ART IS MAGIC, MAGIC IS ART

There is some confusion as to what Magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of Magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “The Art”.

Because I am a bearded Wizard of the Comici Arcanum Guild, knowing Wizard stuff, I know this is completely literal. I know that Magic is Art, and that Art, whether it be Painting, Writing, Music, Sculpture, or any other form of Art is literally Magic.

Art is, like Magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about Magic seems to be talking as much about Writing or Art as it is about supernatural events.

For example, an illustrated proto-comic book of spells, called a Grimoire , is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people’s consciousness.

And I believe that this is why an Artist and a Writer of a comic book Grimoire is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Wizard.

I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the Arts or Sciences were the province of the Wizard.

The fact that in present times, this Magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy.

At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and Magic to shape our culture are neuro-advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people’s reptilian-brain-stems more manipulable.

Their Magic box of television, and by their Magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.

In all of Magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of Magic would place a Bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a Magician.

A Magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot.

If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family.

It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries.

Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated Magic.

In latter times I think that Artists and Writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that Art and Writing are merely forms of entertainment.

They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society.

They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the Wizard job of the Artist to give the audience what the audience wants.

If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the Artists. It is the Wizard job of Artists to give the audience what they need.

The above excerpt was slightly adapted from an article by the Wizard Artist

– Alan Moore

GOETIA GIRLS OF LILITH’S HAREM

Artists often engage themselves in the ‘derangement’ of their senses in order to mutate their perception, to thence attain another inspired perspective.

One example being Salvador Dali, who developed a surrealist technique of creative derangement, he termed as the paranoiac-critical method during the 1930’s. (The watercolour painting above depicts Mesphistophina. Click the image or here for further details.)

However, Dali’s paranoiac-critical method has been utilised by shamans for ages, whose psychonaut techniques of lucid dream inducement involved the creation of dream characters, a Tibetan Buddhist would term as being Tulpas.

I am aware that a number of dry scholars have pompously pointed out that the word Tulpa is a misinterpretation of the Tibetan term, Tulku, which is essentially a self-constructed Avatar. However, when assuming the alternate guise of a Tulku within a lucid dream, it is like that of an actor playing a part in a film, whose other supporting characters are Tulpas, who reflect back the assumed guise of a constructed Tulku.

For example, if you assume the Tulku guise of Vincent Price, you might just find yourself having a dream of being in a horror film, whose other actresses and actors are Tulpas. Why would you assume the guise of Vincent Price, you might ask? Well, it may be because you seek to empower your acting ability, should your profession be that of an Actor; or to otherwise assume the guise of Austin Osman Spare, if you are an Artist.

Perhaps you might decide to fuse these influential personages together with Henry Miller, to thereby create a Tulku; and like a time-travelling Doctor Who writer would do, whose TARDIS brain to travel around the Succubae Decans of the Zodiac ages, you can also imaginatively assume the star-sign guise of Vincent van Gogh.

Should this sound rather ‘deranged’ to you, consider the intriguing experiments conducted by Vladimir Raikov who is a Russian psychotherapist, head of the Laboratory for Hypnosis at the State Scientific and Research Centre for Preventive Medicine. In general Raikov hypnotised his subjects to believe that they were the reincarnations of Rembrandt or Mozart, etc.

Evidently after a period of doing this, his subjects brought back from their induced trance state the abilities of the personages with whom they had identified. For example, someone who had identified himself with Rembrandt had awakened his or her own artistic ability to eventually make a career out of Art; others may prefer to identify themselves with Aleister Crowley.

“There is also a third kind of madness, which is possession by the ‘Muses,’ enters into a delicate and virgin soul, and there inspiring frenzy, awakens lyric….But he, who, not being inspired and having no touch of Madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks he will get into the temple by the help of Art–he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the Madman.”

― Plato, Phaedo

If you consider all of this to be quite mad, keep in mind that children subconsciously learn from any influential role-models around them. Raikov’s technique is just an adaption of what children naturally do. However, the barriers of accumulated belief of an adult, blocks him or her from fluidly learning as a dreaming child. Hence, the beliefs of an adult requires the need to be broken down by believing that the assumed persona is a reincarnation, even if it is an artificially constructed Tulku, which could just as well be that of a future incarnation.

However, you do not need to be hypnotised by another individual, such can be potentially very dodgy; you can attain the same experience via lucid dreaming, which of dream Yoga, will enable you to assume a desired guise of a particular Tulku.

A Tibetan Buddhist would otherwise assume the Tulku guise of one of his many Buddhas via meditative and auto-hypnotic (trance) practices, in order to empower his spiritual progression. You will also find that each Buddha is depicted copulating with a female representing the power of a corresponding dream domain, who is termed as being Shakti, Carl Jung would call the ‘Anima.’

The Anima can manifest as differing female characters, each of which can be seen to be a female Tulpa, who empowers a corresponding Tulku.

The female Tulpa can be ‘artistically’ constructed as a mind-doll means to empower lucid dreaming, which a Tibetan Tantric Buddhist would call a Dakini.

Although the medieval mind-set of the West, a Dakini is otherwise called a Succubus, the prior ancient Greek’s knew as a Muse, who to remind that Art is Sorcery, Sorcery is Art, they are indivisible from each other, one and the same of shamanic practice.

When to see a Succubus as a constructed Tulpa, it is none too different to a computer program, like that of a web-bot browsing your informational dreams, which then initiates a virtual reality lucid dream, created by your quantum computing TARDIS brain.

The Succubus has lost its deeper meaning since the medieval mindset of the West has castigated sexuality and the feminine principle out of the spiritual equation, whereupon becoming purely demonic of hedonism, having no meaning whatsoever beyond that of blindly copulating.

The male counterpart of a Succubus is an Incubus, whose ‘Animus’ manifestations of God, Devil, angels and demons are commonly listed in many a Grimoire, who are known as Daka in Tibetan Buddhist dream Yoga practice.

The reasoning behind the focus upon a (Dakini) Succubus is that of introverting the sexual impulse in order to overcome what is technically termed as the Old Hag Syndrome, when accessing the hypnagogic state of trance, at the point of sleep. The hypnagogic state and the ensuing sleep paralysis can be quite terrifying, which of Bedroom Invader nightmare terrors can be otherwise transformed into a Night-Mare Succubus to ride into conscious dreaming.

This can be achieved when the sexual impulse is introverted, via a prior meditation upon an erotic image of a particular Succubus, in order to negate the fear of the practitioner; for it is the reactive state of fear, which makes the experience of hypnagogic trance so horrifying.