I believe in the God that people who don't believe in God believe in.
--Bill Talen, aka "the Reverend Billy"
Medicine men -- the herb healers as well as our holy men -- all have their
own personal ways of acting according to their visions. The Great Spirit
wants people to be different. He makes a person love a particular animal,
tree, or herb. He makes people feel drawn to certain favorite spots on
this earth where they experience a special sense of well-being, saying
to themselves, Thats a spot which makes me happy, where I belong....All
creatures exist for a purpose. Even an ant knows what its purpose is --
not with its brain, but somehow it knows. Only human beings have come
to a point where they no longer know why they exist. They dont use their
brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their
sense, or their dreams. They dont use the knowledge the spirit has put
into every one of them.
--John Fire Lame Deer
When a given plant, beast, or stone carries a meaning it can become a
message. Through the medium of nature, speaking the language and symbolism
of life, the great spirit, the mutual sentience of the all-self can reveal
itself...All of these are gifts. Nature offers them freely to all who
bother to recognize and enjoy them.
--Jan Fries
In creating life out of the primordial slime, Chaos has always sought
to increase its possibilities of expression and to diversify its manifestations.
--Peter Carroll
My happiness did indeed arise from the same secret as the happiness in
dreams; it arose from the freedom to experience everything imaginable
simultaneously, to exchange outward and inward easily, to move Time and
Space about like scenes in a theater.
--Herman Hesse
Casting a spell is a willful act, some say. It is interfering with the
natural order of things. I say casting a spell is observing and participating
as an equal partner in the natural order. A woman is part of the natural
order. Her directed willpower is part of nature. I recognize the reluctance
toward casting a spell. It is against any kind of social conditioning
you have ever recived. So I advocate doing this: go ahead and scare yourself.
Its good for you.
--Z. Budapest
The spirit of the life force is the spirit of the dual ecstasy, procreation
and reabsorption, sex and death. Beautiful and terrible God of the hovering
hawk, God of the thrusting sapling, God of conjoined lovers, God of the
worm-filled carcass, God of the starting hare, God of the wild hunt carousing
the forest in mad exhilaration. Invoke this God with wild uninhibited
love play, and with wine and strange drugs which thrill and exalt the
vitality and imagination. Lastly, draw thine own exhilarated consciousness
into communion with this God by profound concentration and visualization,
and the magic life force is thine to wield for good or ill.
--Peter Carroll
One should plunge passionately into every possible experience; by doing
so one is purged of those personal prejudices which we took so stupidly
for ourselves, though they prevented us from realizing our true Wills
and from knowing our Names and Natures...Anyone who is doing his true
Will is drunk with the delight of Life.
--Aleister Crowley
Magick can be worked quite easily once one learns to re-believe in innocence,
simplicity, and direct inspiration. Why use a memorized invocation including
divine names and words of power when one can get better and livelier results
by speaking from the heart plus a dose of freestyle chaos language and
chanting?
--Jan Fries
If you're into ritual at all then it's quite likely that, somewhere amongst your legion of selves, there's a drama queen screaming for recognition. So be flamboyant. Put on a good show and the gods will reward you, give good reviews, come back for more and tell their friends about you.
-- Phil Hine
There is no use in this indulging in a lifelong competition to change
the structure of the little environment he seems to be trapped in. But
one could see the larger pattern and move with it -- Go
with the flow! -- and accept it and rise above one's immediate environment
and even alter it by accepting the larger pattern and grooving with it
-- Put your good where it will do the most!
--Tom Wolfe, on Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters
God is dual, as we have seen, composed of a female and a male principle.
The union of the two is harmony, love, creation; thus man must unite with
woman in order to be as God. All the other aspects of God are also paired
into male and female forces. When they unite they create, they are in
harmony. They can never create while separated...Because man was created
in Gods image, he has all of Gods powers within him.
--Migene Gonzalez-Wippler
Personally we find it pleasurable and useful to take frequent inventory
of all the gods or selves in our pantheon and to let each take some daily
exercise when possible, in the imagined style of the complete renaissance
man.
--Peter Carroll
In my opinion, the low technological level of (shamanic) cultures compelled
their members to develop to the highest degree possible the ability of
the human mind to cope with serious problems of health and survival.
--Michael Harner
(Aldous Huxley) compared the brain to a "reducing valve." In ordinary
perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the
brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for
the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become
so rational, so so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes pale and thin.
It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous
part of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're
shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich
and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a
few months -- until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on
this other world, usually for good...
--Tom Wolfe, on the Merry Pranksters
For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our
minds dominate but when we lose our minds...
--Anais Nin
The realization that belief is a tool rather than an end in itself has
immense consequences if fully accepted. Within the limits set by physical
possibility, and these limits are wider and more malleable than most people
believe, one can make real any beliefs one chooses, including contradictory
beliefs. The magician is not one striving for and particular identity
goal, rather one who wants the meta-identity of being able to be anything.
--Peter Carroll
Magic, being both an art and a science, has remained relatively free
of the restrictions of orthodoxy by virtue of its position outside socially
sanctioned thought. It has been constantly accumulating data and technology
as humam consciousness evolves, despite occasional attempts at cauterization
by the nostalgically inclined. It is the very nature of Magic to be progressive,
anarchic, and experimental...Magic has acted as a matrix from which the
courageous can explore a universe that answers to no authority.
--from the Templum Nigri Solis
One aspect of Chaos Magic that seems to upset some people is the Chaos
Magicians occasional fondness for working with images culled from non-historical
sources, such as invoking HP Lovecrafts Cthulu mythos beings, mapping
the Rocky Horror Show onto the Tree of Life, slamming through the astral
void in an X-Wing figher, and channeling communications from Gods that
didnt exist five minutes ago. It is the adoption of the belief which makes
it viable, not its coherence.
--Phil Hine
...will you shop at the supermarket of beliefs or the supermarket of
sensation and let your consumer preferences define your true self? Or
will you, in a bold and lighthearted fashion, thieve from both for the
fun of it?
--Peter Carroll
While the majority of magical perspectives seek to transcend or reject
paramount Reality in favor of higher states of being, the Chaoist Paradigm
makes Paramount Reality into a Playground for the phenomenizing of will
and desire.
--Phil Hine
We are not to regard ourselves as base beings, without whose sphere is
Light or God. Our minds and bodies are veils of the light within. The
uninitiate is a dark star, and the Great Work for him is to make his veils
transparent by purifying them. This purification is really simplification,
it is not that the veil is dirty, but that the complexity of its folds
makes it opaque.
--Aleister Crowley
Every human being has two distinct personalities living within him, the
demonic and the divine. The magician has free access to both. When he
is able to harmonize them he becomes the perfect man.
---Migene Gonzalez-Wippler
A medicine man shouldn't be a saint. He should experience and feel all
the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and reality, the courage
and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug,
or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is not
good as a medicine man. Sickness, jail, poverty, getting drunk -- I had
to experience all that myself. Sinning makes the world go round. You cant
be so stuck-up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped
up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both
of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the
turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in
all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the
fool now and then. That's sacred too. Nature, the Great Spirit, they are
not perfect. The world couldn't stand that perfection. The spirit has
a good side and a bad side. Sometimes the bad side gives me more knowledge
than the good side.
---John Fire Lame Deer
Alternating the negative with positive qualities will help you see into
your integrated being. When you manage to unblock your compassion for
yourself, and direct it back into the parts of you that you originally
despised, you will free the entire stock of psychic energy that was yours
all along but not available to you because of self-hatred.
---Z. Budapest
Remember that all dirt is only misplaced matter capable of being re-used
elsewhere. The energy we tie up or confine in hatred, envy, resentment,
fear, etc., can be used constructively elsewhere in our lives.
---Clifford Bias
This distinction perpetuated the division of the world into matter versus
spirit, subjective versus objective, reflecting a general philosophy(shared
by science and religion) which regarded the demands of the everyday world
as being inferior to abstract metaphysics...Sorcery, which is concerned
with the everyday world, can help us keep our feet on the ground, which
is very important for those who would reach for the stars.
--Phil Hine
Reject then the obscenities of contrived uniformity, order, and purpose.
Turn and face the tidal wave of Chaos from which the philosophers have
been fleeing in terror for millennia. Leap in and come out surfing its
crest, sporting amidst the limitless weirdness and mystery in all things,
for those who reject false certainties. Thank Chaos we shall never exhaust
it. Create, destroy, enjoy, IO CHAOS!
--Peter Carroll
Pan was primarily a god of kindly merriment, worshipped with music and
dancing. Dancing and play are a basic activity of all life. Children are
natural dancers, and so are animals. Forest creatures leap and gambol
in the woodland. The mating dances of birds, the amazing springtime antics
of hares, even the constant swarming of gnats on a summer evening, are
all part of the same instinctive impulse. The earth, the moon, and all
the planets join in a great circling dance about the sun. The island nebulae
seem to be circling about a centre. The merry circle dance of the witches
was a deeply instinctive response to the living Nature with which they
sought kinship.
--Doreen Valiente
There are a good many gods and spirits who care very little for the meaning
of the invocation and respond much faster to its mood. This is especially
the case with the elder gods, the Ancient Ones and those primal spirits
of the dawn ages who dont give a damn for reason anyway...Praying to the
beast spirits has to be congruent with their animal sentience, otherwise
they wont notice the call. Forget about poetic language and subtle definitions.
That sort of thing may work well with the more refined gods. It wont work
with the beasts. The beasts will react to your emotions, to your passion,
to the hunger of the calling. They dont give a damn for the intellectual
approach... If you want to meet your ancestors, few of whom were human,
be prepared to welcome them in every cell of your body.
--Jan Fries
Magic is a two-way process; you use it to change yourself and in return,
it changes you. Letting yourself enter a magical reality is not about
creating an enclave of magic beyond your everyday life, but allowing magic
in -- allowing for the intrusion of the weird, the irrational, the things
you can't explain, yet are undeniably real. You may well learn the summoning
of spirits using ritual magic, but what happens when the spirits summon
you?
--Phil Hine
I hope that some of the more daring among you will now voice that obvious
question, Really, what is a nature spirit? Frankly, I dont know. I have
no idea what a spirit really is, or what you and I really are, let alone
what reality might be. Luckily, we dont have to know. Do we require objective
proof that some person really exists before we dare to mumble those sacred
words, Brother, would you lend me some cash?
--Jan Fries
