is magic,
Speaker 6: I mean, they're basically there. And that's that's part of why,
Speaker 6: you know, some of the reasons I wrote the book,
Speaker 6: right I I the language is of magic. I joked
Speaker 6: around before that it's it's depending which way you look
Speaker 6: at it's either a book about semiotics disguised as a
Speaker 6: book about magic, or it's a book about magic disguises
Speaker 6: a book about semiotics. Because there there is that that
Speaker 6: very kind of commonality in the in the way they work.
Speaker 6: And that's also why it's also interesting people that work
Speaker 6: directly with semiotics are tend, even in the academic world,
Speaker 6: tend to be very open to new places to use
Speaker 6: semiotics to understand how something fits together, how how it works.
Speaker 6: And so studying magic as a similar process is something
Speaker 6: that you know that people that don't even think of
Speaker 6: those sorts of magicians, you know, like maybe like an academic,
Speaker 6: you know, philosopher that works with semiotics, you know, still
Speaker 6: finds that interesting as a way to apply it, as
Speaker 6: a way to understand and a way to see that
Speaker 6: there's a there's a commonality in and and how things work.
Speaker 6: Would you you have some very cool stuff in your background.
Speaker 6: Want I want to hear more? You should maybe an
Speaker 6: email talk about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I love that, Thank you job.
Speaker 5: So would you say that is is there any equation
Speaker 5: where each element is necessary to create a specific let's
Speaker 5: call it a magic spell for a specific intention or purpose?
Speaker 5: Is there a code? Is there something that can be followed?
Speaker 5: Or there are so many variants that you have to
Speaker 5: try endlessly until you finally find something that works.
Speaker 6: Well. I think it's endless variants, But I think it
Speaker 6: is the more, the more you do with magic, the
Speaker 6: more you'll find what works best for you. Don Webb
Speaker 6: talks with us quite a bit actually in his in
Speaker 6: his book How to Become a Modern Magus, which is
Speaker 6: I think it's his latest book on magic. The idea
Speaker 6: that you want to you want to have as rich
Speaker 6: of a tool kit as you can build, but you know,
Speaker 6: the you have you have to get used to how
Speaker 6: the tools work for you, because like the same tools
Speaker 6: may work differently for you than than they do for me.
Speaker 6: You know, is they have may have we have certain talents,
Speaker 6: we have certain ways of thinking about things, may certain
Speaker 6: ways of relating to the world, you know, certain ways
Speaker 6: that we that we communicate, communicate our intent, et cetera.
Speaker 6: So like it's always gonna be very individual. But I
Speaker 6: think for individual person, yeah, you can. I don't think
Speaker 6: you never get to the point that you have, you know,
Speaker 6: bucket of guaranteed success and you just pull out those
Speaker 6: things that's all you need. But you have the like, look,
Speaker 6: this this thing works for me most of the time.
Speaker 6: This is what I'm gonna do. Uh, this is I'm
Speaker 6: gonna start from here and then I'm gonna like add
Speaker 6: on other stuff depending on what exactly the current moment,
Speaker 6: current moment needs. And I think as you do that,
Speaker 6: over time, you'll find you'll find you'll build up It's like, okay,
Speaker 6: these are these are my go tos. But that's but
Speaker 6: that can also be its own trap, right because just
Speaker 6: just like with with with words, you used to speaking
Speaker 6: in a certain way. You know, a certain language. Well,
Speaker 6: that's going to constrain in some ways. Not a rigid constraint,
Speaker 6: but just it's going to predispose you towards thinking in
Speaker 6: certain ways because this is how you normally the words
Speaker 6: you normally used to describe something, et cetera. So we
Speaker 6: have always have to be careful in magic not to
Speaker 6: go but I always do this and always works. Well,
Speaker 6: maybe this is the time you need to do something different, right,
Speaker 6: But yes, I think it's over time you'll build up,
Speaker 6: you build up that idea that you have. Okay, look,
Speaker 6: these are the things that I go to, are things
Speaker 6: that tend to work for me. These are things that
Speaker 6: if it doesn't work in a particular situation, I know
Speaker 6: this tool well enough, this particular technique or whatever well
Speaker 6: enough that I that I can I can modify it
Speaker 6: in the moment to work in a slightly different way,
Speaker 6: et cetera. But yeah, you don't want to get so
Speaker 6: caught up on the But but if I don't do
Speaker 6: it this way, it's not going to work. That it
Speaker 6: becomes so rigid in your approach to magic that you're
Speaker 6: missing out in other ways of approaching problems. Think of
Speaker 6: magic as like a type of apply problem solving. So
Speaker 6: I just answer the.
Speaker 5: Question that because being rather ignorant in this, I tend
Speaker 5: to look at what is normally understood as a spell, right,
Speaker 5: And most of the spells have for most people nonsensical
Speaker 5: sequence of words, right, or even nonsensical use of groups
Speaker 5: of of letters that convey words that are not known
Speaker 5: in any language. So I was wondering if there was
Speaker 5: some kind of method where you use specific tones according
Speaker 5: to your own way of expressing, to your own frequency,
Speaker 5: and then seek a way to finally obtain something that
Speaker 5: works from that. So if you go to ancient texts,
Speaker 5: you find the witch's spells that are using words in
Speaker 5: sequences that make no sense, and people would say it's
Speaker 5: a wait, it's a witch because the way she's speaking
Speaker 5: conveys a different meaning to the language itself, right, or
Speaker 5: the way that is expressed. So I was just trying
Speaker 5: to figure out if there was a basic, very basic
Speaker 5: method where you build upon that to create what you
Speaker 5: want to do. So that's basically what I was trying
Speaker 5: to get to. I'm sorry if it's confusing.
Speaker 2: Question.
Speaker 3: I was going to ask next, but go ahead.
Speaker 6: Sorry, Sorry, Now I just just will briefly on that point.
Speaker 6: Some of that is where that starts. I can't tell
Speaker 6: you how it is, because that's that's where you have
Speaker 6: to figure out exactly. But where it starts is is
Speaker 6: finding those pieces that resonate with you, the thing that
Speaker 6: calls to you, the thing that just feels feels right.
Speaker 6: And then as you start to work with those things.
Speaker 6: This is why keeping a medical diary is absolutely critical
Speaker 6: for anyone considers themselves a magician. Is that you have
Speaker 6: to be able. You have to be able to honestly
Speaker 6: assess how how did it go right? And so that's
Speaker 6: where that's where you can you can catch yourself with
Speaker 6: the tendency of the man. I've been clinging to that
Speaker 6: tool because I like that tool. Maybe it was the
Speaker 6: first one I used, but like it's just not working
Speaker 6: anymore because you've got the diary and you can see it.
Speaker 6: It's like, oh, yeah, well did it The last five
Speaker 6: times I did that, I got I got jack for
Speaker 6: what I was trying to do. Maybe I need to
Speaker 6: look at a different tool. Right. See, there's that constant
Speaker 6: self reflective thing. Because like with the Greek magical papyrie,
Speaker 6: I keep going back to that because but it's a
Speaker 6: it's a good example for a lot of the things
Speaker 6: that I center magic around. You know, that's not a coherent,
Speaker 6: a single coherent body of work. It's it's a bunch
Speaker 6: of documents over four or five centuries to been on
Speaker 6: when you when you where you draw the lines. And
Speaker 6: but the reason they're kind of grouped together as magical
Speaker 6: papyrie is because there's there's some some commonalities and the
Speaker 6: techniques and the approaches and the words that they use
Speaker 6: and and things like that. But it was very experimental.
Speaker 6: They were probably they were probably passed around in the
Speaker 6: same way that like the the gould Biker the books
Speaker 6: of magic passed around like an early modern Iceland, the
Speaker 6: idea that if you knew somebody that again that they
Speaker 6: do this kind of work as well, and you go, well,
Speaker 6: do you have any bellows that do the kind of stuff?
Speaker 6: What's what's worked for you? And you borrow it and
Speaker 6: you make your own copy of it, and then now
Speaker 6: it becomes part of your toolkit. And then but then
Speaker 6: like you decide, you know, maybe maybe you know, you
Speaker 6: try it for yourself and do anything, throw it out,
Speaker 6: or maybe you do and it's like, you know, what I
Speaker 6: think it needs this and you try it again, the
Speaker 6: experiment with it so like it already. Even if you're
Speaker 6: taking it from something that somebody else did as a
Speaker 6: starting point, it starts to become more personalized to you
Speaker 6: as you work with it and you decide, well, what's
Speaker 6: really working for me over time? And yeah, I'm a
Speaker 6: big believer in that idea of that you don't be
Speaker 6: afraid to pull from different traditions, different schools, different approaches
Speaker 6: from what you're used to, because you never know what
Speaker 6: you're gonna need any any more time. You ever know
Speaker 6: what's going to become like, oh that's my go to technique. Now,
Speaker 6: I'm I'm gonna run with that one for a while
Speaker 6: until it stops working for me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you cannot choose the same key to if you
Speaker 5: open different doors, right basically right, right, But you.
Speaker 6: Have to be able to look back and and honestly assess,
Speaker 6: you know, do I keep using this because it works?
Speaker 6: I keep us in this because I like it? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 6: that's where that's where you have to have that kind
Speaker 6: of brutal self reflection as a magician, and the magical
Speaker 6: diary critical and.
Speaker 5: The universe is in constant motion. So what worked before,
Speaker 5: things are not as they were before, So you need
Speaker 5: you need to adapt that key to to the movement
Speaker 5: of the cosmos, of the of the spheres or uh
Speaker 5: as as they as they move along.
Speaker 6: Yea, thank you. So well, let's very quickly on that,
Speaker 6: and I promise I'll get to your question, Lisa. Well, sorry, Lisa, sorry,
Speaker 6: so my it's absolutely critical. Uh piece of Egyptian spell work.
Speaker 6: That's you we use with the within the Temple of
Speaker 6: Set and it's and I think it's useful beyond that
Speaker 6: as well. That's from uh propyrus called the Bremner Ryan Papyrus,
Speaker 6: and it's a part of a prevention spell. This the
Speaker 6: kef rak kefer kefel re formula. There's demeral ways to
Speaker 6: translate it. The translation that don Web uses and use,
Speaker 6: the one that I stick with or similar is that
Speaker 6: so kefer rah kefer keferu, so I have come into being,
Speaker 6: and through the process of coming into being, the process
Speaker 6: of coming into being has been established. That's a bit
Speaker 6: of a mouthful. And you notice how I have to
Speaker 6: use a long string of stuff in English to do
Speaker 6: what was like three three short words an Egyptian. But
Speaker 6: the gist of what that is, and the reason that's
Speaker 6: so important is what what I brought into being, The
Speaker 6: way that I brought something into being this time, the
Speaker 6: way that I created being out of nothingness, the way
Speaker 6: that I carved out from from the you know, the
Speaker 6: unknown vastness of being. For this particular manifestation of being
Speaker 6: is never going to work exactly the same the next time.
Speaker 6: It's gonna be similar. I can build on it, I
Speaker 6: can take it as a starting point. But I've established
Speaker 6: this way of coming into being, But then the next
Speaker 6: time I may have to establish a new way to
Speaker 6: come into being. And that's there's lots of different directions
Speaker 6: that goes off into extraordinary useful and initiation as well
Speaker 6: as in magic. But relevant to your part of what
Speaker 6: you're talking about there is the idea that you have
Speaker 6: you have to be constantly reinventing yourself. That doesn't mean
Speaker 6: starting from scratch every time. It just means being on
Speaker 6: the lookout for what needs to be tweaked for this
Speaker 6: particular instance, this particular context, this particular situation too. To
Speaker 6: do what's called for here and not just to do
Speaker 6: it this way because well I did it the way
Speaker 6: two weeks ago, so that that kind of reinvent a
Speaker 6: process is extraordinarily important, and in order to effectively reinvent,
Speaker 6: you have to be able to to honestly know what
Speaker 6: you've been doing and what happened and what hasn't been
Speaker 6: working as well.
Speaker 5: Like you others says always in motion the future.
Speaker 6: Is so yeah, you need to be aware of that.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, go ahead at least.
Speaker 3: To build upon what you were saying. And I am
Speaker 3: also very new to this. I'm here to learn what.
Speaker 6: You were talking about.
Speaker 3: The type infernal geometry was one of the spins. And
Speaker 3: then with the talk of isosophy, which Nick and I
Speaker 3: had done episode about it, and in it we talked
Speaker 3: about magic squares, and so you had Fagris and so
Speaker 3: that reminded me of his magic squares. You know the
Speaker 3: three by three which you get a nine, and when
Speaker 3: you add say the name of an archangel, right, and
Speaker 3: you add in the number of numerical value for each letter,
Speaker 3: you get a sigil. Is that correct?
Speaker 6: And so when you look at that, when you look
Speaker 6: at how numbers represent a letter.
Speaker 3: And they give rise to geometry. Is that kind of
Speaker 3: the concept with I guess magic insiduals and the power
Speaker 3: of a word in a sense.
Speaker 6: Yeah, well it's it's one way with working working with
Speaker 6: them because you have to find you have to find
Speaker 6: meaning in different ways. We were talking earlier about mathematics
Speaker 6: as geometry, mathematics as music, mathematics as astronomy, but that
Speaker 6: that underpinning all of them. So like you're you're kind
Speaker 6: of each one tells you something different about the thing
Speaker 6: that you're looking at. So like no, no one of
Speaker 6: them by itself is the thing itself. Each one is
Speaker 6: like it's like a facet of the thing itself. I'm
Speaker 6: a big believer of using tools. What you look at
Speaker 6: things in a variety of different ways, you know, well
Speaker 6: literally you know, looking for it from different angles, right,
Speaker 6: so that you can see the entirety. You can see
Speaker 6: the entirety of the thing. Because on one of the
Speaker 6: things that that's interesting about human interesting is not unique
Speaker 6: to humans, But one thing that is interesting to say
Speaker 6: all living things is that there their sense processes are
Speaker 6: always limited in some way. In humans, for example, we
Speaker 6: can only see a visible light within a certain range.
Speaker 6: We can only hear within within the twenty hurts to
Speaker 6: twenty killer hurts range, et cetera. So there's any sense
Speaker 6: that we apply to interacting with the world is already
Speaker 6: already limited in some way. That's the same thing with language.
Speaker 6: We were talking earlier about the you know, the wide
Speaker 6: variety of sounds in humans create versus the number of
Speaker 6: sounds that are used in any particular language. You know,
Speaker 6: So there's already some limitation there. But there's even limitations
Speaker 6: in meaning, you know, limitations in words. Once I once
Speaker 6: I describe if I have like some crazy experience, some
Speaker 6: profound experience that I had, once I describe it in words,
Speaker 6: I've cut off part of the experience. Maybe I can
Speaker 6: still think of it because I still know what it
Speaker 6: felt like. I mean, I can visualize something that I
Speaker 6: can't describe. But if I'm describing it to you, there's
Speaker 6: always a limit to what you can understand about my
Speaker 6: experience because it was not your experience. It was it
Speaker 6: was my experience. Now you can you can maybe get
Speaker 6: a very good sense of that if you've had a
Speaker 6: similar experience. And because of the words that I use
Speaker 6: to describe it, it maps onto your experience in a
Speaker 6: way that lets you kind of get a deeper sense
Speaker 6: of what I'm talking about beyond just the words. Right,
Speaker 6: But it's still limited, still limited in some way. And
Speaker 6: so that's that's why I find like, like tool, what
Speaker 6: you're describing, it's very handy to have tools that let
Speaker 6: you hit see those different perspectives on on things to
Speaker 6: get to what is the entirety of a thing instead
Speaker 6: of mistaking just this one way of looking at it
Speaker 6: for being the entirety of the thing. Does that make sense? Yeah,
Speaker 6: I've not worked extensively with with what you're talking what
Speaker 6: you're talking about, although I work with sigils quite a bit,
Speaker 6: but usually more of the kind of the word method
Speaker 6: type schigils from Austin Osmond Spare but but that, but
Speaker 6: they work broadly in a similar similar way the idea
Speaker 6: that you have. You have some particular concept, some idea,
Speaker 6: some principle that you're trying to convey, but you're you're
Speaker 6: working with some sort of a system to let you
Speaker 6: carve out part of it in order to represent the whole.
Speaker 6: I talk a bit about that a little bit in
Speaker 6: the language as a magic. That's a linguistic thing called
Speaker 6: metonomy where you use like part of something too or
Speaker 6: something closely associated with something to represent the entire thing.
Speaker 6: Like for example, we talk about we refer to like
Speaker 6: journalists as the press, even though no one uses a
Speaker 6: printing press anymore, right, you know, use the thing associated
Speaker 6: with them kind of stands for the whole thing, but
Speaker 6: it's not the entirety of that thing, you know. But
Speaker 6: that's when we work with magic. We're looking very often
Speaker 6: we're working in a very metaphorical analogical type of way
Speaker 6: where we're kind of where we're conceiving of something as
Speaker 6: part of our magic in a certain way that is
Speaker 6: that has a relationship with what we're trying to bring about,
Speaker 6: but they're not the same that we're there we're looking
Speaker 6: at trying to think out up with us. We're looking
Speaker 6: at some part of what we're trying to create through magic,
Speaker 6: and we're focusing on that. That's where I'm going to
Speaker 6: direct my magic into that little bit right there, and
Speaker 6: it's going to you know, affect the rest of the
Speaker 6: concept that I'm trying to create, if that makes any sense.
Speaker 6: But yeah, that's why I'm a big, a big believer
Speaker 6: in those type of tools, just because you need need
Speaker 6: to have you need to have different perspectives on the
Speaker 6: thing you're trying to understand or the thing that you're
Speaker 6: trying to create so that you can find what is
Speaker 6: the most effective. It's like, ah, that's where I'm going
Speaker 6: to get it right there.
Speaker 4: Have you ever used Burrows's cut up method?
Speaker 6: Oh? Yes, yeah, I'm a big, big fan of of
Speaker 6: burrows is working in general. You know, actually talking about
Speaker 6: languages being a virus a bit in the languages of magic.
Speaker 6: But yeah, that that's that was the technique that was
Speaker 6: adopted very own early on by the Chaos magic folks.
Speaker 6: I was talking with my friend Dave Lee recently. One
Speaker 6: of the the og Chas magic guys was like right
Speaker 6: there at the beginning with Carol and Sherwin and et cetera.
Speaker 6: And that was one of the that was one of
Speaker 6: those early things that they they kind of brought in
Speaker 6: that was like not magic in the conventional sense, but
Speaker 6: they realized, wait, this is magic. Why are we not
Speaker 6: using this as part of the magical work that we do?
Speaker 6: And I love with Burrows especially, I love that kind
Speaker 6: of free form, kind of improvisitory like like go with
Speaker 6: what's in the moment that you need kind of approach
Speaker 6: to magic and Burrows I mean, for those who don't know,
Speaker 6: I'm sure you're aware of this, but those who may
Speaker 6: not know, Burrows considered himself a magician. He understood what
Speaker 6: he was doing as magic, and in fact, later on
Speaker 6: even joined joined up with the Luminus of Panataros, the
Speaker 6: chast Magic organization, because he recognized, hey, you guys are
Speaker 6: taking what I'm doing in a in a new direction.
Speaker 6: But yeah, the cut up is a very a very
Speaker 6: interesting method for those listening. You may not know. The
Speaker 6: cutups have a wide variety of purposes, but it's it's
Speaker 6: the idea that you tell a very kind of easy example.
Speaker 6: If you take like a like a magazine, right, and
Speaker 6: you cut out different pieces of different images, different pieces
Speaker 6: of pages, and you reassemble them in new ways to
Speaker 6: make something new out of it. You know that, whether
Speaker 6: it's randomly or going by the aesthetics of what you're
Speaker 6: trying to look at, et cetera. But it's it's not
Speaker 6: at all dissimilar to you know, magical work of assembling
Speaker 6: a reality. You're basically taking pieces of what's there to
Speaker 6: work with, what's there as part of what's available for change,
Speaker 6: and you're creating something new out of it. And sometimes
Speaker 6: you can use this in like a like a divinatory way,
Speaker 6: like if you if you take like that, like a
Speaker 6: written page out of a magazine, cut it up, reassemble it,
Speaker 6: read the words the way that arrange now and sometimes
Speaker 6: you find, oh, that's that's a different way to arrange things.
Speaker 6: You know, we've felt a lot about, you know, syntax
Speaker 6: and rearranging words as part of this conversation, or maybe
Speaker 6: it's more a visual thing. Yeah, there's it's a very
Speaker 6: ripe kind of magical technique, whether it is like a
Speaker 6: divinatory type purpose or as a you know, I'm going
Speaker 6: to rearrange these things to create a new vision of
Speaker 6: what I want to be. So so if if.
Speaker 5: This makes sense to you, you spoke about schedules, and
Speaker 5: I'm thinking about the influence that a written word can
Speaker 5: have on a glass of water when you've frozen the
Speaker 5: water after you left the word on top of the
Speaker 5: on the bottom of the glass. So could a word
Speaker 5: be a sigil in descent that is affecting the water
Speaker 5: and it has no sounds, it's just a written word.
Speaker 5: Does it become a sigil and that's why it affects
Speaker 5: the water?
Speaker 6: HM, think about that for a second. Well, you know,
Speaker 6: one way to think of sigils, and this is common
Speaker 6: whether it's once created from magic squares sort of the
Speaker 6: old school Agrippa style signals, or if it's the word
Speaker 6: method type sigils or other techniques. There's a method of
Speaker 6: distillation you're taking. You're taking, you know, the the entirety
Speaker 6: of the concept of the statement, whatever you're working with.
Speaker 6: You're distilling it down to something that is that represents
Speaker 6: you know, it's one small piece of it representing the
Speaker 6: entirety in your specific example. I'm not sure, partially because
Speaker 6: I've not worked with them in that way.
Speaker 5: He's talking about.
Speaker 4: He's talking about Beta Austin's work. If you ever get
Speaker 4: a chance to get on Instagram and look at Beta Austin,
Speaker 4: she puts pictures and words next to ice before she
Speaker 4: puts it the freezer, and these images come through as freezing.
Speaker 4: So there's a really weird conversation happening between water and symbols.
Speaker 5: Yeah. For instance, if you put the word love beneath
Speaker 5: a glass of water, and in the morning you freeze
Speaker 5: the water right when you look at at the microscope,
Speaker 5: the crystal will be beautiful, perfect, symmetric, magnificent. If you
Speaker 5: write the word hate and you do the same process,
Speaker 5: it will be chaotic, deorganized, and there is no intention
Speaker 5: is just to words. So you were speaking, and I'm
Speaker 5: thinking maybe words can become a seal if when they
Speaker 5: are used in this in this way. So I'm sorry
Speaker 5: this comes right from my lack of knowledge in this,
Speaker 5: but I'm just trying to.
Speaker 6: Of knowledge too. That's an interesting Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 6: I have experiment with that. That that's the idea.
Speaker 5: I'm sorry, I'm just making weird, weird questions.
Speaker 6: Sorry, no, I'm fine. If you guys want to say something,
Speaker 6: play stump the guest too. That's always fun.
Speaker 4: Toby get those little plastic petri dishes.
Speaker 6: Well yeah, well the other thing, like probably noticed as
Speaker 6: the last two things, like if I don't know something,
Speaker 6: I'm not going to bullshit you about it. I'm not
Speaker 6: going to make up stuff. I'll just telling you I
Speaker 6: don't know or I haven't seen it before. I mean,
Speaker 6: because I mean, I'm here to learn too, because like
Speaker 6: I learned from the questions that y'all answer, y'all ask
Speaker 6: and the audience asked, because it's you know, it's either
Speaker 6: its ways I've not thought about this before, which is
Speaker 6: always good to get. But it's also you know, like
Speaker 6: magicians and techniques, so like, I'm not familiar with you know,
Speaker 6: because maybe that becomes part of my tool get who knows?
Speaker 6: So no, it's great, but yeah, I'm not like if
Speaker 6: I don't know something, I'm not going to make it
Speaker 6: up for you.
Speaker 5: Sure I don't remember the name.
Speaker 2: Ye, thank you.
Speaker 5: In my case, I listened to this from a Japanese
Speaker 5: fellow that I can't remember the name, but I think
Speaker 5: he was the first much so mut.
Speaker 6: Or something like that.
Speaker 5: I can't remember the name, but he discovered this that
Speaker 5: the simple word written with intention can affect matter, right,
Speaker 5: and and that can be fine found by just freezing
Speaker 5: and then looking at a piece of that ice into
Speaker 5: the into a microscope. And they are completely different according
Speaker 5: to what you write. And the two different results come
Speaker 5: from these two simple words love like written not in
Speaker 5: a specific intentional way like all capitals. You just write
Speaker 5: the word love. But when you're writing, you're sinking about love,
Speaker 5: and when you write about hate, you are sinking about hate.
Speaker 5: And that affects the water. Although the water is not
Speaker 5: connected to the process of creating the world itself, So
Speaker 5: our thinking is by writing it with intention, you might
Speaker 5: be creating a sigil if But I don't know what
Speaker 5: a sigil is in any sense, so I'm just ignorant
Speaker 5: in relate to this. But I just connected the two things,
Speaker 5: and I was trying to see if there was something
Speaker 5: to it.
Speaker 6: I mean, I would say in a broad sense, that
Speaker 6: would be a type of sigil, because it is you're
Speaker 6: you're encoding something into it that is not going to
Speaker 6: be It's one of things with sigils is that if
Speaker 6: you do it right, and pretty much every technique working
Speaker 6: with sigils will suggest this, if you're doing it right,
Speaker 6: you can't take just the sigil and build a reverse
Speaker 6: engineer to get back to what the original thing was.
Speaker 6: It's meant to be a distillation where certainly fromation is
Speaker 6: lost or or is encoded in a way that's beyond
Speaker 6: you know, you know, rational understanding at that point. Yeah,
Speaker 6: I mean normally in my own work, and this is
Speaker 6: not exclusively like this for everybody, but in my own work,
Speaker 6: I tend to use sigils when I'm trying to implant
Speaker 6: something for myself, basically, to to put something deep beyond
Speaker 6: just the rational mind, so that I can make sure
Speaker 6: that I remember something or that I know something or
Speaker 6: that or that I or that I think in a
Speaker 6: certain way about something, et cetera. But you know, other
Speaker 6: people tend to use sigils more for operative, outward facing things.
Speaker 6: But that's just a quirk of my own, my own
Speaker 6: practice and in preferences, not not that it has to
Speaker 6: be that way or that excludes other ways I'm working
Speaker 6: with it.
Speaker 5: Sure, it's it's masaow and motto if you want to
Speaker 5: look at it. I think it's the root masato and
Speaker 5: it's the name of the fellow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do. I don't want to ask you a question, Toby,
Speaker 2: that's actually a little bit more specific to your book,
Speaker 2: and I kind of like wanted to hear and I
Speaker 2: do want to hear the answer, and I think it's
Speaker 2: actually just interesting for the listeners. You do kind of
Speaker 2: from what I got out of it in this in
Speaker 2: your the first book, kind of contrast angular and circular magic. First,
Speaker 2: it's kind of like a two part question if you
Speaker 2: don't mind maybe giving as basic as you can of
Speaker 2: an understanding of those two and then how do you
Speaker 2: kind of pair them with left hand path and right
Speaker 2: hand path.
Speaker 6: Sure, so, this division between angular time and circular time,
Speaker 6: it was sort of originally inspired by a work called
Speaker 6: The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknapp Belong he was
Speaker 6: one of Lovecraft's many correspondents. A Long was actually like
Speaker 6: a very young man at the time, like nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 6: I think was when the story was written, and so
Speaker 6: he corresponded with a Lovecraft like took advice from him,
Speaker 6: because the Lovecraft was very generous with advice for aspiring writers.
Speaker 6: Fritz Liber Robert Block, people like that, other people that
Speaker 6: were mentored by Lovecraft to a large extent. But anyway,
Speaker 6: and in his in the story of the Hounds of Tandalos,
Speaker 6: I don't want to give it away because it's a
Speaker 6: very very cool and interesting story that's sort of written
Speaker 6: within the Cathullo mythos, and Lovecraft later uses the hounds
Speaker 6: as well. But there's this idea of introduced of curved
Speaker 6: time and angular time. What curved time, curved circular is
Speaker 6: the perspective of time from like in the objective sense,
Speaker 6: you know, like we're going at the clock on the wall.
Speaker 6: You know it's been thirty minutes since whatever. Now, as
Speaker 6: we all know, magician or not, we know that the
Speaker 6: subjection experience of time is different. You know, it could
Speaker 6: have been that could have been a short thirty minutes,
Speaker 6: or it could have been a long thirty minute to
Speaker 6: been on what was happening right during that period of time.
Speaker 6: And so what this becomes is that in angular time,
Speaker 6: this is the time time is experienced by an individual
Speaker 6: sendient being in their experience of time when it can stretch,
Speaker 6: it can it can compress, et cetera. Things maybe happen
Speaker 6: in different order, like you maybe have like some great
Speaker 6: insight that that kind of circumvents like a long process
Speaker 6: of reasoning, et cetera. Now, what this becomes as part
Speaker 6: of I'm just gonna it's not gonna be helpful for
Speaker 6: people just hearing this, but I'll give it my best. So,
Speaker 6: so this image on the cover of Infernal Geometry, you
Speaker 6: see you have the have a circle, then you have
Speaker 6: a pentagram, then you have a trapezoid, and only the
Speaker 6: trapezoid is connecting the pentagram and the circle. So the
Speaker 6: pentagram and the trapezoid are what we're called we're call
Speaker 6: we call the nine angles, uh from the Ceremony of
Speaker 6: the Nine Angles. Okay, so it starts off. The first
Speaker 6: one is the trapezoid in the upper right and then
Speaker 6: it goes to the sorry backwards, Yeah, a baride ever
Speaker 6: left is you know, because it's goes left of course
Speaker 6: left hamp path. You know. So the first wrangles or
Speaker 6: the trapezoid trace us and then you go back to
Speaker 6: the beginning with the pentagram, and then you know, those
Speaker 6: those five traced. Okay, So if you're if you're tracing
Speaker 6: them in terms of because I'm trying to look at
Speaker 6: the camera while I'm trying to get my finger around
Speaker 6: the corner here, so give me a second. So if
Speaker 6: you're if you're tracing them in terms of the angles,
Speaker 6: you're gonna go, you know, one, two, three, four, five, sorry, five, six, seven, eight, nine,
Speaker 6: and so forth right. But if you're tracing them around,
Speaker 6: you would go, you know, one, five to eight. You know,
Speaker 6: uh was a four, six, nine, et cetera. So there's
Speaker 6: different ways of tracing that figure, in an anger a
Speaker 6: way and in a curved way. Okay, So I'm trying
Speaker 6: to figure out how to talk about this in a
Speaker 6: six sixteenth succinct way. But in terms of your your
Speaker 6: general question around the left hand path, think of this
Speaker 6: in terms of the left hand path is dependent on
Speaker 6: the way that you subjectively understand things that you as
Speaker 6: the thinking, acting subject working against or with, depending on
Speaker 6: what's needed at the time. The the objective universe, which is,
Speaker 6: you know, the things outside yourself, the that's the you know,
Speaker 6: the universe of matter and the laws, the government, it's
Speaker 6: the people and other sending it being is within that.
Speaker 6: It's basically everything outside of your own subjective, subjective self.
Speaker 6: So you work with this idea that time for me
Speaker 6: internally is different than it is for time outside myself.
Speaker 6: It is perceived in a different way. We can work
Speaker 6: with it in different ways, we can use it in
Speaker 6: like for example, Lovecraft described and stories like The Haunter
Speaker 6: of the Dark and the Dreams in the Witch House.
Speaker 6: He even saw angular time as this kind of gateway
Speaker 6: to different dimensions of way of working with non conventional reality,
Speaker 6: working outside of just what what is the province of
Speaker 6: everyday experience? Now within the within the left hand path,
Speaker 6: there's this idea that not only do you have do
Speaker 6: we stand apart in some way from the natural world.
Speaker 6: Doesn't mean that we dislike it, doesn't mean that we
Speaker 6: we ignore the natural world. Just means that we have
Speaker 6: something that is separate in some way from it and
Speaker 6: That's what has developed as part of the left hand path,
Speaker 6: this idea that we become more potent, aware, capable, you know,
Speaker 6: understanding within within ourselves, and that this is projected outward
Speaker 6: in some way. It's known by its effects in the
Speaker 6: world outside ourself. The way the angular time plays into
Speaker 6: that is this this idea that you sometimes when you
Speaker 6: have a different experience of time in a given situation,
Speaker 6: you're not in control of it. You know, maybe it's
Speaker 6: your you're stressed out or or you're super happy or whatever,
Speaker 6: and it's going to affect the way the time time flows.
Speaker 6: But what happens when you control it? What happens when
Speaker 6: you sort of slow down time yourself, your your perspective
Speaker 6: of time. And I'm and I'm well aware that I'm
Speaker 6: not necessarily unless I'm traveling near the speed of light,
Speaker 6: I'm not slowing down the passage of you know, a
Speaker 6: second in the objective world. I'm talking about the passage
Speaker 6: of a second within my subjective self. What you find
Speaker 6: is that you can take more, you can find more
Speaker 6: nuance in what you're doing. You can find you can
Speaker 6: find those gaps in your understanding that maybe were not
Speaker 6: invisible when you were just blazing past it at the normal,
Speaker 6: normal rate of time. When you're engaged in some sort
Speaker 6: of a creative process. Let's say, for example, you're writing
Speaker 6: a piece of music, and this is an example. I
Speaker 6: go into the illustrate within the book the way the
Speaker 6: way that process looks internally acording to my own sort
Speaker 6: of angular clock, you know, the way that I process
Speaker 6: time within within myself is gonna be different from what
Speaker 6: someone watching me, like create the music or rehearse it
Speaker 6: or whatever, is going to see, you know, and like
Speaker 6: you you may even have like normal examples you've seen
Speaker 6: of this, Like if you ever watched like an elite athlete,
Speaker 6: you know, and you watch them do moves like within
Speaker 6: a space of time, you can't even understand someone moving
Speaker 6: that fast. Well, if you ask them what they are
Speaker 6: experiencing for them, it's like, oh, yeah, I had all
Speaker 6: the time in the world to do that, to do
Speaker 6: this one move. And you're like, but that's but that's
Speaker 6: not what I saw. But that's right. It's because you're
Speaker 6: seeing from the outside as opposed to what they're experiencing
Speaker 6: from the inside. So so that kind of being able
Speaker 6: to speed up and slow down your perception of time
Speaker 6: is crucially important for for magic. That's also crucially important
Speaker 6: just for anything that that works with the world outside yourself,
Speaker 6: because you need to be able to interact with it
Speaker 6: on your own term. So that's a critical part of
Speaker 6: the left hand path. It's the I am deciding how
Speaker 6: this interaction that is going to go. But it's also
Speaker 6: in terms of trying to trying to have a better
Speaker 6: understanding and more deeper understanding of who am I as
Speaker 6: part of this, you know, to be able to you know,
Speaker 6: to speed up or slow down that perspective of yourself
Speaker 6: as as someone acting within time, because we can't escape
Speaker 6: from time. You know, we're you know, we've been talking
Speaker 6: for an hour and fifty fifty minutes now, right, you
Speaker 6: know that's at one level, that's an hour and fifty minutes.
Speaker 6: I'm never going to get back. But on the other hand,
Speaker 6: I'm having a great time. On the third hand, third hand,
Speaker 6: I'm going back to Lovecraft, I guess on the on
Speaker 6: yet another, yet another hand. If you if I couldn't
Speaker 6: see that on my screen, I'm putting my hand up
Speaker 6: before I can't see it. And you asked me how
Speaker 6: long we've been talking, I would have said maybe thirty
Speaker 6: minutes so far. I don't know, right, because because you
Speaker 6: don't really we're not always aware of of of doing this.
Speaker 6: But if I deliberately decide, you know what, I'm going
Speaker 6: to make this hour and a half last as long
Speaker 6: as I can, that opens up possibilities to you that
Speaker 6: weren't there before as well. So so I guess to
Speaker 6: make a long story short and yeah, too late. I
Speaker 6: know that's that's the case with me. But but but
Speaker 6: it's a lot of it's about that how you can
Speaker 6: manipulate and work with your own perception of time in
Speaker 6: order to open up possibilities and work there before. But
Speaker 6: see if I just said that one sentence, so you
Speaker 6: were to go you answer a question, man, Whereas I, if
Speaker 6: I say that to sum up what I just said,
Speaker 6: is like now it's like, oh that makes sense.
Speaker 5: Sure, I'm using late to work when I when I
Speaker 5: had a boss, and I did try to slow time
Speaker 5: down so that I don't get too late to work,
Speaker 5: and in my mind it did work. So it's it's
Speaker 5: all a matter of using that plasticity that time is
Speaker 5: in terms of your perception and what time and you
Speaker 5: can actually see the time on the clock take longer
Speaker 5: to cause. That might be our own self activation, creating
Speaker 5: it to yourself, but it might be real right it all,
Speaker 5: It all depends on your ability to use that intention
Speaker 5: and transform time itself or the bubble that where you
Speaker 5: are set into.
Speaker 6: Mm hm.
Speaker 2: Did have any other questions before?
Speaker 3: I was going to ask a more simple question? Could
Speaker 3: you for the audience and especially for me, because.
Speaker 7: I don't know what what is the is what is
Speaker 7: the difference in the relationship between the Temple of Set
Speaker 7: and the Order trapsoid okay?
Speaker 6: So so within the temple, well, I mean back for
Speaker 6: a second, so for for those for those who may
Speaker 6: not know, So the Temple of Set is there's an
Speaker 6: organization built around the religion of Uh working with with Set.
Speaker 6: We don't like the word Setianism very much, but say
Speaker 6: like the Setian Setian religion if you will. So it's
Speaker 6: it's it is religious, although not all members see it
Speaker 6: as a religion. They some of them just see it
Speaker 6: as a magical organization. And that's okay, Uh, But we
Speaker 6: do work with the magic we were Uh. We consider
Speaker 6: ourselves to be engaged in initiation, basically improving ourselves. But
Speaker 6: one things that's sometimes misunderstood about the temple because the
Speaker 6: name Temple of Set is they assume, oh, it's only
Speaker 6: about Egyptian stuff. That's definitely not the case. It's never
Speaker 6: been the case. The reason is that Temple of Set
Speaker 6: is for us, that is the oldest as we understand it.
Speaker 6: That is the oldest name that we as humans know
Speaker 6: of for the figure we sometimes referred to as the
Speaker 6: Prince of Darkness. You know, it's been known by many
Speaker 6: other names Set, other than Mardu, Tescalavoca, et cetera. But
Speaker 6: Set is probably the oldest such name for it that
Speaker 6: we know of. And so that that's that kind of
Speaker 6: like getting back to the roots kind of ideas part
Speaker 6: of Wife's there. Now. We do work quite a bit
Speaker 6: with the Egyptian ideas, but that but definitely not exclusively those.
Speaker 6: And in fact, I'm I'm probably kind of the middle
Speaker 6: of the road, in middle of the pack in terms
Speaker 6: of like focusing on Egyptian ideas. I mean, I'm well
Speaker 6: versed in it, but it's not my focus now within
Speaker 6: the temple. And this is makes more sense with that
Speaker 6: idea that it's not just an Egyptian thing. We have
Speaker 6: these groups within the temple called orders. Now, orders are
Speaker 6: led by masters of the Temple. There are people that
Speaker 6: have reached certain levels of a certain degree of initiation
Speaker 6: within the Temple. And orders are sort of like if
Speaker 6: you think of like a university, you have like you
Speaker 6: have like the University of wherever, but then it has
Speaker 6: like the College of Arts and Sciences that has the
Speaker 6: College of Business, that has the College of this. So
Speaker 6: think kind of like the orders are like individual colleges
Speaker 6: within this broader thing that is the Temple of Set.
Speaker 6: Now I'm a member of I personally am a member
Speaker 6: of two orders within the with the Temple. That's not
Speaker 6: an uncommon thing to have happened. There are Oh I
Speaker 6: don't know, I don't want to go, I want to
Speaker 6: sit down. Think by the Holism is like eight or
Speaker 6: ten orders active at the moment, something like that that
Speaker 6: that focus on specific areas of magic, specific areas of
Speaker 6: understanding of the set, or understanding of the things that
Speaker 6: things that we do. Now, the Order of the Trapezoli
Speaker 6: is one of those. I'm the grand master of that order.
Speaker 6: I'm part of a different order, but I'm not the
Speaker 6: grand master of that order. I'm part of the Order
Speaker 6: of Tmot as well, which works with Mesopotamian magic and
Speaker 6: related ideas. So the Order of the Trapezoid has its
Speaker 6: roots in the Church of Satan. It was an idea
Speaker 6: originally sort of created by Anton Leave even though it
Speaker 6: never was really a formal thing within the Church of Satan.
Speaker 6: It was just kind of it was it was an
Speaker 6: idea that that he had that there was a sort
Speaker 6: of kind of rarefied thing behind like the movers and
Speaker 6: shakers behind the church, that the Order of the trapsol
Speaker 6: was is the board of directors, the of the security staff,
Speaker 6: the but but it also had very Germanic like looking
Speaker 6: at ruins and the figure voting and things like that,
Speaker 6: because Anton Anton don't really know much about rooms, but
Speaker 6: he was very well versed in very enamored with German expressionism,
Speaker 6: things about the Cabinet of Darda Caligary metropolis of those
Speaker 6: great movies from the and art et cetera from the
Speaker 6: nineteen twenties in Germany. Anyway, so when the Temblives that
Speaker 6: was founded in ninety seventy five, that the Order of
Speaker 6: the Trapezoid as an idea was kind of kept as
Speaker 6: a similar sort of thing. Then later nineteen eighty two
Speaker 6: by Michael Aquino, who was the founder of the Temple
Speaker 6: of Set at did A, in response to things that
Speaker 6: were happening with other temple did A working that he
Speaker 6: came to understand more deeply. What he saw was the
Speaker 6: idea of the Order of the Trapezoid, and what he
Speaker 6: realized is that a it's focused on things like ruins
Speaker 6: and the like were it was kind of like a
Speaker 6: almost like a yin yang kind of thing with what
Speaker 6: we were doing with the the some of the work
Speaker 6: of the temple. The idea that you need kind of
Speaker 6: like you need like a different way, a different perspective,
Speaker 6: a different alternate perspective of looking at some of the
Speaker 6: ideas that we had about about Set and magic and
Speaker 6: so forth. And so it became, alongside several other orders
Speaker 6: at the same time, became orders that were that were
Speaker 6: specific to specific ways of looking at magic, specific ways
Speaker 6: of looking at the figure of Set and related figures.
Speaker 6: And so to this day, the Order of the Trapezoid
Speaker 6: is largely focused on broadly speaking, well really it's broadly
Speaker 6: speaking about runa. Runa is an ancient Germanic word meaning
Speaker 6: the mysteries or mystery. In fact, like the oldest long
Speaker 6: form written text in any Germanic language is the Gothic Bible,
Speaker 6: written by the Bishop of Uffalas somewhere around the year
Speaker 6: four hundred, I think that were in the fourth century.
Speaker 6: In any event, where he was translating the New Testament
Speaker 6: from a from ancient Greek into the Gothic language, which
Speaker 6: is a Germanic language. It's now extinct. No one speaks
Speaker 6: Gothic still, at least is a first language. And so
Speaker 6: Runa was like the way that the word mysterion from
Speaker 6: Greek was translated. So that's how we know that it
Speaker 6: means not just mystery, like like where my car keys go,
Speaker 6: but like transcendent mystery, right, the idea that that there's
Speaker 6: you know, there's a hidden reality behind things that we
Speaker 6: have to discover in and of ourselves. Because that's how
Speaker 6: the word mysterion was used in the New Testament. It
Speaker 6: was referred to the mysteries of God, you know, the
Speaker 6: mysteries of the Crucifixion, et cetera. Now, in practical sense,
Speaker 6: you know, a lot of what we work with in
Speaker 6: the order of the trapezoid is like things like ruins
Speaker 6: we work with, you know. Odin is the particular form
Speaker 6: of the prince of darkness that we kind of interact with,
Speaker 6: which is different. I mean not definitely would not say
Speaker 6: that Set and Odin are the same god, but that
Speaker 6: they are both through culturally determined way as they're expressing
Speaker 6: something essential about what it is to be a self aware,
Speaker 6: self evolving a being than the cosmos. And so yeah,
Speaker 6: so that we also work with broader things, which is
Speaker 6: runa mystery is the connector more so than the Germanic things,
Speaker 6: but just so happens in many of things were interested
Speaker 6: in our Germanic things, like like the ruins, you know,
Speaker 6: the cosmology of of the the pros that is on
Speaker 6: those lines. So yeah, so, I mean it's not entirely accurate,
Speaker 6: but the easiest way to describe it as like we
Speaker 6: look at basically the more kind of Germanic type forms
Speaker 6: of magic and religion and initiation, even though it kind
Speaker 6: of goes a bit more broadly than that, because like
Speaker 6: it's like for myself that that's mean I mentioned like
Speaker 6: I don't work it as much directly with with Egyptian ideas,
Speaker 6: you know, I'm relatively well versed in them. I tend
Speaker 6: to think more in terms of the coroner of Germanic orientation,
Speaker 6: because I'm also part of the Rune Guild, which is
Speaker 6: an initiative organization founded by Stephen Flowers that all that
Speaker 6: works with the Rooms and works with it doesn't The
Speaker 6: Room Guild is an initiatory organization, a magical organization. It's
Speaker 6: not a religion, even though there are people within the
Speaker 6: Guild who are also true you know, work with you know,
Speaker 6: the Norse gods in certain ways. But yeah, it's just different.
Speaker 6: It's a different approach to magic, a different approach to
Speaker 6: the mysteries of the cosmos, a different approach to what
Speaker 6: it means to be a self aware of self evolving being.
Speaker 6: So there's different ways to look at it. And then
Speaker 6: that's where the university metaphor is kind of apt, because
Speaker 6: like you, you know, you're you're learning whatever college you're
Speaker 6: part of, but you're learning through the lens of business
Speaker 6: in the College of Business. You're learning through the lens
Speaker 6: of some sorts of arts or sciences in the College
Speaker 6: of Arts and Sciences, et cetera. So you may learn
Speaker 6: the same things but from different perspectives and with a
Speaker 6: different orientation, with a different a different concentration and focus, if.
Speaker 4: You will, Mil there is kind of a trapezoid too,
Speaker 4: that's kind of the shape of the hammer.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, I don't know if it was. I doubt
Speaker 6: there was any kind of explicit connection to it, because
Speaker 6: like a lot of times, and a lot of the
Speaker 6: more trapezotal ones are newer designs, although there are some
Speaker 6: historical antecedents for those, A lot of the oldest designs
Speaker 6: that are generally agreed to be to be hammers are
Speaker 6: they would just like it up like a t or
Speaker 6: or even just like a a cross. Now, now what
Speaker 6: you do see a very Trapizola figure is that what's
Speaker 6: come to be known as the vauk newt youah, the
Speaker 6: no of the Fallen, even though that's a that is
Speaker 6: an old Norse name, but that is a name. That's
Speaker 6: a sign of that figure out which we have no
Speaker 6: idea what it was actually called, or even if it'd
Speaker 6: even had a name. But that's that's the three triangles
Speaker 6: that interlocked with each other, right, And it shows.
Speaker 4: Up oftentimes in the figure of Odin's horse like where
Speaker 4: and so to me that kind of implies some some
Speaker 4: form of shaman is am associated with that symbol.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, it it almost exclusively shows up in yeah,
Speaker 6: and images with with odin yeah, often not always with
Speaker 6: sleepe near the legged horsemen, but often. Yeah, that was
Speaker 6: probably some association with it. And I don't know who
Speaker 6: gave it the name. The Vaulknut, which which means the
Speaker 6: not of the fallen vall is the same root as
Speaker 6: in Valkyrie and Valla in Canute. Is not fairly really obviously,
Speaker 6: but yeah, it's a yeah, that's the thing. I Almost
Speaker 6: anything you read about that figure is is speculative. But
Speaker 6: I mean it fuels Whenever multiple people, multiple people speculate
Speaker 6: the same thing about a symbol like that, they're probably
Speaker 6: onto something, even if you can't prove it.
Speaker 4: Right, well, I think the artistic representation sort of put
Speaker 4: it into those different positions as being relevant. So like
Speaker 4: binding on binding and and you know, like destruction, those
Speaker 4: those are all sort of bound up in that same
Speaker 4: sort of schedule.
Speaker 6: Right. Well, you can also think of it again, this
Speaker 6: is speculative, so no one, no one shoot me if
Speaker 6: you think about this differently, but you because it's all
Speaker 6: it's all speculative with that figure. But you know, another
Speaker 6: way to look at it is that it's representative or
Speaker 6: connected with somehow with weird, you know, because if you
Speaker 6: think about if you have the three triangles that are interlocked,
Speaker 6: you know, if you have if you have that, if
Speaker 6: you're holding a figure in your hand, there's three triangles
Speaker 6: that are interlocked, like, you can't pull it apart. It's
Speaker 6: that arrangement is not going anywhere. It's stuck. Well, that's
Speaker 6: that's what weird is. It's like, weird is what has
Speaker 6: been laid down in this it's configured in the way
Speaker 6: that it happens whatever whatever actually came to be. That's that.
Speaker 6: That was it, that was that was the why it happened.
Speaker 6: But if you had those, if you had the three
Speaker 6: triangles like, it wouldn't be you could pull them apart,
Speaker 6: but you could still maybe wiggle them a little bit. Well,
Speaker 6: you can still you know, wiggle your perception of the past.
Speaker 6: You can still think of it in certain ways. You
Speaker 6: you can you can see you can see ways that well,
Speaker 6: I can look at it this way, you can look
Speaker 6: at it this way. You know, two events, you know,
Speaker 6: peering uh, you know, differently to different observers. So like
Speaker 6: that weren't.
Speaker 4: The two uh crows of odin right there too, So
Speaker 4: you've got sort of that same kind of dual perspective
Speaker 4: on things, right.
Speaker 6: Right, well, and even there it's you know their name,
Speaker 6: Hugen immunion, right, so it's mind and memory, uh broadly,
Speaker 6: you know, and what what they're what those two things
Speaker 6: in interaction with the other. Tell Odin or tell anyone
Speaker 6: else that would work with work with those consops. And
Speaker 6: that's also I think it's in the Grimnis Male, one
Speaker 6: of the poems in the poetic Atta, where Odin says
Speaker 6: that you know that every day you know the rayvens.
Speaker 6: I don't know the exact line, but every day they
Speaker 6: fly out, and like I fear that h Can won't
Speaker 6: come back, But I fear even more than Union won't
Speaker 6: come back. If we think about it, you have to
Speaker 6: have effective thought requires effective memory. You have ever been
Speaker 6: around someone with dementia, which, unfortunately you know a couple
Speaker 6: of people in my family have. I have dealt with that.
Speaker 6: It's one of the things that happens when someone is
Speaker 6: is losing their ability to form or to recall memory,
Speaker 6: is they use the ability to think rationally as well,
Speaker 6: because they can't hold the things in mind to think
Speaker 6: about them in in a meaningful way. So yeah, it's
Speaker 6: there's a lot of wisdom encoded in that that it's this,
Speaker 6: you know, I mean, the one thing that that bugs
Speaker 6: me to know in about myth. And this is a
Speaker 6: very modernistic way that people see myth is that Leo
Speaker 6: is just like bad science. They just understand how the
Speaker 6: World war. It's like, yes, there's some parts of myth
Speaker 6: that that that was attempts to explain national phenomenon, But
Speaker 6: so much of myth is really about encoding. This is
Speaker 6: what matters, is what matters to us as a society,
Speaker 6: because sometimes you have in mythology around like the you know,
Speaker 6: the gods, like this is this is portraying the ideal
Speaker 6: arrangement of of of our society. But in other cases,
Speaker 6: like Hugan immunion, it's it's encoding certain things that they understood.
Speaker 6: And if people that heard the stories would have not
Speaker 6: just thought, oh, it's a story about two ravens, they
Speaker 6: would have understood, yes, but it has this significance is
Speaker 6: why the story matters. Well, yeah, you've got to send
Speaker 6: them out to bring you to bring you back knowledge. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 6: and even and that's the thing. Even the the old
Speaker 6: Norse term for mad for well, on one old Norse
Speaker 6: term for magic god are ultimately comes from the same
Speaker 6: roots as the root for the sounds that raven makes.
Speaker 6: So there's a very deep connection that that's there as
Speaker 6: part of it.
Speaker 2: And if you.
Speaker 6: We don't have a lot of information about how runes
Speaker 6: were worked with and you know, in olden times like that,
Speaker 6: but we have a lot of clues that tell us
Speaker 6: that these are probably related to the ways they worked
Speaker 6: with and the idea of speaking, you know, go back
Speaker 6: to ideas about word magic, an idea of like chanting
Speaker 6: certain things. And sometimes that's it's actual wars. Sometimes it's gibberish.
Speaker 6: There are runic formulas in in the Elder Fouth arc
Speaker 6: you know, two thousand, five hundred years old that that
Speaker 6: are are not actual words. So it may have been
Speaker 6: glossa elia, it may have been. You know, they're trying
Speaker 6: to create the sounds have the magic. The word doesn't
Speaker 6: have the magic. That idea. But if you've ever spent
Speaker 6: much time around ravens, Ravens talk all the time. You
Speaker 6: Crows are not the same. They're they're related birds, but
Speaker 6: they're not. Crows are smaller, they're less chatty. Ravens talk
Speaker 6: all the time, and ravens are also fascinated with people
Speaker 6: that they hang around, and not just because they're waiting,
Speaker 6: wantings to give them a crumb. They're they're fascinated by
Speaker 6: I don't know if they think we're just weird ravens.
Speaker 6: I don't know what they're thinking, but objects, shiny objects.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 6: But like they're they're talking, they're talking all the time,
Speaker 6: and they're talking the way of the ways that like
Speaker 6: that sounded like it had intent. That was not just
Speaker 6: like a random wasn't a bird song. It's not it's
Speaker 6: not beautiful speech, you know, but like you know, you
Speaker 6: you hear them, you hear them, and like it's said,
Speaker 6: it sounds like they're talking to each other because it
Speaker 6: just sounds like you can't understand it, even though some people,
Speaker 6: you know, you know, according according to the saga, some
Speaker 6: people can understand it.
Speaker 4: That's what they call the language before the Tower of Babylon,
Speaker 4: right mm hmm.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, in here they cut a line that is being
Speaker 5: min east the tongue of the tongue of the of
Speaker 5: the of the raven, and they are they start to
Speaker 5: speak much like humans and much less like birds. When
Speaker 5: that is done.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, wow, because.
Speaker 5: The tongue the sun gains the ability to move much more.
Speaker 5: So it's it's a terrible procedure, but but it works.
Speaker 5: They start to speak normally, but almost normally. You can
Speaker 5: understand everything they say, and they can understand almost four
Speaker 5: hundred words some of the birds. So it's a lot.
Speaker 6: Very between ravens and humans. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I just want to jump in and say, for Carter's point,
Speaker 1: is that in Sanskrit the word for twilight language and
Speaker 1: the is it literally means besides pilight language, the words
Speaker 1: within the gap. So again it's sort of bringing it
Speaker 1: back to the angle right like the you'd be so, yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go.
Speaker 2: Nice? Nice. Did anybody have any other questions before I
Speaker 2: wrap it up? It's been a minute now, I think Toby,
Speaker 2: that was amazing. Thank you so much, and everybody on
Speaker 2: the show too, with all the questions.
Speaker 6: Thanks for having me back always. You guys always have
Speaker 6: great questions. It's always really fantastic discussion. Yeah, happy to
Speaker 6: come back on anytime. Just let me know what we
Speaker 6: want to talk about it.
Speaker 2: I'm sure. I'm sure we will have you on again. Uh,
Speaker 2: before we wrap it up, would you like to let
Speaker 2: everybody know where they can find your work and all
Speaker 2: your stuff again, please.
Speaker 6: Sure so recapping a bit from the beginning so you
Speaker 6: can find me most easily in a couple of places
Speaker 6: online at Infernal Geometry dot com as well as that's
Speaker 6: kind of my older site, and the one that's a
Speaker 6: bit more current is that semiurgist dot com see am
Speaker 6: I U R G I S T dot com, and
Speaker 6: that has content information for me for social media. It
Speaker 6: has an email address if you want to write to me,
Speaker 6: please feel free to write if you want to talk
Speaker 6: any more about any of these things or or beyond.
Speaker 6: Listen man, you can find my two books, Infernal Geometry
Speaker 6: and The Left Hand Path, actually right here in Fernal
Speaker 6: Geometry in the Left Hand Path, which was what we
Speaker 6: occasionally talked about today, and then and then the newest one.
Speaker 6: The language is a magic. You can find them wherever
Speaker 6: books are sold. The inter Traditions has very wide distribution,
Speaker 6: so they should be easy to get hold, easy to order,
Speaker 6: if not find in your favorite brick and mortar store.
Speaker 2: Listen. Thank you so much again, Toby, and again for
Speaker 2: the people who are listening that may not have heard
Speaker 2: the first episode, definitely go check that one out. It
Speaker 2: was just as good as this one. Thank you again Lisa,
Speaker 2: jin Headless and Ricardo for coming on. That was awesome,
Speaker 2: great questions. Again, this was a chat that went better
Speaker 2: than I could have expected, you know, and thank you
Speaker 2: everybody in the chat when awesome. A lot of great
Speaker 2: stuff in there. People seem to really have been digging it.
Speaker 2: That's what's up. I appreciate you all jumping in on
Speaker 2: the live and until the next one, everybody be well
Speaker 2: later