Gandalf, fireworks and magical training
I have a long way to go in my ambition to be as awesome as Gandalf in all respects except one: handling fireworks.
All my imaginary friends
Chaos magicians put a lot of time, effort and care into building friendly thought-forms we call servitors. Understandable when incautious tulpa creation can leave you with an over-attached pony messing up your sex life and threatening to kill you.
Do you know who else put lots of time, effort and care into building friendly thought-forms?
Six-year-old you, that’s who!
Careful what you wish for
It was late in the evening when the conversation came around to growing old and dying.
“I don’t think I want to live to be a hundred,” my friend confided.
“A hundred?” I scoffed. “I’m looking forward to my billionth birthday. That will be a milestone worth celebrating!”
Stealth sigils
Sigils are one of the fundamental tools of the chaos magician, but sometimes they can be impractical when you need a spell right now.
Maybe you’re travelling, perhaps you’re at dinner with your Evangelical relatives who already think you’re Satan, or maybe you just feel like doing things differently (gosh, I like you already! :D )
What’s a wizard to do?
Choose your own reality
Belief-shifting is the most powerful tool in the chaos magic chest, yet also the most easily overlooked.
I’m as guilty as the next wizard; I started out with sigils, moved on to servitors, and then finally got around to the boring belief stuff. I mean, I even called this blog Sigils and Servitors, not Sigils, Servitors and Belief-Shifting, though admittedly that would have spoiled some really sweet alliteration.
Gazing upon the monster
Although I’ve never had much luck with it myself, I know quite a few people who’ve found EFT tapping invaluable for dealing with negative thought patterns and other types of personal shadow-work.
One unusual thing about the process is the way you start off by acknowledging aloud the negative reality you want to change, then follow a path of affirmations that lead to where you want to be.
Conversations with mud
When I started learning Finnish, I was advised to learn the words for “snow” and “mosquito”, because “we have one of them all winter, and one for the other three months of the year.”
Finnish mosquitoes don’t typically carry any nasty diseases, but that’s about the only good thing you can say about them: they’re three times the size of their blood-sucking cousins in the UK, are distressingly hard to kill, and worse: they love foreign food.
Me, for example.
The power of yeast…?
Princeton’s PEAR laboratory did some fascinating experiments in the 1970s and 80s which appeared to show that baby chickens and even house-plants can exert influence on random number generators in a way that produces more favourable outcomes for them in the world.