Orange begins the data-download of the light half of the year. The weather swings wildly from brilliant sun, through glowering stratus to sparkling showers of rain, a cut-up climate. Eggs appear, laid by both Easter Bunnies and my hens. Orange magick is transmitted by the sephira of Hod, communicated by Thrice Great Hermes.

Our first work is the ‘Voodoo Coffee Morning’ a rite of celebration. We praise caffeine, that loquacious molecular messenger, decode its vever (the molecular diagram of C₈H₁₀N₄O₂) and sip strong black coffee. Fortified by this stimulating medicine, our next rite is presented by TP808 – the full ritual text of which is given here. Chaos magick, as a style of occultism, is sometimes characterised as being too often about silly rituals which lack depth. However the ritual below, although it uses non-standard esoteric iconography, is far from a superficial, unconsidered working. As well as the ritual itself TP808 describes the symbolic and metaphyiscal structures that this rite articulates:

Orange Magick – The Nina Murmuration. 13-04-13

“Music is freedom” – Nina Simone
“We always thought of music as psychic resistance.” Bobby Gillespie.

4 Nina Simone albums in the four quarters.

“This is a good time to introduce you to the heart beat of our organization, the pulse of everything that we do: it centers around the drums and of course if you think about that really seriously you know that your entire life is centered around your heart beat, and that’s rhythm is it not?

Recite Westwind lyrics.

STATEMENT OF INTENT – the aim of this ritual is to time travel using soundwaves. Working with the Deleuzian notion of the “fold”:

“The fold is the general topology of thought… ‘inside’ space is topologically in contact with the ‘outside’ space… and brings the two into confrontation at the limit of the living present.” Deleuze,  – “Foucault. University of Minnesota Press, 2000 p. 118-19

The ritual space is;

“groundless depth from which irrupts something that creates its own space and time It is not the line that is between two points, but the point that is at the intersection of several lines.”

Deleuze, Gilles. Pourparlers Paris: Minuit, 1990 p. 219 – Quotes taken from “GILLES DELEUZE  the architecture of space and the fold” by Matthew Krissel at http://digitalprocess.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/gillesdeleuze_fold.pdf

The ritual also considers Dogen’s concept of existence-time (Uji):

“The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world.  See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time:

“Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another.  The way-seeking mind arises in this moment.  A way-seeking moment arises in this mind.  It is the same with practice and with attaining the way.

Thus the self setting itself out in array sees itself.  This is the understanding that the self is time.”

See Shobogenzo Chapter 11 discussed by Norman Fischer at http://sweepingzen.com/dogens-time-being-uji-1/ or Buddhist Pagan blog: http://buddhistpaganmagick.wordpress.com/2012/06/21/everything-is-ending-but-not-yet/

Finally, the ritual also draws upon the concept of quantum foam:

“a qualitative description of subatomic space time turbulence at extremely small distances …At such small scales of time and space, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle allows energy to briefly decay into particles and antiparticles and then annihilate without violating physical conservation laws. As the scale of time and space being discussed shrinks, the energy of the virtual particles increases. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, energy curves space time. This suggests that—at sufficiently small scales—the energy of these fluctuations would be large enough to cause significant departures from the smooth space time seen at larger scales, giving space time a “foamy” character.” WIKI http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_foam see also MAGIC Telescopes – (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescopes – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAGIC_%28telescope%29

PATHWAY – The ritual uses energy fluctuations generated by drumming and archival recordings of Nina Simone to fold in past and future to this moment now. As a group we drum along with the two pieces of music, the first using our bodies as instruments and the second using noise making machines (drums/rattles.) We become a machinic assemblage; the murmuration is the sound of sound being simultaneous and multiple in the same moment.

“The beauty of the assemblage is that, since it lacks organization, it can draw into its body any number of disparate elements. The book itself can be an assemblage, but its status as an assemblage does not prevent it from containing assemblages within itself or entering into new assemblages with readers, libraries, bonfires, bookstores, etc.” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html

Nina Simone – Nina (From “It Is Finished” 1974)

Body percussion.

#ends

(Improv – glosolalia Nina-nina-nina, murmuration, murmur, murmur murmuration, communication in this place and space Nina-nina-nina  Unify us, don’t divide us, etc.)

We also draw upon Starhawk’s description of immanence as a walk on a beach (in Dreaming the Dark Chapter 3 – “Thought-Forms; Magic as Language p-15-16 to “even God…”) accompanied by hammered African thumb piano to induce trance.  Then expand upon this with a visualization of the same beach at night time, the experience of merging with an orange gelatinous sphere and the visual stimulus of a fire giving off orange embers spiraling into the night sky;

“And then kerjillions of stars start to shine
And Icy comets go whizzing by
And everything’s shaking with a strange delight
And this is it: the enormous night” ~ Laurie Anderson – My Eyes- from Strange Angels – 1989)

Beach visualization orange sphere, bonfire, covered in orange membrane. Sea, stars, warmth.

Nina Simone – Westwind (From ‘Black Gold’ 1970 written by Miriam Makeba)

Westwind blow ye gentle
Over the shores of yesterday
My sun is brown and over
Here within my heart they lay they lay

Westwind with your wisdom
Gather all the young for me
Black cloud hanging over
Nest your bosom strong and free

Got each gallon water is plane
Got each gallon water is plane
Cos I am the soil from which they came
I am the soil from which they came

So Westwind with your splendor
Take my people by the hand
Spread your glory sunshine off
And unify my promised land

The pieces of music are based on African traditional drum patterns and are filtered through Nina Simone’s political commitment to civil rights, anti-racism, Black power and the struggle for justice for people of colour and other oppressed groups. An apposite theme on this day when people are processing the death of Margaret Thatcher.  As a group we bring Pagan drum patterns to the mix; we are forced to find a space in the music that accommodates our rhythms and also to listen to each other so that we create a horizontal (with each other) and vertical (with the music) matrix of sound that speaks to a)each other now and b) the past simultaneously in a sound driftwork.

LINK TO SYMBOLIC CARRIER –  eating the orange segment to create a virtual and psychick circuit –  prior to the start of drumming, the circle is established by the  group taking a segment each and placing it into someone else’s mouth. We bite into the fruit at the same time synchronising time, place, space and taste buds. The introduction to the ritual echoes the intro speech given by Nina Simone in Windward – echoic time shift. This is only revealed to other participants once they hear the music. Noise making machines also symbolically link all elements of the ritual.

The tantric outer/inner/secret structure of the ritual –

Outer – time travel as explained above

Inner – Strange Angel themes of Robert Mapplethorpe/AIDS/bereavement/Right Wing Censorship of Art/Walter Benjamin’s critique of modernity- “History is an angel, being blown backwards into the future. History is a pile of debris and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken but there is a storm blowing from Paradise and the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future, and this storm is called progress…”)

Secret – another (unstated) purpose of this ritual is for me to connect with my drum and find out what its relationship to my magick is…

INTENSE GNOSIS – trance brought about through drumming, listening and visualisation.

FIRE – out into the kerjillions of stars spiralling to infinity, devisualisation moving out of liminal space back to the here-now. Back to the beach – the return of the orange membrane to the ground – to be called upon again when needed.  Eating a Jaffa cake, drinking orange Tango

FORGET

The Alan Partridge Banishing

AHA!
Rooarrrrrrr!!

An orange meditation on non-attachment and love comes next. For this each participant takes an orange and mindfully appreciates this fruit (an unscripted similarity with the previous ceremony creating a recursive feedback loop in the ritual arc). The fruit reminds us of the saffron coloured robes of Buddhist monks or the orange garb of the Shivite sadhu, peeling we consider non-attachment. We see that we are all flow and that any ‘being’ is temporary, illusionary. But in understanding non-attachment we do not fall into a solipsistic or disconnected state. Instead with our attachments gone we can peel back apparent reality and enjoy the fruit of experience. More than this we can know love, the bliss of the world and the joy of communion. This comes as we each take a segment and place it on our mouths, biting down together we share the common experience of orange magic, of the bounty and love of the world, of sweetness and nourishment.

Brother Pelagius provides another ritual:

Three Mages Alchemy Rite.

This working was connected to Orange magick via my own relationship with Mercury as the patron of both communication and alchemy. The purpose of the working was to visualise a situation that we wished to transform in our lives and to use the potency of our anxiety/fears about the situation to fuel willed change.

The schema used was inspired by the work of Michael Kelly found in his books “Apophis” and “Dragonscales” in which we find the figures of the Black, White and Red mages. For me these correspond to the alchemical stages of nigredo, blanco and reubedo, and our rite sought to use these three states to integrate our unconscious, super-conscious and conscious minds.

After imbibing the dark sacrament of Guinness, we imagined our current situation at night, coated with the fluid tar of our fears. These nightside emissions were not to be rejected, but used to fuel our desires.

Next we opened our eyes to the bright flame of the superconscious. The White Mage greets us and shows us our idealised goal and the changes in ourselves that are necessary in bringing forth such transformations. We cannot dwell here long, for if our work is to become more than a pipedream, it must be born of blood.

So we return to the realm of Midgard and the Red Mage. The flame is now transformed through potent alchemical filters so that the world is seen through a blood soaked hue (okay so we’re now looking at the candle through bits of red cellophane). The idealised state needs to be earthed in reality as we channel the dark energy of our fears so they can be put to more skilful ends.

Many rituals are for sharing. The non-attachment and love ritual with the oranges I was able to share at another two meetings. The first of these was at the far end of Cornwall with friends from a South American shamanic path. The third time was at the request of a Priestess (who had been present at the second performance) to share the technique in a circle cast on the north Cornish coast. In that third circle stood a Native American Woman who, later that night, shared song and skill (and delightfully strident opinion) with the company. We traded chants, some from the British Isles, some from the States. I offered a song which the Grandmother medicine had taught me, sung to the insistent rhythm of the Grandfather medicine’s water drum.

That simple rite, as easy as you like, peeling an orange (and I know it’s been done before, there is, as they say, nothing is new under the sun) has popped up in three circles and crossed the paths of native British, South American and North American cultures. Techniques are shared, the world is enchanted, communication magick unites us.

So (as the caffeine kicks in) what next? Well that orange magick vibe reminds me of cut-ups and the excellent experiments of Thee Temple of Psychick Youth and their descendants. Reading THIS I’m inspired to revisit some of those methods. Now where did I put my old dream machine..?

JV, TP808, SD and members of The Western Watchtower

Numbers. Strange artificial squiggles, the first writing, all around us in the urban environment. Quantity exists everywhere, tis true, but numbers, as the signs, the representatmens of quantity, they are a different game.

The Babylonians started it, counting grain by the sack load coming in and going out of their storehouses. Precious metal tributes from their allies/enemies (Orwell’s conflation of these concepts demonstrates nothing new under the sun!) flooded in and the treasure keepers had to maintain lists of the top 10, so they would get prime spots in the next procession.

They also used numbers when they realised that days could be counted too, to keep lists of stars, the times when dragons appeared above the horizon, and scorpions sank below. Now they were really on to something; the wheel of the year handily divides into 360 (give or take) bits, and geometry adds to the range of complex puzzles that make sudoku look like the child’s play it is.

Stars and moons in their revolutionary aspects as seasonal time pieces, give us an undeniable cue for group/community agricultural annual practices. One suspects that previously the sign of a full moon fulfilled practical roles such as signalling the right night for a good feast, as it continued to do up till the invention of electrical lighting. For many people and places the full moon still acts as lamp in this instance even today.

But back then the authority of the heavens telling when the work in the fields had to occur, was an apposite metaphor for the overseers. If a man could foretell the future days, of blood red eclipses, and exactly which nights a star spangled character peeped over the horizon, then they surely knew the ways of the gods. They were the mouthpiece of heaven, and what they said was the lore.

So numbers, and the art and science of manipulating these signs, gave great kudos to the priests.

Fast forward a bit, to the time of oceanic navigation (well actually oceanic navigation has been happening for thousands of years but for an easier story, we will ignore those mysterious adventurous Pacific voyagers). Tides and moons rise and fall, in the northern seas some tide ranges are enormous (tens of metres). Knowing in advance when spring and neap tides are due gives the knower a distinct advantage over mere mortals, allowing cargoes and vessels to move efficiently and safely. Counting days and sleeps until tide timing and moon phases coincide with weather and daylight hours allowed to plan for the continued livelihood of the crew, and increase the possibilities of trade and travel.

Numbers had added importance now, arithmetic as a methodology vital to the functioning of travel, exchange and making a living had arrived to stay. Architecture, design, biology, chemistry, all found ways to use the practical application of precise figures.

I have railed before about the primacy of number in science, a trend championed by that obsessive Isaac Newton, who wasn’t interested if you couldn’t make a graph out of it.

In his time as president of the newly minted Royal Society, he steered the fledgling entity of science into a career of counting quantities, to the detriment of quality. Numbers that go up remain, many centuries later, the yardstick by which we measure everything.

Mercantile culture seized this vision of reality as numbers, the elevation of numeric quantity over quality suited the marketplace just fine. Far easier to understand, to make definite decisions, to attract investors. Numbers that go up! (Unless they go down.)

Similarly, reducing a social issue to a simplistic snapshot of statistics, instead of the stories beyond the graphs, gives those who tend towards wanting clear answers clear conclusions rather than otherwise messy and complex situations.

Mapping dualities onto one another has been a habit of humans since they learned to tell their right from their left. Levi Strauss took this to the ultimate level, with his tactic of pairing comparisons.

I would like to draw up one of these charts for you:

Raw	Cooked
Emotional	Intellectual
Verbal	Calculating
Moon	Sun
Home	Work
Pretty	Clever
Complicated	Decisive
Love	Money

So, in which columns of these dualities would you place the pair Man Woman?

I hope that like me, gentle reader, you were able to say that you know men and women who fit equally into either column, and even mixtures of the two apparent ‘polarities’. However I fear that (eke like me) you were aware that the initial impulse was to see one of these lists as dualities associated with the one gender.

Leaving aside the false nature of dichotomy and ‘opposites’ itself, the way we think on the fly often approximates to making these types of associations. Without the conscious awareness of such inbuilt convenient quick reference tables, we can easily fall into the trap of mistaking them for some kind of reality. In a situation where a snap decision needs to be made (snake, lookup table says = danger), they can prove immensely useful and allow us to react faster than we can think properly. Reflex thinking like this is awesome in an emergency situation.

However. When we have time to reflect, and mull over our courses of action at leisure, often we see in hindsight that we had other options, fight or flight from that bear has other possibilities suddenly; climb a tree, spread out your coat to look big, lay down and play dead. Which of those works with bears… um I would have to think about that before I could work it out… The prevalence of mathematics with its two dimensional descriptors of the world (numbers go up vs numbers go down) supplies us with a poor model on which to hang real life. Even with the orthogonal axes of 3D choices added, the basic premise is still dual in nature, merely negative or positive steps summed together.

We usually tend to think of the sexes as being two. One of these is Woman, representative of the Goddess of Nature, animalistic and ‘in touch’ with the cycles of life (as unfertilised incubator), menstrually ebbing and flowing, with the tides, with the moon.

The average (mean) length of time between menstrual cycles is indeed, according to wikipedia 29 days, like the moon’s cycles (although, the ‘normal’ menstrual range varies by nearly the length of the cycle (22 to 43 days). That is a fairly wide spread of numbers and can cover the potential range of one woman’s personal average cycle length from, not just the variation in regular cycle length of all women.  In ‘normal’ (evolutionary timescale) reality, it is thought by many that a woman would have few periods during a lifetime; either pregnant, nursing or not weighty enough to have regular predictable bleeds.

I therefore question the identification of the female menses with the moon’s monthly visits; it is an approximation at best for a few women, and for most of us probably not an exact synchronisation for more than a few cycles at a time.

So to believe that the natural way is to bleed in time with the tides, leaves a lot of women disenchanted with the notion that they personally have anything to do with Mother Nature (as they ‘should’). Counting the days until the regular (there are in fact some reprobates who bleed in an untimely fashion, known as the ‘irregular’) red spots appear, we go through agonies of fear at what this means if a day or two late: Pregnancy? Menopause? Illness?

Are we women who draw down the goddess if our defining periods of bleeding and fertility are not 29 days apart?

This version of what it is to be a person of the female persuasion does not resonate with me. Where is the rest of my life in this Maiden Mother Crone categorisation? This triple aspect goddess has a role for sure, however to define myself primarily in these terms does not sit well with this child of the 60s, who was told to think outside of stereotyped gender roles, and to value many other characteristics, applicable across the range of possible human sex-based definitions.

The need to count, to discover the divine Laws behind signs of such import, provides some amazing results. Newton’s project to reveal the hand of God in all of nature’s patterns, has given us bridges, engines and space travel.

But did he go too far by expunging from science, from ‘reality’, all that could not be counted?

As our exercise above demonstrated , there need not be a wholly positive or negative descriptor of anything, and the predilection for counting everything, seeing only the regular as correct and the irregular unpredictable unclassifiable as somehow wrong, can lead us into reflexive reactions when instead a more measured approach might provide different results.

This mechanism of preferring simple either/or choices when in a state of panic could explain the way that the differences in socio-economic thinking recently described (see Wikipedia) gets utilised by  political parties. An unstable and urgent atmosphere pushes the decision making system of the individual into a snap reflex action based on immediate evidence.

Encouraging a more nuanced approach gets stereotyped into an intellectual liberal wishy washy indecision; where do you stand on immigration, benefits, bringing back hanging? Yes or no? (Or, in a less stressed environment, maybe we might think, perhaps we need more information and a list of alternative approaches…?)

By encouraging a lack of debate over alternatives and restricting the presented courses of action to given simple easy to grasp binary options, the small c conservative status quo quashes dissent.

Whether these contrasting and complimentary (both have their uses) ways of weighing up information are intrinsic to the human species, cannot be ascertained easily without control groups of differing cultural backgrounds. Perhaps, you might like to try the thought experiment of mapping the idea of left/right brained thinking (where each hemisphere is supposedly either creative/holistic/spatial/artistic, or analytical/linear/verbal/scientific) onto this, if one were to go along with the dualistic listing and direct one-to-one matching approach described above.

My take home message from all of this messy thinking is, that statistics rarely fit to reality. Just as the average number of legs per person in any given country will be less than two, the average length of biological cycles cannot be meaningfully reduced to a single number, and those who vary from the average are not abnormal… an obvious statement yet one packed with allegorical significance.

So what on earth does this have to with magick?

I have been asked repeatedly for years, by several people, about the idea of collecting evidence or reports demonstrating the overall rate of successful results magick. This would give us, I am informed, a nice measure of whether doing magick is a worthwhile occupation.

Leaving aside the incredibly tricky issue of defining ‘success’ in these circumstances, the statistics of success still don’t supply us with an answer to the basic question. I could succeed in only 10% of cases but that 10% might include a particularly spectacular and life changing spell. Or the converse of that, 90% success, with only minor consequences. How does this analysis affect my world, my magickal conduct?

Magick, like much of life, cannot be reduced to a linear scale of numbers or values that go one way or another. A balance sheet approach to life leaves us bereft of almost all which makes it worth living; a love life cannot be judged on the number of lovers, the number of years spent in love, or by comparing scores of various attributes. A day is neither good nor bad when we reach the end of it, as what looks like a fail can often pave the way to opportunities, and a win could lead us into further enjoyment or, to a crash back down to earth. If we expect to either epically win or fail, we leave no space for the complexity of life’s rich tapestry, pulsing with moments of sheer awe, of solid everyday satisfaction, of unexpected uncertain outcome events, those ordinary outside description times which we flourish on using, transforming, when given half a chance.

Approaching magickal practice with defined results in mind gives aim and purpose to our behaviour. The process of deciding on those aims gives opportunity for reflection on the implications, the motives, the ramifications. The underlying history. How we subsequently assess the results of our practices (was it worth it?) can often become a deeply meaningful process, in itself taking us around the loop of reframing or wider understanding (overstanding), of the specific action, and also how we think about it.

Ramsey Dukes once challenged his readers to accept every occurrence they experienced (for a limited period of time), as a message directly to them from the heart of Chaos. As a paradigm, this challenge resulted (in me) with a more conscious willingness to listen, to understand, to reflect upon, and to keep looking even after I had already got a story from the apparent facts. Creative people continue to seek for alternatives even after finding solutions, the search for diversity of choice, of looking beyond the adequate.

(I have to add that it also taught me the immense value of being able to apply shallow thought, where cake is simply an enjoyable foodstuff, rather than a total minefield of extended meaning.)

This need to seek for ever more unknown, more Mysteries to understand, whilst aware that one may never reach that understanding; this is the Great Work.

Reducing that epic quest to a series of Wins or Fails, by quantifying our progress with a scorecard, seems to me to miss the mark by some miles…

 NW

“Understand now that in yourselves is a certain discontent. Analyse well its nature: at the end is in every case one conclusion. The ill springs from the belief in two things, the Self and the Not-Self, and the conflict between them. This also is a restriction of the Will… Ultimately, therefore, the problem is how to destroy this perception of duality, to attain to the apprehension of unity.”
-Aleister Crowley