Black Magick and Curses

I don't seem to have re-read much of Bob's since he died. Of course, he had pointed students off in all directions (apart from his own work) so many of us found ourselves becoming Joyceans and researchers of Ezra, and suchlike.

Anyway, I started browsing through Email to the Universe last night. When it came out I rushed through it, feeling (like many completists) that much of it was familiar material - perhaps a compilation from his publishers because he had not completed the promised Tale of the Tribe - which we had all anticipated so much, before he fell ill. Actually, I love the haiku in that book (which you may also find elsewhere).

One chapter that grabbed me last night, however, was called

Black Magick and Curses
SECRETS OF YE DARK ARTE CALL'D DUCDAME

and I immediately remembered that Bob had set it as a text on his Quantum Psychology course. I wanted to find it online for you to read, but feel sad to say that I can only see it posted at the American Buddha site, which I cannot recommend. Apart from their awful taste in colours, their peculiar attitude to copyright, and their downright disrepectful treatment of their Buddhist teacher (oh, do yer own research!) I just get a bad vibe from the site. But I digress.

I could post the complete text myself (I have it in the book, anyway, and also as the original course material) but I don't want to upset the RAW estate. I might pass it to the official RAWilson Fans site, who seem to have established a right to compile RAW material as a research resource.

Or you could just go buy the book! Fellow researchers could always email me for a copy - for personal use only.

The essay itself seems to me a fine example of Bob's amusing, thought-provoking, challenging style. It rapidly ranges through General Semantics, NLP (the meta-model of precise language and verifiability, and the Milton model of ambiguity and projection), magick, placebos and curses, and a whole host of other fascinating subjects - lucidly and tantalizingly and briefly.

It seems like compressed and dense material that rewards a bit of unpacking, and further research.

I'll come back later (gotta clean the pond and walk the dog) and maybe offer some quotes at least... Here's a teaser:

In other words, the distinction between "magick" and "communication" exists only in our traditional ways of thinking. The uncanny Egyptians attributed both inventions to a single deity, Thoth, god of speech and other illusions.

In the existential world -- in the sensory-sensual continuum -- Thoth still reigns and language still has magick. All communication contains sorcery and/or hypnosis, because humans use howls, snarls, yaps, purrs, gargles, gurgles etc. -- noises of many sorts -- to create a neuro-semantic "grid" projected upon all incidents and events. We generally call these grids languages.

We literally "see" incidents and events only as they register upon that grid.

If I use certain words that cause you to have certain predictible neuro-somatic reactions, I have cast a spell upon you. I have enchanted you. I may even have cursed you.

[Sure you want to know more about this?]


And it ends:


Whosoever speaks in any tongue gives birth to blessings and curses.

& if the uncanny Egyptians made Thoth the father of both language and magick, the canny Greeks made Hermes, their version of Thoth, the god of both language and fraud.

ESPionage and magiCIAns

Don't start me talking
I'll tell everything I know
Gonna break up this signifying
Everybody's got to go

Sonny Boy Williamson

Magic of a kindIt’s funny how things come together. I didn't finish this yet, but here's take one...

I like magic (the conjuring tricks of my youth), but have difficulty contemplating magick (the ritual type), which (in spite of the protests of people I know who use it) seems to me like a religious or mystical modeling of the world. Still, they have lots in common (more than either might like to admit) – especially in the area of the manipulation of perceptions and beliefs.

Although a pre-computer geek sub-culture, the magic community has always seemed not so much a secret society as a ‘society with secrets’ (as the Masons also like to consider themselves). The Magic Circle of London has always sounded to me much like a sort of ‘gentleman’s club’ as so many other specialist lodges appear (My grandfather and uncle may have belonged to a masonic ‘music lodge’), but I don’t think it really bears comparison with Masonic groups, even if it shares similar structures (for decades membership remained men only, as initiation you have to perform magic in front of them, they award medals and ranks, and have an Inner Circle, etc. Still, people from all ‘classes’ – remember them? - belong.).

Membership may remain open to all, but it has an elitist quality which does seem to invite the middle classes, the established members of society, the respectable. Similarly, the defence of the realm (the intelligence services) have drawn most of their candidates from Oxbridge (I suspect you will find more John Le Carrés than Harry Palmers).

Magic and spiesAnd the skills of the magician (trickster version) have always figured in secret service skills and interests. The perfect murder? Slipping things into people’s drinks unnoticed? Picking their pocket, extracting information and returning it? Codes and ciphers? Hiding information? Misleading people?

You can find how John Mulholland (a widely respected magician) got involved with spooks, and shared his skills, and is now sometimes vilified by his fellow magicians – for misuse of the arts – in this book.

The MagiCIAn: John Mulholland's Secret Life

If you don’t want to read a book, this article in Genii (Genii - The Conjuror’s Magazine - April 2001) might do

THE SPHINX AND THE SPY
The Clandestine World of John Mulholland
By Michael Edwards Copyright 2001 by The Genii Corporation. _All Rights Reserved. _

"The manual as it now stands consists of the following five sections:
1. Underlying bases for the successful performance of tricks and the background of the psychological principles by which they operate.
2. Tricks with pills.
3. Tricks with loose solids.
4. Tricks with liquids.5. Tricks by which small objects may be obtained secretly. This section was not considered in my original outline and was suggested subsequently to me. I was, however, able to add it without necessitating extension of the number of weeks requested for the writing. Another completed task not noted in the outline was making models of such equipment as has been described in the manual.""As sections 2,3,4, and 5 were written solely for use by men working alone the manual needs two further sections. One section would give modified, or different, tricks and techniques of performance so that the tricks could be performed by women. The other section would describe tricks suitable for two or more people working in collaboration. In both these proposed sections the tricks would differ considerably from those which have been described.Gottlieb, whose goal was an operational guide that would be of use to agents in the real world, shared Mulholland's view that broadening its scope to include collaborative efforts by teams of operatives or by female agents was well worth the delay. On November 17, he authorized Mulholland to draft the two additional chapters and extended the timeline for completion of the book until May. This new work became MKULTRA Subproject 19…”
Magic, camouflage, dirty tricks and the occult...
And yet Jasper Maskelyne (of a family of British magicians) used his skills to confuse and bemuse the enemy in WW2 and seems to come out of it as a hero. Book: War Magician. Disguising tanks as trucks, and (when necessary) trucks as tanks, moving a whole port city along the coast (by lighting), so bombs fell harmlessly, and all kinds of camouflage and bluff got involved. ‘Dirty Tricks’ still had a glint of wicked deviousness back then.

Ian Fleming, Dennis Wheatley, Graham Greene, John Le Carré – I enjoy to see how much play-acting, fiction, magic and games (from chess to poker) have to do with the world of the spook.

So it almost bemuses me to find espionage doubts and suspicions directed at ‘occult practioners’, too.

Gurdjieff (in James Webb’s The Harmonious Circle);
Crowley (in Secret Agent 666: Aleister Crowley, British Intelligence and the Occult), and even hints about
HPB (Blavatsky) herself - spying for Russia in The Great Game of mystical imperialism (British Empire and Tsarist Russia fighting over central Asia - Tibet, Afghanistan, etc).

Scientific expeditions, or spying?

Early travelers and adventurers sometimes brought back useful maps and information which they perhaps shared if asked, bullied, blackmailed, pressurized, paid, etc. They might even have found it a good way to fund their explorations (as taking a tv crew can today), with upfront payments and commissions.

From the point of view of local peoples, however, foreigners often get treated with suspicion, and if border tensions increase then the unknown may look like military reconnaissance rather than science… Even Wordsworth and Coleridge, poetically wandering in the hills of Somerset (West of England), and conversing in French, were suspected of being spies from the French Revolution (a threat to Britain at the time) and got investigated.

Cells and such

Lone travelers may appear odd enough, but extended networks can come under even more suspicion, as the secretive nature of some business links crime, smuggling, espionage, etc.

Of course, any organisation using a clandestine cellular system has high security but still lays itself open to corruption from within – as a small pocket of members with a different agenda is (by definition) isolated and able to develop its own path and priorities. So I don’t think of all Freemasons as ‘baddies’ (for instance) but I suspect that Freemasonic Lodges do sometimes get taken over (‘turned’), and misdirected from their original course. One example, in Italy and the P2, for instance.

The British secret service apparently ‘turned’ virtually every German agent in the UK during WW2 – and were effectively running the German network, feeding it good, bad or indifferent info and misinfo, etc.

Occult lodges seem a likely target for seeking out and drawing in people, and acquiring influence among intelligent, multi-lingual, well-travelled and perhaps ‘amoral’ people.

Psychic Research

How much of the Russian ‘psychic research’ arose from the Cold War, (secret weapons, black ops, psychological warfare, etc) and how much as genuine scientific research still seems unclear to me, and it turns out the Americans had invested quite a lot of time and money in it, too. Think Puharich and Geller, or Jon Ronson’s The Men Who Stare at Goats.

There are so many threads to pursue. What of the connected stories implicating UFOs, alien abductees, secret experiments, social manipulation of belief systems, and all the other ‘paranoia’ of the ‘conspiracy theorist’ (and those inverted commas show how easily such comments get turned aside)?

Ah, yes, anyway...

When we published Magical Means, we dropped in passing mention of The Great Game (the battle between Brits and Russians over control of India, Tibet, Afghanistan, etc) but perhaps we didn’t take it seriously enough.

[Update: Aug 2014: new material on Houdini as spy in The Secret Life of Houdini]

As in any good scam (or double-cross heist movie), you eventually wonder who controls who...

A few more references:

Joyce Colin Smith – an appreciation of James Webb

In case (like Chris M) you mistake me for a total sceptic about psychic and paranormal 'stuff', can I point you to The Trickster and The Paranormal for an interesting mixed view. Website. Book. Blog.

All my own magic research links can be found on this blog.

Randi's Project Alpha

An interesting edition of the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition (The Occult and Espionage)

Mary Douglas and Witchcraft

I was told "you wont meet a magician in Wandsworth" (in London), "but you might hear of people operating New Age psychic phone lines". Pah.

"I once met a 5th degree Magus from the O.T.O" I said. Blank looks. "Oh, and I've done a few rituals here and there, mostly on my own, but once with some of the leading abassadors of the Native American tradition in this culture. Apparently". Blank looks.

One of my assessments is to review a book called "Purity and Danger" written by famous anthropologist Mary Douglas (R.I.G.), and I thought I'd share my final piece (which is for me quite refreshing in its absence of references, the material being sufficiently internalized).

The original, inferior, version of this aritcle is here: http://theatreovdiscontent.blogspot.com/2008/04/douglas-witchcraft-amended.html

The all singing, all dancing version is here:

Introduction:

Mary Douglas begins “Purity and Danger” with an overview of the legacies of Robertson-Smith and Sir James Frazer. She challenges their belief that what made a culture primitive was its inability, collectively and individually, to distinguish between the ‘sacred and profane’, in the words of Robertson-Smith, or between the ‘subjective and objective’, as Sir James Frazer put it. Douglas then introduces the model of logical vs. mystical mentalities proposed by Levy-Bruhl, one assumes, as a superior model when it came to categorising and analysing the difference between primitive and modern culture. The greatest criticism of Levy-Bruhls’ model was that it was based on a rigid dichotomy that required the exaggeration of logical thinking in modern culture, and the exaggeration of mystical thinking in primitive culture, in order to make the differences apparent. These differences in mentalities were too stark and their mutual exclusivity led to contradiction. Nevertheless, it is Levy-Bruhls model that has the greatest influence on Douglas’s book, despite the weakness in the model that she attempts to overcome through some very feeble means. Essentially, Mary Douglas seeks to duck beneath the radar of previous criticism by a less-than-cunning substitution of psychological definitions (“logical” vs. “mystical”) with sociological definitions (“technological” vs. “magical”), simply changing the focus from mentality to institution. Douglas delves into the rabbit hole towards a sociology of ritual, and it is in search of a sociology of ritual that Douglas encounters witchcraft and magic in primitive culture, no doubt wearing top hats and drinking tea, offering, perhaps, a dubious invitation to the naïve catholic girl who forgot the mysteries of her own culture, and who, like a very naught catholic girl, attempts the uninspiring hubris of defining a prayer to god as analogous to writing a letter to a friend, in chapter four. May she rest in ignorance, and may her reply be swift and painless.

On Magic:

Mary Douglas’s approach is a sociological one. It is not spiritual, it is not psychological, it is not magical. This to me, in my wayward anthro-ignorance, seems like a piecemeal analysis of culture. However, her insights into the sociology of ritual are exceptional, with one exception. Malinowski had already said most of what she had to say about magic, and one wonders why he is barely mentioned. Again, perhaps it is because Malinowski’s approach, like Levy-Bruhls, was based on a model of individual psychology and Douglas was interested in sociology. However, I suspect deeper-rooted biases perpetuated by the mutual exclusivity of sociological and psychological disciplines, enflamed through the irritant of functionalist vs. structuralist discord, that causes Douglas to omit reference to Malinowski’s contribution. I guess they didn’t want to play with each other any more.

The sum of Douglas’s understanding of magic in primitive culture resonates within her exegesis of the significance of the Trickster myth of the Winnebago Indians. In this story is described the process of developing awareness and mastery of the self as it relates to its environment. The Trickster starts life as an amorphous bag of emotions and desires, and slowly refines its body into human proportions and its minds into, well, modern proportions, in which it is at last capable of discernment between person and thing – between subjective and objective. Despite Douglas’s superb parrying of Frazer’s “undisguised contempt” for primitive people in her elucidation of primitive peoples ability not only to discern between subject and object, but also to discern when the this discernment is actually useful, her understanding of the Trickster myth as it relates to sociology reflects the same attitude as Frazer, but with a more politically correct flourish. To summarise: Douglas uses the Trickster myth as a metaphor for technological progress. In her model, with advances in technology, magic becomes mundane (clearly she was not an initiate). Perhaps this is verifiable where institutions are concerned, but then the focus is clearly on institutions per se and not magic specifically, a distinction that might be easily overlooked if ones cultural orientation valued group dynamics universally over magical dynamics specifically.

It is the lack of distinction on the part of Douglas between the general and the specific that leads her into error. In describing prayer as analogous to writing a letter, and in – fatally! – describing money as ritual, Douglas exhibits the same confusion between subject and object that she so superbly falsifies in the interpretations of Frazer and Robertson-Smith. Money, for example, is not a ritual, any more than a wand is a ritual. It is a tool used in ritual ways, depending upon ones ontology and paradigm, and viewed as such this distinction makes Douglas’s ‘Durkheimian’ model of technological progress – where it is assumed that magic becomes mundane – unequivocally unfounded. Through a sociological exploration of magic as a pre-literate judiciary and economic system, where accusations of witchcraft enforce social cohesion and the perceived power to bless or curse maintains authority, Douglas makes a subtle yet crucial error. She makes such erroneous comparisons between ‘primitive ritual’ and ‘modern economics’ because, for whatever reason, she denied the existence of magic in her own culture, and denied it on a deep level. I suspect, however, that this denial is not simply caused by a superiority bias, in which she thinks her culture is superior to cultures with magic (something she makes clear several times throughout the book) but out of an implicit desire to invent a control group for her research, to contrast a culture ‘with magic’ (theirs) to a culture ‘without magic’ (ours). And this is that elusively subtle yet confounding and pertinent error that looks as if it could make anthropology boring for everyone.

What She Should Have Done:

Her explicit and repeated intention is to show how rules around pollution work in other cultures through an understanding of how they are similar and different to our own rules of pollution. So she contrasts secular politics with magical ritual – a bit like contrasting an apple with a spoon, but useful if one is only interested in the form and not the content. Had Douglas contrasted the secular politics of magical ritual in another culture with the secular politics of magical ritual in our culture, I would not take issue. Her mistake is that she saw magical ritual as political in essence. One look at the hollow rituals of the Catholic Church and it’s easy to see how she made this mistake, although her inability to see that her own analysis is piecemeal is beyond being dignified with rational thought.

Although I doubt the term “Folk Devil” entered into common parlance until the release of Cohens book in the seventies, Cohen himself points out that this phenomena has been particularly apparent since the WORLD WARS, and it is clearly this phenomena that Douglas is concerned with in “Purity and Danger” when she talks about the ‘interstitial roles’ and ‘failure bias’ in magical practice. In the case of Nazi Germany, for example, an economic crisis lead to the Great Jewish Witch Hunt, in which Jewish people became vilified as the source of social dissolution due to their assumed Economic Sorcery. Satire of the time even shows Nazi leaders dressed in Shamanic clothing, and the presence of both mystical mentalities and institutions was evident in propaganda about the ‘Rule of a 1000 Years’ and in a disrespectful and rudimentary grasp of the philosophy of the ‘Ubermensch’.

Douglas uses witchcraft to demonstrate the sociological processes and effects of magical activity, but she seems confused about what she is doing even herself, for she frequently confuses the politics of magic with magic itself. This is the cause of my suspicion that “Purity and Danger” is too contaminated by the politics of our indigenous institutions to see the woods for the trees when attempting the ever-so-slightly deluded exercise of understanding a culture ‘not in piecemeal’, as Douglas says, or ‘in its totality’ as Malinowski said. Both mistake the map for the territory, but Malinowski at least attempted something innovative. Something so innovative, in fact, it turned out to be a taboo in this culture, and was commonly construed to be an outdated approach simply because it had never been tried. It was Malinowski’s intent to show that magic was an institution in its own right, and was not the forerunner of science, as Durkheim and Douglas understood it. I believe he even campaigned when he could after the WORLD WARS to bring to public awareness the similarities between ‘magical thinking’ and Nazism. Douglas neglects to mention this. She also neglects to mention that Malinowski was perhaps the first anthropologist to apply the principles of social drama to ritual, which is an approach Douglas profits from enormously in her book, particularly through her references to the work of Turner. What she doesn’t neglect is the time honoured ritual of making things up when your weak ego confounds your intellect, and she invents her quote about the Dinka Maleria Ceremony, in which she claims that ‘even’ the witchdoctor ‘urged’ people to visit the western medical centre. I don’t need to analyse this really, since it’s a fiction.

In Conclusion:

Draw your own, and respect yourself enough to admit that you do so.

Mary Douglas - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article1805952.ece

Levy-Bruhl - http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9048002/Lucien-Levy-BruhlJames

Frazer - Not interest until anthropologists apply his insights to our own culture (see Dr. C. S. Hyatts work for an idea).