Reality, as Simon Moon says, is thermoplastic, not thermosetting. It is not quite Silly-Putty, as Mr. Paul Krassner once claimed, but is much closer to Silly-Putty than we generally realize. If you are told often enough that “Budweiser is the king of beers,” Budweiser will eventually taste somewhat better—perhaps a great deal better—than it tasted before this magick spell was cast. If a behavior therapist in the pay of the communists rewards you every time you repeat a communist slogan, you will repeat it more often, and begin to slide imperceptibly toward the same kind of belief that Christian Scientists have for their mantras. And if a Christian Scientist tells himself every day that his ulcer is going away, the ulcer will disappear more rapidly than it would have had he not subjected himself to this homemade advertising campaign. Finally, if a magician invokes the Great God Pan often enough, the Great God Pan will appear just as certainly as heterosexual behavior appears in homosexuals who are being handled (or manhandled) by Behavior Therapy.
The opposite and reciprocal of “Invoke often” is “Banish often.”
The magician wishing for a manifestation of Pan will not only invoke Pan directly and verbally, create Panlike conditions in his temple, reinforce Pan associations in every gesture and every article of furniture, use the colors and perfumes associated with Pan, etc.; he will also banish other gods verbally, banish them by removing their associated furnitures and colors and perfumes, and banish them in every other way. The Behavior Therapist calls this “negative reinforcement,” and in treating a patient who is afraid of elevators he will not only reinforce (reward) every instance in which the patient rides an elevator without terror, but will also negatively reinforce (punish) each indication of terror shown by the patient. The Christian Scientist, of course, uses a mantra or spell which both reinforces health and negatively reinforces (banishes) illness.* Similarly, a commercial not only motivates the listener toward the sponsor’s product but discourages interest in all “false gods” by subsuming them under the rubric of the despised and contemptible Brand X.
Hypnotism, debate, and countless other games have the same mechanism: Invoke often and Banish often.
The reader who seeks a deeper understanding of this argument can obtain it by putting these principles to the test. If you are afraid that you might, in this Christian environment, fall into taking the Christian Science mantra too seriously, try instead the following simple experiment. For forty days and forty nights, begin each day by invoking and praising the world in itself as an expression of the Egyptian deities. Recite at dawn:
I bless Ra, the fierce sun burning bright
I bless Isis-Luna in the night
I bless the air, the Horus-hawk
I bless the earth on which I walk
Repeat at moonrise. Continue for the full forty days and forty nights. We say without any reservations that, at a minimum, you will feel happier and more at home in this part of the galaxy (and will also understand better Uncle John Feather’s attitude toward our planet); at maximum, you may find rewards beyond your expectations, and will be converted to using this mantra for the rest of your life. (If the results are exceptionally good, you just might start believing in ancient Egyptian gods.)
A selection of magick techniques which will offend the reason of no materialist can be found in Laura Archera Huxley’s You Are Not the Target (a powerful mantra, the title!), in Gestalt Therapy, by Perls, Heferline, and Goodman, and in Mind Games, by Masters and Houston.
All this, of course, is programming your own trip by manipulating appropriate clusters of word, sound, image, and emotional (prajna) energy. The aspect of magick which puzzles, perplexes, and provokes the modern mentality is that in which the operator programs somebody else’s trip, acting at a distance. It is incredible and insulting, to this type of person, if one asserts that our Mr. Nkrumah Fubar could program a headache for the President of the United States. He might grant that such manipulating of energy is possible if the President was told about Mr. Fubar’s spells, but he will not accept that it works just as well when the subject has no conscious knowledge of the curse.
The magical theory that 5 = 6 has no conviction for such a skeptic, and magicians have not yet proposed a better theory. The materialist then asserts that all cases where magic did appear to work under this handicap are illusions, delusions, hallucinations, “coincidences,”* misapprehensions, “luck,” accident, or downright hoax.
He does not seem to realize that asserting this is equivalent to asserting that reality is, after all, thermoplastic—for he is admitting that many people live in a different reality than his own. Rather than leave him to grapple as best he can with this self-contradiction, we suggest that he consult Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, by Ostrander and Schroder—especially Chapter 11, “From Animals to Cybernetics: The Search for a Theory of Psi.” He might realize that when “matter” is fully understood, there is nothing a materialist need reject in magick action at a distance, which has been well explored by scientists committed to the rigid Marxist form of dialectical materialism.
Those who have kept alive the ancient traditions of magick, such as the Ordo Templi Orientalis, will realize that the essential secret is sexual (as Saul tries to explain in the Sixth Trip) and that more light can be found in the writings of Wilhelm Reich, M. D., than in the current Soviet research. But Dr. Reich was jailed as a quack by the U.S. Government, and we would not ask our readers to consider the possibility that the U.S. Government could ever be Wrong about anything.
Any psychoanalyst will guess at once the most probable symbolic meanings of the Rose and the Cross; but no psychologist engaged in psi research has applied this key to the deciphering of traditional magic texts. The earliest reference to freemasonry in English occurs in Anderson’s “Muses Threnody,” 1638:
For we be brethren of the Rosey Cross
We have the Mason Word and second sight
but no parapsychologist has followed up the obvious clue contained in this conjunction of the vaginal rose, the phallic cross, the word of invocation, and the phenomenon of thought projection. That the taboos against sexuality are still latent in our culture explains part of this blindness; fear of opening the door to the most insidious and subtle forms of paranoia is another part. (If the magick can work at a distance, the repressed thought goes, which of us is safe?) A close and objective study of the anti-LSD hysteria in America will shed further light on the mechanisms of avoidance here discussed.
Of course, there are further offenses and affronts to the rationalist in the deeper study of magick. We all know, for instance, that words are only arbitrary conventions with no intrinsic connection to the things they symbolize, yet magick involves the use of words in a manner that seems to imply that some such connection, or even identity, actually exists. The reader might analyze some powerful bits of language not generally considered magical, and he will find something of the key. For instance, the 2 + 3 pattern in “Hail Eris”/“All hail Discordia” is not unlike the 2 + 3 in “Holy Mary, Mother of God,” or that in the “L.S./M.F.T.” which once sold many cartons of cigarettes to our parents; and the 2 + 3 in Crowley’s “Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!” is a relative of these. Thus, when a magician says that you must shout “Abrahadabra,” and no other word, at the most intensely emotional moment in an invocation, he exaggerates; you may substitute other words; but you will abort the result if you depart too far from the five-beat patttern of “Abrahadabra.”*
But this brings us to the magical theory of reality.
Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji* writes in Yoga for Yahoos:
Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, color, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese …
What then are these qualities of wh
ich we are so sure? They would not exist without our brains; they would not exist without the cheese. They are the results of the union, that is of the Yoga, of the seer and seen, of subject and object …
There is nothing here with which a modern physicist could quarrel; and this is the magical theory of the universe. The magician assumes that sensed reality—the panorama of impressions monitored by the senses and collated by the brain—is radically different from so-called objective reality.† About the latter “reality” we can only form speculations or theories which, if we are very careful and subtle, will not contradict either logic or the reports of the senses. This lack of contradiction is rare; some conflicts between theory and logic, or between theory and sense-data, are not discovered for centuries (for example, the wandering of Mercury away from the Newtonian calculation of its orbit). And even when achieved, lack of contradiction is proof only that the theory is not totally false. It is never, in any case, proof that the theory is totally true—for an indefinite number of such theories can be constructed from the known data at any time. For instance, the geometries of Euclid, of Gauss and Reimann, of Lobachevski, and of Fuller all work well enough on the surface of the earth, and it not yet clear whether the Gauss-Reimann or the Fuller system works better in interstellar space.
If we have this much freedom in choosing our theories about “objective reality,” we have even more liberty in deciphering the “given” or transactional sensed reality. The ordinary person senses as he or she has been taught to sense —that is, as they have been programmed by their society. The magician is a self-programmer. Using invocation and evocation—which are functionally identical with self-conditioning, auto-suggestion, and hypnosis, as shown above—he or she edits or orchestrates sensed reality like an artist.*Everybody, of course, does this unconsciously; see the paragraph about the cheese. The magician, doing it consciously, controls it.
This book, being part of the only serious conspiracy it describes—that is, part of Operation Mindfuck—has programmed the reader in ways that he or she will not understand for a period of months (or perhaps years). When that understanding is achieved, the real import of this appendix (and of the equation 5 = 6) will be clearer. Officials at Harvard thought Dr. Timothy Leary was joking when he warned that students should not be allowed to indiscriminately remove dangerous, habit-forming books from the library unless each student proves a definite need for each volume. (For instance, you have lost track of Joe Malik’s mysterious dogs by now.) It is strange that one can make the clearest possible statements and yet be understood by many to have said the opposite.
The Rite of Shiva, as performed by Joe Malik during the SSS Black Mass, contains the central secret of all magick, very explicitly, yet most people can reread that section a dozen, or a hundred times, and never understand what the secret is. For instance, Miss Portinari was a typical Catholic girl in every way—except for an unusual tendency to take Catholicism seriously—until she began menstruating and performing spiritual meditations every day.* One morning, during her meditation period, she visualized the Sacred Heart of Jesus with unusual clarity; immediately another image, distinctly shocking to her, came to mind with equal vividness. She recounted this experience to her confessor the next Saturday, and he warned her, gravely, that meditation was not healthy for a young girl, unless she intended to take the oath of seclusion and enter a convent. She had no intention of doing that, but rebelliously (and guiltily) continued her meditations anyway. The disturbing second image persisted whenever she thought of the Sacred Heart; she began to suspect that this was sent by the Devil to distract her from meditation.
One weekend, when she was home from convent school on vacation, her parents decided she was the right age to be introduced to Roman society. (Actually, they, like most well-off Italian families, had already chosen which daughter would be given to the church—and it wasn’t her. Hence, this early introduction to la dolce vita.) One of the outstanding ornaments of Rome at that time was the “eccentric international businessman” Mr. Hagbard Celine, and he was at the party to which Miss Portinari was taken that evening.
It was around eleven, and she had consumed perhaps a little too much Piper Heidseck, when she happened to find herself standing near a small group who were listening raptly to a story the strange Celine was telling. Miss Portinari wondered what this creature might be saying—he was reputedly even more cynical and materialistic than other international money-grubbers, and Miss Portinari was, at that time, the kind of conservative Catholic idealist who finds capitalists even more dreadful than socialists. She idly tuned in on his words; he was talking English, but she understood that language adequately.
“‘Son, son,’” Hagbbard recited, “‘with two beautiful women throwing themselves at you, why are you sitting alone in your room jacking off?’”
Miss Portinari blushed furiously and drank some more champagne to conceal it. She hated the man already, knowing that she would surrender her virginity to him at the earliest opportunity; of such complexities are intellectual Catholic adolescents capable.
“And the boy replied,” Hagbard went on, “‘I guess you just answered your own question, Ma.’”
There was a shocked silence.
“The case is quite typical,” Hagbard added blandly, obviously finished. “Professor Freud recounts even more startling family dramas.”
“I don’t see …” a celebrated French auto racer began, frowning. Then he smiled. “Oh,” he said, “was the boy an American?”
Miss Portinari left the group perhaps a bit too hurriedly (she felt a few eyes following her) and quickly refilled her champagne glass.
A half-hour later she was standing on the veranda, trying to clear her head in the night air, when a shadow moved near her and Celine appeared amid a cloud of cigar smoke.
“The moon has a fat jaw tonight,” he said in Italian. “Looks like somebody punched her in the mouth.”
“Are you a poet in addition to your other accomplishments?” she asked coolly. “That sounds as if it might be American verse.”
He laughed—a clear peal, like a stallion whinnying. “Quite so,” he said. “I just came from Rapallo, where I was talking to America’s major poet of this century. How old are you?” he asked suddenly.
“Almost sixteen,” she said fumbling the words.
“Almost fifteen,” he corrected ungallantly.
“If it’s any affair of yours—”
“It might be,” he replied easily. “I need a girl your age for something I have in mind.”
“I can imagine. Something foul.”
He stepped further out of the shadows and closer. “Child,” he said, “are you religious?”
“I suppose you regard that as old-fashioned,” she replied, imagining his mouth on her breast and thinking of paintings of Mary nursing the Infant.
“At this point in history,” he said simply, “it’s the only thing that isn’t old-fashioned. What was your birthdate? Never mind—you must be a Virgo.”
“I am,” she said. (His teeth would bite her nipple, but very gently. He would know enough to do that.) “But that is superstition, not religion.”
“I wish I could draw a precise line between religion, superstition, and science.” He smiled. “I find that they keep running together. You are Catholic, of course?” His persistence was maddening.
“I am too proud to believe an absurdity, and therefore I am not a Protestant,” she replied—immediately fearing that he would recognize the plagiarism.
“What symbol means the most to you?” he asked, with the blandness of a prosecuting attorney setting a trap.
“The cross,” she said quickly. She didn’t want him to know the truth.
“No.” He again corrected her ungallantly. “The Sacred Heart.”
Then she knew he was of Satan’s party.
“I must go,” she said.
“Meditate further on the Sacred Heart,” he said, his eyes blazing like a hypnotist’s (a cornball gimmi
ck, he was thinking privately, but it might work). “Meditate on it deeply, child. You will find in it the essential of Catholicism —and the essential of all other religion.”
“I think you are mad,” she responded, leaving the veranda with undignified haste.
But two weeks later, during her morning meditation, she suddenly understood the Sacred Heart. At lunchtime she disappeared—leaving behind a note to the Mother Superior of the convent school and another note for her parents— and went in search of Hagbard. She had even more potential than he realized, and (as elsewhere recorded) within two years he abdicated in her favor. They never became lovers.*
The importance of symbols—images—as the link between word and primordial energy demonstrates the unity between magick and yoga. Both magick and yoga—we reiterate—are methods of self-programming employing synchronistically connected chains of word, image, and bio-energy.
Thus, rationalists, who are all puritans, have never considered the fact that disbelief in magick is found only in puritanical societies. The reason for this is simple: Puritans are incapable of guessing what magick is essentially all about. It can even be surely ventured that only those who have experienced true love, in the classic Albigensian or troubadour sense of that expression, are equipped to understand even the most clear-cut exposition of the mysteries.*
The eye in the triangle; for instance, is not primarily a symbol of the Christian Trinity, as the gullible assume—except insofar as the Christian Trinity is itself a visual (or verbal) elaboration on a much older meaning. Nor is this symbol representative of the Eye of Osiris or even of the Eye of Horus, as some have ventured; it is venerated, for instance, among the Cao Dai sect in Vietnam, who never heard of Osiris or Horus. The eye’s meaning can be found quite simply by meditating on Tarot Trump XV, the Devil, which corresponds, on the Tree of Life, to the Hebrew letter ayin, the eye. The reader who realizes that “The Devil” is only a late rendering of the Great God Pan has already solved the mystery of the eye, and the triangle has its usual meaning. The two together are the union of Yod, the father, with He, the Mother, as in Yod-He-Vau-He, the holy unspeakable name of God. Vau, the Holy Ghost, is the result of their union, and final He is the divine ecstasy which follows. One might even venture that one who contemplates this key to the identities of Pan, the Devil, the Great Father, and the Great Mother will eventually come to a new, more complete understanding of the Christian Trinity itself, and especially of its most mysterious member, Vau, the elusive Holy Ghost.*
The illuminatus! trilogy Page 85
