No. I'll just roll on through with this one. People are entitled to their opinions - and their tactics.
Here is the latest written work by THEM.
Among other things, this essay discusses the fallacy of the A-causal and its relationship to the worship of God and the human-centred flaw in Aeonics.
"Magic, God, THEM & the Pi Syndrome"
March 9th +O+ 2015
The Decline of the West (
German:
Der Untergang des Abendlandes), or
The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by
Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918. Spengler revised this volume in 1922 and published the second volume, subtitled
Perspectives of World History, in 1923.
The book introduces itself as a "
Copernican overturning" operating as a
paradigm shift involving the rejection of the
Eurocentric view of history, especially the division of history into the linear "
ancient-
medieval-
modern"
rubric.
[1] According to Spengler, the meaningful units for history are not
epochs but whole cultures which evolve as
organisms. He recognizes eight
high cultures:
Babylonian,
Egyptian,
Chinese,
Indian,
Mexican (
Mayan/
Aztec),
Classical (
Greek/
Roman),
Arabian,
Western or "European-American." Cultures have a lifespan of about a thousand years. The final stage of each culture is, in his word use, a '
civilization'.
Spengler also presents the idea of
Muslims,
Jews and
Christians, as well as their
Persian and
Semitic forebears, being
Magian;
Mediterranean cultures of the
antiquity such as
Ancient Greece and
Rome being
Apollonian; and the
modernWesterners being
Faustian.
According to Spengler, the Western world is ending and we are witnessing the last season — "winter time" — of the Faustian civilization. In Spengler's depiction, Western Man is a proud but tragic figure because, while he strives and creates, he secretly knows the actual goal will never be reached.
From Spengler we gain a cyclical understanding of birth, life, decay and death that moves beyond the confines of the personal/human cycle and into the cycles of larger life-forms viz a viz the cities and civilizations that we ourselves have formed en masse by our activities.
Just as cells, microbes and organs live an existence that is to us alien yet intrinsically symbiotic and/or simultaneous to our own, their union forms, occupies and co-exists with our human organism. Humans in turn form the cells, organs, blood and muscles of a higher type of organization viz. cities. Cities form the cells, organs and muscles etc. that evolve into the highest or final form of organization via a civilization; an eventuation that for Spengler was classically linear (ancient-medieval-modern) and an instrumental/purposeful occurrence that is a zenith of human achievement that gives rise to a different (evolved) consciousness.
Each mode of form has its own life-span and each life-form is made up of and makes up, others. A microbe may live twenty-four hours but may contribute to and make possible the organizational structure of a human being. A human being may live seventy years but contributes to and makes possible through density of population a city, which may exist for hundreds or thousands of years. The passage of Time is different for each of the life-forms mentioned and when we get up toward the Civilization stage of life-form that may reign for Aeons we are talking about the passage of time in terms of Aeonics. Precisely how long an Aeon is and what defines the start, middle and end of one, has no easy answer. Occultists continue to debate the subject with numerous schools of thought available variously describing the lifecycle, behaviour, identity and duration of Aeons. The Precession of the Equinox is one such description whereby the Earth's wobble causes the location of the Pole Star to shift every 2,300 years or so and the Sun to move into the house of a new sign of the Zodiac. Thereby each sign denotes a specific level of consciousness or mode of being called an Age that characterizes the Aeon over the course of 2,300 years; with the current Age being disputed as belonging variously to the Age of Aquarius, or Pisces. Any close examination of the concept of Time from an archaeological perspective reveals that there exists grave disagreement over this fundamental progression with numerous Chronological models suggested by which to accurately date historic events, so for several reasons any type of Aeonics, (and further, its entanglement with a conception of a non-causal dimension) rests on very unstable footing as a precise science or credible/useful mode of apprehension.
A particular cynicism idiosyncratic of the Temple of THEM is that views of History by virtue of being based on History are unfortunately shaped by the evidence available. It is almost certain that as well as the Steel, Iron and Stone Ages there was a Wood Age of which no remnants survive. Archaeology discusses surviving wooden artifacts and structures within the Iron Age but is strangely silent on the possibility that prior to Iron there prevailed a masterful epoch that utilized wood. There is almost certainly, embedded in rock deep beneath the oceans surface, vestiges of other cultures and civilizations that perhaps some day during the next Ice Age when the sea levels once again drop hundreds of feet as the oceans are locked in ice, may reveal themselves and their horrors or marvels to those humanoid eyes still living. A bitter shame we shall not bear witness to such prophecies. Sadly, History is an artificial assembly often relied on as fact or evidence, that, without all the necessary pieces, struggles to fit the pieces it has where it can. It is almost certain too, that despite the evidence in existence found buried across the globe in presently raised landmasses, those that have long sunk beneath the waves took with them many traces of empires and edifices that long predate our recorded history. In the shallow depths of bays and harbours such glimpses of forgotten relics hidden beneath even a few tens of feet of water occasionally surface, reminding us that much has been swallowed by the rising seas - and as time progresses will continue to be - until such low-lying cities and their cultures as presently exist now, are lapped at and eventually drowned beneath the waves, relegated as generations pass to myth and finally forgotten like the rest of the Abyssal.
It has been argued that cities cannot be alive to which the reply has been that they perform all of the major functions that human beings do that defines a living thing, including breathing, excreting, and growing as well as being composed of living cells (humans). Another argument that cities are alive is that they are composed of material that while seemingly inert from our human-sized perspective, is a seething invisible dimension of other living creatures. Concrete for instance is subject to biodeterioration by micro-organisms that live inside it and specialist industries tackle biofouling, the build-up of organisms on surfaces that cause detrimental effects. What then of water, petrol or wood? But this argument amounts to little more than saying a city has a slimy overcoat. Certainly cities are filled with other lifeforms besides our own, and one might even say that the increased complexity afforded by the accumulation of human beings in a given locale also gives rise to forces that operate at a greater complexity than humans do in isolation such as economics, logistics, resource management, market forces, crime and quickly take on a life of their own that is very difficult to predict and affects human beings from top-down. These forces become separate from the control of any individual but are given shape by rational and irrational forces, which potentially behave the way they do in a style that seems chaotic via its own laws with complex rules and repercussions. Certainly one could put forward the statement that cities are a more complex arrangement of living beings.
But is to equate a city as being alive a biased reliance on human-centred perspectives and vantages and project what is important and relevent to our organism onto it as if it were a singular entity with identity? Is it Romanticism to suggest a city has a pulse, a heartbeat, a personality or sentience? Or is it recognition of a more evolved and complex lifeform? Is it perhaps just simple anthropomorphism? The God Projection that we throw onto dolls, pets, cars, corporations and inert icons? Must everything be equated to humans? Must everything in some way resemble us and become an extension of our self-importance?
For us, the Phyrm denotes that which manifests in degrees of resistance and substance, beyond the two pseals. But there are no neat divisions where one thing ends and another begins except for those appearances afforded by a given vantage. It is impossible to disentangle the 'e' from the 'E' except for convenience. The influence of Psy cannot be eliminated to distill an equation. From our personal optical vantage the world appears beset by entirely unique forms and forces, but further in we are but cells and bacteria, water and electricity - and from further out, microbes on a ball among billions of balls. Only from our vantage do we retain the identity and appearance we so characterize as distinctive of human beings, and given that we are incapable of viewing the world from other vantages as often as we are the personal optical one, we naturally tend to cement a belief in human superiority and self-importance.
In previous essays THEM have written about the A-causal, a term coined by Carl Jung in his work 'Synchronicity' and expanded upon by later voices. In those essays were sentiments that likened the Acausal to the Sea; and suggested similar properties of flow, ebb, and tide that penetrate our own causal dimension as though flowing through holes from that dimension into this one per the rents to other dimensions (ripped in the sky) made famous by Lovecraft, slowly filling up our dimension with a stream of other-dimensional energies. According to some, such energies presence themselves through human beings as an increase of individual consciousness and/or a rise of collective consciousness.
Furthermore is the belief, that each of us acts like a socket between the two dimensions through which these other dimensional energies flow. The premise being that if these isolated sockets were to be somehow plugged into one another creating a circuit for the energies rather than just lone pin-points – then the foundation is set for an expansion from the individual to a group, the group to a city, city to a culture and culture to a civilization. As the human sockets - individually discrete in their own dimension but singularly united by virtue of the fact they are powered by the mother intrusion in this Other dimension come together to create a circuit, they so-called 'presence' this Other dimension. Accordingly, the more of this energy flowing into a given individual or any other level of form (group, city, culture) the higher the chance of it evolving into a Civilization.
While this concept is acceptable as a model in its own right, it supposes a number of factors that run counter to our particular understanding and is fraught with problems of the self-importance of human centred perspective. To believe there is a special 'pool' set aside, the purpose of which is to help human beings attain anything, let alone assist them in burrowing into the earth and being responsible for its grand follies over the course of a thousand years is the equivalent of believing God exists so you can pray to him to help you tie your shoes, win the lottery or whatever other petty personal goal you desire to attain that day. Whether that God be encapsulated as an entire other dimension, a race of alien superbeings, a single intelligent creator or a carpenter makes no difference when how that God is utilized is identical irrespective of its form. If the A-causal exists it is because we need a new superstition to stroke our egos, once again deluded that the powers of the Phyrm (forces of THEM) have nothing better to do than look after us.
The inherent prediliction of human beings is to create or accept and then project outward mammoth omnipotent entities that occupy some divine hierarchy well beyond the human order, and then arrogantly enslave them and push them about using all manner of arcane methodologies including prayer, incantations, sympathy and faith. 'God favours me' they say, or 'Jesus made it so', 'Mohammed is kind because it did not rain' and other trite self-serving aggrandizements that indicate a belief that such powerful entities have no better purpose or role, for all their power and wisdom, than to ensure some human being finds a five dollar note, gets a meal, or successfully harvests some carrots. The same criticism applies equally to Satan-ism & Satan-ists. What is most objectionable about religion, above all the squabbling, mindless bloodshed, cruelty, stupidity, arrogance, stink of human weakness; is this fervent belief that God (by any other name) is a slave to petty personal whims and has a vested interest in seeing these whims realized. The same objectionability applies to the persistent vogue of 'summoning' various demons or deities to tell them what to do and demand favours and presents from them - a practice that is highly popular even among those who claim to reject God. Yet what is it that all Gods, have in common? Their existence is to serve humanity or in some absurd cases, an individual human.
So if Gods exist to serve this purpose, and we see that Gods are apparently particularly fond of looking after, watching over, being there for, humans. What many in fact reject, is ever only a particular 'shape' of God from a very wide selection - they do not reject the concept of God. Some reject the concept of God as a Creator in Heaven in favour of some other shape, whatever it might be, however they might paint it - but every human however, utilizes their own shape of God in an identical fashion. Wherein that shape exists only to serve, prop up or aid the human being that believes in it. If a shape does not aid a given human being, it has no utility, no use, and is spurned, burned, hated, forgotten or replaced. Imagine a God that did nothing but exist. Who did not listen to prayers or answer the pleading whine of human beings on their knees or in synagogues or mosques, that had no interest whatsoever in the human race but existed among it as an array of powerful forces that only incidentally and never with deliberation, affected us. You have just imagined, THEM.
An unfortunate side-effect of our Temple being a Temple is that in having a symbol, a mission statement, aims, a lexicon, imagery, texts, an ideology we run the risk of being transformed into a religion. For all of these icons if you like, are what are required for a human to build a ladder to God. The paradox being only by providing these icons can humans be spoken to. The struggle then, is to speak to them without inadvertently giving rise to the means where another shape for God is created that merely replaces their existing one. It is far more difficult to escape the lure of an Apex, of monotheism, of believing in God, than most believe and unfortunately this does not look set to change anytime soon. Humans are religious creatures in act despite the intellectual insistence they have long left it behind.
Insofar as it is observable, the forces of THEM have no interest whatsoever in the preservation or assistance of the human race. Neither to appear to each of us to exhibit themselves and prove their existence (however much we exhort, plead, whine, demand and by whatever means we think we can bring them forth!) nor to help us achieve a single thing important to us at the low scale of answering our prayers or the high scale of building empires and ruling over one another with bloody sticks and blind religion. The forces we name Death, Time, Gravity, Progression, Entropy - no human has ever escaped these forces or their inhuman march - at best we have made use of them in an entirely human-centric vantage to structure our aims and ideologies. But lo, let us not make yet another God out of prostrating ourselves yet again before some giant phallus and make ourselves feel good and worshipful from a holy acknowledgment of our insignificance! Such a sharp razor on which we have to walk...
What the concept of the Acausal equates to is the same faith-based projection outwards that something cares about us or directly exists for our benefit - that is to say, God. The desire too, to build monuments about us that explain the enormity of life and stave off the utter chaos in which we cannot live as rational logical beings, is a product of understanding collective curiosity, fear and survival. But each to their games.
The 23 Syndrome was a discovery that allowed us to understand that if we were able to consciously re-orient the lens through which we saw the world, our interpretations and thus perceptions would shift significantly and allow us to believe whatever we needed to believe. As life for us consists of navigating through seas of form this shift is often forced upon us, or through neglect, ignorance or co-ercion by ideation consumes us - or, more rarely, arises of its own volition as originality, genius or madness. The mind is a fragile container and finds it easiest to gravitate toward God or an Apex of sorts that simplifies the complexity of lifes forms through reliance on a single lens. The brain does not seem overly capable or amenable of altering this singularity to accept and function with a multiplicity of lens. But perhaps this is through atrophy and the sovereignty of the Ego and it is or can slowly learn.
Jung made the philosophical argument that such a force as the A-causal could only be presumed operating by the fact that while it could not be shown to exist it stood to reason there was some force operant behind Synchronicity. Others followed suit. There are some people who dismiss Synchronicity as mere coincidence. They use the word coincidence pejoratively to imply that the connection drawn between two events is absurd. Yet the word coincidence, means co-incidence, 'co' meaning to share the same time and/or space, and 'incidence' the phenomena of two simultaneous events. Saying synchronistic events are just a coincidence then, denotes only uninformed and unintentional agreement.
A Tradition the Temple of THEM has inherited relates that mages of old had found a correlation between keeping their word to the Gods, and the gods keeping theirs. That is to say, that if the mages actions were rightly aligned with the will of the gods, there would appear synchronous portents which are today called coincidences. It would happen that fortuitous circumstances of extremely good (or ill) luck would manifest for the mages that helped them reach their goals on earth; so long as they did not break their word to the Gods, the gods would continue to help them in mysterious ways.
This seems to be the fundamental law of “Wyrd”: the idea being that some of us have a destiny to convey the wishes of some Other via our
life and in being an envoy of such greater powers, are granted our desires, goals, and the necessary outlets for that Others expression. How we distinguish what are Others wishes and what our are own is a matter for philosophers.
Magick is rooted somewhere between the realm of the irrational and the realm of the logical - at some point, different for all, we have to jump off into the absurd and be okay with it, for magick to work. We are required to suspend belief and doubt and trust in some other force by mysterious means to achieve our will.
One mode of thought by THEM that views the Phyrm as malleable Black Clay suggests that it doesn't matter if you use an old shoe to base your cosmology on if it gives you the results you need - while another mode of thought by THEM asks is life about getting the results you desire? Is life about getting results? Many people seek only to get results and pore over occult tomes (and not just occultists, but people in general) seeking methods and looking for short-cuts and promises from others to give them what they want. They do not ask whether they should, whether results should be the goal, or whether they are entitled to them - for that is the realm of the monk not the monkey. This evidential autonomous belief of self-entitlement is the root of all human conflict.
For all my logical thinking and ordering of things neatly I have at times had to perform “leaps of faith” and shut off the sceptical thinking part of me. During the Ordeal of the Nine Moons I entered my temple space and asked a 'Dark God' to aid me in finding a partner to join me on my path.
I informed this entity that I would withhold what she wanted most until my request was met. I should add here, that it seems rather pompous and downright silly to be making demands of Dark Gods, I suppose that in working with ancient practices created during a time of different consciousness it seems strange to the level of consciousness that now attempts to invoke them to be doing so. But to do so one must play the role of the magickian, and part of that role is a mastery or triumph of demons within and without. In the early stages of Satan-ism, it seems by necessity to garner insight by elimination, and almost archetypally inevitable that a magickian must be arrogant, self-assured, believe in magic and make demands of greater powers.
So what did the Dark God I made a promise to, want most? According to my guide, she wanted my ejaculation. The sexual energies created by an orgasmic release are those most crucial for Dark Gods to manifest. Why? Because they represent power and life and the means to separate from the Web of Wyrd that ties all human beings into a destiny of death and being merged once again with the Cosmos - and by giving up my sexual energy I was relinquishing my right to an independent existence from that web of Wyrd as an autonomous Sorcerer beyond space and time. One might say, I would remain food for the Dark Gods.
By keeping my seed to myself and performing the necessary libations I went through considerable torment that one day gave way to a strange sharp peace. I felt that sexual urges, impulses and projections had ceased to motivate me and my perception gave way to a world that was previously concealed behind the hazy veils of sexual tension. With no projections of my fantasies, needs, desires onto others – I could for the first time see people clearly without the rosy haze of sexual/emotional transactions getting in the way, and in a raw light that caused a profound esoteric change in my understanding of my being. There is a similar exercise from the Vamachara wherein for a considerable time the student imagines all humans beings as skeletons, wherein we are all the same underneath, there is no sexuality, lust or prejudice against a skeleton upon which we cannot project our unconscious biases that details of the flesh and gender incite.
Whilst withholding my seed from the dark goddess, I entered the temple regularly to re-state my vow. The Ritual was supposed to last nine months, but within two, I had met three women suitable for partnership. My sacrifice had given me the results I wanted and by keeping my word, the Gods had kept theirs. The woman whom I chose, “Bron Wrgan” led me through a relationship that broke a level of my naivety as she was to prove mad and allow me to see that such madness lay under the surface of most but in some was of an entirely different ilk. I felt that Bron Wrgan had taught me a greater lesson in self-reliance and that I should abandon looking for a priestess. However, Bron was a twist in the road to Wyrd. Patterns knitted together that continued to synchronise the appearance of a great woman to be my partner. I later joined paths with my present partner through an intense magnetic attraction with great swathes of synchronistic events. How did this come about? Coincidence? Positive Thinking? Will-Power? Dark God intervention? A little of each? It’s not easy to pin down.
That I believed that I was able to make such a transaction, that there were powers out there capable of granting my desire, that this method would work if only I gave it devotion, that I was entitled to invoke these powers to grant me a partner, were magickal threads of which any single one would be very difficult to justify. There was rather, fervent faith, intent to believe, willingness to suspend logic and doubt, and re-interpret reality involved, and so I implored my will to re-arrange events, meanings and symbols to show me the reality I wanted to see. And, if results are what are desired, then adopting such methods is a valid way to achieve them. Wherein, due to the lens distortion, even events that may have nothing to do with favourable alignment, can be seen as such and the Sorcerer believes their goals aided by the forces they believe in. If the result is the same, whether an actual change afforded through such forces was co-erced or random events were taken as signs of forces aiding the goal and thus the Sorcerer is deluded (and ability to discern the two is existentially questionable) makes absolutely no difference to the Sorcerer. What others percieve of the events claiming such methods are madness or impossible also has no bearing on the alignment created by the Sorcerer so long as the Sorcerer remains convinced of an altered reality, so will they live it. Magic is in effect pejoratively a self-induced psychosis or an artform reducible to the Crowley-esque phrase 'Shape under Will and Will over Shape'. If you sustain a magickal paradigm by yourself it can be difficult to block out those who would seek to return you to logical dismissal of your ability to perform such feats. But, if you are surrounded by those who constantly affirm your ability to say, speak with angels or the dead, convey the messages or love (or wrath) of a God, then it is much easier to sustain a self-induced psychosis or act of magick longer, deeper and without doubt with group support that feeds the magickal egregore. This practice is an expansion of the individual 23 Syndrome into a collective Syndrome known as the Pi Syndrome after the indefinite string of numbers attached to Pi that occur beyond the constant 3.14. And Pi Syndrome is the successful method at the heart of organized and dis-organized religion. [One million people can't be wrong.
]
The idea that we can somehow snatch hold of some invisible currents in the earth or floating about in the air and transform things into other things, or that we can tap into a world of sympathetic demons and through laborious incantations and spells have it change an event or help/harm a person seems an ancient belief, but it has never really become an antique – it has been in constant use at least since Sumer and is still in full swing now as writers and artists use words and images and struggle to expound, or as physicists search for the latest theory to explain everything, tinker with stem-cell and bio-tech research and decipher and alter the human genetic code. Magic, is universal. But God is a scourge that will not die and is far from dead.