Occult Priesthood by Our Pope of Pestilence

Magical, Mystical & Religious enterprises seek to fulfill five basic human needs, which can be identified as follows:

To provide techniques of Emotional Engineering. 
To give life a sense of Meaning.
To provide some means of Intercession or Intervention.
To supply an explanation of Death.
To formulate a Social Structure or Cult.

These needs are deeply interrelated and many religions, and particularly many political philosophies, do not attempt to deal with them all. Finding a solution to some of the problems may make it less urgent to solve others. An occult priest should be capable of dealing with all of these issues. Let us consider how he might tackle each one and contrast his methods with those of the more orthodox systems.


Emotional Engineering

This includes all practices designed to stimulate or control emotional states. Exaltation in prayer and song, contrition and guilt for imagined sins, fear and anguish at the specter of divine anger, and joy at the prospect of divine reward.

In our culture, a correlation between a fall-off in religion and an increase in the use of mood-altering drugs is very marked. The greatest threat to religion, however, is entertainment. The new power of the entertainment media to supply us with everything from joy to terror has usurped many of the functions of the priest.

There is a refreshing honesty about secular entertainment; it's just entertainment without the excuse of spirituality for its justification. It is still, however, manipulative.

If the priest wishes to put himself into or out of any emotional state, then he should be provided with the techniques to accomplish this. The process requires no justification — that he wills it is sufficient. One cannot escape emotional experience in a human incarnation, and it is preferable to adopt a master rather than a slave relationship to it. The priest should be capable of instructing anyone in the procedures of emotional engineering. The main methods are the gnostic ones of casting oneself into a frenzied ecstasy, stilling the mind to a point of absolute quiescence, and evoking the laughter of the gods by combining laughter with the contemplation of paradox.

Anyone who masters these techniques fully has achieved a tremendous power over himself more valuable than health, love, fame, or riches. He has set himself free from the effects of the world; nothing can touch him unless he wills it. As it has been said, the sage who knows how can live comfortably in hell.

Meaning

Meaning is motivation. Anything which gives rise to physical and mental behavior of any kind is providing meaning. Thus the body is the source of many basic meanings in this world. Pain, pleasure, hunger, sexuality, and so on provide an impetus to action and hence a source of meaning. Once the organism has solved these problems, other more subtle motivations arise on the mental level — desire for knowledge and power, and emotional gratification of all kinds. Beyond this the organism may seek higher level purposes which have been called "spiritual," and some there are who seek the meaning of meaning itself.

To question any level of meaning with reason is usually to loose it. Meaning arises from the differentiation of experience into pain and pleasure, good and evil, interesting and uninteresting, beautiful and ugly, worthwhile and not worthwhile. Experiences are only meaningful when we are sensitive to them. We can only perceive difference. Ideas are only meaningful when we can appreciate their separateness and novelty. Spirituality only arises when we begin to consider some things non-spiritual. Meaning is dependent on establishing dualities, and belief is fundamentally an act of differentiation — considering one thing different from another. So ideas which create meaning for us must be conditional beliefs. For example, certain knowledge about God, whether it was yes or no, or certainty about everlasting life, either yes or no, would completely destroy any meaning in these ideas. If this were absolutely believed to be everlasting heaven or hell with no escape, there would be no reason to care about anything.

Reason is therefore destructive of meaning when it seeks unconditional and absolute answers. In this context it is probably more prudent to stay the hand of suicide and ask if reason is not somewhat out of phase with the nature of existence.

The ascetic mystic and the occult magician adopt different stances toward their respective existences. The ascetic mystic conceives a vast differentation between the material and the spiritual. He then attempts to withdraw meaning from the material so that he can put in into the spiritual. Withdrawing meaning from the material seems a bizarre exercise, but there is an inner logic to it. He seeks indifference to sex, indifference to hunger, to pleasure, and to pain, indeed to everything that motivates normal men. In return a whole world of what he calls spiritual experiences opens up for him. His dreams, his acts of devotion, and his inner thoughts become charged with meaning.

For those who devise or believe in religions, it is necessary to erect conceptions on a cosmic scale to provide a source of reference and meaning. Invariably the highest principle must be paradoxical or contain some duality. Either the ultimate principle must actually consist of two opposed principles or there must be some sort of fall from the ultimate. The paradoxes of religion are unquestionable and can only be interpreted on a hierarchical basis. Religions are innately repressive and conservative. Only heresy and schism permit any evolution of ideas. Much of the meaning in religion derives from authority-and-obedience relationships; hence most religions exist only as social phenomena. Private religion inevitably evolves into mysticism or magic, and these have a tendency to devolve into new religions.

The occult magician does not conceive of such a vast gulf between spirit and matter. To him they are both part of the same thing, and he exalts neither above the other. He rejects no part of his experience. The magician lives in a continuum beginning with the sublime and ineffable Tao/God/Chaos/Kia through the mysterious and subtle Aethers to the awesome and strange material world. To the magician, any piece of knowledge, any new power, any opportunity for enlightenment is worth having for its own sake. The only thing abhorred in this incredible existence is failure to come to grips with some part of it. To be able to operate in all spheres, the magician must master the art of either acting without belief or of being able to invest belief temporarily in anything with which he is experimenting. The occult magician should be equally at home with a crozier, a paintbrush, a test tube, or a wand. In all things he is seeking to bring his Tao/God/Chaos/Kia into manifestation; for him life is its own answer, and the way he lives it is his spirituality.

It is senseless to ask grand and unspecific questions about life and the universe in general, because for an answer we can only invent hypothetical states of not-life or not-universe. The universe as it exists is a fantastic and magical place itself, and life is a mystery whose depth can never be exhausted. It is only when man does not pay enough attention to the totality of what is going on around him every second that he is tempted to invent spurious theories to cover his lack of knowledge. For the occult magician, that lack of knowledge is the ultimate source of meaning. The true priest is one who can communicate this sense of mystery.

Intercession

All religions have some method of affecting reality, or of encouraging some god to affect reality, or of merely giving the appearance that they are doing these things. As a religion becomes more institutionalized and orthodox, there is less and less emphasis on this type of activity, and for good reason. Magic is a very anarchic business. Some people have a greater gift for it than others and sometimes it fails. Most priests who become adept at it would soon realize it was their own psychic power at work and not that of a god. Such priests who became adept would soon attract a huge following and usurp and disorder the clerical hierarchy. All orthodoxies tend to frown on its use for this reason, and also because they might not themselves be able to deliver on demand.

The religions' answer is to involve the congregation in a half-hearted attempt at intercession, and then be ready with the catchphrase, "It was not god's will," in the event of failure. One might well ask, if god is going to do his will anyway, surely he does not require a cue from us?

The approach of the priest is entirely different when he leads his order or coven in magical activity. There is a high probability of failure because they may not be able to raise sufficient power and they may not be doing exactly what is required. Everyone will be aware of this. In this situation they have to act with total commitment and without the slightest trace of lust of result. Everything possible must be done on the physical plane to set up the conditions of success beforehand, and then the magic is hurled in to tip the balance. To have given one's utmost is enough in itself. The result can be awaited without fear or desire and received with laughter, whatever it may be.

Death

The difference between ideas and beliefs is that ideas may be true but beliefs are always false. That may seem a monstrous thing to say, but I offer it as a definition. What separates an idea from a belief is the emotional force committed to upholding the belief. If something were really true for us, we would not have to make an effort to believe it.

All beliefs about death have one other characteristic apart from their inherent improbability and falsity. They have to be conditional. That is to say, they have to contain both heaven and hell, or both pleasant and unpleasant reincarnations. Consider a scheme in which one was destined for either everlasting heaven or everlasting hell or for either total extinction or perpetual existence as a totally disembodied spirit without the organs of will or sense. Or consider a certain knowledge that one's next incarnation could not be affected by events in this life.

As beliefs, these things would be quite useless and unsatisfying. This reveals beliefs about death for what they mostly are, devices to create emotional effects in this life. The priest should abstain from adding anything to this necrotic heap. Rather he should devote his talents to showing people what death is like. Necromancy is something of a dying art these days, largely because it has been widely abused by those who are merely telepathic with the living and/or who want their money. Nevertheless those who have directly seen or spoken to the dead have a certainty of something beyond faith. The single experience of having left one's body for a time is worth more than any belief, and it is the only useful preparation for death. The experience is reasonably accessible to any determined person.

Social Structure

Any human enterprise involving more than one individual will exhibit some form of social structure from complete hierarchy to apparent democracy. The dynamics of assorted cults, cabals, and religions are instructive of the various ways in which magical orders ought, and ought not to be, organized.

In a religion, hierarchy is of paramount importance and is effectively an object of worship itself, though this would never be openly stated. To enslave their followers, hierarchs represent themselves as the emissaries of higher powers or "the teaching" or whatever, but not as the thing itself. This is analogous to troops saluting not the officer but the commission he wears on his breast. The end result is the same, but it does help to overcome the ego resistance involved in one person submitting to the will of another.

 Once such an assymetric relationship has been established, it readily perpetuates itself. The priest or leader is permitted to pass personal comments on his followers. These do not even need to be especially perceptive. They need only be the sort of things one's friends wouldn't say to one's face, plus a few things one would like to hear and suddenly the guru appears the wisest man on earth.

Another gambit of religious and political organizations is to force a re-rationalization of beliefs through action. People are not persuaded into belief intellectually. They are persuaded to perform religious acts in childhood or while under stress. Afterward they develop or accept the rationalizations and opinions that go with it. To convert a man to anarchism, persuade him to throw a bomb for various romantic emotional reasons. He will subsequently have to adjust his beliefs to justify what he has done. The most successful organizations are those that plunge potential converts straight into action. Obedience follows a similar pattern. At first only the smallest and most inconsequential obediences will be demanded. These force the rationalization that one is in fact loyal to whatever one is giving one's obedience to. This loyalty is but a stepping stone to greater acts of submission, usually of one's intelligence, wallet, and sexual favors.

Leader-follower relationships also allow the leader to license his followers to act without responsibility. The natural inhibitions to displays of violence, sexuality, and other emotionalities can easily be over-ridden if the leader tells his followers to do these things. They will often thank him for letting them do what they have always had a desire to do. Secrecy and elitism characterize all hierarchies. There is nothing wrong with being elite or having real secrets, as such, but most cults rely heavily on artificial elites and manufacture secrecy as a means of enticement and control. Accepting that elites exist and keeping secrets are acts of obedience themselves. Membership within an elite and a degree of megalomania are among the licenses leaders can confer upon followers. To this end most cults reinforce their collective identity with standards of dress and behavior and all manner of badges, insignia, and labels. These often assume as much importance as the actual activities of the cult. People are easily tricked into accepting membership in a large group as a substitute for enlarging themselves.

The activities of cults would seem to presuppose a high degree of cynicism among their leaders. This is rarely so. Most have swallowed their own lies and deceptions totally, or else rationalized them in terms of an even higher cause. As a result, their burning obsession equips them with a certain charisma which puts fire in their eyes and inflames their speech. And what is the end result of all this cultish activity?

Commercialism or a Police Raid: A cult either manages to turn itself into a harmless institution or it becomes progressively more extremist until the state decides to smash it. A genuine Order will be engaged in psychic guerrilla warfare against all black cults and religions including materialist philosophies. In such a cult every man is his own priest. Any member has the right to teach any other member anything he knows. No member has the right to claim any secret within the Order beyond the secret of his own identity if he wishes it.

Unlike cults and religions, a genuine Order will not admit people on a number-for-its-own sake basis. Vitality can only be maintained by quality control at the intake. Whatever hierarchy arises within an Order will be a reflection of demonstrable ability. Attempts to use the various tricks of the teacher enumerated in this section will be immediately spotted and ridiculed. There is only one justification for the existence of a genuine Order — to enable individuals to take control of their own spirituality. And that is a very heroic and dangerous objective. Watch out for the Police Raid.

CHAOS ALWAYS HAS THE LAST LAUGH (buy the Octave-ooo!)

(Scribbled From Chapter ? of the Octavo)
RIGHT NOW
The major question facing our species at this time = 

Do we want an apocalypse or not, and if so, of what kind?


Chaos always raises more questions than answers, we will always have chaos but do we want high grade evolutionary chaos or low grade devolutionary chaos?

Chaos started as Khaos a sort of unpredictable primordial mess from which the ordered universe developed. The classical Greek idea of a ghastly, unpredictable and unlawful mess from which emerged first the world and then the rather nasty Titans, and then the slightly more agreeable gods and eventually humanity, with the implication it could all go Khaos-shaped again if we don't behave.

Subsequently chaos just became a synonym for disorder, meaningless randomness, anarchy, system failure and destruction. However a few contrarian souls could still perceive the positive potential embodied in the concept of chaos. The power of chaos to reverse entropy and bend the laws of possibility. For creative destruction. For adventitious change. For unlimited possibility.

Mathematicians discovered that many process that seemed random actually showed extreme sensitivity to initial conditions. Thus we now understand why we cannot solve the three body gravitation problem, and why we cannot predict next month's weather and a vast number of other moderately complex things. In fact it seems that we can now prove that we cannot really anticipate what any complex system will do beyond a certain point.  To know such things we would require impossibly precise data about the starting conditions because in many systems a minute difference at the start rapidly mushrooms into a completely different future, yet this will happen to ANY system eventually.

Extreme sensitivity to initial conditions has no theoretical limit in chaos science. Thus it extends down to the quantum domain underlying physical reality where events become indeterminate. So it acts as a sort of ladder by which quantum randomness climbs up into the macroscopic world to eventually create huge indeterminacies. So not only might a butterfly changing direction over Mongolia eventually trigger a hurricane in Florida, but a random quantum quirk in the butterfly's nervous system might have contributed to the direction change in the first place.

Thus massively improbable things happen all the time. All events that occur partake of this fantastic improbability. At the times of our conceptions the chances of us encountering each other on precisely this apge would have stood at almost infinity to one against.

The whole universe runs on a Total Improbability Drive, Chaos Rules!

Averting the Apocralyse

The Gods come from Chaos as our Hellenic ancestors surmised. The deeper you penetrate into Chaos the more primordial, powerful and unpredictable the deities you encounter.

The Elder Gods of Sex and Death, of Love and Hate, and of Fear and Desire, lurk beneath the thin and fragile veneer of our Civilization.

Yet beneath this pantheon lie the Elder Gods of all, the raw forces of creativity and destruction of the Universe itself.

The universe has a Panpsychic Sentience of a sort. It lives. Its components exhibit random quantum autonomy and they communicate with each other non-locally to produce a spectrum of 'consciousnesses' from the sub-atomic through the biological to the galactic.

Most of these 'consciousnesses' appear so alien to us humans that we can barely recognize them as such. Fellow mammals seem partly comprehensible, reptiles seem less so, insects remain inscrutable, and as for atoms and galaxies, well we merely have a few flimsy and paradoxical equations with which to understand them.

Our appreciation of Chaos has evolved from a primitive dualistic view of Order verse Chaos into a more sophisticated triality of Order-Chaos-Disorder in which Chaos not only undoes things but it also acts creatively to ferment and evolve new Order and fresh complexity.

Magicians seeking to invoke Chaos need to carefully consider the cost - benefit analysis of such Faustian Pacts, for Chaos can manifest on a spectrum from random destruction to random creativity. Making anything always involves breaking something else; the magician should carefully consider the size and quality of any omelette that may possibly result.

The magical technique of Anthropomorphic Deity Personification (ADP) remains the magician's most effective method of interacting with events that we can at best in rational mode, usually only conceptualize as abstract concepts.

Chaos phenomenises in fractal mode, from quantum particle level, through it chemical, biological, ecological, sociological, psychological, technological, and political manifestation, and then on up into astronomical and cosmological levels.

At the most basic nuclear level such anthropomorphic personifcations as H.P. Lovecraft's conception of AZATHOTH, the 'blind mad god at the centre of chaos' allow the magician to channel pure randomness to macroscopic levels.

Of course unadulterated randomness will most probably have deleterious effects on the health, lifestyle, and sanity of relatively highly structured organisms such as ourselves, and few take such risks, except in extremis. Magic may well fill the vacuum when you have exhausted the resources of common sense, but conjuring for a purely random result implies either a great faith in the universe or perhaps a great faith in one's own deep unconscious.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For every successful artist, hero and mystic, hundreds lie dead and forgotten, their random inspirations led to nothing more.

At the more complex levels of reality the interplay between Chaos, Order and Disorder becomes more sophisticated. Order strives to control Disorder but it also provides new possibilities for Chaos, and Chaos spawns both new Order and Disorder.

The more highly ordered a structure gets, the greater the likelihood of catastrophic failure, unless it retains enough chaos to restructure itself.

As we enter the somewhat arbitrarily designated third millennium the Order of the human world seems perilously perched on the brink of Apocalypse.

We have built a fantastically complex and interdependent system of Integrated Information based critically on the energy/information input from fossil fuels. However we have now entered the realm of diminishing returns from this resource. We have already used vast amounts of it merely to create entropy and huge amounts of low grade throwaway Integrated Information instead of quality creations. If we cannot innovate and substitute some other inputs such as nuclear or renewable power then a systemic collapse will follow and most of our population and culture will go with it. End of Story.

Stand on any hillside overlooking on of our huge cities and notice its fundamental instability. Any interruption to the endless food convoys streaming into it or to the megawatts of power and fuel flowing in spells disaster, as does breakdown in its internal communications media. Modern cities lack the robustness of pre-modern towns which could usually supply themselves from the surrounding countryside, and restore command and control functions with a short walk and talk.

Our numbers and our consumption have reached levels that our technology cannot sustain for much longer.

We have severely depleted our planet's fossil fuels to achieve such levels of population and consumption.


We face catastrophic climatic and ecological changes if we continue on our present course.

We do not appear to have many viable alternatives to this Apocalypse on the horizon.

The world's richest nation now needs 10,000 gallons of oil to survive each and every second. It has few plans to reduce this dependency, and most other nations now seek to emulate this behaviour.

We have already wrecked large areas of the planet's oceans and our new unsustainable industrial farming techniques imperil the fertility of the land.

On current projections the human population of earth will climb to 9 billion by mid-century. The end of century figure remains debatable but may  not exceed a few hundred thousand living in Medieval or perhaps even Neolithic barbarity in the Polar Regions only.

The four horsemen, Famine, Pestilence/Pollution, War and Death, groom their steeds. Within a few decades most of our cities and civilization may lie in ruins as the food and the fuel run out and we slaughter each other over what little remains.

This has happened many times before on local scales, it may soon happen on a global scale.

Any fall tends to occur much more quickly than the long and apparently comfortable climb up to the cusp of catastrophe.

Unless of course we evolve other plans.........

Whether we act or not, we seem to face an impending Eschaton, a global change of planetary ecology and climate and human civilization. A slim chance exists that we can Immanentize an agreeable Eschaton rather than a vast historical reversal. It seems worth a try.


The chances of advanced human civilization surviving the twenty first century now seem to diminish with every passing year. As a species we stand in dire need of creative shocks and surprising innovations to our ways of thinking.

Humanity got into its current impasse by stimulating scientific enquiry in the first place but this has led to unsustainable forms of hyper-industrialization. Now we must search for new and alternative futures. Science on its own now seems alarmingly short of technical fixes for the problems that its technology has spawned. 

(BAM BAM BA BA BAAAAAAAAAAAA BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA)

Cue the entry of the Fifth Horseperson, Chaos, who might just show us how to distort probability and arrest the slide into entropy sufficiently to create a merry Revelation instead, in which the impending Apocalypse becomes but a mere myth which we had the sense and inspiration to avert.  


=========================================================


How are we to circumvent our circumstances?
Aren't we here to make change the course of history?
Are we not here to confound priests, princes, politicians, scientists, suits, standards and policemen?
To break the rules, bend the boundaries.....dare i say....
ARE WE NOT HERE TO ATTEMPT THE IMPOSSIBLE?????!?!?!?
TO OVERTHROW CONSENSUS REALITY!
TO REGAIN THE SPIRIT!
TO SAVE HUMANITY!
NEED A GOOD REASON FOR THE SEASON?
OUR PURPOSE = TO BATTLE THE GLOBAL MELTDOWN OF CIVILIZATION
OUR MISSION = TO RECREATE EXISTENCE IN OUR OWN MEANINGFUL IMAGE
WE ARE HERE TO FIGHT FOR THE FUTURE & PREVENT TOTAL ARMAGEDDON 
SO LET US HEED THESE WORDS & IMMANENTIZE OUR OWN DAMN ESCHATON/S!


NOW JUST SO HAPPENS TO BE THE TIME FOR ACTION


NOW THE ONLY SPACETIME LEFT TO DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS
NOW & ONLY NOW (PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE COMBINED)
NOW THE TIME FOR MAGIK


NOW IS 
RIGHT NOW
now
go


"we may well be the ones
to set this world on its ear.
we may well get it done
if not, then why the hell are we here?" - Westerberg

"every dis-ease is a musical problem;
every cure is a musical solution."- Novalis



- SO (if there must be) The pope PJC
(mostly & definately not the last bit) (you know who you are)


(with minor humble editing by the number two.....seriously though absolutely full on mad deep respeck &  thank you o so much Mr. Carroll.... in advanced. this needed to be passed on to show what is truly at stake. 2 gives mad love and will take down anything (specially in regards to our more than likely piss poor editing) if asked)
PS likewise goes for the art 2 and any names will be added if found,noticed and/or wanted.