Uncategorized | The Blog of Baphomet

Fotamecus is a spirit that I’ve worked with for several years, an entity with the power to assist us in expanding or contracting our subjective perception of time. I say ‘subjective’ advisedly – while we live in a world of atomic clocks and the connected pulse of internet timekeeping – as Dr Who observes, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… timey wimey… stuff.”

Clocking the nature of time

I’ll give you a recent example. I needed to catch a train and had set out from home just a little too late. The inveitable morning traffic jam meant that I arrived into town only 7 minutes before the train was due to leave. While waiting at a roundabout on the road, watching the digital clock in my vehicle tick inexorably away, I chanted the name Fotamecus and deployed the Slow Time mudra. This is one of three mudras that were developed during the rituals which attended the filming of Chronomancy (I’ll explain the tech. in a moment).

Arriving at the railway carpark I had moments to spare. I grabbed my belongings and rushed into the station. In front of me a man was buying a complex ticket but even so I was still able to pay for mine and successfully board the train. Once sat down I used the Reset Time mudra to put time back into its normal course, and mentally thanked the Fotamecus spirit for its assistance.

Now of course as a chaos magician there are numerous ways in which I can look at the sequence of events above. I could say that psychologically the effect of placing my trust in an (apparently) external entity (ie Fotamecus) allowed me to relax and not to get flustered (and end up wasting time by doing stuff like dropping my keys, fiddling for change in my wallet, forgetting that I has already got the number on my phone needed to pay for my parking and so didn’t need to use the machine in the car park but could pay for the service once onboard the train).

Then there is the inner scientist which says ‘well hey, what about all those times where you used Fotamecus and it didn’t work?’ However the answer to that is ‘there aren’t any’. Now this doesn’t mean I, Fotamecus or whoever has absolute control over time. Had I left my house even later, or the traffic had been even more heavy, I probably wouldn’t have bothered with any magical shenanigans, but would have simply accepted the fact that I’d have to drive to my destination rather than take the train. This is part of the trick of magic. That the magician seeks to bend reality, to warp the possible futures of experience. There is little or no point in casting spells to achieve highly improbably outcomes. The skill of applied magic is finding where some wriggle room in a system exists and placing pressure skilfully there. (The story of the Taoist Butcher explains this beautifully.)

Then there is the animist or spiritist view of Fotamecus. That this is an entity which exists in something like another dimension (usually called the astral plane or whatever). This could means that the manifestation of this entity is a warping of the 4^th dimension (duration) which has effects in the first to the third dimensions (the world of apparent objects). The spirit doesn’t exist only in a separtate reality but has some form of agency because of its emergence in dimensions beyond the 4^th (check out this nice video, previously posted by Sef to this blog, to wrap your brain round multi-dimensional reality HERE). This means that what the spirit can do in our apparent reality can look miraculous. The emergent properties of the spirits’ character, and its abilities, may well be rooted in the 3D world (they exist as names, gestures, films, images etc) and are really no more tricky to explain than the fact that a cascade of chemical interactions emerges to form your mind reading this text.

So let’s get down to some magic-tech…

Developing a relationship with the spirit

It’s polite to develop a relationship with anythng your going to work with – people, entities, entheogens, tools. In the case of the spirits there are various models of how to do this. Perhaps one of the most obvious is the notion of feeding the spirit. In the case of Fotamecus I recommend the following:

Spend some time getting to know the spirit. Read its back story (some of which is HERE). Maybe create your own sigil, or use one of the ones that have already been connected to this entity, and place this on your altar or perhaps beside a clock in your home.

Have a party for Fotamecus. In Britain I do this when our clocks change; forward an hour in the spring and back an hour in autumn. Decorate the sigil or other represetentation of Fotamecus with suitable offerings (clock parts and dandelions for example). Watch films that you think Fotamecus would ‘like’ (aside of Chronomancy movies like Momento, Ritual in Transfigured Time or Back to the Future and lots of others, would work). Chant the name Fotamecus as an offering of practice – experiment with doing this slowly, faster etc.

Devotional Fotamecus wallpaper

Using the Fotamecus Mudras

These are three mudras designed for empty handed magic. They are based on one of the forms of sign language. They are best deployed after chanting the name of Fotamecus (at whatever speed or volume) to get into a light trance state and of course having first made your own connection to the spirit.

To slow time down: Extend your left arm, palm down, and slowly move the palm of your right hand up the left arm, stroking it from fingers to upper arm. This is a slow movement.

To speed time up: Hold your thumb, index and middle fingers out beside your right ear. Now quickly move your hand forward so the arm is outstreched, with the fingers closing as the arm reaches full extension (rather as though catching an insect).

To re-set time: Place the palms of both hands over the forehead, thumbs extended. Now pull the hands apart so that the hands end up roughly over the shoulders. As you do this the thumbs and fingers fold in (imagine you are strectching out an invisible blob of ‘timey wimey’ something between them). As you make this mudra close your eyes for a moment.

Experiment with these techniques for yourself (and, of course, create your own) and you too can discover how time is on your side 🙂

Enjoy!

In 2001, Matt Lee, director and epic beard-owner, announced the Fotamecus Film Majik Project, a plan to make a “film about time and modern magick, a story about shifting perceptions of time.” The film would follow six chaos magicians as they cast a spell through the use of a sigil to “construct a tool with which our subjective perception of time can be altered.”

Sigil of Fotamecus

The film’s title, Fotamecus, comes from the name of a servitor created in 1996 by a magician calling himself Fenwick Rysen. In chaos magic, a servitor is an artificially created being with limited autonomy that executes a pre-programmed task. In the case of Fotamecus, the the task was to literally condense or expand time, dependent on the needs of the operator. Say, for instance, I was running late to an appointment. In theory, I could call upon the entity to contract the amount of time it would take to get there, and the trip would shorten. The problem, according to Fenwick, is that to contract time in one place meant that time had to be expanded in another. To this end, the servitor was then programmed to self-replicate clones of itself as needed, creating a matrix of servitor nodes. That way, if I needed to make my trip shorter, then a node would be created which another person could access if they wished to make another time period last longer (insert minute man joke here). This would keep me from having to “pay” for my time. With me so far?

Jump ahead five years to Matt Lee and friends, plotting out a film that would manifest the entity onto a projector screen, reaching a larger audience and teaching them how to contact it, effectively taking control of their own perception of time. Matt began soliciting crowd-sourced funding in return for what he called The God Maker Program, a CD/DVD/VHS package including background information on the film, images, audio files, and writings pertaining to DIY servitor creation.

Interest surged. Julian Vayne mentioned the film in his book, Now That’s What I Call Chaos Magick. Discussions and comments popped up all over the internet expressing excitement for the project. Filming began. A release date was projected for 2003, but was pushed back later to 2006. Then, to the frowns of the internet occult community, it was canceled altogether.

Due to the economic downturn, the film’s production company, Indifference Productions, had closed its doors, leaving Matt with hours of 16 mm film that would never be seen. The only publicly available footage resulting from from the work would be a trailer and a forty-one minute documentary entitled Chronomancy.

The first portion of Chronomancy features the magicians making a batch of cookies with the Fotamecus sigil imprinted on them while discussing their own experiences with the servitor as well as some explanations of the sigilization process. The second portion documents a ritual in the woods being performed to invoke Fotamecus into the film while a narrator explains what is happening. Throughout the footage, we hear the entity’s name being repeated as a mantra. As we watch, we are forced into the role of participant, with the mantra being burned into our memory on a level matched only by “Call Me Maybe.” By witnessing the ritual, we are perhaps invoking Fotamecus ourselves.

Although Matt Lee and numerous internet commentators seem a bit disappointed with the outcome of the Fotamecus Film Majik Project, I have to say that the original intent may have found fruition even without an actual release. This writer, at least, has now been exposed to the entity, and plans on future experimentation with his own subjective perception of time.

*sniff* Dammit. I think I left my sigilized cookies in the oven too long.