Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

A few months ago, I was invited to speak at a day of talks about chaos magick in Bilbao. I agreed, and then googled where Bilbao actually was…

At the southern edge of the Bay of Biscay, in the Basque country, Bilbao is a northern industrial city. Therefore, grim, I suspected. The airfare arrived the next day, courtesy of some unexpected proofreading work, and I booked my flights. I packed for cold weather, with a waterproof coat as my prize last minute purchase! Optimistically I bought some sunblock at the airport. Both proved essential, as Blibao’s weather is the most abruptly changeable I have ever encountered.

The locals seemed very friendly, the food delicious, and the city easy to enjoy. Not grim at all, although certainly robust in places.

The talk itself presented a few issues. I cannot speak any Spanish, and my audience was unlikely to have much English. Making an opportunity out of this, I gave a talk on language and non-verbal communication. I include the notes below:

Introduction

¡Hola! No hablo nada de castellano. Es una pena, lo siento mucho. Mi amigo traducirá por mí, y voy a tratar de ayudar mediante el uso de gestos.

[Hi! I do not speak any Spanish. This is sad. I am very sorry. My friend will translate for me, and I shall try to help by using gestures.]

Words shape our thoughts. They are the containers of our concepts, or we can think of them as the handles by which we move abstract ideas around in relation to one another.

These sounds that indicate either physical objects, like this table, or non-physical objects, like April (Abril), allow our species to share our intelligence and emotions with each other. With this group mind, we can achieve different things than as individuals.

BUT!

Words alone only communicate a small amount. Most of our evolutionary past did not use ‘words’. Other signals gave us ways to share information and emotions.

Knowing another person’s internal emotional state proves vital. Our current technological social media recognises this as the primary motivation, shared status updates are where it begins.

Acting together as a group has always been important. In ritual space we often need to co-ordinate our movements. Giving verbal instructions can interrupt the flow of the ritual.

Today we can see if we can perform a ritual, using a few words as possible.

We will be creating parts of it together too, and as we do not share expertise in one language we will need to communicate using other tools as well as words.

There are chalks to draw with, we can use sounds and gestures. We will practice these in a moment.

Words are used so much today as we type and write to each other so easily. We sometimes forget to learn about other ways of listening to others, ways of understanding what they really feel or know.

Magicians like to escape from the patterns and traps of the usual. We sometimes use made up languages (so, not like the ‘real’ ones we all speak everyday…), like Enochian, or ancient ones like Latin or Greek, or strange sounding multi syllabic Ouranian barbaric. This gives the narrative verbal parts of our awareness something to play with, while our consciousness can then focus on getting meaning from other levels of communication signs.

If we add in a simple repetitive set of movements, to entertain the bodily awareness too, our intellect is freed to wander, to see directly what remains outside of words, outside of existing categories. The attention floats free, as in los sueños. And, this helps us to find ourselves in magickal states of consciousness.

Rituals often require these components, meaningless sound, and repetitive movements.

Today we will do a ritual which we construct as a group.

We will do the whole process with very few words, using sounds, and movements.

The basic elements of Bilbao

SOI

*takes paper. Writes on it, big* This is a spell, the result: For all of us to gain the power to understand what people are REALLY saying to us, by paying attention to their non-verbal communication.

Explain charging stuff in centre

The power of the spell becomes alive when we charge it, a word which has echoes of charging a phone with energy.

It also means to give instructions, to give responsibility for a task.

These objects *place them on paper* will catch the charge, and act as talismans to carry this spell with us, to help it to come back from the ritual into our daily lives, acting as a physical reminder (until we lose it, by which time it won’t matter as we will be the talismans ourselves…).

Charging a thing can take many forms *demonstrates*

Elements

Many systems use four elements one for each direction. *demonstrate* Other qualities can be mapped onto these four, according to local cultural and geographical influences.

Glossolalia

We do not all know a common language, so we will just make random sounds. Practicing: Take a breath, let the air out through open mouth. Let the air make sounds, as it wishes to.

Sound & movement

*Get groups to make up elemental evocation, and they each charge the spell with their elemental power*

Four groups

*People into four groups* Name each element.

Say stuff about each one.

Chalks

Give chalks out/have them in situ in advance

Charge stuff in centre, by non-verbally leading the group through holding hands and raising cone of power.

Everyone gets a talisman or several, moment of silence while holding them before breaking out into laughter.

The group of nearly 20 people joined in with gusto, and the talismans worked well, with very few problems with communicating during our stay! Some intelligent questions were asked, and excellent conversations had.

I was in Bristol recently, one of my favourite cities in Britain. A city in many parts of which I have lived, done extensive psychogeography, and where I continue to visit often. Like London, indeed like many urban centres in Britain, Bristol has a rich and delightful mix of cultures, styles, ethnic groups and more. The same cannot be said for northern Devon where I now reside and where, at this time of an imminent general election, the signs of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) and the Conservative Party appear in the fields and hedgerows.

Historically, support for the right-wing Conservatives, and now for the (similarly right-wing) UKIPs is predominantly located in more rural regions of England. That’s not to say that support for right-wing approaches is limited to those resident outside cities. I recall, somewhat to my surprise, Pete Carroll proffering me a flyer promoting what I now recognise as a nascent UKIP while we were in a Bristolian pub many years ago. Seems that the intervening 20 or so years haven’t significantly changed Pete’s party political views (as you can read here. Though, he does declare himself as a Conservative voter this time round).

The current election slogan of the Conservative Party is ‘For a Better, More Secure Future’ and this for me summarises the attitude of what we might broadly understand as the left vs right-wing political approaches. Generally right-wing attitudes tend towards maintaining the status quo (as understood by those who are economically successful: those with inherited wealth, landowners and petty bourgeoisie). This conservativism seeks to keep things as they are; in the words of the Conservative Party to make the future more ‘secure’.

House party

Right-wing ideologies may well be rooted in a neurological style. (Also see here for more on the construct of binary divisions in society, esp ‘them/us’. NW). Sometimes we need quick, clear, simple solutions (though we should be mindful of this). When we are being attacked by a tiger we need to fight or run, and we need to make this decision quickly and definitely. Meanwhile left-wing approaches are good for when we are dealing with more nuanced, complex situations, where the issue isn’t so much about making a grand decision as it is about understanding (and trying to subtly influence) things. A good example of this is the progress made against racism, which has, broadly speaking, emerged as a project from left-wing discourses. While some older people, and those in reactive right-wing mode, are prepared to embrace racist beliefs, for most younger people the idea that black humans are not as good as white humans has been successfully challenged and changed in many environments in Britain (such as schools, employment law, media etc).

Groups such as the UKIP, and indeed the Conservative vision of a ‘more secure’ future, generate a series of scary bogeymen in order to justify their swift, decisive, right-wing style policies; the hoards of Islamic militants in the UK intend on instituting Sharia Law; the ceaseless march of wind turbines across the country, ruining the ‘traditional’ landscape of Britain (the beauty of enclosed monoculture fields and electricity pylons…); a supposedly homogenous (and of course ahistoric) British culture being destroyed by the rapacious money-grabbing activities of immigrants; and more especially (in the case of the bogeyman set-up by the UKIP) an undemocratic European Union bent on taking away British sovereignty, turning our island into a hell of legal aliens and metric measurements.

Decision tree

In practice, the fear driven reactive policies of groups such as the UKIP appeal to folk who believe they have something to lose, and this concern is typically the shadow of the normal ‘clanning instinct‘ that humans possess. Yet even in rural regions this instinct is taking some fascinating forms in the current general election. In a constituency near me while the UKIPs seem to be doing better in the polls than the Conservatives, 37% of the electorate who plan to vote are, as yet, undecided about who they will choose.

Such uncertainty in the polls has drawn the usual words of worry from the mainstream parties. We are assured that a ‘coalition of chaos’ will be the outcome if the British public fails to return a clear majority for the Tories. I wonder if perhaps this situation might actually create a diverse and interesting hybrid government, where deals and negotiation will of necessity replace the tyranny of the parliamentary majority?

In any case it looks like a number of parties are moving towards constitutional changes for Britain. They include proposals to lower the voting age, to finally sort out the House of Lords (though it’s unlikely to be restructured using my favourite model) and to abandon the first-past-the-post system appear in a number of manifestos. Previous ‘majority’ governments have often been chosen by a relatively small percentage of the electorate.

Perhaps this uncertainty about who will control Britain is actually a good thing? While voting isn’t by any means the only political process we can engage with it is, in my view, an important one. Many people, including my own cultural ancestors, campaigned for enfranchisement and, as is often pointed out, some people will certainly be using their right to vote, and inaction can allow all kinds of nasties to get into government.

Finally, perhaps magicians of all political stripes might want to experiment with the following banishing ritual. The technique presented below may be combined with dance bodywork (using the track below for instance). Maybe this election is an opportunity for us to go beyond our fears and into a political landscape that unseats the limiting duality of two party politics into something richer, stranger and, who knows, maybe better?

Suggested banishing ritual for the British general election:

1. Touch the forehead say, ‘Green Party Above Me!’
2. Touch the base of the sternum say, ‘UKIP Below Me!’
3. Touch the left side of the chest say, ‘Labour to the Left of Me!’
4. Touch the right side of the chest say, ‘Conservatives to the Right of Me!’
5. Hold the arms out wide, as though greeting (or surrendering) say, ‘Liberal Democrats Behind Me!’
6. Make a triangle with the hands, palms facing outward (one point uppermost in the manner of the Illuminati), arms reach forward, say, ‘Chaos Before Me!’
7. Laugh.

Obviously many variations of this technique exist; for example, a powerful visualisation may be included of that Wrathful Dakini Nicola Sturgeon arising from the triangle of arte formed in step 6.