By 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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