Occulture

by Carl Abrahamsson

  As a cosmic principle, karma could be said to exist—meaning the books need to be balanced or there will be extra taxation or perhaps even investigation of fraud or tax evasion. Water always finds its own level. On a personal level, though, karma is mainly a cultural concept that has seeped into the West from the East. The term itself thus becomes entangled with both religious and moral issues, which creates an unnecessarily complex overview. In its place in this context I would therefore like to substitute the term magicoin. Sure, magical currency could be another suitable term, but this easily becomes semantically entangled with other kinds of concepts within the magical sphere (the 93 current, the Setian current, etc.).

  In our Western sphere, self and will rule supreme. And this is as it should be: without self-knowledge and will, we get nowhere; or perhaps, at most, we get shuffled around by others who are more eloquent in defining us and who thereby can use us for their own ends. But if self and will are there, firmly rooted within the individual, we have a good, solid foundation to learn about how magic (and life) works. If we stay on the level of “I want” without further understanding of genuine magicoin principles, there will be debt. If we work with agents like spirits or other nontangible, inner forces, we can only go so far with a steady flow of demands—just as with credit cards.

  It’s almost easier to understand the magicoin principle when looking at it outside the sphere of magic. Money is one very clear sphere; human relationships another. If we take something and don’t pay, that’s called stealing. If we use someone else indefinitely for our own ends, that turns into abuse and, very likely, confrontation. That’s why we don’t do those things if we see the big picture and understand our own position within it.

  Why is the dilemma even there? That is, why is it that magicians in the Western sphere so seldom understand these basic principles? I think the problem is twofold. One is that magical practice is usually compartmentalized in time and space and seen as an activity separate from the overall flow of life. This is a big error. If magical practice is fully integrated in one’s life, for instance, by applying one’s own terms and interpretations rather than rehashing traditional, dogmatic, symbolic, and arcane ones (and thereby also increasing the potential for a better understanding of the concepts), there won’t even be any dilemma left. Hermes Trismegistus’s dictum of “As above, so below” will rule on all levels, both outer and inner.

  The second aspect is that I perceive that many young people begin with magical practice before they’re fully individuated. That is, before they fully understand their own relationship to everyone and everything else. Magic is mistakenly regarded simply as something you do at certain times and spaces, not something you are 24/7 and wherever you go or stay. Magic is mistakenly regarded simply as something you do to achieve your own ends in fairly nonrational ways, not something that ties you together holistically with the universe.

  It’s a bit like cramming in school. Students can mechanically or automatically repeat what’s been taught in class and thereby give a semblance of knowing. Which can, in bad schools, actually produce good grades. But these are grades that are misleading as indications of real understanding. Any challenging or unexpected question to the student will quickly reveal that it’s just a matter of regurgitation or repetition.

  By being, we carry potential. By doing, we achieve. But by achieving, are we always successful? What we do affects us on the inner planes, and also the totality outside us. If we disregard any overall karmic concepts as being strictly moral ones, and instead just look to the economy of the processes, it is my experience that if there’s a conscious and willed balance in the magicoin books, there will be success.

  It’s always healthier to generate funds than it is to deal with credit—this is something most of us recognize from everyday finances—and how we generate is by offering first and asking later. It’s interesting to see how the word offer even ties in etymologically to this. To sacrifice means “to make holy.” The German word for “victim” and for “sacrifice” itself is Opfer (in Swedish “to sacrifice” is att offra; cf. “make an offer”). The word victim is originally Latin, and means exactly the same as in English. Its roots can be traced to a “sacrificed animal.” Another synonym for something sacrificed is hostia, as for instance in the “host” of the Christian communion, and as in the English hostage, something or someone being offered in return for something or someone else.

  Is magical success equal to the concept of profit? That is, if we generate more than what we spend, is that a sign of specific magical success? The answer is no. Profit and surplus are in our minds predominantly an economic, cultural concept within a tradition, not an existential given. Of course, one could argue that financial profit and its residues are necessary as status indicators and thereby of natural stratifying processes. However, the magical process is always an individual one. It can never be collective. Magical success equals the balancing of the individual magicoin books. One exception would be when advanced magicians actually contain more magicoin energy than they need for their own individual purposes. This can then be shared with others. If someone not advanced enough tries to do the same thing, there will be depletion and chaos within his or her own magicoin system.

  Goethe’s Faust is an often-referenced work of art in this regard, as is Marlowe’s earlier play and a hundred different variants of the theme. Making a pact or a deal with the so-called devil is merely succumbing to a credit-based slavery situation. The same goes for working within traditional esoteric systems where so-called external forces are called forth to presence. If and when the magician declares his or her will to the force in question, but forgets to explain the possible dividends or even to add a please or thank you after the declaration, the odds are likely that the outcome will be more expensive than could ever be imagined.

  What this means in real life is of course not that some occult force pops up at night and demands to be paid back in full or that some fantastic devil tries to drag your soul to some monotheistic vision of hell. But what it could mean is that you, after a successful ritual, find that its manifested goal may contain problematic aspects too, previously not considered. Had the preritual overview been crystal clear (the equivalent of an economic budget that balances out), problems could have been foreseen and possibly dealt with even before the ritual. An example: you perform a ritual to secure one more or less constant sexual partner. This manifests in a perfectly sexually compatible woman and she is very nice indeed. But she’s also a human being with emotions and a will of her own that might not be compatible when she’s making demands for a deeper relationship than one merely carnal. Or that as a result of the volatile and intense lust she’s able to provoke, all according to your fantasies, you make her pregnant.

  Another example could be an even more youthful or naive one: A young magician wants a gadget that he can’t afford right now and performs a ritual for the situation. The train of events leads to that a good friend of his, equally poor, actually steals two gadgets and gives him one. This could be seen as a beautiful and successful operation from the magician’s perspective. However, the friend was caught on CCTV and is later charged with the crime. The attraction of that gadget very soon loses its potency.

  It would be much better to generate the energy needed oneself and then send it off on adventures of manifestation. If well directed, it not only becomes an appropriate legitimate expense but also potentially an investment—that is, an expense that furthers the cause, broadens the base, facilitates creative expansion. In the example of the fencing young magician, things could have been changed for the better with mere expression of intent. If he had integrated the expression of desire in a larger context of self-development for instance, in which the gadget could play a tangible, creative part, the result could have manifested in a different way, and his using the gadget lead to an improved skill rather than a bad conscience.

  As in our normal economy, there is also a meta-level in the magic business. We normally
talk about a stock market that trades in worth, loss, and potential in existing companies. Translated into our own sphere of hocus-pocus this would correspond to the lucrative area of magical books. They carry potential for change on their pages, and attract by symbolism, poetry, promises of power, and so forth. They deal with magic and they deal in magic. Thereby the entire metasphere of magical literature and its writers becomes the stock market of occultism, a realm of speculation in worth and potential. If more people invest in one writer rather than another, even though these writers may be writing about the same kinds of magical phenomena, then his or her value increases and even more investors show up. This could also strengthen related power structures such as magical groups or orders behind the writer in question, which could then be seen as an actual or an advisory board for the writer/corporation in question.

  When the Catholic conquistadores entered Central America and were shocked by the human sacrifices performed by the Aztecs, they apparently forgot about the essence of their own religion. The Aztecs tried their best to appease their main sun god and other minor gods and goddesses by ritually killing human beings. In their own minds they succeeded, because the sun did come back. Every day, in fact. And crops and harvests were for the most part plentiful in that fertile region. So in a way they existed within a brutal and blood-soaked logic of success. The very same logic was then applied by the conquistadores, who slaughtered and eradicated the Aztecs and their behavior for their own profit and for Catholicism. They also succeeded: the Aztecs were killed off and Catholic success and affluence followed, which meant the remaining converts could now instead partake of communion consisting of blood and flesh from the invaders’ own sacrificial proxy, Jesus Christ.

  Today, human sacrifice is not condoned, if we exclude fundamentalist Muslim terrorists and some retrograde tribes in remote jungles. The challenge today, if we stick to our young hubristic Western magicians, is rather to deal with a culture of fragmentation and oversaturation. If we already have everything and still want more, wouldn’t the most rewarding sacrifice have more to do with behaviors and attitudes rather than with tangible objects or life-forms? Cleaning up internally first, so to speak? Getting rid of destructive behavioral patterns and shortsightedness? Sacrificing external pollution and internal malnutrition?

  An interesting yet considerably more speculative area of magicoeconomic research could be whether the magical currency (NB, not “current”) is exchangeable or universal. Would it, for instance, be meaningful to use Scandinavian heathen magic in central Africa, or would one need to somehow exchange the terminology and the forces used for a successful operation? Would American Indian magic work well in Tibet? Aboriginal magic in the Vatican? Or vice versa?

  Interesting things are also going on within the highly abstracted sphere of high finance in regard to Mother Nature’s capital, which in many ways is permeated by powerful sources of magic. Where an old-fashioned economic thinking simply got what it wanted from the planet without returning anything at all (a very black form of magic) and thereby facilitated incredible fortunes out of many magical and sensitive ecosystems, today the phenomenon of “mitigation banking” is a new growth market in the undertow of ecological consciousness (or simply a bad conscience). It works like this: A bank buys a huge piece of land that needs protection for the sake of, for instance, biodiversity. Rapacious corporations can then buy or lease a small segment to exploit, quite expensively, and part of the bank’s revenue then goes to actual further bioprotection. It’s a very strange setup, almost illogical, but it’s now making huge profits for all concerned. And yes, to perhaps a greater extent than in recent decades, wildlife can now be better protected. But it does have a strange, almost eerie aftertaste. It’s like a bank suddenly owning a previously raped woman, and now, in the name of her overall protection, sells long-term leases on her body to her previous rapists. Translated into a magical setup, it’s like a mitigation made by a wise magician for an assortment of unwise magicians, who all want to have results immediately but cannot see the big picture or the role they play. They can use the force but only when sanctioned by some other magician who is thereby getting morally and inexorably entangled in whatever it is that’s going on. A healthy setup? I think not.

  On a stricter and more concretely generative level, we can always return to the main mysteries of magic—the sexual ones—for both metaphor and concrete food for thought. The theory is usually divided into psychosexual and physical-residual parts. Isolationists say the creative force lies in one but not the other, and other, more holistically inclined theorists say it’s a mix of both. That is, that the magical force lies in the ecstatic moment itself, which can be charged and directed, or that the dissemination and direction of the ultra-proto-generative force in the physical sperm and egg is what matters.

  It’s interesting to note, though, that the physical sacrifice of sperm in ejaculation carries almost unlimited potential when it comes to generating new human life. Even if there is conception, that was made possible by the parallel sacrifice of a billion sperm-buddies. Male generative sacrifice is usually associated with intense pleasure. Female generative sacrifice is usually associated with intense displeasure. The sacrifice of an unfertilized egg in menstruation is not such an apparent joyous occasion, but it does facilitate the placement of new egg, ready and willing should a vital sperm drop by. Considering the potential these generative sacrifices contain, both as states of mind and body, both as ecstasies and physical residue, it’s no wonder that they constitute prime magical currency. With this very basic insight in mind, it should be easy to see that a credit-based magical economy might not be the best place to begin your own magical career.

  Essentially, it’s very simple: plus and minus need to add up to zero, in magical operations and in life in general. That’s quite enough. If we can learn to change from looking at sacrifice as a painful noun to looking at it as a pleasurable, constructive verb, we have come a long way.

  17

  The Magic of Dreams Made Real

  Originally a lecture delivered at Aleph in Skopje, Macedonia, 2014.

  IN OUR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE the dream sphere has been moved to a mystical and stigmatized corner. It’s a sphere that we usually try to understand by simplified interpretation models and a superstitious rationality. One of those interpretation models is the hierarchic one. This doesn’t merely come from Freud but from a much larger background and perspective. But if we stick with Freud’s powerful legacy, we recognize the hierarchic structure: id, ego, superego, and so on. It’s a model we’ve grown accustomed to, as we have with his dream theories, claiming that the subconscious lies beneath and occasionally stirs up things when we let our guards down, reminding us of wishes, desires, fears, and frustrations. One central element in this model is that the rational mind runs the show when we’re awake.

  But there’s no escaping the fact that we sleep and thereby dream approximately one-third of our lives. That’s a lot of time and a lot of energy spent on something that is generally regarded as passive and irrational. Strangely enough, this perspective seems predominant even within contemporary psychology—at least that’s how it’s being taught today at American universities. The focus here seems to be on clinical experiments, neurology, and neurochemistry. But that in itself contains the same fundamental dilemma as most of the natural sciences: the beauty of a flower cannot be understood by dissecting it over and over again and trying to find out which chemicals are involved.

  Quoting the American psychology professor Roger Knudson, a critical voice: “American psychology majors learn that dreams are meaningless by-products of brain processes. This is taught by every textbook in introductory psychology used in our department over the past decade.” Also: “Imagination is mainly a source of error in memory and therefore is not to be trusted.”1 Freud was a child of his times, and the authoritarian, hierarchic thinking was in his case based both on his own religious environment and the overall European culture of postindustrial r
ationalism. Of course, we can absolutely not say that Freud regarded dreams and their importance as insignificant. Quite the contrary. But he worked within a context where focus on order was essential. Otherwise, in the dualistic logic that reigned supreme, everything would turn into chaos and inner disturbances.

  Parallel to Freud’s work were other manifestations of progress within the natural sciences, some of which unleashed enormous energies, for good and bad. The atomic structure theory, with its protonic center and a varying amount of electrons in orbit, quickly generated metaphysical speculations concerning the similarities with the structure of the universe. The atomic model of interpretation of both an inner and outer world is in many ways more usable in most contexts. It seems as though the hierarchic one fits best in processes that are rigid in their focus on pecking order, that is, ascribing to something a relative value: the higher is worth more than the lower, and so on. That kind of value-related thinking doesn’t really exist within the atomic model.

  We’re going to stick with the atomic here. If we begin on an overall human level and look at the protonic center, we might as well call that core the individual. Around the individual many important phenomena and energies spin in orbit and make up the individual’s makeup, so to speak. One model could be time and function based: one-third consists of awake work, one-third of awake social life, and one-third of sleeping/dreaming. Another model could be the sleeping third, where the proton could still be seen as the individual and the electrons could be physical repose and different types of dreaming. Or even different specific dreams.