Now, Mercury, Venus, Pluto, Polaris, Vega, Mirphak, Zubenelgenubi, they all get capitalized, no questions asked. But Sun, Moon and Earth? I challenge you to find any real consensus on this.

The most common answer seems to be that you capitalize them when you’re talking astronomy to someone, e.g. “The Earth orbits the Sun, and the Moon orbits the Earth.” But if you’re just talking about them in an everyday context, you don’t, e.g. “The sun’s warm today.”

Now, that last instance looks right to me. It’s how most people write. But I don’t see any sense in it. Or any other instance of these bodies being uncapitalized. They’re all proper nouns: “a noun representing a unique entity (such as London, Jupiter, John Hunter, or Toyota)”. There are some variations in the definition of proper nouns—the names of days and months are proper nouns in English, but not in many other languages. Fair enough, they’re abstract entities. But the Sun, Moon and Earth are as proper as nouns get. They’re unique, and very concrete.

There is the fact that these words can also refer to a class of entity, e.g. every star is a sun, in its own context; Jupiter has moons. But surely if you’re talking about the Sun or the Moon, capitalizing them is a way of being clear. I guess that until we start travelling to other planets (or stars), saying, “The sun is warm today” doesn’t need much clarification. But still, the principle holds.

As to why anyone would lowercase “Earth”—I’m lost on that one. Sure, you pick up a handful of dirt, you say, “Look at this lovely earth!” That’s a different meaning of the same word, which isn’t a proper noun, so you don’t capitalize it. Simple. But when you’re saying “the Earth rotates on its axis” or “he’s the most pedantic person on Earth”—why would anyone lowercase it? Because a style guide says so? What reason does it give?

I guess there’s an argument that it’s just the natural drift of language that’s commonly used, like “e-mail” becoming “email”. But I talk about London more than the Earth, and no one has ever started writing “london” (outside SMS and people who don’t write properly anyway).

The thing is, I’ve started coming across excellent books on the history of astronomy, recent books published by reputable academic presses, and they’re lowercasing “Earth” always, even in an astronomical context.

I would say (with tongue in cheek), “It’s XYZ gone mad.” But for the life of me, I can’t think what that “XYZ” even is.

Painters! on you I call! Sculptors! Architects! Suffer not the fashionable Fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works or the expensive advertizing boasts that they make of such works.

Thus cries William Blake in his preface to Milton. His fine righteousness aside, what seems notable here is the thing that seems to mark it as slightly outdated English. More than the stray capital letter that we wouldn’t use these days, the “z” in “advertizing” jumped out at me as looking quite odd.

A while ago I decided to standardize (see!) on using “z” instead of “s” in such verbs. As far as I can tell, both are acceptable; the “z = American” / “s = British” idea seems largely to be a myth. So—a few petty lexicographical arguments that I’m probably not aware of notwithstanding—it seems to be a matter of aesthetic choice. For me, at the time I standardized, I felt the “z” had a resonance I preferred: stronger, with more bite in the shape of the letter, not to mention a closer match to the feel of the noise.

Some time later, in my years-of-not-writing-much, I reverted to the “s”. Maybe that reflected my written word sinking a little more into the background, the softer shape belying and dampening the sound, perhaps.

Getting back into writing more has, with a considered but abrupt aesthetic u-turn, found me preferring that jaggedy “z” again.

Apart from “advertising”. The wonders of digitization means I can check, roughly. A search on this site for “advertising” gives 16 hits. “Advertizing” gives none (and a helpful hint directing you to the other spelling). Now, I’m not saying I’ve managed to be completely consistent in using “z” on everything else, but this word seems to be an odd exception. My Concise Oxford Dictionary gives “advertising” as the primary spelling, whereas a random sample of other verbs (“organize”, “categorize”, “theorize”) give the “z” first, and add “(also -ise)”.

Using Google again, we find that global searches for “advertising” and “advertizing” give 529,000,000 and 1,430,000 hits respectively. Something like “organise” and “organize” gives us 42,500,000 and 87,200,000 hits. Hardly scientific, but still, very odd.

And here’s Blake using the “z”. It’s strange; it seems to me this spelling subtly emphasizes the sleazy, glitzy, grimily duplicitous nature of advertizing. It doesn’t do anything similar in any other word I can think of.

Maybe that’s just my mind, or the context of Blake. But from now on, I’m going to follow Blake, consciously bringing advertizing into the “z” fold, and let its sleaze shine through!

Join us!

The key to their thinking is metaphor. Their technical definition is: projecting or mapping qualities from a source domain onto a target domain. I would say: understanding one thing in terms of another. Their contention is that metaphor isn’t just some rarified literary technique, some flourish that only happens when we wax poetic, but that it is actually part of the bedrock of the way we conceptualise the world—that is, part of the foundations of thought. Metaphors are not just the domain of language; they work at the deeper but connected realm of conceptualisation, too. Lakoff & Johnson never seem to refute the existence of purely literal, non-metaphorical conceptions; they merely point out that such conceptions, when truly stripped of all metaphor, are so skeletal as to be virtually unusable. "Neural beings" such as us prefer "something to hold on to". Metaphor is the flesh of conscious thought, without which it would flail around like some ineffectual ascetic.

The main challenge to Western philosophy is that the "source domain" for what they call "Primary Metaphors"—the real meat as opposed to the non-essential delicacies we rustle up for florid writings like this—is the material realm. Specifically our bodily interactions with the world. Jim was pretty non-plussed and unimpressed when I ran some of their examples by him, such as the idea of emotional "closeness" (the "target domain") being metaphorically derived from its association in childhood with physical closeness (the source). Jim’s argument—and that of the many critics of the Lakoff/Johnson school of cognitive science and linguistics—is that these two senses of "close" are just homonyms (words with the same spelling or sound but with unrelated meanings). It’s an interesting debate that’s not going to be resolved here. Suffice it to say that the scientific evidence, such as it is, seems compelling. And if Primary Metaphors do form the foundations for the rational mind, the traditional Western philosophical notion of a disembodied basis for mind, untainted by the sensual world’s dynamics, has to be discarded. (If that is, you haven’t already joined the party with Blake, Nietzsche, Freud, Watts, and all the feminists, ecologists and neo-pagans who’ve pulled themselves together and embraced matter. An accurate criticism of Lakoff is that he hasn’t fairly acknowledged the shoulders he’s standing on.)

My thoughts on this are constantly, as ever, spinning off on tangents. I’m sure most people reading this are familiar with the way the mind itself has been understood metaphorically via contemporary technologies. The ambience of the Industrial Revolution gave Freud and his mates all their ideas of forces and pressures—consciousness as a mechanical engine. (Not to mention film and lighting tech’s contribution to the idea of "projection".) And the Information Age has given us the computer as a model of mind—it’s all hardware (or wetware) and software, all circuits and networks.

It’s always tempting, when you catch sight of such larger perspectives, to be dismissive. "It’s just a phase" is something we hate hearing applied to ourselves as teenagers, but love dishing out intellectually when we feel we’ve gained some higher, "superior" vantage point. As I’ve argued elsewhere, that word "just" is a little bastard. It undervalues things in a deceptively casual way. What if the phase is important? What if the process is the product? "Just a phase" stands in this light as an everyday inheritance of our Christian death-denying fixation on the importance of unchanging constants, something any good Taoist would point at and laugh.

The thing I like most about Lakoff & Johnson’s thinking so far is that they’re wholly anti-reductionist, and see metaphor—however temporary and limited the models we build with them are at any given time—as crucial to scientific advances:

Cognitive neuroscientists engaged in neural computation have a theoretical commitment to the reality of neural gates, synaptic weights, thresholds, and mathematical operations "performed by neurons" [...]. Of course, the numbers used in such calculations are not literally there in the cell bodies. The mathematics used in the computations is part of a critically important scientific metaphor for understanding how neurons function: the Neural Computation metaphor. [...] It is extremely common for computational neurobiologists to form what linguists call a "conceptual blend" of the source and target domains of the metaphor [...]. In such a blended discourse, biological structures are conceptualized as if they "changed (the numbers indicating) synaptic weights," "sent inhibition," "formed gates," and so on. Conceptual blends of this sort are the norm in scientific discourse.

And discussing the use of spatial metaphors for time in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, they’re careful to stress that we shouldn’t let our inherited feel for metaphors as literary "window dressing" lead to the idea that they’re putting the theory down:

One can see general relativity as metaphorical. This does not make general relativity either false or fanciful or subjective, since its metaphors can still be apt. That is, they can entail non-metaphorical predictions that can be verified or falsified. In general, to say that science is metaphorical is not to belittle it. [...] Indeed, metaphor is what allows mathematical models to be linked to phenomena in the world and to be regarded as scientific theories.

To get back to that whole thing of comprehending the mind in terms of technology, then, I found it amazing to happen across a link in a friend’s blog about someone I had, equally amazingly, never heard of: Paul Stamets (do check out all the links on this profile page). A visionary mycologist, this guy makes Terence McKenna’s allegiance to the mushroom look like a half-hearted fling. It seems his research is being taken seriously as well, as he uncovers the potential in mycelial mats (the dense networks of underground fibres that are to mushrooms as trees are to fruit) to process all kinds of hydrocarbon waste and pollutants, and regenerate damaged ecosystems ("mycoremediation").

Stamets’ Big Idea (at least, the main one I’ve found in articles and interviews so far) is that the structure and "behaviour" of mycelial networks is reflected in human neurophysiology, as well as our rapidly flowering technological network, the internet. I wonder, then, whether we would have come to such an understanding of the nature of mycelia if we hadn’t progressed thus far in neuroscience—itself inspired by our after-the-fact comprehension of the technologies we’re extruding. It all resounds with the tone of that old chestnut about us being the universe’s attempt to reflect on itself and know itself. Maybe (deep toke, long hold, slow release) Adam was the first metaphor… God’s little whizz-bang gadget that helped him on his oh-so-important journey of self-discovery:

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 1:26

Understanding one thing in terms of another, remember?

Of course, shamans were comprehending consciousness in terms of nature, as a part of nature, long before they had enough tech to use for really sophisticated metaphors. But it’s interesting to note the conclusions that anthropologist Graham Townsley (cited in Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent) came to studying the songs of Yaminahua ayahuasqueros in the Peruvian Amazon, which they learn from spirits in their hallucinations.

Townsley writes: "Almost nothing in these songs is referred to by its normal name. The abstrusest metaphoric circumlocutions are used instead. For example, night becomes ‘swift tapirs,’ the forest becomes ‘cultivated peanuts’ [...]" In each case, writes Townsley, the metaphorical logic can be explained by an obscure, but real, connection [...] Why do Yaminahua shamans talk in [what Townsley translates as] twisted language? According to one of them: "With my koshuiti [songs] I want to see—singing, I carefully examine things—twisted language brings me close but not too close—with normal words I would crash into things—with twisted ones I circle around them—I can see them clearly."

I should note that if anyone’s interested in delving into Lakoff’s ideas, Bob recently recommended his more linguistic work as a good introduction, and Mark Turner’s The Literary Mind: The origins of thought and language as "by far the most digestible exegesis of cognitive linguistics".

This article explores the relationships between language and magick, and uses concepts derived from neuro-linguistic programming to bring into focus the core elements of magickal training.

Introduction: What is Language, and What isn’t?

Some dualisms are actually useful, and considering them leads us deep into magick. One such complementary dyad is that of biogram and logogram. The biogram is seen as the operation of the entire genetic potential, the whole genome, of the individual or, on a wider scale, the gene-pool of the whole human race. This includes flesh, desires, atavistic levels; in short, everything that Austin Osman Spare might have implied by the definition of Zos as ‘the body considered as a whole’. It appears that the biogram contains the needs for food, shelter, sex, companionship and some form of ecstasis.

On the other hand, the logogram contains the whole gamut of symbolic systems that humans use—language in all its forms, from the abstractions of mathematics through spoken and written word, semaphore, the structured visual and audial imagery of painting, TV, music, to symbolic postures and hand gestures and everything in between. A magician can be viewed as someone who seeks to strengthen, liberate, feed, indulge and enjoy the biogrammatic forces through transforming his or her portion of the logogram, although it might be pointed out that this definition is broad enough to take in anyone who succeeds in generating sane (functional) behaviour out of the logogrammatic mess of mass culture.

The distinction between biogram and logogram gets blurred when we consider our appetite for ecstasis, or what is usually called the ‘drive to transcendence’. This whole issue is dominated and confused by religious/political exploitations of our fears of death and social ostracism. This exploitation takes the form of repressive dogmas built deep into the logogram in the course of the socialization process, along with their related reward/punishment patterns. The function of these elements is the achievement of social conformity via co-option of the ‘transcendence drives’. This pollution of the weirdest aspect of the biogram has the effect that many magicians deny the existence of any ‘drive to transcendence’. This is not surprising, considering that ‘transcendence’ usually (and wrongly) implies escape from the world of the senses—indeed, escape from biogrammatic realities into the cloud-cuckoo lands of religion or historical determinism.

This is basically the position of Freudians, who identify transcendence with mere escapism, regression to the oceanic consciousness of the womb. While this is valid as a critique of religion and body-denying mysticism, it has to be borne in mind that the outcome for the Freudian process is the return of the individual to the ‘ordinary misery of life’. The more sophisticated views of the postmodern psychonaut assert that there is a whole spectrum of eigenstates available to us. In this view, the socially-sanctioned formula of ‘ordinary misery’ is merely one rather sad example of institutionalized disappointment and hedonic dysfunction. Let’s face it: either we are here to experience ecstasy in as many manifestations as we can handle, or we’re wasting our time.

To look at civilization so far, it’s easy to get the impression that the logogram has won a decisive victory over the biogram. The contents of the logogram, under the influence of the slave-religions, have been severely anti-hedonistic and anti-bioaesthetic, crippling the ecstatic capacities of all but a few strong individuals.

There is no easy solution to this mix-up, and I believe there is a good reason for that: human consciousness is, by its nature, incomplete, provisional. Our atavistic prehistory in the stream of organic evolution provides us with the biogrammatic constants of hunger, sex, the search for shelter, and the more primitive forms of reproductive bonding. As soon as we start to construct more complex social forms, we need language. It may even be true to say that the evolution of language and the evolution of society go hand in hand. In any case, as soon as we start consciously defining and negotiating our relationships with each other and the world, we transform ourselves. Therefore, language is the prime medium of transformation; the logogram is the history of our past transformations, and a set of levers which we must use to achieve the next ones. Awareness of the inevitable link between language and magick is recapitulated in numerous myth cycles—Hermes was the Messenger as well as god of magick; Odhinn gained the runes, bringing the core of the mysteries into focus through a sophisticated system of semiotics.

Structures of Magick

Certain themes are common to all effective systems of magick. These core elements have also been recognized in one of magick’s postmodern descendants—Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP. NLP has been described as ‘an attitude and methodology which leaves behind it a trail of techniques’. It is the techniques that NLP is best known for; the ’10 Minute Phobia Cure’, and the Pacing and Leading techniques that are taught to salespeople are (in)famous, and tend to give the impression that all NLP is is a set of techniques for doing a few tricks with the mind. This is not the case: NLP is essentially about finding out how people who are exceptionally good at something actually do it, including the parts that they may not have conscious access too. In other words, the practitioner finds a precise role-model for the skill he or she wants.

To illustrate this, imagine you want to become better at, say, archery. The most obvious route would be to find a truly excellent archer, the best you can find, and get him to teach you. Now, your master archer will only be able to transmit to you what he knows he does when he shoots an arrow. Unless he is also an exceptionally sophisticated teacher, this will consist only of the conscious part of his skill. Under his tuition, you will no doubt progress to a much higher level of skill, but it is unlikely that you will achieve his own level unless you also absorb the unconscious strategies that hone his technique to a level of brilliance. The elicitation of these strategies comprises the core NLP technique of modelling.

Some of these strategies may appear initially to have nothing to do with the skill of archery; for instance, you may find that you have imitated his stance, his breathing, his sighting… and still you miss something. By talking to him, however, you may find that he performs a particular visualization, or hears a particular voice in his head just before he releases the arrow. At an even more internal level, you may discover that he has a particular belief or set of beliefs about his archery skill. You may even find that he has beliefs about life in general, powerful generalizations that mark the difference between you and him, and which facilitate his excellence. In any case, the model is complete when you are able not only to achieve his level of excellence, but able to communicate to others the internal processes that can take a third party to a new level of proficiency.

What is it that is being studied here? In the most general sense, it is the internal language of the person being modelled. The phrase ‘Neuro-Linguistic Programming’ reflects discoveries of how the brain actually represents information—in other words, the internal language of consciousness. Magicians have been ‘programming’ in this sense throughout the history of magick, and many of the concepts and structures of magick have been rediscovered by NLP modellers. Some of these are:-

Using Willed Imagination

Magick is often seen as a linking of imagination, will and desire towards a single aim. Much of basic magick consists of the controlled daydreams of visualization and audialization (and to a lesser extent the use of imagined kinaesthesia and smell). Anybody who has tried this a few times will realise that it works, if the focus is strong enough. Much NLP work also relies heavily on imagined situations, although usually for effects on the self. (NLP practitioners will seldom admit (at least in public) that they are trying to affect consensus reality!) The point is, your brain cannot tell the difference between the ‘real’ situation and the visualized/audialized one, and responds accordingly.

Try this exercise: remember an emotionally-loaded situation that is past and done, and check you reactions to it. Better still, evoke one of your obsessions, a concept you can get really emotional about—for instance: scroungers, poverty, Country and Western music, or whatever really rattles your cage. Get really worked up about it. Now relax and look at what you have done: you have taken some key images, sounds and words, and created a set of feelings which are indistinguishable from the feelings you would have got if you were standing in front of a real sample of your obsession. In fact, even when you are in a ‘real’ situation, you are often dealing with it through the lens of previous remembered experience. In other words, you aren’t there at all. Experiment with evoking the whole range of emotions—start off with a basic 6 or 8—lust, tenderness, anger… proceed to more complex ones, like gratitude or jealousy… experiment with different modes of each one. Remember to banish! This is—or should be—absolutely central to basic magickal training. If you cannot achieve a resourceful/useful emotional state at will, you are always vulnerable to enemies and manipulators. That is one of the differences between a magician and a non-magician.

The ability to change your state of consciousness via imagination takes us on to the next point:-

Correspondences and Anchoring

Correspondences are often used by magicians to attain repeatable states of consciousness. Correspondences work by conditioned reflex linking the desired state to a symbol at a pre-conscious level. For instance, a magician may associate personal dynamism and assertiveness to Mars, via repeated work with the colour red, iron, blood, and the smell of leather. Every time these symbols are used deliberately, the Martial state is evoked. In NLP this type of process is known as Anchoring, and it appears virtually everywhere—consider the power of a perfume or other unusual aroma to bring back a precise memory from years before. Consider also the ways in which we associate a particular task with a particular emotion; how do you feel when it’s time to get out of bed in the morning on a work day? Or again, on a day when you’re about to go on holiday? At some stage in the past, you had anchored a particular state to an imagined situation; whatever went through your mind, whatever picture or voice was in your head, had had that emotion anchored to it. Knowing that, you know that you can change any state, if you want to enough.

Will and Congruence

One of the central themes in magick is Will. This is probably best defined as ‘unity of desire and purpose’. This is the unity of purpose that brings about the reification of your most inspiring dream. Most people, most of the time, hardly ever achieve this condition, and simply wander from one passing impulse to another. Failed attempts to break out of the cyclical world of desire-gratification-frustration and achieve one’s dream of life often feed back to the person an increased sense of impotence, resulting in further entrenchment in hopeless cyclicity.

The condition of one-pointedness is known in NLP as ‘congruence’. A person in a congruent state knows what he or she wants, and is already in the process of achieving it, by that very fact. She can walk into a room and command attention by the slightest of gestures. The kind of congruence required to influence others can, to some extent, be developed by rigorous attention to one’s own body language and voice tonality whilst in the process of speaking one’s desire. This will lead to some inner congruence. However, the royal road to congruence at every level is to pay attention to signals from the ‘unconscious’ that manifest as body sensations, inner voices and images.

Try the following: get into a relaxed posture, and ask your ‘unconscious’ if it’s listening: you will probably get a sensation of some kind; this is a congruence signal. Now repeat to yourself a desire-sentence about which you have some doubt or fear. You will probably experience a different sensation, which is an incongruence signal. Experiment with different formulations of the desire-sentence, until you feel quite a different sensation. When you are confident that this is a congruence signal, you will have formulated a congruent desire. If you persist with such techniques, it becomes rather like dowsing. Some form of congruence testing is a powerful tool for magick, because you have at your disposal the entire committee of selves whenever you want to clarify your will.

Multiple selves, Goddesses & Gods

Chaos magicians have been working with the notion of multiple selves for some time. So have NLP practitioners, as the following quote from Frogs into Princes by Bandler and Grinder shows:-

We’re all schizophrenic… Evolutionarily, the next step, which we’re all engaged in, is multiple personality. You’re all multiple personalities. There are only 2 differences between you and an officially diagnosed multiple personality: 1) the fact that you don’t have amnesia for how you are behaving in one context; you can remember it in another context, 2) you can choose how to respond contextually. Whenever you don’t have a choice about how you respond in context, you are a robot. So you have two choices. You can be a multiple personality or a robot. Choose well.

We can view a personality as a pattern of social responses. It consists of language, of external and internal signals—body language, voice tonality and language patterns that project it to other people, and internal dialogue and internal imagery that supports it and keeps it in place internally. It has an agenda, concerning social power transactions via the repetition of learned roles (or, in the case of more advanced personas, adaptation). One feature of personalities is that they attempt to achieve (or believe they have achieved) some consistency of behaviour. They are in a sense functional clusters of wordviruses or memes which have acquired self-consciousness, and in this respect they are like deities.

Chaos magicians invoke god/dess-like entities from various sources, including the archetypal/stereotypical humanoid deities of pagan pantheons, characters out of films and comics. The god/dess form Baphomet as used by chaos magicians is a kind of reinvented gnostic entity, culled from various sources, which has come to represent magick, and the universal life-field, the planetary biogram. When we invoke any of these entities, we are seeking to bring into our nervous systems a perfect (or at least improved) role-model for one of our personas. Or indeed to assemble a ‘new’ personality for some new function. These selves are then available so that we can access and act from whatever self is the most effective in every situation we find ourselves in. The use of samples is a kind of parallel in music to this modelling of personality traits we desire. Flexibility is one of the cornerstones of power.

Systems, Levels & Hierarchies

Magickal systems almost invariably involve some sort of symbolic psychocosm. These maps can be useful for doing practical magick—generally in proportion to how much the magician immerses herself in the set of beliefs that the system implies and depends upon. The usual meta-belief in Chaos Magick is that belief is a tool, rather than an end in itself , and a particular psychocosm is viewed in the light of its usefulness. Psychocosms originate from mystery schools (‘Qabalah’ means something like ‘oral tradition’) or from commentaries on older texts (the I Ching, reconstructed Runic systems), or from scientific considerations, like the 8 Circuit model of Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson.

Some such maps can be viewed as purely magical or ‘spiritual’ in purpose. Such psychocosms have teachings associated with them which are only comprehensible if the map itself has been internalized. Further, some, like the Qabalistic Tree of Life, have an inbuilt up/down quality, a hierarchy, explicit or otherwise. This kind of hierarchy is seldom helpful in practical magick. For disentangling levels in the selves, the neurolinguist Robert Dilts has created a ‘Unified Field of Neurological Levels’. This is purely functional, stripped of any ‘spiritual’ message. Each level contains all the most general features of the level below it. In other words, the patterns in one level imply the patterns in the next level down. This means that change at any level will affect the levels below it, but not necessarily the levels above it (although this can happen). It is not the case that higher levels are more important than lower; rather, the model reflects the way in which willed change works: it is more effective to make a change at a higher level, and that is precisely what makes it a higher level. Dilts’ Neurological Levels are:-

• SPIRITUAL: Purpose. This is anything which is at a higher level of power or priority than:-
• IDENTITY: all the things we tell ourselves about who we are; we are often not conscious of the self-referential loops that inhabit this level;
• BELIEFS: whatever ideas we think are true. This includes our criteria, which are implicit in the way we make decisions, whether we are conscious of them or not.
• CAPABILITIES: these are our skills—not just manual or recognized intellectual ones, but the abilities that enable us to get through our everyday lives, socialize, make decisions, engineer our emotions and so on.
• BEHAVIOUR: what we actually do in the world. Our usage of time.
• ENVIRONMENT: the final level which we change through action (including magick).

Conclusions

Magick is inextricably intertwined with language, and language is just about everything. We are immersed in it for better or for worse, and so we need to understand it, take a grasp of our inner linguistic processes, so that we can become just what we want, rather than another robot whose blueprint was drawn up by someone else. Change is resisted by the nervous system, which prefers to repeat comfortable and familiar actions which have become ineffective rather than adopt new and more powerful strategies.

Magicians are generally aware that, in order to get results and fulfil your potential, you have to do things you don’t initially like—you have to break out of your ‘comfort zone’, in order to change. Through its modelling of successful change, NLP has accumulated (and is still accumulating) some of the smoothest techniques for changing beliefs and identities. This in itself makes it worth the magician’s while to investigate.

Recommended reading

NLP

• Richard Bandler & John Grinder—Frogs into Princes. Fast-moving seminar transcripts from the original masters.
• Joseph O’Connor & John Seymour—Introducing NLP (Thorsons). Good general introduction to NLP, including Robert Dilts’s Unified Field.

Magick

• David Lee—Chaotopia! (Attractor)
• Peter J. Carroll—Liber Null (Samuel Weiser)
• Phil Hine—Prime Chaos (Chaos International, BM Sorcery, London WC1N 3XX)

The 8-Circuit Model

• Robert Anton Wilson—Prometheus Rising

by Gyrus

Rock art has recently begun to cause more than a little conflict in academic archaeology. Curiously, the controversial discovery that some rock art was inspired by what we call ‘shamanism’ and ‘altered states’ was made through the dogged pursuit of scientific method, not through ‘fringe’ research. But as these areas brush against some of the deepest levels of the human psyche, they have inevitably raised a few hackles.

While not made in reference to these aspects of rock art, Richard Bradley’s comment that rock art research "must contribute directly to archaeology if it is to achieve anything of value" (Bradley 1997: 8) is interesting. Evidently archaeologists are eager to keep their ‘sub-discipline’ firmly in their grasp. It can’t help to have bugbears such as shamanism and altered states arriving on the scene. The first is a classic example of a multi-disciplinary phenomenon, due to it being essentially ‘pre-disciplinary’. The latter, more often than not, utterly transcends such conceptual categories. Gradually, more and more respectable archaeologists, like Bradley, are paying heed to the ‘trance interpretation’ of rock art. But perhaps there is a lingering fear that the act of studying altered states and shamanism will influence those doing the studying, as it has in areas such as anthropology and psychology. Such influences may begin to dangerously loosen the boundaries of archaeology—boundaries that have been diligently erected in archaeology’s long struggle to gain the status of being a ‘science’…

A Trojan Horse?

Western science’s first attempt to grapple with subjective geometric hallucinations (after Dronfield 1996). Images on the left are identified as ‘entoptics’ arising from neurophysiology during altered states; images on the right are identified as possibly arising from such states, but not exclusively.

The ‘entoptics’1 theory of geometric rock art arose from comparisons with hard neuroscience data. But however much the theory was smothered in references to neurological studies, and decorated with reassuring graphs and tables, it carried with it the unmistakable whiff of non-ordinary consciousness. For perhaps the first time, this phenomenon could confidently raise its head in archaeology as well as anthropology, neuroscience and psychology departments. Not the romanticised magic associated with prehistory by early antiquarians; not the megalithic astronomy described by Professor Thom; not even the communal experience of formalised ritual. All these have been dismissed or absorbed by archaeology with relative ease. But the personal experience of losing contact with consensus reality and entering a wholly Other world raises too many questions and, let’s face it, fears. Can we really grapple with this sort of subjectivity when envisioning the distant past? We have so many problems tackling it now!

Altered states can not only shed light on the origin of form in some rock art; they can assist in assessing the possible significance of all rock art. Altered states radically affect our apprehension of meaning, and help considerably in expanding our capacity for modes of signification that are less linear, monolithic and immutable than the traditions Western thought has inherited. Thus, worked with sensitively, they may provide keys to unlocking symbolic possibilities in prehistoric art and architecture—even if these relics’ only connection to ‘altered states’ is the fact that they were created by cultures whose entire mindset was constantly ‘altered’, in relation to our own.

Models of trance

To begin with, we must look at the distinctions made in the ‘pure’ trance theory of rock art. ‘Entoptic’ images are generally understood to be abstract geometrical images (lines, dots, dashes, circles, spirals) that arise in the early stages of a trip to the otherworld.2 ‘Endogenous visual phenomena’ are entoptics whose forms are seen to specifically arise from neural structures, especially those of the optical nerves.

This preliminary arena of geometrical imagery should be familiar to all with even mild experience of altered states. The literature associated with dimethyltryptamine (DMT) seems particularly relevant here. Although DMT occurs in many plants with a history of shamanic usage, and can even occur naturally in the human brain (Most 1986), it is usually used in the West in its smokeable synthesised form. When smoked, one immediately feels its effects; within a minute or two one reaches the peak of the trip. And one returns to ‘normal’ consciousness after about 15-20 minutes. The astonishingly rapid action of this compound means that the various stages of trance are tightly compressed, and are thus made clearer for explanatory purposes. Building on extensive accounts of various people’s experiences, Peter Meyer (1994) breaks the DMT trip into levels, which may be used to model many similar forms of trance:

Level I: Pre-hallucinatory experience

This stage is characterized by an interior flowing of energy/consciousness.

Level II: Vivid, brilliantly coloured, geometric visual hallucinations

Here one is observing a patterned field, basically two-dimensional, although it may have a pulsating quality. One may remember having seen this before.

Transitional Phase (Level IIB?): tunnel or breakthrough experience

One may see or fly through a tunnel… A veil may part, a membrane may be rent. There is a breakthrough to another world (or perhaps even a series of breakthroughs). Alternatively, it may happen that the transition from Level II to Level III is abrupt, almost instantaneous, with no experience of transition.

Level III: Three- or higher-dimensional space, possible contact with entities

This stage is characterized by the experience of being in an "objective" space, that is, a space of at least three dimensions in which objects or entities may be encountered. Sometimes the entities appear to be intelligent and communicating beings.

Level II is the arena of entoptic imagery, and is the prime concern rock art researchers looking at abstract geometrical shapes. It is these forms that are posited as being transcultural, arising from the very structures of the human nervous system. The ‘transitional’ phase also enters this arena in rock art studies. Bradley (1997) associates the concentric circular patterns in cup-and-ring art with tunnel-like images common to entry into profound altered states; Dronfield (1996) associates these images with both the tunnel-like entrances and the spiral art found in passage graves in Ireland.

Level III is what I call ‘full visionary consciousness’, and can relate to rock art that depicts representative forms (e.g. therioanthropic images). This level is seen by most rock art researchers to be culture-bound. That is, the forms of entities (spirits, gods, ancestors) encountered here—and the transformed identity of the voyager—are clothed with culturally-defined expectations. Thus, for example, an Amazonian ayahuasquero‘s3 Level III may be replete with jaguars and anacondas, while a San medicine man’s Level III may be clothed with antelope and giraffe.

An obvious question, though, is whether a San person taken to the Amazon to partake of an ayahuasca ritual will still find the otherworld populated with African fauna. Are Level III’s ‘clothes’ contained within the acculturated portions of a person’s mind, or can they emerge from a highly transpersonal interaction with the immediate ecosystem? A friend visited the Amazon recently and, during an ayahuasca ceremony, saw, alongside angels from his Catholic upbringing, a very unusual animal he had never encountered before. Days later he saw this otherworld animal’s real counterpart in the jungle. Suffice it to say that Level III is much too vast a can of worms to really prise open in this article!

Narrow visions

I’ve only come across one archaeologist who has busied himself with dismissing the ‘trance theory’ area of research. In British Archaeology, Paul Bahn wrote an article called ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas’ (1998). He compared the rise in attempts to interpret prehistoric rock art in terms of shamanic altered states to 16th century Christian missionaries who attributed ‘footprints’ in South American rock art to St Thomas. This analogy was in fact a thinly disguised attack on the students of the MA in rock art at Southampton University, which was devised by Thomas Dowson (the analogy also insinuates a degree of hoodwinking in Dowson’s teaching methods). The students on this course responded to the attack, and in his reply to this Bahn said that his article had brought much congratulatory feedback, and that the only negative response was from the students in question. Nevertheless, the only response to the article printed in British Archaeology (not from one of the students in question) rightly criticised Bahn for universally dismissing the ‘shamanic hypothesis’ (Chapman 1998). And in the commentaries on Dronfield’s article in Cambridge Archaeological Journal, from a variety of experts in the field, Bahn stands alone in his dismissal of altered states.

Bahn appears to be quite isolated in his opposition to this field of study, and criticism of his reactionary views may appear redundant. However, his biases are no doubt shared by many other less public voices, and a close examination of what they represent should prove useful in divining and breaking down restrictive attitudes to rock art and altered states in general.

Firstly, it must be said that his main point of criticism is actually based on important perceptions:

Interpretations in rock art studies—and indeed in archaeology as a whole—come in cycles or phases that often reflect their period and cultural background. Hence Lerio-Gourhan’s binary and sexual approach was born of the French structuralism and the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, and the astronomical approach came into its own during the Space Age. The current paradigm, trend, fad or bandwagon—as one might call it depending on where one’s own sympathies lie—seems to be the direct legacy of the drug culture of the late 1960s and 1970s, with its attendant interest in mysticism and shamanism, hallucinogens, altered states of consciousness, etc., all of which have coalesced into the massive ‘New Age’ literature of the 1980s and 1990s.

Paul Bahn (in Dronfield 1996)

Some crucial distinctions need to be made in this inaccurate morass of classification, if we are to clearly understand the cultural juncture we stand at which has made academic contemplation of theories about phenomena such as entoptics possible.

His use of the term ‘New Age’ implies an awareness of this field not very far removed from that of the average tabloid reader. The social phenomenon that calls itself ‘New Age’ is not really concerned with hallucinogens and authentic shamanism. The "drug culture of the late 1960s and 1970s" has not coalesced into the ‘New Age’. A diversification has occurred, leaving the more fad-driven factions in the public eye. However, far below the cultural horizons of Daily Express readers thrives a bunch of serious researchers concerned with psychedelic shamanism (see works by Terence McKenna, Jonathon Ott & Jim de Korne) and altered states in ritual (see works by Dave Lee, Phil Hine & Jan Fries).

But then all this solid exploration would be neither here nor there to those who see it as some backwash from the sixties. To these people, interest in altered states is merely a decadent and temporary fad, which we’ll probably all ‘grow out of’ sooner or later. Just like the Amazonian ayahuasqueros, Mexican curanderos, Indian tantrikas, African Bwiti cultists and San medicine men, Siberian and Eskimo shamans, Haitian voudon priests, Australian Aborigines, Nepalese sorcerors, Hawaiian Huna healers, Huichol Indians, and Native Americans, I suppose.

The dismissal of the "cycles" of archaeological theory as ‘fads’ amounts to a misperception of the way we are gradually recovering awareness of our environment and experience. Professor Thom’s megalithic astronomy theories may well have been made possible by the cultural milieu of the Space Age; but they uncovered a vital aspect of megalithic culture that now has a firm place in the archaeologist’s collection of lenses with which to view prehistory. The "’shamanism’ bandwagon" we are now "suffering" (Bahn 1998) is neither a bandwagon nor something to wake up screaming about—unless of course your ego structures are so rigid that they view challenges such as altered states with abject terror. No—it is a recovery of awareness.

Interpretations old & new

I have begun to take a shine to the view that all cultures have ‘interpreted’ art and monuments left by previous cultures. And yes, each interpretation says as much about the interpreting culture as the originators. Medieval peasants often ‘interpreted’ prehistoric cup-marks as places to make libations to elemental spirits (see Bennett 1998). The clergy from the same period had very different ideas about such relics, usually involving Satan and his little wizards. Interpretations in the twentieth century have chopped and changed as rapidly as Western culture in this period. But there is a vital distinction to be made between the interpretations of country folk up into living memory, and those made by academic researchers. Pre-twentieth century rustics, unlike most rock art researchers, still retained the archaic feeling that the land is alive with spirit. And, most importantly, they used and interacted with these remnants of cultures long gone.

Most academics, in looking at the "cycles" of modern interpretation, neglect the larger picture. Our current view of archaic art reflects our alienated paradigm, wherein we study the environment in an uninvolved way, never thinking (or daring?) to interact with it. In this sense, there is a much larger gulf between medieval peasants and us than there is between medieval peasants and their Neolithic ancestors. I fully recognise the difficulties in using folklore collected over the past two hundred years to gain ideas about the original purpose of prehistoric carvings and monuments; but even if the specifics are wide of the mark, the essential perception that nature is alive, and bursting with sentience, brings us much closer to understanding these relics than any quantifiable, measurement-based fieldwork.

Another interesting aspect of Bahn’s attack is that he cites our obvious inability to "be sure" what rock art motifs were intended to represent as an argument against the ‘trance vision’ interpretation. All I can say is that a human whose vision is only interested in what can be known with absolute certainty is hideously impoverished. Bahn says that "one of the joys of prehistoric art is that it does not necessarily require interpretation, and can convey huge amounts of information of other kinds—in its technology (including pigment analyses), in its location, … and in its dating." (1998) Joys?! In the end it’s each to their own—but I’d rather not limit myself to such meagre data purely because it’s a ‘safe bet’. That isn’t to dismiss the essential work in the arenas mentioned; it’s just to say that a timid self-restriction to these ‘certainties’ cannot hope to fulfil healthy human curiosity and need for meaning.

Multiple meanings

Various meanings ascribed to circular forms in aboriginal Australian art by aboriginal informants. From information collected over the past 100 years from across the continent (after Layton 1992).

We’ll never decisively nail down the significance of prehistoric rock art, obviously. But why should we not try to unfold the many possible meanings, and let them exist untethered? This may broaden our vistas of past art, and perhaps of present and future art, too. Indeed, much ethnographic evidence (e.g. Layton’s study of Aboriginal art, 1992) suggests that preliterate artists never even intend that elusive singular ‘meaning’, the certainty that scientistic researchers vainly lust for. Abstract symbols such as Aboriginal concentric circles or European cup-and-rings are obviously amenable to polysemy, the existence of many meanings. In Australia we have clear ethnographic accounts to help us in interpretation; in Europe we have scant folklore (though this may often be useful, as I have already mentioned). But even if we cannot safely ascribe Aboriginal meanings to cup-and-rings here, we can at least appreciate the importance of polysemy in preliterate signification—and realise that we can neither nail singular meanings to our prehistoric art nor shy away, in reactionary fear, from attempts to raise plausible possibilities.

Petroglyphs from Puuloa, Hawaii (after Cox & Stasack 1970).

A linguistic example of polysemy, which may show how alien singular meanings are to many non-Western cultures, occurs in relation to petroglyphs in Hawaii. At Puuloa, a large hill of solidified lava, there is testimony from the nearest inhabitants that cup-marks are used when a child is born (Cox & Stasack, 1970). They translate ‘Puuloa’ as meaning ‘Hill of Long Life’; when a baby is born, they go there to carve a new cup. They place the baby’s piko—which may mean ‘umbilical stump’ or ‘umbilical cord’—in it, cover it with a stone, and leave it overnight. "If the piko remained overnight (or disappeared—there is conflicting evidence about which would be effective) long life would be assured for the child." (ibid.) But piko is not limited to only two possible meanings:

As a noun it refers to the navel, navel string, and umbilical cord. Figuratively it can be used to refer to a blood relative and also to the genitals. It can be used to describe the summit of a hill, the crown of the head, tip of the ear, end of a rope, and the place where a leaf is attached to the stem. There are many other meanings, as is the case with very many Hawaiin words.

(ibid.)

Polysemy reveals a richness of signification that has become more and more alien to us since monotheistic literalism and the codification of language represented by dictionaries. The associations that polysemy weaves between different ideas and forms—wonderfully evident in the above example—allow for a perception of the world that owes more to the self-similar hierarchies of fractal theory than to the cut-and-dried isolation of meaning inherent in the Western rationalist paradigm.

But how in hell do you know what someone’s going on about with this many possibilities? In short: the ambiguities of communication are ironed out with context—either surrounding words and symbols, or, more interestingly, bodily presence. In using language that can refer to many things, it is vocal tonality, and the silent expression of gesture, eye contact and generalised ‘body language’ that steers verbal vehicles of expression:

In more traditional worlds … I’ve noticed that people remain much more attuned to the languages of gesture; where there’s no TV & "nothing ever happens", people watch people, people read people… I never knew this till I lived in Asia. Here in America, people react to you most often on the basis of the idea you project—thru clothes, position (job), spoken language. In the East one is more often surprised to find the interlocutor reacting to an inner state; perhaps one was not even aware of this state, or perhaps the effect seems like "telepathy". Most often, it is an effect of body language.

Hakim Bey

Here we need to appreciate the subtleties implied in the term ‘altered state’. It needn’t necessarily imply a wild trance, a voyage into the otherworld. A native of Darjeeling, in relation to our ‘normal’ consciousness, is in a constantly ‘altered state’. Culture is a drug—and each variant has its own nuances, induces differing sensitivities to environmental cues and sensory stimuli. We rarely notice that we’re loaded on culture because most people around us are too. This awareness of ‘altered states’ needs to be applied to signification in prehistoric art—to realise that these carvings were originally perceived from a totally different standpoint to ours, even by ‘passers-by’.

Transcending the borders of sense

Our understanding of polysemy may also be fruitfully enhanced by more intense altered states. Most interesting of all are experiences of synaesthesia (most common when using potent psychedelics), where signification becomes a complex trans-sensory experience that far surpasses frozen words. Polysemy is no longer: "This thing here may refer to that, that, or that"—because the extra dimensions and dynamic nuances involved in psychedelic spaces allow a transcendence of the linearity of language, and the ‘piecemeal’ signification it involves.

Clearly, some form of mutually agreed-upon system of signification is still needed to understand symbols arranged in such a space; but a right-brained task like this may well be simpler for ‘preliterate’ cultures than for our own, just as it is often simpler for someone who is stoned on tryptamines than for someone who isn’t. Terence McKenna’s fieldwork in the Amazon has convinced him that the "magical songs of the ayahuasqueros, the folk medicos of the Indians and mestizos of the jungle back rivers, are not song as we understand the term. Rather they are intended to be seen and to be judged primarily as visual works of art. To those intoxicated and adrift upon the visionary reveries unleashed by the brew, the singing voice of the shaman has become a magical airbrush of color and organized imagery that is breathtaking in its alien and cosmic grandeur." (McKenna 1991)

A mild experience of such synaesthesia once opened me up to new possibilities in rock art. Having taken some 2CB (a synthetic phenethylamine), I went to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to experiment with harmonic chanting. I put my face about 5 inches from a bare, uncarved surface and began chanting. I kept my eyes open. What occurred was a meshing of entoptic phenomena (usually assumed to manifest behind closed eyelids) and exterior reality—in this case the plain rock surface.

But it isn’t ‘plain’ at all. It is alive with the tiny crystalline structures that compose the rock surface itself. There’s no ‘blank canvas’ in rock art! As I chanted, the irregular pattern of these crystals smoothly coalesced into a regular lattice-work pattern, always gently shifting. Embedded in this lattice were diaphanous symbols—the usual lines and circles, again always mutating. Their form and movement appeared to correspond to the modulation of my voice.

Carvings on the Badger Stone (after Hedges 1986).

As I hit a certain tone, the patterns seemed to reach a certain stability, and the atmosphere was charged with a pregnant and slightly ominous expectation. Nothing dramatic followed. But my feeling was that if I had taken a slightly larger dose, or perhaps if I had managed to side-step the familiar shock that impending tears in the fabric of reality induce, I would have gone into the rock.

This reminded me of an article I had read:

In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock… In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock.

Grant S. McCall

Could vocally-induced altered states, perhaps aided by other trance induction methods, have played a part in the genesis of some rock art? There is strong evidence that acoustic effects such as echoes play a part in the Korku tribe’s decisions for locating rock paintings, and Steven Waller has found unusual echoes at over 100 rock art sites across the globe (Trubshaw 1997). Whether this idea can be extended to include the more intimate use of voice seen in my own experience is unclear; but the notion of entoptic phenomena being seen, not behind closed eyelids, but on the rock surface itself, is surely intriguing when considering rock art. Even more intriguing is the idea that the genesis of some prehistoric visual forms may have been rooted in synaesthetic experience, and owed as much to sonic performances as they did to purely ‘visual’ phenomena.

Transmedia contexts

We should realise the full extent to which our division of ‘the arts’ into respective media—writing, song, dance, visual arts, etc.—may blind us to the function of rock art. The term ‘multimedia’ has recently narrowed in meaning to refer to shoving a CD into a computer. Perhaps we should adopt the term ‘transmedia’ to refer to attempts to break down the walls between various artistic media in an active, body-centred way (see P-Orridge, 1997). ‘Transmedia’ is to separate artistic media what synaesthesia is to the five senses; and both may inform our view of preliterate cultures.

Citing Nancy Munn’s research into the teaching systems of Aboriginal mothers, where symbolic visual elements, hand gestures and language are utilised simultaneously to impart information about the mythical landscape, Robert Andreas Fischer (1997) argues:

So-called orality within indigenous societies has … never existed. Oral communication is the tag non-alphabetical literate societies have received from alphabetic literate societies. In reality, so-called oral communication is composed of an extremely sophisticated, multi-layered, polysemic codification-system of simultaneous communication systems. The "orality" of indigenous societies is actually a form of "savage multi-mediality".

We cannot let any trace of our ‘frame & gallery’ approach to visual art distort our investigations into carvings that were probably part of a culture where different artistic media flowed into each other, and merged with the environment.

In the archaic universe all things were signs and signatures of each other, inscribed in the hologram, to be divined subtly.

Giorgio de Santillana & Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill

In unearthing rock art’s many possible meanings, we must be cautious about saying that meanings ‘belong’ to such-and-such a painting or petroglyph. Especially when dealing with abstract symbols. For if we are to take the Aboriginal mothers’ methods of teaching to be a viable contextual possibility for prehistoric rock art, we must consider the possible replication of the symbol in other media, and even in the environment.

What I mean by this can be seen if we visualise scenarios around, say, the Badger Stone. Perhaps some symbols on the stone are replicated in geoglyphs on the ground before it, or on body paintings or tattoos. It is impossible for those present to consider these symbols as wholly distinct from the bodily motions, ritual actions, vocal performances or stories woven around and among them. The symbols on the stone are not the foundation or ‘base’ of the web of significance; they are merely elements in the network. (But then the same is true of all symbols, even today—only the linearity of prose blinds us to this.)

This network extends outwards beyond human society. A cup-and-ring could relate to the form of a burial construction (see Bradley 1997), a water source, a heavenly body (e.g. the Pole Star—see Oakley 1998), a whirlpool, a tunnel to the otherworld, or the circle of the horizon. The network of meanings could also extend inwards beyond culture: to the eye, mouth, breast, nipple, navel, vagina, anus, or neural structure. Any or all of these references could coexist simultaneously in the web of meaning.

Similarities between the forms of cup-and-rings and monumental structures (after Trubshaw 1997).

This vision of signification, with meanings floating in a complex pool of cross-references, where symbols are only anchored to human life through ritual and the body, is what I have been led to through my experiences of altered states and my study of rock art. It obviously presents a difficult challenge to Western academic traditions (be they institutionalised or not). Because the only language that can grapple with this vision is one that owes as much to poetry as to prose, and more to play than to work. Finally, maintaining this vision requires something that totally breaks the present boundaries of intellectual study: active involvement.

There is a huge amount of study to be done, and fun to be had, in interpreting and revitalising archaic artforms. We should not let the inherent uncertainty and multiplicity of meaning involved in this task discourage us; but rather appreciate and enjoy the many-faceted, unfixable nature of reality that makes these things inherent. Beyond entoptics, I feel that it is in the comprehension of this more general paradigm that altered states—both subtle and intense—will benefit rock art research.

A personal testament to the archetypal nature of vortex imagery. I did the finger-painting on the left after a psilocybin-fuelled Chemical Brothers gig, 7/10/95. Six months later the 5 year-old daughter of a friend spontaneously presented me with the drawing shown on the right.

Footnotes

1. Championed by David Lewis-Williams and Thomas Dowson. ‘Entoptic’ literally means ‘inner eye’. [back to text]
2. I like the term ‘otherworld’, despite its neo-Celtic connotations. To me it simply signifies a self-consistent world that is Other than this one, only accessible via altered states. Its after-death connotations are, given shamanic testimony, entirely appropriate. [back to text]
3. An ayahuasquero is a shaman whose sacramental psychedelic is the potent brew called ayahuasca. This comprises varying hallucinogenic plants, usually DMT-containing varieties, plus the harmine-containing Banisteriopsis vine. [back to text]

References

• Bahn, Paul, 1998, ‘Stumbling in the footsteps of St Thomas‘ in British Archaeology February 1998
• Bennett, Paul, 1998, ‘Cup-and-Ring Art: Its Folklore, Myths, and the Shamanic Perspective’ in Towards 2012 part IV, Unlimited Dream Company
• Bey, Hakim, n.d., ‘Evil Eye’, http://www.spunk.org/texts/writers/bey/sp000536.html
• Bradley, Richard, 1997, Rock Art and the Prehistory of Atlantic Europe, Routledge
• Chapman, Bill, 1998, Letter in British Archaeology April 1998
• Cox, J. Halley & Stasack, Edward, 1970, Hawaiin Petroglyphs, Bishop Museum Press
• de Santillana, Giorgio & von Dechend, Hertha, 1999, Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating The Origins Of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, Godine
• Dronfield, Jeremy, 1996, ‘Entering Alternative Realities: Cognition, Art and Architecture in Irish Passage-Tombs’ in Cambridge Archaeological Journal vol. 6
• Fischer, Robert Andreas, 1997, ‘Protohistoric Roots of the Network Self’ in Towards 2012 part III, Unlimited Dream Company
• Layton, Robert, 1992, Australian Rock Art: A New Synthesis, Cambridge University Press
• McCall, Grant S., n.d., ‘One Medium, One Mind’, http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3339/rockart.html
• McKenna, Terence, 1991, The Archaic Revival, HarperSanFrancisco
• Meyer, Peter, 1994, ‘Apparent Communication with Discarnate Entities Induced by Dimethyltryptamine (DMT)‘ in Lyttle, Thomas (ed), Psychedelics, Barricade Books
• Most, Albert, 1986, ‘Eros & the Pineal’, http://www.magnet.ch/serendipity/dmt/eros.html
• Oakley, G.T., 1998, Verbeia: The Goddess of Wharfedale, Norlonto
• P-Orridge, Genesis, 1997, ‘Thee Splinter Test’ in Towards 2012 part III, Unlimited Dream Company
• Trubshaw, Bob, 1997, ‘The Altering State of Rock Art Research’ in At The Edge no. 8

An Interview with Dave Lee

by Gyrus

Starting out

Gyrus: What were your early experiences that led you into magick?

Dave: The older I get, and the more experienced in magick I get, the more experiences there seem to be in the past. It’s as if history comes into focus. I think the things that precipitated me into a magickal universe, with no doubt that it was happening, were early psychedelic experiences in my late teens. When I took on a magickal paradigm later in life, in my twenties, I did start to remember things from childhood that were magickal experiences. But at the time, as a child, they didn’t take me off the path of rational thought, and attraction to science, which was also one of my main things from childhood.

Gyrus: You studied science as a degree?

Dave: Yes, I did a science degree.

Gyrus: Were you bringing science and magick together back then in your thinking?

Dave: Towards the end of my undergraduate years I did start to look into the philosophy behind science, the philosophy underpinning science, and realized it was far more flimsy than I’d previously assumed. And that it was built upon an abyss of ignorance, and that there were ways of apprehending reality other than science. I took up some magickal practices, meditation and so forth, starting to explore what the mind could do.

Gyrus: What were the magickal traditions and writers inspired you early on?

Dave: Well, when I first got into magick as a subject, actually read about it, there were early experiences I had with the I Ching. I found myself in possession of a copy of the I Ching when I was about 18 or 19, and when I used it, it had a peculiar sense of rightness about it. I must say I didn’t really use it in any rigorous sense for divination like I would now. It was more for general advice about life. It was the beginning, obviously, of an acceptance of synchronicity, an acceptance of the connectedness of things which goes beyond ordinary materialist reductionism—this is implied in using the I Ching.

But the first actual magickal writers I got into… well one of the main ones of course was Crowley. In the late 70′s there wasn’t much else around that was as wide-ranging and genuinely exploratory—and, at its best, non-dogmatic.

Gyrus: I suppose the fact that he tried to combine science and magick in one framework appealed to you.

Dave: Yes, there’s an element of that. His writing is often very overblown and pompous, and quite difficult to get any sense out of, but as I say it was more or less the only thing that was around. It wasn’t very long before I collided with the emerging current that later became called Chaos Magick—Pete Carroll’s first book Liber Null came out in the late seventies.

Gyrus: What did you feel around that time—that it was a condensation of something that had been welling up in magick for a while, or that it was quite a surprise emergence?

Dave: There was a refreshing sense about that book, Liber Null, like a breeze blowing through things. A sense of "Yes! I’m glad somebody’s saying this!". Of course it was written by somebody who had a far more systematic experience of magick than I had; therefore I didn’t understand everything in it, because you can only understand magick by looking at experience of magick. Having said that, the bits I did understand had a certain sense of familiarity about them, as if I was waiting for a magickal philosophy of that kind—and a rigorous approach to practical magick.

Gyrus: Did you follow any one tradition, and train yourself rigorously in that before the idea of combining traditions, picking and choosing, came along?

Dave: When I first decided to do some practical magickal work, within a tradition, it was because I’d met two guys who were really into Qabala. They taught me a few of the basics, the Golden Dawn and post-Golden Dawn, Crowley/Dion Fortune, styles of Qabalistic work—the Middle Pillar meditation, the Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram, that kind of thing. I started doing pathworkings, where you work from the bottom of the Tree of Life upwards, climbing through the different symbolic levels, and having sometimes unremarkable experiences, and sometimes very vivid and intense experiences, with a real degree of mythic seizure in there. There’s no sorcery in that system, but there’s a lot of good self-transformational magick. So I learnt basic Qabala, I learnt my way round the Tree of Life and the paths on it—that is, the kind of Qabala that is mediated by the Golden Dawn, which is obviously very different from the Qabala of the rabbinical tradition. But what was called the Western Esoteric tradition, which has a lot of Qabala in it, that was the first system and tradition that I studied.

Then, being introduced to Chaos Magick, I studied bits of other systems; but I didn’t really educate myself in other systems until much later.

Gyrus: So was Chaos Magick an impetus to look at other systems, like the runes? And did you feel in Qabalism a lack of relevance to where you were living, the culture you were living in, and that culture’s history?

Dave: I think my eventual disappointment with Golden Dawn-style Qabala was the fact that you can’t really do sorcery with it. It’s all about self-transformational magick. Of course you can do sorcery with it, but it doesn’t encourage it, it’s not easy to get sorcery out of it. For instance, in the four-levels Qabala that the Golden Dawn taught, the lower-level spirits are the ones that actually go out and do the business. But you have to address them through the angels, and address them through the archangels, and address them through the gods. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with that system, it’s just that it isn’t designed for doing results magick, for doing sorcery?

Gyrus: A bit bureaucratic…

Dave: It is a bit bureaucratic! The Northern Tradition, of course, is very different; it’s applicable in a very vivid way, both for self-transformational magick and for sorcery, but it wasn’t until much later that I got into that. I think Chaos Magick initially stimulated me to be a bit of a squirrel, running around gathering bits from all sorts of different traditions, from whatever attracted me. I had some successes, and also got into some blind alleys; when you’re investigating any subject that tends to happen. I learned a little bit about Voudon, a little bit about everything, really… No, a little bit about a few things, to be fair. It wasn’t until rather later that I got into the Northern Mysteries; and to me that became a much more complete paradigm. It wasn’t that Chaos Magick pushed me in that direction; it was that for me Chaos Magick was the exploration of a lot of different directions. And eventually the one that I stuck with the longest was the Northern Tradition.

So there isn’t some sort of equinamity towards all traditions—Chaos Magick is a way of loosening up and exploring traditions you might not have thought about normally.

There’s no reason why people should study the tradition of the country they live in, or study any tradition for any specific reason—other than that they’re truly attracted to it, or other than that they’re investigating it to find out how attracted to it they are. For the purpose of doing basic sorcery, you can more or less start anywhere. Or, of course, you can take the more purist approach that Chaos Magick started off as, which is taking the Austin Spare-type approach, where you devise your own system. Very few people actually consciously and deliberately do that, very few magickians. But a lot of magickians have learnt a tremendous amount from Spare’s notion of throwing out tradition, and looking at the essentials of what the magickal process is. And, of course, if you read Spare in the original rather than just in context, you realise there’s mystical elements to him as well. But there’s a very strong practical current, and that is one of things that coloured Chaos Magick, and it’s one of the things that Chaos Magick has brought back into focus—and influenced other magickal traditions thereby.

Sorcery, class & religion

Gyrus: Sorcery is very stigmatised in a lot of magickal traditions, even if it’s just by down-playing it. What do you think sorcery essentially is, and why has it’s gained this reputation?

Dave: Well sorcery can mean a lot of different things, of course—most words can—but sorcery is a word that is used very differently by different people. In this context, I’m generally meaning ‘results magick’. I’m meaning magick that has some effect on consensus reality, rather than a purely internal, psychological effect, or some more subtle spiritual kind of effect.

As to why it’s been stigmatised or anathematised, I think that’s got a lot to do with Christianity, and the way that Christianity itself has influenced magick. Oddly enough, even though many people still think of Aleister Crowley as "the Wickedest Man in the World", he, in many respects, was very much a Right-Hand Path magickian—or at least he liked to think he was. He said things like, "Any magick that isn’t done with the intention of attaining Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel is black magick." Maybe from some perspectives that’s true—but what does he mean by black magick? And so forth. But phrases like that certainly put a lot of people off doing sorcery. You can hardly overestimate how influential the man was, and his writings were in this century’s occultism. Similarly, Dion Fortune seemed to have the attitude that it was a bit ‘naughty’ to do results magick. A lot of magickal organisations that have evolved either from Dion Fortune or Aleister Crowley do still have those attitudes. And a lot of the magickal tradition of the western world comes through those very organisations, and through that very influence.

Gyrus: There must be a misconception about sorcery or results magick that it’s bad because it’s about gaining worldly things, and is an ‘unenlightened’ short-cut to ‘mere hedonism’. But presumably after most people practice results magick for a while they realise it’s not quite as simple as that!

Dave: If it was just about hedonism, you could see how the Right-Hand Path and religious people would object to it. But really it’s got a lot to do with money; it’s got a lot to do with the fact that both Crowley and Fortune were wealthy people. Well, Fortune I’m not so sure about, but Crowley was very wealthy—he got rid of his fortune of course. He basically was brought up with the sense of always having enough. Fortune I’m not so sure about; she certainly wasn’t working class, she certainly never experienced poverty for very long, and wasn’t brought up in that condition. Objections to sorcery, practical magick, are almost invariably made by people who are materially very secure.

Gyrus: So you think there’s a class element to it?

Dave: Not universally; but it seems that there has been in the history of British occultism, certainly. Let me think of another example where that might not be the case… Perhaps in India, where the Right-Hand Path saddhus don’t like magick very much, it’s a distraction from the path of ‘illumination’. But I don’t know, maybe they’re Brahmins—maybe that’s worth looking into, as to what the objections are. Of course I don’t necessarily mean that all Left-Hand Path sorcerors are from a lower caste or class. I very much doubt that that’s the case, in fact, because they tend to be highly educated people as well. But there is a basic attitude that the universe is provided for you, a basic trust in the universe in the Right-Hand Path philosophy. Whereas the Left-Hand Path philosophy is a sense of basic trust in your own will, your "might and mane", as they used to say in the northern lands.

Gyrus: Referring to your comment about the influence of Christianity, it must especially be Protestantism that has influenced attitudes to sorcery. It’s based on the idea that nothing you do in this world will lead you towards a state of grace or salvation; it’s purely an internal, intangible exercise of faith. Besides Christianity’s basic prejudice against magick, that’s a huge prejudice against part of the spiritual path being in this world, and your interactions with it.

Dave: There is this curious connection of sorcery with Catholicism of course. For instance the artworks of a chap I know, Snakes—’Automatic Prayer Machines and Divinity Selectors’—strange bits of post-technological art that contain in them numerous tiny things from the Spanish religion and sorcery industry, Santiago, where he found places where you can buy all sorts of spell-kits, essentially, for using in the church. And this has been going on for centuries. People are allowed to do sorcery, as long as it’s thought of as ‘prayer’.

I suppose a lot of the Middle and South American traditions containing sorcery, which managed to graft with invading Catholicism to an extent, to form various syncretist religions, may have had a harder time of holding onto fragments of their traditions if they were invaded by Protestants…

Out & about

Gyrus: In its connection to the everyday world, Chaos Magick popularly, if that’s the right word, has a very ‘urban’ feel to it. Well I know you’ve done quite a few treks into nature to do magick—what are your experiences of that?

Dave: The second Chaos Magick group that I was ever in, which was the group that became known after it had ended as the Circle of Chaos, for want of a better name—it was ‘The Group’ at the time—was in West Yorkshire in the mid-eighties. We worked eight rituals a year, on the old festivals—the quarters and the cross-quarters, the Celtic festivals. We worked seven or all eight of them each year out of doors. We sometimes worked Yule indoors because it seemed like an indoors kind of thing. But the rest we worked out of doors. And I loved it. Putting a certain amount of effort into certain types of magick enhances it—prolonged concentration, prolonged focus. Walking for, say, a mile through woods at night, in silence, with no torches—because it’s actually easier to walk at night without torches in the woods than it is with them, you get selectively blinded if you’ve got a source of light. We used to do it in silence, and just thread along in a chain—or otherwise we’d go in smaller groups of two or three, and meet up somewhere. You’d have to actually find other people in the woods, at certain sites where we’d meet. And then maybe build a fire in silence. And with the awesomeness of the night, after the couple of hours that it took to get all this together, you’d be in an interesting and wonderful altered state.

Gyrus: I heard that in one of Yorkshire’s witch covens, one of their initiations was to walk around very craggy, dangerous wooded areas at night with no lighting. It’s a very intense way of extending your sensitivity towards what’s around you, in a practical as well as magickal sense.

Dave: One rite we did involved splitting up and all going off in different directions to explore the moor top, at least over from Sunnydale up to Ilkley Moor, those miles of bleak moorland. Obviously we were doing it in the summer, but it was still very much a survival night. That was very intense. ‘Stalking Power’, we called it.

Gyrus: Did what’s known as ‘earth mysteries’ feed into the stuff you were doing outdoors?

Dave: For me it did. I’ve always had a real fondness for the study of earth mysteries, and for some of the people who write about them, their work. I must say that most people I know on the Chaos Magick scene don’t really get that far into that sort of stuff, but I love it. I’ve had some extraordinary experiences at Avebury, for instance. Around there the energies to me are really amazing for particular types of deep transformational magick. Ilkley Moor is another example—that’s a very different type of current. Other places, too. I’m deeply curious about the way that people lived in these landscapes that nowadays are often bleak and uninviting, like Rombald’s Moor, the Ilkley Moor complex…

Gyrus: It was covered in trees…

Dave: Exactly, it was more wooded at the time. And the carvings that are left up there on Rombald’s Moor, the Badger Stone and the Swastika Stone for instance—who knows how old these things are? There are theories about it, but they could be completely wrong, they could be much older. There’s a sense of the tracks of a people who were maybe only just settling down from nomadism, or maybe still nomadic. We have a very old phenomena here, some very old magick. I went to a talk by a chap called Brian Larkman back in the old Leeds University Union Occult Society days, back in the early to mid-eighties. He showed slides of cup-and-ring marks, and noted how the swirling concentric patterns, and looped joins between them, are very similar to those that were found on Aboriginal initiatory shields, which young men carved after, I believe, they’d had their particular major Dreamtime experiences. And these things appeared to be maps of the landscape, from a subjective point of view, a magickal point view. I wonder whether there was a culture rather similar to that living on Rombald’s Moor at one time.

Gyrus: Did any of these ideas feed into your ‘Stalking Power’ experiences?

Dave: They did for me. I found myself, on that particular night I was referring to, walking miles up the moor top, bright moonlight… kind of looking for a line of connection between things. I never found it, actually, but had some very interesting experiences. I was looking for a way of walking up to one of the stone circles up there; intuitively that was the way I wanted to go. So it did feed in, yeah.

Gyrus: From what I know, it seems that the Aboriginal mythical maps of their landscape are all bound together with songs. Obviously, the lyrics would change from tribe to tribe, through different languages; but the rhythm and the melody would be the same right the way across the continent. The ‘texture’ of the music actually describes the nature of the land, so you can use songs as a navigational tool. If you’re walking a certain distance along a ‘songline’ joining sacred sites, you can sing the song as you go, and you’d know through the structure of the song where certain landmarks are.

Dave: That makes so much sense, for a nomadic or semi-nomadic people to have an oral tradition which is intimately concerned with knowledge of the landscape.

Gyrus: Did you do any vocal experiments during the time you’re talking about?

Dave: No, I didn’t actually. Not that I remember, no.

Gyrus: But you’re quite into that now—vocal techniques, chanting and so on?

Dave: Yes. I’ve not used them much at specific sites, for particularly connecting in to landscape energies or whatever. But I do a lot of magickal work with what’s called galdr, a northern tradition which basically means both ‘sorcery’ and ‘song’, ‘magick’ and ‘song’. It involves the chanting of runic formulas as a means of sorcery and divination.

Psychedelics & magick vs. mysticism

Gyrus: Not many magickal writers seem to go into psychedelics much, and vice versa; all the big psychedelic writers brush past magick. Again it’s this mysticism/magick duality. Was it natural for you, when you came across both, to put them together?

Dave: Absolutely. As I said, much of my direct experience of being immersed in a magickal universe came from early psychedelic experiences. At the time, most of the stuff written about psychedelics, back in the late ’60s, early ’70s, was by people who were heavily influenced by Oriental mysticism. I’m not knocking that, that’s fine; but it was very one-sided. Much of the writings carried over the contempt for, or fear of, practical magick and sorcery. Perhaps Casteneda was the exception. I did find his work quite intriguing, but it seemed to relate to a tradition that was very hard to come to terms with in urban UK at that time.

Essentially, for me what’s happened is that I’ve had to grow up enough to write my own manuals, that I wish I’d had when I was 19; to write the fusion of magick and psychedelics that is my own experience. I suppose some people who do psychedelics do end up being attracted to a path which is essentially Right-Hand Path, because it’s to do with the annihilation of the personal self—eventually. It’s to do with dissolution. Whereas the Left-Hand Path is to do with individuation, and the emulation of godhood. I think that’s intimately connected to psychedelics, but I can see how—maybe it’s a cultural thing—there’s this separation between magick and psychedelia, inasmuchas the manuals for the connection weren’t written a couple of decades ago. Or maybe it’s to do with the fact that different people are normally attracted to each of those approaches. I happen to be one of those strange people who’s attracted to both!

Gyrus: It’s curious, because from what we know of existing primitive tribes, much aboriginal use of psychedelics was part-and-parcel of the ‘sorceric’ aspects of shamanism—using psychedelic trips to look for animals to hunt, to find lost objects. It’s odd that as both sorcery and psychedelics were repressed by monotheism, they diverged into ‘magick’ and ‘mysticism’.

Dave: Psychedelics, in their recent reincarnation since the ’50s, either developed a kind of ‘high culture’ position, like Aldous Huxley, which is essentially non-magickal and mystical—he’s very intriguing, his writings are great; very, very good in my opinion—Leary’s a little bit like that, although there’s more Left-Hand Path elements in Leary—or they went in the Ken Kesey ‘pop’ acid direction, which was almost Christian.

Gyrus: Like the Jesus Army?!

Dave: Oh, I don’t know about them! I wouldn’t even like to speak the names of Kesey and the hippies and the Jesus Army in the same breath! Terrifying…

Gyrus: I just had this image of Kesey’s brightly coloured bus and those Jesus Army buses! A totally fanciful connection…

Dave: No, that’s horrible! But there’s a tendency that is pretty near to Christianity in a lot of Kesey’s philosophy. It influenced an enormous number of people who became known as hippies. That’s pretty much a Right-Hand Path philosophy.

Gyrus: What exactly is the connection you see between that sort of promotion of psychedelics and Christianity?

Dave: I think people who take a really staggeringly large amount of psychedelics—even, it might be fair to say, a little too much—get to a kind of state which is sometimes known in the trade as ‘gnostic burn-out’; where really, what they want to do most is come down. Some people developed actual paradigms for ‘coming down’. And I think one of them was Kesey’s notion of going ‘beyond acid’; which, for him, didn’t mean getting into magick—which was what it meant for me, getting into the Left-Hand Path of magick—what it meant for him was getting back into the Earth, and community… doing things together collectively, being a good neighbour… all those good things which are to do with the building of communities. But they’re just half the story, they’re part of the ‘way of the household’. Even then, it’s not the full way of the household, if the householder is truly a magickian. The person who is a strong and significant member of the community may be on a path that is Left-Hand Path also. Like in Voudon, they talk about "serving with both hands". Which means that you both serve the community and you serve yourself. Whereas there was a complete repudiation of any magickal exploration in much of what Kesey said and wrote. This is as an example; I’m not particularly trying to pick on Kesey, I think he was splendid in many ways. But he’s an extraordinarily influential man; he was responsible for most of hippiedom. Leary was far more ‘high culture’. Leary was far more at the sci-fi end of it, rather than at the ‘nice country people giving each other peace signs’ end of it.

I think the fact that all that needed to come down into something is the connection. Fourth Circuit, basically… it’s to do with having your mind blown out into the Eighth Circuit. It seems that where Kesey landed was Fourth—which is essentially to do with morality, and pair-bonding, and the tunnel-vision of any given society.

Left hand, right hand

Gyrus: I was thinking there of the traditional idea of the Left-Hand Path being the eschewing of the Right-Hand Path’s ‘steady progression’. It’s a ‘short-cut’, not meant with any negative connotation. Some people took psychedelics as a short-cut, and went so far out that they elastically ‘snapped back’, to channel it all into Earth-bound community-building. But your opposition to that seems to be to do with an on-going integration of far-out states into a balance, serving with both hands.

Dave: There’s a spectrum here. The kind of example I’m using is an almost ideal example, of the community priests of Voudon, the houngans, who are very powerful members of the local community—businessmen, farmers, whatever—professional people. A lot of people—rather like an extended family, the village or part thereof, like an extended kinship grouping—a lot of people depend on that person. They’re very much in the position of being a leader, a spiritual and business leader of that community. They will do the birth and marriage ceremonies, they will put on all the very expensive events that require the hiring of places, paying drummers, all that stuff.

The reason I’m using Voudon as an example is that there isn’t really an equivalent in England, or in Europe—there’s no precise equivalent of that type of integration into the community of magickal service with magickal selfishness, the importance of one’s own development. At the extreme of the Left-Hand Path is the kind of sorceror who’s become an outlaw; either because he’s a bit out of order and has been rejected, or because the community does naturally reject sorcerors, which is usually the case anyway. In the old northern lands there were people who became outlaws who were sorcerors, who lived by their own might and mane. There were also priests of Odin, who were members of the local community, and were probably only a priest as far as their own extended kinship group was concerned—again, rather like the houngans. But of course these men and women would also be serving their own ends, they would also be evolving along the lonely path of the Left-Hand Path.

By the way, it’s interesting too that you mentioned the notion that the Left-Hand Path is the short but dangerous one, all that. This is something that I came across way back at the beginning of my magickal career, maybe even earlier. I think some Indian writers, or yogic writers, have it that way—I’ve heard that in a lot of different ways. And I think it is a particular bit of nonsense. It’s absolutely nothing to do with speed of development—although of course you do go a lot faster on the Left-Hand Path because it is development truly into magickal individuation, whereas the Right-Hand Path is not.

It might appear that a priest who is serving with both hands is a jolly good chap who’s on the Right-Hand Path. But we must remember the Norse myth of Tir, who has his hand bitten off by the wolf. He sacrifices his hand in defence of the community, against forces of chaos and night. But in so doing, he himself is on a very lonely journey. There’s a lot of connections between leadership, the myth of Tir, and the notion of serving with both hands—interestingly enough in this instance for a god who’s only got one. The appearance from the outside might be that he leads, that he gives to his community, and serves, and is therefore on the Right-Hand Path; but in his own heart, he’s on the Left-Hand Path.

Gyrus: I’ve never thought about the connection before, but there seems to be some similarity between Tir and Odin, who loses one eye; there’s the idea that he has one eye pointing out to the world, and the ‘missing’ eye points inwards. There’s that same balance.

Chemical tools, chemical intent

Gyrus: How do you relate to the different psychedelics? A lot of people have preferences, and very different conceptions of, especially, man-made and natural psychedelics.

Dave: It’s a complex question. I tilt slightly in favour of natural psychedelics; but I do make an exception for acid, which I think is an extremely valuable substance. Some of the other synthetic psychedelics I’m not as interested in.

Gyrus: Do your preferences relate to how you find them suitable for magickal work?

Dave: Well in my experience, LSD is very valuable for healing. In the right hands, of course, under the right conditions, the right guidance. For self-healing or healing of others, it can be an extraordinary catalyst.

I’ve never known anybody find a use for DMT. DMT is a thing in itself. Enough said!

Gyrus: Obviously you’re talking in terms of smoking synthetic DMT?

Dave: Yes—well, it might not be synthetic, but yes, in terms of the usual administration of it in this culture, which of course is smoked. Mushroom is in some ways the vastest and weirdest of them all. You can control it quite easily sometimes, other times it completely takes you over. Sometimes you can use it for sorcery, sometimes it’s much more mystical. That’s perhaps the most challenging.

Gyrus: What do you think about different attitudes towards intention and psychedelics? John Lilly once said that the absolute worst thing you can do when taking acid is go in with preconceptions or intentions. But of course magick is more about control and having very clear intentions. Do you have a general principle between these two approaches, or do you use one sometimes and the other at other times?

Dave: I think with Lilly you do have bear very, very strongly in mind that with a lot of the things reported as being said about acid, he was in fact talking about ketamine. At the time he wasn’t allowed by his publishers to mention ketamine, for some reason. I’m not sure why—maybe they just didn’t want to start people thinking about yet another drug that sends you crazy, with the LSD scare on. But apparently during that era he was completely wiped out on ketamine all the time. I think on a high dose of ketamine, particularly in sensory isolation, it’s absolutely impossible to do anything, in terms of guidance of the experience. I’ve very limited experienced in this area, but I’m astonished that Lilly has got so many brain cells left if he used that much, frankly. I don’t think it’s a particularly benign substance.

Having said that, I think I agree with him that it’s not a good idea to go in with any preconceptions; but I think it’s a very good idea to go in with intentions, even if they’re broad ones, and totally mystical. It doesn’t have to be sorcery—you don’t have to go, "Right! I’m gonna do this acid and do a spell to get myself a new job!" I think that’d actually be rather silly. But if you say, "Right, I’m gonna do some LSD and heal a particular aspect of myself, confront a particular demon and sort it out…" Under the right conditions of course—don’t do this at home, kids! Your unconscious will give you all the experiences you require to lock into that intention. But of course you have to flow with the details. It’s not a good idea to have preconceptions about the actual details of what will happen. You will be taken on a journey, and you’ll find yourself coming out the other end of it with a good result. You can’t force each stage of the journey, but you can put an overall intention in there. In fact, I would say that a lot of time, the problems people have with psychedelics are to do with the fact that they don’t have any intention at all. That doesn’t matter with low doses, recreational doses. But when you take a high dose, a truly psychedelic dose, if you don’t have any intention whatsoever, you can get locked into confusion until your psyche actually goes to a deep enough, sometimes dark enough level to find an intention. The intention might be as general as to have a good time, it might be as general as to feel a taste of oceanic bliss.

London

Gyrus: What attracts you to London, in a magickal sense?

Dave: I love this town. My present phase is spending more time and creative energy in writing, not just technical magickal stuff but fiction as well. London is a great city, it’s full of stories. Since I’ve been down here I’ve plugged right back into it, so many stories are happening.

It’s very much a place for reinventing yourself, a place for finding yourself in the right social scene, or the right creative environment, to move on a stage—that’s what it’s been for me.

Gyrus: How do you relate to the city magickally? Are there any tinges of adapting ideas about landscape and the environment in nature? Do you go for any of the urban psychogeography?

Dave: Yeah, I think London is absolutely thick with power-places, extraordinary power-places. I think that’s why it’s such a sprawling city, and so much of it’s a bit of a mess, and overpopulated, and all the other problems we associate with it. People have come here because it’s magickal. It is an extraordinary bit of land, for various reasons—the practical always links with the impractical in these things. I always have a personal, mythic sense of where I live. I’ve developed that over the years, and enjoy it. I like to find out about where I live. Just the other day I bought a second-hand copy of the London Encyclopaedia; I look places up, and learn a little bit about them—very gratifying. It’s part of the layers of my magickal world. One of the stories I’m currently working on is provisionally entitled ‘The London Web’, and it has some reflections on the power of London in it… the way that people’s lives get entangled in this city.

Gyrus: Do you do much venturing out from here, or do you find London sufficient in itself?

Dave: No, I really love the area around Avebury—the Ridgeway, bits of the southwest, which is like my ancestral home, as it were. I love to get out to Avebury, West Kennet, a couple of times a year at least. I go up north and visit friends up there. I’d like to get around more, really.

Healing currents

Gyrus: Healing, especially interpersonal healing, seems to be neglected in the Chaos current. I was trying to think of a reason for this, and the strong association of healing with the New Age movement sprang to mind.

Dave: I think you may be partially right. There’s this tendency for people who think of themselves as ‘hard sorcerors’ to think of healing as… puff’s magick!

Gyrus: Perhaps it’s renamed and thought of as ‘self-transformation’…

Dave: I think there’s a lot of credulous people on the New Age healing fringes who are punters for various techniques, that may sometimes work, but are often expressed in ways which are really to do with dragging more credulous punters in. So some magickians might turn their noses up at perfectly valid techniques that have got that particular marketing surrounding them.

I think that the techniques of healing are a little bit different to the other techniques of magick. In some ways there are more techniques of healing than there are techniques of magick. You can cast a sigil for healing, like you can cast a sigil to get more money, or find a lover, or to defend yourself against someone, or whatever. All the basic sorcery techniques apply to healing as they do to other areas. But there’s also a sense in which healing is a very special kind of magick that’s actually easier to do. There’s more ways of doing healing. In some ways it’s an easier type of magick to do. I think it’s a cliché, but it’s probably true that everybody has the ability because I suspect that everybody heals themselves anyway. As long as one actually makes it out of infancy, there’s probably some ability to heal oneself. And I think all healing is ultimately self-healing; and a healer is someone who tricks you into healing yourself.

Gyrus: I was thinking that the neglect of healing in the Left-Hand Path is odd, what with its emphasis on results in the material world. But then healing is probably on the borderlines; most healing traditions take some sort of psychosomatic approach to illness, so it’s on that borderline between inner and outer work.

Dave: It’s one of the things that people most often want when they come to some form of occult practitioner—a fringe practitioner, or sorceror, or shaman or whatever in the tribe. Healing is one of the things they most commonly want.

It’s an ingress point into magick for a lot of people, I think, if they get successfully healed. In a sense what you’ve got is an internal environment that you’re acting upon; it’s an environment that can be objectively studied, the human body, to some extent. But it’s internal, it actually belongs to you; you’re in it, and you can do things within it. So you’ve potentially got far more power over it than you’ve got over many things in life. Which is why healing, in a certain respect, is a lot easier. And as I said, it’s also an ingress point for a lot of people because of that feature of it. I’ve had, and seen, some of the most spectacular results of any magick I’ve done, in the area of healing—so-called incurable diseases healed, things like that. Quite extraordinary, massive, rapid changes in people under magickal conditions; crises averted; lives saved, I believe. I think it’s a tremendously heartening aspect of magick, getting such good results.

The other thing is the fact that if you actually set yourself up as a healer, you’re going to have a lot of people knocking at your door. And if you’re not comfortable about mixing your wyrd up with strangers, mixing the threads of your life up with those of strangers, or even those of people you don’t know very well, then healing, professionally, is just not an option. Because it does mix up your wyrd with that of other people, it connects you with other people. It was quite late in my career that I discovered I was quite good at healing; it was because a friend of mine that I worked with magickally insisted that I do healing on him. I discovered I could; it worked. But I’m just not prepared to tangle the threads of my life up with those of loads of strangers, at that kind of intimate level. Maybe other magickians feel that in some way, either clearly or vaguely, as well.

But the techniques of healing are enormously valuable; and even if you only use them on your nearest and dearest, they should be a very important part of any magickian’s bag of tricks.

Sex magick

Gyrus: What do you think are the biggest misconceptions about sexual magick, and what do you think are the most important things about it?

Dave: I think that sex is so intrinsically enjoyable that in a lot of instances, people, even magickians, just enjoy it and don’t do much with it. Once you start to have the frame of mind where you’re doing something with the energies of sex, that’s not always appropriate to the relationship you’re in; it may very well be appropriate, it may very well not be. I think, for instance, that in a lot of cases, regular couples who have been together for years, very happy with each other—relatively happy, anyway—that’s not usually the best type of relationship for doing the most wonderful forms of sex magick in. So much of the energy of sex seems to go towards the maintenance of the relationship itself, whereas sometimes the explosive energy of a new relationship, or a relationship that doesn’t actually last very long but is incredibly intense, can be an amazing source of energy.

I don’t like using sexual magick for what I would think of as relatively trivial or unconnected ends. For instance, I would never use sexual magick in any aggressive or cursing mode, because I don’t want to mix up that aspect of my psyche with my sexuality. Similarly, anything that didn’t feel right, on a gut level, as a spell, I wouldn’t do using a sexual gnosis. That still leaves plenty of stuff that does work, though. Some sexual magick is best done on your own—because you don’t have to concentrate on anything else, except your own arousal and focus of consciousness.

What Crowley said about sex magick, in some respects, still stands. He essentially wrote about two gnostic states: energised enthusiasm and eroto-comatose lucidity. Energised enthusiasm is just what it says, that wonderful state of energised bliss, which is nonetheless highly conscious and has a good deal of focus—potentially, or actually—that can be used for sorcery, or for self-transformation. Eroto-comatose lucidity is the state of translucency that’s produced by sexual exhaustion, where the more divinatory and passive forms of magick can be undertaken. (Tape pauses for a roll-up break) …you just mentioned Katon Shual talking about the emotional side of the relationship being more important than the magickal side or whatever—is that roughly it?

Gyrus: I think he was talking about preconceptions, probably arising from Crowley’s accounts of just using women for his magickal purposes. I know there’s an aspect of that in traditional Tantra, where the goddess is revered in the form of a woman. But it’s sometimes subtly repressive towards women, because she’s just a vessel for the tantrika’s magick.

Dave: I don’t think that technique in itself is necessarily repressive. In the context of some patriarchal, male-dominated magickal organisation it could be, certainly. But the technique of objectification is one which occurs right across the sexual spectrum. In some instances, sex is better when the other person’s objectified; in other dimensions it isn’t. I think emotional closeness is enormously important; but in the course of sexual play, it’s sometimes desirable to achieve a state where the other person is the vessel of female or male sexuality—the sexuality that you’re attracted to. A pure, impersonal vessel, of that force. That in itself is something of a cosmic vision.

Basically, I don’t actually do very much sexual magick, in terms of sexual sorcery, because it doesn’t always fit in with my actual enjoyment of sex. Sometimes magickal operations fit perfectly; not many, though… I’ve gone back on what I was saying earlier in a sense, when I said that there were still plenty of magickal operations which I would use sex magick for. But there actually aren’t that many, when I think about it. A lot of the time, sex creates a loop of ecstasy, which does all sorts of transformative things that I allow to happen, but don’t direct very much with my will. I might have an overall intention at the beginning, but it’s not like I think sex is better if you draw sigils all over your partner and gaze at them.

I think there are two types of sexual arousal in any case. There’s sexual arousal which is aiming towards fairly rapid gratification, what I’ve called in my book Chaotopia! ‘the quickie orgasm’. This is the kind of thing the Crowley was doing, by and large, with prostitutes in New York—the basis of Rex De Arte Regia and his other notes on sex magick. With Crowley of course, things are rather different, because he was actually doing some sorcery, for a change. He didn’t actually do very much sorcery. But in terms of the quality of the sexual relationship, obviously it was pretty minimal… a fun kind of thing I suppose, but there are deeper forms of sex that rely on the generation of the ‘internal bliss-wave’, as it’s been known. What I think of as Fifth Circuit consciousness, or higher. That does involve opening up to the partner a good deal more, and taking more time over it.

Gyrus: So you think sex is often ‘useless’, in terms of magick, in the same way that DMT is, but for different reasons?

Dave: An interesting analogy!

Gyrus: It’s not that you’re too far out, it’s just that there are so many other things going on, particularly emotionally, that it’s just not applicable.

Dave: Yeah. Sex, to me, is just one of the best things in life, and I don’t want to necessarily always force it into the Procrustean bed of practical sorcery. Sometimes I’d rather just let it be sex. Which nonetheless, at its best, can sometimes go into a kind of mysticism. As the sex gets better, you reach higher and higher states of consciousness, and you find that you’re in a state which is rather like sex—but not as we know it, Captain! That’s another game entirely from the quickie orgasm; it’s another game entirely from practical sorcery.

Millennial culture

Gyrus: When I was talking to Amodali [of Mother Destruction], I realized for the first time—I suppose entering the final year of the decade has something to do with it—that the 90′s is the first decade in the last half of this century not to have thrown up some sort of distinctive youth movement. What do you think is going on here? Is culture now too chaotic for anything like rave or punk to just spring up?

Dave: I think we’re in the afterglow of the rave subculture…

Gyrus: It’s lasted so long though!

Dave: It has lasted so long; I think it’s been a particularly successful subculture. And that’s why it’s gone on for 10 years! I knew little about it in ’87, when most people date it from; it’s more of a ’90s thing from my experience. Being a bit older, I missed out on some of the rawest and newest aspects of youth subcultures as they came along. A lot has come out of the rave culture. To me it’s been the most significant youth culture since the 60′s. My 90′s has been coloured by a sense that here is a bunch of young people, dancing and doing MDMA and so forth, and then getting a bit more sophisticated, some of them going into psychedelics and into magick. And in parallel with a load of older people like myself who remember the late 60′s, early 70′s, before it became that completely commercialised glitz of 70′s culture, which was then smashed by punk. The late 60′s thing was so naïve and primitive, compared to the sophistication of the rave culture generation. Of course that generation built upon earlier experience, which is why I think it’s stabilised, as a subculture, more than most. It’s had a longer shelf life, even though of course it did become commercial. In terms of music styles, everybody thinks techno’s old hat now. There doesn’t seem to be any youth culture accompanying the most advanced forms of dance music now. Basically I suppose drum and bass and hip-hop are the cutting edge of dance culture now. That doesn’t have the same youth culture, doesn’t have a revolutionary youth culture attached to it; it has more of a clubby, hedonistic…

Gyrus: There have been musical revolutions, but they’ve kept within the bounds of music, and the culture that surrounds that, rather than any wider social culture.

Dave: I really don’t know where it’s going next. Lionell Snell always had interesting notions about micro-aeonics. I’ve got my own theories, but his were more prediction-based than mine. He was actually trying to use astrological, or quasi-astrological models to predict the next stages of mass fashion. I think his cycle was Science, Religion, Art and Magick. I think when he was talking in ’93 he was talking about us going into a Religion phase—or was it coming out of a Religious phase? I can’t remember now. I don’t know his astrological gnosis well enough to be able to comment and add it to my own notion of micro-aeonics.

Gyrus: Was it anything to do with solar cycles?

Dave: Pete Carroll’s very much into the sunspot cycles… Was it a 19-year cycle or was it 11 years?

Gyrus: I came across the 11-year sunspot cycle in Iain Spence’s article in Towards 2012 part III. He related this cycle to the Transactional Analysis grid, relating youth subcultures to the four ‘personality types’. I think he pinned the hippies to ’66, punk to ’77, rave to ’88, and of course ’99 was the next big one.

Dave: Ah, well it’s all been warped by the millennium, hasn’t it? We’ve got a massive cultural log-jam happening which is called the millennium! After the millennium, when people sober up around January 30th or something next year, they’re going to realise of course that nothing in itself has changed, unless they want it to change. The economy might well take a bit of a dip, after all the partying, until new things take hold. I’m inclined to think that the 2012 concept will actually go mass after the millennium. When people get disappointed by the millennium, they’ll be looking for the next ‘millennial’ change; and 12 years is a nice sort of period. I think there’ll be something of a mass culture to do with the 2012 phenomenon.

Gyrus: I’d never considered that…

Dave: Yeah, look out for that late next year, or by next summer perhaps.

Gyrus: I think I have a blind-spot past the millennium. Obviously it’s like a big New Year, and I have this every winter, coming up towards Christmas and New Year. You have all your Yule plans laid out, and you probably have plans for January, but they don’t seem as ‘real’ as plans for a month or two ahead do normally. It’s a big version of that. A psychological block, I suppose.

Dave: When I was a youth, I would have laughed at the notion that I would have survived this long! So it’s like free time in a way, it’s great!

I think there may be an increase in the sort of ‘whizz-bang’ technology factor… or perhaps ‘gee whizz’ technology factor would be a better expression. An absolute awe of technology, almost a kind of religion of hi-tech. But we are developing an increasingly fragmented society in some ways; although there’s a lot of communication, there’s a lot of little subcultures going on, even the youth subculture. Maybe because it’s lasted so long since rave, a lot of the rave generation have said, well, what’s happened is that loads of people from different scenes used to dance together—now they dance in different clubs. Totally different scenes, taking different substances to enhance their evenings, and they have different subcultural values. Maybe that will continue, maybe new forms of that will come along. But a mass youth culture… I wouldn’t like to predict one, but I think the 2012 thing is going to be part of it.

Gyrus: What do you think are the drives behind the human yearnings for, and fears of, apocalypse? I’ve thought of it as collective coming to terms with personal death; then there’s Immanuel Velikovsky’s ideas of race memories of vast catastrophes, comets impacting in prehistory. Like the Celts who told the Romans that the only thing they feared was the sky falling…

Dave: ‘Cos it’d happened to their ancestors! Yeah, it really had, in my belief. And I think that quite a few mainstreamers are beginning to accept certain aspects of Velikovsky’s notions. Maybe not exactly as phrased; but the idea of there being cyclic catastrophes that have wiped out whole civilisations, I think is highly probable. I think the conventional, old-fashioned notion of history as being a continual rise of civilisation from people walking around with clubs a few tens of thousands of years ago, up to the present marvellous things we’ve got, is probably nonsense. I very much doubt that there’s been a civilisation that has had our sort of technology before, but I think there have been civilisations before where people lived in cities, had very highly organised and stratified social systems, and a class which was able to enjoy the best of everything that was produced—a leisured aristocratic class, what we normally call ‘civilisation’. I do think that there probably are race memories of great catastrophes. This is becoming a theme in sci-fi, I’ve noticed, probably because of the gradual bleed-through of Velikovskian kind of notions into popular culture. And also because of the millennium—even though people don’t pay much attention to Christianity these days, by and large, we still have that culture within us. The very fact that our calendar is constructed in this way tends to make us think that something bloody amazing, or awful is gonna happen—maybe not this year, but maybe in 10 or 20 years’ time. There’s the general sense that in our lifetime something big might happen. And it could be an asteroid crashing into the Earth; it’s improbable that that’s going to happen in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I think another level of it is simply that people want to tidy their lives up, want to see life in a more simple fashion than it is. Fundamentalist Christians are an obvious example. They love the apocalypse, because it means that all the people they disagree with are gonna get murdered by God, and that they’re going to live forever in a sort of suburban paradise. This is an extreme example of the way that people use the notion of apocalypse to tidy up life, which is a messy and intricate system, a set of interlocking systems that can’t be reduced to a single truth.

Gyrus: There’s obviously a lot of cynicism about the year 2000 because it can be seen as just an arbitrary date on the calendar. But do you think there’s a leftover yearning from cultures that had cyclic calendars which scaled time up from years to aeons? A leftover need for large-scale renewal festivals or phases, in spite of the millennium being used by corrupt systems like the State and the Church to glossily ‘renew’ their waning powers?

Dave: I think there is, actually. I think it helps when there are people in a culture with a much vaster sense of timespans operating. I do try to avoid politics most of the time, but the way that politics works is incredibly short-sighted. It just makes me tear my hair out if I look at it too closely. The whole short-term fix, the whole mentality of politics… it’s probably no different to what it’s always been, but there’s no sense of the larger picture, no sense of the important features of what makes human life. Culture absolutely needs much longer-term perspectives embedded within it. Usually those are provided by religion. Hopefully we’re moving out of the large scale of the excesses of religion, and there might be a fairly mass-scale wisdom about larger timescales evolving. I’d like to hope so.

Ad astra

Gyrus: Do you think you’ll see affordable space travel in your lifetime?

Dave: Within my lifetime and my income bracket, those two things? I think that’s a great question, a fun question! Well, as to whether it’ll come within my lifetime and my income bracket depends on one of the parts of the old Leary S.M.I².L.E. formula, Life Extension. I could be dead tonight or I could live another 200 years! But I think it’s highly probable that we will see people going on holiday on Earth orbits, as a sort of jaunt; and maybe a bit further into the future going to the Lunar Hilton. Or an orbital space station might be more likely as a first stage. I mean the Japanese have commercial space station projects on the go, I think some of the Japanese companies have got…

Gyrus: People are paid up?

Dave: I think part of their long-term corporate strategies is to get a proper decent space station up there that people can go and visit. I think it’s definitely going to happen.

Gyrus: Has space travel ever obsessed you?

Dave: When I was a kid it did—I wanted to go into space when I was a kid, absolutely!

Gyrus: It’s strange that for a lot of kids growing up after World War II it was an obsession—"What do you want to be?" "I want to be an astronaut!" But it seemed fade out after the space programs didn’t progress as fast as we thought they would. And now it’s resurging because the idea of adults being able to consider going on holidays in space has come over the horizon. It’s finally gonna happen within the next 30 years or so.

Dave: Well like the invention of the printing press, it’s not something that happens overnight. There was a steady linear increase in the number of people who could read and the number of books in homes, or even in libraries for that matter. But it did mean that after decades, centuries there was noticeable change. We’re now in a zone of more rapid change, but there’s still gonna be ups and downs in space exploration, I think.

Gyrus: How do you think magick will function in terms of living in space? Magick originated in nature-based paganism, and now thrives in cities—as it’s probably done in the past, but more noticeably now. Perhaps the whole idea of cities is preparation for leaving the Earth, to learn to build mythologies and so on, totally separate from the land?

Dave: Skyscrapers look like rocket ships… What will happen is that if you’ve got an ecologically self-sustaining space station, what you would have is a capsule of what Earth was about—a semi-stable ecological system, a little capsule of Earth-life in our space stations. And no doubt people would not only use that to grow fruit and vegetables, but they would also go and sit in there with the trees, because part of our genes is tuned in to all that, it’s very much part of us. If we didn’t have that, it would drive us a little bit mad, I think—it would be difficult. If you thought you were never going to see green growing things again, it’d be very difficult.

Of course there are other levels of nature which are out there. You can think in terms of being inside the body of the star goddess Nuit; you’ve got the primal fire of suns as tiny points within the body of the goddess. There’ll be mysticisms and religions based upon the experience of space travel; and there necessarily will have to be, because space is such an uncomfortable… you can’t just go there without a capsule to be in, because it’s nearly absolute zero, it’s fucking freezing. There’s no life as we know it out there. It seems like a very hostile place, so we’d have to develop new myths to deal with living in space. But we’ll also have to take with us encapsulated forms of the old Earth mythos.

Gyrus: I’ve just read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick. He presents a really bleak view of space travel, or colonising other worlds. The colonists on Mars live in tiny communities in a very barren, poisonous landscape that they’re in the slow process of terraforming. What they do to cope with this is they have what I suppose are doll’s houses, with a version of Barbie and Ken living in them. They chew this hallucinogen, and all the women are transported into the female doll, all the men into the male doll. It’s seen in very religious terms by the colonists. But instead of having far-out psychedelic trips, what they do is just ‘commune’ with this doll’s environment, this microcosm of Earth life, just going around doing everyday things, like going for a drive to the beach. I suppose it’s like people escaping from their lives on a Friday night by getting pissed or doing an E, but in a very powerful, focused way. It’s quite a melancholy view of nostalgia for Earth.

Dave: Imagine if you’re living in a very small community, maybe there’s only a few hundred of you in an expeditionary community on Mars or something, terraforming it. It’s gonna be ages before you get any results. You’d all get really fed up with each other! You’d have to live in virtual universes to be able to bear such an environment, I think. You wouldn’t be able to get away from other humans very easily. It wouldn’t be like there’s a city you can go out and party in from time to time, to get that sort of release of meeting new people and being put in different situations. You would need some form of virtual reality, like that story, which would probably be based on, certainly for the first generations, on Earth. It sounds like a soap opera, that!

Gyrus: It is portrayed as being like plugging into a soap opera.

Dave: An interactive VR soap opera!

Gyrus: Just to get a taste of ‘back home’…

Dave: It seems like a reasonable kind of direction.

Gyrus: Maybe the cultures that arose from the first colonists would have a Garden of Eden-type myth about Earth?

Dave: There’ll be a Golden Age thing somewhere in the past, there always is.

Gyrus: Do you think that’ll persist wherever we spread, or will there be opportunities for ‘clean breaks’ in space?

Dave: I think it will persist, because people do need a sense of continuity and race memory; so that’s naturally going to produce nostalgias for other conditions. Which, particularly in moments of hardship in your present life, will always seem to be superior. Maybe there was a community… this book [From Ashes To Angels by Andrew Collins] argues there was a very advanced community up in the hills of Kurdistan, 10,500 years ago, which was Eden. An excellent book, actually.

Gyrus: Is it related to any of McKenna’s theories about an African Eden?

Dave: Not really. But on another level, we’re remembering oceanic consciousness in the womb. If you take Stanislav Grof’s model of consciousness, the perinatal matrix of oceanic consciousness, the part of your nervous system that was programmed in the womb, picks up a whole gestalt of related feelings and myths that occur to you throughout your life—as you become conscious, as you become mythically aware, as you become culturally aware, and as you have various accidents and incidents in the course of your childhood and adult life. Those certain types of myth and experience will aggregate at that first perinatal matrix, which is to do with oceanic bliss, and the disturbance thereof. Being forced out of Eden, all that. So there’s a lot of levels on which this might work; and I’m inclined to think that it will continue, this sense of a Golden Age.

The word

Gyrus: What are your current obsessions?

Dave: One of the areas that I’m getting into with magick at the moment is story-telling as magick. The authorship of stories, or the telling of them as a magickal act. I’ve enjoyed writing short stories for a while, but I’d never done much with them until recently. One of the things that’s stopped me short from writing stories before is that I’ve always been intensely aware of my degree of identification with protagonists in stories, and having to be very, very careful of what I make happen to the protagonist. Because I really feel like I’m writing my own life-script. I did at a certain point start to realise that I was doing this, and writing other people’s life-scripts. That responsibility implies power, and power implies responsibility. I’m fascinated at the moment by fiction as a tool of magick, both of sorcery and of self-transformation; and the way that a story can be a complex series of enchantments which produces new truths for me as a writer, and produces new objective circumstances around me.

Gyrus: There’s a lot of mythology around writing in terms of ‘telling it as it is’. Perhaps I’m thinking of Burroughs’ bit in Naked Lunch saying that a writer can only write about what is happening at the moment of writing. Obviously this wasn’t literally meant, but he seemed to be eschewing the idea of ‘artistically imposed’ structure and meaning. But then his cut-up ideas often cross the border from prophecy to sorcery…

Dave: Well one of my main influences over the course of my years in magick has been William Burroughs’ work. He didn’t declare himself upfront, most of the time, as a magickian, but he wrote as such. His notions of the magick of writing are very profound, I think. I bet that thing about the writer being a ‘passive recorder’ was an exploration, with a certain degree of irony, of that position. What is the writer writing down as he apparently passively records? He’s actually writing down his own thought-stream. He may tweak it, and maybe even cut it up and rearrange it later, to make it serve his purposes of communication. But Burroughs wasn’t a camera. He was a living consciousness, selecting certain aspects of the reality in which he found himself, and applying enormous skill, and experience, and concentration, to put them in a certain order. He wasn’t just a ‘mere recorder’ of what’s happening. He was shaping reality by selecting bits of it—very vividly so.

I’m going to be doing a talk at the World Rune Gild meeting in November, hopefully, in the States, on story-telling and magick—that’s my theme for this year—and I’m going to read bits of stuff there. It fits perfectly with my Norse paradigm, because Odin is very much a god of story-telling; he’s a god of pure intelligence that manipulates… he’s the arch-manipulator, he’s the arch-control freak, and does it by creating reality. He’s the arch-magickian, because magickians are control freaks; that’s another level of the whole difference between magickians and mystics, and between magickians and people who’ve—up until now anyway—been into psychedelics. Magickians sometimes have a real problem in letting go. I’ve had to work on that—bodywork has been one of the ways through for me, Vivation breathing and so forth. To actually learn to let go sufficiently to achieve integration. There’s a point beyond which magickians, people of the Left-Hand Path don’t want to let go, because you don’t want to let go into annihilation, ultimately. So you train yourself to resist annihilation. But on the other hand, to let go into the deeper levels of trance is what seidr is about, as opposed to galdr, which is more intellectual and focused—willed.

Gyrus: So galdr isn’t just the vocal tradition, it was a whole?

Dave: It meant ‘magick’, to a large extent, it meant the magick that was acceptable. The thing is, Germanic magick goes back into the mists of time, but we know most about the Viking age because there’s a lot of literature from there—these people were great story-tellers—and a lot of artifacts have survived to give us an idea of what the culture was like. It was only a particular phase of northwest European culture; it was probably very different a few centuries before that. But that particular political and cultural phase produced a society in which galdr was kind of acceptable, but seidr was a bit naughty. Seidr practitioners are always accused of y’know, taking it up the arse, being unmanly, being dirty and all this kind of thing—it’s there in the Norse literature. There was a sense that galdr was masculine magick, and seidr was feminine magick. Seidr was supposed to have been taught to Odin by Freya. She was the Vanic witch, the sorceress of the old Earth cults of the Vanir, whereas Odin represented the Aesir—in a sense, more of an intellectual tradition.

Gyrus: Warrior-based.

Dave: Later, I think, yes; not necessarily earlier. The roots of the name ‘Odin’, or ‘Woden’, seem to be to do with ecstasy. So it goes into an almost shamanic mode. Again, the form of the story-teller as an ecstatic intelligence applied to the creation of reality—that’s what the story-teller was doing around some campfire half a million years ago!

It was a sunny autumn day, and I took about 7.5mg of 2CB1 before venturing onto Rombald’s Moor, West Yorkshire. This dose was enough to elicit minor psychedelic effects, but not enough to pass the threshold into a full-blown trip. This is commonly known as a ‘museum-level’ dose: enough to deepen appreciation of art without making it difficult to function in ‘everyday’ situations. I find this level useful for enhancing wanders across the moor and still being able to find the right change for the bus back home.

Drawing showing carvings on the Barmishaw Stone, Ilkley Moor.

My first stop was a flat rock bearing several cup-and-ring type petroglyphs, which includes a couple of ‘ladder’ designs instead of the usual singular grooves extending out from the central cups. The rock is just south of a cluster of trees on the north side of the moor, to the east of Spicey Gill, and is known as the Barmishaw Stone (OS reference SE 1123 4648). Paul Bennett tells me that Barmishaw is from the Yorkshire dialect for "spirit in the woods", as in "Barm i’ Shaw". The rock lies near the highest edge of Barmishaw Woods.

I knelt next to the stone and gazed over the glyphs. My first intuition came as a result of a modulation of my spatial perception. I believe this aspect of psychedelic experience may be very important in the investigation of rock art, and landscape archaeology in general. As I gazed at these glyphs, I began to feel that the flat surface of the rock was a full landscape in itself, and I was a large, omniscient presence flying above it, surveying its features. This reminded me of (and was possibly unconsciously prompted by) the concept of shamanic flight in the ‘middle’ world of the three-levelled shamanic cosmos. Shamans often claim to be able to leave their bodies and fly not only into alternate realities, the upper and lower worlds, but also across the surface of this world. They often use this technique to perform common tasks like finding lost objects or searching for animal herds. As this concept melded with my perceptions of the rock, I simultaneously began to sense a dissolution of the barriers between my perceptual world, which was occupied solely by the rock, and the rest of the surrounding landscape.

This particular sensation is very difficult to convey to those who aren’t sensitive to alterations in consciousness and haven’t used hallucinogens. It was the very first astounding experience that I had on my first LSD trip, by a lake at dawn. I held my head in my hands, probably as an attempt to hold it together, and was amazed at what happened when I closed my eyes. I could still perceive the entirety of my surroundings, but felt them to be spatially located between my hands. This exchange or fusion of inner bodily experience with outer sensory experience is found throughout the literature of mysticism and magick. It is explicit, in relation to physical landscapes, in certain aspects of Tantric practice, and has surely influenced Australian Aboriginal beliefs.

My experience of it at this carved rock, together with my feeling of ‘flying’ over the rock surface ‘landscape’, brought me back to the first idea I had when I saw cup-and-ring marked rocks—that they are maps. One idea that flitted through my head as I looked over the rock surface was that the stone could have been used by shamans in trance states to transpose their consciousness to a broader perspective on the landscape. The rock surface would become the local landscape, and the shaman would become the sky, or be transported into the sky. During modulations of spatial perception, the rock could become a doorway to a more omniscient perspective on the local geography.

Many people have tried to correlate cup-and-ring marks with the local landscapes in order to test this hypothesis, but none (as far as I’m aware) have been successful. Recently, my research has led me to the conclusion that if they are maps of any sort, they are more likely to be maps of ‘spiritual’ realms, symbolic delineations of the structures of inner experience. My experience over this rock led to a third hybrid hypothesis: that the glyphs are maps of the region where the local landscape overlaps with the inner human landscape. There are many possible variations on this idea, which is very close to Aboriginal perceptions. As James G. Cowan notes,

That landscape is the ‘bones’ of Aboriginal myth making suggests a new (in reality, an old) way of looking at the earth. It implies a metaphysical structure within the earth that enables it to transcend its material limitations, and so enter the minds of men as a symbolic image.

The Aborigine Tradition, Element, 1992, p. 80

One would expect, then, that if cup-and-ring marked rocks are a microgeography of the ‘mythical’ aspects of the surrounding land, depicting key sites and their inter-relationships, they would still correspond to observable features in a literal way. They would be selective in their cartography, filtered through whatever geomythical complexes the carvers had developed, but they would still have yielded results in the aforementioned ‘map hypothesis’ tests (which they so far haven’t). Perhaps we should explore the notion of structures of energy in the earth imperceptible to ‘unaltered’ consciousness.

Tests for this hypothesis will inevitably be difficult. They should be greatly aided when researchers sympathetic to these ideas get their hands on more advanced computer resources than word processors. I look forward to the day when I can get (or develop) a Wharfedale CD-ROM, incorporating detailed OS maps of the area, a full image bank of all the carved rocks, the ability to selectively superimpose advanced geological maps showing fault lines and other geological data, perhaps together with a compilation of ‘fringe’ data assembled from dowsing, measurement of electromagnetic anomalies, and the experiences of pagans and magickians in the area. [Haha! Now I can, I'm too busy... Gyrus, 2002] However, it is possible that, even if the ‘metaphysical landscape’ idea is close to the mark, no amount of rigorous assimilation of presently available data will reveal the perceptions of the glyphs’ originators. Maybe their perceptions were far too idiosyncratic to be recovered.

Then again, while I’m very interested in the impossible task of piecing together our distant ancestors’ perceptions and beliefs, I’m also into how we today can alter our perceptions and beliefs in order to relate to the environment (‘natural’ and ‘constructed’) in a closer and healthier way. My experience at this carved stone had precedents, but it may not have bonded so closely to my feelings about the landscape if it wasn’t for my interest in the stone’s carvers. Even if this particular idea is never verified as being relevant by consensus, I would still think of it as interesting and useful. Fascination with the past often acts as a good catalyst for novel perceptions. Just don’t confuse inspiration from the relics of the past with direct knowledge of the past (which happens in the ‘earth mysteries’ community as often as unexamined assumptions distort academic notions about the past).

Audiovisual Hallucinations

Drawing showing carvings on the wonderful Badger Stone, Ilkley Moor.

I moved from this rock to the nearby Badger Stone, a little to the south (SE 1108 4605). By this time, the effects of the 2CB were sufficient to lend a pale violet ‘glow’ to the edges of rocks and the hills. I knelt in front of the carved side of the stone. I began to do some chanting. I have a friend who is skilled in overtone chanting, and although I have only been able to elicit overtones sporadically, practising chanting with him has enabled me to greatly deepen and broaden the range and resonance of my voice while chanting pure vowel sounds. As with spatial perception, vocalization is a different experience for me in the open countryside. There are no inhibitions about being heard by neighbours, and the feel of a wide open landscape, fresher and more vigorous than indoors, contributes to the chanting. I seem to be able to discover a much richer voice on the moor.

I placed my face a few inches away from the rock surface, and began to intone a range of sounds. I shifted across the rock, noting various acoustic differences in chanting at different areas. I finally rested on one spot, and although cup-and-ring glyphs cover most of this side of the stone, I focused not on a carved pattern but on a patch of plain rock. A familiar perceptual shift occurred: when faced with a repetitive but irregular pattern, visual perception influenced by hallucinogens seems to smoothly rearrange the pattern into a more regular and geometrical (but constantly mutating) one. I experienced this with the minutiae of the rock surface’s texture, the irregular arrangement of tiny crystalline structures. They shifted, arranging themselves into different regular patterns, sometimes with diaphanous shapes and symbols embedded in the network. The mutation of the patterns seemed, as I had expected, to be governed by my modulation of my voice.

There is evidence to suggest that some shamanic ceremonies of Amazonian tribes using ayahuasca (a blend of plants, also called yagé, containing the synergistic hallucinogens harmine and dimethyltryptamine) are directed by the power of vocalizations to elicit visual phenomena. Shamans’ songs are not really sung here for the sounds they make, but for the visual sculptures they produce in the perceptions of those hearing the song during ayahuasca intoxication (Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, pp. 116-141).

Amazonian Indians do not, as far as I’m aware, sing to rocks. But their art is inextricably linked to their drug visions. G. Reichel-Dolmatoff said that when he asked Tukano Indians about the paintings on the front walls of their homes, they replied: "This is what we see when we drink Yagé…" (R.E. Schultes, & A. Hofmann, Plants of the Gods, Healing Arts Press, 1992, p. 121). There is some surviving ancient rock art, similar to contemporary paintings, in the Amazon. One of the key images in most Amazonian ayahuasca art—as with many preliterate cultures, ancient and contemporary—is a dot surrounded by a circle.

There is good evidence that some cultures who produce rock art do sing to stones, though:

Over the last ten years Steven Waller has investigated over 100 rock art sites in France, Australia and USA for sound reflections, and found unusual echoes at every one of them. . . . Direct ethnographic evidence for acoustics as a motivation factor for the production of rock art has recently been found in India. Echoes have religious significance to members of an indigenous tribe called the Korku. This tribe continues to produce rock art today, using echoes as a selection criteria when choosing which caves to paint.

Bob Trubshaw, At The Edge #8, December 1997, p. 6

Cup-and-ring art is obviously a different case. Being largely carved on rocks on open land (as opposed to paintings done on larger rocks and cave walls), they were probably not sited according to echoes.

Prehistoric multimedia

I feel, though, that it’s entirely possible that the cup-and-ring producers incorporated sonic elements into the carving and/or use of these glyphs. Indeed, cultural anthropologist Robert Andreas Fischer has argued that we should begin to recognize the multi-media aspects of ‘preliterate’ cultures. (NOTE: ‘Multi-media’ here has nothing to do with CD-ROMs! The term is used to highlight the fact that much ‘primitive’ art, in the way it functions in society, cannot be categorized as purely ‘visual’, ‘acoustic’, etc.) Citing research into the teaching systems of Australian Aboriginal mothers, where symbolic visual elements, hand gestures and language are utilized simultaneously to impart information about the mythical landscape, he argues that

Western societies imprinted . . . a negative definition of communication codification on non-alphabetical societies, because they are—from their point of view!—not using the same model of language codification. They were therefore defined as oral societies. . . .

So-called orality within indigenous societies has, however, never existed. Oral communication is the tag non-alphabetical literate societies have received from alphabetic literate societies. In reality, so-called oral communication is composed of an extremely sophisticated, multi-layered, polysemic codification-system of simultaneous communication systems. The "orality" of indigenous societies is actually a form of "savage multi-mediality".

‘Protohistoric Roots of the Network Self’, in Towards 2012 part III: Culture & Language, Unlimited Dream Company, 1997, p. 33

We can’t be sure how far the cup-and-ring folk had got with language. Anyway, we need to think of ‘language’ and ‘communication’ in much broader ways in relation to this art. While Aboriginal culture may be much more complex than and quite different from stone age Yorkshire culture, I think we should use Andreas’ redefinition of indigenous societies to build more sophisticated visions of possibility for prehistoric societies. Rock carvings and flint arrow heads are just about all that’s left on Rombald’s Moor from before the Bronze Age. We can never know if they painted or anointed the carvings, what sounds they may have made at them, if they danced around them, or how they dressed or painted their bodies if they did dance. But, given the evidence from contemporary hunter-gatherer cultures, it’s unlikely that they just sat and stared at them!

Symbols and trance

Recent rock art research has begun to admit to the possibility that visionary states of consciousness have something to do with rock art. Well, not just admit to the possibility. The blatant obviousness of this idea (which is seen when altered states are experienced) has made it impossible to resist, once it was brought to light. Indeed, the hypothesis that shamanistic trance states are related to prehistoric rock art is now dangerously (and ironically) close to becoming new dogma.

Neat, unexamined ideas that ‘explain away’ prehistoric relics are not new to archaeology. It used to be common for any anthropomorphic sculptured stone to be explained away with the word ‘idol’. So many writers harp on about the ‘deities’, ‘gods’, and ‘goddesses’ of the stone ages without any real personal idea of what emotional and cognitive structures, and what direct experiences these words can imply. Our culture’s atrophied and dying relationship to the Divine has a lot to do with it. I don’t think a degraded and spiritually forgotten tradition of monotheism from the Middle East will suffice in trying to understand artefacts from more ancient polytheistic cultures in other lands.

Again, it’s a cliché/joke in archaeology that artefacts which can’t be accounted for are explained away as ‘ritual objects’. The fact that this category became such a catch-all refuge for puzzling relics reveals how hazy, unformed, or plain absent our contemporary ideas about (and experience of) sacred ritual are. There are endless codifications of ritual elements, documents of ritual practices, etc.—and a lot of this work is invaluable—but I think people with a passion for anthropology or archaeology owe it to themselves to experiment, even a bit, with whatever practices seem connected to the understanding of their area of study. As Goethe once said, "One only understands what one loves." Love doesn’t just mean a keen interest. It means involvement, connection and an openness to new experiences. This isn’t a new idea to the human sciences. The importance of direct, involved experience has long been recognized in anthropological fieldwork. Prehistoric studies are hampered by the lack of evidence as to what they should get involved in to help their research. I suggest the playfully serious use of the imagination.

Are ‘trance states’ to become the catch-all explain-away box for rock art? The vital element missing in research that will prevent this happening is the development of a much deeper understanding of trance states themselves. By seeking to understand trances more, from the inside-out, we will be able to assess their possible relevance to rock art more accurately. If such states of consciousness are just brushed against, our lack of understanding will make ‘trance states’ as hazy and unclear a term as ‘ritual’ often is. It will become a concept very easy to explain things away with, and also very hard to discuss openly without being refuted by knee-jerk cynicism.

It’s easy to resign to the belief that a pragmatic understanding of altered states can never become a part of ‘scientific’ research. Consciousness unshackled from habit is unbelievably plastic and mutable, and inevitably interwoven with subjectivity—with the perceptual and cognitive habits we return to. Individual beliefs usually overlap with a lot of other people’s, but sometimes bridges to consensus academic opinion are difficult to build. A good tactic here is to say, "Fuck it! Who cares if some people don’t get it?" Many breakthroughs in human culture would never have happened if everyone was afraid to say this. Then again, nobody, no subculture, and no academic discipline is an island. One of the most basic bridges that cries out to be built is between the intellectual study of prehistory (specifically its religious/shamanic aspects) and the experience of visionary states of consciousness. This is already happening, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. One of the problems involved may be that some of the human sciences are being asked to move even further away from the status of being a ‘science’. If information from altered states is used not just as ‘evidence’ but as openly acknowledged inspiration—heck!, you may as well move your human so-called ‘sciences’ department over to that arts block. I’m not advocating some free-for-all in archaeology or anthropology, turning them into the academic equivalent of one of those tedious Usenet psychedelic discussion groups. Expanding the parameter of a science does not mean ditching coherent analysis. An even greater diversity of opinion about prehistory(!) will develop—so be it. At least we’ll each have a more tangible, creative and involved relationship to our ancestors.

So, trance states. The most common idea being tossed about is that some ‘abstract’ rock art patterns are connected to entoptics, geometric ‘inner eye’ visuals seen behind closed eyelids while entering a trance. Another name for these patterns is ‘endogenous visual phenomena’, meaning "imagery determined by neural structures rather than hallucinatory images derived from visual memory." (Trubshaw, ibid., p. 3) Just to give you the idea, there is an array of entoptic forms shown to the left (copied from Jeremy Dronfield’s article on Irish passage grave art, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1996).

This notion accords with previous research I have done into the body, specifically inner experience of the body, as a source of visionary and mythical motifs. The clearest ethnographic evidence for this idea I’ve come across is Henry Munn’s article on mushroom use among the Mazatec Indians in Central America. He says, "There is a very definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings of the organism: it as if the system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals and stomach." I would expand this list by adding brain physiology, the central nervous system, DNA, and the flow of energy around the body.

I like this entoptics theory. A big cautionary note I’d like to add to the debate is: don’t fall prey to dualism! We’ve made this mistake for far too long now. Things can get pretty confusing when the boundaries between inner and outer experience melt and dissolve, but let’s not be frightened off by this initial bewilderment. I’d hate to see research into visual hallucinations and neuropsychology totally neglecting any correlations between neuropsychology and patterns in the environment, be they exoteric and observable (e.g. shapes in trees, water and the sky) or esoteric and hidden (e.g. cellular, atomic and energetic structures). Also, the visual hallucinations experienced while staring close-up at rock surfaces fall, I believe, into that important borderland between inner and outer experience. The shifting networks and symbols I saw were the result of a dynamic interaction between my inner eye and my two flesh eyes, between my neuropsychology and my perception of the rock. But isn’t that just as true when I look at a rock ‘unaltered’? All experiences (except perhaps dreams and very deep trance states) are dynamic interactions between the body-mind and the environment. What we’re looking at with the ‘endogenous visual phenomena’ theory are circumstances where external sensory input is lowered, and heightened internal perception begins to reveal the more esoteric structures of the human body.

The most powerful part of my chanting at the Badger Stone was one of those tantalising and elusive psychedelic moments where you feel like you’re on the verge of something big and then feel that the effects of the drug are on their way down—like hitting the accelerator to catch up with something and finding you’re out of fuel. Or maybe it just wasn’t the right time. It had a big effect on me, nevertheless, and it’s given me a good idea of where to head for. At one point in the chanting, as I hit a particularly piercing and resonant tone, I felt the atmosphere change noticeably. The shifting patterns in the rock surface seemed to stabilize, slightly ominously. I felt that if I hit a certain tone, the patterns would part, and I would be able to go through. An intentional ritual based around this idea, and maybe a higher than museum-level dose of sacrament, will be useful to explore this further.

This experience may sound tenuous to anyone who hasn’t had a similar ‘not quite there’ moment on psychedelics. Also, it was almost certainly affected by my having read Grant S. McCall’s article ‘One Medium, One Mind’ months before:

In many cultures, the shaman in his trance passes through the rock into the spirit world, and to communicate what had happened in the trance, the shaman depicts what had happened on the other side on the rock. . . . In addition, several contemporary shamans have acknowledged that the rock art is a marker for where a shaman could enter the rock.

He also mentions the opinion of African rock art researcher J.D. Lewis-Williams, that "the rock is merely a ‘veil’ between this world and the spirit world, and that rock art is the destruction of this veil." It could well be that my trance was influenced by my having previously considered this theory. What makes the idea more interesting to me is that afterwards I quickly remembered an experience my friend who I practice chanting with had had. Before I had really begun to study rock art, he had chanted to a stone in Avebury, and even though he wasn’t stoned on anything, he returned very shaken up. He said that while chanting he had gradually developed the feeling that something in the stone was drawing him in, and he pulled back and stopped out of fright. This experience was totally free of influence from theories about rock art.

Well this may all be on the ‘bloke in the pub’ level of credibility to some, but it has greatly enriched my ideas about rock art. Firstly, we have to consider the fact that these rocks were probably not related to in the same way that modern portrait artists relate to their blank canvases. Rocks were almost certainly alive in some way to archaic humans, already imbued with their own idiosyncratic visual and tactile textures, perhaps also containing spirits, a force of their own, or a gateway to the spirit world. Blending carvings with existing irregularities in the rock surface is typical of cup-and-ring marks, showing in a very basic way that there is no ‘blank canvas’ in rock art.

Even mild trance states can make the life of a rock plainly visible. Maybe the hypothesized ‘endogenous visual phenomena’ were not seen behind closed eyelids but in the dancing networks of crystals on the rock, visions made flesh by carving them into the very surface upon which they manifested. Maybe these surface patterns were seen to function as keys to the spirit world, or locks to be opened with vocal techniques. There have been reports from Aborigines that they use singing or didjeridu-playing to unlock the spirits in rocks. Further, visionary journeys behind the rock surface would have been a very rich and compelling source of imagery to carve into the rock gateway.

I have intentionally concentrated here on the possible significance of trance states in relation to rock art. I’m not suggesting that all cup-and-ring art emerged from visionary experiences. Or that those which could have were connected to trances induced by psychedelic plants.

Our culture has become almost entirely devoid of traditions of trance-induction, indeed it is only recently that intense ecstatic states of consciousness have begun to shed their taboo status (at least in some subcultures). It seems pretty apt that the first suggestion of evidence for an association between trance states and rock art among indigenous people was published in America in 1967! However, it’s obvious from many other cultures around the world that humans don’t necessarily need drugs to change neurochemistry. Those prepared to experiment can do the scientific thing and verify this for themselves. I’m not a chemical zealot, I’m just trying to use psychedelic insights to loosen up some blocks in my visions of the past, as well as in current debate about trance-related prehistoric art.

We need to fully admit to (and sometimes submit to) the psychedelic experience in order to deal with the matter of trance states in general more clearly. My own experiences have convinced me that psychedelics are entirely valid tools for altering consciousness, though they are not danger-free (like all such tools). I have also experienced a much broader range of non-drug altered states since beginning to use them.

I am writing here with rock art researchers and not the psychedelic underground in mind. But I’ve tried to forget all pressures to sanitize discussion of psychedelic drugs for fear of knee-jerk reactions in my gentle readers. Maybe I should have used the word ‘entheogen’. This term has been adopted by serious chemical fans to avoid the baggage loaded onto the words ‘psychedelic’ and ‘hallucinogen’. Cynicism informs me that whatever word is used, there will always be resistance to psychedelic research as least as long as possessing psychedelics is a criminal offence.

One final pre-emptive remark. Even though I’ve concentrated on the genesis and function of rock art in relation to trance states, it’s entirely possible that some originated in association with inner visions, but functioned in other ways for the tribe/community. I do not deny the possibility of non-shamanic, more mundane functions, because I don’t believe in a singular model for any rock art. Carvings were probably used by different people through time for different purposes; by different people across space for different purposes; and almost certainly by the same people for different purposes. And all these people will have had a very different ‘normal’ state of consciousness from you or I, because of their different psychic, social, economic, spiritual and (pre)historical circumstances. Even if this art was produced by shamans or some proto-priesthood, it’s still possible that it would have resonated more powerfully in non-shamans then than Holy Communion does in Catholic priests today.

There is a huge amount of exploration to be done. The bulk of this essay was written rapidly over a few days. It feels a bit foolhardy to throw such hostility-invoking thoughts into the research arena without arming them with enough references to ‘authorities’ to defend themselves. My hope is that they will help out, and be helped out by, allies in this turbulent, rapidly moving debate. I need to do a lot more research, but I hate sitting on interesting ideas—especially when the internet gives you no excuse for not publishing.

Some significant areas to explore further seem to be:

• The relationships between entoptic patterns in humans from different cultures, abstract rock art patterns, archetypal patterns in nature, and the structure of human neurophysiology. This research is already underway, I hope it grows and continues.
• The effect of sustained harmonic tones on human brain chemistry and perception, under ‘normal’ conditions and under the influence of the various hallucinogens. Some bizarre areas of research are suggested by Terence McKenna’s account of his experiment with mushrooms in the Amazon, True Hallucinations (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993). His brother Dennis proposed that psilocybin may make the spin resonance of electrons in brain DNA audible as an internal perception, that chanting could harmonize with this tone and modify it, thus modifying neural genetics. I’m not aware of any evidence backing this idea up, but the experiences that evolved from the theory seem astonishing enough to make it worth looking into. In any case, the general study of harmonic chanting, neurochemistry, and the tryptamine family of psychedelics (especially psilocybin mushrooms, the only tryptamine native to the areas in Europe where cup-and-ring art is found) could have an important bearing on rock art research. I mention tryptamines so much because they’re closely associated with unusual and powerful audiovisual experiences, as well as with the generation of bizarre linguistic structures, sometimes reported as being like a meta-linguistic ‘ursprach’. States of consciousness where the roots of language and symbolism seem to be unearthed should be of supreme relevance to ‘abstract’ rock art, even if there’s no reason for believing that the art’s creators took tryptamines.
• The re-examination of rock art sites with broader ritual possibilities in mind. Ritual has always been seen as significant in Palaeolithic cave paintings like Lascaux, which are often concealed in places that are extremely hard to reach, and could only have been viewed by one or two people at a time. This immediately suggests that they were sacred, restricted paintings, possibly involved with ritual initiation. All possibilities need to be considered for any rock art site, though. We should begin to look more at acoustic anomalies, and at the way that the human body can relate to the rock (are the carvings easy to get to, easy to touch, easy to be face-to-face with?).
• Most importantly, and this area is being explored more and more, we need to look at how our position at a site places us in the local landscape. The land may have changed—for instance, Rombald’s Moor may well have been covered in forest when the cup-and-ring marks were made—but a more holistic landscape-based approach always bears vital fruit. At the very least, it will help us to begin developing our own relationship to the land, and to our environment in general.

Footnotes

1. 2CB was invented by Alexander Shulgin in the seventies, and is a close relative of mescaline. For more information on this fascinating substance, check out The Lycaeum. [back to text]

An Interview with Terence McKenna

by Gyrus & John Eden

Gyrus: Firstly, have you seen Independence Day, and what did you make of it?

Terence: I didn’t see it, because I saw enough of it in shorts to realize it’s The Day The Earth Stood Still with worse actors and more money.

Gyrus: Fair enough. Now, do you see a contradiction in the desire to leave the planet and the desire to save it? Is it merely a case of delaying global catastrophe so that we’re here long enough to leave?

Terence: I don’t really see a contradiction. We probably saved the Earth the first time in 6000 BC, when we decided to move into cities. That gave the Earth enormous breathing room—up until the present moment, in fact. At what cost to ourselves is hard to assess. Certainly, we’ve become different creatures than we would have been otherwise. Probably the Earth and the human segment of the biosphere must be parted, not only to save the Earth, but in a sense to save ourselves. Our thing is to unfold the imagination, and that’s all very well when the best trick you can do is a Gothic cathedral. But we’re capable of things far, far beyond that, and if we were to try to unfold these dreams on the surface of the planet, we would probably wreck it and toxify ourselves. On the other hand, outer space is almost like mental space. Where we’re headed, whether we leave the planet behind or not, is into the imagination. And either it will be a three-dimensional space colonizing, a kind of Buck Rogers deal; or the more contempo-vision I think is of a nanotech immigration into some kind of virtual or cybernetically maintained space.

The whole question revolves around the body. What is it? Where are you going to put it? What role should it have? Is the body the defining quintessence of humanness, or is it the ball and chain that holds us from forever realizing what humanness is? That’s an ideological cat-fight that I’d like to sit in the front row and watch, but I don’t think I want to get down on the mat. It’ll sort itself out.

Gyrus: I was interested in this because the in plot of Independence Day, the aliens were basically seen as going from planet to planet, using all the resources, going to another planet, and so on… This seemed to be some sort of projection of ourselves—if we leave the planet, still with this potential for destroying resources, that’s what we would be.

Terence: All projections of aliens are statements about the human condition. And I think you’re quite right. I mean, this horrific vision of alien triage and waste-making is precisely how we would conduct ourselves if we were to ever make it out there. The point being that it may be possible that you can’t organize a global society for starflight without stripping out some of its more savage and brutal tendencies. For example, how long has it been? Thirty years since the landing on the moon? And our humanness has made it impossible to go beyond that. It was essentially a stunt, staged for political and ideological purposes. It wasn’t an evolutionary thrust, unstoppable and leading to starflight. It was a political stunt. Now, there may come a time when we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and spread out into the galaxy, but I think we have to do a lot of dirty laundry here before that’s possible to contemplate.

A friend of mine, somebody worth quoting—Howard Rheingold, who’s a hot VR guy… I was with him once on a psychedelic trip, and in the middle of it, he stood up and said, "My God! I’ve understood what virtual reality is for!" (laughter) And I said, "What is it for, Howard? You invented the term ‘teledildonics’, I thought you’d already figured out what it was for." He said, "No, no, virtual reality will keep us from ever leaving the planet." So he saw it as a cheap shot, a second prize. No, you can’t conquer the galaxy, but here’s a simulacrum of Madonna that you can screw forever. Real colonization of the galaxy is quite a technological leap from anything that we’re capable of now. Clearly, virtual reality, indistinguishable from reality as we know it, will arrive long before anyone sets foot on Zeta Reticuli Prime. That’s way out in the future, if possible at all.

Gyrus: In your writings, you’ve really aligned yourself with Huxley rather than Leary in the psychedelic propaganda argument. I was interested in why you worked with such an overground band like The Shamen. I know you appeared with them at the Birmingham NEC. How does that stand with your statements…

Terence: …I think when I worked with The Shamen, they weren’t so above ground. Time is a curious thing. We did all that stuff… four years ago? Something like that. So they were respectably underground at that point. Nothing ruins you for the underground like success. So when Boss Drum went double platinum, they were obviously ‘establishment’.

Gyrus: So you were on the cross-over…

Terence: That’s right. I worked with bands like Spiral Tribe and Zuvuya truly, authentically impossible to project into the commercial domain type bands. I’m much more comfortable with that. I’ve talked to Colin about this, and he agrees. It would have been wonderful to hit it big at 23. At 35 it becomes a pain in the ass, and you just have to manage the money and the image.

John: Are you still interested in working with popular cultural
things like music?

Terence: I’m interested, but I have no interest in giving advice to the young. I don’t want to become a grandfather figure. I would like to follow. I’d like to be accepted as the oldest and longest-toothed in the pack. But I have no illusions that my generation has great wisdom to impart. We impart a strong example; but that isn’t to say that those that went through it understand the kind of example they’ve become.

My hope is that the present youth culture will be a bit more resistant to co-option than the youth culture of the sixties, because those people just turned into the unbearable yuppies of the seventies and the eighties. The thing that keeps the youth culture vital in the UK is that there’s no social escape into respectability. A very small percentage may go on to nice houses in Hampstead, but the English social system has condemned most people to marginal positions vis-à-vis the official culture…

Gyrus: And they’ve made it worse with the Criminal Justice Act, they’ve just marginalized people and politicized loads of people like ravers… who may have just been into going out. And then when government say, "You’re not having free parties in the countryside", they think… "Let’s get ourselves together."

Terence: Well I think good art arises from a certain state of discomfiture. If you were to be totally embraced, what would be the point?

Gyrus: You’ve mentioned a few times the production of dimethyltryptamine in the human brain, and all the statements I’ve found in which you mentioned it have been up to ten years ago. I was wondering have there been any new developments in this, new research, especially in relation to dream activity?

Terence: Well the only research that’s been done since ten years ago is work done by Rick Strassman at the University of New Mexico. And it was very interesting. It certainly showed that DMT can be safely used. Although the fate of that research is very interesting. He was, he is, a Mahayana Buddhist, and at some point the Lamas came to him and asked him to stop that research, because they said it was "messing with peoples’ deaths." And, without a lot of debate, he folded. I respect Rick, but I would have asked, "Based on what published papers and in what journal of religious studies can we find this data?" (laughter) I think the most terrifying thing about DMT is it’s utter harmlessness. So there is no rational argument against it. And yet here it is, so much more powerful than any other psychedelic that it barely is in the same category.

Gyrus: You’ve made statements condemning the view that mathematical equations can bring us closer to a view of reality because they don’t come into our immediate experience of life. How does Timewave Zero fit into that? With it you’re trying to describe our felt experience of time, and yet it itself is a mathematical equation.

Terence: My gripe with mathematics is not that it’s remote from human experience, but that it uses a language that’s excruciatingly remote. You’ve referred to it as mathematical equations. What you see when you use Timewave Zero is not mathematical equations, but an easily understood picture like a stock market graph. The great revolution in mathematics, that’s going to make every one of us a mathematician, involves the fact that you no longer need numbers to do it. It all can be seen with computers. So I could cover this wall with equations and you wouldn’t know what I was talking about. But I can show you a ten second video clip of a certain object rotating in space—and you’ve got it. And that’s the same thing as all those equations. So what’s happening is mathematics is being taken out of the hands of an elite priesthood who speak a special secret language, and being put into the common language of visual appearances, by people like Ralph Abraham, and so forth and so on. This is very exciting stuff. So it isn’t mathematics per se that my argument is with, but the style of doing mathematics that was imposed upon it by the limitations of technology, pre-computer.

Gyrus: Most of the questions I came up with going through your work were all about paradox. There are so many paradoxes in your work. But it seemed to me that the biggest one was the actual practice of Timewave Zero, which is about setting a date for the end of time—at least in one of its interpretations. But you’ve stated that you see the run-up to 2012 as a time of ever increasing paradox. What are your thoughts on this?

Terence: Well, who was it? Oscar Wilde, or somebody said, "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Reality is inherently paradoxical. And the beginning of intellectual maturity is to be able to simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time. People ask me if I believe in the 2012 prediction. I don’t believe in anything. My anti-ideological stance makes it very important to believe nothing. I regard Timewave Zero as a fascinating model of a previously unmodelled system—which is human history. The fact that it seems to deliver interesting data… for instance, I predicted a very deep plunge into novelty this past summer. Just as it was at its deepest, the Martian meteorite chock full of fossils arrived—along with a lot of email demanding to know where was the miracle I had predicted. (laughter)

I like the word models. What we’re trying to do is build models. By saying the word ‘models’, we make it very clear that this is not ‘Truth’, and that there will be a better model, and we’ll swap the old for the new. So at the moment Timewave Zero is simply a better model of history than the idea that there is no model at all, which is what’s taught in the Academy. The definition of history, if you study history in the Academy, is: it’s a trendlessly fluctuating process. If true, it’s the only trendlessly fluctuating process ever to be observed in this universe. So obviously it’s not true, it’s just that we lack a model. So people say… like, Toynbee’s model was that ‘God is waiting’, somebody else had a ‘Great Man’ model, Marx believed it was all driven by class struggle, and Freud that it was all libido. Well, these are just opinions. Those aren’t theories, those are opinions. A theory has an ability to make predictions, and refine itself, so that’s what I offer with Timewave Zero.

It arises out of my relationship to the psychedelic experience. Because I believe that when we finally understand what a psychedelic trip is, we’ll realize that during the experience consciousness unfolds into a higher dimension. Not metaphorically, but literally a higher dimension. And that that’s how the shaman can tell where the game has gone, that’s how the shaman predicts the weather, that’s how the shaman knows more than the people he serves—because they’re all caught in a lower-dimensional slice of reality, and he’s looking down from a place that becomes accessible to him when cultural boundaries are dissolved. This is a key concept in my thinking: dissolution, and maintenance, of cultural boundaries. This is what psychedelics do. Whether you love ‘em or hate ‘em, what they do is dissolve boundaries. And this is of course closer to the way reality is. The boundary-riven reality is always the creation of a local language—English, French, Witoto—they create synthetic boundaries at the convenience of local syntax. What the psychedelic state shows you is that beyond that localism which is historically finite is the wisdom of the body, and the wisdom of the body is higher-dimensional.

And I mean these things very precisely. I’m not at war with the New Age, it’s the only category they have to put me in, but I really believe the New Age is a flight from authentic experience. That’s why the New Age is so uncomfortable with the psychedelic experience—they would rather have you drinking wheatgrass juice and staring at your navel. You could almost say of the New Age that they will accept anything as long as they can be assured of its lack of effectiveness. (laughter) That’s an assurance you don’t get with psychedelics. Even the critics of psychedelics grudgingly admit, "It works." But… you don’t work hard enough, or it doesn’t last long enough, or some other gripe. No gripe with its effectiveness.

Gyrus: You’ve said quite often that the world is made of language, and this seems to have caused quite a bit of confusion, myself included. Could you clarify what you mean by the word ‘world’ and what you mean by the word ‘language’ in that context?

Terence: Well, for example (the example I always use), the child lying in a crib with an open window—a pre-verbal or nearly pre-verbal child—and a hummingbird flies through the room. It’s a psychedelic miracle, it’s absolutely stunning. The boundaries of that experience are completely undefined. But then the mother or the nanny walks into the room and says, "Oh! It’s a bird, baby. Bird." The miracle immediately collapses down into a hard little tile, and by the time a person is six years old, reality has been entirely replaced by a mosaic of defined and very non-numinous meaning. And so people are then imprisoned in this language. And they will remain so imprisoned until the yawning grave, unless they are put in touch with the transhistorical wisdom of the body. And that means psychedelics. By the way, this idea that reality is made of language is actually the standard position in structural linguistics. This is not a radical position, this is dull-as-dog-shit orthodoxy for those people.

Gyrus: I was talking with a magician the other week and he was in complete agreement. You said once that the true secret of magick is that the world is made of words, and if you know what words the world is made of, you can do with it as you wish, and yeah, he was…

Terence: Yes, and energy follows attention. So, what we care about is what we take to be real. And there are all kinds of realities around us that we don’t even see. And then when these realities intrude into our vision, we become very upset. And often the urge is to suppress, because it presents itself as somehow threatening. This is why, in my opinion, psychedelics, though they do very little social harm, and don’t promote criminal syndicalism, we don’t have people overdosing in doorways, and so forth and so on; nevertheless, they are at the top of the agenda for suppression. Because, whether you’re a fascist state, and industrial democracy, a monarchy or whatever, the one thing you’re not interested in is having people question first premises. And psychedelics will force you back to do that. All social systems are to some degree con-games, because they’re always inconvenient for individuals, and they’re always extremely convenient for institutions. Psychedelics are hideously unfriendly to all forms of institutional thinking, and tremendously supportive of what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what ideology, and propaganda, and government, social programming, they all make war on the felt presence of immediate experience, and try to get you to deny the obvious wisdom of the body—and replace it with Christianity, Islam, the work ethic, whatever they’re pedalling at the moment.

John: Is that one of the reasons you backed off from an academic approach to all this?

Terence: Oh, I could never fit myself into an organization like that. I live in Hawaii, I’m virtually a hermit, I organize my own speaking, I say what I want. My fortunes ebb and flow with forces mysterious even to me. I can’t imagine committing myself to any kind of institutional structure. It’s tremendously disempowering. I mean, there’s nothing more contradictory than a radical in an organization. That’s why—let’s whisper it low—the ICA is an entire contradiction. The very idea of institutionalizing the avant-garde means that you don’t understand what the avant-garde is.

Gyrus: I’m interested your theories about the Stropharia cubensis mushroom evolving extra-terrestrially. Is this entirely due to information imparted in the trance that it induces? I was curious because there’s so many other species of mushroom, and other plants, that access these same dimensions, why is Stropharia cubensis this ‘special case’?

Terence: Well, it’s a complicated argument. There are a number of things you could say about Stropharia cubensis. First of all, an organism that wastes energy is slated for extinction. Thousands of mushrooms exist on this planet that don’t make psilocybin. Stropharia cubensis channels approximately fifteen percent of its metabolic energy into making psilocybin. Why, if mushroom existence doesn’t require that for any important purpose? It begins to look to me as though the mushroom may be a kind of technological artefact.

The other thing to notice is that, and this is true of all fungi, they’re what is known as primary decomposers. They exist only on dead matter. That’s the only karmaless place in the food chain. Vegetarianism compared to that is an orgy of mass slaughter. I guess I have a slight Buddhist bias here. But it seems to me that we’ve only known about DNA since about 1950, and we’re already talking about completely redesigning ourselves based on reprogramming the human genome. So it may be that this is a stage that any intelligent being, species, organism, anywhere in the universe passes through, a phase where it takes control of its own design process. And Stropharia cubensis looks to me like it’s been designed for immortality, information storage, low-speed space flight, an ability to adapt to an incredible variety of environments. So I’m willing to at least entertain the possibility, based on the fact that it talks to you and fills you with alien information, that it may in fact be an artefact of extra-terrestrial origin.

This is how real aliens would do it. They don’t arrive in the middle of the night with an interest in your asshole like the stories we’re given, that’s preposterous. Still less do they have an interest in the electrical grid, or the Gross National Product, or any of that. The problem with an extraterrestrial is to know when you’re looking at one. I once visited the world’s largest radio telescope in Araceibo, Puerto Rico, and they search for extra-terrestrial life with this thing. It’s so large a telescope it’s basically a dish suspended in round valley. And underneath the dish there’s pasture land, and white cattle, and Stropharia cubensis… It’s like this amazing image of this instrument studying the centre of NGC-3622, and yet a hundred feet from the main control booth is probably what they’re looking for. (laughter)

Gyrus: This is probably a peripheral question, but a lot of your descriptive, poetic language that you’ve used to describe the psychedelic experience has very industrial connotations. There’s been a lot of digital metaphors about the DMT trance, but you use… "machine elves", and "the green vegetable engine of nature"…

Terence: …That’s a steal from Dylan Thomas…

Gyrus: …Right—so that’s where it comes from?

Terence: "The greeny engine that drives the flower." Yeah. So what about that?

Gyrus: It’s interesting that this very thing that you seem to be railing against a lot of the time… well, not railing against, but putting a lot of environmental destruction down to the industrial revolution—and these adjectives are seeping into your description of this state…

Terence: Well, I don’t think the problem is with machines per se, I think it’s that we’re in a very early and primitive stage with machines. Nanotechnology holds out the possibility of building as nature builds, atom by atom. I think that the machines that we possess today are to the machines of the future what the chipped flint of the palaeolithic is to our machines. The key concept is prosthesis—in other words, the extension of human understanding and feeling by mechanical means. That’s tremendously exciting to me. I mean, given the human body, that’s hardware enough to integrate into a group of seventy hunting-gathering nomads. But a city like London—you need the tube system, you need the black cabs, you need radio and all of it, and these things are all prosthesis. And if we’re really talking about going to the next level, a global collectivity, a global telepathic state of mind, this can only be done at this stage by prosthesis. At some point, perhaps, one could reprogram human beings to be able to talk to each other on the other side of the planet. On the other hand, we see no animals who do that. There simply may be some things that lie beyond the capacity of mere unassisted flesh to achieve. But assisted flesh, flesh in marriage to prosthesis, can do anything. I think the whole curious fascination with piercing, and the mechanization of human body parts, and so forth and so on, that informs art at the moment is actually art performing the function it’s always performed—of anticipating where we’re headed.

Gyrus: As far as that concept of prosthesis goes, you’ve talked about machines and cultural artefacts as an extension of humanity, and you condemn laboratory-manufactured psychedelics to a large extent. Why would they not fall into the…

Terence: Well, I don’t condemn them out of some kind of purist "Plants are good, chemicals are bad"… No, I condemn them for very practical reasons. First of all, a white powder drug. You have no idea what it is. You can be fairly sure it was manufactured in an atmosphere of criminal syndicalism where the major goal was to make money. That’s not a very reassuring statement of drug purity and chemical attention to detail. And the other thing is, the vegetable psychedelics, we have our human data—five thousand years of mushroom use in Mexico, and so forth and so on. With a new drug, since it’s illegal to do research on it, we have no human data. And sometimes it takes a generation or two to see what the consequences of exposure to a compound are. So I don’t have an absolutist position against laboratory drugs, it’s simply that if we’re trying to get to a certain place—which is the dissolution of the ego, and the entry into psychedelic space—at this stage, the vegetable psychedelics are just simply more effective, better track record… they work.

Gyrus: So your argument is bound by the context of human society now?

Terence: Sure. If someone can produce a drug that meets all these requirements… And DMT occurs in nature, but when actually smoked, it’s usually coming out of a laboratory.

Gyrus: You’ve said that you don’t consider yourself a shaman just because shamans cure and you don’t cure anyone. Also you write a lot about the re-emergence of the shamanic institution. What do you think of its re-emergence in the modern world—how can it’s integrity be preserved, if at all, and how must it evolve?

Terence: The music. And the trance-dance drug-taking situation is the establishment of a ritual space outside the conventions of ordinary society, that is the new shamanism. And that’s again what makes it so suspect in the eyes of the establishment. They sense that this is something they can’t get a handle on and control, or that it takes them some time to get a handle on—they have to figure out how to co-opt each generation in a new way. My generation was co-opted in a very crude way, with money. Your generation… The Establishment’s not interested in that, they’d rather keep the money for themselves. I’m hoping that the new trance-dance culture has enough integrity to resist being folded into commercialism and ordinary mass cultural entertainment. But we shall see.

Gyrus: Could you outline the influence of Teilhard de Chardin on your work?

Terence: Yes. Essentially, he’s me without drugs or immediacy. (laughter) My rap would be much more palatable if I said it was all gonna happen fifty thousand years in the future, a million years in the future… The only difference between me and a lot of apocalyptarian thinkers is that I see this curve of increasing novelty and approach toward the transcendental as happening at a much faster rate. But I base my estimate of its acceleration by looking at how fast it’s accelerated in the past. I don’t see how anyone can speak in rational terms of a thousand years in the future, or five hundred years in the future. The twentieth century is ten times weirder than the nineteenth, and the twenty-first will be a thousand times weirder than the twentieth. Well then how can anyone extrapolate any institution or idea or style that far into the future?

It’s perfectly clear that we sought transcendence from the very first moment of consciousness. It takes about fifty thousand years to go from the "Gee, wouldn’t it be nice?" to the "My God, it now stands at the door…," and it now stands at the door. We’ve been planning and plotting this since the Pyramids and Stonehenge—it’s all been about this, apparently, moving ourselves, positioning ourselves for an evolutionary leap off the planet. Nature is not interested in sustainability. Ninety-five percent of all life that ever existed on this planet is now extinct.

John: I’ve got one last question. You said that you don’t see yourself as a shaman, and I guess you don’t see yourself as a guru either—so what do you see yourself as?

Terence: A troublemaker. A messenger, and somewhat of a troublemaker. Gurus… the mushroom said to me once, it said, "For one human being to seek enlightenment from another is like one grain of sand on a beach to seek enlightenment from another." The point being, the holiest, highest person you’ve ever met, Dalai Lama, Shree Bhagwan, you pick your guy, is no different from you. It’s an illusion that anybody is smarter than you are. People love to give away their power, and follow Christ, or Hitler, or Shree Bhagwan… They don’t understand that no one is smarter than you, no one understands the situation better than you, and no one is in a position to act for you more clearly than you are yourself. But people endlessly give away this opportunity, and subvert their identity to ideology. It’s the most perverse thing about human beings.

Gyrus: Where do you think this comes from?

Terence: Well, I had a professor once who said if you think of human beings as angels, it’s a shit of a scene. If you think of people as apes—it’s the most astonishing accomplishment you’ve ever laid eyes on. (laughter) And this is where we are, with one foot in a carnivorous, cannibalistic ape, and the other reaching out for deity.

You talk about a coincidentia oppositorum, a union of opposites, a living contradiction—human beings are that. Every one of us individually and then the entire enterprise as a collectivity. We’re in the process of changing—from an animal, into a god. It takes thirty thousand years. That’s a very uncomfortable moment. But in the life of a species, it’s the blink of an eye. We just happen to, because we live seventy years, it takes what? Five hundred generations to stumble through that zone of uncertainty that we call human history. Now, I think we’re close to the jackpot. I can feel the heat of the thing. And a lot of people fear it, because they cling to the old order. But there’s no room for clinging at this point. I mean, hang on, do not attempt to stand up, do not attempt to leave the carriage, we’re going over the top! (laughter) Scream if you must, but stay seated please!

by Gyrus

In the tide of irrational hatred that men have felt and expressed towards women, we find the deepest insights in the unseen undercurrents. In the violent disgust underlying the perception of physiological difference.

Even beyond the suppression of representations of the female genitals (curiously not quite as stringent as the censorship of male genitals, though) cunts are often mysterious to men. They are folded and soft, the pleasure centre is concealed, and they are openings. The cock is a dry display of protrusion. The cunt is a concealment of depth and self-generated wetness.

The cunt is denigrated through language. Although "dick" and "cock" can be used as insults, they are almost frivolous, gaining venom only through intonation. But "cunt" is an insult surrounded by the greatest taboo: for men, because it feels so vicious; for women, obviously, because the viciousness that patriarchal society has imbued this word with cuttingly reminds them of the strength of the hatred which this society feels for their sex. And "pussy", almost invariably used as an insult by men on men, equates femininity with the most negative forms of passivity and weakness. I use "cunt" habitually now; having learned its linguistic origins in words denoting ‘wisdom’ and ‘knowledge’, I want to reclaim it. A gradual shift of perspective has led to it becoming a word that can be used affectionately, lustfully, and lovingly to refer to the female genitals. And its use as an insult becomes, to me, more and more an unwitting admission on the user’s part to crassness and misogyny. They are offensive now, not the word. And there’s no call for ‘Political Correctness’ here. More repression is no answer.

But most importantly, the cunt is denigrated through associational folklore. The two most common myths of disgust are the idea of teeth lining the vaginal walls (Vagina Dentata), and the idea that the cunt is something filthy. Both are seen condensed together in the perversions of medieval Christian theology, where the Mouth of Hell (lined with teeth) is often graphically depicted to resemble female genitals; and Satan’s realm is seen to be one of shit, filth and ‘uncleanliness’.

There may be whole library shelves full of psychoanalytical analyses of these distortions, but here I only need one Freudian tool—the concept of psychological projection—to unearth what I think is a key model for the two ‘myths of disgust’.

What is the cunt? It is an orifice. What are the two major orifices in men? The mouth and the arse. As far as genital sexuality goes, an opening is feminine, and this is what men most fear. Being open… being vulnerable… being penetrable… Yet they can never be completely closed-off—they have two other orifices to remind them. It seems it is men’s fear of their own openings, and their sexual associations in the unconscious, which is projected onto women, into the cunt. The arse leads to: "It’s filthy down there!" The mouth leads to: "There are teeth in there!". The subliminal idea that cunts are dirty may persist beyond experience of them, centuries of misogyny subtly conditioning perception of the rich musky scents and tastes. Even vagina dentata may survive beyond the actual sensation of warm, slippery snugness.

So this runs deep. Men, if you’re afraid of or repelled by the cunt… look into your own depths, realize and come to terms with your own openings and vulnerabilities.