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Foreword
by Dale Scheisse
Some time ago, as a wet-behind-the-ears sales manager, I was
privileged to witness a dynamic young speaker address an audience
of formidable business leaders from the YPO. before my doubting
gaze, this hardcore group of prominent CEOs and executive heads
went suddenly boggle-eyed, gaping like unterwasserkinder as the
dazzling speaker fertilised their imaginations with his potent
methods for 'perpetual self-re-definition'. Clapping like retards
in wool hats, the titans of Wall Street and Madison Avenue played
follow-my-leader through the corridors of the Convention Center
Hotel, exposing themselves to sympathetic maids, guest and
bellboys at every turn.
The subject of this entrancing talk/stroke/orgy? Using magic to
improve your business.
The charismatic speaker? Grant Morrison.
As Grant talked, I was introduced to the idea of corporations as
living thoughtforms. The Dow Jones Company Index or 'dictionary of
demons', as Grant put it, stood revealed as the first great
grimoire of a new magical century. He demonstrated the use of
brands and logos as fastbreeding memetic sigil-bombs, engineered
to colonise and paralyze unprotected imaginative spaces within
moments. He showed his audience just how much damage one of their
competitors could cause with only a little knowledge of advanced
magical martial arts and some basic Neuro-Linguistic Programming
and Feng-shui skills.
It was clear to me that I was seeing something quite special. A
new voice and a new energy had arrived in the business community
and those jaded entrepreneurs knew it.
Since then I've continued to watch Grant's eerie, mesmeric talents
develop over the years and have shared podiums with him all over
the world. I've tried to analyze his style but I think it�s best
just to sit back and watch the man himself. Grant looks straight
into your fourth eye, the one you think no-one knows about and
delivers a message of personal change and monetary gain that just
demands all your attention.
So why magic ? Why now ?
Look around! The companies Grant and I consult with are already
mutating themselves into non-linear viral formats as we leave the
industrial era behind like the arse-ring of a rocket and engage
warp factor 90 for the imaginal age of the coming decade.
Why do you think Buffy, Xena, Harry and Sabrina are so popular ?
Why do you think Borders bookshop now sells 'Voodoo Spell Kits'
for love and revenge ?
Our parents were the inheritors of existential culture which grew
up in the ruins of World War 2. Now, just imagine that apocalyptic
war for a moment, really think about what it meant to have real
evil empires hungering for your very freedom. Think about bombs
falling on your town and the possibility of losing it all. Having
to die or capitulate as jackbooted soldiers marched through your
house. Think for a moment how it must have felt to survive the mud
and the blood and the slime of death camps. Ruined cities and
human remains.
They found it hard to believe in anything after that, you can be
sure. The huge religious faith structures bequeathed by
their parents had failed to account for the savagery of human
behaviour during the war-century. Good and evil meant
nothing any more. "What god would allow this ???" they cried. And,
missing the point, rejected spirit altogether.
These people grew up a little fucked in the head. But forgive them
if you can: they went through humanity's dark nightof the soul so we wouldn't have to.
That doesn't mean we can trust any of their bleak philosophies.
And no amount of covering it up can hold back the tide of the
repressed; after half a century of denial, people are
admitting the truth again - the world of 'spirit', of action at
distance and prediction and contact with 'alien'
intelligences is as real as the world of telephone calls and
quantum physics, e-mails, downsizing and bullets.
It shouldn't come as any surprise; people have been writing down
reports and detailed instructions for thousands of
years. Did you honestly believe all those brilliant Buddhist
sages, Christian mystics, Muslim sufis, witches, alchemists
and 'occultists' were just blowing it out through their asses?
Get with it. Magic is real. It works like gas. Everyone can use
it.
And everyone wants to.
WHY MAGIC?
Because it's magic time.
Grant Morrison knows this better than anyone. In this baffling
anti-matter topsy-turve where great opportunity and
zero job security exist side by side, magic can keep us flexible,
adaptive, and ready for tumultous change.
POP MAGIC! will give you an insight into the tools, the ideas and
the potentially life-changing high-performance
strategies of today's magical innovators.
This book fascinates the tits off me. Read, then do. Read then do
Dale Scheisse
(Dale Scheisse is Creative Director at Winston-Claire Cognitive
Management Associates a division of Sony-Manticore
responsible for management training, consulting and executive
magic. He is author of Man and Salesman, Games the
Clever Play and co-author with Grant Morrison of the best-selling
sales classic Never Mind the Products)
PART 1
THINKING ABOUT IT
All you need to begin the practise of magic is concentration,
imagination and the ability to laugh at yourself and learn
from mistakes. Some people like to dress up as Egyptians or monks
to get themselves in the mood, others wear animal
masks or Barbarella costumes. The use of ritual paraphernalia
functions as an aid to the imagination only.
Anything you can imagine, anything you can symbolise, can be made
real and produce magical changes in your
environment.
FIRST STEPS ON THE PATH
Magic is easy to do. Dozens of rulebooks and instruction manuals
are available in the occult sections of most modern
bookstores. Many of the older manuals were written during times
when a powerful and vindictive Church apparatus
was attempting to suppress all roads to the truth but most of them
are generally so heavily coded and disguised
behind arcane symbol systems that it�s hardly worth the bother -
except for an idea of how other people used THEIR
imaginative powers to interpret non-physical contacts and
communications.
Aleister Crowley - magic's Picasso - wrote this and I can't say it
any better than he did.
"In this book it is spoken of the sephiroth & the paths, of
spirits & conjurations, of gods, spheres, & planes & many
other things which may or may not exist.
It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain
things, certain results follow; students are most earnestly warned
against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to
any of them."
This is the most important rule of all which is why it's here at
the start. As you continue to learn and develop your
own psychocosms and styles of magical practise, as you encounter
stranger and stranger denizens of the Hellworlds
and Hyperworlds, you'll come back to these words of wisdom again
and again with a new understanding each time.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN
Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician,
practise magic every day.
Be honest abut your progress, your successes and failures.
Tripping on 500 mushrooms might loosen your astral
sphincter a little but it will not generally confer upon you any
of the benefits of the magic I'm discussing here.
Magic is about what you bring BACK from the Shining Realms of the
Uberconscious. The magician dives into the
Immense Other in search of tips and hints and treasures s/he can
bring home to enrich life in the solid world.
And if necessary, Fake it till you make it.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 2
Read lots of books on the subject to get in the mood. Talking
about magic with non-magicians is like talking to virgins about
shagging. Reading about magic is like reading about sex; it will
get you horny for the real thingbut it won't give you nearly as
much fun.
Reading will give you a feel for what's crap and what can usefully
be adapted to your own style. Develop discrimination. Don't buy
into cults, aliens, paranoia, or complacency. Learn who to trust
and who to steer clear of.
HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN 3
Put down the books, stop making excuses and START.
MAGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Magical consciousness is a particular way of seeing and
interacting with the real world. I experience it as what I can
only describe as a 'head-click', a feeling of absolute certainty
accompanying a perceptual shift which gives real world
transactions the numinous, uncanny feeling of dreams. Magical
consciousness is a way of experiencing and participating with the
local environment in a heightened, significant manner, similiar to
the effects of some drug trips, Salvador Dali's
'Paranoiac/critical' method, Near death experiences etc. many
Precognitive and telepathic latencies become more active during
periods of magical consciousness. This is the state in which
tealeaves are read, curses are cast, goals are scored, poems are
written.
Magical Consciousness can be practised until it merges with and
becomes everyday consciousness. Maintained
at these levels it could interfere with your lifestyle unless you
have one which supports long periods of richly
associative thought.
EXERCISE 1
As a first exercise in magical consciousness spend five minutes
looking at everything around you as if ALL OF IT was trying to
tell you something very important. How did that lightbulb come to
be here exactly ? Why does the murder victim in the newspaper have
the same unusual surname as your father-in-law ? Why did the phone
ring, just at that moment and what were you thinking ? What's that
waterstain stain on the wall of the building opposite ? How does
it make you feel ?
Five minutes of focus during which everything is significant,
everything is luminous and heavy with meaning,
like the objects seen in dreams.
Go.
EXERCISE 2
Next, relax, go for a walk and interpret everything you see on the
way as a message from the Infinite to you.
Watch for patterns in the flight of birds. Make oracular sentences
from the letters on car number plates. Look
at the way buildings move against the skyline. The noises on the
streets, voices cut into rapid, almost
subliminal commands and pleas. Listen between the lines. Walk as
far and for as long as you feel comfortable.
The more aimless, the more you walk for the sake of pure
experience, the further into magical consciousness
you will be immersed.
Magical consciousness resembles states of light meditation,
'hypnagogic' pre-sleep trance or alpha wave brain
activity.
SIGILS
The sigil technique was reconceptualised and modernised by Austin
Osman Spare in the early 20c and popularised by Chaos Magicians
and the Temple of Psychic Youth in the 1980s.
The sigil takes a magical desire or intent - let's say 'IT IS MY
DESIRE TO VISIT RWANDA' (you can, of course, put any desire you
want in there) and folds it down, creating a highly-charged
symbol. The desire is then forgotten. Only the symbol remains and
can then be charged to full potency when the magician chooses.
Forgetting the desire in its verbal form can be difficult if
you've started too ambitiously. There's no point charging a sigil
to win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket. Start with stuff
that's not too emotionally-involving. I usually sigilise to meet
people I'm interested in, or for particular qualities I'll need in
a given situation. I've also used sigils for healing, for locating
lost objects and for mass global change. I�ve been using them for
twenty years and they ALWAYS work.
For me, the period between launching the sigil and its
manifestation as a real world event is usually 3 days, 3 weeks or
3 months depending on the variables involved.
Sigils ALWAYS work. If you encounter any problems getting them to
work for you, let us know.
So. Begin your desire�s transformation into pure throbbing symbol
like this:
First remove the vowels and the repeating letters to leave a
string of consonants - TSMYDRVWN.
Now start squashing the string down, throwing out or combining
lines and playing with the letters until only an appropriately
witchy-looking glyph is left. When you're satisfied it's done, you
may wind up with something like this:
Most homemade sigils look a little spooky or alien - like UFO
writing or Witchy wall-scratchings. There are no rules as to how
your sigil should look as long as it WORKS for you. RESULTS ONLY
are important at this stage. If something doesn't work, try
something else. The point is not to believe in magic, the point is
to do it and see how it works.
Charging and launching your sigil is the fun part (it's often
advisable to make up a bunch of sigils and charge them up later
when you've forgotten what they originally represented).
Now, most of us find it difficult at first to maintain the precise
Zen-like concentration necessary to work large-scale magic. This
concentration can be learned with time and effort but in the
meantime, sigils make it easy to sidestep years of training. To
charge your sigil you must concentrate on its shape, and hold that
form in your mind as you evacuate all other thoughts.
Almost impossible, you might say, but the human body has various
mechanisms for inducing brief 'no-mind' states. Fasting, spinning,
intense exhaustion, fear, sex, the fight-or-flight response will
all do the trick. I have charged sigils while bungee-jumping,
lying dying in a hospital bed, experiencing a total solar eclipse
and dancing to Techno. All of these methods proved to be highly
effective but for the eager beginner nothing beats the wank
technique.
Magical masturbation is more fun than the secular hand shandy, and
all it requires is this: at the moment of orgasm, you must see the
image of your chosen sigil blazing before the eyes in your mind
and project it outwards into the ethereal mediaspheres and
logoverses where desires swarm and condense into flesh. The sigil
can be written on paper, on your hand or your chest, on the
forehead of a lover or wherever you think it will be most
effective.
At the moment of orgasm, the mind blinks. Into this blink, this
abyssal crack in perception, a sigil can be launched.
When the peak passes and the sigil has been launched, feel free to
roll over and return to your fever dreams of Tom Cruise wielding
the cat o'twelve tails as cruel Lestat while Sarah Michelle
Gellar, unable to resist her brutal transformation into a slutty
undead bitch, gets off on drinking dog blood...
Or whatever sick thing makes it easy. The sigil is now safely on
its way and you may continue with your life and await results.
The sigil is the first and one of the most effective weapons in
the arsenal of any modern magician. In upcoming chapters we'll
explore new developments of the basic sigil concept: learn the
science behind corporate hunter-killer sigils like the McDonald's
'M', and how to create incredibly powerful unfolding narrative
hypersigils like THE INVISIBLES comic book.
SPECULATOR TIP:
The first person to create and launch a mass market glossy magic
magazine for young women will become as rich in the first decade
of 21c. as the creators of 'Loaded' magazine became in the last
decade of 20c.
PART TWO |
