Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 308: Chaos Magic Part 2 - Chaos Magic Makes Chaotic History
Episode Date: July 27, 2025Is it in the mind? Or is it MAGICK!?! Mike, Jesse and Alex finish up the Chaos Magic series this week by looking at what it is, what it isn't, and it's real world fingerprint on history. And we teach ...you to make a magical Servitor! LIVE SHOW TICKETS ON SALE: https://lh-st.com/shows/11-01-2025-cox-n-crendor/ MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thank you to - All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro Sources: Condensed Chaos: An Introduction to Chaos Magic by Phil Hine Liber Null & Psychonaut by Peter J. Carroll The Book of Results by Ray Sherwin The Book of Pleasure: The Psychology of Ecstasy by Austin Osman Spare ~ANATHEMA OF ZOS~ THE SERMON TO THE HYPOCRITE~ - https://sacred-texts.com/eso/chaos/anathema.txt
Transcript
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Hello everybody and welcome back to the Chiluminati Podcast episode 308.
As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined by my very own personal Lois Lane and
Clark Kent, Jesse and Alex.
Hello, boys.
Oh, hello.
Oh my God.
Who's who?
That's the real question.
I know I said no more pairing, but we were just talking about a lot of comic book movie
stuff and it's on my mind and now I want to know who would you assign yourself as?
You know, Jesse makes a big hullabaloo in his life, in his public life about being a
man with questionable morals.
But I do believe that deep down he's actually...
Don't put me on blast like this.
Yeah, he's a little bit of a teddy bear.
He's a little bit of a teddy bear. He's a little bit of a teddy bear. Teddy bears, Iggy pop, punk rocker, James gun, Superman soundtrack, Jesse
Superman, I'm obviously Lois Lane.
Uh, because I'm a reporter, my neighbor has a la cucaracha horn.
I would say just based on personality in general, I feel like I expect too much out of the world.
And you are like deep diving and looking for like, all right, what's wrong with this?
That's the difference. Okay. Have you read Kingdom Come?
Sure. Yeah.
Yeah. In that Superman gives up on the whole world because
they have his his morals are too good for the world. And if I hadn't been killed in
that attack at the Daily Planet, I would have been able to level you out. Oh my god, am
I going full injustice? No, I'm all right. No, no, no. I don't like it. I don't like
it. I'll tell you what, that comic book had no business being like a quality
piece of writing I
I do not love when they do like can you imagine if Superman was evil?
Like at this point do we like evil Superman?
How do how did one guy being evil become the sequel to like zombies? How did that happen?
Crazy. I'm literally watching two shows with that idea with ya boys and invincible. Yeah, what if Superman evil?
And you want to be crazy you want us to be even crazy
Even crazier. What's the name of the dude from invincible? Who's not invincible the other the older one?
Omni-man. Yeah, omni-man yeah omni-man yeah that's the
superman that's evil so okay but that's what i'm saying omni-man himself is a creation
from another comic book about a like a superman like another like fake superman that's written
by alan more alan more made a clark kent character who's a comic book writer who invented Omni-Man
Jesus dude, that's a that's a that's an evil superception, bro. That's fucking chaos magic is what that is. Yeah
Right, right. Oh, that's crazy though. Holy shit. Actually if I if I mentioned Alan Moore, that's always an actual good
Transition into talking about chaos magic. We're also going to be talking about Grant Morrison today. A lot.
That is a, that is one of the most amazing,
like reading experiences of my life was reading their book,
super gods.
We're talking more about the invincibles today. Oh, the invisibles.
This is all sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The book is about comic books.
Invincible. Now my brain is like, yeah, I know. Yeah. Invisibles, sorry, invisible. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was saying invincible. Yeah, the book is about comic books. I'm talking about invincible.
Now my brain is like invincible.
Yeah, I know.
Yeah, he writes about that experience a lot.
The Super God's book is like kind of about the history of comics, but it's kind of autobiographical.
Gotcha.
I gotta check it out because yeah, before we jump into this episode also, um, I want to make sure we get
Hey go buy our live show tickets out there. I don't know how many are left. I haven't I do 23
We just looked this up on my god fox and crendor jim carrey
Number 23, yeah, i've seen that movie one time and of course you remember much of it
You've seen every movie that is so weird
You've seen every movie that why have you seen that?
You've seen it.
I don't know why that's his movie taste is why that's math is
move math is movie taste is what are you talking about?
I've seen that movie.
I can't wait to watch step monster with you guys.
Go buy our lives tickets 23 left.
They might be gone by the time this episode even gets out. But if they're not, go get them.
We'd love to see you. And you can get early warnings of when tickets are going on sale if you're a member of Patreon.
That's right. A wonderful website where you can get all the goodies that we produce early for you.
What am I talking about? You get
minisodes that come out every time we put out an episode
and they stay exclusive for like a very long time before they become public for everyone.
So there's a huge sort of fudgy layer of back-listening that you can do at any given time if you want
to jump in and join our Patreon. That's all I'm saying.
I love it. Alright, boys, it's time to dive into the part to the
final part of Chaos Magic. Now, before we jump in, everybody
who's listening, if you partake in the weed, I think it's a
good time. This is maybe one of my it's not or you setting up to
be a rate. Is that what I'm learning? If you partake in the
weed makes my narcole arm go off.
I feel like my fucking grandma just go off so hard. Have you partake in the weed sometime around 4.20?
I feel like my fucking grandma just walked in the room.
Hello, fellow teens.
Have you partake in the weed?
This isn't my longest script yet, but it is close to.
It's really, really big because there's a lot here
that I want to cover.
So put your moods into, I'd say, a mildly chaotic mood.
You boys can get a little too chaotic sometimes because last week
we trace kind of Chaos Magic back to its grandfather a man by the
name of Austin Austin Austin Osmond Spare who was kind of this
teenage art prodigy in London.
Some people were hailing him as the next Aubrey Beardsley and
then all that talent and potential kind of got set on fire when he walked away from it all.
He eventually would join Alistair Crowley only to tell Alistair Crowley to basically go fuck himself where he would then eventually retreat into a basement and in Brixton where he would write up the if you remember reading a little bit of it last week.
The Zoos Kia cultists the giant manifesto that was a giant
fuck you to Alistair Crowley essentially.
And he's quite on the end of magic guys.
I mean, kinda is in a lot of ways.
In a lot of ways.
In a lot of ways he really was.
We're thinking about Qui-Gon Jinn at a time like this.
Honestly, kinda is a little bit, you're not wrong.
Qui-Gon Jinn, kind of a chaos magician. Yeah, not wrong quite gone Jim. I'm a jazz musician
Yeah, Bruce. I'm learning also a chaos magician. Yeah, Bruce Lee. She couldn't oh
Daddy Monday also he oughta Monday
No, I don't like I think he's like almost I think he's almost like
Anti, he's like he's like worse than crowd. He's like. Yeah, I don't know what his deal is. He's like Jack Parsons, Jack, which we'll talk about one day as well. Oh, very soon.
Actually, he also, yeah, God, there's a whole, God, you got a whole history.
You guys can't believe how much we're doing.
Chiluminati, the novel this year, like you guys are being like, I don't think it'll be this year.
It's happening.
I know for sure it's happening. If you if you started like twenty twenty five, like
Cornerfest, bang, boom to the next Cornerfest, bang.
It's like we did like an essay together, all of us, like
every episode that we did, we like set you guys up to
where shows become is like I've learned to write dissertations
on topics that will earn me zero grades in any college.
The most frustrating thing about being interested in shit is that to actually
understand it, you have to like delve into learn shit,
you have to learn shit before you can like know about the thing you want to know
about. So yeah, you gotta like not actually buy the bullshit,
but buy the bullshit to understand the bullshit to then say, oh, it's okay.
It's all bullshit, but you got to like get into their mindsets.
Like trying to get into the minds of a cult leader.
Like why are they like the heavens gate leader in particular?
And we talked about getting into his mindset in particulars.
Where was he come from?
It's very similar with chaos magic in that way to get back to it.
Cause spares big discovery when he was in the basement for him was basically simple and rude that the idea is the subconscious is the real engine of
magic. It's the actual engine of enchantment. Rituals are just kind of
clever ways to sneak desires past what he called the psychic sensor. Episode
one we followed that fuse of that discovery into the 1970s, where after his death, his teachings, shall we call him,
the booklet was then rediscovered by a man called Peter J.
Carroll and another one, his friend, Ray Sherwin,
and they together through their punk zine at the time called the new
equinox declared that dogmatic orders were dead weight in this
chaos magic was the true way they strip magic to its bare circuits borrowed
spares sigil magic stuff stapled on some discord and humor and the line.
Nothing is true.
Everything is permitted was born pretty mind-blowing stuff got to say.
This is just the origins of it all like where we started last week.
Yes, just like as a just as a phrase. I'm just saying they nailed that. Right. You know
what I'm saying? Very, very clean. And also I forgot that we said this last time because
it was a week skip. But yeah, Constantine is the perfect chaos magician example. Yes,
he really is. Who was he written by? Did Morrison ever write him?
Alan Moore invented him.
Okay.
Of course.
But I think Jenkins is the guy who like first wrote the big
like first Hellblazer run.
I've never read anything by Morrison.
He's from Swamp Thing.
Do we talk about this?
Why is this in my head?
Morrison, the the comp, I think it's like 2016 maybe, Nameless?
It's like an eight issue story about like an asteroid is headed towards Earth with a weird sigil on the side of it.
Are we talking about Grant Morrison or Alan Moore?
Morrison.
Grant Morrison, yes.
Alan Moore is who wrote Swamp Thing and invented Constantine.
Sure, I'm talking about like, there is a very chaos magicky comic called Nameless,
I believe that's the name of it,
and it is bizarre to the nth degree,
I highly recommend it, it is very like,
math-ist. Oh yeah, yeah.
Dude, I remember this, this is the Burnham one, yeah.
Dude, this is good. Morrison is an actual practicing,
actual practicing chaos magician.
What was it? What was it?
It took three times to read through it before I understood what the hell was going on.
Is it like the star with the square around it? Very bizarre and it's a horror. It's a horror comic.
So like this graphic and weird and crazy, but like I check it out.
I'll say this, like Grant Morrison is like so famous, like they've written.
And by the way, I keep saying he, because I'm old,
but Grant Morrison prefers they, they, them pronouns. So,
so that I remember to say it. But, uh,
the thing that's so interesting about Grant Morrison as a writer is that X
man, like Batman, Superman, all like the
biggest, some of the most popular stories ever written in a JLA in any of those
things are all Grant Morrison. But Grant Morrison is probably like the edgiest,
trippiest, like most insane experimental like edge writing sort of like occultist a short of Alan Moore who they kind of like
Get into it with each other sometimes like as rivals kind of I think yeah more is more mad than Morrison is
But it's just interesting how
There's the
Fingerprints of Chaos magic seem to be all over
Grant Morrison's career in like a very real way.
It is.
Absolutely is.
And the fingerprints of chaos magic, as we're going to learn today,
are all over everything from politics down to video games.
I must stress creations again, still on the train of it sounds more like philosophy than magic.
But but you're not.
I'm also not.
You're also not wrong. As we said last week, you're not wrong. I understand. I just don't like the phrase chaos, but but you're not. I'm also not. You're also not wrong.
As we said last week, you're not wrong.
I understand.
I just don't like the phrase chaos magic
because it makes me crazy.
But I'm with you.
Yeah, that's just how it's branded out there.
And I get it.
I get it.
Sounds like philosophical belief rather than like,
focus, focus, you know.
Yeah, it's philosophical belief married
with ritualistic practice.
But it will talk. It's called chaos married with ritualistic practice, but it will talk.
It's called chaos magic to free you up, to make it bigger than it need than then.
Then it makes it it makes it as doing. I don't like it.
It makes it as inner as it is outer.
Let's put it that way. Yeah, sure.
Yeah. And to be.
Yeah. So nothing is true.
Everything is permitted.
Kind of was the saying they nailed and
Would be wizards were to treat beliefs like software load the software run the software
Delete it when you don't need it anymore and repeat and in this episode. We're gonna get into like the real nitty-gritty
We're gonna talk a little bit more about sigils. We're gonna introduce creating your own servitor
The psychology and psychological effects behind it all don't't worry, Jesse, we'll get into it.
Are you playing Warhammer right now?
And whether you believe in it or not,
the profound historical impact that chaos magic itself has had on the world that we all live in, whether you like it or not. And like most things,
this isn't to say, yes, this works or no, it's bullshit.
It's just me being a simple, curious Internet clown with way too much
time on my hands and a fascination with this stuff, a cult history
and where they often intertwine that draws me to this stuff.
And without magic, we're starting to sound like me without chaos magic.
Really? Our world would look incredibly different today.
And by the end, clowns, Warhammer anyway.
That's awesome. By the by the end of this?
Hopefully you'll know exactly how chaos magicians test reality
log their hits and successes and stay just skeptical enough
ideally to laugh when the universe at least seemingly synchronistically
nudges and gives you a wink back in return.
So without further ado, let's begin the end of the Chaos Magic series. Begin the
begin. Begin the begin. Now there's this moment in kind of every beginner's reading binge when
it comes to Chaos Magic that stops feeling like weird theory and starts suspiciously looking like
this book is like a workshop manual. That kind of gear shift for me happened when you realize Phil
Heinz claim that the same psychological lever flips on whether you are chasing
cosmic illumination and enlightenment through whatever magical practices or
literally just hustling somebody for a fucking parking space or something.
He calls the split between the two. As we talked a little bit about last week,
high magic where you're doing all that cosmic ritualistic work and low magic
when you're just kind of doing the nitty gritty of trying to get what you want
in the moment. Uh, a yeah,
it's like the difference between perfumant and perfume and parchment illusion
that like people often referred to in his own words, sorcery,
magic aimed at day to day results, quote,
keeps our feet on the ground, a necessary counterweight for anyone who dares to eventually reach for the stars. He doesn't. You don't necessarily want to jump for cosmic enlightenment before you do the grounds.
Basic stuff first to understand how this shit works is what he's basically saying.
Like, don't don't forget.
You're just a person and a lot of this is in your subconscious.
He would want,
want you basically to strip away all the incense, the Latin.
He argues in both flavors run flavors for like,
he argues that both flavors run on the same engine,
focus altered consciousness and a willingness to tinker with your own belief
until reality seemingly blinks back at you.
And chaos practice begins with an act of intellectual house cleaning.
Hein describes it as deconditioning, a continuous chiseling at the ego cement, prying out inherited beliefs and habits until identity stops feeling
like a hand-me-down furniture and the chaos magician chooses freedom of movement
over psychological lockdown,
which means any model of reality can be adopted, tested, and if it doesn't work or you just
don't like it, jettison without remorse.
You're using these beliefs as tools and the payoff for doing this is agility.
If you're thinking like if compassion rituals from Tibetan Buddhism solve a bout of little depression then use them if it works use it if a sigil scrawled on a receipt lands you a
freelance gig
Count it that works to hey it worked that means you use it you use it as a tool
when truth with a capital T is
Kind of this unreachable thing usefulness more takes its spot. Would you say it's more it's all real or it's all fake?
So to the chaos magician.
Yeah. It's all real in in that it's achieving the same end.
You don't necessarily you're not necessarily saying
if you use the Catholic perspective and you're praying to the saints
for something to happen. Right. And it works.
And then next thing you want to do, you go to the Koran and you start praying
to the Koran, you know, to and that what is it called?
Go on. Yes. Go on. I mean, Muslim.
Like you're you're not your angry letters to.
Yeah, please.
You're basically just adjusting your focus to achieve the goal.
I think what the cast magician would believe is that the outcome and the poking
of reality is working,
even if the lens or the perspective they're using is disposable.
So it doesn't matter. Like, so it doesn't matter then, for example,
no, you just need to convince your subconscious that it's working. Like, well,
like what I mean is like, okay, like in Christianity, for example, it's like, thou
shalt not hold, you know, worship any other God or whatever it is, the commandment, right?
And like, you know, if you're breaking that rule in Christianity, maybe you can't like,
I don't know, like, that's a bad example, but like there's no, no rule.
Yeah. So it's much closer to in Catholicism in particular, um, saints are patron
saints of specific things that we've talked about a little bit in the past.
And you can go to a church that, you know, of that certain patron saint light
a candle specifically to them, pray specifically to them for whatever it is
you're looking for for whether it's like
financial help or healing of an ill and you do that over and over and over again that's
chaos magic through the lens of Catholicism and the Catholic believes it's God because
in and so their subconscious is tricked because they believe in religion and so they convince
themselves like subconsciously this might be working. And so when the result happens,
they attribute it to the saint,
but maybe it was them tricking themselves
via the chaos magician is to recognize that
Catholicism, Judaism, you know,
any religion, you name it,
is all a different tool out of the same toolbox
to accomplish a result.
You're just running a like-
The result is what you're after.
On an emulator with hacks, kind of.
Yes, right, exactly.
You're like cloning the beliefs and using them
in your own little religious environment
instead of trying to be like,
for this moment, I am Catholic.
Yeah, the belief isn't your home.
The belief is the tool.
They compare it to like, yeah, like you said, software.
I don't, I don't know what the word is.
It's like the negative version of unwavering, resolute, determined, whatever that is.
It, it, there's something about this that screams to me like, um, yeah, using whatever you have available to achieve a goal.
That's what this is. But there's something like there's a negative emotion I have to that where it's kind of like, I don't care about any of the religious stuff or any of the history or any of the, I'm going to use whatever I can in order to get ahead. Yeah, it seems like villainous.
You know what I mean?
That seems like the bad guy mindset of like a probably feels.
Yeah, but you're not wrong.
And as we'll cover, there is if you are a believer in chaos
magic blow back for using chaos magic as shortcuts to achieve
short term goal stuff.
Okay.
So yeah, belief is a tool.
It's not home base.
It's not like your way you root yourself as a chaos magician.
He pushes the metaphor Heinz does that, uh,
urging magicians to treat consensus reality more as like a playground where
will and desire will just leave, leave fingerprints.
And then that playground is messy. It's unpredictable,
which is why chaos methods obsess over measurement. A lot of the time,
results are the only trustworthy metric as to whether it's working or not a spell that takes six months and a mahogany altar is not superior to a bathroom mirror mantra.
If the mantra hits faster, it's there's no power in how you do it.
It's more your own willpower behind nothing unnecessary stopping you from using one or the other.
It's just what youpower behind it. Nothing unnecessary stopping you from using one or the other.
It's just what you know about it. So you can use it.
There's also something like incredibly gullible about this though.
The idea of I tried for six months using the power of X religion didn't work.
But then when I switched to this thing, it did work.
It doesn't mean that that's what happened.
It just means that that's when it finally worked.
I feel like I'm getting the sense and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking
about like the herefant or the magician, like card.
Yeah. And then I know the power and how they're like, yeah. And how they're like open and
kind of enlightened people symbolically. Like there's kind of like a, there's like a not like it's some kind of
understanding that they have. And I think like,
I'm starting to like want to say that this is like postmodernism as like a
force. I feel like this is like the first time you ever think about stuff outside
of it being like yours or theirs.
The difference to the chaos magic jet from Jesse's perspective is like the
chaos magician does truly believe though, that whatever it is you're doing,
cause never forgetting is part of it.
And all that stuff is that you are slipping by your own subconscious blocking
mind and touching the fabric of reality enough to what we would consider
nowadays manifest a early, like we talked about last week, the secret, which was like late
nineties, early two thousands manifester like that's what
chaos magic essentially is the belief of is like doesn't
matter how I do it as long as I can imprint reality and have
it come to me change for my better again.
Yes, very villainous, but okay, very human.
Absolutely.
Again, Alistair Crowley was extremely selfish and not necessarily a good dude by any stretch.
That's kind of the dark side of the Magician. That's what I was saying is like, they're ascended people.
They're like, they're up on a hill, but sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad.
Like dark mage versus nice clean wizard. It's the same guy.
And while there is blowback, you know was we'll talk about in the series, too
You got to keep in mind to the chaos magician that believes as well that the world is not ruled by a god or whatever like
Selfish or not
The world is what it is and it's they're gonna do what they're gonna do and the only risks they have are whatever the blowback
Is of whatever they're trying to it like on chin
Yeah
Like there is no you know great ruler who at the end is gonna
deem you worthy or unworthy of entering the pearly gates.
Reality is what it is.
It's malleable and those who don't take advantage of it are left behind.
It is almost a billionaire mindset.
Wait till we get to the end of the episode.
I must stress,
for those of you who have not like read a lot of books about people who hang out with billionaires,
a lot of them are not religious because they're like,
this life is all that matters and get yours and who cares?
But at the same time, the power of vibes are undeniable.
Yes, no.
Like when I'm like, the vibes are good.
Like that means something, right?
Like, you know what a good vibe is, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, like we can, we can affect each other.
Yeah, I don't know.
Oh yeah.
And that's, yeah, let's keep going.
Cause we're gonna get, we're gonna get muddled down in this.
If we got to push through for a little bit here,
basically all the hardware that we talked about,
we got sigils, servitors,
something called paradigm sprints, which we'll cover.
All this exists simply.
Like I said, to slip past an intention and what spare labeled the psychic
sensor, which is like this kind of guardian between you and reality.
And he, what he thought was his genius was realizing that you could sneak
payloads through a disguise of like will and kind of like folding a note into a
paper crane, toss it like through
into the past the sense of reality and then as it unfolds the real desires are hidden within
that's kind of what he was really kind of obsessed over heine refines the idea with practical kind of
bells and whistles build rituals that spike attention fire the glyph at the peak forget
about it and gnosis and let the subconscious
compress the request into what is actionable code quote unquote within the background reality.
The approach was kind of is kind of just very democratic.
You don't need Robes lineage wizard shit, any of that stuff.
You only just need curiosity enough to run the experiment and enough detachment to just
let it breathe and do its thing. Now that stance dissolves the kind of polite hierarchy between mystic and sorcerer,
which is something Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky were very, very attached to.
And if you can light a candle for personal transcendence, for instance,
you can light the same candle for backdated rent.
You don't need separate candles for all this other shit like a lot of them
rituals tend to do. You don't need separate candles for all this other shit like a lot of them rituals tend to do.
You just use the same fucking candle.
All that other stuff is superfluous.
So for this pragmatism kind of means
accounting for that cosmic deadpan, right?
Goals clearly leave room for mundane channels
and build safety valves around your ritual
so the multiverse doesn't like settle the tab and like fuck you over
without because you weren't thinking.
It's still gotta be exciting magic still has to be dangerous.
It's always always.
So with that philosophical kind of scaffolding in place with
belief in being modular as appliance consciousness as kind of
like an assembly line and outcomes are the only honest scoreboard
for any chaos magician whatsoever.
What we're going to now dive into is theory to practice.
We're going to talk about how this is all done and we're going to go back to revisit
and just re talk a little bit about sigils before we move into servitors.
So spare sigil method is a kind of perfect street corner technology.
It's super, super easy.
You pick a single desire, take that sentence and
write it out, remove the repeating letters. Then if you choose to remove the vowels, then take the
letters that are left, layer them on top of each other, twist them around, do whatever you have to
do until you have a unique sigil or like whatever you want to call it that you know what it means,
but nobody else does. Then you have to enter a state of gnosis, whether that means a meditation,
whether that means having sex, whatever you have to do to get to the point
where you have like you said last week isn't real hard, you know,
anything to do to like get your mind to a point where there's not really thought
happening. What did you call it?
What did you call it?
Zero zeroing.
You know, there was another word that you used last time. I can't remember.
Thank God we've forgotten. Oh, that's part of the sigil, dude.
Oh, chaos magic, baby.
No, I don't remember. But yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's not just flow stage.
Basically, real quick. There's something about this that has the vibe of like that guy standing
in the corner of the party. Like they don't know that I know chaos magic. There's something about this that has the vibe of like that guy standing in the corner of the party.
Like they don't know that I know chaos magic.
There's something about this that has that vibe.
Absolutely, dude.
That's like literally the definition of esoterica.
If you think about it a little bit.
Yeah. So yeah, you enter a state of gnosis, however you have to do it, you with the kind of pushing that energy to your will.
And then when that's done, you destroy the sigil and then you forget about it. Don't
think about it. Just fucking forget about it. And then hopefully it happens. And that's
that's all you have to do for sigil magic. But, you know, while that was kind of put
together by Peter Hein or Phil Hein rather, the bones of that stuff was very much in spares work from him creating all the
stuff in that basement. Remember spare died, nameless,
penniless in a basement surrounded by apparently countless cats
from what I read. So he didn't get famous from any of this.
It wasn't until Phil Hein found it became popular.
Found the book. Yeah, I don't. It was like during, I think, uh,
like a renovation during the area.
He's found it in the basement.
What?
Like next to his fucking skeleton
and a hundred cat skeletons?
Gotta be honest with you,
I was so deep into trying to learn the magic,
I didn't really look up that moment too deeply.
I don't really know how they came across.
It's just interesting to think that this wouldn't exist
if this, it's like Emily Dickinson. It's crazy
So with no sis again spare talk about knocking the conscious mind offline letting the subconscious take the shot
Putting your your will toward all that stuff most now what's interesting too. Is that a bunch of?
Internet magic quote-unquote
borrows a lot from chaos magic that we're gonna get into as well
But also for excitatory noses things like an ice bath shock also viable.
If you're like a sprinter works chanting drumming and literally fucking anything
to get you into the Zen state, the flow state, whatever it is you want to call it.
Set it on fire, delete it, forget it.
And if you catch yourself kind of like wondering an hour later,
whether the magic is real, you're already fucking it up.
Like if an hour later, you're like, it work.
You fucked it.
You got to let it go.
You're you're contaminating the fucking magical Petri dish of shit.
You got going.
Don't think about it.
Now most internet internet mystery symbols also begin life in things
like marketing departments too.
And there was a person by the name of Ellis who kind of influenced the stuff.
Ellis was born on a kind of a low traffic occult message board in 2004 and I
promise this may seem disjointed but it will all loop back. Now the user
posted it went by the name of Ar Jill and Ellis created a sigil that apparently went wildly viral and ended up kind of like really influencing shit through through just like 4chan 8chan and shit like that.
Have any of you heard of the Ellis sigil before?
No, I might have seen it. I don't know. Okay. All right.
Look it up right now and just tell me if that looks familiar. Oh yeah. 100% kind of L shaped one. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen doesn't look familiar to me at all. But no. Okay. The fact that there are so many images. I've seen it on bags and pins.
No, OK. The fact that there are so many images.
I've seen it on bags and pins. I'm surprised. OK, so I actually I guess I'm not super surprised.
Alex has seen it before.
Yeah, you maybe it'll be more familiar as we continue.
I was kind of hoping it was that S thing that all the kids draw.
You thought it was going to be like the not Stussy.
Yeah, not that I was really like, whoa, I thought of my mind blown, but no.
Basically, this sigil kind of my mind blown, but no, basically
this sigil kind of took over the like viral in a lot of different ways.
And what it ended up being was kind of fascinating.
So the users user out there on Reddit who went by the name of our Jill A.R.J.I.L. and
this account is been inactive for nine years.
I discovered and I I during my research of the Ellis sigil came across him and he's apparently
the person that created the Ellis sigil and he specifically created the Reddit account
to specific answer questions about the sigil back then and then that hasn't been touched.
So anytime I reference this guy take it with a grain of salt.
I could not confirm it was him or not exactly,
but there's a lot of stuff he talks about there, but it's a, again,
it's a dormant now 10 year old Reddit account, but the glyphs apparently started
as a sideline component for glamor bombs.
And these are like little discreet have a nice day charms that chaos magicians
hide in public stuff that they put out there that are supposed to just bring
good vibes to the area. And this was one of them. It's a call to call the glamour bomb
and the L.A. schedule is simple. It's a red lightning bolt spidering kind of like inside of
a loose circle. And this guy's experiment was to ask fellow practitioners of chaos magic to copy
this mark into any working that they were performing
through their chaos magician magician rituals like kind of like for him he kind of compared it to like
stapling a little extra credit onto the work that they were creating and
early feedback through his early experiments apparently suggested that this bolt was lending a little extra
sauce to some of people sigils and rituals without having to rewrite their intent at all that they could like slap the sigil onto their own sigil without having to give it any meaning.
And it was making it like the results happen faster for some people or they got results that were better than they were expecting.
And then there was the Marauder Underground, which was his loose crew of people that he
gave this idea to.
And then they took the idea outside on their own.
It's like a LRG.
Like they started to shock.
Yeah, they started to chalk the ball under new age shelves at a Barnes and Noble to siphon
wish energy from browsers. They hit it beneath highway overpasses that were supposedly I suicide like rate bridges
hoping that it would help reduce people like wanting to jump off the bridge with a you
know again positive good luck kind of jaw a jive and charm every new tag that was both
a was kind of both a deposit into the shared battery and landline connecting each of these symbols place to place to what you would
call source reality consciousness behind it all.
And people continued to report mild upticks, a little found cashier there.
Someone had a lucid dream or a weird kind of uncanny synchronistic scheduling
luck between them and a friend who couldn't quite get together.
It might have been like a little prank for a little while
if a larger chaos magic collective, DKMU, had not adopted the glyph
and then rebranded it, Ellis the Red Queen,
and then published a manifesto that read like, kind of like
Gorilla Street Art meets sympathetic magic handbook.
Like a high.
Yeah, the hijacked the symbol.
Yeah.
Why in the manual then outlined seven practical uses of the symbol
talk the sigil beside your own glyph to add like that extra sauce tag
liminal zones to knit them into this network spray it where the vibe
is dead to wake reality up and kind
of bring life back around it blasted in or blasted in plain view.
So random pastors by get as they called quote unquote Ellis into an interesting afternoon.
You could even meditate on the symbol or pull raw charge by the way of a Wiccan might do
it might draw like from the full moon.
The only warning was tone control.
Whatever mindset you hold while sketching programs,
the resonance is the resonance you receive.
So draw it while giggling at entropy
and expect a trickster static kind of to return.
Your mindset and your mood will affect how the sigil
reflects back to you what you're
trying to get. If you draw it while quietly asking for creative flow, then maybe you'll
get you'll supposedly get like teacher like nudges and enter the flow state more easily
rather than pranks back.
Most chaos workers kind of ignored that caution and went straight obviously because people
are people for straight maximalism over the next decade, the glyph crossed the Atlantic on stickerbacks, cameoed and alley murals,
and slipped into metadata of fucking JPEGs.
Sightings began clustering around music venues, college areas, festival bathrooms, roadside tourist traps,
all places where folklore and all kinds of stuff easily breeds
wildly out there. Skeptics obviously dismissed the whole phenomenon is just
vandalism co-opted by pattern seekers but even they conceded at some point that
the replication curve resembling early Twitter virality was happening. It was
going viral before viral was really fully a thing and honestly from a
sociological angle,
this demonstrates that kind of just like a an occult glyph
and just travel through the same channels as a political slogan
or any sort of imagery that is just catchy
and can slip through cultures across the ocean.
Yeah, yeah, it's a dude.
Just hang on to that thought.
You do. You don't even know what you're hitting on right now.
So later we like through the Reddit posts, I was able to like go through
in his later Reddit post, he kind of just threw his answers,
cuts through a lot of the hype of the questions that were being asked.
He basically says most effects that happened were subtle,
that extreme winds do happen, but burn out quickly
and that Ellis should be treated less like a wish machine
and more like a roaming
kind of current that you can give out to people in small in small bits.
It's not supposed to be this thing that you put in.
I want to be a millionaire and it gives you a millionaire thing.
It was always supposed to be just a good vibes, have a good day charm put out there that was
co-opted and then redefined by these other people that had
kind of gotten their hands on it. He does offer he literally continues on and kind
of like says that he offers like a simple replication test like if you want
you can invent a clean simple clean symbol your own link two copies in
separate ritual spaces meaning creating two separate ones and see whether you
can like move from one focus to the other and have the, his sigil on one and one, not on the
other one and see if one seems to occur more readily than the other one does.
Like it's the only way you can really test this thing is running two different sigils
at once or two different intents and see if the one that you put the Ellis sigil on, you
know, gives you like a better result than the one that you don't
put the L.A. Sigil on.
But obviously, there's no way to scientifically measure any of this.
So but if you want to run your own kind of study, just choose a symbol.
You can do even simple things like choose a symbol that just out there,
state a single job and then publish minimal ground rules with it where you
want to tag it what mood to hold and how to log outcomes and track the results
and just see what happens tell your friends if you are if you're all into
that stuff you know hand it out amongst a small group of people and tell them
what the rules of the symbol are and just see what happens but keep it chill
keep it a good vibe if you're going to other Other people who've practiced and done stuff like this,
who've created symbols like this,
I also wanna talk about, particularly I wanna talk about
Grant Morrison as well.
Now, Grant Morrison likes kinda to say out there
that they grew up convinced comics were magic spells
kinda printed on cheap paper.
If you don't know who Grant Morrison is,
is very quickly, he was born in Glasgow in 1960. He had an ex-military father and a mother who smuggled, apparently, escapist paperbacks
past like rationed area of Scotland.
His dad became like a, like a protester.
Like he like snuck onto like nuclear bases and like took pictures.
He was like serious anti government guy.
Yeah, that it's it's his yeah, we this whole episode on him we can do really
and apparently when he's a kid he was just fucking taken in inhaling superhero
weeklies like it was his job like he loved that shit and by the late 80s they
were he was they were scripting mainstream stuff for DC.
And but the real turning point for him came in 1994 when Vertigo Greenlit, a creator own title, Morrison pitched as like psychic James Bond
versus the architecture of oppression apparently was the pitch.
And the book that I'm talking about is The Invisibles, a 70 issue psychedelic epic
whose apparently real ambition was hidden between the splash
pages.
The invisibles for Morrison was actually him practicing chaos
magic in the guise of creating a comic book.
But I mean, even in the comic book, it's like people just legit practicing magic
in the comic. Yeah.
He planned, just legit practicing magic in the com. Yeah, but he planned.
They plan to use the title as what they later coined a hyper sigil,
which is like a sustained narrative engine designed to echo, amplify
and eventually reshape the actual author's actual life through.
And that is what Morrison was doing with the invisible.
You know what else people always say is that people like it's based,
like the matrix came from the Invisibles also.
Dude, we're going in there. I promise you, uh, for him,
like the blueprint is kind of fucking like, what's the word?
It's like audacious, right? Like in this shit,
the lead character whose name was King mob Apparently just leave this looks uncannily like Morrison's like mirror selfie down to
If you saw them if you saw them in the 80s they look like a goofy like they could have been Doctor Who like it's right
They always have these wacky outfits on and they were in a band your sings leather. Yeah, it's that kind of shit
Yeah, exactly
And the main characters allies included a teen runaway with latent reality warping powers a transgender
Brazilian shaman a time-traveling
individual from 1890s and a former NYPD officer initiated into voodoo
It's pretty silly. It's pretty sick. It's fucking crazy. It's a pretty sick book.
And their one shared mission was kind of crazy.
Tear down the metaphysical prison erected by the outer church
extra dimensional entities that had fed on human fear and conformity
in more but through this seems to be about the Matrix.
Yeah, yeah.
And through all this Morrison's private goal was kind of parallel,
destroy the limiting story that they felt trapped in as a
closeted working class kid from Glasgow and replace it with one where glamour,
travel and Gnostic revelation were his day, their daily currency.
This is crazy. Do you have, I, dude, when I started,
I'm so glad I got like, I had so much time to do this.
And when I started the grant Morrison hole, I was like,
that was like two days of my life. Just like,
you should reach out to them. Holy shit. I bet you didn't come on the show.
I would love to, I would love to talk to them,
but I want to read some of their work first more than I have got all of it
pretty much. That was nuts.
And I, like, this is all very true.
I'm not lying about any of this shit.
The first 12 issues followed a pretty tight structure.
Kind of cliche in a way, recruit the team,
rate, which is a part school,
rate a secret Masonic bunker,
and then rescue, obviously, a psychic kid.
Sales for it were pretty healthy,
reviews were glowing, and Morrison's own life
suddenly began ticking off the script's wish list.
DC flew them to San Diego Comic-Con,
where they partied with rock stars and occultists
because of this comic,
very much mirroring King Mob's jet set adventuring,
and Morrison noted each synchronicity
in a leather diary marked results long.
Then 1995 less than a year later and the Kathmandu incident
while trekking Nepal after dude,
while trekking in Nepal after a promotional tour, Morrison contracted,
math is his dream. Actually, it's crazy.
He contracted a really f*****g vicious staph infection in both lungs.
Fever delirium spiked to 106 degrees, culminating what Morrison later described as an encounter with quote,
fifth dimensional machine elves made of Mandelbrot equations.
Yes!
This is like that dude who messaged us and said he saw math. There's I mean, literally, literally this week, I think it was there was there was an article out that was like, there's a really huge correlation between the things that everyone sees on fucking acid and shrooms and shit.
And going back decades. It's crazy. Um, but local doctors, while they were working on him, predicted that he was, that they were going to go through organ failure. Um,
and Morrison apparently was spending, he's, uh,
they spent spending their nights kind of bargaining with whatever intelligence
was behind the morphine curtains. He was saying was seeing nine and he said,
he, they,
they would promise to reshape the comic if they were, if they survive.
And after a nasty week,
the staff infection of both lungs receded.
Morrison flew home 60 pounds lighter and filled with new pages
of notes. True to the bargain.
The next story arc curled King Mob into a mirrored torture scenario
and mob survived by surrendering ego and embracing death as
a data transfer event.
Um, exactly the epiphany Morrison felt while he was in the hospital.
Now critics obviously noticed the total shift in the books.
The books earlier earlier books had, I guess more of like a punk swagger.
It was like the team.
Yeah.
Like, yeah, like a cosmic weirdness to it.
Tantric sex magic and metaphysical kind of physics
But still in that like bubble caption comic booky way, like Alex just said sales dipped when the tone changed and DC
considered cancellation
Morrison ever the fucking practicing chaos magician turned crisis into spellcraft
a chaos magician turned crisis into spell craft.
They wrote a call to arms in the letters and the letters column,
urging readers to perform a group sigil quote by the book,
where the sigil badge think of freedom. That was his direction.
Fans a complied spray painting, the stylized V logo on bus stops from Melbourne
to Manchester orders ticked upward just
enough orders ticked upward just enough to guarantee one more year's run and
during Smitty is like upset about the cancellation of the series dude he's
doesn't we doesn't want it to happen he's mad about fans complied spray
painting the stylized V logo on bus stops from Melbourne
to Manchester all over the place and orders ticked up just enough to guaranteed another
year's run and during this kind of like rescue mission chaos magic operation, Morrison was
also testing real world sigils.
They published an essay and Pop Magic, laying out a
to-do-it-yourself chaos method, draw a glyph, charge it with unusual states,
forget it, then watch reality pivot. In one public test, a sigil for
mainstream recognition of the invisibles, two years later, the Wachowskis
released The Matrix, wearing influences so fucking blatant that journalists
literally rang and called Grant Morrison for comment and he simply said, looks like the
spell worked on radio.
He said on BBC radio.
It's crazy.
Yeah, no joke.
This, this like kind of final act pulled narrative and diary in a lockstep again and King mob retired from violence to write
novels in Marrakesh and Morrison in real life bought a flat
and Tangier took Arabic lessons and began wearing linen
kettans and interviews and a supporting character Lord Fanny
transition genders with shaman shamanic grace Morrison came
out as nine non-binary soon after and adopting
sing singular they pronouns and leather skirts on stage panels
even like to see disease loops closed when mobs lover developed
a lethal nanotech infection healed by tantric ritual.
Morrison's lingering respiratory issues cleared out during
an ayahuasca ceremony, apparently.
Hell yeah, okay.
I used to see this guy around, right?
They'd be out by the pool at a comic event with babes dressed in a white suit,
with a gold chain, with people like hedonistic acts around them.
And they just seem to kind of mob from like the beginning of the comic.
Yeah, it's them.
It's literally them.
So all that was missing when we tried to get you to see a UFO that one time was a
sigil, huh?
I guess so. I guess that's all that was missing.
That's what I'm getting out of this.
A few more years later, the series finale would be in 2000
and Morrison basically claimed success
on every original bullet point, world travel, cult fame,
creative autonomy, and a community
of magically minded readers who now treat the comic
as fucking scripture.
They coined hyper sigil in a disinfo con lecture
which is fucking awesome and Uh, and defined it, uh,
defining it as quote a work of art designed as an extended spell,
the writer becoming co-creator with their own fictional universe until feedback
makes the boundaries meaningless. End quote.
And in the chaos magic sense, the term stuck.
It offered a framework for musicians who program albums as rituals,
filmmakers laying intention into shot composition, and podcasters,
yes, like us, who realize a multi episode arc can double as a probability
engine if you run it with just enough care.
And that's the only way that the Chiluminati podcast resembles a hyper
sigil., yeah now
It's also important to know there is a cautionary bit to this
Morrison admits that the toy that they were playing with this fucking sharp the tortured lung
Coincidence nearly killed them later
They wrote a storyline where King Mob loses a finger and Morrison sliced the same finger on a kitchen mandolin weeks before
publication a finger and Morrison sliced the same finger on a kitchen mandolin weeks before publication That happened to me one Thanksgiving and Kelly didn't want to use it for two years.
Just made my balls fly into my throat.
I was gonna say, you really, that was a visceral reaction from me.
Oh dude, I remember seeing it there on the fucking other side of the mandolin.
And that was, again, weeks before the book was ever public.
Basically the advice that they gave give new hyper-sigil engineers is kind of
more pragmatic advice. Keep mundane safeguards,
rewrite when the narrative tilts towards self harm.
And remember that every supporting character is a mirror neuron waiting to teach
you something pleasant or not.
So, which I love it literally is another fast like inside characters were just another facet
of their personality.
And if there's anybody listening wants to borrow the trick without spending six years
on a monthly title writing their own comics, Morris Morris suggests short form practices
treat a week of diary entries as the life of an ideal future self like create a little story for that week in the future you write sensory rich details then close the notebook and act as if filming the sequel or you can storyboard like even like if you do stuff like with us storyboard a podcast season of whatever you're doing, where each episode solves a personal obstacle through research and humor or
track whether life hands you raw material between recording sessions,
hyper sigils crave engagement, feed them with attention. You know, again,
like adjust and change as you need to.
It's not supposed to be super rigid in that way. And if they respond,
sometimes it's quietly sometimes with a lot louder, you never know.
But, you know, be present in the moment.
It's not about thinking much like all chaos magic.
Morrison suggests.
Said it.
Forget it.
You know, you don't don't run.
Pupil.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Looking back, Morrison kind of frames the entire ordeal as like a weird interactive
theater with the universe, the collapsing lung, the matrix echo, uh, each anomaly served
the narrative.
They had kind of already set in motion critics still today on forums, mostly debate whether
that is mystical causality or just good storytelling, like recognizing the patterns of life and telling stories around them.
And they just kind of crop up in there.
But it chaos magicians don't really fucking care.
They like they don't care if it's one or the other.
They see a like more of a control group of one running a six year self experiment whose published data set is 70 issues fucking thick and still spawning weird footnotes to this day.
And that's that makes the invisibles the most heavily kind of documented sigil chaos magic in modern or cult history.
It is the biggest piece of sigil work I could find.
It was like his own personal fucking magic lab.
And I did not know like when I was doing this that the invisibles were like it was literally him doing chaos magic like not not figuratively yeah
literally that's their whole career in comics pretty much like the whole
philosophy of comic books goes into this sort of magic like I don't know it's
really interesting to think about the idea of exchanging ideas and the sort of
information packet that a sigil can be.
I guess you're just imagining like,
instead of it being like a picture that you look at,
it's like, with like, where you take all the letters
and make it into a picture,
you like do that with like 1,000 million letters, I guess,
is the idea with the high-presidual.
But the idea of it being a comic book
and it being this sort of thing that has sort of like
a permanent and non-permanent home is kind of interesting.
Because I have a lot of those things on my desk,
they're, you know, like things that I've bought for years.
I have all the Invisibles books on my shelf,
but a lot of the people who read it,
like read and threw it away, I don't know.
There's something kind of extremely powerful,
specifically about comic books in that way to me.
They kind of resonate a little harder than other things.
Now, obviously it would be remiss for me not to,
before we continue on and talk about actually practicing some of this stuff
beyond the sigils that we've talked about.
The important thing to know is like modern psychology just offers a really slick,
very non mystical model for why all this shit works, by the way,
transforming text into abstract art can block verbal rumination and files kind of
like this will, um, I don't know if I call it a wish more under implicit memory.
This is kind of what we were getting at last week.
The whole point is you're trying to embed in your mind the goal subconsciously so that even if you're not thinking about it, your subconscious is aware and being and looking for like again, if we're talking job promotion, while you may not be consciously thinking about it. of when little things that come up that could help boost your notoriety pop up and you jump on them
and and try to do them when maybe if you weren't or hadn't done that or embedded that into your mind
you wouldn't small things that might not seem like a potential opportunity for growth that now you
were willing to do because you've subconsciously trained yourself that any opportunity that arises
you should take you know that kind of thing um that's what psychology is basically saying
they also talk about charging during like the flow state orgasm stamps you know that kind of thing. That's what psychology is basically saying. They also talk about charging during like the flow state orgasm stamps,
you know, that kind of thing.
That's all just very heavy dopamine neural imprints when you're doing
that and you're thinking about that stuff during that moment.
Dopamine is flowing and that shit is getting seared into your brain
in a way that it wouldn't normally do it.
If you're not, you know, having sex and soon as you bust a fucking nut, you think about job promotion,
job promotion, you know, it's the dopamine.
That's what happens every time I bust a nut.
Romantic. Yeah, I know, right?
Every single time I bust a nut, I'm like, job promotion!
You know what I just realized? This is a deep cut.
But for anyone who's seen
the show Mr. Robot, the bad guy air quotes, this
is this is that dude, him and his wife are like this completely 100%. Yeah, like that's
the like, yes, that's the point. Like even when when past magicians are brought up like well, it's just this it's psychology
They literally go. Yeah, we know like they accept it, but they add one
I will say they add a little little sprinkle of extra to it. They
What they say is if the brain essentially what they say is that the brain
Truly is editing your perception this much even if you're not aware of it,
but you're literally doing things you wouldn't normally do otherwise,
then altering the brain is indistinguishable from
altering external reality to the user. It doesn't matter.
If like they're basically like, who, it doesn't matter if it's,
if it's achieving its goal,
if it's literally changing the way your brain is reacting to situations,
even if it's explained by chemicals and neurons, is it all that different?
And regardless of model,
the safeguard is always going to be measurement too.
Like you want to seal the statement of intent within an envelope, date it,
don't open it for a month, like put it, set it and forget it.
And if nothing happens,
ritual cost you a sheet of paper and what some ink, some time, maybe you busted a nut and had a good
time. Like all I can think about is, is that rotisserie chicken thing. It's 2 AM. I'm in the
college dorm and he's like, set it. And the crowd goes and forget it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And,
and it was right. Yeah. So if nothing happens, then like I said, nothing, nothing, yeah. And basically, right.
Yeah. So if nothing happens, then like I said, nothing, nothing was wasted.
No time. Minimal time was lost.
And if results do appear, they also make note.
That's not it's just not evidence for you to declare a new religion.
You have one result.
Now do another one. Second trial.
Do it differently, maybe set a different goal, whatnot.
Log your successes, date when they happen and your failures
Seems like don't be a weird asshole is part of it like it
You're not supposed to step out there and go I figured it out. No, this is for you. It's for you
Chaos magic is very personal. It's not for you to start a fucking religion with
And then like if you want to start here's how I would like how they suggest you
start low, low stakes, start low stakes. We're going to get some practices now and then we're
going to move into servitors. So what you want to do is you want low stake desire, something
like you want a free pizza or maybe you want to hear from an old friend you haven't heard
from. I can get blowback from a free pizza. Well, let's talk about it. The smaller, the smaller the desire and tenter will, the easier it is for you to forget.
If you're like, man, I want a free pizza. And like the next,
at some time in the next month,
you think a week and a half later you're going to remember you like want a free
pizza and you've been, you know, fucking hoping and hoping and hoping.
If you put, I want a million dollars. It's going to be hard to forget.
You want a million dollars. But if you have, say you have pizza two times a week and you want one free pizza,
and then you kind of like to put a sigil and then, you know, seal it for a month and forget about it.
I at least pretty sure I'm going to fucking forget it because I forget a lot of things all the time.
You know what I mean?
But that's why you want to start small.
I feel like I've benefited from little accidental pockets of this.
You know, like I feel like it's at certain points in my life.
I just didn't have to worry about getting like I remember in high school, for example,
I just decided that I could save my money every day at some point because I wanted to like
get something that I wanted to buy or something like that.
Yeah. And so I would take the couple of dollars that my parents gave me to buy lunch
and stash and I would keep it and then I would just walk around.
I wish I had learned that earlier than 30.
Well, but I just walk around and then I'd look on the ground and I'd see a lunch
ticket for the day.
That's exactly.
Yes.
Yeah.
And because yeah,
just kind of thinking about it and like you see a little money on the ground.
You're not thinking about in that moment, I'm looking for money.
I'm looking for money. But if you see money and like out of the corner of your eye.
Not even money, just a little like the state, like, you know, like you apply for your like lunch ticket at school.
Like, I don't know, maybe in the 90s you had to do this.
I was in Catholic school.
The state would pay for your meals if you fell below a certain income.
And so a lot of kids would bring these to school and just throw them on the
ground. Cause they didn't want them.
And so I just sort of knew each day that I would get lunch anyway.
And it just, I'd come, I'd, and it started to be this thing where it changed your
thinking. Well, on the one hand, they're everywhere. Yep.
But on the other hand,
I started going to this one part of the
school every day for some reason and there would always be one there waiting
for me and I didn't I didn't even look for them after a while. You know what I
mean? It's an interesting synchronicity. Yeah. Right. That's all I'm saying. You
it was gonna be there. That's all I'm saying. It's like I didn't do it. I didn't
like intend for it to occur that way. I wasn't like I am practicing magic, but something kind of happened.
I like my brain started to control it in some chaos magic would also say like you obviously you weren't actually doing any practicing of magic that you don't go out and say, ah, look magic got me free lunch.
Right. It's just it's just it's just a thing that happened.
Synchronicity a weird thing that helped you save money.
And did you get to buy whatever is you were looking to buy when you saved
enough money I yeah I bought a couple things I don't remember like you know it
was like that movie it was like something you were so excited to get I
was like I can do a game here and there or like go see a flick you know yeah
yeah yeah um yeah so minimum wage wasn't that different but inflation was a lot
lower so yeah it went pretty far
So the idea is keep it small if you want if you want to try this just keep it fucking small
And if you try it, you don't have to believe it can literally just be a curiosity of something
You just want to see what happens even if it's just for a fun little game you've wanted to do
But the smaller the easier it is for your brain to kind of just let it go
You can do something like logbook with like columns for your the date, the intent,
how you charged it and what your desired outcome is.
And then if any side effects happen, you can always write those down.
How do you forget?
If you have a log book.
If you're going to log book it, that's a little bit hard.
Well, the log book is supposed to write it down everything you did and then close it for a month and then go back
To it after a month if you remember just keep the log book out of sight put it somewhere
You're not looking at it like that
You can do like same thing
You could write write this on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope as well and like slide that somewhere where you forget
Doesn't matter how you do it if you're I'm just saying if you're gonna do it a lot
Log book from multiple times if you just want to do it once do a fucking piece of paper
the and a lot log book for multiple times. If you just want to do it once, do a fucking piece of paper. The and so if you, you know, see what happens after a month,
obviously, the temptation can be to escalate to rent money,
finding your soulmate.
Don't do that shit.
Because like you're putting yourself into a bad headspace alone.
Never mind if the magic is fucking real or not.
That's just not the right, you know, that's not what
that's the wrong headspace to be doing this shit with it's not it's not step one
It's not it's not even it shouldn't even be step 10
You should never like soul mate hunt with chaos magic and stuff because it's all gonna be this is so weird to say
But do you think you could?
Because I've been thinking about the entire time that there's definitely people out there who
There's definitely people out there who, um, probably could use some good fortune,
but like, like, you know, if, if you believe in chaos magic, for example, and you want this to happen to you very badly, but then you do all the steps and
whatever, it still doesn't happen.
Right.
Like the difference between it worked and it didn't work to me, seems like
your cosmic luck rather than anything else.
But absolutely.
Oh, ignoring the fact that I still think it's bunk.
Could you not simply say it's chaos magic when someone says
instead of looking for love.
Don't and it will find you like that.
One hundred percent. Yeah.
Mm hmm. That's exactly what that means.
Or like just like when you go get a parking spot and you just kind of like.
No, you're going to get one and then you get one eventually.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's it's even Phil Hein kind of talks about that in the book where I mean,
he kind of has like two like main rules for this shit.
One is make sure you phrase your goals positively.
It's all about being positive. It's not about being, you know, negative about shit. One is make sure you phrase your goals positively. It's all about being positive.
It's not about being a, you know, negative about shit, but the other one, he also really
be positively negative. Like I really want insert name to suffer in the best way possible.
You know what I mean? Like, yeah, probably. If you're, if you're like Alistair Crowley and
you can like purely wish for that. Yeah. Well, but I mean, like what I mean? Like, yeah, probably. If you're, if you're like Alistair Crowley and you can like purely wish for that.
Yeah. Well, but I mean, like what I'm saying is you just said positively.
You didn't say it couldn't be positive or negative outcomes.
Like I very much want to insert name to have the worst day
ever. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people have, we're going to talk about that too.
We're almost, we're getting there. I know it's a big chunk. Um,
but the other thing he also, like the rule too,
that I want to talk about is he talks about making sure you basically keep
quote unquote, like mundane pathways open.
And the best example he uses for this is like, if you want cash,
you want a little more money in your life, like not like millions,
a little bit more money because you're just struggling in the moment.
When you create your sigil for this, um,
it's also important that you are still sending job applications to right.
A mundane pathway for cash to flow to you.
One that is earned rather than given.
And a sigil for love. If you do desire, desire to use it for it would like land
faster to you.
If you go out and leave the house and socialize with people as opposed to
staying in the house and only online, your own will, will it's still your own will yeah you they're still you
know you can't just sit there given sigils are more like kind of like a
Swiss Army magic knife in that way they're very super cheap they can kind
of do a lot of different things like a one purpose like a one-purpose magic one
exactly that yeah exactly that so with that in mind with sigils, let's now move over to servitors and what they
are and how valuable they can or cannot be.
So if you think of like sigil as like that kind of little simple thing,
a servitor is more closer to like a custom built,
like psychic drone that circles around you until the work is done in chaos magic jargon
It's a thought form given just enough structure to operate without
constant
pilot input
Phil Hine calls it quote an entity consciously created to perform a task
What was that other thing we talked about before I say which sounds natural sounds natural. And maybe if it sounds familiar like a tulpa.
Yes, there's some difference is though, like most of the building
blocks are already native to the mind for this.
Whenever you would imagine like an argument in the shower or
rehearse a pep talk on the drive to work, you are spinning up
sketches of personalities that talk back for a lot of people,
right?
A servitor is kind of what happens when you take that sketch of an individual
and then kind of train it on one singular purpose and then give it a badge that
says, you're now an expert at this one singular purpose.
That's what you exist for.
Austin Osmond spare kind of hinted at the idea when he,
with his original
creations, when he referenced something called atavistic residues,
he believed buried instincts could be coaxed into temporary shapes
that handled chores.
The conscious mind found boring.
Bill Hine took that and turned that kind of hunch.
It was very, very loosely talked about in his original works, and to do it. So, the first thing you like do is craft a tight statement of purpose.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that.
So, you're going to be doing a lot of work on that. So, you're going to be about, we'll get, I'm going to give you an example along with the steps of how to do it.
So the first thing you like do is craft a tight statement of purpose. Uh, no wider than one singular,
clear verb. Get that?
Distill that sentence into a sigil. We're going to talk about examples.
Don't worry. Distill that sentence into a sigil.
So the conscious brain stops fussing with any of the grammar model,
a body for the sigil either physical like a clay figurine or like
you can draw a cartoon if you have the artistic kind of talent there
and you can picture behind like kind of picture yourself behind the
eyelids like kind of as you're creating this thing, try to imagine yourself as the thing being created.
Then you're going to charge the construct with focused attention until it feels slightly
separate from you. The way like almost like a half dream can be like when you're in that half
dream state where you're like recognize you're, you're maybe seeing something or like half aware that you're dreaming,
which kind of it's not really, you're not like fully conscious,
you're dreaming, but you are aware that you're aware you're dreaming.
It's called the hypnagogic state in psychology. When like, um,
I've had it happen where like my eyes are closed. I'm mostly asleep,
but suddenly I realized I'm looking at like buildings and I know on my eyes are
closed and I'm like, huh,
That's really weird. And then all blurs and disappears because I'm now back into the condo. I'm like
Like you're trying to get to that point
That's what they mean by that. And then when that's done, you're going to bolt in an off switch
So that no matter what the outcome that this servitor will basically retire and disappear
On its own before it
gets before it kind of becomes a tulpa.
Like before it becomes the brooms, the Mickey Mouse brooms.
Tulpas are the thought forms you breathe life into and give focus to until it is entirely
on its own and you can't really do anything with it.
This is that proto state.
It's much more simple.
It's much more focused and you don't want it to outlast what you're doing.
Some chaos magicians treat servitors as like autopilot subroutines.
Like we talked about kind of software and code before,
like a sort of psychological code that maybe pings their nervous system when the
cue for whatever their intent is happens.
Others kind of prefer animus reading and talk to their creations
like their tiny spirits that they've created.
The difference is just mostly practice.
It doesn't really matter how you go about it.
Both camps agree on basically the same house rules.
A servitor should have one task, one fueling method and one retirement date.
Skip any of those safeguards in the project.
This little project can sprawl sprawl into basically the mental equivalent of like an old browser tab eating more memory eating more resources
Until it does become its own thing so build lean feed very little and shut that fucker down on schedule
So with that in mind, let's build one together as an example and you can build it
I don't want to be part of this. This is going to come back to me.
I'm like Alex, I don't know.
But we'll walk through it. This one will.
I've written out. I don't want to come back on me.
I don't know. I don't know. This guy, I don't know.
You guys laugh at me.
Let's build one together. This servitor is going to be named.
We're going to call this the Pomo Goblin. OK.
Oh, goblin. I like that.
We're going to create the Pomo Gob Goblin. Okay. Pomo Goblin. We're going to create the Pomo Goblin.
I didn't actually know stand for,
well, it's task is simple.
Whenever we feel procrastination sneak in the Pomo Goblin supposed to be like,
Hey, fuck you.
Do those snacks. Hey, go write your script. You fuck. Hey, go do your research.
Hey, Jesse, go do that paid promotion. You were hired to do already. Uh,
you know, that kind of thing. You start procrastinating. Um,
my manager, what the hell? Yeah. And yeah. And I went with goblin cause,
you know, I want it to be annoying. I don't want it to like,
if like I'm procrastinating,
I want it to be really like on my ass about it kind of thing. Right.
I got this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's all, I'll make sense. Uh, and, uh, well,
then what you're going to do is write down,, I don't want to procrastinate anymore or I wish no longer to procrastinate.
And that's what the Goblin's for.
You're going to copy, write that all down, create the sigil and obviously put your focus into the thing.
Keep it a thought form.
You can sketch it out if you want.
I didn't sketch it out and actually do this.
So then so step one, write the sentence or write the pretense sentence
I progress through my daily code and efforts that hope to merge with disciplined curiosity
Like a very flowerful kind of way to putting it then you're gonna first you're gonna trim
Surplus words until the line feels like a command, then remove repeated letters, then
remove vowels if you want, rearrange letters to sigil, you know how that goes.
This glyph kind of think of it like the DNA to the servitor.
We have created the DNA of the pomo goblin.
Okay.
Now draw it on a note card, then redraw it mirrored or rotated until the shape looks unfamiliar.
The aim is basically to fool your conscious mind into letting the subconscious take ownership
of this thing.
Then we move on to step two, a servitor can live inside anything that will hold your attention
long enough for the spell to anchor.
That's where like the clay figure comes in, but other things can work too, like a USB
drive, key caps to your
keyboard, a back panel of like a mechanical keyboard also works for a Pomo goblin.
Why don't we just say like a physical object that sits near the plot?
The problem space.
And where do you find yourself?
What?
A Ness Amiibo.
A Ness Amiibo.
Yeah, exactly, dude.
Yeah. Wherever you find yourself sitting and procrastinating when you should be working,
you need something there that you're going to use. And so a Ness Amiibo will be correct. Exactly, dude. Yeah, wherever you find yourself sitting and procrastinating when you should be working,
you need something there that you're going to use.
And so a Ness amiibo will be correct.
Now you want to ruin your Ness amiibo by either painting the sigil onto it or carving the
sigil onto this thing.
Put that shit right on the bottom.
It's the best place for it.
Oh yeah, right in the fucking bottom.
Exactly.
It's a big circle.
Yeah, guys.
Exactly.
And then this is where like the point of focus is when you need to feed or retire the entity
Step three is to write the operating manual for this thing
Servitors kind of got to think of them behaving like small neural scripts small lemming programs. Yeah. Yeah lemming. Yeah
Yeah, they need a very clear job description
And you also need to dictate the method of feeding and what its sunset terms are.
So draft like a short contract on a piece of paper that like can read like my example
one I wrote was Pomo Goblin will nudge me within 60 seconds when I drift from my current
task.
The nudge will arrive as a flicker of unease or a sudden memory of the goblin itself or
my phone phantom buzzing on my leg.
Oh, fuel arrives for this sigil and for this servitor when I acknowledge and the
prompt and push one meaningful commit to that commit within five minutes to the
procrastination. There we go. Jesus Christ couldn't get that word out of my
mouth. Yeah. So fuel arrives when I acknowledge the prompt and push one meaningful commit
within five minutes of being reminded of the procrastination.
He reminds you to do it and he lives off you doing it.
Every time you do it, it feeds him. Yes, correct. Exactly.
And when you feel the nudge,
basically it's within five minutes for you to get back to work.
And if you fail to do it,
you fail to feed it and you fail to fuel the servitor and the sunset
clause states that after 30 days of service,
the goblin will be thanked dismantled and returned to and in this case of the
nest inner plastic.
And that is how you create a servitor for something mundane like
procrastination.
That's what they're supposed to be for.
Then you animate it for step four.
You got to pick a time when your work area, wherever it is, is quiet.
Dim the room enough that maybe have the monitors glowing, you know, place this,
uh, to be goblin in front of you with the sigil showing.
So if we're going to put on the bottom tilt it maybe somewhere
we can see the sigil recite the intention three times while breathing
in and out slowly and on the fourth breath stare at the glyph and
allow your vision to blur until the symbol symbol waivers into
like an unreadable blurriness at that peak moment.
Speak the Goblin's name once Pomo Goblin. Yeah.
Picture a thin wire running from its chest into your solar plexus and snap your
fingers. That click marks the moment it is alive and it's task has begun.
Turn the figure to face you. So I've, you know,
turn Ness to face you
in your keyboard, close the little notebook
where you wrote all those things,
and walk away for 10 minutes.
Give your brain a break.
Don't think, just go take a walk, just chill,
relax, and then
you can come back and get to work.
And you're done. That's how
it works. That gobble will be working
overtime in my house.
Yeah, that's yeah.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah, the procrastinator.
Do we name our goblins anything?
Yeah, absolutely.
Nice.
Because I don't think we should all have the same goblin.
I want mine to be named like Grinkle.
Yeah, yeah.
Grinkle gob.
You know, whatever you want to fucking go.
No, not Grinkle. Gob. Just Grinkle. Just follow the goblin's grinkle. The gobbler. Yeah. Yeah. Grinkle gob, you know, whatever you want to fucking go. No, not gringle gob, just gringle.
Just follow the steps. Gringle the gobbler.
Uh, then to sunset it, to decommission it, um, on a day,
on day 30 place the goblin in a small bowl,
sprinkle a pinch of salt over the sigil and thank it for each confirmed
nudge that you felt and responded to.
Recite the original intention once followed by simply saying task,
complete rest, wipe the sigil with a, if we, if he's painted it,
just like I said, a purple alcohol, if you carved it, I like to scratch it up some
more, I guess at that point, remove any paint if possible,
and then you can store the figure out of sight for at least a full moon cycle. Uh, the removal of the glyph severs the code.
Most practitioners say they feel a brief dip in motivation the next day as the
mind kind of takes back the workload that was being handed off to the goblin.
And you kind of fill that gap with mundane habits.
You just kind of get back to the habit again. Um,
now we can start doing calendar reminders, give yourself short
breaks, posture checks, so the brain learns to integrate the skill.
The point isn't to always offload it forever to the goblin.
It's supposed to kind of give you an easy in a little head start,
but you do want to integrate it because you don't want to rely on this thing.
Always create a new one every single time.
It's pointless.
But if you are suffering from a really big
bout of procrastination, maybe you're burnt out.
This is a nice way to try and get it back in that way.
Now things that can go wrong.
There are things that can go wrong.
If you neglect the kill switch, you know, a servitor built
for vigilance, for instance, can escalate into a low-grade
paranoia in yourself left
unfed.
The fix is usually like a firm shutdown ritual as we just described.
And then getting in destroying whatever it was that the that the servitors in.
So say we forgot to do it with Ness.
We now destroy Ness like completely instead of just putting him away because it's been
too long.
Rare.
Some rare cases some people have talked about on forums and stuff involved servitors that top hosts
Showing up in a roommates dream things like that kind of becoming a tulpa in that way
And they're great stories, but there's no way I can verify any of them
So I'm not gonna give them fucking too much credit here too much time here Phil Hine
of them fucking too much credit here, too much time here.
Phil Hines specifically specifically also warns about over complexity.
Like somebody new might draft a 20 page
specific documentation for wealth gathering servitor
that negotiate stock options or maybe it monitors crypto and shit like that.
You know, don't do that shit. It's not going to work.
Monitors, crypto is so funny, dude. You just become You know what I'm gonna do a dude just get an app
Exactly, uh it's supposed to be simple tasks simple psychic clean code if you want household helpers and shit like that
It's not this is not what this is for
Yeah, it's not what it's made. What if there's like water like rapidly rising in my wizard tower, and I need somebody
Yeah, I don't think you need to hurry. Yeah, I think they'll motivate you to not procrastinate to quickly
Quickly call like a plumber to come help no dude you have to that's it
You if you want the magic to work you got to do it yourself, dude. Just like Mickey
Yeah, did it. Yeah, just like Superman. Yeah
Dude, just like Mickey. Yeah.
Yeah. Just like Superman. Yeah.
Servitors are not like they also service or stug
probability inside like creators as well.
Some people use them to like spike their creativity and stuff.
Use them to spike coworkers project stuff.
Usually doesn't work and ends up kind of moving into you manipulating your workers instead.
So that's kind of like weapons when you try and focus it on other people,
because again, it's all operating through your subconscious and let you know,
and unless you let it go too long, homo goblin is supposed to be more internal.
It's not supposed to be for anybody else than yourself.
Other than your little guy, he's a little easier.
I'm a little guy. Yeah. Yeah.
Or whatever you glizzle block the goblin, whatever the fuck you want to call it.
You know, that's what it is. I've changed my mind.
I want to call him Bing Bang.
The big wrinkle is now Bing Bang.
Gringo Gringo is now Bing Bang.
Can I switch it up as I go?
Like, what if I feel like it's not landing?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, man.
We got 30 days nothing happened.
I fail or did foosball my Goblin fail.
If you get to on your own head about it, it's you.
It's the exact enemy of Chaos Magic is like what if I don't
what if I do everything right and still fails?
Well, how how complicated what are you asking it to do?
I'm asking it to help me write eloquent emails.
So you just keep it in front of you.
It's not in your, your emails are just not become eloquent.
Yeah.
I keep ending every email with yours.
Fuck Lee, Jesse Cox.
Do you ever catch it or do you only realize it after the 30 days is over?
Uh, I try to catch myself, but sometimes I can't help it.
What if I'm just doing it for years? What if some intern reads it and is like, you know what?
I want to live my life like this asshole.
This is, this is this live fuckly guy.
I love this guy.
I'm going to change how I live to be like this guy.
Like, would that be enough?
Well, well, cause then, but I want to not do that anymore.
I want to be more eloquent in the way I end my letters by saying thank you or
yours truly, or be in touch soon instead of sit on my dick and spin Jesse Cox.
You know?
Yeah.
I feel like that's very eloquent.
Like I, I like the messages coming across.
Like I think maybe the reason this guy's not working is cuz he doesn't have a job
Jesse Cox that's incredible Alex. What a goddamn point you made me
Oh God wish I wrote that in any email that I ever wrote as we wrap up the part of server tours
We move into the back left the part. I've done three by six PM set it in spin.
Yeah, Jesse Cox, Jesse Cox.
We as we were talking about chaos magic loves the slogan results over doctrine,
how you do it.
But Phil Hines very much talks about even with server tours,
every shortcut hides a speed trap.
OK, this is the part you were talking about talking about Jesse before the glamour of tricking
probability can slide into habits of yourself that start hollowing out your own
ability of your own judgment or fray or start hollowing out your friendships.
And even the imagination you were trying to like make better,
your creativity starts becoming less and less, uh, as more, you know, you're,
you become more and more isolated from people.
Phil hind devotes honestly an entire appendix in condensed chaos to what he calls
gremlins that follow success.
This is kind of like, we're not going to call, I'll go over all of it, just a couple of things.
So you understand where the risks can be with servitors and particularly
servitor dependency comes first right at the top because it creeps
up kind of just like without you realizing it.
The servitor does its job so well, you just stop practicing whatever underlying skill
you're hoping that it fixes.
The goblin that snaps you back to like the moment at every distraction feels like an
ally until you try to work on a borrowed laptop where the plastic mascot is now missing. Now you're out and like you're, you're somewhere else. You're traveling.
You didn't bring them with you. And now what you look at him, he's not there.
And now you just keep procrastinating. Why? Because you're relying on it too much.
You're not integrating as it's happening. The point is to,
yeah, as I remind you, you're supposed to be building the habit alongside the
reminder, right? That's, and if you're not doing that,
and you're just literally relying on seeing
it and then it's not there and now like it's an actualization assistant.
Correct.
Yeah, it's not I I I truly kind of a slave.
I kind of I've kind of a pair it next to in a weird sense mushroom trips.
And if you don't mind me saying because a lot of point of mushroom
trips is to integrate whatever internal work.
If that's what you're doing,
like, you know, dealing with like issues within yourself to integrate that not
to rely on the trips and the mushroom trips to make you feel going to think about it.
The point is to come out and then think about what it is.
You realize in that moment or work through in that moment and then make it part
of who you walk like that's that's the point of servitors. It's not supposed to be something you lean on
and rely on. They're supposed to be there for 30 days to help you build the habit and then remove.
That's why this is one of those kickbacks. The mind kind of just gets accustomed to outsourcing
the task and then stalls when the helper's gone. He personally calls it the post servitor slump.
The fix he says is to schedule a gap week of deliberate mundane
practice, brainstorming by hand, time, free writing,
literally anything that just kind of rebuild whatever muscle you were trying to
have the servitor build before spinning up a new server tour.
If that's what you want to do, give yourself a week to try and do it yourself.
Then there's what he calls belief whiplash, which hits people who have a paradigm hop.
Like you were talking about earlier, Jesse about, well, what if I, this doesn't work
in Catholicism, but I do this. Peter Carroll actually jokes kind of about swapping belief
systems like programming languages works until the psyche wakes up. Not sure which accent
it speaks is not sure why you're even doing
this. It kind of becomes you blunt the effect of it.
You just everything kind of becomes blurred, right?
You know, you spend a month venerating good dash for obstacle
removal, which is just like a weird thing I discovered and
then you just straight jump straight into like NASA fucking
Mars photos of weird shit the jump that the heavy jumping and looking for what you want through different lenses,
whether it be religion, science, conspiracy, that shit needs to like,
that won't work.
Your psyche will eventually blunt to it one way or another.
He calls it identity vertigo in the book where like nothing again,
all things are kind of equal
to the you in that perspective.
One practice of chaos magic kind of described the symptom as feeling like he'd bet he'd
left the front door open in his head.
Voices of past paradigm.
Yeah, like you would talk about like voices of past paradigms would like quote unquote
walk in at random hours, uh, a Venantic calm at breakfast, cyberpunk nihilism at lunch,
like that kind of shit where like it was just,
there was no grasp on it on context.
I didn't know what he believed. It's like Johnny Depp.
He just doesn't know what accent he has anymore. Or Gary Oldman. You're like,
dude, what is wrong with you? What happened? Yeah. Interesting.
But actually like really comparable Johnny Depp's like, Hey, hey, what's up? Hey, hi, hi.
I'm Johnny Depp, Karen melting down and realizing all of these identities.
He was in are like all just acts that kind of, yes, that,
except for like the, but your belief system in place of your own self. Yeah.
He would say like the remedy for him. You say like,
take like two weeks of just chill, no rituals,
no esoteric content intake whatsoever.
All you're gonna do is mundane chores around the house,
long walks of clear outside, clearing your head
and just try to let the internal monologue come on its own
without exerting yourself in any way.
He Hein continued kind of to note in the book
that switching masks is safe, kind of just so long as you hang each one back on the peg quote unquote
and make sure and check your own face underneath. Don't lose yourself in these switching belief
systems. That's the backlash that can happen if you do it, you know that. And then the
last one I think I would say I and the one I put on here is last because I think this
will resonate with a lot of people, particularly you, Jesse, uh, magical thinking
as a lifestyle cope.
This is a big thing that he, he talks about.
He calls us the slowest trap and the hardest to clock because it really can masquerade
as progress.
Sometimes chaos techniques work sometimes spectacularly, which temps the practitioner
to apply them to
every solvable annoyance in their life. Need rent? Write a sigil. Saratona boost?
Get a servitor. Need better sleep? Visualize a dream template.
Like the list can go on and on. You can start outsourcing all this stuff useful
until like, so to speak, like everything is brushed under the rug and nothing matters anymore. It's all it's all magic at this point.
Phil Heinz would often tells beginners to keep shit mundane for this reason of just like trying to use magic as a cope immediately.
The temptation is obviously there right that desire to see a fix all tool system that is supposed to fix all things, except if you
actually read like the practices and the nuances of it all, that's not what it is whatsoever.
But beginners who only hear of it and jump into it are everywhere where like that's what
they try to do.
Everything gets a servitor, everything gets a sigil.
Life is not yours to try anymore.
It's to offload onto chaos magic.
And that's your and it. Min maxers dude.
And that's your, and it's min maxing exactly,
but you're getting the backlash of nothing's happening
because they're not doing anything.
They're not having fun.
They're just min maxing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, man.
Exactly.
You know, so when supernatural for him,
when he was saying like when supernatural tactics
substitute for ordinary effort,
the spell stops being a tool and just graduates into becoming a crutch for your
own like weaknesses. The eventual bill for him,
it will say like arrives in the form of neglected, neglected work,
or things like spoon fed relationships that fall apart after feed your own
atrophied planning skills. If you do,
if you're offloading being reminded to do something to a servitor,
it just cuts across the border. And this is the stuff you really do need to worry about because it is
psychological. And if you're gonna do like
psychological, lazy or offloading things, it will
have a negative impact on you psychologically because that's what all of this is about in the first place and sigil should be nothing more than a nudge.
You know, things should only be things to help you build your brain and train it to
look for the things that you're that you want out of your life by putting in the effort
alongside it.
And as far as like dealing with other people, as far as chaos magic is concerned, consent
matters in others. You can't just chaos magic other people.
It will just affect how you act toward them as you maybe start looking at them
differently because you did a symbol on them or you did all this stuff.
What it does is it changes your behavior,
not theirs maybe to build that relationship that you think you want or don't
want with them.
But in reality it's probably very shallow and built through the lens of you
specifically looking for the moments where the spell is supposedly working.
And then the last is like this, like problem blowback, where he talks about
like there's like slingshot effects when desire snaps back.
If handled carelessly, anecdotes of like
things like a Toronto occultist sigiled for more heat during a brutal winter and his landlord's boiler exploded like that kind of thing.
Like, you know, that kind of shit. Um, this is all very,
very important to all of this.
And I think it really does point to that chaos magic is psychological work on
yourself in its own way. Self-hypnosis is another way I kind of like look at it.
Um,
so where is, has it become, you know, as we wrap this episode up,
I do want to talk about the impact this thing has had on history.
And particularly how it's had a huge effect on modern history and kind of trace
the path chaos magic took to get there.
We're going to start not in the 19, uh, not in the 1890s where chaos magic was.
We're going to start after right in the eighties where we kind of left off our
19 years, the 1980s,
where British counterculture is splintering into like punks ragged aftermath,
like afterward. And one of the loudest splinters is robbing gristle,
which was a noise art quartet that swapped guitars for tape loops
and on stage autopsy footage. And their co-founder,
Genesis P. Orange absorbs Peter Carroll's chaos.
Genesis porridge. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh,
absorbed the chaos magic primer.
It decides anything for like five minutes and he just screamed Genesis porridge. Yeah, yeah. Absorb the chaos magic primer and decide
that this is anything for like five minutes and he just screamed Genesis Porridge.
Yeah. Yeah.
Rivers at the office is probably like.
What? That motherfucker just see Genesis Porridge.
Peter Carroll's chaos magic primer
and decides that the theories shouldn't stay on the page.
And what emerges in 1981 is
the temple of
Psychic youth and I'll show you how it's spelled so, you know, I'm not saying it would bore at you because this is how it's
Temple tell me how you would pronounce that the temple of psychic youth
pronounce that the temple of psychic youth.
Psychic youth. Okay. Well, yeah. But I just happened to know that at one point in time,
psychical research was like esoteric occultism. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
I get it. OV is not how you spell of, uh, no, I get it. I get it.
You tell them, not me, man. Genesis Porridge, uh, definitely wrote this.
Let's put it that way. Yeah. Uh, or we just call it toppy for short to py
Okay, this was a loose worldwide network that treats every branch of this do-it-yourself
Chaos magic media as like ritual Bible
top wise mechanics kind of feel weird, but imagine like
patreon crossed with like a cult pen pals,
your mail, you mail in a stamped envelope,
get a photocopied newsletter back and inside find an quote unquote access point
for the coming month, perhaps draw sigil in menstrual blood, for instance,
or photograph and then photograph it and send the print to a central address.
The point is everybody does the same thing each time. Yes.
Members pin the same symbol over their beds, believing the shared design links,
their personal workings into a group circuit, uh, for music P orange,
P dash orange, not poured. No, no.
That's like saying King K rule. No, that's King cruel, dude.
No, no, that's what you're talking about.
No, he just likes bananas.
K.
Rule.
All right.
You just like bananas.
But for music.
Yeah.
Pete Orange launches psychic TV shape, a shape shifting band
whose live shows kind of double as open ritual space.
Grainy with stuff like grainy VHS loop strobe light,
spoken word invocations
lifted straight from Pete like Peter Carroll's notes on that gnosis.
The British press, the British press immediately smells satanic panic gold and runs a splash
headline about quote drug fueled sex cult and hands the, the temple of site chick, the exact spotlight that it wanted shocked parents,
banned the newsletters, art students devoured them,
photocopied onto zines and they export the aesthetic to New York loft parties.
And within a few years, the early rave scene,
even skeptics of this agree that Tio that that top be sort of rewired fringe
music visuals with that grainy collage, cut up slogans,
biological fluids as ink kind of thing.
That's so crazy.
Cause Constantine was also in a band just like this. That's great.
Which is kind of interesting. Oh, by the way, it was Jamie Delano.
I said Jenkins earlier. He did not call Jamie Delano. I'm so sorry. Well, now we got it right. Oh, Jenkins. way, it was Jamie Delano. I said Jenkins earlier. He did not create Jamie Delano. I'm so sorry
Well now we got it right. Oh Jenkins right on it
Yeah, we got it right at the end of the episode, but someone will already have commented
It doesn't matter because I just know my shit so well
Not that they originated this but for the time they you know the 1980s
They kind of popularized the idea that spiritual practice could be, could kind of be remix culture,
grab a mantra here and maybe a weird thing there and mash them together until
magic happens. Basically, uh,
whether the rituals like moved external forces, uh, or anything else, uh,
toppy demonstrated that Carol's modular chaos magic thrives.
Once you plug it into male art, gorilla video, you know,
bassy music, the cut and paste spirituality that you see later
on like Tumblr mood boards and shit traces a clear line back
to these photocopied access points stapled in like bedrooms
across the UK at the time and obviously eventually the world
and then in the 80s as we move into the 90s while this is happening
This is when Grant Morrison steps in and writes the invisibles
Framing the entire series is like the hyper sigil as we talked about like he's walking in at the perfectly right time as this other
Thing is also yanking chaos magic and injecting it into music now. It's fucking
everywhere and like you said earlier,
like the letters, the letters
page mass symbol that rescues
the comic from cancellation,
the subsequent pop culture echo,
the Matrix trilogy fucking popped
out out of this, which is an enormous
historical and cultural
stamp that
can never be undone as long as we're
alive. It's literally just the cyberpunk version of the invisibles.
It's amazing.
Yeah.
It's incredible.
Yeah.
And this gives like and this all gives like journalists massive
sale figures to tally against like all kinds of other shit millions
watch a film franchise seeded at least in part by a writer who
claimed to bargain with fucking machine elves.
Hollywood accounts don't debate ontology.
They just they count box office returns.
And in that sense, Morris's private
enchantment rewire rewired a corner of mainstream cinema, no matter how you score
the metaphysics, because the matrix would not exist as it does without Morrison.
Is the invisible some shit like that's how far reaching this is gone
Not and we not to put words in the Wachowski's mouths, but like it's pretty uncanny
Yeah, yeah exactly
Now we meet the KLF
this was the most commercially successful prank to come out of
Britain's acid house wave of shit a
Man by the name of Bill Drummond had been an a and our man at Warner before turning Renegade
Jimmy Cawdy played guitar in the bands band stuff that became known as the orb and under
Ailes's like the justified ancients of Mumu, they hacked together rave
beats and pop courses sampling whatever the fuck and whoever the fuck they wanted and
they paid fines later. They basically are like as for forgiveness, not for permission.
And their name and mythology were lifted straight from the Illuminati trilogy.
Robert Anton Wilson satire that mixes discord in humor. Yeah, basically a magic textbook. Yeah. Yes.
And in the novels, the justified ancients are a secret order
bent on sabotaging authoritarian reality.
And Drummond read those pages and decided pop charts could be the orders
next front line.
And between 1988 and 1992, the KLF sold millions of singles,
3 a.m. eternal last train to trans central.
Millions.
Ancient. Yes.
She's well issuing press releases that read like, uh,
like other manifestos each each hit funded the next stunt,
ice cream vans parked outside award shows
Sheep's heads dumped at the Brit Awards gunfire blanks over crowds the underlying logic came straight out of Chaos Magic
symbols hijack attention hijacked attention
rewrites Consensus reality it doesn't matter if it was a prank.
If reality is at the end of it all,
people believe it's real and therefore doesn't make it real.
And at midnight on the 23rd of August
in 1924 Drummond and Cawdy buried a metal suitcase stuffed with 50 pound notes
to a disused boathouse on the Scottish island of Europe.
I think that's how you say it.
J.U.R.I. say it. J U R I.
His name is Jura with one handheld camera rolling.
They poured the cash onto a stone hearth and fucking set it on fire.
A pyre worth 1 million pounds sterling their entire royalty fortune.
The film watched the cave foundation burn a million quid toward outhouses,
our houses, not our houses at the following year
Viewers booed cheered walked out in silence
tabloids demanded an investigation into whether the burned violation currency destruct destruction laws
Members of Parliament tabled questions about artistic responsibility
The Arts Council has since referenced the act in funding debates as a benchmark for spectacle versus value. Pretty solid.
Drummond's post-mortem framed the berm as quote,
a banishing ritual aimed at money's psychological hold, whether any,
like whether any occult force accepted the offering, uh,
the gesture accomplished a real world mutation. It forced critics, bankers and lawmakers to discuss the fucking metaphysics
of cash on record because they had to be debated about is is this crossing a line?
Did he break a law is the same logic as the servitors to be out to be honest.
It really kind of did in chaos magic terms.
The KLF treated media itself as the sigil
public outrage as the charge for the simple
sigil in the ripple through cultural economics as the manifestation of the intent.
Chaos ideas also felt filter into corporate branding.
Modern marketing decks talk about brand sigils shorthand
for logo types designed to elicit emotional triggers beyond rational product features.
Senior strategists cite Carol's principles that symbols work best when
unchained from literal meaning.
Chaos magic has literally helped dictate how branding is done.
They point to Nike's swoosh or Apple's bitten fruit and explain almost verbatim that
the image functions like a charging singe. It compresses a feeling and fires it each
time the eye meets the curve. No candles, no Latin, no robes, no spells, no ones, fucking
nothing. Yet quarterly revenue charts track the spells efficiency. It is being tracked.
Now we take that and roll the clock forward to 2015 and we open a browser tab on
4chan. Imagine, imagine we're doing this. The image board. Okay. Imagining it like I never did that.
The image board famous for pranks that sometimes escape, uh,
sometimes escapes escape into national news image board on the site.
Yeah, I didn't know this because I'm not really a big fortune
user at all, but each board on the site assigns every new
post obviously a sequential ID number for I knew the anonymity
but land on a post with repeating digits dubbed dubs trips
or quads and you have bragging rights for the rest of the
day.
Apparently that lottery mechanic kind of primes users already to treat
numbers kind of like omens of something or good luck charms,
which kind of becomes important once we are moved into the world of
politics because surround this time,
a green cartoon amphibian named Pepe the Frog has
already achieved meme ubiquity. Artist Matt Fury drew Pepe in a stoner web
comic called Boys Club. Internet culture borrowed the face for reaction images
as the internet does for many different images out there, but one afternoon a
user notices a weird statistical oddity. Threads,
praising presidential hopeful at the time, Donald Trump,
keep landing the coveted repeating digit IDs,
often with Pepe images attached.
The board begins joking that Pepe is granted numerical blessings.
Within days,
somebody Googles frog God and finds Keck,
an Egyptian deity depicted with a frog's head who governs the
primordial darkness before creation or chaos.
The overlap between Pepe and Keck is too good for the fucking internet.
And the irony hungry crowd cannot resist.
And they start calling the cartoon and avatar of an ancient force.
Now at it at first it's pure mischief. Obviously.
Tech is also the translation of LOL in world of warcraft from the other side,
which we'll talk about, which also is where that's pulled from. But
at first it's literally just pure mischief,
but a subset of users decide to
formalize the bit a little bit.
They have, they not only dig up, they stumble across Peter Carroll's library.
No, and Phil Heinz chaos condensed or condensed chaos.
They copy sections explaining sigil creation and gnosis and post step by step guides on how to
generate a Pepe sigil. The instructions went a little something like the
following draw Pepe weave a slogan that pleases Keck flash the image in a
heightened emotional state often achieved by binge scrolling outrage
headlines then spam it online and forget.
And because 4chan is anonymous and kind of a weird place,
forgetting comes naturally to people post goes post leave.
Nobody thinks twice about it. The image sinks into archived obscurity.
While another dozen fresh memes flood the feed,
further just filling 4chan's history with forgotten Keck
sigils.
The practice evolves its own liturgy.
Users type praise Keck when in a post ID lands matching digits.
They remix the Egyptian hieroglyph for Keck, two arms upraised into ASCII art.
Someone notices the fictional country code Keck, K-E- Keke is unclaimed in ISO tables and invents.
Kekistan complete with green and black battle flag loosely parading a Nazi war banner.
Suddenly mean play has a flag a deity a pantheon of Saints various different
Pepe's and an obvious enemy in quote unquote, nice or me reality, normie reality.
Journalists now covering the 2016 U S election,
see the activity spike whenever polling swings.
Mother Jones runs a profile titled meet the alt rights favorite frog wired
publishes internet memes are now an occult ritual, quoting Carol's definition specifically of Sigil,
almost verbatim. The sub,
the Southern poverty law center adds the cult of Keck to its extremist watch
glossary, noting that participants,
a self identity as chaos magicians who believe quote unquote mimetic warfare
can tilt elections. Homeland
security some subcontractors pick up the turn in little reports here and there. And a 2017
Rand report on fire hose propaganda briefly stites Kekistan forums as examples of quote,
proud sourced influence operations that mimic occult initiation.
In academic circles,
the association of internet researchers host a panel called feels good tech man
where scholars trace direct citations of Carol's chaos magic in archived screen
captures practitioners inside the board begin
running coordinated experiments.
One involves mass posting a stylized Pepe overlaid with the phrase Trump
will win during key debate nights accompanied by a Carol inspired
inspired mantra quote impose will forget result another ties every
post ending in sevens to a luck charge for market gains.
Users track the Dow Jones and claim victories on green candle mornings.
Verification is impossible because the signal to noise ratio is thin and
statistical cherry picking is fucking rampant.
But the feedback loop of claim coincidence and celebration keeps the practice alive regardless.
And importantly, the board itself remains a swirl of different motives.
Some users treat me magic as sincere chaos, magic practice,
complete with personal diaries and dream logs.
Others ridicule the spiritual veneer,
but join the spam for political trolling cause fuck it's funny.
A third camp sticks around only for the schadenfreude.
This ambiguity mirrors early chaos magic gatherings where devout experimenters, pranksters, and
tourists shared photocopiers and fucking tried shit out.
The difference is scale though.
See back then you can only mail out photocopied stuff to so many people that you knew that
you knew would actually like get it.
But a meme sigil can reach millions in an afternoon.
The spillover is measurable too. I looked Google trends.
Google trends shows a sharp climb in searches for sigil magic and chaos magic
between mid 2016 and early 2017 aligning with mainstream articles on
Pepe and Keck online booksellers report a bump in Carol's back catalog,
discord servers dedicated to left-hand path trading appear,
which is a type of magic practice, blending chaos theory, chart analysis,
and Pepe memes. And in 2018,
the U S army cyber Institute publishes a brief titled mimetic warfare,
the future of influence referencing chaos magic terminology to illustrate how
symbolism accelerates message spread.
Two lessons emerge from this fucking chaos magic Petri dish.
First, chaos magic techniques scale effortlessly in the social media age
because they rely on distributed participation and rapid forgetting
functions. This is the internet boiled down. Second,
the ethical questions Carol touched on in the seventies grow thornier when the
target of a meme spill a spell might be an electorate rather than a job
interview consent blowback and ownership of narrative became become geopolitical
issues. Once governments,
government analysis start quoting library fucking null.
Now whether the cult of Keck actually swayed any voice votes is unprovable.
Polling dynamics involve huge ground campaigns, funding, complex demographics,
but chaos magicians argue that the proof of concept was never about outcome.
It was about engagement.
A frog sigil got thousands of apathetic posters to focus emotional
energy on a shared intent.
Reporters think tanks and security agencies noticed that was happening and then
further fed the fuel, making it bigger.
That alone marks a historical moment where a joke born on a message board,
drag chaos, magic vocabulary into fucking Senate hearing footnotes. And in, and this is like, this is a working,
in other words, this is like a working designed for lulls still manifested
a measurable ripple in our reality in history,
even if all it conjured was a round of policy briefings
and a new law and a new line item in extremism
databases.
Like, for listeners, I don't think the takeaway shouldn't be to lionize Pepe or excuse the
darker corners of the board.
It's to recognize how quickly the machinery of this shit adapts to modern time.
A sigil that once faded on a cafe wall now replicates at fucking fiber
optic instant speed charged or not.
Its trajectory proves the central chaos claim. Imagination,
ritualized and distributed produces real world effects, cultural,
political or psychological, a mix of the three,
long before anyone agrees on why.
And looking at these points in history, for me, a pattern emerges.
Austin spare sketches his weird shit in 1900.
Peter Carroll systemizes them in the seventies Genesis P.
Orridge then weaponizes them for art and punk music and the industrial art of the
eighties KLF burns a million pounds in the nineties to prove money is imaginary.
Grant Morrison folds the theory into a comic that leaks into the matrix and
changes his entire life. And Hollywood consciousness in the late nineties,
image board pranksters flip the toolkit into political memetics by mid 2010s
along the way, therapists,
advertisers and brand consultants borrow fragments of chaos magic directly because results are results.
No matter the dogma,
do any of these episodes prove that you can bend reality with a doodle? No,
no way in hell, not in a lab sense whatsoever.
They prove that people who treat imagination as leverage can move headlines
and balance sheets. The effects are measurable.
Even if the causal chain is slippery,
one could call it a placebo amplified by social networks,
but placebo here means belief changing physiology, purchasing behavior,
and yes, even voter turnout.
And that material is real in the historical record
and unignorable.
Is it magic in the magic sense?
No, or at least nobody can say,
but it has absolutely changed the course of human history.
And that is the end of our chaos magic two-part voice.
And everybody listening, how you feeling about that last little bit of- That is the end of our chaos magic to pardon boys.
Everybody listening, how you feeling about that last little bit of-
Why you gotta do that?
Why you gotta, why, you know what?
What's the matter with you?
I was fine with porridge.
I'm not porridge.
But you have to look at the effects.
Maybe this is a blowback.
Maybe this is the blowback.
But I know people are like, it's all bullshit. I even maybe agree with you, but I know people like it's all
bullshit. I even maybe agree with you. It's all bullshit, but it's not bullshit.
It's not that it's bullshit or not. It's just a way of thinking about it, right?
But the actual like literal chaos magic as branded by K as chaos magic by Peter
Carol specifically changed human history, matrix, invisibles, all of that is literally based directly on chaos magic and chaos magic is directly in reference in branding shit and in military and in government research it chaos magic itself.
It would be diff the world we'd live in now would be unbelievably different if
chaos magic and his like things were never found and popularized and then grabbed up by grant Morrison and uh, the fucking in a KSR or whatever it was.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I'm sorry, but like it's the, the Pepe thing. That's just, that's just that was another day or you like multi-day rabbit hole of like, holy shit
I did not know this. We need the snake god. What's the one the day the what's the opposite of Keck?
Boy, that's that should be it. That should be what we push for is like it's a snake the opposite
I'm pretty sure it's a snake boy. I don't remember
I didn't like I knew
kick obviously I knew kick got crazy popular and I knew it became a very
right-wing kind of thing I didn't know about the chaos magic feels like like
cat clearly for me is that like wow online mean goof laugh like thing like
cuz that was the kick it kick it kick it back in the day in Kekistan I remember
this I remember the whole it's still going.
I mean, yeah, the guy I'm saying, like, I feel like it came from one thing
and then was attributed to something else because that's like way just like Ellis.
It's just like the Ellis schedule.
You know, did it or was it like did was it just an alignment
of two separate pieces of culture?
Wow. And people who knew the Egyptian shit and it just kind of brought them together on this and like merge them like it's yeah but regardless like it's crazy because I
again I knew the popularity of kek and all that shit I did not know the chaos magic roots that
people were practicing with this thing and what they were trying to accomplish with it and the
fucking articles and shit I didn't realize any of that.
Like they're all obsessed with control.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
They're all like all those types of people.
They all just want to get a leg up on controlling others.
And now guess what's happening.
They have somebody in office that is going to control
in ways that they don't want him to.
Right.
But they got what they wanted.
And the blowback is getting the worst thing that you that you asked for
Yeah, in its own way as as you know Medicare gets stripped away into like for 500 million people
Like that, you know, like it's isn't that weird but again as I say at the end
There's no way to you know, there's no way to say this is chaos magic. It has inevitably however
Made an impact on history
Chaos magic it has inevitably however made an impact on history Mighty chaotic
You're the snake you guys
We're off to go do a mini-sode
You're the snake guys
You're the snake, yeah we gotta get the snake out there
I remember something about the Pharaoh's like little snake being like to protect against
the powers of chaos but that may not be made up I don't know
It's also insane to me that they would like heck is like the chaos God or something like it's a way weird
anyway we're off to go do a mini soda patreon.com slash children iPod where
you can go support us in all of our endeavors thank you all so much grab
those live show tickets 23 the number Jim Carrey one song what's this a song by
like cake that plays I can't remember what it is oh it's such a bad trailer
thank you bye
anyway me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night
enjoying ourselves I needed to go to the bathroom so I stepped back inside and
after a few moments I hear my wife go, Holy shit, get out of here!
So I quickly dash back outside.
She's looking up at the sky in awe.
I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. So Thanks for watching!