NOTHING SHORT OV A TOTAL WAR (STANZA L). by Genesis P-Orridge T.O.P.Y. ...real total war has becoum information war, it is being fought now... DISTRIBUTING INFORMATION That's thee key to change, thee key to knowledge and thee key to development on all levels really. It's a mistake to believe in ANY dogmatic politics. Politics is just a facade. It happens to suit thee vested interests of a lot of different groups in society to encourage a belief that politics rules countries and decides their destinies when, in fact, it doesn't at all. Certainly not in thee way people are led to believe. Politics is just a convenient charade to allow people to feel secure. It makes them believe society is in their own control. They vote for their leaders, therefore they MUST choose them. Politics IS just a convenient charade to make people feel secure. To feel that it's all run consciously, democratically, that they understand what is happening. That there are different polititians, who have different dogmas and they argue over these in public and then thee public choose who seems most sensible and capable to take office at any given time. Don't believe that at all. E believe that there has been an endless process since very early tribal times, through settlements and towns and industrialization to contemporary times. This E call thee "control process" and it exists independently of any individuals. This "control process" can be operated by almost any vested interest group at any given time in history. This process does not take sides, has no morality, no obligations, no character, no sense of urgency. Thee "control process" is always present. "Control needs time like a junkie needs junk" (W.S.B.) E disagree on that control transcends time and space. Control eats people, eats history, eats ideals, eats hope. It goes on right throughout time, whatever disguise it might have. E am very antagonistic to thee whole concept/situation of ultimately being controlled by a process which nobody wants, (given a degree of individual sanity). E don't like that idea at all. If we have any enemy at all, then thee "Control Process" is that enemy. It is vital to short-circuit that "control process". It is a very invisible, subtle process. In a sense it has becoum a part of each human being's metabolism. Thee only real way this control process can be broken is simply through people beginning to mature. As the level of maturity of individuals increases, so does their ability to think for themselves, to accept responsibilities, to make decisions. In a sense, to develop an atmosphere of reasonableness and logic. Most people don't want to develop this for quite fair reasons: they don't want to get involved. It's a hell of a big battle and you can't even be sure who is in charge. For all they know, they might be doing exactly what they are already programmed to do, in fact, because any "control process" needs antagonism, it needs people fighting against it. Its biggest strength is it controls information. Basically thee power in this world rests with thee people who have access to thee most information and also control that information. Most of thee paranoia concerned with politics is about what is REALLY going on, what is secret, what we are not being told about. Diplomacy is about that really. So, the enemy is thee "control process" and thee power of thee "control process" isn't actually armies and police, it isn't power through force. That is a secondary tactic, butter not thee crucial thing, thee real power is who's got thee information. Thee weakness of whoever controls that information bank at any given time is that, to store and use that information, systems have to be developed for storing it and reproducing it. Those systems are very expensive and cumbersome, requiring capital & equipment which can't be utilized thee whole time. So, to cover costs and keep equipment running, these systems have to be made available to thee rest of us to keep them financially viable. That's why you get access to cable TV, to computer time, to xerox, instant printing and cassette recorders, even thee mail, polaroids too, and video. These are all spin-offs from business, conglomerates and people at thee top who deal directly in control. They develop these systems for their own reasons, butter they are so expensive they have to mass produce them to finance them. So we all get easier and easier ways to mulitply our ideas and information, it's a parallel progression. Also, another of their weaknesses, those who control control, is that they have a very one-directional view whereas we, thee outsiders, thee genetic terrorists, or control agents, as we in T.G. call them (meaning NOT that we're into control butter dealing with it), we have thee mutant ability to make conceptual leaps. Which is really what is said about creative people, or artists, or talented criminals, that they can perceive things in a wide spectrum, from outside they can analyse structures, play games with that knowledge and manipulate it, throw it back. In inspired moments chuck spanners into various works. So we get tools to increase thee efficiency of our mischief as a spin-off from thee controllers. In return they get something from us. We are always developing ideas which are non-linear and therefore outside their scope butter which they can adopt and adapt. In a crisis, it is often and outsider who sees a solution, invents a new gadget, effects a coumpromise. So it's a two-way thing. Each side giving things to thee other as a direct result of their intrinsic conflict. Ultimate irony and also organically cyclical and sensible. Parasite feeding off host, host kept alive by immunity afforded it by parasite. Thee "control process" develops machinery, equipment and techniques which we can play with for our own ends. Butter by us playing with them, inevitably, there is a spin-off philosophical and creative progression, an analysis of experience which can the be taken back by thee "control process" for its own ends. We need this system as a target, a stimulus outside ourselves to fight against, and thee system needs a rebellious questioning minority to develop new possiblilities from a flexibility of view it can never posses by its very rigid nature. It seems likely however, that very very slowly this minority is growing. More people are breaking taboos, they have realised, through people telling them, in leaflets, on TV, etc., in other words, through information being made available, they have certain rights. That they can question things, they can organise, they can set up their own structures. that is not to say necessarily that all those things are per se right, butter it does seem symptomatic of a larger breakdown of this "control process" than many people might suspect. And it probably explains thee swing towards repressive ideas in politics to cover a growing fear of usurpation by those presently in charge of thee process and its information bank. NOTES FROM A MAGICKAL DIARY 1967-87 The indifference ov satiation, thee knowledge ov indifference. Wise indifference. Anxiety is a coummon term, one of thee mainstays of psychiatry. It is defined as an emotion. It is not. It is a coumpound ov two elements: awareness of ambiguity and a depressive reaction to this awareness. E am interested in thee extension and investigation ov culture, ov mythologies, personal symbol systems, thus E chose to always work with a group ov Individuals. Our works are poor traits that interconnect. Whatever E do, am involved in, help thee expression ov, is, in a real way, a poor trait ov myself, and a poor trait ov each Individual member ov thee group ov Individuals who collaborated with me on that particular work/action also. Yet there is a mystery involved. They exist, these poor traits, because E exist, they are collated and organised by me, and yet E do not create every part ov them directly, they are the sum total ov all who participate. There is a chain ov creation, rather than a chain ov coumand. It is this process and parallelism that fascinates me, thee abrogation, or fragmentation ov specific responsibility, and it seems in coum way linked with Charles Manson than I often care, or dare, to admit in public. Perhaps it is merely a long- engrammed trick to side-step total responsibility, in order to avoid a clear case ov knowing it was me, or my act alone, that had failed. Certainly E despise myself at many times for failing to achieve more. Yet, mystery again, E desire achievement in order to share, to share coumpletely, and demonstrate CARING, and thee ultimate achievement E seek is total liberation ov thee human spirit and ALL its expressions, and total destruction ov control and hypocrisy and all thee sick manifestations ov inherited social values. E must fail by definition, and succeed by intention. E guess we can only fail by failing to achieve thee goal we set ourselves, those secrets that so few know. Who are we challenging in our imagination, who do we wish to outdo? Times change, people change with them and adopt thee processes, ideologies and styles ov their time. Those people are RE-PERSONALISING their expression ov themselves, their "art". E do not believe that ANY art has intrinsic value. It is a result, it is not a thing itself. It is expression and description, not experience, it is residue, it is means. Magick is thee only medium that can be both. It was through thee process ov art that E located Magick. Art became a diluted sham, too fixed in thee superficial, coumsumerist ethics ov its era. E have consciously and subconsciously substituted thee word Magick where E once placed thee word Art, now E feel coumfortable, before E was always uncoumfortable, suspicious, embarassed by the vacuous label my actions were presented under. It seems to me Magick is about movement and change, about Time passing. Thee Medium ov Magick is Time itself, and thee Belief ov Magick is Action. We risk our emotions to place our vision ov how thee world and life are into a public arena. Our vision coums from observation ov our own experiences and RE-COGNITION. We hope to discover that perhaps we are not alone, that other people have felt or seen thee same. Magick is about thee process ov telling thee truth, thee whole truth, and about not having any secrets. Paradox- where does practical discretion becoum elitist secret? E think when it is USED to project or hold power, or to attract, in itself, or to imply authority for egotistical reasons. Therefore a contemporary and relevant Magickal network must be about ACCESS, sharing ov techniques and information, it must attack thee hoarding ov knowledge and give any useful ideas and structures availability to all who ask. There are no secret teachers, no "more responsible" or "entrusted" masters. Magick HAS to be for everyone. Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth is a family ov experiences. It is an eternal search and struggle through false rules that we and others have set for ourselves. To find peace ov mind does not mean a religious following and isolation. This is a misleading view from thee society we now live within. It is wrong to seek oneself in isolation when our world is proportionately city- built, each coumglomerate full ov scared, lonely, rejected people. One must live within thee environment ov thee Times and make THAT environment as free as possible to as many people as possible. This is thee trick, thee aim, thee revolver ov hope. To give people what they already have, butter that has been buried by yera's ov varying human ideals and standards. All we ask is that people once more work with themselves, their feelings, FEELINGS, and in doing so, becoum aware ov others and their feelings. We are eaten like offal by rats, treated as stinking, redundant garbage, discarded as outdated fuel resources as the ratios ov control adjust. It is simple, yet difficult, in "reality", to touch oneself once more. Thee simplest things are thee most difficult. Re-integration ov every aspect ov one's conscious and subconscious mind, all feelings, aspirations, sexualities, fears, insecurities, dreams, skills, strengths and emotional capabilities must be located, focussed, examined, absorbed, and balanced. Our society, and now by succumbing to coumpetition and to tribal rivalry onece more, our own culture, have deliberately splintered and fragmented our personalities. We are linear, fear ridicule, follow style and muscle ov every type, we forget we do not wish to PARTICIPATE as frozen personalities. We have TRACKING problems, we need to link directly and make adjustments. We do not confront each other and ourselves enough. We are not honest enough. From thee older generation there is buried guilt that they failed to develop their dream, were side-tracked into habits, into superiority, into stability. These expresses via drugs, via jobs, via New Age Babble. In thee younger generation there is fear ov failure, fear ov ridicule by thee next generation that coums out as cynical nihilism, like thee anarcho-hippies that drench themselves in death and Anger, righteous justified and challenging anger, yet still it ends camouflaging guilt at impotence and a feeling that they too are succumbing to their own systems ov habits and peer group values, opinions and status. Guilt in LOVE, Guilt in ANGER. Yet all fueled by sincere motivation. It is always so easy to feel radical and be merely deluded. Whatever you do has to make sense to EVERYONE on EVERY STREET, or it means jack shit. It has to do with thee realities of life around you. You can't rebuild your house, butter you can redecorate your bedroom. You can be an example. You can win a battle everyday. Thee LOVE, and the ANGRY brigade today at their best both do just that. Butter too many swap action for habit. To wear black, take smack and say you don't care does not PROVE you are radical, or aware. To take acid, and be placid does not make you cosmic or there. Each morning you awake, you experience morning sickness, MOURNING sickness. Mourning thee death ov your belief in human nature, in evolution, in love, in thee fuel ov action from anger. Love can be strong and ruthless, it can generate strong action, obsessive behaviour against all odds, it can see thee stupidity ov thee human race, yet embrace and encourage human beings. Anger can be coumstructive, fueling positive, non-damaging, truly control-confronting behaviour and celebration, and reinvest humans with being. Never do anything that is not instinctive. Never do anything forced upon you. Never do anything for ulterior motives. BE ACTIVE, use ANGRY LOVE. COLLABORATE. Each action is a true action, pure and simple, there for every other person to take and interpret as they wish. It is that interpretation that is thee beginning ov their struggle. It must be voluntary to exist at all. Caring is not weakness. TURN ON (control) TUNE IN (to your Self) DROP OUT (ov control). There has to be a CLEAR message. It has to be possible for anyone to identify with it. It has to INSPIRE and EXCITE. It has to generate ACTION. It must AIM HIGH. It must spread by, and operate via EXPANSION not subtraction. It must INCLUDE not EXCLUDE. It must be capable ov instant and constant change. It should have no limits on thee enemies it can tackle, or thee area ov coumcern it will invade. It must therefore be rooted in people, what they believe they are capable ov, what they believe is possible, their behavior and their imagination. Real and full integration ov EVERY aspect ov being a Human Being without recourse to mysticism, afterlife, outside entities or any personalisation ov phenomena and interpretation ov phenomena. Responsibility for EVERYTHING must be accepted by us, by all people(s) without fear, without excuse. Thee surrender ov responsibility (for One Self) has always been a key problem. What we don't understand is simply what we don't understand. What am E thinking about? Where am E really placed? Thinking, why am E thinking? Looking, why am E looking? An industrial problem for Magick: SAMENESS. Thee onward progression toward uniformity, thee suppression ov Individuality, thee pressure ov fashion, ov peer group, thee need to belong, to avoid loneliness. Incubated inside mass media, mass production, mass consumption and mass culture. Thee Cloning ov Radicalism. Psychedelic Grey. WOLF=FLOW Another problem: MYSTIFICATION and EXCLUSIVITY. In keeping a monotonous culture and society under a Control process, one creates a facade ov experts guarding knowledge/information and its dissemination. People at large feel excluded. magick often falls prey to this fault too. People feel excluded, that it is not for them, that only intellectuals, or well-read literates with leisure time have thee time, right or correct credentials to be part ov it. Often they have been deliberately made to feel excluded and feel inferior, unable to participate CORRECTLY, lacking in training or etiquette necessary for true understanding. Well, bullshit! Correctness, good manners, etiquette, spurious training are all traits ov an historic and effete aristocracy that deserves only scorn. De-mystification is our duty, work and action our only obligation. We are supposed to be coumunicating. What we do, what we express are simply that, they are produced for result, not praise, to touch not impress. They should aim to be how people are, how they respond to where they live, when they live, how they live, and their aspirations in all these respects. Minus thee demands ov World, Market, Career it becoums - Magick. Magick requires hesitancy and uncertainty in its special relationship with reality and person Magick is a search for definitions. A series ov statements, observations and actions blended through intuitive ritual (real or imagined) to fix in more concrete terms thee eternal, non-extant paradox ov Time. "We all die". "Well spoken," said thee sage to thee wall, painting it white. 1967 spoke ov LOVE and it inspired, energised, felt fresh and relevant. And it included anger at injustice, Vietnam, sexism, hypocrisy. 1987 speaks ov ANGER and that too can be inspired, energised, feel fresh and relevant. It can include love, ov humanity, stupid though it is, and ov sexuality and ov life and colour. We suggest in our idealism through sin-icism. September marks thee WINTER OV ANGRY LOVE. Thee perception and anger at all thee Wrongs and thee awareness and refusal to stoop to society's level ov destruction. Dreaming ov thee romance of loneliness and thee adventure of sex. Will it ever be resolved? Our culture guarantees disappointment. It thrives on disatisfaction. A phallus on a string drawing us onwards. Completion is like a needle of junk. It thrills and dies. Pagan blood. Our concern as self-professed and reconstructed heathens, Godless and proud, is to becoum INTEGRATED on every level ov consciousness and ov character. No emotion spared. No end in sight. We believe at thee time of orgasm, a hieroglyph symbolising a desire, an awakeness, can be lodged in thee inner recess of thee brain, in what is commonly dubbed thee sub conscious mind, butter which we call thee REAL- CONSCIOUS MIND. This act then concentrates thee entire personality upon achievement ov thee desire. All this coums from our brains, our brains program us. There are no demons or gods. No mysteries. Observation and action are thee key. We can internalise our program, transmit our desire, and observe thee video of our thoughts on thee retina of thee mind. Thee sex moves, it groans and there really is nothing left butter thee exploration of our final lust. Genesis P-Orridge, October 85. Society murders every day, it murders childrens' imagination, it murders wives' love for their husbands, it murders men's respect for women, it murders people's hopes, dreams, joy in Life. Society mass-murders every day, and society is thee vehicle for control, and control is administered by thee rich and political, thee inheritors of feudal power. That's why capitalism/thatcherism, politicism is EVIL-LIVE if there is such a thing as Evil. That's why we are ANGRY in our LOVE for humanity, for each other. People are divided, scared, hurt, damaged, betrayed, their spirit murdered every day. RIOT IN THEE EYE, not thee riot on thee street, thee perception of life/society and what generates this anger, seeing, SEEING thee cruel, sadistic destruction of hope. What makes matters worse is that thee people who administer Control don't even really know what it is, how it works, they are ignorant incompetents, which makes everything far more scary and dangerous. That's why they need to be removed and Control short-circuited and dissipated. Thee Psychic Youth DROPS-OUT OV CONTROL, refuses to connive and collude in thee murder of thee populace and themselves by society. Music is not thee rebellion, behaviour is, perception is, thee EYE, seeing how things are, refusing to reinforce it, be part of it. TURN ON CONTROL NEVER ACCEPT WITHOUT QUESTION TUNE IN TO YOUR SELF ALWAYS ASK WHY DROP OUT OF CONTROL NEVER FEEL OBLIGED NEVER FEEL SCARED CELEBRATE AND ACTIVATE CARING IS NOT WEAKNESS TOUCH YOURSELF TOUCH OTHERS THEE BEST EXAMPLE IS EXAMPLE MAGICK DEFENDS ITSELF Thee hammer house of horror interpretation of Magick and Wicca is that curses and invocations are uttered by black-robed crones whilst they eat frogs and rat tails and drink bat's blood. In fact, so rare is thee energy of pure, undiluted anger that thee true mechanism of magickal defence is missed. It is a frequency generated and transmitted, just like a television signal. It does not need conscious direction. It homes in on thee receptor by default. That is, they are consciously disconnected from thee caring and protection of thee Individual angered. This exposes them to thee vagaries of a neurotic mass subconscious and within that mass thee anger still lurks. In a sense Magick is a Zen Archer. By a combination of thee initial pure anger, and a second stage of disconnection, considered disinterest, it is able to defend itself by channeling "Active Truth". In simple terms, when you care for a person, or are closely involved with them in some way. Then they betray, abuse or corrupt that caring. You remove your protection. When you remove your protection, they are once more open to those forces and pitfalls from which you protected them. A true curse is to us then a technique of inaction and non-violence from which we can perceive thee effects of revenge without recourse to guilt on our part. Magick defends itself. It comes from intuition, is guided by will, and honours no gods, demons, or spirits. It is thee birthright of all human beings and thee progeny of their brain, not some outside superbeing. Polititians and Religious leaders of ALL persuasions hypocritically tell us otherwise. Believe none of them. Believe only your own experiences of life. To die free of guilt is to die pure. A star. And every man and woman is a star. Our aim is wakefulness. Our enemy is dreamless sleep. Thee essential structure of our Western Society is Feudal. Only thee names have been changed to protect thee guilty. Most of thee population are merely a natural resource, like oil, coal, water that is drawn upon for self- perpetuation and for self-aggrandisement by those vested interests that administer Control. No-one controls Control anymore. It has a parasitic and debilitating life all its own. Certain very select groups have merely inherited thee almost Priestlike role of its protection and nurturing. Control replicates and expands inexorably, in a manner quite exactly like malignant cancer or, to use a current example, like AIDS, affecting individual aspirations and potential, our sense of unity and freedom, social and ideological optimism in precisely thee same terminal manner that those diseases affect our bodies. Time is a key to thee perception of this process. Cancer and AIDS work through time. They are linear problems. Their destructiveness accelerates at an ever-increasing rate until thee termination of thee host body. Control need Time also. It hides in social structures like politics, religion, education, mass-media, thee nuclear family. Just like a virus, it exists for its own sake. It relies upon a certain element of belief in a rational order, acceptance of inherited values and measurements, hopelessness. Control relies upon manipulation of human behaviour. Culture is an expression of states of mind rooted in thee effects of behavioural conditioning, albeit often obliquely. Culture is also a modification of language that can be read. It can reveal, describe, measure and expose Control. Control can be short- circuited. Once identified and isolated, thee parameters and limits of Control are visible. We need to search for methods to break thee preconceptions, modes of unthinking acceptance and expectations that make us, withing our constructed behaviour patterns, so vulnerable to Control. De-construct to Re- construct. We must retrain our inherited concept of what we are told is "reality". By applying a non-linear fragmenting process to every aspect of perception, reality, society, behaviour and ideology it is possible to modify and confound Control, and jar its manipulation of behaviour and violation of self-respect. Magick, as we see it, is precisely this, a fragmenting process that does damge to Control and its primary tools of Guilt and Fear. It can operate within thee same medium, "Behaviour", as Control. It presents a system ot challenge, emasculate and render impotent thee parasite itself. In a real sense, it detoxifies thee behavioural immune system, restoring its balance. Control disintegrates, Magick integrates. Thee method is a systematic application of the fragmenting Process to all modes of inherited behaviour and belief. Thee intention is reclamation of self-determination and self-description by truly free choice. Thee result is to neutralise and challenge thee centre of social control. TOPY sent 5 individuals, untrained in lecturing or justification to thee very well organised THELEMIC Conference in Oxford in October(87). We learned that a large majority ov thee audience were genuinely interested in TOPY and Modern Magick. A small, drunk, loudly vocal minority, were interested in thee preservation ov thee Museum Ov Magick and their own Egos. They confuse every Individual's right to be unique and special with their own need to feel Superior. It's thee same old simplistic ignorance that confuses POWER with CONTROL. At thee very least, five ov our number now realise how awkward and frustrating it can be to coumunicate one's honesty and enthusiasm to intellectual snobs. They also saw how a few ov these old, old guard "Thelemites" see A. Crowley as a Hero, yet cannot observe their chosen hero clearly. They talk ov flamboyance, charisma, and personality cults as weaknesses, yet their hero exploited all these attributes to thee hilt. They criticise others for re-interpretation ov his ideas to KEEP THEM ALIVE AND RELEVANT, and they act like his parents, thumping their chosen bibles, chanting his texts like doggerel, he would laugh, take thee piss and ridicule from these insecure characters for totally missing the point. All culture is magick, and magick is FOR ALL, not just scholars, and to be FOR ALL, it must be understood BY ALL, and relevant to ALL. Which must include making its language modern, FLEXIBLE, and straight forward. At least we can see thee Magickal Establishment reveal itself for what it has becoum. A backwater. Librarians are ov course useful to us all, butter they are best left in their closets. TIME MIRRORS Since all phenomena (or phenomenally appearing things) which arise present no reality in themselves, they are said to be of the noumena (in other words, they are of the Voidness, regarded as the noumenal background or Source of the physical universe of the phenomena). Though not formed into anything, yet they give shape to everything. Thus it is that phenomena and noumena are ever in union, and said to be of one nature. They are, like ice and water, reflection and mirror, two aspects of a single thing." The Seven Books of Wisdom Tibetan text In the case of a mirror, there is a third aspect, the subject/viewer. Mirrors reveal and conceal. Their mystery permanent, their hints at doorways, windows and thresholds out of reach of most minds. Time. Image. Idea. There can be no separation, scientifically or subjectively. The atavistic face gazes down into a crystal pool. Ice- cold water. Grunts. A hand shatters the image, fear gaunt and haunting passes across, a shadowy cloud, and through all Time that moment can persist, be reclaimed. "What is Time, but a variety of one thing? AOS These moments of Time accumulate, are listed under memory in our modern synapses, are posited as always retrievable, amorphous. Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks to place, of Time. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggested the very power of suggestion. No-one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-forces, death-forces that modern persons are divorced form. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement. "Magick consists in seeing and willing beyond that next horizon." The Sar. Mrs. Paterson stares down. Pencilled into existence. It is her as she was when she took Austin Osman Spare at 14 years old and initiated him into the art of sexual magic and a powerful system of sorcery that she had rediscovered through communion across time with systems and techniques that grew from a most animalistic and pure union of instinct. She knew, and she taught Spare, how to travel through Time, and how to remain Present in Life after bodily death. She was a medium, but her guides were not just ikons of the intuitive tribes, American indians, tantric Tibetans, aboriginals. She understood the most particular secret. Her medium was herself. She was able to ravel through mirrors back in Time, and forward in Time. There is a drawing by Spare, pencil and gouache, finished in 1928. The main figure is Mrs. Paterson. Coming from behind her head, making a blister in the shimmering green aura, a half complete Face.It belongs to no-one, everyone. It is her, literally, it is a cavalier, symbolically, it is Austin Osman Spare literally. This one picture contains all the secrets Spare never wrote down. He appears in the bottom right-hand corner, an old man, eyes closed, concentrating, materialising. What Spare does is trick us. All his writings are symbolic, they were never intended to be taken literally on any level, despite modern infatuations to the contrary. His writings are purely decorative. They are entertainment. His relaxation AFTER his real work. His special trick was to convince everybody that his drawings, paintings, images were symbolic. They are in fact his only real work. Like all great sorcerers, he hid his real secret in apparently commonplace media. In the key picture, he is actually kneeling. It is a photographic image of his prediction of both his own bodily death, and his worship of Mrs. Paterson as his true Goddess. His use of prostitutes and scarlet women of middle age in his sexual magick was to return to his potency with his only access point through Time into Timelessness. They were closer to Mrs. Paterson, so he used them as a focussing visual image to recharge his contact with her. When she died, he took her energy and literally trapped it, living, into this, and one or two other pictures. He sinks into her chest, is absorbed, they rise together, androgenous, both their faces, all their agaes superimposed. He has drawn himself dying, conjuring himself into the image in advance, so he remains always about to return. "Art is the truth we have realised of our belief." AOS "Art can contradict science." AOS "Do you see those flowers growing on the sides of the abyss whose beauty is so deadly and whose scent is so disturbing? Beware ..." -de Guatia In his images of sorcery, his purest incantations through Art, Spare uses a graphic skill and technique second to none. Yet his most commonly seen works are excellent, but obvious in their skill. Sometimes deliberately fast and loose. The nearest modern parallel would be Salvador Dali, who could suggest perfection in a few marks, or worship HIS goddess, Gala, with a photographically pure technique that is unearthly accurate. It seems to me that Spare is equal in geniu to Rembrandt in the past, Dali in the present and Brion Gysin in the future. "The future is in the past, but it is not wholly contained in the present." Hoene-Wronski Both Spare and Gysin lived to reach new dimensions, they understood to pursue Wisdom, no knowledge. This alone made collaboration with most magickal groups impossible. Where the need for nostalgic elitism and power by knowledge and length of bookshelf are too often camouflaged self- aggrandisement where self-improvement to serve is the rality. Peladan was in fact a prophet of developments that later became possible, and only now become likely. Spare was aware that mystery and magick generate fascination and action in human persons. He used his books, his Beardsley- like graphics, his writings to attract interest after his death. He knew that this would reactivate his soul and animate his psyche once more. He was also shrewd enough to make ALL his Secrets non-verbal. Not one is contained in his writings. Only the atavistic hintings, and the "Time Mirror" drawings explain his vision. "The Universe is a creative Process carried on by man's imagination, an operative power capable of becoming more supple, more animate." Teilhard de Chardin What is happening in these certain key pictures is this. All ideas have an image. There are no exceptions. All materials that make a piece of art are material. They are formed of patterns of atoms and molecules, charged by various energies. Modern psychology also accepts that Ideas are material entities, like animals and plants. All mythological ideas, Jung states, are ESSENTIALLY REAL, and far older than any philosophy. They originated in primal perceptions, correspondences and experiences. The catalytic element that regenerates a reaction between entitic Ideas and spectator (viewer of painting) favours parapsychological events is the presence of an active archetype. In the cas of Spare's Art, this can be anything from an obvious glyph, a non-decorative aesthetic arrangement, or in the most intense works, an invisible charge of energy which calls the deeper, instinctual layers of the psyche into action. The archetype is a borderline phenomenon, an acausal connecting principle closest in explanation to deliberately controlled, SELF- conscious, synchronicity. When Spare says Self-Love, he means Self- Conscious, yet egoless. When he uses the word Chaos, he is amusing himself, and leaving a key clue. Austin Osman Spare's Chaos is both a signature and a signpost to Future Time. ChDVH (CH)=JOY=23. AOS is simply his name, his authorship within his secret sorceries. "Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious." A.O.S. After Mrs. Paterson died, Spare was waiting to be inside her again, fused with her energy. The key picture is the actual moment of his death, and the moment of her death overlaid. His aim in all his magic was to reunite his spirit and hers within his Art so that they might quite literally live forever. They do live. Many unprompted witnesses have seen Mrs. Paterson's eyes close, open, cry, her whole head turn, a quite literally living portrait. Magic makes dreams real, makes the impossible possible, focusses the will. Throughout its history, crystals, water, polished metal, mirrors have been used to oracular ends. Spare's massive achievement is that he recognized the potential of Art, of image, to be the most powerful mirror of all. A window in Time, an Interface with death. In his art he captures not just an image but a life-force and energy. What happens is this lies dormant until it comes into contact and reacts with other energies, the viewer. Primal, atavistic man knew this and invested his ideas/images with unrestricted power: when you deal with image nly, as with most 20th Century Art, you don't get anything back except aesthetics. Spare has achieved the previously impossible, a two- way communication where his image reacts to and with us. It has a life of its own. The nearest parallel, a mirror in which you can see another world, another Time, another dimension, yet one you cannot reach into like water, one your hand reaching out cannot quite touch, the glass remains solid and frustrates us. What this energy held within his images is doing is transcending the barriers of observed Time so what we are dealing with is a four-dimensional object or image. This form of energy will have existed at all times and will exist at all times. An objective and critical survey of the available data would establish that perceptions occur as if in part there were no space, in part no time. Space and Time are not only the most immediate certainties for us, they are also empirically, since everything observable happens as though it occurred in Space and Time. In the face of this overwhelming certainty, it is understandable that reason should have the greatest difficulty in granting validity to the peculiar nature of telepathic phenomena. But anyone who does justice to the Facts cannot but admit that their apparent space- timelessness is their most essential quality. The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without Space and Time by no means proves that such an existence is, in itself, impossible, and, therefore, just as we cannot DRAW from an appearance of space-timelessness, any absolute conclusion about a spce-timeless form of existence, so we are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is NO FORM of existence without Space and Time. Just as physics now allows for "limitedness of space", a relativization, it is beginning with Catastrophe Theory to posit a "limitedness" of both Time and Causality. In short, nothing is fixed, the possibilities ALONE are endless. "Conscious looking is a search for verification of the notions that impel the search, and always has a circular mirroring element in it." TOPY In Spare's best images, it seems a medium has been found whereby the essence that survives death but is mostly beyond our communication has been captured by, transmitted into, an object that we are familiar with, i.e. a painting, and we are therefore used to trying to interpret or recieve information from. Because of the familiarity of painting, we don't put up barriers. We expect to try and see what the artist felt, wanted to say. If Spare said he was going to capture and demonstrate the soul after death, most observers would switch off. There would be interference with the transmission. Because Spare seduces us by saying this is an artwork, a picture, when in fact it is a photograph of a mirror of an actual reality, we remain open-minded, which means there is more chance that the phenomenon of actual physical changes in his picture will happen. We shall see, in short, that which many of us rightly choose not to believe in, living, moving, changing images of post-death life force, or soul essence. You see it reacting to you, it recieves and transmits direct into your conscious senses, but it must also be transmitting direct into the subconscious also, just as Sigilisation does. Presumably we transmit back to what is there, so what is there will change over the years as it reacts with various observers. All these energies mingle and mutate. The soul, life-force, energy, call it what you will, is generally said to be visible through the mirrors of the soul, the eyes. In the 1928 key works of Mrs. Paterson, the eyes are neither open, nor shut, and this is true in much of Spare's works. They are neither rejecting the possibility of seeing the captured soul, nor openly inviting it. This half- shut, half-open limbo suggests responsibility lies with the viewer to choose to commune with the elemental energies portrayed. By painting himself old when he was young and young when he was old, Spare mirrors Rembrandt once more and clearly directs us constantly to links backwards and forwards through time as he succeeds in presenting an image of the apparently impossible-IMMORTALITY. "Accept nothing, assume nothing, always look further, be open-eyed as well as open-minded and don't kid yourself." old TOPY proverb The psyche, in its deepest reaches, seems well able to participate in an existence beyond the web of Space and Time, this dimension is often dubbed eternity, or infinity, yet it actually behaves, if we take Spare's art as representative (it is not symbolic), as either a one-way or two-way mirror dependent for its function upon the translation of the unconscious, into a communicable image that bonds the actual molecules of the graphic image with its driving forces, unlocked from the unconscious into a fixed or mobile source of power dependent upon previous viewers, and with more vitally, our own abilities to interface directly with its energy. All "matter" is formed of molecules and atoms, therefore, at least in theory, we CAN potentially walk through walls by correct vibration of our own body corresponding with the vibration of the wall. It is just as theoretically possible to lock energy into the form of an image that has the ability to move, change, alter and animate its content. The only gap of credibility being that of first-hand experience. We don't believe it until it happens to us. We only know what we have experienced, belief is rooted in recognition. Imagination opens to syntheses larger than the sum total of reason. New images reflect more than logical synthesis can produce. There is a radical discontinuity in every truly creative idea or discovery. Projection direct from image to viewer involves more than the logical mode of thinking that does the projecting. An idea cannot exist separate from an image. For example, the Virgin Mary image embodies the idea of "compassion". A Goddess or God is a figurative image of an idea. Images are the root language of social and self- control. Science attempts to explain the universe objectively, without a viewer, therefore it cannot explain Art, or the unique effects or phenomena Spare generate by it. This is not a possible function of science, it cannot tell us why Spare's images can alter, why his faces change, eyes open and close, colours vary. Photographs are said to steal souls, they certainly capture a moment in Time. Freeze it. So do the images and oracles of Art, true Art. For Art was originally revelatory, shamanistic, fully integrated into every moment of Life. Spare's images capture the Process of creation, the thoughts of the creator, and the memories of the viewer, which are recalls of past events and feelings that are more compact, briefer, than when they took place originally. Memories are Past-Time, brought into Present-Time. Time is not linear, all Time exists simultaneously and points in every direction simultaneously. It is quaquaversal, omnipresent. There is no reason why Spare's images should not capture Time, thought and experience, then recreate and expand it in the viewer's mind. Subjective experience is no less real than objective conjecture. All roads lead to Rome in a mirror to mirror function. This Function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple, direct way. The higher techniques of idea and artist's illusory skill makes active through Time and Space effects and phenomena normally consigned to the sceptical parking lot of modern existence. Years of trying to rationalise inexplicable experiences adequately fall apart, and only a unique re-assessement via Spare's self-confessed image sorcery begins to give answers to what we see and feel. Time mirrors Time. In the Mrs. Paterson picture, Spare depicts her at the moment of death, but as she looked when she was young. He depicts himself, then quite young, as he would look, old at the moments of death. He thus creates a situaltion of contradiction. She is dead, yet alive and young, he is alive and young, yet dead. This visualisation making the image energies circular, not closed. This is why the picture is a window, mirror, threshold, active and useable by them or us. The illustration is a key to understanding the entire situation and its implications. It is a depiction of the real. Spare and Mrs. Paterson live on in his art, taking the concept of Art being the Life and Soul of a culture further than ever before dreamed. The only question remaining is, now that they have cheated death, can they, will they ever come back out? "He who transcends Time escapes necessity." AOS "All nature is a vast reflection of that which is within us, or else we could not know it." AOS "Embrace reality by imagination." AOS "What is death? A great mutation to your next self." AOS "The life-force is not blind, we are." AOS Genisis P-Orridge London 1987