Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 308: Chaos Magic Part 2 - Grant Morrison is a Chaos Magician

Episode Date: July 27, 2025

Is 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

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Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Chaluminotic podcast, episode 3008. As always, I am one of your host, Mike Martin, joined by my very own personal Lois Lane and Clark Kent, Jesse and Alex, hello. 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 at it?

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 in 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. Teddy bears, Iggy Pop, punk rocker, James Gunn, Superman's soundtrack. Jesse Superman, I'm obviously Lois Lane.

Because I'm an imprepid reporter, my neighbor has a lecukukeracha 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, he's, 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.

I don't like injustice. 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 do not love when they do like, can you imagine if Superman was evil? Like at this point,

Do we, like, evil Superman, how did one guy being evil become the sequel to like zombies? How did that happen? It's crazy. I'm literally watching two shows with that idea with the boys and Invincible. Yeah. What if Superman evil? And you want to know something crazy? You want to something 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, that's the Superman that's evil. So, okay, but that's what I'm saying. Omneman himself is a creation from another comic book about

like a Superman like another like fake Superman that's written by Alan Moore Alan Moore made a Clark Kent character who's a comic book writer who invented Omneman Jesus dude that's a that's an evil superception bro

that's fucking chaos magic is what that is yeah wow that's so crazy right right that's crazy though holy shit Actually, if I mention 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 one of the most amazing, like, reading experiences of my life was reading their book, Super Gods. Gotcha. We're talking more about the invincibles today. Oh, the invisibles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the book is about Convincible. Invincible. Now my brain is like.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, he, uh, that, that, 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. That's, I got, I got to check it out because, uh, yeah, uh, 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 look this up on, oh, my God. Cox and Crendor. Jim Carrey. Dan, no, no, near, near, near, near, yeah. number 23. The number 23. Yeah, I've seen that movie one time and I don't remember much of it. You've seen every movie that is so weird.

You've seen every movie that. Why have you seen that? I don't know why. That's his movie taste is why. That's Madden's movie. Madden's movie taste is what are you talking about? I've seen that movie. I can't wait to watch Step Monster with you guys.

Step Monster. Go by our lives. It's 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 to 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.

All right. Boys, it's time to dive into the part two, 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 are you setting me up to be irate? Is that what I'm learning? If you partake in the weed makes my naut. Mark alarm go off so hard. You partake in the weed sometime around my fucking grandma just walked into

room. Hello fellow teens. If you partake in the week. 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, you know, put your moods into, I'd say a mildly chaotic mood. You boys can get a little too chaotic sometimes. Because last week, we traced kind of chaos magic back to its grandfather, a man by the

name of 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, he basically go fuck himself, where he would then eventually retreat into a basement in Brixton, where he would write up the, if you remember reading a little bit of it last week, the Zoskia cultus,

the giant manifesto that was a giant fuck you to Alistair Crowley essentially. He's the quigong gin of magic, guys. I mean, kind of is in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways. In a lot of ways he really was. We're thinking about quigong gin at a time like this. Honestly, kind of is a little bit. You're not wrong.

Quigon gin. Kind of a chaos magician. Yeah, Bruce. also a chaos magician someone? Yeah, Bruce Lee, Jekundo. Kiadi Mundi also? Kiotti Mundi,

dude, no. No, I think he's like, I think he's like almost, I think he's almost like anti-he's like, 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, um, which we'll talk about one day as well.

Oh, very soon, actually. He also, yeah, God, there's a whole, God. Yeah, you got a whole history in this shit, dude. You guys, you guys, you guys, you guys, can't believe how much we're doing Chulamani 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 2025 like cornerfest, bang, boom to the next corner fest, 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 learn

the show has become is like I've learned to write dissertations on topics that will earn me zero grades in any college whatsoever. The most frustrating thing about being interested in shit is that to actually understand it, you have to like delve into the world. You have to learn shit before you can like know

about the thing you want to know about. So. Yeah. You got to like not actually by the bullshit, but by the bullshit to understand the bullshit to then say, oh, it's all bullshit. But you got to like get into their mindset. It's like trying to get into the mindset of a cult leader. Like, why are they? Like the Heaven's Gate leader in particular. And we talked about getting into his mindset in particular, where was he come from?

It's very similar with chaos magic in that way. To get back to it, because Spare's 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 19th,

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 and this chaos magic was the true way. They stripped magic to its bare circuits, borrowed spare sigil magic stuff, stapled on some discordant. in 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.

Just like as a, just as a phrase, I'm just saying, they nailed that. Right. Very, very clean. And also, I forgot that we said this last time because it was a weak, skip, but Constantine, Constantine, is the perfect

chaos magician example. Yes, he really is. Who is 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. Yes, yes. 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 magicy comic called Nameless. I believe that's the name of it. And it is bizarre to the nth degree.

I'm highly recommended. It is very like mathists. Dude, I remember this. This is a, an actual practicing chaos. Actual practicing chaos magician What was it? What was the thing called?

I want to see the sigil. Nameless. It took three times to read through it before I understood what the hell was going on. I don't want to spoil it, but it's like very bizarre and it's a horror. It's a horror comic.

So like, it's 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 it they them pronoun. So that I remember to say it. But the thing that's so interesting about Grant Morrison as a writer is that X-Men, like Batman, Superman, all like the biggest, some of the most popular stories ever written in J-L-A and any of those things are all Grant Morrison. But Graham 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 Moore is more mad than Morrison is but it's just interesting how there's the 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 and autistic creations. Again, still on the train of it sounds more like philosophy than magic, but, but you're 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 kind of what it was boiled down to. It sounds like philosophical belief rather than like, ohcus, pocus, you know. Yeah, it's philosophical belief married with ritualistic. practice, but it will

talk. It's called chaos magic to free you up, to make it bigger than it need, then then, then, it makes it as it makes it as inner. I don't like it. It makes it as inner as it is outer. Let's put it that way. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Um, and to be, yeah, so

nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Uh, 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 need it anymore and repeat. And in this episode, we're going to get into like the real nitty gritty. We're going to talk a little bit more about sigils. We're going to introduce creating your own servitor, the psychology and psychological effects behind it all. Don't worry,

Jesse. We'll get into it. Are you playing Warhammer right now? Is it? 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 know 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, occult history, and where they often intertwine that draws me of this stuff. And without magic, what's starting to sound like me?

And without chaos magic, really our world would look incredibly different today. You know chaos clowns. Warhammer. Anyway, continue, that's awesome. 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 Hines claimed 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. Yeah, it's like the difference between 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. You don't necessarily want to jump for cosmic enlightenment before you do the ground's basic stuff first to understand how this shit works is what he's basically saying. Like, don't forget you're just a person, and a lot of this is in your subconscious. He would 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 your 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 too. 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, it's all real 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 Quran and you start praying to the Quran, you know, and that, what is it called? Go on. Yes, go on. You know what I mean? Muslim.

Like you're not your angry letters too. Yeah, yeah, please. You're basically just adjusting your focus to achieve the goal. I think what the chaos 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, 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, right. That's a bad example, but like, there's no, no rule in Christianity. It's closer to, yeah. So it's much closer to in Catholicism in particular. Saints are patron saints of specific things as 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, whether it's like financial help or a 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, and so they're subconscious, it's 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 because the chaos magician is to recognize that Catholicism, Judaism, any religion, you name it, is all a different tool out of the same toolbox to accomplish a result. 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. Right. The belief is the tool. Right. They compare it to like, yeah, like you said, software.

There's, 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 priest feels. Yeah. But you're not, you're not wrong. And as we'll cover, there is, if you are a believer in chaos, magic blowback 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 where you root yourself as a chaos magician. He pushes the metaphor, Heinz does, that urging magicians to treat consensus reality more as like a playground where will and desire will just leave fingerprints. And that 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. There's no power in how you do it. It's more your own willpower behind it. Nothing unnecessary stopping you from using one or the other. It's just 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 ex-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 this sense. And you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking about like the herophant or the magician, like, card. Yeah. And 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 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, from Jesse's perspective is like the chaos magician does truly believe though that whatever it is you're doing. Because remember 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 early like we talked about last week the secret which was like late 90s early 2000s manifesting 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. And have it changed for my better. Again, very villainous, but okay. Very human. Absolutely. Again, Alistair Crowley was extremely selfish and not necessarily a good dude by any spread. That's kind of the dark side of the magician. That's what I was saying is like they're there are ascended people.

They're like they're there they're up on a hill. But sometimes that's good. Sometimes that's bad. Like dark, dark mage versus nice clean wizard. It's the same guy. And while there is blowback, you know, as we'll talk about in the series too, you got to keep in mind to the cast magician believes as well that the world is not ruled by a god or whatever. or like selfish or not, the world is what it is

and they're going to do what they're going to do. And the only risks they have are whatever the blowback is of whatever they're trying to attend. Yeah, like there is no, you know, great ruler who at the end is going to 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 villainous sounding. Almost a billionaire mindset. Wait till we get to the end of the episode. Like, I must stress. Yes. For those of you have not, like, read a lot of books about people who hang out with billionaires.

That's what they are. A lot of them are not religious because they're like, this life is all that matters and get yours. And who cares? Like that's 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. Yeah. We can affect each other. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah.

And that's, yeah. Let's keep going, because we're going to get muddled down in this. We've 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 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. Hine refines the idea with practical kind of bells and whistles, build rituals that spike attention,

fired the glyph at the peak, forget about it in Nosis, 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 attachment 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 Alistair Crowley, Madam 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 backday. 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 got to be exciting. Magic still has to be dangerous. 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 on a 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 servitor.

So spare sigil method is a kind of perfect, thick 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 nosis, whether that means meditation, whether that means having sex, whatever. whatever you have to do to get to the point where you have like you said last week isn't real

hard you know uh anything you have 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 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 no i i don't remember but yeah yeah yeah yeah it's nut 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 that vibe. Absolutely, dude, at fedora on, you know? That's like literally the definition of esoterica if you think about it. A little bit, yeah. So yeah, you enter a state ofnosis, however you have to do it,

with the, and 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 all you have to do for sigil magic. But, you know, while that was kind of put together by Peter Hine, or Phil Hine, rather, the bones of that stuff was very much in Spare's 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 Hyde found it became popular. Found the book? Yeah, it was like during, I think, like a renovation during the area. He's found it in the basement. What?

Like next to his fucking skeleton and 100 cat skeletons? Going to be honest with you, I was so deep in trying to learn the magic. I didn't really look up that moment too deeply. I don't really know how he came across. It's just interesting to think that this wouldn't exist. It's like Emily Dickinson. It's crazy. So with Nosis, again.

Spare talked about knocking the conscious mind offline, letting the subconscious take the shot, putting 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 going to 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, did it work?

You fucked it. You got to let it go. You're contaminating the fucking magical petri dish of shit you got going. Don't think about it. Now, most 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

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 Arjil and Ellis created a sigil that apparently went wildly viral and ended up kind of like

really influencing shit 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 it. It doesn't look familiar to me at all, but the fact that there are so many images.

I've seen it on bags and pins. I'm surprised. Okay, so I'm 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, the, not Stozy. Yeah.

I thought I was going to be like, whoa, I thought of my mind blown, but no. Basically, uh, 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 use, there's a user out there on Reddit. who went by the name of Arjill, A-R-J-I-L. And this account has been inactive for nine years I've discovered. And 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 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 again, it's a dormant now 10-year-old Reddit account. But the glyphs apparently started as a sideline component for glamour 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 called a glamour bomb. And the Ellis sigil 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 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's 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 a his loose crew of people that he gave this idea too. And then they took the idea outside on their own. It's like LFG.

They started to shock the, Yeah, they started to chalk the bolt under New Age shelves at a Barnes & Noble to siphon wish energy from browsers. They hit it beneath highway overpasses that were supposedly eye 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 jive and charm. Every new tag that was both the deposit into the shared battery and land. and lined connecting each of these symbols place to pace,

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 kind of like like Gorilla Street Art meets sympathetic magic handbook. Like a hijacking? Yeah, they hijacked the symbol.

Yeah. And the manual then outlined seven practical uses of the symbol. Tuck 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,

blast it in, or blasted in plain view, so random passers-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 you, is the residence you received. So draw it while giggling at entropy and expect a trickster static

kind of it 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 patterned 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 an occult glyph can 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. Dude, you don't even know what you're hitting on right now. So later, like through the Reddit post, 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 and separate rich. spaces, meaning creating two separate ones, and see whether you can, like, move from one focus

to the other and have 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, that's the only way you can really test this thing is running two different sigils at once for 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 Ellis 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's just out there.

Stay 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 a good vibe if you're going to. Other people who've practiced and done stuff like this,

who've created symbols like this, I also want to talk about, particularly I want to talk about Grant Morrison as well. Now, Grant Morrison likes kind of to say out there that they grew up convinced comics where magic spells kind of printed on cheap paper. If you don't know who Grant Morrison is very quickly, he was born in Glasgow in 1960.

He had an ex-military father and a mother who smuggled apparently escape his 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 picture like he was like serious anti-government guy yeah that it's

it's his yeah this whole episode on him we can do really um and apparently when he's a kid he was just fucking taken in and hailing superhero weeklies like it was his job. Like he loved that shit. And by the late 80s, they were scripting mainstream stuff for DC.

But the real turning point for him came in 1994 when Vertigo Greenlit a creator-owned 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 com.

Yeah. He planned to, uh, they plan to use the title as what they later coined a hyper sigil, uh, which is like a sustained narrative engine designed to echo. amplify and eventually reshape the actual author's actual life. Then that is what Morrison was doing with the Invisible. You know what else people always say is that it people like it's based like the Matrix came from the Invisibles also. Dude, you're going in there.

I promise you. 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. But apparently just this looks uncannily like Morrison's like mirror selfie down to If you saw them, if you saw them in the 80s, they looked 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. They're in a band. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 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 18. 90s and a former NYPD officer initiated into voodoo. It's pretty sick. It's awesome. 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 fed on human fear and conformity. And more, but through this. Seems you're saying 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. Dude, when I started, I'm so glad I got like, I had so much time to do this. When I started the Grant Morrison hole, I was like, that was like two. days of my life. Like, just like, you should reach out to them. Holy shit. I bet you they'd 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. Well, I've got all of it pretty much. That was nuts. And I, like, this is all very true. I'm not lying about any of the shit. The first 12 issues followed a pretty tight structure. Kind of cliche in a way, recruit the team, uh, rate, which is part school, raid a secret Masonic bunker.

And then rescue, obviously, a psychic kit. sales for it were pretty healthy, reviews were glowing, and Morrison's own life suddenly began ticking off the script's wish list. D.C. 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 log. Then, 1995, less than a year later, and the Kathmandu in fact. incident. To trekking in Nepal after a promotional tour,

Morrison contracted... He was his dream, actually. Dude, it's crazy. He contracted a really fucking vicious staff 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 messengers and said he saw math. There's, I mean, literally, literally this week, I think it 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. But local doctors, while they were working on him, predicted that he was, that they were going to go through organ failure. And Morrison apparently was spending, he said, they spent spending. their nights kind of bargaining with whatever intelligence was behind the morphine curtains

he was seeing behind. And he said they would promise to reshape the comic if they were, if they survived. 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 hurled King Mob into a mirrored torture scenario. and mob survived by surrendering ego and embracing death as a data transfer event. Exactly the epiphany Morrison felt while he was in the hospital. Now, critics obviously noticed the total shift in the books.

The books earlier books had, I guess, more of like a punk swagger. It was like the team. Yeah, like come on. They had like a cosmic weirdness to it, tantric sex magic and metaphysical kind of physics, but still in that like bubble captioned 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. They wrote a call to arms in the letters in 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, low, 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 doesn't want it to happen. He's mad about it. 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 guarantee another year.

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. And one public test, a sigil for mainstream recognition of the Invisibles. Two years later, the Wachowski's released the Matrix. airing 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 kind of final act pulled narrative and diary in a walkstep again. And King Mob retired from violence to write novels in Marrakesh. And Morrison in real life bought a flat in Tangier. took Arabic lessons and began wearing linen khthans in interviews,

and a supporting character, Lord Fanny, transitioned genders with a shamanic grace. Morrison came out as non-binary soon after and adopting singular they pronouns and leather skirts on stage panels. Even like disease loops closed. When Mob's lover developed a lethal nanotech infection healed by tantric ritual, Morrison's lingering respiratory issues

cleared out during an ayahuasca ceremony apparently. Like, I don't like... Hell yeah. I used to see this guy around, right? Yeah. Like, they'd be out like by the pool at like a comic event with like babes dressed in like a white suit. Yeah.

Like with like a gold chain with people doing like heathistic acts around them and they just seem to kind of... Yeah. From like the beginning of the comic. Yeah. Him. 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 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, filmmakers laying intention. into shock 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 Chulamadhi podcast resembles a hyper-sigil. Yeah, 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 is fucking sharp. The tortured lung coincidence nearly killed them. Later, they wrote a storyline where King Mob loses a thing and Morrison sliced the same finger on a kitchen mandolin weeks before publication.

Oh, yeah. That happened to me one Thanksgiving and Kelly didn't want to use it for two years. Oh, just made my balls flying to my throat. I was going to say, you really, that was a visceral reaction. Oh, dude, I remember seeing it there on the fucking other side of the mandolin. Uh, and that was, again, weeks before the book was ever public, uh, basically the advice

that they gave, give new hyper-sacist. Vigil 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 side 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 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. Right? 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, set it, forget it. You know, you don't move back. Like Rod Poole, 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. Each anomaly served the narrative.

They kind of already set in motion. Critics stills 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 chaos magician. don't really fucking care. They don't care if it's one of the other. They see 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 makes the Invisibles the most heavily kind of documented sigil chaos magic in modern occult history. It is the biggest piece of sigil work I could find. It was like his own personal fucking mess. magic lab. And I did not know, like, when I was doing this, the Invisibles were like, it was literally him doing, they're 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 procedural. 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. You know, like things that I've bought for years. I have all the Invisible's books on my show. 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, 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, Maybe you're more subconsciously aware of when little things that come up that could help boost your notoriety pop up and you jump on them 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 at any opportunity that arises you should take. 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 as soon as you bust a fucking nut, you think about job promotion, job promotion. You know, the dopamine. That's what happens every time I bust it. Yeah, I know, right? Every single time I bust in it, I'm like, chop promotion! You know what I just realized? This is a deep cut.

But for anyone who's seen, uh, 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 what i will say they add a little little sprinkle of extra to it they basically 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. It doesn't matter 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 will 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 a.m. I'm in the college dorm and he's like, said it. And the crowd goes, and forget it. Yeah, yeah, 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 all. also make note. It's not, it's not evidence for you to,

it's like 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 as part of it. Like, it just feels like that. You're not supposed to step out there and go,

I have 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 to 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, fuck, 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 intent or will, the easier it is for you to forget. if you're like, man, I want a free pizza in 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 let us 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? Yeah. 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 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'd 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 that. Yes. Yeah. And because yeah, you're 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 i was in 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 because they didn't

want them oh yeah i just sort of knew each day that i would get lunch anyway and it just i'd come 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 the 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 knew it was going to 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 it wasn't like I am practicing magic but right correct something kind of happened I like my brain started to control

it in some way 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 a thing that happened. Synchronicity, a weird thing that helped you save money. And did you get to buy whatever he was you were looking to buy when you saved enough money? Yeah, I bought a couple things. I don't remember.

Like, you know, it was like a movie. It was like something you were so excited to get. And you were like, oh, I can do. A game here and there or like go see a flick, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So minimum wage wasn't that different, but inflation was a lot low.

So it went pretty far. So the idea is keep it small 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 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're supposed to just literally, if you're going to logbook it, that's a little bit hard. Well, the logbook 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 logbook out of sight. Put it somewhere you're not looking at it. I like that. You can do like same thing.

You could write this on a piece of paper and seal it in an envelope as well and like slide that somewhere where you forget. It doesn't matter how you do it. I'm just saying if you're going to do it a lot, logbook 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, 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 head space to be doing this shit with. It's not, it's not, it's not even, it shouldn't even be step 10.

You should never like, like soulmate hunt with chaos magic and stuff because it's all going to 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 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 or whatever it still doesn't happen right like the difference between it worked and it didn't work to me seems like pure cosmic luck rather than anything else. But,

absolutely. 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 old. 100%. Yeah. That's exactly what that means.

Or like just like when you go get a parking spot and you just kind of like, know you're going to get one and then you get one eventually. Right. Yeah. And it's, and 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. But the other one, he also really, but can you be positively negative?

Like, I really want, insert name, to suffer in the best, and the best way possible. You know what I mean? Yeah, probably. 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 could be positive or negative outcomes. Like I very much want in certain name to have the worst day ever. Yeah, I mean, people have. We're gonna talk about that too.

We're almost, we're getting there. I know it's a big chunk. But the other thing he also, like the rule two 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 cat,

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, 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 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 remember it's your own will it's still your own will yeah they're still you know you can't just sit there the effort has to be given sigils are more like kind of like a swiss army magic knife in that way uh they're very super cheap they can kind of do a lot of different things like a one purpose it's like a one purpose magic wand exactly that yeah exactly that uh so with that in mind with sigil 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 was going to say, which sounds supernatural. 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 Osman Spear kind of hinted at the idea with his original creations when he referenced something called adivistic 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 he turned it into more of a repeatable protocol like he did with most of the other stuff. And that's what we're going to talk about. Would you say, Alex? Sorry. I'm just trying to imagine what kind of task you could satisfactorily perceive as being done by a server. We're going to talk about, 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. 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.

Like you could draw a cartoon if you have the artistic kind of talent there. And you can picture behind, like, try to 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 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're aware that you're aware you're dreaming. It's called a hypnagogic state in psychology when like, I've had it happen where like,

my eyes are closed. I'm mostly asleep, but suddenly I realize I'm looking at like buildings and I know 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 conscious. I'm like, like, you're trying to get to that point. That's what do 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 are the thought forms you you breathe life into and give focus to until it is entirely on its own and

can and you can't really do anything with it this is that proto state you're much 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 have we talked about kind of software and code before? Like a sort of psychological code that maybe pings their nervous system when the queue 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 and the project that this little project can 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 on your own if you want

Part of this. This is gonna come back I'm just gonna come back of me I'm not gonna do the sigil now But we'll walk through it This one will look at I've written out I don't want to come back on me I don't know this guy

I don't know you guys Let me let me do this Let's build one together This servitor is going to be named We're gonna call this the Pomo Goblin Okay Pomo Goblin I like that we're gonna create the Pomo

Goblin What does the Pomo stand for? Well it's task is simple whenever we feel procrastination sneak in, the Pomo Goblin's supposed to be like, hey, fuck you. Go do those things. 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. You know, that kind of thing. You start procrastinating. I am my manager? What the hell? Yeah. And yeah, and it's, I went with Goblin because, you know, I want it to be annoying. I don't want it to like, if 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, I'll make sense. And then what you're going to do is write down, like, I don't want to procrastinate anymore. Or I wish no longer to procrastinate, and that's what the goblins for. You're going to copy, write that all down, create the sigil, and obviously put your focus into this thing. Keep it a thought form. You can sketch it out if you want.

I didn't sketch it out. I 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 weight of putting it. Then you're going to first you're going to trim surplus words until the line feels like a command. Then remove repeated letters. Then remove vowels if you want.

Rearranged 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. 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 server tour 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 mickey panel of like a mouse. mechanical keyboard also works.

For a pomo goblin, why don't we just say like a physical object that sits near the problem space? A Ness amoebo. What? A Ness amibo. 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 amoebo will be correct. Now, you want to ruin your Nes amoebo 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. 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. Servitor is kind of got to think of them behaving like small neural scripts, small little 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 shot. short contract on a piece of paper. I 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. Fuel arrives for this sigil and for this servitor. When I acknowledge and the prompt and push one, 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. So 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, inert 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 you have the monitors glowing. You know, place this 2B goblin in front of you with the sigil showing. So if we're going to put out the bottom, tilt it, maybe somewhere where you 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 wavers 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 its task has begun. Turn the figure to face you, so I have, 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,

chill, relax, and then come back and get to work. And you're done. That's how it works. That gobbling. That's how you make. That's how you make. In my house.

Yeah. Yeah. The procrastinator. Do we name our goblins anything? Yeah, absolutely. Nice. Because I don't think we should all to have the same goblin.

I want mine to be named like Grinkle. Yeah, grinkle gob. You know, whatever you want to fucking call. No, not Griggle. Gub. Just grinkle. Grinkle the goblin. Grinkle the goblo.

Then to sunset it, to decommission it, 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, you know, felt and responded to. Recite the original intention once, followed by simply saying task complete rest. Wipe the sigil with, if you've painted it, just like isopropyl alcohol. If you carved it, I don't 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.

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. 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 and destroying whatever it was that the,

that the server tour is 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. some rare cases some people have talked about on forums and stuff involve servitors that hop hosts showing up in a roommate's dream

things like that kind of becoming a topa in that way and they're great stories but there's no way I can verify any of them so I'm not going to give them fucking too much credit here too much time here Phil Hines 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. It monitors crypto is so funny, dude. You just become paranoid watching crypto all day. Just get an app. Exactly. It's supposed to be simple tasks,

simple psychic clean code. If you want household helpers and shit like that, it's not what this is for. It's not what it's made for. What if there's like water, like rapidly rising in my wizard tower and I need somebody. 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. Servitors are not,

like, they also, servitors tug probability inside like creators as well. Some people, Use them to like spike their creativity and stuff. Use them to spike co-workers project stuff. Usually doesn't work and ends up kind of moving into you manipulating your workers instead. So that's kind of like what happens when you try and focus it on other people.

Because again, it's all operating through your subconscious and let you know, unless you let it go too long. Pomo Goblin is supposed to be more internal. It's not supposed to be for anybody else than yourself other than yourself. He's a little. He's your own around guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Or whatever you glizzle block the goblin, whatever, fuck you want to call it you know that's what it is i've changed my mind i want them call them bing bang wrinkle is now Bing bang grinkle is now 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 riana is pretty days nothing happened yeah i fail or did foosball my goblin fail if you get two 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 it still fails well how how complicated what are you asking it to do i'm asking it to uh help me write eloquent emails so you just keep it in front it's not and your your emails are just not

become eloquent yeah i keep ending every email with yours fuckly jesse cox do you ever catch it or do you only realize it after the 30 days is over uh i I tried to catch myself, but sometimes I can't help it. What if some, I've been 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 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, because 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 like the message is coming across like i think maybe the reason this guy's not working is because he doesn't have a job to do it's not necessary

yeah okay that's crazy sit on and spin jesse cox that's incredible my Alex what a goddamn point you made like are you kidding me oh god I wish I wrote that in any email that I ever wrote. As we wrap up the part of Servitoris, we move into the back left, the part of this episode. I'll have that done for you by 6 p.m. Set it and spin.

Yeah. Jesse Cox. Jesse Cox. 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 Servitor's,

every shortcut hides a speed trap. Okay? This is the part you were 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 can start hollowing out your friendships

and even the imagination you were trying to like make better, your creativity starts becoming less and less as more, you know, you become more and more isolated from people. Bill Hine 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 in 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. A 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 in like your heart, You're somewhere else. You're traveling.

You didn't bring him 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, as it reminds you, you're supposed to be building the habit alongside the reminder. Right? 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 truly kind of, a slave. I kind of, I've kind of a pair it next to, in a weird sense, mushroom trips, if you don't mind me,

as 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 good and think about it. The point is to come out and then think about what it is you realized in that moment or work through in that moment and then make it part of who you are. Like, 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 joked kind of about swapping belief systems

like programming languages works until the psyche wakes up, not sure which accent 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.

You know, you spend a month venerating Kadesh 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,

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 you in that perspective. One practiser of chaos magic kind of described the symptom as feeling like he'd left the front door open in his head. Voices of past paradigms. Yeah, like he would talk about like voices of past paradigms would like quote unquote walk in at random hours. a Vedantic calm at breakfast, cyberpunk nihilism at lunch, like that kind of shit. We're like,

it was just, there was no grasp on it, on context of what he believed. It's like Johnny Depp. He just doesn't know what accent he has anymore. 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 Jeff Perry. Melting down and realizing all of these identities he was and are like, all just acts. That kind of, yes, that, except for like the,

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 going to 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, uh, behind continue 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 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, and the one I put on here is last because I think this will resonate with a lot of people, particularly you, Jesse. Magical thinking as a lifestyle cope. This is a big thing that 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 tempts the practitioner to apply them to every solvable annoyance in their life.

Need rent? Write a sigil. Serotonin 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.

everything is brushed under the rug and nothing matters anymore. It's all magic at this point. Phil Hines 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 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. Minmaxers, dude. And that's your, and it's minmaxing 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-missing. 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 weaknesses. The eventual bill for him will say like arrives in the form of neglected, neglected work or things like spoon fed relationships that fall apart. 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 going to 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 want out of your life. by putting in the effort alongside it. And as far as 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, there's like problem blowback where he talks about like,

there's like slingshot effects when desire snaps back if handled carelessly. Anecotes 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. 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. So where has it become, 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 1890s where chaos magic was. We're going to start after right in the 80s, where we kind of left off our history. The 1980s. The 1980s.

Where British counterculture is splintering into like punk's 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 onstage autopsy footage. And their co-founder, Genesis Pee. E. Oridge absorbs Peter Carroll's chaos magic primers. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Absorb

chaos magic primer and decides... Just doesn't say anything for like five minutes and he just screamed Genesis porridge. Yeah. Yeah. Rivers at the office is probably like, what? That motherfucker just say 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 just saying it weird. Why is you saying it with borat dude? Because this is how it's spelled? You can't buy my temple. Tell me how you would pronounce that. The temple of psychic youth.

Cich. 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. No, I get it. I get it.

You tell them, not me, man. Genesis Porage definitely wrote this. Let's put it that way. Yes. Yeah. Or we just call it Toppy for short, T-O-P-Y. Okay. This was a loose worldwide network that treats every branch of this do-it-yourself,

chaos magic media as like ritual Bible. T-O-P-Y's mechanics kind of feel weird, but imagine like Patreon, crossed with like occult pen pals, you mail in a stamped envelope, get a photocopied newsletter back, an inside find an quote-unquote access point for the coming month, perhaps draw a sigil in menstrual blood, for instance,

or photograph it, 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. 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 King K rule, all right? He just likes bananas. But for music, yeah, P. Orange launches psychic TV, a shape-shifting band whose live shows

kind of double as open ritual space, Graney with stuff like Graney VHS loops strobe light Spoken word invocations lifted straight From Peter Carroll's notes On Onosis 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 Sychik The exact spotlight that it wanted Shocked parents

banned the newsletters Art students devoured them. Photocopied sigils 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 T-O, that Tappy sort of rewired fringe music visuals with that grainy collage cut-up slogans, biological fluids as ink kind of thing. That's so crazy because Constantine was also in a band just like this.

That's crazy. which is kind of interesting. Oh, by the way, it was Jamie Delano. I said Jenkins earlier. He did not create. Yeah, Jamie Delano. I'm so sorry. Well, no, we got it right.

Oh, Jenkins didn't write on it. Yeah, we got it right by the end of the episode, but someone will already have commented. But 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. Whether the rituals, like, moved external forces or anything else,

Topi demonstrated that Carol's modular chaos magic thrives once you plug it into male art, guerrilla 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 moving in the 90s while this is happening this is when grant morrison steps in and writes the invisibles uh framing the entire series as like the hypercigil 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 uh 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 it can never be undone as long as we're alive. It's literally just the cyberpunk version of the Invisibles. 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 seated, 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's the invisibles and shit. Like, that's how far reaching this is gone.

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&R man at Warner before turning renegade. Jimmy Coddy played guitar in the band's band stuff that became known as the orb and under aliases like the justified ancients of Moomu

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 were like as for forgiveness not for permission and their name and mythology were lifted straight from the Illuminata Trilogy, Robert Anton Wilson's satire that mixes discordian humor with a cult conspiracy.

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 order's next front line. And between 1988 and 1992, the KLF sold millions of singles, 3 a.m. Eternal, last train to Transcentral, Justified as ancient. Yes. Jesus.

Well, issuing press releases that read like other manifestos. 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. it was a prank, if reality is at the end of it all, people believe it's real. And therefore, does it make it real? And at midnight, on the 23rd of August in 1924, Drummond and Caudy, buried a metal suitcase stuffed with 50 pound notes to a disused boathouse on the Scottish

island of Yura. I think that's how you say it, J-U-R-I, the name is J-U-R-R-R-I, with one handheld camera rolling, they poured the cash onto a stone hearth and fucking set it on fire. A pyre worth one million pounds sterling their entire royalty fortune. The film watched the Cave Foundation burn a million quid toward outhouses. Art houses, not outhouses, art houses, art houses in the following year. Viewers booed, cheered, walked out in silence. Tabloids demanded an investigation into whether the burned violation currency

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. A 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, 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 this, is this crap? crossing a line. Did he break a law? It's 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, and 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 logotypes 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 apples bitten fruit and explain almost verbatim that the image

functions like a charging signal. It compresses a feeling and fires it each time the eye meets the curve. 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. Each 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. Uh, 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 around 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 an avatar of an ancient force. Now, at first, it's pure mischief, obviously. Keck 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 not only dig up, they stumble across Peter Carroll's Libernoll and Phil Hines' chaos condensed chaos. They copy sections explaining sigil creation and nosis 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 4chance history with forgotten Keck sigils. The practice evolves its own liturgy. Users type praise Keck when a post-ID lands matching digits. They remix the Egyptian hieroglyph for Keck, two arms upraised into Aski Art. Someone notices the fictional country code Keck, K-E-K, is unclaimed in ISO tables and invents Kekistan, complete with green and black battle flag, loosely parading a Nazi war banner. Suddenly, meme play has a flag, a deity, a pantheon of saints, various different Pepe's, and an obvious enemy in quote, unquote, normy 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 Altright's favorite frog. Wired publishes Internet memes are now an occult ritual, quoting Carol's definition, specifically of sigil almost verbatim. The Southern Poverty Law Center adds the cult of Keck to its extremist watch glossary, noting that participants self-identity as chaos magicians who believe, quote-unquote, mimetic warfare can tilt elections.

Homeland Security, 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, crowdsourced influence operations that mimic a cult initiation. In academic circles, the Association of Internet Researchers hosts 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 mantra,

quote, impose will for get 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 because 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 torres, 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 a. millions in an afternoon. The spillover is measurable, too. I looked. 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 up here, 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, desist the internet boiled down. Second, the ethical questions Carol touched on in the 70s grow thornier when the target of a meme spell might be an electorate rather than a job interview. Consent, blowback, and ownership of narrative became, become geopolitical issues once government analysis start quoting Liber fucking null. Now, whether the cult of Keck actually swayed any 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 dragged chaos magic vocabulary into fucking Senate hearing footnotes.

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 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 fiberoptic instant speed. Charged or not, its trajectory proves

the central chaos claim. Imagination, ritualize, 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 Spear sketches his weird shit in 1900. Peter Carroll systemizes them in the 70s. Genesis P. Orange, then weaponizes them for art and punk music and the industrial art of the 80s. KLF burns a million pounds in the 90s to prove money is imaginary. Grant Morrison folds a theory into a comic that leaks into the matrix and changes his entire life.

In Hollywood consciousness in the late 90s, 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-partum. Boys. And everybody listening, how are you feeling about that last little bit of... Why you gotta, why you know what? What's the matter with you?

I was fine with porridge. I love porridge. But you can, you have to look at the effects. Maybe this is blowback. Maybe this is the blowback. But I know people are like, it's all bullshit. I even maybe agree with you.

It's all bullshit. But 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 chaos magic by Peter Carroll specifically changed human history. Matrix, Invisibles, all of that is literally based directly. on chaos magic and chaos magic is directly referenced in branding

shit and in military and government research shit chaos magic itself like changed our we it would be different 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 whatever it was the, uh, 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're like, multi-day rabbit hole of like, holy shit. I did not know this stuff. We need the, uh, 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, but boy, I don't remember. I didn't, like, I knew Keck, obviously I knew Keck got crazy popular and I knew it became a very right wing kind of thing. I didn't know about the chaos magic. It feels like, like, Keck clearly for me is that like, wow, online meme, goof, laugh

like thing. Like, because that was the kukukukuk, kuk, kuk, back in the day. But Kekistan, I remember this. I remember the whole, it's still going. I mean, yeah, the guy. Right. But 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 the Ellis. It's just like the Ellis sigil. Or 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. 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 ask 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 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 metric. It has inevitably, however, made an impact on history. It's mighty chaotic. You're the snake, you guys. We're up to go do a minisone. Here of the snake, guys. Here the snake. Yeah, we've got to 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 weird. Anyway, we're off to go do a Minnesota, patreon.com slash shulam and I pod where you can go support us in all of our endeavors. Thank you all so much.

Grab those live show tickets while they're day. The number. Jim Carrey. One song. What's this? It's 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 her. my wife go, holy shit, get out here. So I quickly dashed back outside. She's looking up the sky in the fall. I look up too, and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky.