Imaginal Time and the Construction of Sigils
Mar 14By Wes Unruh
(Note: This is the Appendix for He and Edward Wilson’s ‘Art of Memetics’ book)
Studying occult arts is dangerous only to those who have a vested interest in seeing you remain the same. There isn’t any such thing as supernatural – all things that occur happen within the realm of the natural. So the occultist’s task is puzzling out the secret knots by which this reality is bound – understanding both the mechanics of reality and the mechanism by which mind, unfettered, can untie these secret knots or bind up new ones.
The adaption of satanic imagery to magic is a relatively christian phenomena – but the supplication of a parishoner to a saintly or divine force is just as magical. Transubstantiation is socially acceptable cannibalistic theater and this kind of theophagy occurs in many different traditions. This is quite possibly the real reason that our culture has produced vampire and zombie archetypes, the symbolism of the blood of Christ has cast a shadow. Any ritual theater gives its shadow equal power, so these doctrines writ large on a society produce a corresponding harmonic negative manifestations can utilize.
I believe the soul you possess is determined by the path you walk, and to alter your course requires that you sacrifice who you are to who you can become, or it requires you to subsume yourself to some greater archetypal force and act as its avatar in the phenomenal world. The pragmatic approach is to engage with experience, then apply experience to signifying intent. If it can be used, then it can be understood. Knowledge, information, is a new ordering, or a reformation, of ignorance. Ignorance can be thought of as a formless void, a place of not-as-of-yet. When knowledge takes up space inside, the ignorance is re-arranged to be meaningful.
This formation is a physical reality, and takes place within the protein strands that make up the cell walls of neurological tissue. Cab drivers in London have been shown to manifest larger sections of their brain because they have to memorize such an impressive array of bewildering and contradictory information, then navigate through it. That which is known never becomes unknown, but it can become inaccessible. The brain being what it is, a crucifixtion of matter and energy upon which consciousness writhes, it can move along axis in time that are un or pre-physical. But how do you get there, and what do you do there once you’re there? Kundalini yoga promises to make the bio-energy field of a mortal some kind of super-conductor, and the easiest way to understand any of this is to look at Alex Gray’s Sacred Mirrors.
There are assumptions we make based on our previous experience, one of which is that 2+2 always equals 4. Another is that 2+2 immediately equals 4. A friend of mine (with a mental clarity I myself lack) pointed out that 2+2 is only 2 2′s until they’ve been rectified to 4 (or 10, or 11) through the passage of time. But 2+2 is equalling 4 on paper, and continues to do so over and over after it is written, wherever it is written, for each and every incident in which 2+2=4 is signified. Thus, the period, or time blip of 2+2 equalling 4, is happening in a concurrent abstract imaginal time which shadows our time stream, much in the way the electronic reality of telephones, telepresence, and the juggernaut meant by thee “world wide web” parallels our own malkuthian physicality. If this shadow time exists, and it is the place where math occurs, then it must also be the arena of bind runes and logograms. It is the sphere of logos, the eighth sphere of the ancient’s heaven.
Another friend of mine would argue that 2+2=4 (or 10, or 11) happens instantaneously, that a numberline is essentially one-dimensional space, and only in the most arcane religious sense could one expect some underlying parallel reality to exist where numbers play with each other. As a materialist, he’s convinced that if something occurs, it is in no way related to some abstract world of forms riding concurrent to our malkuthian realm, but instead comes about through some primary purpose, along with a host of secondary agents all quantifiable by physical measurings. 2+2 equals 4 because 2+2 always is 4, there is no prior point to 4 during which 2+2 is in the action of becoming 4.
To begin, time moves in periods. A period is a “place” of occurence. The period is what is initiated in a ritual setting, for the ceremonially minded. From opening to banishment is one period of time. It can help to understand ‘where’ imaginal time occurs before we progress, which brings us to the concept of the perfect world of forms – the idea being that there’s only One of any one group of like things, and that it isn’t there in the mundane world, only in the abstraction thought of when we reference a specific noun in conversation. This perfect form existed in Mind alone, where Mind is the perfect mind of all those thinking about that perfect form.
Imaginal time, or ‘shadow time’ as some writers have referenced, occurs in this perfect world of forms. It is through operations in imaginal time that new One things are created, other One things are comprehended, and even more important, some One things are cut away. Everyone has their own private time, their own private symbolic garden in which these One things are clustered, and careful preoccupations can direct the inner gardener to the imagos which to water, which to cut apart. But to engage in magic is to find the collective source from which mankind culls meaning, and directly applying sigilic techniques to the energy of the as-yet-unmanifest. Using certain substances has the effect of placing any random individual, prepared or not, into a place where they are effective magicians until that particular state of consciousness fades. However these states of consciousness are accessible through a number of techniques, and often what we think of as magical texts are instructions in achieving these states of consciousness through different methods.
There are demons who have become so through renaming of gods… thus Astarte becomes Ashtoreth, boshet (or shame) bestowed upon her by magicians (priests, not evil ones but levi ones) and the same happened to Baal become Beelzebub by adding zebub (or flies) to his name. Essentially, they dipped into the imaginal bubble where Baal meant lord, and garbled the code to make Baal unworshipful. Yeah, I know I’m playing with semantic fire here, but the cultural effect is now that by calling upon Ashtoreth you are communing with a decadent godform, a godform mutilated by opposing forces. You’d be better off trying to commune with Astarte – only she’s mostly gone, all her energies subsumed by Ashtoreth in the collective unconsciousness.
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The ability to generate then transform meaning in those examples implies a kind of cultural propaganda war. All of history is supposedly the history of secret societies, but if “history’ is the meaning we’ve imparted to it, then history is necessarily the history of conflict between world views – of cultural memory applied to geography. Within each worldview there then must be that which is held apart from common life, be it festival, religion, or monthly party meetings – on the corporate level these are the employee meetings and holiday office parties – and the keeper of the calendar is the mage of that society (just as the keeper of the colander is the cook.)
Still ancient man’s sigilic understanding of the heavens is little more than a confluence of environmental factors and psychological ones. The real exploration took place not in the abstract but in the day to day lifestyle of the average astrologer… “What comes next? Why is it that every 88 days that traveling light returns to that part of the sky? What does it mean?”
What does it mean? That was the question put to the learned, the mages… these fellows who extrapolate meaning have crafted entire cultures for their various bioregions. Of course, thinking globally, networking globably as magicians is an entirely new beast compared to the ancient magics – Apuleius would lose his mind if faced with the basic accoutrements of the technopagan. Those raised in dark cold regions of the earth devise maddeningly harsh cosmologies of fire and ice around their calendar and against that framework they construct their ritual sequences. Islanders in the south pacific, or Aztec priests, or Persian magi would be hard pressed to apply Norse runic magic to their own daily practice (except that it somehow facilitated imagination.) It isn’t part of their worldview, and it doesn’t apply to daily life. Yet all will find reflection in the concepts bound to the moon, for example… or the signifigance of death, or the concepts of storm, or disease – these physicalities spawn abstractions that can be recognized, their significance transcending the physical form of the abstraction.
But that doesn’t fulfill the social duty of the mage, because the relayed wisdom must be put into a context – for at least a while the social group must rise into the same area of thought in which the mage engages abstractions… there must be a key to unlock the verbal transmissions into an internal understanding – the symbolic seed must unflower. Ecstatic states of awareness, the dionysion spirit present in all who tripped on the kykeon, provided a glimpse into the arena in which meaning fought meaning – where ideas breed, battle, and consume, and it is the same place Carl Jung termed the collective unconscious. The closest (if a few years of mucking about with specific agents against 3000 years of precisely synergized compounds can be called close) this culture has come to the Eleusian Mystery Rites was at the hands of the Merry Pranksters, and the reverberations of that carried everyone involved into new mythic resonances within worldwide culture.
But how do you illustrate the effective way to be most effective, most effectively? The mind learns through several ways, and different people acquire knowledge and wisdom through their unique methods and circumstance, or mind set and environment, to riff off Dr. Leary’s Harvard research. To incorporate new experience, the brain shuffles its symbols to incorporate the knowledge – knowledge is stored information, or memory. The art of knowing is the art of memory, a’la the Dominican’s most heretical student, Giordano Bruno. To really understand something though, most people need an experience upon which to base their understanding – a substrate for their foundations of belief. Magick doesn’t ‘just happen’ it is sculpted into being with will and ingenuity and chastity of purpose.
Magic is willed transformation. That’s a pretty straightforward concept. A lot of contemporary magicians are overly involved with manifest evolution, and throughout history evolving consciousness and breaking the barrier between the ego and the self has been the focus of mystery schools and magicians. There’s the trick alluded to in Ridley Scott’s Legend, of light in extension revealing the Id at play, the shadow of the self driven to conflict, the death instinct bound in our fore-shortened telomeres. The very essence of our psyche is biological, for we are still fleshy beings, ridden by the passage of time blipping along. (That’s the real essence of astrology, that time blips past.) But that’s kind of short-sighted depth-psychology and doesn’t illustrate (until directly experienced) any kind of magickal action, even though light in extention is the initiation in it’s most literal sense.
To return again to magic then – what do I mean by the physical form of an abstraction? And how does the physical form of an abstraction effect the abstraction off in its perfect world of forms?
Meaning is created through attention. In On Structural Sigilisation Simon Fabolous by way of M.K. gives us the formula “THE MOMENT OF INTENSIVE THOUGHT BURNS HOLES IN THE FABRIC OF REALITY.” I’d say holes is a touch understated, that in actuality this intensive thought creates discrete wholes. That moment of intensive thought is attention apprehending abstract wholes. To return again to magic then – what is the physical form of an abstraction, and what is the relationship between the abstraction and the physical form?
Sigilization is the seed of the energy for the aforementioned physicality of abstraction, and as such plays a profound role in creating conduits between the inner world of the mage and the external world of all things. Sigils refract vibrations between the mage utilizing the sigil and the shadowtime from which the sigil resides in meaning, as if it were a soul submerged in a fluid of intellect. (I know that’s another woolyheaded phrase to digitize into pixels so lets see if I can give a better comprehensive view of the thesis here.)
To concretize: let us say you wish to create a bindrune from runic letters to act as a focus, for the conscious mind, that change may occur in the phenomenal world. Perhaps, like so many others, you seek wealth, and ascertain that combining lagu, ansuz, and gyfu should produce a runic form conducive to drawing energy related to wealth into your psyche as seed, and thus into the timeline of your sphere of interaction within the phenomenal world. The construction of the runic form occurs in your realtime, and also occurs continuously in shadowtime. Mathematics, or the combination of symbolic forms, doesn’t require a real space in which to occur except in that it provides a way for mind to understand the mechanics of the symbolic sets; a place only as real as it needs to be in order to convey meaning.
The creative element of combining and manipulating the latent symbols into an overall seed glyph occurs both here & in that otherwhen. The unique form of the glyph is the seed, the potential – it is not an individuated energy form as yet. The first logogram designed is just barely a sigil, one could think of it as a solitary seed for a plant never before grown, an unique crucifixtion of potentials, poised between the entity it will come to represent in the abstract world, the place it has come from (within the mind of the designer) the time it was made (each moment or blip a discrete whole in a series of wholes) and the purpose or intent invested in its symbolic structure. From the threads of these four energies a knot is tied on the altar of the mage’s consciousness. This 5th energy, this secret knot now tied, is the true sigil – it is an intersection of the glyph, the time of the glyph’s making, the energy behind the glyph, and the intent in which the glyph was formed.
Symbols are a prime tool of magic, because to will successfully one must be conscious of ones intention, and symbols thus become touchstones for the mind as it navigates the abstractions of shadow time. This mental manipulation of symbols takes place concurrently within shadow time and real time, mind being the gate between the two, as an archway between 2 courtyards. The manipulation of symbols then takes place both within the mind of the magician, as well as within the time stream of the physical and the shadow time wherein abstractions change. Thus, to construct a ritual in physicality is the same as constructing one within one’s conscious awareness – and creating symbols acts to prepare the mind for the use of those symbols. Your consciousness is the altar of the temple of yourself, and you have to figure out what symbolic forms hold meaning for you within that temple structure.
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