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Golden Fiction

This was originally posted to Key23.net waaaaay back in the day. It was the subject of a terrible and ridiculous flame war. The result was that I have rarely discussed or written about magic since. Writing was never about posturing or being a writer to me. It was only about sharing ideas and experiences. The fact that I couldn't do that in a community of presumably like-minded individuals (who I mistakenly thought would be mutually supportive) without people getting personal with me was so demoralizing that I simply stopped. The only reason I am sharing this now is because someone that I care about and respect asked me to.

Golden Fiction: A Brief Discourse On Hypersigils

by Sor. Ceilede 789

I've been asked repeatedly to expound on this topic as I refer to it in many communications with my fellow magicians. A short and succinct reply has not been forthcoming. I've found myself wallowing in material about a topic that is just too consuming and overwhelming, and too large! Truly, I could write an entire book about this process and my experiences with it. I even created a hypersigil about creating hypersigils! These difficulties aside, I know I must begin the dialogue somehow. I've done my best at paring down the information into something somewhat easily digestible.
 
What is a hypersigil?
 
Ever since Grant Morrison coined the term "hypersigil" as a means to describe his work with The Invisibles, it seems like people have been asking "what the heck is a hypersigil anyway?" I understood it right away because it is something I'd been doing for years without a name for the practice. First and foremost, a hypersigil is narrative magic. It is a story meant to cause change. The hypersigil has value as a personal and private narrative, but it can also be shared with others. In this way, the hypersigil becomes a meme that can function as an enchantment.
 
How stories have shaped us! Stories have kept us going all throughout the ages, whether they were clever tales known to be allegorical or those taken to be truth and turned into religion. The most powerful stories move us to do incredible things; sometimes miraculous and sometimes horrific.
 
How does a hypersigil differ from your average glyph or mantra type sigil?
 
A sigil is an abbreviated ritual. It contains all the elements of a good full-blown psychodrama. It has intent, symbolism, altered state of consciousness - all the things that are necessary for the purpose to be embedded into the subconscious and trickle down into the unconscious collective.
 
A hypersigil, then, is a ritual expanded far beyond the usual forms of glyph or psychodrama. A hypersigil is more than one sentence about desire, oftentimes representing a whole bundle of related desires. For this reason, hypersigils are excellent as a means of fueling transformative processes.
 
A simple glyph type sigil is usually meant to be charged and forgotten, whereas a hypersigil is meant to be dwelled upon as an ongoing creation ritual of daydream. The hypersigil functions as a two-way axis, images and symbols of desire being fed into the subconscious and received from the depths as flashes of insight and inspiration. A simple sigil is usually much more straight-forward. One throws the symbol of desire down the well, but does not necessarily draw the bucket back up to receive the Gnostic water.
 
How does one go about creating a hypersigil?
 
With the single-shot glyph-type sigil, you have a sentence of desire encoded into a symbol that the subconscious mind can absorb readily. With a hypersigil, the details of what you desire and what you intend as the outcome are encoded into elements of story.
 
A sorrowful woman who wants to free herself from the bondage of her oppressive life might symbolize herself as a beautiful bird locked inside a rusty cage. If she desires romance, she might tell of a handsome prince or adventurer coming to her rescue, overthrowing her cruel keeper and unlocking the cage.
 
My suggestion is that the magician sit down and outline what is desired. This is similar to defining a statement of intent, but wording doesn't seem quite as important here as with the ordinary sigil. Describing what is desired and what the outcome must be in the most precise way possible is simply prudent planning.
 
The magician then takes this paragraph or list of desire and turns it into a narrative. Let the story become as real to you as possible. See everything, hear everything, smell and taste and let it consume you on the inside. It is a controlled obsession you are looking for. It must have the quality of being overwhelming without actually overwhelming you. It must be a form of truth but not the ultimate truth. Using words to tell your story is the most obvious method, but it is certainly not the only method.
 
The altered state of consciousness necessary to fuel the story is the act of creation itself. If you've ever gotten consumed in the creation of something just for the sake of creation, you must know what I mean. In this state of kairos, you are not self-conscious. You are simply expressing. You become single-pointedly focused on the act of creation.
 
It may take a long time to get the elements of the story just right, and the story may never feel complete. Remember that this is often an ongoing process and it is okay not to be "done." Simply do your best to make sure the elements of the story feel right to you at an instinctual level. I strongly suggest that you employ some form of trance in which to receive dream symbolism relevant to your story. In my own practice, this became a kind of channeling in which I communed with characters in my stories.
 
What are some different types of hypersigils?
 
I've learned that the narrative magic of hypersigils can work in an incredibly wide variety of genre and media. I tend to use the fantasy, sci-fi or horror genres because these appeal to me the most, but there's no reason a romance, mystery or slapstick comedy couldn't work. My hypersigils usually take the form of intense daydreams, guided journeys, pathworkings and ecstatic Gnostic experiences relating to ongoing timelines on other planets. I've also created metarealities that intersect almost seamlessly with our consensus reality. However, hypersigil seems to lend itself well to the entire span of artistic expression. Music, plays, screenplays, poetry cycles,novels, sculpture - you name it, and I could describe the use with narrative magic. If you are an intensely creative person, you'll most likely find your hypersigils expressing themselves in more than one form. I've drawn pictures, brought back poetry and transcripts of conversations from my hypersigil worlds. I've injected knowledge about my metarealities into various online forums, and more.
 
I hope that this small and humble missive sheds some light on the practice of hypersigiling, and inspires further exploration into the mysteries of storytelling. Good luck.

A Red Threatening Sky

 

Please come, please come.

Affirmation.

When I am in the company of greatness, and I am often in the company of greatness, I can start to feel like a very small pale human amongst very tall gloriously golden trees. Ancient trees. Wise trees. The temptation to become little is strong, to squish my heart into a little paper ball of failed dreams and smeared ink. But instead my heart is precocious. She beats like a proud little bird on the gael. I will not give in to feelings of inferiority! I too have a vision and a spirit that sings! I know that what's inside me is the same greatness as the greatness inside of you. We are one water.

What's Boredom? Who is Bored?

Boredom. I really don't get it. The only time I am ever bored is if I'm waiting on someone else. I get anxious because I want to start doing, but I don't necessarily have time to start. Know what I mean?

We, who are privileged enough with the wealth to be reading and writing this on the internet, are living in a world of miracles where there is so much information available, so much to occupy the mind and the hands. You've probably heard the phrase "if you're bored, you're boring" and as much as I hate the cliché, I think it's probably true. Find something to do with your hands. Transform yourself into the kind of person you find the most admirable and interesting. (That is High Magic.)

Why are you stopping yourself from doing the things you know you need to do? Why aren't you pushing forward in spite of your doubts and second-guesses, faking creativity until it comes? It is your aversion to these things that slows you down. You're short-changing yourself with self-loathing. Every little bit helps. Experience accrues in a spiral pattern. What is boredom, but a lack of ingenuity, a fear of your own fearlessness, the fire in your belly going dark? DO NOT LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU. Death is down that way. Boredom is bred in stagnation and stagnation is that death.

There's an endless amount of fascinations in the world, endless forms and permutations. There is so much to do that we can start to feel overwhelmed by it. You may not consciously realize it now, but you have a destiny in mind for yourself. There is something in this world that you are passionate about, that you can accept and claim as your own purpose for being here. So start doing it. Here's how:

Make a list. What are the activities and ideas that make you feel most alive? Go towards those things in any way you can. You may not be good at it now, but believe me, anything you put your attention to can grow within you. It all accrues. You may not be able to live within your fondest thoughts in this life, but you can talk about them and by communicating them, enrich others and possibly even make them more likely to be manifested at some time in the future. Take Buckminster Fuller for example. Plenty of the things he dreamed of never came to fruition in his life, but they still inspire us today. It is a labor of love and if you love yourself (if you are not afraid to love yourself), you will never short-change yourself with self-doubt again. There is only the love and service to yourself and your dreams.

And by the way, don't be afraid to love yourself. You are strong enough to do it. Be bold and let that internal fire grow until it roars.

Visions of the Al Azif

Sunday, November 1st at The Foundry, London.

Raymond Salvatore Harmon presents:

Visions of the Al Azif, inspired by the writings of HP Lovecraft.

A Day of the Dead media performance.

Join us this Day of the Dead for an evening of cinematic ritual performance by Raymond Salvatore Harmon at London's legendary Foundry.

'Visions of the Al Azif' is a cinematic meditation of the altered states explored by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon.

The Al Azif (H.P. Lovercraft's famed Necronomicon) was a massive collection of the madness induced poetic hallucinations of its author. Similar in structure to other Sufic works of the period the Al Azif
speaks of unheard of eons before man walked the earth. Populated with demons and other creatures of questionable age who had come to earth seeking refuge from the emptiness of space.

The evening's performance will be the first screening of these rare and illusive documents of the visionary states that must be obtained in order to communicate with the Great Old Ones of mankind's forgotten past. These detailed organic abstractions illustrate the vivid hallucinatory states and madness inducing transcendental experiences that led to the author's untimely death.

The performance will take place in the catacombs under the Foundry.

Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor and Andy Sharp of English Heretic will be creating the sonic variable for the Visions of the Al Azif performance.

Free admission.

Performance starts at 9pm sharp.

The Foundry
84-86 GREAT EASTERN STREET
London
02077396900
foundry.tv

The Art of Fever

"Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending."-Maria Robinson

Good morning. I'd like to say today is a new day to make new mistakes, but really, today is a continuation of all that has come before. Everything we will do flows from our past experiences. Reality is built on a bedrock of history. If you can do something new that you've never done before, I applaud you. I answered a ringing payphone at the airport recently. I had never done that before, and you know who was calling? A telemarketer. That figures. I was hoping it was opportunity this time, but you know, you really are better off if opportunity comes knocking at your door. That way you can grasp it before it slips away.

Today, I would like to say that my fever is because The Secret works. I set out to be sick and I am. Why would anyone do that? I feel like my body needs these kinds of challenges once in awhile. I'm not going to say that whatever doesn't kill me will make me stronger because I've learned that isn't even true. Some things just break you down. Like cancer. But in my case, I take a lot from working through sickness and pain. I have learned patience. I have learned how to care for my body.

This is how you know when you're growing old: you start caring about what you put into your body because you realize it is winding down and if you don't start taking care of yourself, the rest of your life is basically going to suck. And also when you start to care about politics because suddenly you understand that the decisions other people make for you are actually affecting your life, your wellbeing, your livelihood. The Little Prince is still my favorite book, the star I try to navigate by.

I have often spoken of how much I love the state of feverdream. It feels good to let the mind become unhinged and unbound by conventional rules of rationality and language, to feel that those things take a backseat to pure expression at these times.

So enjoy being sick sometimes. Mandatory downtime that will result in a brighter new day after the sickness has gone. Enjoy the struggle, watch yourself watching yourself. Your aversion to unpleasant experiences is often what hurts the most.

She came to me...

Although I am an atheist, I work heavily with the characters we know as gods. Tonight I read Taylor Ellwood's beautiful account of an experience he had with Babalon. Communion with the gods isn't something I talk about very often with anyone so I was pleased that Taylor's experience was so very like the experiences I've had with the forms. Sometimes they come to you out of nowhere, demanding an audience and speaking in the voice of your true will.

Enjoy.

She came to me

The Abattoir Pages

Guerrilla Zoo and FoolishPeople present The Abattoir Pages, a terrifying immersive Halloween experience, hosted in a vast, secret subterranean landscape that was once one of London's largest abattoirs. 

The Abattoir Pages combines immersive performance, art installation, haunting and treasure hunt-style activity to form a labyrinth of mystery and horror, exposing the earliest Gaelic and Pagan rites. Once inside, audience members will be free to explore the abandoned underground chambers, join the secret party or may be caught in the middle of the most terrifying of puzzles. 

This Hallowe’en, the infamous horror author Helen Mayer will hold court at a debauched secret party. She will share the perverse and warped research conducted inside the old abandoned abattoir, which was the genesis of her greatest work. In this dark playground, the very nature of human terror has been tested, abused and fed into the living story 'The Forest'. 

The author invites you to solve the puzzle and unlock the terrifying history within the old and powerful pages hidden throughout the slaughterhouse. Each holds a key to learning the truth of an ancient tale, which will ensure your survival. 

Tonight, a debt will be repaid to blood dishonoured. An eternal nightmare rises up from the depths of the dark boreal forest, in the shadow of the mountain. It comes to feed on new meat inside an old abattoir.

• 22 October - 1 November 2009
7.30pm, 8.30pm & 9.30pm entrance times

• Halloween Matinee Performances Sat 31st Oct & Sun 1st Nov 4.00pm

• Location: The Old Abattoir, 187- 211 St. John's Street, Clerkenwell, London. EC1V 4LS

More info: http://www.apocryphon.org