Speaker 1: You see somethings going to happen.
Speaker 2: What's going to happen?
Speaker 3: A Welcome to the Occult Rejects. Today's episode, we got
Speaker 3: a very very special guest. I'm very excited to have
Speaker 3: this man on. But before we get to uh Toby Chapel,
Speaker 3: we will introduce the other rejects on tonight. Tonight, I
Speaker 3: got with me Lisa the cult reject mad scientist. What
Speaker 3: is up, Lisa? How are you?
Speaker 4: I'm good, I'm good, wesome.
Speaker 3: Thank you very much for showing up tonight, and uh
Speaker 3: you is there anything you want to plug all rnything?
Speaker 4: Sure, I'm a guilt research institute dot orren. Go check
Speaker 4: out some of the stuff that we've got going on there,
Speaker 4: people writing some of their contributions there if you want
Speaker 4: to absorb media in that form.
Speaker 3: Thank you awesome, Thank you very much. And we also
Speaker 3: got Gin the Ninja jin What is going on?
Speaker 5: Sir?
Speaker 3: Thank you very much, and let everybody know where they
Speaker 3: can find your work.
Speaker 6: Sure, thanks boss, and thanks Lisa, Ethan and Robbie and Toby.
Speaker 6: I'm really excited to speak with you. I don't know
Speaker 6: how much I'll have to contribute, but I'll try. I'm
Speaker 6: Nick knows I was very chattery before we started recording.
Speaker 6: So you can find my show A Threshold Saints on
Speaker 6: Spotify and Apple and anywhere you get your podcasts. Can
Speaker 6: follow me on Twitter or x at Wukong Reborn to
Speaker 6: be a Ukong Reborn or at the show account Threshold Saints.
Speaker 3: Awesome, Thank you very much.
Speaker 5: D D's episode just dropped, oh five minutes ago.
Speaker 3: So it's awesome. And Robbie Marx, what is going on, sir, storyteller?
Speaker 3: Let everybody know where they can find you. Oh you
Speaker 3: muted again? My man?
Speaker 7: Yeah, how's everybody doing? Thanks for having me on. This
Speaker 7: is gonna be a fun one. If anybody wants to
Speaker 7: check out my other stuff, you can check out my
Speaker 7: link tree at our m A r X and that'll
Speaker 7: pull up everything.
Speaker 3: Awesome. Thank you, Thank you, sir. Last but not least
Speaker 3: Ethan Indigo.
Speaker 1: Always.
Speaker 2: Thanks Nick for putting this together. Everyone.
Speaker 8: It's honored to be here with you all. And I'm
Speaker 8: excited to hear what Toby all say talk about. And
Speaker 8: I have a couple of books on Amazon and website
Speaker 8: I believe is down below, and I'm going to be
Speaker 8: dropping an article as soon as I can get my
Speaker 8: junk together on Occult Research Institute and the next day
Speaker 8: or two.
Speaker 3: I keep pulling you on the show too, so I'm
Speaker 3: sure that takes time away. Thank you.
Speaker 8: No, my, that's not my excuse for not writing. Certainly
Speaker 8: there I have better, more more lag than that.
Speaker 3: Well, thank you all for joining us. And finally, finally
Speaker 3: to the guest himself, Toby, please introduce yourself. Let everybody
Speaker 3: know like where they can find your books, and maybe
Speaker 3: give a little bit of background about who you are.
Speaker 1: Sure. So, my name is Toby Chappel. I am an
Speaker 1: author here to talk about my second book tonight, and
Speaker 1: maybe the first one too. We'll see when any questions
Speaker 1: come up around that. First one was Infernal Geometry in
Speaker 1: the Left Hand Path, which is now six years old.
Speaker 1: I believe it or not, I certainly can't believe it.
Speaker 1: And then coming out I'm not sure when this will air,
Speaker 1: but coming out soon April eighth, is The Languages of Magic.
Speaker 1: And my background for this is I've long had an
Speaker 1: enthusiasm for things that are weird, whether it's things that
Speaker 1: are not of this earth. You know, I've been an
Speaker 1: amateur astronomer for most of my life, but also reading
Speaker 1: things often the wild and strange corners of what's possible.
Speaker 1: I've long been fascinated by language, how we use language
Speaker 1: to community, just to communicate with each other, which is
Speaker 1: obviously a very important part of it, but also, as
Speaker 1: I write about in the Languages of Magic, how we
Speaker 1: use language as part of magic itself. My theory, which
Speaker 1: I argue for very strongly in the book, is that
Speaker 1: magic is at its core process of communication, and I'm
Speaker 1: sure we'll be talking quite a bit more about that
Speaker 1: by other means of background. I am a master of
Speaker 1: the Temple in the Temple of set I have been
Speaker 1: part of that organization for will be twenty five years
Speaker 1: coming up this fall. But before that, I've been interested
Speaker 1: in many things that the Temple is interested in, namely,
Speaker 1: what does it mean to be a self and what
Speaker 1: does it mean to create more of what that self is,
Speaker 1: Whether that's becoming more potent and powerful out in the world,
Speaker 1: whether it's becoming more able to meet your own goals
Speaker 1: and ideas and ideals, and what that may mean for
Speaker 1: us when we're no longer have this meat sack to
Speaker 1: carry around and give our consciousness something to manifest through.
Speaker 1: That's been a lifelong fascination of mine as well. I
Speaker 1: spent a number of years in the bit minds as
Speaker 1: I like to call it, aka the tech industry, but
Speaker 1: finally departed from that white last year and uh have
Speaker 1: returned to private study to continue some of my deeper,
Speaker 1: uh deeper thoughts than just uh what sort of system
Speaker 1: to set up this week to serve some corporate overword.
Speaker 3: Uh that sounds good.
Speaker 1: Let's let's let's start from there and see where it goes.
Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome. Uh. I guess if you don't I mean,
Speaker 3: if you don't mind what you did, you could you
Speaker 3: maybe give a little bit of an idea, I guess, like,
Speaker 3: what was your experience like with the Temple of Set? One?
Speaker 3: I have one question I did want to ask, is
Speaker 3: that I do think on your one of your books,
Speaker 3: your last book. Michael Aquino did the forward for did
Speaker 3: You Actually Know?
Speaker 1: Yes, I knew doctor A Queena very well well a
Speaker 1: guest in his home several times. He was very supportive
Speaker 1: of that book because it was based originally in a
Speaker 1: large part among something that he wrote. When so, as
Speaker 1: some of your readers, our listeners may not know, the
Speaker 1: Temple of Set originally began as sort of a a
Speaker 1: sequel of sorts to what certain people saw in the
Speaker 1: early years of the Church of Satan in nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: there was a bit of a disagreement with Anton Leave
Speaker 1: about the direction he wanted to take things in. Some
Speaker 1: people took that as a as a betrayal of what
Speaker 1: the church was originally about, and they left and then
Speaker 1: up forming the Temple of Set. And why it was
Speaker 1: Temple of Set and not not Temple of Satan or
Speaker 1: something along those lines is as much longer topic, but
Speaker 1: we can also talk about that if need be. But
Speaker 1: the so the Temple kind of has its roots in
Speaker 1: the Church of Satan. When Anton Olive was writing the
Speaker 1: Satanic Rituals, which came out in seteen seventy two, he
Speaker 1: was sort of pressed for a deadline and he asked
Speaker 1: a Quino, who was sort of his left hand man,
Speaker 1: if you will, at the time, to contribute a couple
Speaker 1: of things to it, or along basically ideas about how
Speaker 1: one might use the fiction of HP Lovecraft to create magic. Lovecraft,
Speaker 1: as most people know, was a staunch materialist, was very opposed,
Speaker 1: very skeptical about the idea of magic itself. So it's
Speaker 1: a bit strange to take something from someone who was
Speaker 1: that skeptical about the idea and then turn it into
Speaker 1: something you can actually use. But one of the things,
Speaker 1: and I talk about this quite a bit in the
Speaker 1: languages of magic as well, one of the things about
Speaker 1: that is it doesn't matter if something like that is real,
Speaker 1: or even if its author thinks that there is reality
Speaker 1: to it, you can't use it as part of the
Speaker 1: things that the mind is capable of creating. You can
Speaker 1: use it as part of our imagination. But it's not
Speaker 1: just imagination. It's not just spinning a story. It's creating
Speaker 1: something new out of those pieces. We we have this
Speaker 1: strange ability as humans to take pieces of what we
Speaker 1: find in culture, whether it's from other people or some
Speaker 1: things that we create on our own, and to recombine
Speaker 1: them to make assemblages out of them into new things
Speaker 1: that now are They are just as real as you
Speaker 1: know the share that I'm sitting on in one sense,
Speaker 1: but that doesn't mean that they're actual. They have reality
Speaker 1: and that we can talk about them, we can think
Speaker 1: about them, we can we can picture them in our minds.
Speaker 1: But when you take something that is that has a
Speaker 1: real existence but is not yet actual within the world
Speaker 1: and then turn it into something that you know makes
Speaker 1: a thud on the table if you will, then you've
Speaker 1: given it something beyond just mirror uh speculation. You've turned
Speaker 1: into something that now has an effect, has a presence
Speaker 1: that can be further used. So the things that the
Speaker 1: two things, well three things actually that Aquino contributed to
Speaker 1: the Satanic rituals, where the rituals the ceremony of the
Speaker 1: Nine Angles and the call to Cthulhu. And he also
Speaker 1: contributed an essay called the Metaphysics of love Craft where
Speaker 1: he talks about some of these same ideas how you
Speaker 1: would use these fictional creations to create real things, and
Speaker 1: that the sort of the magical system implied by those
Speaker 1: two rituals is the thrust of this book, which I
Speaker 1: talked quite a bit about HP lef Craft. I talk
Speaker 1: quite a bit about the left hand Path as a concept.
Speaker 1: I talk quite a bit about how you can combine
Speaker 1: some of the influences that came into left Craft, and
Speaker 1: some of the influences came into Michael Aquino, like the
Speaker 1: number of mysticism of Pythagoras, things like this, and combine
Speaker 1: them into a new magical system that opens up new
Speaker 1: ways of working within the world that maybe weren't quite
Speaker 1: there in the same form before, and the last thing
Speaker 1: I was going to mention for that is where this
Speaker 1: led to the closer association with Aquino of several reasons. One,
Speaker 1: he was an extraordinarily generous and friendly man. He was
Speaker 1: certainly willing to talk to anyone who wanted to drop
Speaker 1: a mcneila in chat, whether they were in the Temple
Speaker 1: or not. But for people who were in the Temple
Speaker 1: that he was more than willing to support them on
Speaker 1: the projects, to give them feedback, to give them help,
Speaker 1: to mentum them in a sense. It also helps that
Speaker 1: I had become the Grand Master of the Temple's Order
Speaker 1: of the Trapezoid, which was a subgroup within the Temple
Speaker 1: that was originally founded by a Quino. So it was
Speaker 1: sort of since I had taken over, you know, something
Speaker 1: that was near and near to his heart. I'm sure
Speaker 1: that held quite a bit, and so when I began
Speaker 1: to write this book, I immediately asked him that he
Speaker 1: would be willing to contribute something to it, both to
Speaker 1: honor that influence that I took from him, but also
Speaker 1: because he was uniquely positioned to say something about it
Speaker 1: that no one else could same thing with asking Stephen
Speaker 1: Flowers to do the afterword the nine Angles, the system
Speaker 1: created out of the ceremony of the nine Angles, which
Speaker 1: has nothing to do those those idiots that call themselves,
Speaker 1: you know, a magical group of nine angles in the name.
Speaker 3: I was I'm.
Speaker 4: Weird question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was largely take was only developed by Flowers
Speaker 1: within the temple. So Aquino was kind of and a
Speaker 1: lot of things he wrote about he was kind of
Speaker 1: the idea man, you know. He would have an idea
Speaker 1: thrown out of the world other people to run with
Speaker 1: it and make new things out of it.
Speaker 7: Uh.
Speaker 1: And this system, magical system that we call the nine Angles,
Speaker 1: is one of those things. And so it was a
Speaker 1: natural progression to ask the two people most responsible for
Speaker 1: turning this into something we could work with, uh, to
Speaker 1: write a ford and afterward to.
Speaker 3: The book makes sense.
Speaker 1: And Stephen Flowers was also kind enough to write a
Speaker 1: four to my My book came out soon, which again
Speaker 1: is appropriate because his ideas were the root of what
Speaker 1: became this book. That was my first exposure to the
Speaker 1: idea of magic and communication as having something to do
Speaker 1: with each other. But sides just the fact that we
Speaker 1: happen to use words in a ritual.
Speaker 3: I like it.
Speaker 5: I like it.
Speaker 3: I guess I have I guess two other questions before
Speaker 3: we start getting into the book, or a least from me.
Speaker 3: Two of them. One, I really just want you to
Speaker 3: maybe kind of give you a brief description, because I
Speaker 3: don't know if I've ever had anybody on my show before.
Speaker 3: I'm not saying there's a problem with it. It's just
Speaker 3: I never had anybody on my show before who said
Speaker 3: they were into the left hand path. I would like
Speaker 3: you to at least maybe tell my listeners what does
Speaker 3: that mean to you?
Speaker 1: Sure? So, the left hand path is one of those things.
Speaker 1: It has a lot of different shades of meaning depending
Speaker 1: on the perspective one is approaching it from. If you
Speaker 1: go back to sort of the origin of the term
Speaker 1: in India, it has a specific meaning there which is
Speaker 1: similar to, but not exactly the same as we use
Speaker 1: in the West. The idea was brought into Western esotericism,
Speaker 1: if you will buy Madam Bolvatski the theosophy and all that,
Speaker 1: and originally it was sort of a shorthand for the
Speaker 1: things that she didn't like. These were the evil things
Speaker 1: that you shouldn't do, and she contrasted with the right
Speaker 1: hand path, which was the good and the light and
Speaker 1: the things you should aspire to. You see a similar
Speaker 1: usage carried on coming from the same place by Alistair
Speaker 1: Crowley when he talks about you know, a brother of
Speaker 1: the left hand path. He's using that in very pejorative term.
Speaker 1: What the left hand path means within the temple is
Speaker 1: it means primarily two things. It means one that it
Speaker 1: is a path toward some level of self deification, meaning
Speaker 1: that we can become like God's in some way, in
Speaker 1: part by doing the things that gods do. If you
Speaker 1: want to create, you do things that creators do. If
Speaker 1: you want to become a god, you do things that
Speaker 1: gods do. And this is done through introspection, is done
Speaker 1: through magic, is done through a continual process of refining
Speaker 1: the self. As I spoke of earlier, that's something in
Speaker 1: the temple we call kever. This is an Egyptian term.
Speaker 1: It means, depending on the context, it means the dawn,
Speaker 1: but it also means to become or to come into being.
Speaker 1: And this is the idea that you should always be
Speaker 1: striving to become something more than you are currently. To
Speaker 1: take what's the best of you now and make that
Speaker 1: ever more potent, ever stronger, ever have a greater reach. Now,
Speaker 1: the catch is is you can't make it infinite. You
Speaker 1: If it becomes infant, then you've now become exactly the
Speaker 1: same as the universe as a whole, and that's not
Speaker 1: what we're seeking to do. So you have to have
Speaker 1: some level of definition, some level of boundaries around it.
Speaker 1: But that's doesn't mean that you're limited. The boundaries just
Speaker 1: become where the edges of what you're capable of. Now
Speaker 1: that can be expanded as part of the way that
Speaker 1: you grow, as part of the way that you gever
Speaker 1: if you will. And so the way that we approach
Speaker 1: the left hand path is through the process of initiation,
Speaker 1: which is that refinement of the self, through through magic,
Speaker 1: through introspection, through study, through through seeking out those things
Speaker 1: that are holding us back from being what we could
Speaker 1: be and finding new way, finding new places in which
Speaker 1: to grow ourselves. That can be, you know, some new
Speaker 1: level of knowledge, it can be some new level of
Speaker 1: strength and power within within the world. It could be
Speaker 1: it's really up to the person what what that means
Speaker 1: to them, because it ultimately it has to be self
Speaker 1: defined that's another part of the left hand path, as
Speaker 1: we see it, is that you are ultimately responsible for it.
Speaker 1: No one can tell you what it is. You must
Speaker 1: decide what it needs to be for you, and the
Speaker 1: extent to which you are faithful to that quest, you know,
Speaker 1: is that's the measure of success, not what anyone else
Speaker 1: thinks about what you're doing or thinks about the things
Speaker 1: that you may study, your things about the things you
Speaker 1: may you right and become. Now we do stress, of course,
Speaker 1: not if you start off as an asshole and you
Speaker 1: initiate yourself, sometimes you just become a bigger asshole, and
Speaker 1: that's not the goal. If you start off as an
Speaker 1: asshole and you encounter initiation, then the goal is to
Speaker 1: become less of an asshole. You know, to be a
Speaker 1: bit crued with it, because we when you when you
Speaker 1: undergo initiation, when you're trying to expand the boundaries of yourself,
Speaker 1: your entire self is along for the ride. You may,
Speaker 1: you know, just say, for example, you know have some
Speaker 1: some addiction. You know that that you also carry along
Speaker 1: if you don't also seek to evaluate that for what
Speaker 1: it is, and it's up to you to decide whether
Speaker 1: that needs to still be a part of yourself or not.
Speaker 1: But if you're not looking for something like that that
Speaker 1: may be holding you back in some way, it's only
Speaker 1: become more powerful along with everything else. So we have
Speaker 1: to approach is in a very holistic manner. You have
Speaker 1: to think about your entire self, even if you may
Speaker 1: be concentrating on one part of yourself. Everything is along
Speaker 1: for the ride, and that's a crucially important aspect of
Speaker 1: the way we approach this within the Temple at least.
Speaker 3: I like that. Thank you. Anybody have any questions before
Speaker 3: I ask another one.
Speaker 5: I have a quick question for Toby.
Speaker 6: It's not from me, but it is from someone who
Speaker 6: I have been reading some of the we'll say outer
Speaker 6: the available online available Michael Quino, specifically the colored tablets.
Speaker 6: I've read the Onyx, the Ruby, and the Sapphire. So
Speaker 6: someone else that I've been reading them with he had
Speaker 6: a question and I and I promise that if I
Speaker 6: had this opportunity, I would ask it for him.
Speaker 5: So I'm sorry, Just give me a second and I
Speaker 5: will pull it up.
Speaker 6: Okay, So he is asking if the properties of the
Speaker 6: angles I either psychological effects and their utility and magical operations,
Speaker 6: is exhausted when the consciousness decouples from its physical from
Speaker 6: its physical support in the body. So I think he's asking,
Speaker 6: is there like it does an angle inherently imply perception
Speaker 6: and point of view, like a positionality, a cosmology, and
Speaker 6: an ontology. If I understand his question, that's what I
Speaker 6: think he's asking.
Speaker 1: Right, Well, that's that'd be quite a long answer to
Speaker 1: answer in full, but let me let me do that
Speaker 1: because I think the little help web of varstination. So
Speaker 1: what you're referring to here, there's there's a symbol at
Speaker 1: the top, which is what's called within the nine angles.
Speaker 1: This is called the seal of Aruna. Runa is mystery.
Speaker 1: That's the root of the word for rune, but its
Speaker 1: original sense in the Germanic languages was mystery. These are
Speaker 1: not There's not just the mystery of like where you
Speaker 1: where you left your car keys. This is like the
Speaker 1: eternal mysteries that you're attempting to go. When I spoke
Speaker 1: earlier about the idea of initiation and expanding the boundaries
Speaker 1: of yourself, part of what you're doing is you're finding
Speaker 1: those things that are mysterious to you, that pull you forward,
Speaker 1: and you're attempting, they become the fuel that you use
Speaker 1: for initiation. So with within the symbol, you'll if you
Speaker 1: imagine this without the trapezoid in the middle, if you
Speaker 1: imagine just the pentagram and the circle around it, you
Speaker 1: have what we call the temple of the pentagram of set.
Speaker 1: And what the pentagram of set signifies. The reason is
Speaker 1: the the symbol for the temple in a sense is
Speaker 1: it signifies as something very core about or cosmology. And
Speaker 1: that is the distinction between the subjective universe and the
Speaker 1: objective universe. The way these terms are used is that
Speaker 1: the subjective universe will actual when they start the objective.
Speaker 1: The objective universe is the universe of matter and the
Speaker 1: law physical laws, things you can touch and things that
Speaker 1: affect things that can be touched. In the physical sense,
Speaker 1: this has this has no intelligence of guiding it. You know,
Speaker 1: it's driven by the physical laws that hold it together.
Speaker 1: The pentagram signifying the subjective universe is the individual awareness
Speaker 1: of any sentient being. This could be humans. They could
Speaker 1: also be you know, animals and even arguably plants have
Speaker 1: some degree of sentience that they that they display, meaning
Speaker 1: that they can respond to things that they sense and
Speaker 1: in depending on the nature of what it is they
Speaker 1: sense and sometimes they can decide how to respond. It's
Speaker 1: not just an instinctual thing, but it's also a deliberate,
Speaker 1: deliberative thing that can be done. And the reason these
Speaker 1: are shown in the panagram upset is not touching is
Speaker 1: the idea that this idea of self awareness is not
Speaker 1: something that is explainable through the laws of the material universe.
Speaker 1: It's something that seems to arise somehow above It emerges
Speaker 1: somehow from the interactions of things within the universe, comes
Speaker 1: from outside it in a sense, when you add in
Speaker 1: the trapezoid to become to become the seal over in them.
Speaker 1: This is this This is short of shortly the implicit
Speaker 1: connection between the two. When I said earlier that the
Speaker 1: subjective universe is not dependent on the objective universe, it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that doesn't touch it. Clearly it does. If
Speaker 1: I decide to reach out and you know, push a
Speaker 1: book off off my bookshelf in the back, I have just,
Speaker 1: through the power of my mind, implemented that in the
Speaker 1: world to cause some physical thing to happen. So clearly
Speaker 1: we can have effects on that objective universe. But what
Speaker 1: it means is that I can I can conceive the
Speaker 1: things that are not possible within the objecutive universe. I
Speaker 1: can conceive, you know, creatures that don't exist. Like in fact,
Speaker 1: the representation of set to the ancient Obgyptians is an
Speaker 1: animal that there is no It's not there is no
Speaker 1: one animal that represents It's an amalgam of different things
Speaker 1: that represents something that can be conceived but not actualized
Speaker 1: within the world. Now, to go back to your to
Speaker 1: the question, and I hope this was clear enough to
Speaker 1: make a bit of a foundation around it. Perception is
Speaker 1: closely connected with the pentagram, with the star itself, the
Speaker 1: subjective universe. Now, the way the reason that the that
Speaker 1: the trap is alids shown the way it is. You
Speaker 1: notice how it only touches the You know that the
Speaker 1: star does not touch the circle at all, but the
Speaker 1: trapezoid touches that it after two points. So one of
Speaker 1: the things that Stephen Flowers added to the Nine Angles
Speaker 1: coming out of the ceremony of the Nine Angles by
Speaker 1: Michael Aquino was this idea of keywords, the idea that
Speaker 1: you can have a word that encapsulates what that what
Speaker 1: that angle means. I'm not going to go through the
Speaker 1: entire set because of time here, but I will say
Speaker 1: that the first four, which would be the starting with
Speaker 1: the upper right of the trapezoid, then the upper upper left,
Speaker 1: than the lower left, than the lower right, one, two, three,
Speaker 1: and four. He referred to them as chaos order, understanding
Speaker 1: and being. He noticed that the only two places does
Speaker 1: a type So understanding and being are these two places where,
Speaker 1: according to this way of looking at the the subjective
Speaker 1: universe in its relation to the objective universe, those are
Speaker 1: the two places where it coincides. These are the mechanism
Speaker 1: through which you were able to both know something of
Speaker 1: the objective universe. Because we can observe it, we can
Speaker 1: we can determine what laws it seems to follow, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But it's also how we can affect it through this
Speaker 1: understanding and being. Another way to look at that, and
Speaker 1: this is where it becomes relevant to your question, is
Speaker 1: you can look at this as not just the interplay
Speaker 1: between understanding and being, but the interplay between perspective, and
Speaker 1: that's another way to put it. And significance, what things,
Speaker 1: what things you assigned significance to both within yourself and
Speaker 1: beyond yourself out the hope, and you know, no one
Speaker 1: knows because it's uh, you know, no one has come
Speaker 1: back yet to say, you know that the hope is
Speaker 1: is that some level of this understanding does persist past
Speaker 1: the expiration of the body. And that's certainly what we
Speaker 1: in the temple believe to be the case, but we
Speaker 1: also admit that there's no definitive proof we can offer
Speaker 1: from that. Now, whether that persists this understanding, this perception
Speaker 1: of the universe, that's probably up to the individual psyche,
Speaker 1: whether it cares anymore or not it, you know what,
Speaker 1: whether by what mechanism that may become possible afterwards. You know,
Speaker 1: we could speculate all day on it. So I'm not
Speaker 1: going to go too far down down those lines. But this,
Speaker 1: this model seems to be the key to that. If
Speaker 1: there is some persistence of the individuated psyche past the
Speaker 1: expiration of the body, then that would seem to be
Speaker 1: the model of it. And I don't know if if
Speaker 1: that answers your question in a real way, because that
Speaker 1: is a it's a very deep question. And I won't
Speaker 1: even do the thing and say, well, buy the book,
Speaker 1: because I don't I'm not sure that you would fully
Speaker 1: get it from the brooke as well. But I will
Speaker 1: say that one of the best ways that you can
Speaker 1: answer some of those questions for yourself is by working
Speaker 1: with ideas. You know, there's a there's one thing to
Speaker 1: pick up a book and to only just kind of
Speaker 1: read and go out that's really interesting and never do
Speaker 1: anything with it. It's another thing to then take those
Speaker 1: exercises and take those ideas out into the world. It's
Speaker 1: the same thing of how you could read Shakespeare all
Speaker 1: day long, but you'll never really understand Shakespeare until you
Speaker 1: see you performed in the flesh, and you'll understand it
Speaker 1: even deeper when you go perform it yourself. You can
Speaker 1: call that sort of armchair occultism if you will, only
Speaker 1: seeing from the perspective of your armchair, Because ideas have
Speaker 1: an effect through the actions that they cause you to take.
Speaker 1: You know, understanding something in a new way, absorbing some
Speaker 1: new knowledge is very useful and very beneficial, and it
Speaker 1: has its place. But unless that transforms your actions in
Speaker 1: some way, you've limited what you can really get from it.
Speaker 1: And some things can only be understood through a combination
Speaker 1: of understanding and practice. There they're not possible to understand
Speaker 1: just one verse with the other. You know, you can
Speaker 1: read all about the physics of how to ride a
Speaker 1: bike and this still doesn't help you when you get
Speaker 1: on the bike for the first time and fall over.
Speaker 6: Oh yes, that definitely answered a big like. I think
Speaker 6: it really went into the heart of what he was asking,
Speaker 6: and so I thank you for that. I think my
Speaker 6: follow up would be is that when I was reading Runa,
Speaker 6: there's Stephen Flowers seems to have a conceptual sort.
Speaker 5: Of reference point in Tantra.
Speaker 6: But I'm not saying he doesn't know, but I didn't
Speaker 6: necessarily feel like he necessarily grasped some of the key points.
Speaker 6: And I think you alluded to this when you introduced
Speaker 6: yourself and then but then when you were explaining like
Speaker 6: the trapezoids and the keywords, well that obviously makes me
Speaker 6: think of shri Vidia and like the beijas and how
Speaker 6: they arise from the angles as well. So maybe I
Speaker 6: maybe I misjudged him, and maybe his knowledge wasn't as
Speaker 6: superficial as you know I previously determined. But no, I
Speaker 6: appreciate that and thank you so much.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I don't think that he's made an extensive
Speaker 1: study of that, but I'm sure, he's He's done plenty
Speaker 1: of you know, consulting, you know, good quality references on
Speaker 1: things when he when he has written about them. It's
Speaker 1: just not been a primary are of a study. His
Speaker 1: work has been more in well, with one exception a
Speaker 1: couple of exceptions, has been more in the Germanic world,
Speaker 1: because that's part of his training. His PhD was in
Speaker 1: Germanic languages. You know, he's as as many people are
Speaker 1: aware of. He's one of, if not the most significant
Speaker 1: figure in the you know, the last uh forty years
Speaker 1: of the sort of the revival of awareness about the
Speaker 1: ruins and what they can be used for beyond just
Speaker 1: a system of writing. You know. He he has attempted
Speaker 1: to apply his methods in other places, like to zorat Astrianism,
Speaker 1: which he sees as kind of like the root of
Speaker 1: an into deep into European route of many other aspects
Speaker 1: of magic, the pop up into places like India, ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: the Germanic world, et cetera. And he's also written a
Speaker 1: book called Hermetic Magic where he looks at the Greek
Speaker 1: magical papairai, which I talk about also in my book
Speaker 1: with the Languages of Magic. So so yeah, I uh,
Speaker 1: you know, he's he's been studying things for a long time,
Speaker 1: so I'm sure he's run. I'm sure he's run across
Speaker 1: things I'm not aware of.
Speaker 6: Oh absolutely. And you know I agree with him if
Speaker 6: that's his general thesis. I wasn't aware of it, but
Speaker 6: I think Robbie and I have discussed this, and Nick
Speaker 6: as well, this idea of like Iranian or an Aryan
Speaker 6: or a Zoroastrian perhaps or protos Aoastrian origin, for like
Speaker 6: the Cobalistic tree and for a lot of magical ideas
Speaker 6: that came out of Central Asia for sure.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, if you're interested in seeing where he kind
Speaker 1: of took that, especially the Zoroastrian angle, he as a
Speaker 1: book called Original Magic, which is also in introvisions. It's
Speaker 1: probably I don't know, five years old or so at
Speaker 1: this point, but that was kind of his some of
Speaker 1: his writing about or Astrianism and some of the roots
Speaker 1: he sees in other Indo European ideas that seem to
Speaker 1: take their their ultimate root there. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a you know, a worse system of magic, if
Speaker 1: you will.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: I had a quick, a quick thing, would you based
Speaker 4: off what your definition of the subjective universe? Would you
Speaker 4: consider it to be because when I think of left
Speaker 4: hand I think of right brain. And when I think
Speaker 4: of right brain, I think of creativity, of intuition, of
Speaker 4: you know, everything isn't seen, but trying to perceive. And
Speaker 4: so when you talk about the subjective and you're talking
Speaker 4: about the creative, would that be correct to say that
Speaker 4: it is an attempt to decipher what the right brain
Speaker 4: is somewhat trying to formulate in a way that.
Speaker 1: Wasn't the origin of the ideas, but that's certainly one
Speaker 1: way that you could apply them. Original taking the left
Speaker 1: hand path for the description of what the way the
Speaker 1: temple looks at it does have its roots back to
Speaker 1: the original uh uh, Pharma, Mague and Varmachara left hand path,
Speaker 1: right hand path of in England, in England, in India.
Speaker 1: Where as I understand it, and I'm not an expert
Speaker 1: on this, so I'll try to keep it brief so
Speaker 1: I don't say something something wrong. But as I recall,
Speaker 1: in certain rights, you would it would have to do
Speaker 1: with the position of the people within within the rights
Speaker 1: about whether which direction the energy of the universe was flowing.
Speaker 1: If you were trying to have it to flow towards
Speaker 1: the left, to kind of go against against the flow
Speaker 1: or go with the right, which was the natural flow.
Speaker 1: But the thing is and I go. I go into
Speaker 1: this quite a bit in the languages of magic, which
Speaker 1: is largely about how the way that the way that
Speaker 1: we can work with variances in the meanings of words
Speaker 1: as part of magic towards and other science as part
Speaker 1: of magic, is that once you start to use a
Speaker 1: term like that, it's it's no longer just about its
Speaker 1: original context. Once you pull it out of the original context,
Speaker 1: it now finds new things that it is attaches to.
Speaker 1: So when someone else comes to it with certain ideas
Speaker 1: about what left and right mean, whether it's left and right,
Speaker 1: left or right, brain left and right on the political spectrum,
Speaker 1: left and right, you know, whatever orientation you may have
Speaker 1: towards those terms and what they mean in certain contexts,
Speaker 1: you can start to find and even create for yourself
Speaker 1: connections with those original ideas. And that's something that's often missed.
Speaker 1: People sometimes think that if you if you have some
Speaker 1: term that has some deep historical root that you can
Speaker 1: only you're only ever allowed to use in the original sense.
Speaker 1: Otherwise you're using it wrong. That's that's not the case.
Speaker 1: That's how language works. Language changes over time. It makes
Speaker 1: less sense now that everything is bluetooth. But the little
Speaker 1: thing in your computer that you move the point around
Speaker 1: when it wasn't always called a mouse. Mouse used to
Speaker 1: just mean the little thing that you know lives in
Speaker 1: your wall and you know, goes around on the floor.
Speaker 1: But when someone said, hey, let's call it, let's kind
Speaker 1: of like a mouse. Let's call it that, it sticks
Speaker 1: because it captures something about what a mouse looks like.
Speaker 1: It's a little it's a blob of a thing, and
Speaker 1: it's got this little long thing, thin thing hanging out
Speaker 1: of it. And we were able to adapt what we
Speaker 1: think of as meaning. We're to go, oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: can say what it means. That too, becomes like a
Speaker 1: nickname that then becomes just a name for the thing.
Speaker 1: And then now you wouldn't even think twice when someone
Speaker 1: calls that a mouse. It just makes sense. That's just
Speaker 1: the name for that thing. Now it's the same thing
Speaker 1: with all words. Words change over time. That's how different
Speaker 1: languages arise. It's how different languages eventually, the little changes
Speaker 1: in meaning and grammar and the sounds and all that
Speaker 1: accumulated the point that this now divers the same way
Speaker 1: as evolution works. Eventually, enough little changes accumulat now you've
Speaker 1: got big enough changes that wait, these are different things now,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, so uh, what I what I usually
Speaker 1: suggest with with ideas like what what you bring up
Speaker 1: is that if you find it useful, to run with it,
Speaker 1: because that because you're the one that creates meaning for yourself,
Speaker 1: no one else can force meaning. They can attempt to
Speaker 1: force meaning on you, but you ultimately decide I am
Speaker 1: oneing to accept this means that. But it's also it's
Speaker 1: also part of your your psyche at work trying to
Speaker 1: find these connections because we are we are hardwired as
Speaker 1: primates to look for these connections. When primates begin to
Speaker 1: evolve and take to the trees, we we shift towards
Speaker 1: Vision becomes much more important. Sense and other senses Smell
Speaker 1: becomes less important. But it's also we we gain quite
Speaker 1: a bit of all primates have quite a bit of
Speaker 1: tactile sensibility in their fingers and in their toes. We
Speaker 1: can we touch and sense things well. Vision becomes super
Speaker 1: important because if you're in a tree and you're you
Speaker 1: see a branch over there, you need to figure out
Speaker 1: can I make it? Because if you don't that that
Speaker 1: could be a problem. Right. So we we then take
Speaker 1: on this visual perception, you know, this death perception that
Speaker 1: allows us to judge those distances. And this this is
Speaker 1: one of one of the things that just factors into
Speaker 1: we we find patterns and the things we encounter. It's
Speaker 1: part of how we interact with the world. And those
Speaker 1: those patterns are real if the pattern has an effect
Speaker 1: on us, especially if it's a beneficial effect. The pattern
Speaker 1: is real if you if you recognize the pattern of
Speaker 1: of a snake in the grass so that you know
Speaker 1: a step over there, and you then realize the way
Speaker 1: it wasn't a snake with something else that's still that
Speaker 1: still benefited you, that that pattern recognition still helped you
Speaker 1: in a sense, if it was a snake, it really
Speaker 1: helped you. Right, So we we take that as humans.
Speaker 1: We're just hardwired to do it so that we can
Speaker 1: predict what we need to do and to draw connections
Speaker 1: between things so that we can understand what they what
Speaker 1: they're about, how they work, not just will they hurt us,
Speaker 1: but how we can also use them, and how we
Speaker 1: can bring them into the set of tools tools on
Speaker 1: the broad sense that we use to interact with the world,
Speaker 1: whether the tool is a hammer, or tool is a word,
Speaker 1: or or a connection between ideas.
Speaker 6: Toby, one thing I wanted to add was that the
Speaker 6: idea of Conrad Buddhist liturgical Sanskrit is exactly what you
Speaker 6: described like. It's it's the process, the ritual process, but
Speaker 6: not just ritual can also be conceptual consciousness. Purifying the
Speaker 6: beja is purifying the sounds, prefying the words, and like
Speaker 6: reconstituting them and remixing them in a syntax that is new,
Speaker 6: updated for whatever. You know, the you go or the colpus.
Speaker 6: So yeah, I think I wasn't poking fun before I was.
Speaker 6: It was more of a yeah, it was an evil
Speaker 6: ad joke. So it's it's toorally okay, But no, I
Speaker 6: think you understand in a profound way.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, this idea that words have magic to
Speaker 1: them is a very old idea. You know, we see
Speaker 1: it in sources as different as the numa Elish, which
Speaker 1: is the Babylonian creation myth. You know, in the time
Speaker 1: when the the skies above and not yet been named,
Speaker 1: and the gods have not been named, and the world
Speaker 1: have not been named. This idea that you name things
Speaker 1: into existence with thought in the Egyptian to God, that
Speaker 1: he writes the events of the world, and it exists
Speaker 1: that they do not occur until he writes them down.
Speaker 1: Even have it that even seeps into Greek philosophy with
Speaker 1: the logos. That's a very important concept there, and that
Speaker 1: even seeps into early Christianity. You know, the beginning of
Speaker 1: the first chapter of the Book of John. In the
Speaker 1: beginning was the Word, and the word was with God,
Speaker 1: and the word was God. The same sort of idea
Speaker 1: that words have magic. Words convey something beyond what has
Speaker 1: already been brought into being. They allow you to change
Speaker 1: things in a way that you cannot do before words
Speaker 1: were attached to them. And yeah, you see that in
Speaker 1: so many ancient cultures, in their mythologies and in their
Speaker 1: those cultures that have mythical origins for their alphabets, that
Speaker 1: have gods of communication, gods of writing, like Odin. Odin
Speaker 1: is a god of communication. He hangs on a tree,
Speaker 1: the world tree, for nine nights without food or drink
Speaker 1: or support. Then at the you know, just before the
Speaker 1: moment of death, he suddenly is infused with the knowledge
Speaker 1: of the ruins. This this has ruins both of the
Speaker 1: sense of the mysteries, but also ruins and the later
Speaker 1: in the sense of writing. He was the patron of poets,
Speaker 1: et cetera. So that this is this is such a
Speaker 1: deep idea of the way humans have think, think about
Speaker 1: the world. And when you see ideas like that in
Speaker 1: so many different mythologies that could not just be the
Speaker 1: result of borrowing or cultural contact, to me, that's a
Speaker 1: signal that these are reflecting something unique about what it
Speaker 1: is to be a human attempting to comprehend the universe
Speaker 1: around them and comprehend how to affect the universe around them.
Speaker 1: And it's even the case if you think about when
Speaker 1: humans acquire a language, we're acquiring language at the same
Speaker 1: time the same state nerd development. When we are warning
Speaker 1: to interact with the world through touch and movement, we learn, oh,
Speaker 1: I can reach outside the crib, I can touch the thing.
Speaker 1: At the same time we're warning how to say the
Speaker 1: magic words that get Mama to bring us the things
Speaker 1: that we want. Or even though eventually when we infect
Speaker 1: I say the right word and now and now Mama
Speaker 1: brings me candy. You know that that's a very important moment.
Speaker 1: You know that, when you realize that words can affect things,
Speaker 1: not just describe things. And so so many of the
Speaker 1: ways that we use language or tied to this sense
Speaker 1: of movement, that sense of how we interact with the
Speaker 1: world around us, because they were co developed. They our
Speaker 1: brain was developing both of these senses of what it
Speaker 1: means to interact with the world at the same time,
Speaker 1: and so they're going to be just intimately tied together.
Speaker 1: And the fact that later we can then realize that
Speaker 1: words can be used even more magically in what we
Speaker 1: would normally call magic. That's that's not it may be
Speaker 1: a revelation of putting it in those terms, but it's
Speaker 1: a natural outgrowth of the way we've already innately learned
Speaker 1: how to use language to interact with, unaffect the world.
Speaker 1: There's a I was gonna say that, there's actually spent
Speaker 1: one chapter in The Languages of Magic talking about that specifically.
Speaker 1: I look at different mythologies and uh uh, mythical figure
Speaker 1: mythical and legendary figures of communication parsonally to show how
Speaker 1: deep and broad of an idea that is. Because it
Speaker 1: really is pervasive. It's not just something that that's into European,
Speaker 1: it's spans pretty much the entire world.
Speaker 3: Thank you. Uh yeah, I was actually looking to try
Speaker 3: to start to get into your book actually now since
Speaker 3: they can't wait into the show. So I guess, you know,
Speaker 3: the languages of magic? What got you? I mean besides
Speaker 3: the fact, I guess of being I don't know if
Speaker 3: you consider you're ocultist or what if you can consider
Speaker 3: yourself besides being into that stuff? Is what got you
Speaker 3: into the study of you know, got you into semiotics
Speaker 3: and language?
Speaker 1: Sure? Well, I don't consider myself an occultist. That that's
Speaker 1: a longer that's a longer discussion, but but I do
Speaker 1: consider myself a magician for certain I mean in an initiate.
Speaker 1: And it realized for some people those are the same thing,
Speaker 1: and that's fine too again where it's coming different things
Speaker 1: in different people. But what got me into language and
Speaker 1: semiotics originally? So I kind of had a fascination with
Speaker 1: languages when I was younger, and when I got to
Speaker 1: the point in school that I was able to city languages,
Speaker 1: I took Latin. I took four years of Latin, and
Speaker 1: as it happened. And this was purely, purely by by accident.
Speaker 1: It was not something that I knew ahead of time.
Speaker 1: As it happened the high the Latin teacher at my
Speaker 1: high school had a pH d in classics. He was
Speaker 1: a well respected scholar in that world, and I was
Speaker 1: able to stay with him for four years. We happened
Speaker 1: to be my class, happened to be positioned to be
Speaker 1: the last one that started the ninth grade, and so
Speaker 1: we had the opportunity to do four years. But also,
Speaker 1: as it turned out, it had been a number of
Speaker 1: years since he had anyone interested in it. So the
Speaker 1: fourth year was more of like an independent study with
Speaker 1: me and a couple of other of my friends at
Speaker 1: the time. And and in fact, he became one of
Speaker 1: the people I dedicated the book to because of that.
Speaker 1: The book is dedicated to to my high school Latin teacher,
Speaker 1: Richard Beaton, who taught me the magic of language, and
Speaker 1: too Michael o'quina, who taught me the language of magic
Speaker 1: and that sort of fascination with the Languageven Though I
Speaker 1: kind of took a different career path for a while
Speaker 1: into the IT world, as I said before, that never
Speaker 1: never left. It was always kind of there. When I
Speaker 1: became part of the Temple of set in two thousand,
Speaker 1: I was exposed to the work of Stephen Flowers. At
Speaker 1: that point, I was not aware of him before. I've
Speaker 1: been interested in runes, but had not been super interested
Speaker 1: in them, and that was kind of my gay way
Speaker 1: into into his work. And eventually I read about his
Speaker 1: PhD dissertation was about runes and magic, one of the
Speaker 1: few academic studies of that, and this was in nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty four, and he had a chapter where he talked
Speaker 1: about theories of magic. He talked about the way that
Speaker 1: anthropologists had approached the idea of magic a different points
Speaker 1: in time, and he was looking at what were then
Speaker 1: pretty new ideas around looking at magic as communication. That
Speaker 1: sort of starts with there's a pretty famous anthropologist named
Speaker 1: Brandisval Malanowski who studied the some people in the tro
Speaker 1: Beyond islands in Papu window Guinea and previous anthropologists, and
Speaker 1: kind I take in this idea that okay, magic is
Speaker 1: like bad science, it's just fantasy. A lot of these
Speaker 1: people believe these stupid things. He took a different approach.
Speaker 1: He was what his approach was that well, it seems
Speaker 1: to have some effect on them. It seems to mean
Speaker 1: something to them. So maybe instead we should look at
Speaker 1: what gives it meaning to them. Even if I disagree
Speaker 1: and think they're wrong, it has meaning for them, and
Speaker 1: that has value, and I want to understand that. And
Speaker 1: the central part of his idea was that the words
Speaker 1: that they would use in the rituals had meaning that
Speaker 1: were brought into the rituals. So it becomes a very
Speaker 1: important idea. Even if it happens to be some of
Speaker 1: the same words they would use in a in a
Speaker 1: normal setting, they took on additional meaning as part of
Speaker 1: the ritual act. And so I was reading about this
Speaker 1: in this chapter of Flowers's dissertation and it just it
Speaker 1: made something click with me about I love how it
Speaker 1: raised up the thumb every time I've blaked my hand,
Speaker 1: and it kind of connected with that love of language,
Speaker 1: and it made me realize, wait, there's there's something, there's
Speaker 1: a deeper angle here that I've not looked at, and
Speaker 1: what magic might be that I should look into a
Speaker 1: bit deeper. Fast forward a bit too. When I was
Speaker 1: in the very beginning of writing infrontal geometry, I was
Speaker 1: one of the things that I realized is and I
Speaker 1: learned this from Flowers actually originally, is that magic is
Speaker 1: a problematic word. And the reason that's a problematic word
Speaker 1: is that magic means all kinds of things to different people.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying whether they're right or wrong, but just
Speaker 1: that there's a Would you say the word magic to
Speaker 1: a random person on the street, You're going to get
Speaker 1: a whole range of meanings, okay. And this is a
Speaker 1: problem when you're trying to be precise. It's a problem
Speaker 1: when you're trying to discuss specifically whether some particular thing
Speaker 1: is magic or is not magic. You need a definition
Speaker 1: to measure things against. And it doesn't have to be
Speaker 1: the only definitions possible, but you can at least say,
Speaker 1: in this context, I'm measuring against this definition. Okay. And
Speaker 1: I took a reread of that earlier work for his
Speaker 1: that it grabbed me where he talks about what he
Speaker 1: describes as a semiotic theory of magic. Now, he did
Speaker 1: not He did not come up with the phrase semiotic
Speaker 1: theory of magic. It originally goes back to an older
Speaker 1: folkloress named Ronald Grambo from an article back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties where he he talks about his semiotic view
Speaker 1: of what magic is, and I got curious. I had
Speaker 1: sort of what many people have of like a general
Speaker 1: understanding well semi audio something about signs and symbols, right,
Speaker 1: I didn't know much else about it at the time.
Speaker 1: So I started to look more into this and try
Speaker 1: to understand more deeply what this means. And that that
Speaker 1: really made things click, and that kind of what that
Speaker 1: did is I'd already decided that infernal geometry. I wanted
Speaker 1: to do two things. I wanted to talk about geometry,
Speaker 1: just plain old compass and straight edge geometry. Because if
Speaker 1: you're going to have a metaphor use a metaphor in magic,
Speaker 1: you should have understood some understand what the metaphor actually
Speaker 1: means in real life. You should have some lived experience
Speaker 1: of the metaphor. This is something that I believe it
Speaker 1: was Gerald Massey referred to as the living nature of
Speaker 1: the nosis, the idea that's not just an idea. It's
Speaker 1: something that has some some reference within the world that
Speaker 1: you can claim it, that you can claim a connection to.
Speaker 1: And the other I decided was to have a chapter
Speaker 1: to talk about magic. So that was my inittional sort
Speaker 1: of forea into let me talk about the semiotic theory
Speaker 1: of magic are from my perspective, how magic is the
Speaker 1: use of signs, and the sign can be a symbol
Speaker 1: like this, signs or words as well. Signs are it's
Speaker 1: a very kind of general term really for anything that
Speaker 1: refers to something else in some way. And so these
Speaker 1: are sort of kind of one practical one theoretical chapter
Speaker 1: that I thought was very important to set the stage
Speaker 1: so that when I started talking about angles, I can
Speaker 1: know that the reader has has enough of an understanding
Speaker 1: of geometry, or is reminded enough of the understanding of
Speaker 1: geometry to really kind of understand precisely what I'm talking
Speaker 1: about and not just you know, to think, oh, I
Speaker 1: understand that, and not pay attention to the finer points
Speaker 1: of it. And also with magic, to say when I
Speaker 1: talk about magic, this is what I mean in this context.
Speaker 1: And so yeah, so those things started to come together,
Speaker 1: and this is directly related to how this new book,
Speaker 1: The Language of Magic came about. When when you work
Speaker 1: with a with a larger publisher and they're concerned about marketing,
Speaker 1: they want to know how to market your book, and
Speaker 1: everything about the book is marketing, you know, the cover
Speaker 1: covers are are marketing. The title is marketing, the subtitle
Speaker 1: is marketing. How it looks on the spine, it's all marketing.
Speaker 1: What they write on the back about you, right, And
Speaker 1: one of the things they ask you for is they say,
Speaker 1: are you working on any other books right now? Because
Speaker 1: that may be something they can use on some of
Speaker 1: the press information and maybe something they can feed to
Speaker 1: the interviewers maybe to ask about great And I didn't
Speaker 1: have a solid idea at the time, but one of
Speaker 1: my friends who's published books before as well, advice is like,
Speaker 1: whatever you do, don't leave that blank. You make up
Speaker 1: something you have to make plausible, make up something you
Speaker 1: have to do. So I'm like, well, you know, if
Speaker 1: I had the time, maybe sometimes I want to write
Speaker 1: a book about expand semiotic theory magic into a book.
Speaker 1: Little do I know that kind of sealed my fate,
Speaker 1: right because I started off writing another book, but I
Speaker 1: also listed as among possible books to write, and it
Speaker 1: just wasn't really going anywhere. I mean, I was doing
Speaker 1: the research for it, and I just couldn't find the
Speaker 1: enthusiasm to really buckle down and write it. And I
Speaker 1: couldn't figure out why, and then I just kind of
Speaker 1: had those revelation one day. Its because you're writing the
Speaker 1: wrong book, dummy. You need to look at you. You
Speaker 1: need to go figure out what book you need to
Speaker 1: be writing now. The funny thing is I'd been reading
Speaker 1: quite a lot about language and semiotics and reading lots
Speaker 1: of books. Probably can't make them out on the video,
Speaker 1: but most of my library back there books about language
Speaker 1: and philosophy for that reason. And it was like, you
Speaker 1: know what, I want to sit down and write a
Speaker 1: book about this. I had an idea, I had a
Speaker 1: way to approach it, and then it went back and
Speaker 1: looked I don't remember why I looked at it. I
Speaker 1: went back and looked after that original author questionnaire for
Speaker 1: in fronal geometry, and sure enough it says I would
Speaker 1: I'm going to start researching to write this book. I'm
Speaker 1: like a bit of time magic there. I guess it's
Speaker 1: telling future me to write that book five years before
Speaker 1: I started actually writing it. But that that interest has continued,
Speaker 1: you know, I said before, I've had this long standing
Speaker 1: interest in language. When I finally decided that I was
Speaker 1: done with the tech industry and had been thinking about
Speaker 1: what to do instead because I'm you know, not old
Speaker 1: enough to retire for for good at this point, by
Speaker 1: by a long shot, and decided to return to school
Speaker 1: and study those things formally, so to actually get a
Speaker 1: degree in it and not just have you know, the
Speaker 1: autodidactic understanding I have of it now. One thing that's
Speaker 1: important as to be an auto A good autodid act
Speaker 1: is to talk to people that do know something about
Speaker 1: those things for real, because it's easy to just follow
Speaker 1: into on your ununderstanding, you know, through various connections. I
Speaker 1: know people who have advanced degrees and loss of the linguistics.
Speaker 1: You know, have studied semiotics, you know, at the university level,
Speaker 1: et cetera, have studied uh, you know, Mesopotamia magic at
Speaker 1: the university level. I talk about that some of the book,
Speaker 1: and so I always check my understandings. I want to know,
Speaker 1: am I am I on to something here? Or or
Speaker 1: do I have this wrong? Yeah? Because you you don't
Speaker 1: know if you really understand something until you start to
Speaker 1: talk about it with someone, whether it's to teach it,
Speaker 1: but also to talk about with someone that knows more
Speaker 1: about it than you. You know, never be afraid to
Speaker 1: find someone that knows something about something you think you know,
Speaker 1: because you know usually you're only going to benefit from it,
Speaker 1: and you only benefit through him as well. Uh Don
Speaker 1: Webb has this thing he talks about which is as
Speaker 1: pretty much everything he says is absolutely spot on, which
Speaker 1: is that the best way to grow as a magician
Speaker 1: is to work with people that are a little bit
Speaker 1: a little bit ahead of where you are, a little
Speaker 1: bit behind where you are. The ones that are you'll
Speaker 1: both teach and to learn from both of them. Now,
Speaker 1: if they're close to your ability in some way, you're
Speaker 1: going to find a bit easier to work with them
Speaker 1: because you're kind of on the same wavelength about what
Speaker 1: things mean and how to work with them. But that
Speaker 1: will bring you resources you need to help you to
Speaker 1: become better whatever whatever it is you're studying. And that's
Speaker 1: applies not just a magic but to many things. I mean,
Speaker 1: falls right in line with his off repeated saying the
Speaker 1: secret of magic is to transform the magician if you
Speaker 1: want to be capable of better things and become more capable,
Speaker 1: and then the better things will follow.
Speaker 3: Up like that.
Speaker 7: So I was going to say, Now, as far as
Speaker 7: I'm an artist myself and I go through the creative process,
Speaker 7: and marketing, and I'm dealing with everything you're talking about,
Speaker 7: and I've been an independent artist now for going on
Speaker 7: thirty plus years. But as far as the ideas of
Speaker 7: language and symbolism, and you know, you have going back,
Speaker 7: you know, you have the seraphic angels writing down the
Speaker 7: sacred you know, happenings to all you know, thought, writing
Speaker 7: creation into existence. You always have this essential idea of
Speaker 7: the writing, and then you trace that writing through like
Speaker 7: Cadmus coming through Thebes down into Greece and bringing those
Speaker 7: letters and just the expansive quality of what writing itself
Speaker 7: is in the sense, especially when you get to the
Speaker 7: point and you're writing books and you're you're essentially taking
Speaker 7: these these full force ideas and introducing them into the
Speaker 7: minds of people, and I think that's one of the
Speaker 7: most magical things that you can do. And then if
Speaker 7: you layer within that the ideas of you know, showing
Speaker 7: how the language itself works to be able to do
Speaker 7: these subtle exercises to make reality more malleable, I think
Speaker 7: it's it's one of the highest forms of magic that
Speaker 7: you can participate in.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I would agree completely, yeah, yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: it says something that this idea that magic and writing
Speaker 1: go together somehow is such a pervasive idea. I think
Speaker 1: that speaks to something that's very that's very eternal and
Speaker 1: very deep in our understanding.
Speaker 3: Or even this situation. It gives off an email sent
Speaker 3: to me, you're on my show. Note, I mean that's
Speaker 3: magically yeah.
Speaker 1: But you know, one of the main sources that really
Speaker 1: kind of kicked me in a high gear when I'm
Speaker 1: started to really look at Language of Magic as a
Speaker 1: book by a philosopher who died back in the sixties
Speaker 1: named J. L. Austin, and his most famous work is
Speaker 1: called How to Do Things with Words. Brilliant title I love.
Speaker 1: I love the title so much, And part of what
Speaker 1: he's talking about he's not talking about magic at all
Speaker 1: in there directly. He was a philosopher of language. He
Speaker 1: was at he was at Oxford, you know, so it was,
Speaker 1: you know, too much of a too much in the
Speaker 1: Ivory Tower to talk about magic in that sense. But
Speaker 1: what he did talk about extensively was the way that
Speaker 1: we bring things into being through language. He talks about
Speaker 1: what he calls a performative utterance sort of the canonical
Speaker 1: example of that is at a marriage you say, a
Speaker 1: now pronounce you man and wife. At the moment that
Speaker 1: said you're now married, the words themselves cause that to
Speaker 1: happen right then and there. But you say the same
Speaker 1: words in a different context. Yeah, and you know, you're
Speaker 1: joking around at a party, you you know, and then
Speaker 1: say it. Context is not there. The words don't have
Speaker 1: the same effect. The words have a context, and the
Speaker 1: words can cause things to happen just by virtue of
Speaker 1: being spoken and by someone with the right power and
Speaker 1: authority and some in and in the right context. Hugely
Speaker 1: important idea, very magical idea. When I was talking earlier
Speaker 1: about anthropologists in the late twentieth century starting to think
Speaker 1: more about the world of language and magic, that was
Speaker 1: one of the ideas they specifically pulled from. They pulled on.
Speaker 1: They put on two things. They pulled on the idea
Speaker 1: of performative speech from from Austin and they pulled on
Speaker 1: the Austrian slash English philosopher Ludwig Wittckenstein and his idea
Speaker 1: what he called a language games. What a language game
Speaker 1: is he's not talking about. He's not saying the language
Speaker 1: is frivolous or just a game or anything like that.
Speaker 1: But he's talking about the different moves that you make
Speaker 1: in certain kinds of interactions that you take. If you
Speaker 1: think about you go to Starbugs, you order a coffee,
Speaker 1: you have a you know, there's a certain there's certain
Speaker 1: rituals you go through about how you approach the counter
Speaker 1: and the and then the person of the counter asked
Speaker 1: you what you want to do, and then you there
Speaker 1: are certain things you say this to complete the ritual
Speaker 1: of correctly ordering your your morning coffee. That's a particular
Speaker 1: language game. It has certain moves, it has a meaning
Speaker 1: within a context. You take that same those same words
Speaker 1: in the same exchange out of the context, it means
Speaker 1: something completely different. Language is always contextual, and you can
Speaker 1: probably easily see how that can map onto magic if
Speaker 1: you think about I was mentioned earlier with Melanowski and
Speaker 1: the trobriand Islanders, the idea that even if they're using
Speaker 1: the same words they might use outside of a ritual context,
Speaker 1: within a ritual context, they take on certain meanings. They
Speaker 1: have an effect there they don't have elsewhere. They've become
Speaker 1: part of the language game that's used during the ritual
Speaker 1: context that is not present when they're used in a
Speaker 1: different context. And so this is very This is a
Speaker 1: very important step forward in looking at what magic can be.
Speaker 1: And what I argue at length in the Languages of
Speaker 1: magic is that you know, semiotics is as we know
Speaker 1: it today is a relatively new thing, even though it
Speaker 1: has roots going back twenty five hundred years, and of
Speaker 1: course the language goes back. You know, we're not even
Speaker 1: we're probably sure how far back language it goes. But
Speaker 1: even though we're describing it in terms that have arisen
Speaker 1: in modern times, they apply to these things that are
Speaker 1: far more ancient. They eliminate those in ways that let
Speaker 1: us understand them in deeper ways. So these are ideas
Speaker 1: that they've always been there about the language has magic,
Speaker 1: magical components to it. Now we're just what I'm doing
Speaker 1: here is not saying, ah, this is a brand new
Speaker 1: idea that language is magic in some way, or that
Speaker 1: magic can use language in some way. But it's that
Speaker 1: now we have a vocabulary we can use to look
Speaker 1: at it and far more fine grained detail to help
Speaker 1: us understand it in a deeper way. So new ideas
Speaker 1: looking back at things that they've that have they've always
Speaker 1: been part of, just not always seen for what they were.
Speaker 3: You know, I think you had mentioned something earlier. Kind
Speaker 3: of like this a little bit like people taking symbolism
Speaker 3: from like the past maybe and putting it together, or
Speaker 3: like maybe older magic, like magicians kind of look whatever
Speaker 3: you want to call them. Magicians are cult is looking
Speaker 3: at past people's stuff maybe kind of using it. Well
Speaker 3: you kind of I feel like and I know, I
Speaker 3: think your book touches on Crowley just from my opinion,
Speaker 3: I feel like he did that a lot in a sense,
Speaker 3: like once I started looking at stuff like Michael Myers,
Speaker 3: Anthony Acis, Kurt uh oh, God, who was that? Uh
Speaker 3: Heinrich Kohmrath and Empedocles people like that, I'm like, Yo,
Speaker 3: there's certain things that I feel like Crowley even might
Speaker 3: have made art with some like even like came up
Speaker 3: with ideas from pulling different things from them.
Speaker 1: And absolutely one of Croley's superpowers was to be a
Speaker 1: master synthesist of ideas. He was extraordinarily well read. He
Speaker 1: had a very classical education. He came he came from
Speaker 1: wealthy and though he later squandered it, squatded his inheritance,
Speaker 1: but you know, he he spoke French. He'd been trained,
Speaker 1: he'd been to learn French from from an early age.
Speaker 1: You know, he was very well read, and he was
Speaker 1: very he's very much a student of the history of
Speaker 1: ideas and he was he was very astute. Like I
Speaker 1: was talking earlier about drawing connections, he was able to
Speaker 1: draw these connections and go, oh, these ideas seem to
Speaker 1: connect in some way, even though you know, from a
Speaker 1: historical sense maybe they're not connected, but from a conceptual sense,
Speaker 1: they have these connections. And he was able to turn
Speaker 1: that into in some cases some extraordinarily beautiful writing, in
Speaker 1: some cases a completely obtuse writing. But that's you know,
Speaker 1: you take the good of it the bad, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: there's always one things you have to always keep in
Speaker 1: mind when you're reading Crowley and Antony Levey is no
Speaker 1: different is you always have to keep in mind, Okay,
Speaker 1: where is he getting half of us from that he
Speaker 1: sent uside? And that's the thing. Synthesizing is an art.
Speaker 1: It's not you know, everything is remax ultimately right, but
Speaker 1: synthesizing seeing connections, drawing new connections, combine them into new
Speaker 1: and novel ways. It's part of it's part of what
Speaker 1: humans do. But if you have someone that's especially skilled
Speaker 1: at it. That's also that's also very good skill to have,
Speaker 1: especially as a magician, like with Croley for example, if
Speaker 1: if you look at you know, when Croley sort of
Speaker 1: came of age as a magician, you know, in the
Speaker 1: Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn, among other things, was riding
Speaker 1: the wave of Egyptomania in Great Britain at the time,
Speaker 1: idea that everything that was ancient Egret was cool. You know,
Speaker 1: the you know, hieroglyphics had only been deciphered in eighteen
Speaker 1: twenty two. You're starting to see things like the Greek
Speaker 1: magical Papyri were beginning to filter in from the Mediterranean
Speaker 1: world and be bought and then translated and published by
Speaker 1: the British Museum and the British Library. You were, you
Speaker 1: were seeing all these you know, archaeological exservations of Egypt,
Speaker 1: and we're warning so much about them now that we
Speaker 1: can read read the inscriptions that just have to infer
Speaker 1: from what we see, you know, written on the walls
Speaker 1: or from from statues. And so this really took hold,
Speaker 1: not just in the Magical War, but just in general.
Speaker 1: People in the Western world really as a whole were
Speaker 1: kind of obsessed with us. He starts see the pyramid power,
Speaker 1: and you know everything in Egypt is magical and all this.
Speaker 7: They were at one point they were taking mummies and
Speaker 7: grinding them up and sniffing them as they Yeah, as
Speaker 7: an alleviate, you know, for whatever symptoms.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all kinds of things that the paper than in reality.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we were eating mummy chips to right of the
Speaker 8: of the wrappings. I had one correspondence from your set
Speaker 8: of four as you were describing your symbol. It really
Speaker 8: reflects the duality of polarity of yin yang theory being
Speaker 8: major Yin and minor Yin, and major Yang and minor Yang.
Speaker 8: That being the idea of the order and chaos and
Speaker 8: the understanding and being. I found that a powerful set
Speaker 8: of four. I wanted to suggest that the semiotic work
Speaker 8: or the consciousness.
Speaker 2: Of that and the magic of that, if you will,
Speaker 2: I know that word.
Speaker 8: I appreciate that word does have some different interpretations. It
Speaker 8: reminds me of the idea of the agrigor right, the
Speaker 8: Greek word for a symbol or a fictionalized person or
Speaker 8: a thought, kind of being imbued with so much collective
Speaker 8: consciousness or individual consciousness that it kind of becomes becomes real.
Speaker 8: I wanted to ask to one little question that's maybe
Speaker 8: related to a bigger question. Can you explain your reasoning
Speaker 8: for choosing infernal in infernal geometry to someone like me
Speaker 8: who's been captivated by the biblical.
Speaker 2: West of you know, X and Y bad.
Speaker 8: And secondly, I found it very provocative you're the uh
Speaker 8: your inspiration that you might draw from the Pythagoreans, And
Speaker 8: as in relation to initiation, it's hard to find information,
Speaker 8: of course on the secret group.
Speaker 1: So what are some.
Speaker 8: Of the influences from the Pythagoreans or even practices or
Speaker 8: ideas from the Pythagoreans that you might utilize in your
Speaker 8: book or or you you appreciate.
Speaker 1: Right, So, so for the first question Infernal, I was
Speaker 1: there's a couple of reasons behind it. One, I was
Speaker 1: trying to draw an intentional contrast with sacred geometry, not
Speaker 1: because I find sacred geometry fascinating and it is completely
Speaker 1: valid in itself as well, but I was trying to
Speaker 1: emphasize that this is an explicitly left hand path approach,
Speaker 1: and so Infernal sort of seemed to fit in a
Speaker 1: sense to kind of just as a contrast to too
Speaker 1: sacred and it certainly is not meant to or intended to,
Speaker 1: uh belittle or besmirch the sacred geometry, because I say,
Speaker 1: I refer to it quite a bit in in in
Speaker 1: my book as well, because those ideas of things about
Speaker 1: the golden ratio, et cetera extraordinarily valid and interesting ideas.
Speaker 1: And as I'm sure, I'm sure you know, the pentagram itself,
Speaker 1: you know, embodies the golden ratio, and in fact, that
Speaker 1: was that was reputed to be the to be the
Speaker 1: secret symbol of the Pythagoreans because they were they thought
Speaker 1: that their understanding of the golden ratio was, you know,
Speaker 1: you know that this one of the secrets of the
Speaker 1: composition of the universe. You even see that pop up
Speaker 1: again in Plato's Dialogue of the Timaeus when he's describing
Speaker 1: the proportions in which from the absolute that that the
Speaker 1: universe is progressively created. If you if you read the
Speaker 1: way he's describing them, he's describing the golden ratio. It's
Speaker 1: like a golden spiral as as he carves off the
Speaker 1: individual pieces uh from it. With the Pythagoreans more broadly so,
Speaker 1: the Pythagorean number number mysticism. I'm specifically the Monad, the
Speaker 1: Diad and so forth. Was a was one of the
Speaker 1: sources that Michael o'quino was drawing from when he wrote
Speaker 1: The Ceremony of the Nine Angles. In that there's a
Speaker 1: there's a piece in that. I mean it's actually that
Speaker 1: that is uh is printed in full at the beginning
Speaker 1: of infernal Geometry. We don't have a copy of the
Speaker 1: Satanic rituals as well. There's there's a part in the
Speaker 1: Ceremony the Nine Angles where something is spoken that we've
Speaker 1: come to refer to as the bond of the nine Angles.
Speaker 1: These are series of nine stamens or says from the
Speaker 1: first angle is the infinite. We're in the laughing one
Speaker 1: to cry and the flutes wail into the ending of time,
Speaker 1: et cetera, which we're combining two things when they're using
Speaker 1: sort of love crafting imagery. The flut's willing to the
Speaker 1: end of time. That's as ofth Off, you know, playing
Speaker 1: the diabolical flute that brings the universe into being and
Speaker 1: haunts it throughout its existence. But it's also looking at
Speaker 1: the idea of the monad from Pythagoras, the idea of oneness.
Speaker 1: What does it mean to have a unity with that
Speaker 1: keyword of the first angle of chaos. This is not
Speaker 1: chaos of everything going every which way. This is chaos
Speaker 1: of being undifferentiated and not being guided in any way,
Speaker 1: but as pregnant with potential, is waiting to come into
Speaker 1: being as something that with a second the second angle order,
Speaker 1: now you have you have some differentiation from the one.
Speaker 1: The one is no longer a whole and by itself
Speaker 1: now there Now there are two now they but they
Speaker 1: can only have existence that are opposites of each other.
Speaker 1: One can only be with the other is not with three.
Speaker 1: Now you have the potential for a perspective. That's why
Speaker 1: that's part of why I use that as a as
Speaker 1: another word for the third angle. There the idea that
Speaker 1: if you have a third it can it no longer
Speaker 1: is constrained to be just what the other two is not.
Speaker 1: It can now decide. If you think about like three dots,
Speaker 1: you can have two dots in a line, and then
Speaker 1: the third dot can be here, can be here, can
Speaker 1: be here, can take different perspectives on the ringing two dots.
Speaker 1: It's no longer constrained in space just to be in
Speaker 1: one specific relation to the others and so forth. So
Speaker 1: talking about the idea of synthesizing roots of ideas. A
Speaker 1: Quino was was very taken with Pythagoras and his ideas,
Speaker 1: and he had that insight of the If you take
Speaker 1: some of the love crafting imagery of the Cathillu gets
Speaker 1: all the pressed. But cathill was actually barely mentioned outside
Speaker 1: of the one story of his name. You see. The
Speaker 1: four others that you see much more often in lovecraft
Speaker 1: are as Athoth, yox Othoth, nil Hotep, and Shamnigeroth. And
Speaker 1: if you look at the way that they're ascribed, as
Speaker 1: Athoth kind of has this this connotation of the chaos,
Speaker 1: the potential that's waiting to be directed in some way.
Speaker 1: Yox Otho adds some degree of order to it, you know,
Speaker 1: it becomes like the first emanation from as Athoth. Nyl
Speaker 1: Hotep becomes the interface, the messenger from from the outer
Speaker 1: gods to the uh to people. As of author sorry,
Speaker 1: nyl Hotep is the only one that that speaks to
Speaker 1: humans in their own languages in Lovecraft stories. Shabnigaroth is
Speaker 1: the the goat of a thousand young, basically the you know,
Speaker 1: the source of of all possibilities now manifested on Earth.
Speaker 1: And so he had a Quino had this insight that
Speaker 1: you could sort of draw, start to draw a cosmology,
Speaker 1: how a cosmology develops out of those to create the
Speaker 1: objective universe? You know, what is? What has you know
Speaker 1: makes a thud when you put it on the table,
Speaker 1: What has physical laws that describe how the physical matter
Speaker 1: interacts with each other? And then he combined that with
Speaker 1: those ideas of Pythagoras. But what does it mean to
Speaker 1: be a unity? What does it mean to be a duality?
Speaker 1: What does it mean to be a triad? And he
Speaker 1: also realized that even though the Pythagoras kind of goes
Speaker 1: all the way to the deck, add the ten, that
Speaker 1: that's really the one all over again, just an indifferent octave,
Speaker 1: if you will, from a different perspective, you know, starting
Speaker 1: from a from both the original place, but also something
Speaker 1: that now has has these additional things that have happened
Speaker 1: to it that give it you possibility as it begins
Speaker 1: to unfold again. And so he and so in with
Speaker 1: the nine the nine angles out of these, with the
Speaker 1: five angles of the pentagram, the four angles of the trapezoid.
Speaker 1: At the ninth angle at the bottom. That was the
Speaker 1: one he equated with with Kefer, the idea of becoming
Speaker 1: going all the way back what I was saying earlier
Speaker 1: about the temple. Ultimately when I and that's the beginning,
Speaker 1: You've you have become something new. You're becoming a new
Speaker 1: conception of yourself. You're now capable of things you were
Speaker 1: like capable of before. You can now see things you
Speaker 1: could not see before you were you know, you have
Speaker 1: extended the horizon of what's visible to you, of what's
Speaker 1: possible to you, and now you can start from this
Speaker 1: new perspective. Now you can begin the process of expanding
Speaker 1: yourself again. So there's that cycle of nine that you know,
Speaker 1: you start back over. Well, now all things are potential again,
Speaker 1: just they they have this additional base that results from
Speaker 1: what I've become, that's now available to me that was
Speaker 1: not available for me to become before. And then you
Speaker 1: go through the cycle again. So it's not all you
Speaker 1: get to the nine and then you're done. As you
Speaker 1: get to the nine and you know, all right, let's
Speaker 1: let's ride again. So like you never never want to
Speaker 1: get off the roller coaster once you get it started,
Speaker 1: it's like a pump m hm in a sense, yeah.
Speaker 3: Would be some of the just real quick, I just
Speaker 3: want to ask real quick. So, like I guess kind
Speaker 3: of like the understanding of things that you didn't before.
Speaker 3: Would you maybe say that could be like a side
Speaker 3: effect of like having magical experience? Oh?
Speaker 1: Absolutely, I mean everything that we experience informs us in
Speaker 1: some way. You know we some of them. We you know,
Speaker 1: you have like mundane experiences maybe you brush off, but
Speaker 1: then years later you think, why did I react that
Speaker 1: way when someone said that thing to me? And you realize, oh,
Speaker 1: it's because of that thing that happened years ago that
Speaker 1: you thought didn't matter anymore. Now, That's why it's very
Speaker 1: important to whatever. You can never change what you came
Speaker 1: into the world as you know what you know, your
Speaker 1: socioeconomic background, Uh, you know, your your ancestry, things like
Speaker 1: this that are you're sort of thrown into those they're
Speaker 1: always part of you. Even things like think like if
Speaker 1: you grew up in like a super Christian household, then
Speaker 1: the later you reject that, it's not enough to just
Speaker 1: say I'm not a Christian anymore, because you maybe have
Speaker 1: many things that continue to be part of your mindset.
Speaker 1: Because they were there from the beginning. So there's this.
Speaker 1: It's not a one and done thing. You have to
Speaker 1: constantly look at all, Right, what do I need to
Speaker 1: move past? We don't need to understand better about my background,
Speaker 1: about where I came from, well, what choices I've made
Speaker 1: or the consequences of the choices, but also what things
Speaker 1: I didn't have a choice in. And you have to
Speaker 1: look at how you can make make them either work
Speaker 1: for your current conception of yourself or that you can
Speaker 1: deliberately move past them instead of just saying saying yourself,
Speaker 1: well that that doesn't matter anymore. I don't want think
Speaker 1: about it anymore. Because remember earlier I was saying that
Speaker 1: you whenever you undergo initiation, your entire self was along
Speaker 1: for the ride. Things that are part of your shadow
Speaker 1: that still is clinging to you. They're still there. You
Speaker 1: can never get rid of it, but you can integrate
Speaker 1: what you think about it. You can you can gain
Speaker 1: any perspective on it. You can change your attitude towards it,
Speaker 1: even if you can never never shed the fact that
Speaker 1: you know that I'm a you know, white guy that
Speaker 1: grew up in the South, you know, lower medical class background.
Speaker 1: That's always there. There are parts of that you know
Speaker 1: that's still in form, like the way I approach some
Speaker 1: like finances. Today, I catch myself as like, oh wait,
Speaker 1: I don't have to pinch that penny anymore because I
Speaker 1: have I have means now that I didn't before. But
Speaker 1: it's so part of like the way that I grew
Speaker 1: up and what was there that you know, it sticks
Speaker 1: with you and it comes up in unexpected ways. That's
Speaker 1: the thing about your shadow is you only get to
Speaker 1: see what's in the shadow when the light happens to
Speaker 1: catch it. And so you know, if you if you
Speaker 1: go out of your way to try to shine that
Speaker 1: light on all these different aspects of yourself, you're going
Speaker 1: to have a better shot at figuring out, oh wait,
Speaker 1: that's that's there and still having some effect on me,
Speaker 1: what do I need to do with that? Instead of
Speaker 1: forgetting about it and just letting it continue to affect
Speaker 1: you without even being aware of it.
Speaker 4: I had I had a quick I guess question. So
Speaker 4: you're you know, looking over at some of the orders
Speaker 4: that you're involved with and then kind of reading through
Speaker 4: the little synops of the book. It seems like there's
Speaker 4: a huge emphasis in math. Writer or mathematics, so to
Speaker 4: speak right and then your book talks about language, and
Speaker 4: to me listening to you right now, the only thing
Speaker 4: I keep thinking is, you know, going from potential energy
Speaker 4: to kinetic energy, and that when you see words or
Speaker 4: you write words down, you're either harnessing a sound frequency
Speaker 4: into form or you're taking your pen and you are
Speaker 4: shaping light. You know, in the you know, the outline
Speaker 4: of the actual word. Would you say that magic is
Speaker 4: an attempt to bring back alpha numerical systems to where
Speaker 4: both words and numbers unite and give it back its
Speaker 4: own power before it was separated. I think it was
Speaker 4: like in the eleven hundreds or so.
Speaker 1: So to avoid scaring your readers, the math is all
Speaker 1: in the first book, so you don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about running into math. You'd run into semiotics instead, which
Speaker 1: is its own candle worms. But you bring up very
Speaker 1: interesting point. I think I think there's definitely something to that,
Speaker 1: because math it depends on where someone falls on the
Speaker 1: independent existence of math, existence of mathematics some people. Some
Speaker 1: people say that in a very platonic sense, that your
Speaker 1: math math is has its own independent existence and we're
Speaker 1: just discovering what that is. Other people look at it
Speaker 1: from the respective that maybe we are we're using math
Speaker 1: as a way to relate to the universe in a
Speaker 1: way that that's our way of expressing the order that
Speaker 1: we perceive in the universe. I probably fall somewhere in
Speaker 1: the middle of those, maybe some aspects of both of them.
Speaker 1: But you could think of mathematics like a language. It's
Speaker 1: a it's I mean, this is exactly the one of
Speaker 1: the ways that people like Galileo, who coined the term
Speaker 1: the Book of Nature, conceptualized it that basically mathematics is
Speaker 1: one of the ways that Nature is speaking to us
Speaker 1: and allowing us to read what is within nature is
Speaker 1: something that you know, he was despite his persecution by
Speaker 1: the Church, he was a very religious man too. He
Speaker 1: would have seen it as that basically God is revealing
Speaker 1: the universe to us through math. Words are much the
Speaker 1: same way now the Kench's words, at least the words
Speaker 1: that we use are are a human invention, and you
Speaker 1: know they're they're a byproduct of the types of sounds
Speaker 1: that the human vocal apparatus can can create. There are
Speaker 1: you know, there are sounds that other animals can create
Speaker 1: that we cannot because they have differently shaped vocal tracts
Speaker 1: in a sense, and so there are always these kind
Speaker 1: of artificial constraining factors of what we can do with words.
Speaker 1: But when you get beyond you know, the particular arrangement
Speaker 1: of sounds in a given language, to what are these
Speaker 1: words really getting at? What are they trying to express?
Speaker 1: So it's easy, it's really easy to to say this
Speaker 1: thing is called a book, or in German, it's possible,
Speaker 1: et cetera. You can whip out the name in a
Speaker 1: in a Agelian languages, it's a different thing to point
Speaker 1: when I say that that I that I'm sad right now,
Speaker 1: what is that pointing to?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 1: You could point to, well, maybe you have a certain
Speaker 1: look on your face, okay, or maybe it's manifesting your
Speaker 1: behavior in some other ways. But maybe maybe I'm looking
Speaker 1: the same way as I would look up I was happy,
Speaker 1: but I just say that I'm feeling sad. Now you
Speaker 1: can't really point to what is it? What is it
Speaker 1: getting at? So there's this difficulty in how do you
Speaker 1: convey an internal state, And that's part of the difficulty
Speaker 1: of words. It's part of the imprecision of words. The
Speaker 1: idea that we can never kind of fully explain what's
Speaker 1: going on inside. And so that's that's a different that's
Speaker 1: a bit different way of interacting than mathematics is because
Speaker 1: I can I can show you what two things looks like,
Speaker 1: and I can put three things next to them, and
Speaker 1: I can now show you that two plus three equals five.
Speaker 1: I can. You can demonstrate not all of math, but
Speaker 1: you can demonstrate lots of math by illustration, by by
Speaker 1: by showing you can concretize it to say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: this is what that means. I mean you can get
Speaker 1: into parts of math that you can't quite show, like
Speaker 1: so called imaginary numbers or irrational fractions right that you know,
Speaker 1: you can't really show point to what they are in
Speaker 1: a way that someone can see. But certainly the basics
Speaker 1: of math that you can. Yeah, language has that curious
Speaker 1: thing that you there's a limit to what you can
Speaker 1: what you can convey about internal states through it. And
Speaker 1: the best we can do is if I say that
Speaker 1: I feel he sad right now, you can maybe imagine
Speaker 1: what it's like for you to feel sad and kind
Speaker 1: of think about it's like, well, okay, I'm a human,
Speaker 1: he's a human. We both speak the same language, so
Speaker 1: we have certain ways we contextualize the universe. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe we both live in the same place or grew
Speaker 1: up in the same place, we have that kind of
Speaker 1: cultural background, those things like that, and you can kind
Speaker 1: of inferves like, well, Okay, I kind of get what
Speaker 1: sad means. I know what that would mean if I
Speaker 1: said it. But it's still imperfect, because there's always going
Speaker 1: to be shades of meaning that belong to each of
Speaker 1: us individually that we can never fully explain to someone else.
Speaker 1: Back to Wittckenstein, one of his other ideas is this
Speaker 1: wonderful thought experiment called the beetle in the box, The
Speaker 1: idea that, okay, everybody has a box and no one
Speaker 1: else can ever see inside what's your what's in your box?
Speaker 1: But everybody calls the thing in their box a beetle.
Speaker 1: The catch is, how can you know if what I
Speaker 1: call a beatle is the same thing as what you
Speaker 1: call a beatle? We can ever can ever see inside it.
Speaker 1: You can try to describe it. You can make say, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's you know, it's about this big, and
Speaker 1: it's got this many legs, and it's got wings and
Speaker 1: it looks like this and whatever. But those are just
Speaker 1: words that you're saying. You could be making that up.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're a beetle. You know, that was completely different,
Speaker 1: and you're just saying what you think I want to
Speaker 1: hear about what a beatle looks like and what we're
Speaker 1: The reason he brings that thought experiment up is that
Speaker 1: it highlights this difficulty. We haven't conveyed internal states. If
Speaker 1: you if you now take it in the more abstracting
Speaker 1: and gay, well, what if that what's in the boxes
Speaker 1: the mind? Your mind? You have the same difficulty of limited,
Speaker 1: ultimately limited to vocabulary and what you can explain about
Speaker 1: what is in your mind to let someone else understand it.
Speaker 1: And even then you can only talk about specific things.
Speaker 1: I can't tell you everything that's in my mind. I
Speaker 1: can't even tell myself everything that's in my mind. You know.
Speaker 1: HP left Craft famously said that the you know, it's
Speaker 1: a good thing that we can paraphrasing that, it's a
Speaker 1: good thing. We can't correlate the entire contents of our mind,
Speaker 1: otherwise we would just go mad. Right, It's this same
Speaker 1: sort of problem. So there's always a limitation of what
Speaker 1: we can convey, whether it's mathematics or whether it's language.
Speaker 1: But but I think what is important is that we try.
Speaker 1: The trying part is what counts, because if you don't
Speaker 1: or if you never communicate what is with you internally,
Speaker 1: it still belongs to you, but you're limiting your ability
Speaker 1: to see it reflected in someone else, just to see
Speaker 1: what it looks like from the outside, because that's the
Speaker 1: one thing we can't easily do, is see what the
Speaker 1: contents of our own understanding experience looks like from the outside,
Speaker 1: because we see it from the inside, because that's you know, inside,
Speaker 1: because that's where it is. But when you talk about
Speaker 1: it with other people, when you when you see how
Speaker 1: well you can communicate to them, you see then reflect
Speaker 1: your ideas back to you. You see their perspective on
Speaker 1: the changes in your behaviors and attitudes that seem to
Speaker 1: result from your interstate. That helps you to get a
Speaker 1: perspective on it that you can not get otherwise. You
Speaker 1: still have to decide what it means, but you can
Speaker 1: now when you're deciding what it means, you can now
Speaker 1: account for this additional information that you've gained from someone else.
Speaker 1: And the one we can get that is to communicate
Speaker 1: with them.
Speaker 8: It's it's fascinating that a Kino was inspired by Lovecraft
Speaker 8: to conceptualize that set of For.
Speaker 2: What else.
Speaker 8: Did he kind of get inspired from? And is that
Speaker 8: the term? Is that where the term love crafting and
Speaker 8: magic comes from? I believe I've seen that term before.
Speaker 8: Can break that down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was the first one to write about that,
Speaker 1: at least in any public sense. Kenneth Grant's The Magical
Speaker 1: Revival did come out in the same year. However, as
Speaker 1: it happens, Grant's initial exposure to not exposure to Lovecraft,
Speaker 1: but his the seed of idea that he ran with
Speaker 1: in a different way to incorporate Lovecraft into his magic
Speaker 1: actually ultimately came from a Quino. There was one of
Speaker 1: Grant's main correspondence at the time was a man named
Speaker 1: Michael Bertio. It was very it was very prominent figure
Speaker 1: in magic at the time. Has ideas kind of continue
Speaker 1: to pop up as pretty interesting ways and weird and
Speaker 1: strange places, and there was there was another person in
Speaker 1: the Church of Satan at the time that Aquino knew well,
Speaker 1: who also knew Bartio and was basically shared some of
Speaker 1: those ideas with him, and he passed on to Grand,
Speaker 1: and Grand's like, oh, that's interesting. I should maybe try
Speaker 1: to write some about some of that in my book too.
Speaker 1: The original idea to create rituals out of it, Leavey
Speaker 1: had suggested that the different grottos, which were the individual
Speaker 1: groups in the Church of Satan, look towards other mythologies,
Speaker 1: both real and imagined, to draw material from, because it
Speaker 1: kind of gets kind of old if it's all just
Speaker 1: black masses all the time, right, So you're pulling from
Speaker 1: a different other things. And if you read through the
Speaker 1: Satanic rituals, he's pulling from the Yazid's, he's pulling from
Speaker 1: Germanic magic, he's pulling from you know, Russian supposed Russian magic,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Lots of different sources try to kind of
Speaker 1: spice things up to make it more interesting and give
Speaker 1: different perspectives and things to draw from. LaVey was pretty
Speaker 1: well connected with the whole writers and artists and so
Speaker 1: forth in San Francisco at the time, and one of
Speaker 1: one of the frequent attendees at his kind of Friday
Speaker 1: night events was a science fiction writer named Mike Resnick.
Speaker 1: And he was talking with Resnick about this one night,
Speaker 1: and uh was lamenting that he was having troubled coming
Speaker 1: different things to apply. You to bring into some of
Speaker 1: these magical ideas, and Resnick suggested, like, you have an
Speaker 1: entire shelf full of all this weird tales stuff, Lovecraft, Kark,
Speaker 1: Ashton Smith, Robertie, Howard Frank beloped out belong, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Why didn't you bring in some of that. These guys
Speaker 1: talk about magic, they have weird ideas, see what you
Speaker 1: can do with that, and that kind of that was
Speaker 1: what prompted him to ask a Quino to contribute. He
Speaker 1: was originally expecting something with Cthulho. Actually, so the first
Speaker 1: thing that the queena wrote was the Ceremony of the
Speaker 1: Night angles. Anton looked at this and thought this is
Speaker 1: really interesting. But I kind of thought you would just
Speaker 1: do Cathule. And he's like, oh, I'll do that one too,
Speaker 1: So he made wrote the call to Cthulia was a
Speaker 1: different h one, which that that's pretty interesting in its
Speaker 1: own right, I think, because that's looking at you know,
Speaker 1: in the story of the Call of Cathilla by Glovecraft.
Speaker 1: You know, Cathulla is the high priest of the Great
Speaker 1: Old Ones. He's you know, in the sunken city of Riyala,
Speaker 1: which was based on a real place called uh Non Madal.
Speaker 1: There's actually actual ruins. You can go visit a friend
Speaker 1: of mine the temple actually visit them, probably twenty years
Speaker 1: ago this point, even camped out overnight in in the
Speaker 1: inspiration for Riyala. But Cathula was wating, waiting for the
Speaker 1: stars to come right again, you know, for actual procession
Speaker 1: to bring the stars back to where they were at
Speaker 1: a certain point of time, which point Rylea and cthulill
Speaker 1: rise from the sea. The problem is Cathulla came of
Speaker 1: the wrong time because what causes Rila to rise is
Speaker 1: an earthquake, you know, unforse seeing unexpected turn of events.
Speaker 1: But what Cuthulu was sort of bringing back in a
Speaker 1: conceptual sense, at least the way Aquino saw it, is
Speaker 1: this idea of our our deep roots in the archaic past,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea of ancient cultures that that still
Speaker 1: have ideas that permeate today even though we don't think
Speaker 1: of them as such. And there and there are real
Speaker 1: examples of that, like their ideas from Sumerian culture that
Speaker 1: are that are present in the the Abrahamic religions that
Speaker 1: they as the different city states in Mesopotamia assumed power
Speaker 1: at different times. Sumerian, even though it had died out
Speaker 1: as a as a language, was retained as a liturgical language.
Speaker 1: They would write magical rituals in it, and some of
Speaker 1: the ideas continue to seep in. And then you have
Speaker 1: the period of the the Babylonian captivity where the Hebrews
Speaker 1: were exposed to some of these ideas as well. And
Speaker 1: there there are and this is like academic work that
Speaker 1: shows like some of these ideas that have these roots.
Speaker 1: It's not just speculating. And so the question that Aquino,
Speaker 1: I think was trying to answer with his ritual of
Speaker 1: the call to Cthulhu, different from the story call of Cthulhu,
Speaker 1: is that what happens if we deliberately invoke that this
Speaker 1: archaic sense of self and sense of what he at
Speaker 1: the time would have called the black flame, which is
Speaker 1: a term that still was used within the temple as well.
Speaker 1: The black flame is the individual sense of self awareness
Speaker 1: that's innate within each of us. So what happens if
Speaker 1: you call up Cthulhu deliberately and then ask Cathula to
Speaker 1: teach what he has to teach, and then you know,
Speaker 1: being black magicians not being afraid of Cthulhu like people
Speaker 1: were in the story, and then you know, taking that
Speaker 1: knowledge and then using that to uh explore new vestas
Speaker 1: that were not available to you before. Now probably pretty
Speaker 1: far from the original question. So what's so very interesting?
Speaker 8: Well, I can't help thinking something of what you remarked
Speaker 8: before about how Lovecraft was, you know, a East Coast
Speaker 8: materialist of many years ago.
Speaker 2: But it sure does.
Speaker 8: Seem like he was tapped in to, you know, having
Speaker 8: this kind of receptive mind for all these ideas.
Speaker 2: That he that he put out there.
Speaker 1: Right. Grant kind of harps on that point quite a bit,
Speaker 1: the idea that both Lovecraft and Crowley were both tuning
Speaker 1: into the same cosmic radio source. I don't go quite
Speaker 1: that far, but I what I do recognize within Lovecraft,
Speaker 1: and this is hugely important, is that for the thing is,
Speaker 1: Lovecraft didn't right for money. He was like desperately poor
Speaker 1: throughoutretty much most of his adult life. He had a
Speaker 1: small inheritance, his family had once had money, but was
Speaker 1: already very much on the lane by the time he
Speaker 1: was born. And he he had a bit of disdain
Speaker 1: for his stories. You know, he kind of referred to
Speaker 1: them in disarriging ways at times, but he obviously cared
Speaker 1: about them too, because he went to great links to
Speaker 1: craft them. He went to great links to record these
Speaker 1: ideas and more importantly, to record his dreams. He was
Speaker 1: very much a dreamer. Whenever you see the character Raymond
Speaker 1: uh sorry, Randolph Carter in Lovecraft stories, that is Lovecraft
Speaker 1: popping up in the story. So things like the silver Key,
Speaker 1: the statement of Randolph Carter dream, pust of Oona and Cada,
Speaker 1: et cetera, Carter is Lovecraft. Carter is a dreamer. Carter, Carter.
Speaker 1: You know once uh, you came from money, was lost
Speaker 1: at and then eventually came into money again, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And Lovecraft was very meticulous out recording his dreams. He
Speaker 1: he was a extremely prolific letter writer. Thousands and thousands
Speaker 1: of letters the Lovecraft wrote that are actually collected in
Speaker 1: a few collections you can you can buy, and in
Speaker 1: many of those he's describing dreams. Some stories, like the
Speaker 1: story called Nila Hotep originally was a dream. We have
Speaker 1: the letter he wrote to I forget who he wrote
Speaker 1: it to, where he described the dream, and his description
Speaker 1: of the original letter for the dream five years later
Speaker 1: was literally the first page and a half of the story.
Speaker 1: So he's literally like some of his stories are literally
Speaker 1: recording a dream that he had and then taking it
Speaker 1: in new directions. So he was He very much believed
Speaker 1: in the value in the originality of his dreams, even
Speaker 1: if he regarded them as having ultimately a material, material cause.
Speaker 1: And as Michael Aquino pointed out quite astutely, I think
Speaker 1: it's probably better than someone Lovecraft was not actually exposed
Speaker 1: to real magic, because that could have gone quite a
Speaker 1: bit differently. Lovecraft had a pretty poor opinion of the
Speaker 1: magicians of the day. I mean, he was aware of Croley.
Speaker 1: He wrote some pretty disparaiting things about Croley and a
Speaker 1: few others, but he had never really looked into things
Speaker 1: like the Greek magic papyri he had. He had not
Speaker 1: looked at a deep way into John D. He references
Speaker 1: D in a couple of places. He never really looked
Speaker 1: into what D was doing, et cetera. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it was just because he wasn't interested to go
Speaker 1: deep on it, or if he's like, oh, that's BS,
Speaker 1: and why why look at that? Only to the extent
Speaker 1: that I can make a story out of it. I'm
Speaker 1: not really sure, but there was an essay that Don
Speaker 1: Webb wrote many years ago, which he was gracious enough
Speaker 1: to allow me to reprint as an appendix in the
Speaker 1: language as of Magic. That's called plainly why why magicians
Speaker 1: write fiction? And he looks at different people who were
Speaker 1: magicians W. B. Yates, Fritz liber Arthur Mockin, writers like
Speaker 1: that that wrote about magical ideas from the perspective of
Speaker 1: they were magicians. Yates was in the gold and Mackinto
Speaker 1: were in the Golden Dawn. Fritz liber Was was a Wigan,
Speaker 1: et cetera. But also he also writes about what magicians
Speaker 1: can pull from fictional work and to make it real
Speaker 1: within the context of the ritual chamber. Because again, remember
Speaker 1: at the very beginning of the conversation, I was talking
Speaker 1: about idea things that are real in the sense that
Speaker 1: they exist. You can talk about them, and you can
Speaker 1: conceive of them, you can describe them, but they're not
Speaker 1: actual yet because they don't actually have a reference in
Speaker 1: the world that you can you can point to. That's
Speaker 1: part of what magic ultimately is. It's taking those things
Speaker 1: that are that can become real in giving them some reality,
Speaker 1: and that's that's what are any writer is doing. It's
Speaker 1: what an artist is doing. They're taking things that that
Speaker 1: are they conceive of that they can they can conceive
Speaker 1: that this as a possibility, as a high persition that's
Speaker 1: not yet come into being, and they make it come
Speaker 1: into being somehow. They give it some material form so there,
Speaker 1: or some communicable form so that it can have an
Speaker 1: existence from the world, so it can have an effect,
Speaker 1: because if you keep it, if you only keep your
Speaker 1: conception inside, it can't have an effect outside of you.
Speaker 1: If you give it some form that can go forth
Speaker 1: out into the world beyond yourself, now it can have
Speaker 1: an effect.
Speaker 7: So in regard to your hopes with the book, as
Speaker 7: far as where you're going and the stream that you're following,
Speaker 7: what is the ultimate thing that you hope people are
Speaker 7: going to draw from your book?
Speaker 1: So Infernal Geometry focused a bit. There's a lot of
Speaker 1: theoretical and historical background stuff, but it also had some
Speaker 1: practical aspects to it. It showed ways examples of how
Speaker 1: you could create your own angle or workings and so forth.
Speaker 1: The Languages of Magic is more descriptive. What practical stuff
Speaker 1: is in there is left as an exercise to the reader.
Speaker 1: And that's not to say that that it's meant to
Speaker 1: be hard to get to. It's meant to be that
Speaker 1: there are so many, so many examples of existing magic,
Speaker 1: like the Greek magical high Eye things from the Non
Speaker 1: Commodity Library Runs. There's the entire chapter about runs different
Speaker 1: schools of magic, you know, Austin Spair, Inciduals, Crowley, the
Speaker 1: Temple of Set, Temple of Psychic Youth, et cetera. That
Speaker 1: there's lots of examples already in there, So it's just
Speaker 1: not giving you examples. That's giving existent examples and showing
Speaker 1: you a different way to think about them that you
Speaker 1: can then take forward to both to understand better how
Speaker 1: uh the magic that you already do works, have any
Speaker 1: perspective on how it works, and then take that forward
Speaker 1: to go, all right, well, what if I intentionally crafted
Speaker 1: it to work in this way? How can I make
Speaker 1: it or for in a more effective way?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: I sort of jokingly described it to someone as it's
Speaker 1: it's either a book about language and semiotics disguises a
Speaker 1: book about magic, or it's a book about magic disguises
Speaker 1: a book about language and semiotics. Nice.
Speaker 7: I like that, Yeah, And I think Oh, sorry, I
Speaker 7: was going to say. I think as an artist as
Speaker 7: a writer kind of ultimately you you are working towards
Speaker 7: trying to It's a process that you that you're basically
Speaker 7: developing to be able to create. Is kind of what
Speaker 7: I'm getting at.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, But that's a process. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: important part.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: We think about as an artist like if you you
Speaker 1: get you get like a new tool to use in
Speaker 1: your art, or someone shows you a new technique. You're
Speaker 1: still you, You're still doing your art, but now you have
Speaker 1: something available to you that wasn't there before that you
Speaker 1: can now integrate with it. And you may it may
Speaker 1: not be immediately obvious to you how to use it
Speaker 1: or how to integrate it into the type of art
Speaker 1: that you do, but as you begin to work with it,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll start to see those connections, just start to undercover,
Speaker 1: uncover ways that it can add something to your art
Speaker 1: that was not there before. It's the same thing with
Speaker 1: this and Magic By There are a couple of books
Speaker 1: that touch on parts of these ideas, but nothing that
Speaker 1: I'm aware of that brings them together in this way.
Speaker 1: So it's a it's a toolbox that's likely not present,
Speaker 1: and it's in the complete form that's in this book
Speaker 1: with many people I know. I'm well aware that people
Speaker 1: work with some of these ideas already. Uh So there's
Speaker 1: a lot of synthesis going on here as well as
Speaker 1: a lot of background. When I write, I'm very much
Speaker 1: about and when I'm studying something for myself, I'm always
Speaker 1: very much about the history of ideas. I want to
Speaker 1: know not just what does it look like now, I
Speaker 1: want to know how we got here, what are the influences,
Speaker 1: what are the factors that go into it, where this
Speaker 1: come from, what are the other people done with it,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And so that that kind of informs the
Speaker 1: way that I write when I talk about, Okay, this
Speaker 1: is sort of where things begin and this is how
Speaker 1: they develop. But every step along the way, it's never
Speaker 1: just here's like, you know, brain dump after brain dump
Speaker 1: of these ideas. It's always talking about this particular aspect
Speaker 1: of language or of semiotics. Okay, let's go look at
Speaker 1: some examples to kind of illustrate that these points. And
Speaker 1: then when it gets to the what I call the
Speaker 1: case Steudy chapters that they at the end, these are
Speaker 1: taking like deep looks at things like there's there's one
Speaker 1: chapter that's entirely about runes. Not all uses of runes
Speaker 1: are magical biolog shot, but runes can be used in
Speaker 1: magical ways, and this talks about how one might go
Speaker 1: about that. There's a chapter that looks at, you know,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, Mediterranean magic and late antiquity, so looking at
Speaker 1: the Greek magical PAPYRAI cursed tablets, a couple of things
Speaker 1: out of the KNA Commodi Library, things like that, where
Speaker 1: I'm looking at in depth at some existing examples of
Speaker 1: magical uh work and talking about them in linguistics and
Speaker 1: semiotic terms. It's kind of kind of like, Okay, here's
Speaker 1: how to apply these ideas to to something that we
Speaker 1: can study here. Then there's a chapter that looks at
Speaker 1: various modern schools of magic, and it talks about I
Speaker 1: take a look at Anenochian and Sigil magic. It's sort
Speaker 1: of like connecting threads because if you if you think
Speaker 1: about it, a lot of what we refer to as
Speaker 1: a nookan magic today was really kind of started by
Speaker 1: the Golden Dawn. Not a lot of people go back
Speaker 1: to some of the original d material the way like
Speaker 1: the way we work with it is from from most
Speaker 1: people is informed by the Golden Dawn in variations on it.
Speaker 1: But the Anoakian was also important to Crowley, it was
Speaker 1: important to the Church of Satan, it was important to
Speaker 1: the Temple of Set. Same thing with sigils. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: the idea of sigils goes back, you know, probably as
Speaker 1: long as we've been painting on rocks. But you know,
Speaker 1: they started to get formalized in some ways, like in
Speaker 1: in the ancient Mediterranean worlds that pop up exactly yeah,
Speaker 1: and then like in the in the early modern period
Speaker 1: with like with like the Gosha and things like this,
Speaker 1: and and then then you have Austin Osmond's Fair brings
Speaker 1: this very different way of working with sigils as well,
Speaker 1: you reducing statements of intent to visual representations. Well, sigils
Speaker 1: pop up in spares work, they get they pop up
Speaker 1: in chaos magic, they pop up in the Temple of
Speaker 1: Psychic Youth, which is kind of adjacent grass magic in
Speaker 1: a sense. So those are sort of connecting threads through
Speaker 1: some different schools and techniques to kind of show both
Speaker 1: how Anochian and sigils developed, but also how different schools
Speaker 1: of magic, if you will, both formal and informal have
Speaker 1: used magical communication or linguistic aspects of their magic in
Speaker 1: different ways.
Speaker 3: That's even like getting into magic squares. That's like a
Speaker 3: whole the thing right there too.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 8: The idea that D came up with the Enochian magic
Speaker 8: symbols and systems is fascinating. And and again like love
Speaker 8: oh and and with with Kelly, and whether it was
Speaker 8: through the crying glass or just their mind or however whatever,
Speaker 8: it's just fascinating, and it's like Lovecraft.
Speaker 2: It just makes you think they were very tapped in.
Speaker 8: I'm wondering how you think about that in relation to
Speaker 8: a Kino And I've seen, you know, controversial things about
Speaker 8: him and how you like maybe interpret that and so on.
Speaker 2: And then he passed on if I'm right.
Speaker 1: All right, he passed away in twenty nineteen. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So my my personal opinion is that there there's definitely
Speaker 1: something interesting and real going on with D and Kelly.
Speaker 1: The reason I say that is because of the the
Speaker 1: overall it's not completely coconsistent, but the overall consistency of
Speaker 1: what they produced. It was just too elaborate to just
Speaker 1: be plot of thin Air. I mean, Kelly was a
Speaker 1: well known shyster, right, but there are things like they're
Speaker 1: recording things recorded in D's diary about Kelly passing on
Speaker 1: messages in Greek from from the angels. Kelly didn't speak Greek, right, right,
Speaker 1: They had no way to know this, right.
Speaker 8: And it was always ben more complex that it was
Speaker 8: in reverse, right.
Speaker 1: Right, right, Yeah, So all these things is like, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's there was something going on there when we
Speaker 1: never know exactly what I mean, because there are parts
Speaker 1: of it, like of the exact mechanism by which they
Speaker 1: trace out the words or with the symbols on the
Speaker 1: tablets is not entirely clear. Even with these diaries, it's
Speaker 1: not completely clear exactly what they were doing. So there's
Speaker 1: there's some there's something to it, and there's a that's
Speaker 1: one one of the many reasons why it kind of
Speaker 1: has this this long hold on the magical world in
Speaker 1: the West. So something going on there for sure. Where
Speaker 1: where the New King connects with the Temple of Set
Speaker 1: is with thing called a Quino called the Word of Set.
Speaker 1: And what this was was is he he did what
Speaker 1: a new what he called a new magical translation of
Speaker 1: the original keys instead of just taking the original English
Speaker 1: translations of the keys that de recorded in his diaries
Speaker 1: and doing things like Antony Levey did. It is kind
Speaker 1: of changing words, you know, where it says God scratched
Speaker 1: it out right in Satan, you know, think things like that,
Speaker 1: which is and I thought about that in the book
Speaker 1: as well as a bit more advanced in what he
Speaker 1: was doing. People kind of wave off what they was
Speaker 1: doing there. There were there was a method to as
Speaker 1: mad as there, but I won't get into that at
Speaker 1: the moment. But what a Quino was doing was attempting
Speaker 1: to bring in something completely different to that. Now he
Speaker 1: was wanting to to say if because keep in mind
Speaker 1: that that Decon and Kelly considered themselves they were still Christians.
Speaker 1: They still consider themselves doing the Lord's work in some way.
Speaker 1: They were. They were trying to get their name for
Speaker 1: it was not an nook, and their name for it
Speaker 1: was the Adomic language, right. They were trying to they
Speaker 1: were trying to access the language that Adams spoke, which
Speaker 1: had been a quest that many had gone on the
Speaker 1: idea that the original language must have some power. If
Speaker 1: we only find out what that original language was, now
Speaker 1: we'll have that power too. So it's a long line
Speaker 1: of people trying to find the original language, so to speak.
Speaker 1: And what the queena was doing is saying, okay, if
Speaker 1: I'm approaching this ass, someone who is a magician, is
Speaker 1: someone who doesn't have the baggage of being a Christian
Speaker 1: like they did that what that did factor into a
Speaker 1: lot of their interpretations they were trying. They were trying
Speaker 1: to squeeze us into a biblical narrative, somehow, into an
Speaker 1: apocalyptic biblical narrow narrative. Specifically is he described it as
Speaker 1: trying to sense, getting a new sense and what the
Speaker 1: keys were trying to say originally, and I'll pull up
Speaker 1: I'll try to find it very quickly. The best way
Speaker 1: to illustrate this and is with to compare the first
Speaker 1: line of the first key with way the original d
Speaker 1: translation and what you find in the Temple of Set,
Speaker 1: what you find in the Word of Set. Excuse me, aha.
Speaker 1: So the first line of the dran of D's translation says,
Speaker 1: iragn over you saith, the God of justice and power
Speaker 1: exalted above the firmaments of wrath. I'll stop there. The
Speaker 1: first line of the Word of Set. This is a
Speaker 1: Quino's translation. The Aquino's sense of what was trying to
Speaker 1: be said there, I am within you and beyond you,
Speaker 1: the highest of life in majesty, greater than the forces
Speaker 1: of the universe. So we already see here a very
Speaker 1: clear distinction between perspectives I reign over you versus I
Speaker 1: am within you and beyond you. That is a completely
Speaker 1: different conception of divinity and what divinity means for us,
Speaker 1: what it means to have some connection