The Languages of Magic with Toby Chappell(Audio Fixed)

And my background for this is I've long had an enthusiasm for things that are weird, whether it's things that are not of this earth. You know, I've been an amateur astronomer for most of my life, but also reading things often the wild and strange corners of what's possible. I've long been fascinated by language, how we use language to community, just to communicate with each other, which is obviously a very important part of it, but also, as I write about in the Languages of Magic, how we

use language as part of magic itself. My theory, which I argue for very strongly in the book, is that magic is at its core process of communication, and I'm sure we'll be talking quite a bit more about that by other means of background. I am a master of the Temple in the Temple of set I have been part of that organization for will be twenty five years

coming up this fall. But before that, I've been interested in many things that the Temple is interested in, namely, what does it mean to be a self and what does it mean to create more of what that self is, Whether that's becoming more potent and powerful out in the world, whether it's becoming more able to meet your own goals and ideas and ideals, and what that may mean for us when we're no longer have this meat sack to carry around and give our consciousness something to manifest through.

That's been a lifelong fascination of mine as well. I spent a number of years in the bit minds as I like to call it, aka the tech industry, but finally departed from that white last year and uh have returned to private study to continue some of my deeper, uh deeper thoughts than just uh what sort of system to set up this week to serve some corporate overword.

about the direction he wanted to take things in. Some people took that as a as a betrayal of what the church was originally about, and they left and then up forming the Temple of Set. And why it was Temple of Set and not not Temple of Satan or something along those lines is as much longer topic, but we can also talk about that if need be. But the so the Temple kind of has its roots in

the Church of Satan. When Anton Olive was writing the Satanic Rituals, which came out in seteen seventy two, he was sort of pressed for a deadline and he asked a Quino, who was sort of his left hand man, if you will, at the time, to contribute a couple of things to it, or along basically ideas about how one might use the fiction of HP Lovecraft to create magic. Lovecraft, as most people know, was a staunch materialist, was very opposed,

very skeptical about the idea of magic itself. So it's a bit strange to take something from someone who was that skeptical about the idea and then turn it into something you can actually use. But one of the things, and I talk about this quite a bit in the languages of magic as well, one of the things about that is it doesn't matter if something like that is real, or even if its author thinks that there is reality to it, you can't use it as part of the

things that the mind is capable of creating. You can use it as part of our imagination. But it's not just imagination. It's not just spinning a story. It's creating

something new out of those pieces. We we have this strange ability as humans to take pieces of what we find in culture, whether it's from other people or some things that we create on our own, and to recombine them to make assemblages out of them into new things that now are They are just as real as you know the share that I'm sitting on in one sense,

but that doesn't mean that they're actual. They have reality and that we can talk about them, we can think about them, we can we can picture them in our minds. But when you take something that is that has a real existence but is not yet actual within the world and then turn it into something that you know makes a thud on the table if you will, then you've given it something beyond just mirror uh speculation. You've turned into something that now has an effect, has a presence

that can be further used. So the things that the two things, well three things actually that Aquino contributed to the Satanic rituals, where the rituals the ceremony of the Nine Angles and the call to Cthulhu. And he also contributed an essay called the Metaphysics of love Craft where he talks about some of these same ideas how you would use these fictional creations to create real things, and that the sort of the magical system implied by those two rituals is the thrust of this book, which I

talked quite a bit about HP lef Craft. I talk quite a bit about the left hand Path as a concept.

I talk quite a bit about how you can combine some of the influences that came into left Craft, and some of the influences came into Michael Aquino, like the number of mysticism of Pythagoras, things like this, and combine them into a new magical system that opens up new ways of working within the world that maybe weren't quite there in the same form before, and the last thing I was going to mention for that is where this led to the closer association with Aquino of several reasons. One,

he was an extraordinarily generous and friendly man. He was certainly willing to talk to anyone who wanted to drop a mcneila in chat, whether they were in the Temple or not. But for people who were in the Temple that he was more than willing to support them on the projects, to give them feedback, to give them help, to mentum them in a sense. It also helps that I had become the Grand Master of the Temple's Order of the Trapezoid, which was a subgroup within the Temple

that was originally founded by a Quino. So it was sort of since I had taken over, you know, something

that was near and near to his heart. I'm sure that held quite a bit, and so when I began to write this book, I immediately asked him that he would be willing to contribute something to it, both to honor that influence that I took from him, but also because he was uniquely positioned to say something about it that no one else could same thing with asking Stephen Flowers to do the afterword the nine Angles, the system created out of the ceremony of the nine Angles, which

has nothing to do those those idiots that call themselves, you know, a magical group of nine angles in the name.

things that she didn't like. These were the evil things that you shouldn't do, and she contrasted with the right hand path, which was the good and the light and the things you should aspire to. You see a similar usage carried on coming from the same place by Alistair Crowley when he talks about you know, a brother of the left hand path. He's using that in very pejorative term. What the left hand path means within the temple is

it means primarily two things. It means one that it is a path toward some level of self deification, meaning that we can become like God's in some way, in part by doing the things that gods do. If you want to create, you do things that creators do. If you want to become a god, you do things that gods do. And this is done through introspection, is done through magic, is done through a continual process of refining the self. As I spoke of earlier, that's something in

the temple we call kever. This is an Egyptian term. It means, depending on the context, it means the dawn, but it also means to become or to come into being. And this is the idea that you should always be striving to become something more than you are currently. To take what's the best of you now and make that ever more potent, ever stronger, ever have a greater reach. Now,

the catch is is you can't make it infinite. You If it becomes infant, then you've now become exactly the same as the universe as a whole, and that's not what we're seeking to do. So you have to have some level of definition, some level of boundaries around it. But that's doesn't mean that you're limited. The boundaries just become where the edges of what you're capable of. Now that can be expanded as part of the way that you grow, as part of the way that you gever

if you will. And so the way that we approach the left hand path is through the process of initiation, which is that refinement of the self, through through magic, through introspection, through study, through through seeking out those things that are holding us back from being what we could be and finding new way, finding new places in which to grow ourselves. That can be, you know, some new level of knowledge, it can be some new level of

strength and power within within the world. It could be it's really up to the person what what that means to them, because it ultimately it has to be self defined that's another part of the left hand path, as we see it, is that you are ultimately responsible for it.

No one can tell you what it is. You must decide what it needs to be for you, and the extent to which you are faithful to that quest, you know, is that's the measure of success, not what anyone else thinks about what you're doing or thinks about the things that you may study, your things about the things you may you right and become. Now we do stress, of course, not if you start off as an asshole and you initiate yourself, sometimes you just become a bigger asshole, and

that's not the goal. If you start off as an asshole and you encounter initiation, then the goal is to become less of an asshole. You know, to be a bit crued with it, because we when you when you undergo initiation, when you're trying to expand the boundaries of yourself, your entire self is along for the ride. You may, you know, just say, for example, you know have some

some addiction. You know that that you also carry along if you don't also seek to evaluate that for what it is, and it's up to you to decide whether that needs to still be a part of yourself or not. But if you're not looking for something like that that may be holding you back in some way, it's only become more powerful along with everything else. So we have to approach is in a very holistic manner. You have to think about your entire self, even if you may

be concentrating on one part of yourself. Everything is along for the ride, and that's a crucially important aspect of the way we approach this within the Temple at least.

where you left your car keys. This is like the eternal mysteries that you're attempting to go. When I spoke earlier about the idea of initiation and expanding the boundaries of yourself, part of what you're doing is you're finding those things that are mysterious to you, that pull you forward, and you're attempting, they become the fuel that you use

for initiation. So with within the symbol, you'll if you imagine this without the trapezoid in the middle, if you imagine just the pentagram and the circle around it, you have what we call the temple of the pentagram of set. And what the pentagram of set signifies. The reason is the the symbol for the temple in a sense is it signifies as something very core about or cosmology. And that is the distinction between the subjective universe and the

objective universe. The way these terms are used is that the subjective universe will actual when they start the objective. The objective universe is the universe of matter and the law physical laws, things you can touch and things that affect things that can be touched. In the physical sense, this has this has no intelligence of guiding it. You know, it's driven by the physical laws that hold it together. The pentagram signifying the subjective universe is the individual awareness

of any sentient being. This could be humans. They could also be you know, animals and even arguably plants have some degree of sentience that they that they display, meaning that they can respond to things that they sense and in depending on the nature of what it is they sense and sometimes they can decide how to respond. It's not just an instinctual thing, but it's also a deliberate,

deliberative thing that can be done. And the reason these are shown in the panagram upset is not touching is the idea that this idea of self awareness is not something that is explainable through the laws of the material universe. It's something that seems to arise somehow above It emerges somehow from the interactions of things within the universe, comes from outside it in a sense, when you add in the trapezoid to become to become the seal over in them.

This is this This is short of shortly the implicit connection between the two. When I said earlier that the subjective universe is not dependent on the objective universe, it doesn't mean that doesn't touch it. Clearly it does. If I decide to reach out and you know, push a book off off my bookshelf in the back, I have just, through the power of my mind, implemented that in the world to cause some physical thing to happen. So clearly

we can have effects on that objective universe. But what it means is that I can I can conceive the things that are not possible within the objecutive universe. I can conceive, you know, creatures that don't exist. Like in fact, the representation of set to the ancient Obgyptians is an animal that there is no It's not there is no one animal that represents It's an amalgam of different things that represents something that can be conceived but not actualized

within the world. Now, to go back to your to the question, and I hope this was clear enough to make a bit of a foundation around it. Perception is closely connected with the pentagram, with the star itself, the subjective universe. Now, the way the reason that the that the trap is alids shown the way it is. You notice how it only touches the You know that the star does not touch the circle at all, but the

trapezoid touches that it after two points. So one of the things that Stephen Flowers added to the Nine Angles coming out of the ceremony of the Nine Angles by Michael Aquino was this idea of keywords, the idea that you can have a word that encapsulates what that what

that angle means. I'm not going to go through the entire set because of time here, but I will say that the first four, which would be the starting with the upper right of the trapezoid, then the upper upper left, than the lower left, than the lower right, one, two, three, and four. He referred to them as chaos order, understanding

and being. He noticed that the only two places does a type So understanding and being are these two places where, according to this way of looking at the the subjective universe in its relation to the objective universe, those are the two places where it coincides. These are the mechanism through which you were able to both know something of the objective universe. Because we can observe it, we can we can determine what laws it seems to follow, et cetera.

But it's also how we can affect it through this understanding and being. Another way to look at that, and this is where it becomes relevant to your question, is you can look at this as not just the interplay between understanding and being, but the interplay between perspective, and

that's another way to put it. And significance, what things, what things you assigned significance to both within yourself and beyond yourself out the hope, and you know, no one knows because it's uh, you know, no one has come back yet to say, you know that the hope is is that some level of this understanding does persist past the expiration of the body. And that's certainly what we in the temple believe to be the case, but we also admit that there's no definitive proof we can offer

from that. Now, whether that persists this understanding, this perception of the universe, that's probably up to the individual psyche, whether it cares anymore or not it, you know what, whether by what mechanism that may become possible afterwards. You know, we could speculate all day on it. So I'm not going to go too far down down those lines. But this,

this model seems to be the key to that. If there is some persistence of the individuated psyche past the expiration of the body, then that would seem to be the model of it. And I don't know if if that answers your question in a real way, because that is a it's a very deep question. And I won't even do the thing and say, well, buy the book, because I don't I'm not sure that you would fully

get it from the brooke as well. But I will say that one of the best ways that you can answer some of those questions for yourself is by working with ideas. You know, there's a there's one thing to pick up a book and to only just kind of read and go out that's really interesting and never do anything with it. It's another thing to then take those

exercises and take those ideas out into the world. It's the same thing of how you could read Shakespeare all day long, but you'll never really understand Shakespeare until you see you performed in the flesh, and you'll understand it even deeper when you go perform it yourself. You can call that sort of armchair occultism if you will, only seeing from the perspective of your armchair, Because ideas have an effect through the actions that they cause you to take.

You know, understanding something in a new way, absorbing some new knowledge is very useful and very beneficial, and it has its place. But unless that transforms your actions in some way, you've limited what you can really get from it. And some things can only be understood through a combination of understanding and practice. There they're not possible to understand

just one verse with the other. You know, you can read all about the physics of how to ride a bike and this still doesn't help you when you get on the bike for the first time and fall over.

superficial as you know I previously determined. But no, I appreciate that and thank you so much.

aware of. He's one of, if not the most significant figure in the you know, the last uh forty years of the sort of the revival of awareness about the ruins and what they can be used for beyond just a system of writing. You know. He he has attempted to apply his methods in other places, like to zorat Astrianism, which he sees as kind of like the root of an into deep into European route of many other aspects of magic, the pop up into places like India, ancient Greece,

the Germanic world, et cetera. And he's also written a book called Hermetic Magic where he looks at the Greek magical papairai, which I talk about also in my book with the Languages of Magic. So so yeah, I uh, you know, he's he's been studying things for a long time, so I'm sure he's run. I'm sure he's run across things I'm not aware of.

you know, everything isn't seen, but trying to perceive. And so when you talk about the subjective and you're talking about the creative, would that be correct to say that it is an attempt to decipher what the right brain is somewhat trying to formulate in a way that.

I don't say something something wrong. But as I recall, in certain rights, you would it would have to do with the position of the people within within the rights about whether which direction the energy of the universe was flowing. If you were trying to have it to flow towards the left, to kind of go against against the flow or go with the right, which was the natural flow.

But the thing is and I go. I go into this quite a bit in the languages of magic, which is largely about how the way that the way that we can work with variances in the meanings of words as part of magic towards and other science as part of magic, is that once you start to use a term like that, it's it's no longer just about its original context. Once you pull it out of the original context, it now finds new things that it is attaches to.

So when someone else comes to it with certain ideas about what left and right mean, whether it's left and right, left or right, brain left and right on the political spectrum, left and right, you know, whatever orientation you may have towards those terms and what they mean in certain contexts, you can start to find and even create for yourself connections with those original ideas. And that's something that's often missed.

People sometimes think that if you if you have some term that has some deep historical root that you can only you're only ever allowed to use in the original sense. Otherwise you're using it wrong. That's that's not the case. That's how language works. Language changes over time. It makes less sense now that everything is bluetooth. But the little thing in your computer that you move the point around

when it wasn't always called a mouse. Mouse used to just mean the little thing that you know lives in your wall and you know, goes around on the floor. But when someone said, hey, let's call it, let's kind of like a mouse. Let's call it that, it sticks because it captures something about what a mouse looks like. It's a little it's a blob of a thing, and it's got this little long thing, thin thing hanging out of it. And we were able to adapt what we think of as meaning. We're to go, oh yeah, I

can say what it means. That too, becomes like a nickname that then becomes just a name for the thing. And then now you wouldn't even think twice when someone calls that a mouse. It just makes sense. That's just the name for that thing. Now it's the same thing with all words. Words change over time. That's how different

languages arise. It's how different languages eventually, the little changes in meaning and grammar and the sounds and all that accumulated the point that this now divers the same way

as evolution works. Eventually, enough little changes accumulat now you've got big enough changes that wait, these are different things now, and so yeah, so uh, what I what I usually suggest with with ideas like what what you bring up is that if you find it useful, to run with it, because that because you're the one that creates meaning for yourself, no one else can force meaning. They can attempt to force meaning on you, but you ultimately decide I am

oneing to accept this means that. But it's also it's also part of your your psyche at work trying to find these connections because we are we are hardwired as primates to look for these connections. When primates begin to evolve and take to the trees, we we shift towards Vision becomes much more important. Sense and other senses Smell becomes less important. But it's also we we gain quite a bit of all primates have quite a bit of tactile sensibility in their fingers and in their toes. We

can we touch and sense things well. Vision becomes super important because if you're in a tree and you're you see a branch over there, you need to figure out can I make it? Because if you don't that that could be a problem. Right. So we we then take on this visual perception, you know, this death perception that allows us to judge those distances. And this this is one of one of the things that just factors into we we find patterns and the things we encounter. It's

part of how we interact with the world. And those those patterns are real if the pattern has an effect on us, especially if it's a beneficial effect. The pattern is real if you if you recognize the pattern of of a snake in the grass so that you know a step over there, and you then realize the way it wasn't a snake with something else that's still that still benefited you, that that pattern recognition still helped you in a sense, if it was a snake, it really

helped you. Right, So we we take that as humans. We're just hardwired to do it so that we can predict what we need to do and to draw connections between things so that we can understand what they what they're about, how they work, not just will they hurt us, but how we can also use them, and how we can bring them into the set of tools tools on the broad sense that we use to interact with the world, whether the tool is a hammer, or tool is a word, or or a connection between ideas.

It was more of a yeah, it was an evil ad joke. So it's it's toorally okay, But no, I think you understand in a profound way.

have not been named. This idea that you name things into existence with thought in the Egyptian to God, that he writes the events of the world, and it exists that they do not occur until he writes them down. Even have it that even seeps into Greek philosophy with the logos. That's a very important concept there, and that even seeps into early Christianity. You know, the beginning of the first chapter of the Book of John. In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God,

and the word was God. The same sort of idea that words have magic. Words convey something beyond what has already been brought into being. They allow you to change things in a way that you cannot do before words were attached to them. And yeah, you see that in so many ancient cultures, in their mythologies and in their those cultures that have mythical origins for their alphabets, that have gods of communication, gods of writing, like Odin. Odin

is a god of communication. He hangs on a tree, the world tree, for nine nights without food or drink or support. Then at the you know, just before the moment of death, he suddenly is infused with the knowledge of the ruins. This this has ruins both of the sense of the mysteries, but also ruins and the later in the sense of writing. He was the patron of poets, et cetera. So that this is this is such a deep idea of the way humans have think, think about

the world. And when you see ideas like that in so many different mythologies that could not just be the result of borrowing or cultural contact, to me, that's a signal that these are reflecting something unique about what it is to be a human attempting to comprehend the universe around them and comprehend how to affect the universe around them. And it's even the case if you think about when humans acquire a language, we're acquiring language at the same

time the same state nerd development. When we are warning to interact with the world through touch and movement, we learn, oh, I can reach outside the crib, I can touch the thing. At the same time we're warning how to say the magic words that get Mama to bring us the things that we want. Or even though eventually when we infect I say the right word and now and now Mama brings me candy. You know that that's a very important moment. You know that, when you realize that words can affect things,

not just describe things. And so so many of the ways that we use language or tied to this sense of movement, that sense of how we interact with the world around us, because they were co developed. They our brain was developing both of these senses of what it means to interact with the world at the same time, and so they're going to be just intimately tied together. And the fact that later we can then realize that words can be used even more magically in what we

would normally call magic. That's that's not it may be a revelation of putting it in those terms, but it's a natural outgrowth of the way we've already innately learned how to use language to interact with, unaffect the world. There's a I was gonna say that, there's actually spent one chapter in The Languages of Magic talking about that specifically. I look at different mythologies and uh uh, mythical figure mythical and legendary figures of communication parsonally to show how

deep and broad of an idea that is. Because it really is pervasive. It's not just something that that's into European, it's spans pretty much the entire world.

semiotics originally? So I kind of had a fascination with languages when I was younger, and when I got to the point in school that I was able to city languages, I took Latin. I took four years of Latin, and as it happened. And this was purely, purely by by accident. It was not something that I knew ahead of time. As it happened the high the Latin teacher at my high school had a pH d in classics. He was a well respected scholar in that world, and I was

able to stay with him for four years. We happened to be my class, happened to be positioned to be the last one that started the ninth grade, and so we had the opportunity to do four years. But also, as it turned out, it had been a number of years since he had anyone interested in it. So the fourth year was more of like an independent study with me and a couple of other of my friends at the time. And and in fact, he became one of the people I dedicated the book to because of that.

The book is dedicated to to my high school Latin teacher, Richard Beaton, who taught me the magic of language, and too Michael o'quina, who taught me the language of magic and that sort of fascination with the Languageven Though I kind of took a different career path for a while into the IT world, as I said before, that never never left. It was always kind of there. When I became part of the Temple of set in two thousand, I was exposed to the work of Stephen Flowers. At

that point, I was not aware of him before. I've been interested in runes, but had not been super interested in them, and that was kind of my gay way into into his work. And eventually I read about his PhD dissertation was about runes and magic, one of the few academic studies of that, and this was in nineteen eighty four, and he had a chapter where he talked

about theories of magic. He talked about the way that anthropologists had approached the idea of magic a different points in time, and he was looking at what were then pretty new ideas around looking at magic as communication. That sort of starts with there's a pretty famous anthropologist named Brandisval Malanowski who studied the some people in the tro Beyond islands in Papu window Guinea and previous anthropologists, and kind I take in this idea that okay, magic is

like bad science, it's just fantasy. A lot of these people believe these stupid things. He took a different approach. He was what his approach was that well, it seems to have some effect on them. It seems to mean something to them. So maybe instead we should look at what gives it meaning to them. Even if I disagree and think they're wrong, it has meaning for them, and

that has value, and I want to understand that. And the central part of his idea was that the words that they would use in the rituals had meaning that were brought into the rituals. So it becomes a very important idea. Even if it happens to be some of the same words they would use in a in a normal setting, they took on additional meaning as part of

the ritual act. And so I was reading about this in this chapter of Flowers's dissertation and it just it made something click with me about I love how it raised up the thumb every time I've blaked my hand, and it kind of connected with that love of language, and it made me realize, wait, there's there's something, there's a deeper angle here that I've not looked at, and what magic might be that I should look into a

bit deeper. Fast forward a bit too. When I was in the very beginning of writing infrontal geometry, I was one of the things that I realized is and I learned this from Flowers actually originally, is that magic is a problematic word. And the reason that's a problematic word is that magic means all kinds of things to different people. I'm not saying whether they're right or wrong, but just that there's a Would you say the word magic to a random person on the street, You're going to get

a whole range of meanings, okay. And this is a problem when you're trying to be precise. It's a problem when you're trying to discuss specifically whether some particular thing is magic or is not magic. You need a definition to measure things against. And it doesn't have to be the only definitions possible, but you can at least say, in this context, I'm measuring against this definition. Okay. And I took a reread of that earlier work for his that it grabbed me where he talks about what he

describes as a semiotic theory of magic. Now, he did not He did not come up with the phrase semiotic theory of magic. It originally goes back to an older folkloress named Ronald Grambo from an article back in the nineteen sixties where he he talks about his semiotic view of what magic is, and I got curious. I had sort of what many people have of like a general understanding well semi audio something about signs and symbols, right, I didn't know much else about it at the time.

So I started to look more into this and try to understand more deeply what this means. And that that really made things click, and that kind of what that did is I'd already decided that infernal geometry. I wanted to do two things. I wanted to talk about geometry, just plain old compass and straight edge geometry. Because if you're going to have a metaphor use a metaphor in magic, you should have understood some understand what the metaphor actually

means in real life. You should have some lived experience of the metaphor. This is something that I believe it was Gerald Massey referred to as the living nature of the nosis, the idea that's not just an idea. It's something that has some some reference within the world that you can claim it, that you can claim a connection to. And the other I decided was to have a chapter

to talk about magic. So that was my inittional sort of forea into let me talk about the semiotic theory of magic are from my perspective, how magic is the use of signs, and the sign can be a symbol like this, signs or words as well. Signs are it's a very kind of general term really for anything that

refers to something else in some way. And so these are sort of kind of one practical one theoretical chapter that I thought was very important to set the stage so that when I started talking about angles, I can know that the reader has has enough of an understanding of geometry, or is reminded enough of the understanding of geometry to really kind of understand precisely what I'm talking about and not just you know, to think, oh, I understand that, and not pay attention to the finer points

of it. And also with magic, to say when I talk about magic, this is what I mean in this context. And so yeah, so those things started to come together, and this is directly related to how this new book, The Language of Magic came about. When when you work with a with a larger publisher and they're concerned about marketing, they want to know how to market your book, and everything about the book is marketing, you know, the cover covers are are marketing. The title is marketing, the subtitle

is marketing. How it looks on the spine, it's all marketing. What they write on the back about you, right, And one of the things they ask you for is they say, are you working on any other books right now? Because that may be something they can use on some of the press information and maybe something they can feed to the interviewers maybe to ask about great And I didn't have a solid idea at the time, but one of my friends who's published books before as well, advice is like,

whatever you do, don't leave that blank. You make up something you have to make plausible, make up something you have to do. So I'm like, well, you know, if I had the time, maybe sometimes I want to write a book about expand semiotic theory magic into a book. Little do I know that kind of sealed my fate, right because I started off writing another book, but I also listed as among possible books to write, and it

just wasn't really going anywhere. I mean, I was doing the research for it, and I just couldn't find the enthusiasm to really buckle down and write it. And I couldn't figure out why, and then I just kind of had those revelation one day. Its because you're writing the wrong book, dummy. You need to look at you. You need to go figure out what book you need to be writing now. The funny thing is I'd been reading quite a lot about language and semiotics and reading lots

of books. Probably can't make them out on the video, but most of my library back there books about language and philosophy for that reason. And it was like, you know what, I want to sit down and write a book about this. I had an idea, I had a way to approach it, and then it went back and looked I don't remember why I looked at it. I went back and looked after that original author questionnaire for in fronal geometry, and sure enough it says I would

I'm going to start researching to write this book. I'm like a bit of time magic there. I guess it's telling future me to write that book five years before I started actually writing it. But that that interest has continued, you know, I said before, I've had this long standing

interest in language. When I finally decided that I was done with the tech industry and had been thinking about what to do instead because I'm you know, not old enough to retire for for good at this point, by by a long shot, and decided to return to school and study those things formally, so to actually get a degree in it and not just have you know, the

autodidactic understanding I have of it now. One thing that's important as to be an auto A good autodid act is to talk to people that do know something about those things for real, because it's easy to just follow into on your ununderstanding, you know, through various connections. I know people who have advanced degrees and loss of the linguistics. You know, have studied semiotics, you know, at the university level, et cetera, have studied uh, you know, Mesopotamia magic at

the university level. I talk about that some of the book, and so I always check my understandings. I want to know, am I am I on to something here? Or or do I have this wrong? Yeah? Because you you don't know if you really understand something until you start to talk about it with someone, whether it's to teach it, but also to talk about with someone that knows more

about it than you. You know, never be afraid to find someone that knows something about something you think you know, because you know usually you're only going to benefit from it, and you only benefit through him as well. Uh Don Webb has this thing he talks about which is as pretty much everything he says is absolutely spot on, which is that the best way to grow as a magician is to work with people that are a little bit a little bit ahead of where you are, a little

bit behind where you are. The ones that are you'll both teach and to learn from both of them. Now, if they're close to your ability in some way, you're going to find a bit easier to work with them because you're kind of on the same wavelength about what things mean and how to work with them. But that will bring you resources you need to help you to become better whatever whatever it is you're studying. And that's

applies not just a magic but to many things. I mean, falls right in line with his off repeated saying the secret of magic is to transform the magician if you want to be capable of better things and become more capable, and then the better things will follow.

creation into existence. You always have this essential idea of the writing, and then you trace that writing through like Cadmus coming through Thebes down into Greece and bringing those letters and just the expansive quality of what writing itself is in the sense, especially when you get to the point and you're writing books and you're you're essentially taking these these full force ideas and introducing them into the minds of people, and I think that's one of the

most magical things that you can do. And then if you layer within that the ideas of you know, showing how the language itself works to be able to do these subtle exercises to make reality more malleable, I think it's it's one of the highest forms of magic that you can participate in.

in there directly. He was a philosopher of language. He was at he was at Oxford, you know, so it was, you know, too much of a too much in the Ivory Tower to talk about magic in that sense. But what he did talk about extensively was the way that we bring things into being through language. He talks about what he calls a performative utterance sort of the canonical example of that is at a marriage you say, a

now pronounce you man and wife. At the moment that said you're now married, the words themselves cause that to happen right then and there. But you say the same words in a different context. Yeah, and you know, you're joking around at a party, you you know, and then say it. Context is not there. The words don't have the same effect. The words have a context, and the words can cause things to happen just by virtue of being spoken and by someone with the right power and

authority and some in and in the right context. Hugely important idea, very magical idea. When I was talking earlier about anthropologists in the late twentieth century starting to think more about the world of language and magic, that was one of the ideas they specifically pulled from. They pulled on. They put on two things. They pulled on the idea of performative speech from from Austin and they pulled on the Austrian slash English philosopher Ludwig Wittckenstein and his idea

what he called a language games. What a language game is he's not talking about. He's not saying the language is frivolous or just a game or anything like that. But he's talking about the different moves that you make

in certain kinds of interactions that you take. If you think about you go to Starbugs, you order a coffee, you have a you know, there's a certain there's certain rituals you go through about how you approach the counter and the and then the person of the counter asked you what you want to do, and then you there are certain things you say this to complete the ritual of correctly ordering your your morning coffee. That's a particular language game. It has certain moves, it has a meaning

within a context. You take that same those same words in the same exchange out of the context, it means something completely different. Language is always contextual, and you can probably easily see how that can map onto magic if you think about I was mentioned earlier with Melanowski and the trobriand Islanders, the idea that even if they're using the same words they might use outside of a ritual context, within a ritual context, they take on certain meanings. They

have an effect there they don't have elsewhere. They've become part of the language game that's used during the ritual context that is not present when they're used in a different context. And so this is very This is a very important step forward in looking at what magic can be. And what I argue at length in the Languages of magic is that you know, semiotics is as we know it today is a relatively new thing, even though it has roots going back twenty five hundred years, and of

course the language goes back. You know, we're not even we're probably sure how far back language it goes. But even though we're describing it in terms that have arisen in modern times, they apply to these things that are far more ancient. They eliminate those in ways that let us understand them in deeper ways. So these are ideas that they've always been there about the language has magic,

magical components to it. Now we're just what I'm doing here is not saying, ah, this is a brand new idea that language is magic in some way, or that magic can use language in some way. But it's that now we have a vocabulary we can use to look at it and far more fine grained detail to help us understand it in a deeper way. So new ideas looking back at things that they've that have they've always been part of, just not always seen for what they were.

at past people's stuff maybe kind of using it. Well you kind of I feel like and I know, I think your book touches on Crowley just from my opinion, I feel like he did that a lot in a sense, like once I started looking at stuff like Michael Myers,

Anthony Acis, Kurt uh oh, God, who was that? Uh Heinrich Kohmrath and Empedocles people like that, I'm like, Yo, there's certain things that I feel like Crowley even might have made art with some like even like came up with ideas from pulling different things from them.

ideas and he was he was very astute. Like I was talking earlier about drawing connections, he was able to draw these connections and go, oh, these ideas seem to connect in some way, even though you know, from a historical sense maybe they're not connected, but from a conceptual sense, they have these connections. And he was able to turn that into in some cases some extraordinarily beautiful writing, in

some cases a completely obtuse writing. But that's you know, you take the good of it the bad, and so yeah, there's always one things you have to always keep in mind when you're reading Crowley and Antony Levey is no different is you always have to keep in mind, Okay, where is he getting half of us from that he sent uside? And that's the thing. Synthesizing is an art.

It's not you know, everything is remax ultimately right, but synthesizing seeing connections, drawing new connections, combine them into new and novel ways. It's part of it's part of what humans do. But if you have someone that's especially skilled at it. That's also that's also very good skill to have, especially as a magician, like with Croley for example, if if you look at you know, when Croley sort of came of age as a magician, you know, in the

Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn, among other things, was riding the wave of Egyptomania in Great Britain at the time, idea that everything that was ancient Egret was cool. You know, the you know, hieroglyphics had only been deciphered in eighteen twenty two. You're starting to see things like the Greek magical Papyri were beginning to filter in from the Mediterranean world and be bought and then translated and published by

the British Museum and the British Library. You were, you were seeing all these you know, archaeological exservations of Egypt, and we're warning so much about them now that we can read read the inscriptions that just have to infer from what we see, you know, written on the walls or from from statues. And so this really took hold, not just in the Magical War, but just in general. People in the Western world really as a whole were

kind of obsessed with us. He starts see the pyramid power, and you know everything in Egypt is magical and all this.

related to a bigger question. Can you explain your reasoning for choosing infernal in infernal geometry to someone like me who's been captivated by the biblical.

there's a couple of reasons behind it. One, I was trying to draw an intentional contrast with sacred geometry, not because I find sacred geometry fascinating and it is completely valid in itself as well, but I was trying to emphasize that this is an explicitly left hand path approach, and so Infernal sort of seemed to fit in a sense to kind of just as a contrast to too sacred and it certainly is not meant to or intended to, uh belittle or besmirch the sacred geometry, because I say,

I refer to it quite a bit in in in my book as well, because those ideas of things about the golden ratio, et cetera extraordinarily valid and interesting ideas. And as I'm sure, I'm sure you know, the pentagram itself, you know, embodies the golden ratio, and in fact, that was that was reputed to be the to be the secret symbol of the Pythagoreans because they were they thought that their understanding of the golden ratio was, you know, you know that this one of the secrets of the

composition of the universe. You even see that pop up again in Plato's Dialogue of the Timaeus when he's describing the proportions in which from the absolute that that the universe is progressively created. If you if you read the way he's describing them, he's describing the golden ratio. It's like a golden spiral as as he carves off the individual pieces uh from it. With the Pythagoreans more broadly so, the Pythagorean number number mysticism. I'm specifically the Monad, the

Diad and so forth. Was a was one of the sources that Michael o'quino was drawing from when he wrote The Ceremony of the Nine Angles. In that there's a there's a piece in that. I mean it's actually that that is uh is printed in full at the beginning of infernal Geometry. We don't have a copy of the Satanic rituals as well. There's there's a part in the Ceremony the Nine Angles where something is spoken that we've come to refer to as the bond of the nine Angles.

These are series of nine stamens or says from the first angle is the infinite. We're in the laughing one to cry and the flutes wail into the ending of time, et cetera, which we're combining two things when they're using sort of love crafting imagery. The flut's willing to the end of time. That's as ofth Off, you know, playing the diabolical flute that brings the universe into being and

haunts it throughout its existence. But it's also looking at the idea of the monad from Pythagoras, the idea of oneness. What does it mean to have a unity with that keyword of the first angle of chaos. This is not

chaos of everything going every which way. This is chaos of being undifferentiated and not being guided in any way, but as pregnant with potential, is waiting to come into being as something that with a second the second angle order, now you have you have some differentiation from the one. The one is no longer a whole and by itself now there Now there are two now they but they can only have existence that are opposites of each other. One can only be with the other is not with three.

Now you have the potential for a perspective. That's why that's part of why I use that as a as another word for the third angle. There the idea that if you have a third it can it no longer is constrained to be just what the other two is not. It can now decide. If you think about like three dots, you can have two dots in a line, and then the third dot can be here, can be here, can be here, can take different perspectives on the ringing two dots. It's no longer constrained in space just to be in

one specific relation to the others and so forth. So talking about the idea of synthesizing roots of ideas. A Quino was was very taken with Pythagoras and his ideas, and he had that insight of the If you take some of the love crafting imagery of the Cathillu gets all the pressed. But cathill was actually barely mentioned outside of the one story of his name. You see. The four others that you see much more often in lovecraft

are as Athoth, yox Othoth, nil Hotep, and Shamnigeroth. And if you look at the way that they're ascribed, as Athoth kind of has this this connotation of the chaos, the potential that's waiting to be directed in some way. Yox Otho adds some degree of order to it, you know, it becomes like the first emanation from as Athoth. Nyl Hotep becomes the interface, the messenger from from the outer gods to the uh to people. As of author sorry, nyl Hotep is the only one that that speaks to

humans in their own languages in Lovecraft stories. Shabnigaroth is the the goat of a thousand young, basically the you know, the source of of all possibilities now manifested on Earth. And so he had a Quino had this insight that you could sort of draw, start to draw a cosmology, how a cosmology develops out of those to create the objective universe? You know, what is? What has you know makes a thud when you put it on the table, What has physical laws that describe how the physical matter

interacts with each other? And then he combined that with those ideas of Pythagoras. But what does it mean to be a unity? What does it mean to be a duality?

What does it mean to be a triad? And he also realized that even though the Pythagoras kind of goes all the way to the deck, add the ten, that that's really the one all over again, just an indifferent octave, if you will, from a different perspective, you know, starting from a from both the original place, but also something that now has has these additional things that have happened to it that give it you possibility as it begins

to unfold again. And so he and so in with the nine the nine angles out of these, with the five angles of the pentagram, the four angles of the trapezoid. At the ninth angle at the bottom. That was the one he equated with with Kefer, the idea of becoming going all the way back what I was saying earlier about the temple. Ultimately when I and that's the beginning, You've you have become something new. You're becoming a new conception of yourself. You're now capable of things you were

like capable of before. You can now see things you could not see before you were you know, you have extended the horizon of what's visible to you, of what's possible to you, and now you can start from this new perspective. Now you can begin the process of expanding yourself again. So there's that cycle of nine that you know,

you start back over. Well, now all things are potential again, just they they have this additional base that results from what I've become, that's now available to me that was not available for me to become before. And then you go through the cycle again. So it's not all you get to the nine and then you're done. As you get to the nine and you know, all right, let's

let's ride again. So like you never never want to get off the roller coaster once you get it started, it's like a pump m hm in a sense, yeah.

important to whatever. You can never change what you came into the world as you know what you know, your socioeconomic background, Uh, you know, your your ancestry, things like this that are you're sort of thrown into those they're always part of you. Even things like think like if you grew up in like a super Christian household, then the later you reject that, it's not enough to just say I'm not a Christian anymore, because you maybe have many things that continue to be part of your mindset.

Because they were there from the beginning. So there's this. It's not a one and done thing. You have to constantly look at all, Right, what do I need to move past? We don't need to understand better about my background, about where I came from, well, what choices I've made or the consequences of the choices, but also what things

I didn't have a choice in. And you have to look at how you can make make them either work for your current conception of yourself or that you can deliberately move past them instead of just saying saying yourself, well that that doesn't matter anymore. I don't want think about it anymore. Because remember earlier I was saying that you whenever you undergo initiation, your entire self was along for the ride. Things that are part of your shadow

that still is clinging to you. They're still there. You can never get rid of it, but you can integrate what you think about it. You can you can gain any perspective on it. You can change your attitude towards it, even if you can never never shed the fact that you know that I'm a you know, white guy that grew up in the South, you know, lower medical class background. That's always there. There are parts of that you know that's still in form, like the way I approach some

like finances. Today, I catch myself as like, oh wait, I don't have to pinch that penny anymore because I have I have means now that I didn't before. But it's so part of like the way that I grew up and what was there that you know, it sticks with you and it comes up in unexpected ways. That's the thing about your shadow is you only get to see what's in the shadow when the light happens to

catch it. And so you know, if you if you go out of your way to try to shine that light on all these different aspects of yourself, you're going to have a better shot at figuring out, oh wait, that's that's there and still having some effect on me, what do I need to do with that? Instead of forgetting about it and just letting it continue to affect you without even being aware of it.

a huge emphasis in math. Writer or mathematics, so to speak right and then your book talks about language, and to me listening to you right now, the only thing I keep thinking is, you know, going from potential energy to kinetic energy, and that when you see words or you write words down, you're either harnessing a sound frequency into form or you're taking your pen and you are shaping light. You know, in the you know, the outline

of the actual word. Would you say that magic is an attempt to bring back alpha numerical systems to where both words and numbers unite and give it back its own power before it was separated. I think it was like in the eleven hundreds or so.

independent existence of math, existence of mathematics some people. Some people say that in a very platonic sense, that your math math is has its own independent existence and we're just discovering what that is. Other people look at it from the respective that maybe we are we're using math as a way to relate to the universe in a way that that's our way of expressing the order that we perceive in the universe. I probably fall somewhere in the middle of those, maybe some aspects of both of them.

But you could think of mathematics like a language. It's a it's I mean, this is exactly the one of the ways that people like Galileo, who coined the term the Book of Nature, conceptualized it that basically mathematics is one of the ways that Nature is speaking to us and allowing us to read what is within nature is something that you know, he was despite his persecution by the Church, he was a very religious man too. He would have seen it as that basically God is revealing

the universe to us through math. Words are much the same way now the Kench's words, at least the words that we use are are a human invention, and you know they're they're a byproduct of the types of sounds that the human vocal apparatus can can create. There are you know, there are sounds that other animals can create that we cannot because they have differently shaped vocal tracts in a sense, and so there are always these kind of artificial constraining factors of what we can do with words.

But when you get beyond you know, the particular arrangement of sounds in a given language, to what are these words really getting at? What are they trying to express? So it's easy, it's really easy to to say this thing is called a book, or in German, it's possible, et cetera. You can whip out the name in a in a Agelian languages, it's a different thing to point when I say that that I that I'm sad right now, what is that pointing to?

of words. It's part of the imprecision of words. The idea that we can never kind of fully explain what's going on inside. And so that's that's a different that's a bit different way of interacting than mathematics is because I can I can show you what two things looks like, and I can put three things next to them, and I can now show you that two plus three equals five.

I can. You can demonstrate not all of math, but you can demonstrate lots of math by illustration, by by by showing you can concretize it to say, oh, well, this is what that means. I mean you can get into parts of math that you can't quite show, like so called imaginary numbers or irrational fractions right that you know, you can't really show point to what they are in a way that someone can see. But certainly the basics

of math that you can. Yeah, language has that curious thing that you there's a limit to what you can what you can convey about internal states through it. And the best we can do is if I say that I feel he sad right now, you can maybe imagine what it's like for you to feel sad and kind of think about it's like, well, okay, I'm a human, he's a human. We both speak the same language, so

we have certain ways we contextualize the universe. You know, maybe we both live in the same place or grew up in the same place, we have that kind of cultural background, those things like that, and you can kind of inferves like, well, Okay, I kind of get what sad means. I know what that would mean if I said it. But it's still imperfect, because there's always going to be shades of meaning that belong to each of us individually that we can never fully explain to someone else.

Back to Wittckenstein, one of his other ideas is this wonderful thought experiment called the beetle in the box, The idea that, okay, everybody has a box and no one else can ever see inside what's your what's in your box? But everybody calls the thing in their box a beetle. The catch is, how can you know if what I call a beatle is the same thing as what you call a beatle? We can ever can ever see inside it.

You can try to describe it. You can make say, oh, you know, it's you know, it's about this big, and it's got this many legs, and it's got wings and it looks like this and whatever. But those are just words that you're saying. You could be making that up. Maybe you're a beetle. You know, that was completely different, and you're just saying what you think I want to hear about what a beatle looks like and what we're The reason he brings that thought experiment up is that

it highlights this difficulty. We haven't conveyed internal states. If you if you now take it in the more abstracting and gay, well, what if that what's in the boxes the mind? Your mind? You have the same difficulty of limited, ultimately limited to vocabulary and what you can explain about what is in your mind to let someone else understand it. And even then you can only talk about specific things. I can't tell you everything that's in my mind. I

can't even tell myself everything that's in my mind. You know. HP left Craft famously said that the you know, it's a good thing that we can paraphrasing that, it's a good thing. We can't correlate the entire contents of our mind, otherwise we would just go mad. Right, It's this same sort of problem. So there's always a limitation of what we can convey, whether it's mathematics or whether it's language. But but I think what is important is that we try.

The trying part is what counts, because if you don't or if you never communicate what is with you internally, it still belongs to you, but you're limiting your ability to see it reflected in someone else, just to see what it looks like from the outside, because that's the one thing we can't easily do, is see what the contents of our own understanding experience looks like from the outside, because we see it from the inside, because that's you know, inside,

because that's where it is. But when you talk about it with other people, when you when you see how well you can communicate to them, you see then reflect your ideas back to you. You see their perspective on the changes in your behaviors and attitudes that seem to result from your interstate. That helps you to get a

perspective on it that you can not get otherwise. You still have to decide what it means, but you can now when you're deciding what it means, you can now account for this additional information that you've gained from someone else. And the one we can get that is to communicate with them.

in magic at the time. Has ideas kind of continue to pop up as pretty interesting ways and weird and strange places, and there was there was another person in the Church of Satan at the time that Aquino knew well, who also knew Bartio and was basically shared some of those ideas with him, and he passed on to Grand, and Grand's like, oh, that's interesting. I should maybe try to write some about some of that in my book too.

The original idea to create rituals out of it, Leavey had suggested that the different grottos, which were the individual groups in the Church of Satan, look towards other mythologies, both real and imagined, to draw material from, because it kind of gets kind of old if it's all just black masses all the time, right, So you're pulling from

a different other things. And if you read through the Satanic rituals, he's pulling from the Yazid's, he's pulling from Germanic magic, he's pulling from you know, Russian supposed Russian magic, et cetera. Lots of different sources try to kind of spice things up to make it more interesting and give

different perspectives and things to draw from. LaVey was pretty well connected with the whole writers and artists and so forth in San Francisco at the time, and one of one of the frequent attendees at his kind of Friday night events was a science fiction writer named Mike Resnick. And he was talking with Resnick about this one night, and uh was lamenting that he was having troubled coming

different things to apply. You to bring into some of these magical ideas, and Resnick suggested, like, you have an entire shelf full of all this weird tales stuff, Lovecraft, Kark, Ashton Smith, Robertie, Howard Frank beloped out belong, et cetera. Why didn't you bring in some of that. These guys talk about magic, they have weird ideas, see what you can do with that, and that kind of that was what prompted him to ask a Quino to contribute. He

was originally expecting something with Cthulho. Actually, so the first thing that the queena wrote was the Ceremony of the Night angles. Anton looked at this and thought this is really interesting. But I kind of thought you would just do Cathule. And he's like, oh, I'll do that one too, So he made wrote the call to Cthulia was a different h one, which that that's pretty interesting in its own right, I think, because that's looking at you know, in the story of the Call of Cathilla by Glovecraft.

You know, Cathulla is the high priest of the Great Old Ones. He's you know, in the sunken city of Riyala, which was based on a real place called uh Non Madal. There's actually actual ruins. You can go visit a friend of mine the temple actually visit them, probably twenty years ago this point, even camped out overnight in in the

inspiration for Riyala. But Cathula was wating, waiting for the stars to come right again, you know, for actual procession to bring the stars back to where they were at a certain point of time, which point Rylea and cthulill rise from the sea. The problem is Cathulla came of the wrong time because what causes Rila to rise is an earthquake, you know, unforse seeing unexpected turn of events.

But what Cuthulu was sort of bringing back in a conceptual sense, at least the way Aquino saw it, is this idea of our our deep roots in the archaic past, you know, the idea of ancient cultures that that still have ideas that permeate today even though we don't think of them as such. And there and there are real examples of that, like their ideas from Sumerian culture that are that are present in the the Abrahamic religions that they as the different city states in Mesopotamia assumed power

at different times. Sumerian, even though it had died out as a as a language, was retained as a liturgical language. They would write magical rituals in it, and some of the ideas continue to seep in. And then you have the period of the the Babylonian captivity where the Hebrews were exposed to some of these ideas as well. And there there are and this is like academic work that shows like some of these ideas that have these roots.

It's not just speculating. And so the question that Aquino, I think was trying to answer with his ritual of the call to Cthulhu, different from the story call of Cthulhu, is that what happens if we deliberately invoke that this archaic sense of self and sense of what he at the time would have called the black flame, which is a term that still was used within the temple as well. The black flame is the individual sense of self awareness

that's innate within each of us. So what happens if you call up Cthulhu deliberately and then ask Cathula to teach what he has to teach, and then you know, being black magicians not being afraid of Cthulhu like people were in the story, and then you know, taking that knowledge and then using that to uh explore new vestas that were not available to you before. Now probably pretty far from the original question. So what's so very interesting?

was born. And he he had a bit of disdain for his stories. You know, he kind of referred to them in disarriging ways at times, but he obviously cared about them too, because he went to great links to craft them. He went to great links to record these ideas and more importantly, to record his dreams. He was very much a dreamer. Whenever you see the character Raymond uh sorry, Randolph Carter in Lovecraft stories, that is Lovecraft

popping up in the story. So things like the silver Key, the statement of Randolph Carter dream, pust of Oona and Cada, et cetera, Carter is Lovecraft. Carter is a dreamer. Carter, Carter. You know once uh, you came from money, was lost at and then eventually came into money again, et cetera. And Lovecraft was very meticulous out recording his dreams. He

he was a extremely prolific letter writer. Thousands and thousands of letters the Lovecraft wrote that are actually collected in a few collections you can you can buy, and in many of those he's describing dreams. Some stories, like the

story called Nila Hotep originally was a dream. We have the letter he wrote to I forget who he wrote it to, where he described the dream, and his description of the original letter for the dream five years later was literally the first page and a half of the story. So he's literally like some of his stories are literally recording a dream that he had and then taking it

in new directions. So he was He very much believed in the value in the originality of his dreams, even if he regarded them as having ultimately a material, material cause. And as Michael Aquino pointed out quite astutely, I think it's probably better than someone Lovecraft was not actually exposed to real magic, because that could have gone quite a bit differently. Lovecraft had a pretty poor opinion of the magicians of the day. I mean, he was aware of Croley.

He wrote some pretty disparaiting things about Croley and a few others, but he had never really looked into things like the Greek magic papyri he had. He had not looked at a deep way into John D. He references D in a couple of places. He never really looked into what D was doing, et cetera. I don't know if it was just because he wasn't interested to go deep on it, or if he's like, oh, that's BS, and why why look at that? Only to the extent

that I can make a story out of it. I'm not really sure, but there was an essay that Don Webb wrote many years ago, which he was gracious enough to allow me to reprint as an appendix in the language as of Magic. That's called plainly why why magicians write fiction? And he looks at different people who were magicians W. B. Yates, Fritz liber Arthur Mockin, writers like that that wrote about magical ideas from the perspective of they were magicians. Yates was in the gold and Mackinto

were in the Golden Dawn. Fritz liber Was was a Wigan, et cetera. But also he also writes about what magicians can pull from fictional work and to make it real within the context of the ritual chamber. Because again, remember at the very beginning of the conversation, I was talking about idea things that are real in the sense that they exist. You can talk about them, and you can conceive of them, you can describe them, but they're not actual yet because they don't actually have a reference in

the world that you can you can point to. That's part of what magic ultimately is. It's taking those things that are that can become real in giving them some reality, and that's that's what are any writer is doing. It's what an artist is doing. They're taking things that that are they conceive of that they can they can conceive that this as a possibility, as a high persition that's not yet come into being, and they make it come

into being somehow. They give it some material form so there, or some communicable form so that it can have an existence from the world, so it can have an effect, because if you keep it, if you only keep your conception inside, it can't have an effect outside of you. If you give it some form that can go forth out into the world beyond yourself, now it can have an effect.

be hard to get to. It's meant to be that there are so many, so many examples of existing magic, like the Greek magical high Eye things from the Non Commodity Library Runs. There's the entire chapter about runs different schools of magic, you know, Austin Spair, Inciduals, Crowley, the Temple of Set, Temple of Psychic Youth, et cetera. That there's lots of examples already in there, So it's just

not giving you examples. That's giving existent examples and showing you a different way to think about them that you can then take forward to both to understand better how uh the magic that you already do works, have any perspective on how it works, and then take that forward to go, all right, well, what if I intentionally crafted it to work in this way? How can I make it or for in a more effective way?

can now integrate with it. And you may it may not be immediately obvious to you how to use it or how to integrate it into the type of art that you do, but as you begin to work with it, you'll you'll start to see those connections, just start to undercover, uncover ways that it can add something to your art

that was not there before. It's the same thing with this and Magic By There are a couple of books that touch on parts of these ideas, but nothing that I'm aware of that brings them together in this way. So it's a it's a toolbox that's likely not present, and it's in the complete form that's in this book with many people I know. I'm well aware that people work with some of these ideas already. Uh So there's a lot of synthesis going on here as well as

a lot of background. When I write, I'm very much about and when I'm studying something for myself, I'm always very much about the history of ideas. I want to know not just what does it look like now, I want to know how we got here, what are the influences, what are the factors that go into it, where this come from, what are the other people done with it, et cetera. And so that that kind of informs the way that I write when I talk about, Okay, this is sort of where things begin and this is how

they develop. But every step along the way, it's never just here's like, you know, brain dump after brain dump of these ideas. It's always talking about this particular aspect of language or of semiotics. Okay, let's go look at some examples to kind of illustrate that these points. And then when it gets to the what I call the case Steudy chapters that they at the end, these are taking like deep looks at things like there's there's one

chapter that's entirely about runes. Not all uses of runes are magical biolog shot, but runes can be used in magical ways, and this talks about how one might go

about that. There's a chapter that looks at, you know, broadly speaking, Mediterranean magic and late antiquity, so looking at the Greek magical PAPYRAI cursed tablets, a couple of things out of the KNA Commodi Library, things like that, where I'm looking at in depth at some existing examples of magical uh work and talking about them in linguistics and semiotic terms. It's kind of kind of like, Okay, here's how to apply these ideas to to something that we

can study here. Then there's a chapter that looks at various modern schools of magic, and it talks about I take a look at Anenochian and Sigil magic. It's sort of like connecting threads because if you if you think about it, a lot of what we refer to as a nookan magic today was really kind of started by the Golden Dawn. Not a lot of people go back to some of the original d material the way like the way we work with it is from from most people is informed by the Golden Dawn in variations on it.

But the Anoakian was also important to Crowley, it was important to the Church of Satan, it was important to the Temple of Set. Same thing with sigils. Uh. You know, the idea of sigils goes back, you know, probably as

long as we've been painting on rocks. But you know, they started to get formalized in some ways, like in in the ancient Mediterranean worlds that pop up exactly yeah, and then like in the in the early modern period with like with like the Gosha and things like this, and and then then you have Austin Osmond's Fair brings this very different way of working with sigils as well,

you reducing statements of intent to visual representations. Well, sigils pop up in spares work, they get they pop up in chaos magic, they pop up in the Temple of Psychic Youth, which is kind of adjacent grass magic in

a sense. So those are sort of connecting threads through some different schools and techniques to kind of show both how Anochian and sigils developed, but also how different schools of magic, if you will, both formal and informal have used magical communication or linguistic aspects of their magic in different ways.

be plot of thin Air. I mean, Kelly was a well known shyster, right, but there are things like they're recording things recorded in D's diary about Kelly passing on messages in Greek from from the angels. Kelly didn't speak Greek, right, right, They had no way to know this, right.

not completely clear exactly what they were doing. So there's there's some there's something to it, and there's a that's one one of the many reasons why it kind of has this this long hold on the magical world in the West. So something going on there for sure. Where where the New King connects with the Temple of Set is with thing called a Quino called the Word of Set.

And what this was was is he he did what a new what he called a new magical translation of the original keys instead of just taking the original English translations of the keys that de recorded in his diaries and doing things like Antony Levey did. It is kind of changing words, you know, where it says God scratched it out right in Satan, you know, think things like that, which is and I thought about that in the book as well as a bit more advanced in what he

was doing. People kind of wave off what they was doing there. There were there was a method to as mad as there, but I won't get into that at the moment. But what a Quino was doing was attempting to bring in something completely different to that. Now he was wanting to to say if because keep in mind that that Decon and Kelly considered themselves they were still Christians. They still consider themselves doing the Lord's work in some way.

They were. They were trying to get their name for it was not an nook, and their name for it was the Adomic language, right. They were trying to they were trying to access the language that Adams spoke, which had been a quest that many had gone on the idea that the original language must have some power. If we only find out what that original language was, now we'll have that power too. So it's a long line of people trying to find the original language, so to speak.

And what the queena was doing is saying, okay, if I'm approaching this ass, someone who is a magician, is someone who doesn't have the baggage of being a Christian like they did that what that did factor into a lot of their interpretations they were trying. They were trying to squeeze us into a biblical narrative, somehow, into an

apocalyptic biblical narrow narrative. Specifically is he described it as trying to sense, getting a new sense and what the keys were trying to say originally, and I'll pull up I'll try to find it very quickly. The best way to illustrate this and is with to compare the first line of the first key with way the original d translation and what you find in the Temple of Set, what you find in the Word of Set. Excuse me, aha.

So the first line of the dran of D's translation says, iragn over you saith, the God of justice and power exalted above the firmaments of wrath. I'll stop there. The first line of the Word of Set. This is a Quino's translation. The Aquino's sense of what was trying to be said there, I am within you and beyond you, the highest of life in majesty, greater than the forces of the universe. So we already see here a very clear distinction between perspectives I reign over you versus I

am within you and beyond you. That is a completely different conception of divinity and what divinity means for us, what it means to have some connection