Phase III – Stealth Is.

Steve Foland: I hear you’ve been working on a definitive Burroughs biography. How is that going, when can we expect it and is that going to be your final word on the subject?

James Grauerholz: In 1972, when I was not yet twenty, I wrote out-of-the-blue fan letters to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, in New York and London, respectively.

Allen’s reply led to my meeting him in the Lower East Side in spring 1973, and when I returned to New York City in late January 1974, Allen told me William was in New York, too, and sent me over to meet him.

William’s reply in late ‘72 is interesting. In mine to him, I had written something to the effect that I wanted to interview him, with a focus on his childhood, his school years, his early European travels.

Very little about the first 30 years of Burroughs’ life had been published, as of 1972. Only Alan Ansen’s late-1950s essay* offered any real detail, and it compared intriguingly against Burroughs’ own tight-lipped “Prologue” written — reluctantly — in 1952 for his first book, Junkie (1953), and there were only brief, superficial bios in the early “Beat” stories in LIFE, et al.

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SF: Were you involved with William’s magickal practices personally? And if so, would you describe an experience?

JG: Not really; let’s say, a few things early on. It’s all there in the Red Night Trilogy if you want to look for it.

But I followed my own spirit guides (so to speak), and they did not impel me to participate personally in the rather well-known “Sweat Lodge” experience that William had in 1991 — with Allen Ginsberg and Michael Emerton, as well as facilitator William Lyon, and the Shaman — whose name escapes me.

I kept the same distance — supportive, respectful, encouraging — from William’s developing contacts with the I.O.T.

(Author’s Note: I.O.T. refers to the Illuminates of Thanateros — A Chaos Magick organization founded in Britain in 1978 by Ray Sherwin and Peter J Carroll)

The way some people think of me as “controlling” William and all this horse shit is ironic to the point of bitter hilarity. The truth is, I made sure that I did not come between him and the people and experiences he had, and relationships he started with them, and kept up on his own. Ask Marcus Ewert, who — bless his heart — has charmingly revealed, to the printed (or electronic) page and the motion picture camera, more details about his affair with William in the latter’s, uh, latter years, than I can imagine very many people even wanting to know. But Marc is, like me, a disciple of Ginsberg (if not also of Warhol), and I can only applaud his let-it-all-hang-out policy about those days and nights with William. But Marcus will tell you, I ran our whole little crew away from that house with the two of them in it, postponed the lawnmowing, etc., so they could — well, do whatever they wanted to.

SF: William’s magickal experimentation, the aspects of recording what he called “Danger Sounds” and replaying them in proximity to his target, or using collage to hit a specific target has become the stuff of legend. Some attribute the closing of one particular establishment to William’s hexes. Is there another specific instance which you can recall that is as dramatic and apparently self-evident?

JG: Nope, not really. You are likely referring to the Moka Bar in London, where William said he received snide, snotty service and lousy, weak tea — and his tape-recorders-and-cameras mock-surveillance routine, back and forth on the sidewalk of Frith Street, and how the Moka Bar failed and was shuttered not too long after that.

Forgive me please, but my cast of mind leads me to suspect the Moka Bar, if it really did sell lousy tea with terrible service, might have been headed out of business, with or without the sound-text-tape-film sidewalk-pacing routine…

As with William’s long-ago theory that, because he had never known a NYC junky ever to get a seasonal cold, it was likely that Junk provided a protective covering to the cells (or else, maybe Junk kept the cells well-exercised and in-shape with a constant cycle of shrinking to kick, swelling back up in re-addiction, kicking, hooked again, etc.) — I pointed out that, because a junky with a good supply on hand rarely leaves his apartment to mingle on the sidewalk with other people (which would expose him to more airborne rhinovirus particles), maybe the apparent immunity was more the result of limited exposure to current pathogens…

This all might sound terrible to you, as if I was a bringdown — in fact, William and I were beautifully balanced. He appreciated that about me, and I appreciated his love for the fantastic and extravagantly-explained. Which is funny, when I remember now that it was William’s own mention of “Ockham’s Razor” in my 1966 copy of Naked Lunch that first alerted me to the existence of Occam’s principle of parsimony….

SF: William’s painting “Creation of the Homunculus IV,” graces the cover of Phil Hine’s Prime Chaos, and a glowing endorsement from William appears on the back of Condensed Chaos. Did William have frequent contact with the leaders of the Chaos Magick movement or was his involvement on an individual by individual basis?

JG: Yes, William was very serious about his studies in, and initiation into the I.O.T. Of course, you would have to ask (if they would even describe it for you) the persons who took part in that initiation — I didn’t. Our longtime friend, Douglas Grant, was a prime mover; William met and liked Peter Carroll and Phil Hine, I am pretty sure. I myself only got to know the good Doug Grant a couple of years after William’s death, in August 1997.

SF: William’s “Orgone Chamber” is well known to his devotees. Did you feel the effects of it as well? When did William’s interest in Radionics begin? Can you recall who introduced him to the subject?

JG: Yes, I suppose I could feel something in the various Orgone Boxes I have sat in. William’s 1940s letters reveal his early contacts with the works of Wilhelm Reich, although it’s evident (from, for example, several sources gathered by Ted Morgan for Literary Outlaw, 1988) that Burroughs had come into contact with some of Reich’s writings, in translation, by the 1930s. As to who brought it to his attention, my immediate guess would be his childhood friend, Kells Elvins. And there are several sources we might search for more evidence of that source in William’s life for that particular influence.

SF: Given his influence on Magickal theory and practice (The Cut-Up, Third Mind, Dream Machine and his writing) who would you say was William’s largest influence? Crowley, Spare, none of the above?

JG: Pardon me but I don’t see many direct influences by William’s thought upon Magickal theory — the other way around, heavens, yes.

But Burroughs considered Crowley a bit of a figure of fun, referring to him as “The Greeeaaaaaat BEEEEAST!” in that behind-closed-doors, queeny comic delivery he used sometimes: his voice rising straight up in pitch, into an hysterical falsetto. You can hear it in lots of tapes, I’m pretty sure.

William knew quite a bit about Crowley’s life and work, and he certainly dug deep into the Necronomicon (anonymous but often attributed to Crowley) when it became available in a snazzy, black-morocco, tooled-leather hardback binding. He appreciated much about Aleister Crowley. Influenced by him? I don’t really see it. And to be truthful, I knew more about Austin Osman Spare than William did, in the beginning.

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SF: What, if any, opinion did William have for Jack Parsons’s work?

JG: William’s thoughts about Jack Parsons were, I believe, based far more on what he knew about Parson’s life, than on any writings or paintings by Parsons. William knew about the origins of JPL, the early ties to L. Ron Hubbard, and so forth. If memory serves, William was mainly impressed by the way that Parsons’ life ended.

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From The Art of Memetics by Wes Unruh & Edward Wilson:

We’ve covered a good deal of ground now, from examining construction and distribution of memes to exploring how group minds come into being. We’ve examined how to distribute signals and discussed the power dynamics of information and the overlapping domain of marketing, magic, and masterminding. Now let’s backtrack a bit and examine how to program your preconscious mind intentionally. Your preconscious mind needs precise goals which it interprets literally, and those goals should be upgraded regularly. Your preconscious mind also retains memetic content indefinitely, and so once a meme is embedded it will continue influencing you until it is deliberately altered or removed. Likewise, once a meme is dissolved from your preconscious mind you will no longer have the result of that meme present in your life. By keeping a record (be it journal, collage, series of tattoos, etc.) you can track the directions of the preconscious motivators.

The preconscious mind is driven by emotional energy to move along specific pathways, acting on the dominant memetic structures. Those structures are put into place through repetition, which is a replication of action. What you believe determines how you imagine, and what symbolic structures you access while imagining. We’ve already discussed how the preconscious mind isn’t affected by the passage of time (when you picked up a meme), but rather by the intensity or resolution of a meme. As your beliefs are the very currency of a memetic economy, and belief constrains the patterns imagination can take, monitoring your imagination and critically thinking about why your imagination consistently follows specific vectors will help you identify the belief structures that limit your creativity.

Previous experiences will always be repeated unless the imagination is properly engaged, because those patterns are already in existence internally. Once the imagination is engaged without the constraints of belief, you can begin to be selective about adopting or generating new meme structures. Once engaged, new memes require an incubation period to properly unfold and become dominant, during which time problem solving and goal achievement is being pre-consciously calculated. This programming of the pre-conscious mind is very straightforward, and throughout this text we’ve been exploring the various methods that can be used, as well as the theory behind these practices.

The best results will come from clearly believable and attainable goals which elicit a strong emotional reaction. Begin by specifying all the details of the goal in clear and unambiguous language. The end results should be clearly visualized, and creating a tangible representation of this end result to be a focus for visualization is incredibly useful, and might as well be ESP in as much as psychic abilities and ESP develop directly from this flexing of the imagination’s muscle.

Daily visualization that resolves around having the goal (as opposed to needing the goal) creates a resonance with the subconscious mind and triggers events that will lead you to your desired result. Celebrating successes along the way is reinforcement even more powerful than using positive affirmations, as affirmations can trigger unconscious resistance to the statements98. Over time, the visualization should be made more and more immediate through sigilization techniques, the eventual outcome of this is an intuition as uncanny as any natural ESP or psychic gift.

Continued below…

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From a recent interview with Phil Hine:

Christopher: I know that it was the magic part that attracted to me even into Wicca. Danger is one of the excuses used not to teach teenagers magic, because of their constant roller coaster emotional ride makes for poor choices and decisions. Then there is unexpected consequences. We get results but in some other way than we expected. In Wicca we have a few people afraid of using magic at all for fear it might even accidentally cause unexpected harm to someone.

How much of this fear is overblown from your experience? Have you run into any areas where you felt yourself to be in danger in your magical practice?

Phil: I think in part, it relates to control – and the inherent unpredictability of magic. As you say, results come “in some other way than we expected”. Despite much gassing about magic being a science it still doesn’t have that 1-to-1 repeatability – do ritual x and you will have result y – has it?

I actually think it’s okay to be have concerns about it. Many years ago, whilst I was training to be a therapist, I had an experience which comes to mind on this subject. I was working in a psychiatric dept and my boss and I were doing this “guided visualization” – walking a group of clients into a forest. Fairly innocuous stuff you might think. Suddenly there’s a bang and this old geezer is out of his chair, out of the room and down the corridor.

So I checked up on him and he said that last time he’d been in a forest (in similar circumstances to the journey scenario) was in 1940, listening to the rest of his platoon being machine-gunned by Germans. Neither me or my boss were expecting anyone to react in the way this guy did to what we thought was a “safe” exercise.

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Christopher: I know in my own magical experience, there comes a question of how much of what I am doing is necessary, and how much is merely decoration? Usually when we think of magic, we think of ceremony, tools, movement and chants and what have you? It is certainly good theater, but is all of it necessary? What about magic in day to day life, where it might not be possible to do full ceremony?

Phil: All you really need is to remember that you have a body. Yes, it’s nice to do “big ritual” occasionally in the way you describe, but I really think we need to break down this distinction between ritual space and day-to-day-life space.

Much of the tantra practice I do is oriented towards “day-to-day life” and “big ritual” doesn’t necessarily translate into heightened intensities. I’ve had some really intense experiences as by-products of really simple rituals, with not much in the way of props and limited space for flouncing around.

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Christopher: What was different about Chaos Magic from other systems of magic that drew you to it for awhile?

Phil: I first encountered what came later to be described as “Chaos Magic” through two texts – Peter J. Carroll’s “Liber Null” and Ray Sherwin’s “The Book of Results” – in the late 1970s, and engaged with the latter text first.

This was because I’d come Austin Osman Spare a few years earlier and found it quite easy to get into the practice of casting sigils. In fact it was Spare’s work which got me interested in magic in the first place. Between 1979-80 I was doing a correspondence course in Qabalah, and was getting ticked off by my mentor because I told him I was doing sigils.

I didn’t really start doing anything with Liber Null until 1981, by which time I was in a Wiccan coven and the High Priestess encouraged me to “find out more about this chaos stuff”. I think what initially attracted me to Liber Null was the idea that all magical “techniques” were essentially similar, regardless of the context they appeared in – and also the idea that you could take material from outside of what’s considered to be the “occult corpus” – such as fiction. I’d already made some moves in this direction – having done some rituals inspired by Lovecraft’s fiction between 1979-80.

I think Chaos Magic was, for me, an arena for experimentation, although it didn’t really become dominant in my strands of practices until the late 1980′s.

Just to give some more background – I first became interested in Tantra in 1982, following a series of recurring dreams in which the goddess Kali loomed large, but again, this didn’t become a dominant theme for me until the late 1980s.

I read Robert Anton Wilson’s & Robert Shea’s Illuminatus! trilogy in 1985, and began to work with the discordian goddess Eris around that time – but I was approaching Eris very much through a Wiccan framework, being still in contact with the coven I’d joined in 1981.

In fact I didn’t really begin to focus heavily on what was then becoming known as Chaos Magic until around 1986, after I’d left the coven and started to strike out on my own.

I’d moved to Leeds by then, which was a kind of melting pot for experimental magic, and got involved with the Chaos scene there – as well as hooking up with people who were experimenting with Lovecraftian magic, Tantra, and politically-oriented Pagan activism.

The “urban shamanism trilogy” of chapbooks (you can find them on www.philhine.org.uk as pdfs) were written in this period, and, together with a few friends, I started publishing a monthly pagan ‘zine – Pagan News (again, there’s some pdf-ed issues on the website).

This was a very vibrant time for me – I was doing a hell of a lot of magical experimentation in different directions – and involved with several groups simultaneously.

In 1991 I moved to London, and because a high proportion of the people I knew were involved in the chaos magic scene down there, Chaos Magic came to dominate my approach to magic. I’d already written two short chapbooks on Chaos Magic – “Condensed Chaos” and “Chaos Servitors” – both based on stuff I’d been doing in Leeds, but these didn’t get released until I hit London – to be followed (in

1993) by the first edition of Prime Chaos – which I’d been working on since 1988. I did quite a few workshops, lectures, etc., both in the UK and in Europe/America – latterly through being a member of the IOT.

It was through the American head of the IOT – the late Bob Williams, that I managed to get a deal with what was then New Falcon Publications, who went on to publish “Condensed Chaos,” a heavily revised “Prime Chaos,” and my little chapbook on Lovecraftian magic – “The Pseudonomicon,” which remains my favourite of the three.

All the way through this heavily chaos magic-oriented period, I was still pursuing my interests in tantra, and by 1995 was running, with my partner, a tantrically-oriented group – and were in contact with other tantrically-inclined folk in the UK (AMOOKOS). We were also regular participants in a kind of free-form, dance-oriented pagan group called “the Mad Shamans”

Christopher: At what point did you come to the conclusion it was time to move on to something else?

Phil: It wasn’t that simple. One of the reasons I’ve answered the previous question with so much “biographical” info is to highlight that I’ve always – until fairly recently – had several irons in the fire at once, and these irons were often related to the different networks of friends I was moving in.

I’ve friends for example, from my period of being Wiccan-dominant who still invite me to gatherings and I’m sometimes amazed how easily I can slide back into that framework for ritual work – it’s like “coming home” in a way.

But, to answer your question, I think I’d hit a point where I’d become dissatisfied with some of the patterns I’d let myself become habituated to. Firstly, I came to realise that a lot of my own practice had become workshop-orientated – by which I mean that I was doing stuff with a view to turning it into a workshop session, rather than for its own sake. So that had to stop.

Secondly, I left the IOT in 1996 (or thereabouts) and in so doing, lost contact with that particular network of chaos people. Thirdly, my tantric practice, which had become increasingly dominant for me, was what I wanted to concentrate on (don’t forget I’d been pursuing this on and off since 1982). This latter point might help understand one of my problems with Chaos Magic as an approach.

One of CM’s primary assertions is that magic can be formulated in terms of “techniques” and that the theoretical underpinnings or cultural-historical context in which those “techniques” appear isn’t really important. A good example would be the idea of “mantras”.

The term mantra is now used fairly widely in books on modern magic to denote any iterative repetition of a word or phrase – so something you’ll sometimes see advocates of CM asserting is that singing rune charms and repeating Hindu mantras are essentially the same procedure – the forcus being on the repetition of a word or phrase – in order to enter an altered state of consciousness. So mantras are something that gets chanted – and the chanting (i.e. the iteration) is what’s important – not the content or the context.

This, to me, is a kind of reductionism. It predicates a universal explanation – that the “technique” of iterative speech is enacted in order to establish an altered state of consciousness in the practitioner – and subordinates all instances which apparently look as though that’s what’s going on – to it. So for an advocate of CM, there would be little practical difference between, say, chanting a rune poem, repeating the Gayatri mantra, or singing a sea shanty.

Apparently Phil’s books are receiving a new printing and his new blog has a wealth of thought provoking ideas.

(Extra thanks to Plutonica.net for helping to keep us in the loop)

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David Goddard joins the host of Occult of Personality to discuss some finer points on the Western Hermetic tradition:

“Teacher and author David Goddard returns to the show in podcast episode 80. David’s books include “The Sacred Magic of the Angels”, “The Tree of Sapphires”, “The Tower of Alchemy”, and “The Dragon-Treasure of Hermes”. He is the co-founder of Rising Phoenix Foundation and was our guest previously in podcast episodes 54 and 62.”

Listen to this episode at Occult of Personality

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