Who is number two?
..and who does he work for?

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Thee ∞ Magiks by Peter J Carroll

Our perceptual and conceptual apparatus creates a fourfold division of matter into the space, time, mass, and energy tautology. Similarly, our instinctual drives create an eightfold division of magic. The eight forms of magic are conveniently denoted by colours having emotional significance:


Octarine Magic

Following Pratchett's hypothesis, the eighth colour of the spectrum, which is the magicians personal perception of the "colour of magic", may be called octarine. For me, this is a particular shade of electric pinkish-purple. My most signifikant optical visions have all occured in this hue, and I visualise it to colour many of my more important spells and sigils on the astral. Before I set sail in a handmade open boat through the Arabian Sea I was tricked into accepting a huge and priceless star ruby by a wizard in India. It was of an exactly octarine hue. During the most violent typhoon I have ever experienced I found myself shrieking my conjurations to Thor and Poseidon whilst clinging to the bowsprit as mountainous waves smashed into the boat and octarine lightning bolts crashed into the sea all around. Looking back it seems miraculous that I and my crew survived. I have kept the octarine stone, uncertain as to whether it was passed to me as a curse, a joke, a blessing, or a test, or all of these things.



Other magicians perceive octarine in different ways. My personal perception of octarine is probably a consequence of sex (purple) and anger (red) being my most effective forms of gnosis. Each should seek out the colour of magic for himself.

The octarine power is our instinctual drive towards magic, which, if allowed to flower, creates the magician self or personality in the psyche, and in affinity with various magician god forms. The "Magician Self" varies naturally between magicians, but has the general characteristics of antinomianism and deviousness, with a predilection for manipulation and the bizarre. The antinomianism of the magician self arises partly from the general estrangement of our culture from magic. The magicial self therefore tends to take an interest in everything that does not exist, or should not exist, acording to ordinary consensus reality. To the magician self, "Nothing is Unnatural". A statement full of endless meanings. The deviousness of the magician self is a natural extension of the sleight of mind required to manipulate the unseen. The god forms of the octarine power are those which correspond most closely with the characteristics of the magician self, and are usually the magicians most important modes of possession for purely magical inspiration. Baphomet, Pan, Odin, Loki, Tiamat, Ptah, Eris, Hekate, Babalon, Lilith and Ishtar are examples of god forms which can be used in this way.

Alternatively the magician may wish to formulate a magician god form on a purely idiosyncratic basis, in which case the symbolism of the serpent and the planet Uranus often prove useful starting points.

The magician can invoke such god forms for the illumination of various aspects of the magical self, and for various works of pure rather than applied magic. The category of pure magic includes such activities as the development of magical theories and philosophies, and magical training programs, the devising of symbolic systems for use in divinations, spells and incantations, and also the creation of magical languages for similar purposes. It is worth noting here that chaos-magical languages are usually now written in V-Prime before transliteration into magical barbaric form. V-Prime or Vernacular Prime is simply one's native tongue in which all use of all tenses of the verb "to be" is omitted in accordance with quantum metaphysics. All the nonsense of transcendentalism disappears quite naturally once this tactic is adopted. There is no being, all is doing.

The octarine power is invoked to inspire the magician self and to expand the magicians primary arcana. The primary personal arcana consists of the fundamental symbols with which he interprets and interacts with reality (whatever that may assault perception as), magically. These symbols may be theories or kabbalas, obsessions, magical weapons, astral or physical, or indeed anything which relates to the practice of magic generally, that is not dedicated specifically to one of the other powers of applied magic, whose symbols form the secondary personal arcana of magic.

From the vantage point of the octarine gnosis, the magician self should be able to perceive the selves of the other seven powers, and be able to see their interrelationship within his total organism. Thus the octarine power brings some ability in psychiatry, which is the adjustment of the relationship between the selves in an organism. The basis difference between a magician and a civilian is that the latter the octarine power is vestigial or undeveloped. The normal resting or neutral mode a civilian corresponds to a mild expression of the yellow power which he regards as his normal personality or "ego". The magician self however, is fully aware that this is but one of eight major tools that the organism possesses. Thus, in a sense, the "normal personality" of the magician is a tool of his magical self (and, importantly, vice versa). This realisation gives him some advantage over ordinary people. However the developing magical self will soon realize that it is not in itself superior to the other selves that the organism consists of, for there are many things they can do which it cannot.

The development of the octarine power through the philosophy and practice of magic tends to provide the magician with a second major centre amongst the selves to complement the ego of the yellow power. The awakening of the octarine power is sometimes known as "being bitten by the serpent". Those who have been, are usually as instantly recognisable to each other as, for example, two lifeboat survivors are.

Perhaps one of the greatest tricks of sleight of mind is to allow the magician self and the ego to dance together within the psyche without undue conflict. The magician who is unable to disguise himself as an ordinary person, or who is unable to act independently of his own ego, is no magician at all.

Nevertheless, the growth of the octarine, or eighth power of the self, and the discovery of the type of magician one wants to be, and the identification or synthesis of a god form to represent it, tend to create something of a mutant being, who has advanced into a paradigm that few others are aware of. It is not easy to turn back once the jouney has begun, though quite a few have tried to abort the voyage with various narcotics including mysticism. It is a pilgrimage to an unknown destination, in which one awakes successively from one nightmare into another. Some on them appear vastly entertaining at the time. There are worlds within us, the abysses are just the initiations in between them.

The evocation of an octarine servitor can create an invaluable tool for those engaged in magical research. The main functions of such entities are usually to assist in the discovery of useful information and contacts. Negative results should not be ignored here, the complete failure of a well prepared servitor to retrieve information about the hypothetical cosmic "big bang", was a contributory factor in the development of the Fiat Nox theory, for example.

Black Magic

The Death programs built into our genetic and hence behavioral and emotional structure are the price we pay for the capacity for sexual reproduction which alone allows for evolutionary change. Only organisms which reproduce asexually, to replicate endless identical copies of their very simple forms, are immortal. Two conjunctions with the black power are of particular interest to the magician: the casting of destruction spells and the avoidance of premature death.
So called "Chod" rites are a ritual rehearsal of death in which the Death-self is invoked to manifest its knowledge and wisdom. Traditionally conceived of as a black robed skeletal figure armed with a scythe, the Death-self is privy to the mysteries of ageing, senescence, morbidity, necrosis, entropy and decay. It is often also possessed of a rather wry and world weary sense of humour.

Surrounding himself with all the symbols and paraphernalia of death, the magician invokes his Death-self in a Chod rite for one of the two purposes. Firstly the experience of the Death-self and the black gnosis brings the knowledge of what it feels like to begin dying and thus prepares the magician to resist the manifestation of actual premature death in himself and perhaps others by, as it were, knowing the enemy. A demon is just a god acting out of turn. In the course of various Chod rites the magician may well experiment in shamanic style by invoking into himself the visualised entities and symbols that he associates with various diseases, to practice banishing them. Thus the Death-self has some uses in medical diagnosis and divination.

Secondly, the death-self may be invoked as a vantage point from which to cast destruction spells. In this case the invocation takes the same general form but the conjuration is usually called an Entropy Rite. One should always look for any possible alternative to the exercise of destructive magic, for to be forced into the position of having to use it is a position of weakness. In each case the magician must plant in his subconscious a mechanism by which the target could come to grief and then project it with the aid of a sigil or perhaps an evoked servitor. Entropy magic works by sending information to the target which encourages auto-destructive behaviour.

Entropy magic differs from Combat magic of the Red Gnosis in several important respects. Entropy magic is always performed with complete stealth in the cold fury of the black saturine gnosis. The aim is a cold blooded surgical strike of which the target is given no warning. The magician is not interested in getting into a fight, merely in a quick and efficient kill. The supreme advantage of such attacks is that they are rarely perceived as such by the targets who have nothing but themselves and blind chance to blame for the disasters which even magnanimity in victory does little to assuage. One disadvantage however, is that it is rather difficult to present invoices to clients for effects that appear to be due entirely to natural causes.



God forms of the black power are legion; if the simple form of a cloaked skeleton with scythe does not adequately symbolise the Death-self then such forms as Charon, Thanatos, Saturn, Chronos, Hekate the Hag, Dark sister Atropos, Anubis, Yama and Kali may serve.

Servitors of the black power are rarely established for long term general use, partly because their use is likely to be infrequent and partly because they can be danger to their owner, thus they tend to be made and dispatched for specific single tasks.

Blue Magic

Wealth is not to be measured in terms of assets, but rather in terms of how much control over people and material, and thus ultimately one's own experiences, one achieves by economic activities. Money is an abstract concept used to quantify economic activity, thus wealth is a measure of how well you control your experiences with money. Assuming that varied, exciting, unusual and stimulating experiences are preferable to dull ones, and that they tend to be expensive for this reason, then the main problem for most people is to find a highly efficient form of money input which has the above agreeable qualities. The aim of wealth magic is to establish a large turnover of money which allows agreeable experiences at both the input and output stages. This demands what is called Money Consciousness.



Money has acquired all the characteristics of a "spiritual" being. It is invisible and intangible, coinage, notes and electronic numbers are not money. They are merely representations or talismans of something which economists cannot coherently define. Yet although it is itself intangible and invisible it can create powerful effects on reality. Money has its own personality and idiosyncratic tastes, it avoids those who blaspheme it, and flows towards those who treat it in the way it likes. In a suitable environment it will even reproduce itself. The nature of the money spirit is movement, money likes to move. If it is hoarded and not used, it slowly dies. Money thus prefers to manifest as turnover rather than as unexploited assets. Monies surplus to immediate pleasure should be re-invested as a further evocation, but the truly money conscious find that even their pleasures make money for them. Money consciousness gets paid to enjoy itself. Those in money consciousness are by nature generous. Offer them an interesting investment and they will offer you a fortune. Just don't ask for small cash handouts.

The attainment of money consciousness and the invokation of the Wealth-self consists of the acquisition of a thorough knowledge of the predilections of the spirit of money and a thorough exploration of personal desires. When both of these have been understood, real wealth manifests effortlessly.

Such invocations must be handled with care. The blue gnosis of wealth and desire creates demons as easily as gods. Many contemporary success and sales seminars concentrate on creating an hysterical desire for money coupled with an equally hypertrophied desire for the mere symbols of wealth rather than the experiences the punters actually want. To work like a possessed maniac all day for the questionable pleasure of drinking oneself into near oblivion on vintage champagne every night, is to have missed the point entirely and to have a entered a condition of anti-wealth.

However, the majority of those who are poor in relatively free societies where others are rich, owe their poverty either to a lack of understanding of how money behaves, or to negative feelings which tend to repel it. Neither intelligence nor investment capital are required in any great degree to become wealthy. The popularity of tales about the misery and misfortunes of the rich is testimony to the ridiculous myth prevalent amongst the poor, that the rich are unhappy. Before beginning works of blue magic it is essential to seriously examine all negative thoughts and feelings about money and to exorcise them. Most of the poor people who win in lotteries, and only the poor regularly enter them, manage to have nothing to show for it a couple years later. It is as if some subconscious force somehow got rid of something they felt they did not really deserve or want. People tend to have the degree of wealth that they deeply believe they should have. Blue magic is the modification of that belief through ritual enactment of alternative beliefs.

Blue magic rituals may thus involve exorcisms of negative attitudes to wealth, divinatory explorations of one's deepest desires, and invocations of the Wealth-self and the spirit of money during which the subconscious wealth level is adjusted by ritual expression of a new value, and affirmations of new projects for the investment of resources and efford are made. Hymns and incantations to money can be delivered. Cheques for startling sums can be written to oneself and desires can be proclaimed and visualised. Various traditional god forms with a prosperity aspect can be used to express the Wealth-self such as Jupiter, Zeus and the mythical Midas and Croesus.

Simple money spells are rarely used in modern blue magic. The tendency nowadays is to cast spells designed to enhance schemes designed to make money. If one fails to provide a mechanism through which money can manifest then either nothing will happen or the spell will flesh by strange means, such as a legacy from the untimely death of a much beloved relative for example. Serious blue magic is never attempted by conventional forms of gambling. Conventional gambling is an expensive way of buying experiences which have nothing to do with increasing one's wealth. Blue magic is a matter of carefully calculated investment. Anyone but a fool should be able to devise an investment that offers better odds than conventional forms of gambling.

Red Magic


As soon as humanity developed the organisation and weapons technology to defeat its main natural predators and competitors it seems to have applied a fierce selection mechanism to itself in the form of internecine warfare. Many of the qualities we regard as marks of our evolutionary success, such as our opposable thumbs and tool handling abilities, our capacity for communication by sound, our upright posture, and our capacity to give and receive commands and discipline, were almost certainly selected for during millennia of organized armed conflict between human bands. Our morality reflects our bloody history, for whilst it is taboo to attack members of one's own tribe, it remains one's duty to attack foreigners. The only debate is over who constitutes one's own tribe. When enthusiasm for war is limited, we devise sports and games in which to express our aggression. From the whole ethos and terminology of sport it is plain that sport is just war with extra rules.



However, it should not be supposed that war is completely without rules. Wars are fought to improve one's bargaining position; in war the enemy group is a resource that one wishes to gain some measure of control over. Wars are fought to intimidate one's adversaries, not to exterminate them. Genocide is not war.

The structure and conduct of war reflects the "fight or flight" program built into our sympathetic nervous system. In battle, the aim is to intimidate the enemy out of the fight mode and into flight mode. Thus, assuming there is sufficient parity of force to make a fight seem worthwhile to both parties, morale is the decisive factor in conflict. Indeed, it is the decisive factor in virtually any inter-human competitive, sporting or military encounter.

Red magic has two aspects, firstly the invocation of the vitality, aggression, and morale to sustain oneself in any conflict from life in general to outright war, and secondly the conduct of actual combat magic. A variety of god forms exist in which the War-self can be expressed, although hybrid or purely idiosyncratic forms work just as well. Ares, Ishtar, Ogoun, Thor, Mars, Mithras and Horus in particular are often used. Contemporary symbolism should not be neglected. Firearms and explosives are as welcoming to the red gnosis as swords and spears. Drums are virtually indispensable. Sigils drawn in flammable liquids, or indeed whole flaming circles in which to invoke should be considered.




Combat magic is usually practised openly with the adversary being publicly threatened and cursed, or finding himself the recipient of an unpleasant looking talisman, spell or rune. The aim is intimidation and control of one's adversary who must therefore be made as paranoid as possible and informed of the origin of the attack. Otherwise combat magic takes the same general form as that used in Entropy Rites, with sigils and servitors carrying auto-destructive information to the target, although with sub-lethal intent.


However, the real skill of red magic is to be able to present such an overwhelming glamour of personal vitality, morale and potential for aggression that the exercise of combat magic is never required.


Yellow Magic

Most of the extant texts on what is traditionally called "solar magic", contradict each other or suffer from internal confusion. Astrological commentaries on the supposed powers of the sun are amongst the most idiotic nonsense that discipline can produce. This is because the yellow power has four distinct but related forms of manifestation within the psyche. This fourfold division has led to immense problems in psychology, where various schools of thought have chosen to emphasize one in particular and to ignore those which other schools have alighted upon.



The four aspects can be characterised as follows. Firstly the Ego, or self image, which is simply the model the mind has of the general personality, but excluding most of the extreme behaviour patterns that the selves are capable of. Secondly Charisma, which is the degree of self-confidence that a person projects to others. Thirdly, something for which there is no single English term, but which can be called Laughter-Creativity. Fourthly, the urge to Assertion and Dominance. All these things are manifestations of the same yellow power; although their relative emphasis varies greatly between individuals.

Success in most human societies usually results from a skilful expression of the yellow power. The strength of the yellow power in an individual seems to bear a direct relationship to levels of the sexual hormone testosterone in both sexes; although its expression depends on personal psychology. There is a complex interplay between testosterone levels, self image, creativity, social status and sexual urges, even if they are unexpressed. In esoteric terms, the moon is the secret power behind the sun, as most female magicians realise instinctively, and most male magicians discover sooner or later. The Ego gradually accretes through the accidents of childhood and adolescence, and, in the absence of particularly powerful experiences thereafter, remains fairly constant even if it contains highly dysfunctional elements. Any type of invocation should make some difference to the ego, but direct work with it can achieve much more. Several tricks are involved here. The very recognition of the ego implies that change is possible. Only those who realize that they own a personality rather than consis of a personality, can modify it. For most people a preparation of a detailed inventory of their own personality is a very difficult and unsettling activity. Yet once it is done it is usually quite easy to decide what changes are desirable.



Changes to the Ego or self image or personality by magic are classed as works of Illumination and are mainly accomplished by Retroactive Enchantment and Invocation. Retroactive Enchantment in this case consits of re-writing one's personal history. As our history largely defines our future, we can change our future by redefining our past. Everybody has some capacity to re-interpret things which were considered to have gone wrong in the past in a more favourable light, but most fail to pursue the process to the full. One cannot eliminate disabling memories, but by an effort of visualisation and imagination one can write in parallel enabling memories of what might also have happened, to neutralise the originals. One can also, where possible, modify any remaining physical evidence that favours the disabling memory.

Invocations to modify the ego are ritual enchantments and personifications of the new desired qualities. Attention should be given to planned changes of dress, tone of speech, gesture, mannerisms and body posture which will best suit the new ego. One manoeuvre frequently used in yellow magic is to practice the manifestation of an alternative personality with a specific mnemonic trigger, such as the transference of a ring from one finger to another.

Various god forms such as Ra, Helios, Mithras, Apollo and Baldur are useful to structure fresh manifestations of the ego, and for experiments with the other three qualities of the yellow power.



Charisma, the projection of an aura of self confidence, is based on a simple trick. After a short while there is no difference at all between the pretence and the actuality of self confidence. Anyone wishing to remedy a lack of confidence and charisma, and uncertain as to how to begin pretending to these qualities, may find that a day or two spent pretending to absolute zero self confidence will quickly reveal both the effectiveness of pretence and the specific thoughts, words, gestures and postures required to project either pretence.

Laughter and Creativity may not immediately seem to be related, but humour depends on the sudden forging of a new connection between disparate concepts, and we laugh at our own creativity in forging the connection. Exactly the same form of elation arises from other forms of creative activity, and if the insight comes suddenly, laughter results. If you don't laugh when you see a seriously brilliant piece of mathematics then you have not really understood it. It also take a degree of positive self-esteem and confidence to laugh at something creatively funny. Persons of low self-esteem tend only to laugh at destructive humour and the misfortunes of others, if they laugh at all.

Laughter is often an important factor in the invocations of the god forms of the yellow power. Solemnity is not a prerequisite for ritual. Laughter is also a useful tactic in drawing conscious attention away from sigils or other magical conjurations once they are finished with. The deliberate forcing of hysterical laughter may seem an absurd way of ending an enchantment or an invocation, but it has been found to be remarkably effective in practice. This is yet another sleight of mind manoeuvre which prevents conscious deliberation.

The "pecking order" within most groups of social animals is usually immediately obvious to us, and the animals themselves. Yet within our own society such dominance hierarchies are equally prevalent within all social groups; although we go to quite extreme lengths to disguise this to ourselves. The human situation is further complicated by the tendency of individuals to belong to many groups in which they may have different degrees of social status, and status is often partly dependent on specialist abilities other than displays of naked force.



However, assuming that a person can appear competent in the specialist ability that a social group requires, that person's position in the group depends almost entirely on the degree of assertion and dominance that person exhibits. It is basically exhibited through non-verbal behaviour which everybody understands intuitively or subconsciously but which most people fail to understand rationally. As a consequence they cannot manipulate it deliberately. Typical dominance behaviours involve talking loudly and slowly, using lots of eye contact, interrupting the speech of others whilst resisting the interruption of others, maintaining an upright posture of concealed threat, invading the personal space of others whilst resisting intrusion into one's own, and placing oneself strategically in any space at the focus of attention. In cultures where touching is frequent, the dominant always initiate it, or pointedly refuse it. Either way, they control it.

Submissive behaviour is of course the reverse of all the above, and appears quite spontaneously in response to successful dominance from others. There is a two way interaction between dominance behaviour and hormone levels. If the levels change for medical reasons then the behaviour tends to change, but more importantly, from a magical point of view, a deliberate change of behaviour will modify hormone levels. Fake it till you make it. There is nothing particularly occult about the way some people are able to control others. We simply fail to notice how it is done because nearly all the behavioural signals involved are exchanged subconsciously. Dominance signals do not tend to work if their recipients perceive them consciously. Thus in most situations they must be delivered subtly and with gradually increasing intensity. One of the few situations where such signals are exchanged deliberately is in military hierarchies, but this is only possible because of the immense capacity for direct physical coercion that such systems exhibit. Break the formal rules of non-verbal communication with an officer and he will have a sergeant instil some submission by direct means. Eventually the formal rules become internalised and function automatically, allowing enough obedience to permit mass self-sacrifice and slaughter. The yellow power is the root of most of the best and the worst of what we are capable.


Green Magic


There is inevitable a considerable overlap in what is written in popular magic books on the subject of venusian (love) and lunar (sex) magic. Consequently a planetary nomenclature has been largely avoided in this text. Although love magic is frequently performed in support of sexual objectives, this chapter will confine itself to the arts of making other people friendly, loyal and affectionate towards oneself.
Friends are probably anyone's greatest asset. My adress book is easily my most valuable possession. As with erotic attraction, it is first necessary to like oneself before others will. This ability can be enhanced by appropriate invocations of the green power. Most people find it easy to elicit friendliness from people that they like themselves; but making persons who are not disposed to friendship towards you, become friendly, and making persons who you do not like at all friendly towards you, are valuable abilities. An unreciprocated friendship is a disability only to the person offering it.




Invocations to the green power should begin with self-love; an attempt to see the wonderful side of every self one consists of, and then proceed into a ritual affirmation of the beauty and loveability of all things and all people. Suitable god forms for the Love-self include Venus, Aphrodite and the mythical Narcissus, whose myth merely reflects a certain male prejudice against this type of invocation.



From within the green gnosis, spells to make people friendly may be cast by simple enchantment or by the use of entities created for this purpose. However it is in face to face meetings that the empathic abilities stimulated by the invocation work most effectively. Apart from the obvious manoeuvres of showing interest in everything the target has to say and affirming and sympathising with most of it, there is another critical factor called "behavioral matching", which usually takes place subconsciously. Basically, in the absence of overtly hostile postures on the part of the target, one should attempt to match the non-verbal behaviour of the target precisely. Sit or stand in the identical bodily posture, make the same movements, use the same degree of eye contact, and talk for similar intervals. As with dominance behaviour, such signals only work if they are not consciously perceived by the recipient. Do not move to match the target's moves and postures immediately. It is also essential to try and match the verbal behaviour and to communicate with the same level of intelligence, social status and sense of humour as the target.

Before I made myself wealthy, I used to practice these abilities when hitch-hiking. Soon, even people whom I found quite ghastly were buying me lunch and transporting me far out of their way. Empathy will get you anywhere.

Orange Magic

Charlatanry, trickery, living by one's wits and thinking fast on one's feet are the essence of the orange power. These mercurial abilities were traditionally associated with the god forms which acted as patrons to doctors, magicians, gamblers and thieves. However the profession of medicine has now partly dissociated itself from charlatanry since doctors discovered that antibiotics and hygienic surgery actually worked. Nevertheless about eighty percent of medications are still basically placebos, and the profession still retains the mercurial caduceus for its emblem. Similarly the profession of magic has become less dependant on charlatanry with the discovery of the quantum-probabilistic nature of enchantment and divination and the virtual abandonment of classical alchemy and astrology. Pure magic is now best described as an expression of the octarine power, having an Uranian character. Yet charlatanry still has its place in magic as in medicine. Let us not forget that all "conjuring tricks" were once part of the shamanic warm up repertoire in which something lost or destroyed is miraculously restored by the magician to get the audience in the right mood before the serious business of placebo healing began. In its classical form, the magician puts a dead rabbit in a hat before pulling out a live one.

To the list of professions drawing heavily on the orange power one must now add salesman, confidence trickster, stockbroker and indeed any profession with an extreme heart attack rating. The motive power of the orange gnosis is basically fear, a species of fear which does not inhibit the user, but rather creates an extraordinary nervous speed that produces quick moves and answers in tight corners.


The apotheosis of the Wit-self is the ability to enter that state of mental overdrive in which the fast response is always forthcoming. This ability is,, paradoxically enough, created by not thinking about thinking, but rather allowing anxiety to partially paralyse the inhibitory process themselves so that the subconscious can throw out a quick witted response without conscious deliberation.


Invocations of the orange power are best delivered at frantic speed and gnosis can be deepened by the performance of mentally demanding tasks such as adding up large lists of numbers in one's head or ripping open envelopes containing difficult questions and answering them instantly; activities which should be persisted with until a breakthrough to the experience of thinking without deliberation is achieved. Varied god forms can be used to give form to the Wit-self. Hermes, Loki, Coyote the Trickster and the Roman Mercurius are often employed.




Orange magic is usually restricted to invocations designed to enhance general quick wittedness in secular activities such as gambling, crime and intellectual pursuits. Enchantments and evocations performed subsequent to an invocation of the orange gnosis rarely seem to give results as effective as the invocation itself in my experience. Perhaps something should be said about crime and gambling for the benefit of those hotheads who may misunderstand what can be done with orange magic in support of such activities. Theft is ludicrously easy performed methodically yet the majority of thieves get caught after a while because they become addicted to anxiety, which they experience as excitement and start taking risks to increase it. The novice thief who, in state of extreme anxiety, takes something in a situation of zero risk, does not of course get caught and neither does the careful professional. However there are few careful professionals because there are far easier ways of making money in most societies for people with that kind of ability. The great majority of thieves however always manage to find some way of incriminating themselves because the anxiety of the theft itself fades, only the anxiety of punishment remains. Those quick witted and outwardly cool enough to thieve successfully can easily make more from salesmanship.




There are three types of persistent gambler. The losers account for two types. Firstly there are those addicted to their own arrogance, who just have to prove that they can beat pure chance or the odds set by the organisers. Secondly there are those addicted to the anxiety of loosing. Even if they win, they invariably throw it away again soon afterwards. Then there are the winners. These people are not gambling at all, either because they are organising the odds and stakes, or because they have inside information, or because they are cheating. This is true orange magic. Poker is not a game of chance if played skilfully, and skilful play includes not playing against persons of equal or superior skill, or persons holding a Smith and Weston to your Four Aces. Most conventional forms of gambling are set up in such a way that the use of anything but the most extreme forms of psychic power will make little difference. I would not bother to bet on odds that I had reduced from an hundred to one to merely sixty to one. However certain results obtained using double blind prescience with horse racing show encouraging potential.


Purple Magic


A large proportion of all the cults throughout history have shared one particular characteristic. They have been led by a charismatic man able to persuade women to freely dispense sexual favours to ther men. When one begins to look, this feature is startlingly common to many ancient cults, monotheistic schismatic sects and modern esoteric groups. Many, if not the majority of adepts past and present were, or are, whoremasters. The mechanism is quite simple, pay the woman in the coinage of spirituality to service the men who repay you with adulation and accept your teachings as a side effect. The adulation from the men then increases your charisma with the women creating a positive feedback loop. It can be a nice little earner until old age or a police raid catches up with the enterprise. The other danger is of course that the women, and eventually the men, may come to feel that constant changes of partners work against their longer term interests of emotional security and reproduction. The turnover in such cults can thus be high, with young adults constantly replacing those approaching early middle age.



Few religions or cults lack a sexual teaching, for any teaching provides a powerful level of control. The vast majority of the more durable and established religions trade on a suppression of so called free love. This pays considerable dividends too. Women's position becomes more secure, and men know who their children are. Naturally adultery and prostitution flourish in such conditions because some people always want a little more than lifelong monogamy has to offer. So it's quite true that brothels are built with the bricks of religion. Indirectly so with conventional religions, directly so with many cults.

All this begs the question of why it is that people have such an appetite for wanting to be told what to do with their sexuality. Why do people have to seek esoteric and metaphysical justification for what they want to do? Why is it so easy to make a living selling water by the river?

The answer, it appears, is that human sexuality has some built in dissatisfaction function of evolutionary origin. Our sexual behaviour is partly controlled by genetics. Those genes most likely to survive and prosper are those that in the female encourage the permanent capture of the most powerful male available and occasional liaisons (clandestine) with any more powerful male that may be temporarily available. Whereas in the male, the genes most likely to prosper are those encouraging the impregnation of as large a number of females as he can support, plus perhaps a few on the sly that other men are supporting. It is interesting to note that only in the human female is oestrous concealed. In all other mammals the fertile time is made abundantly obvious. This appears to have evolved to allow, paradoxically both adultery and increased pair bonding through sex at times when it is reproductively useless. The economic basis of any particular society will usually supply some pressure in favour of a particular type of sexuality and this pressure will be codified as morality which will inevitably conflict with biological pressures. Celibacy is unsatisfactory, Masturbation is unsatisfactory, Monogamy is unsatisfactory, Adultery is unsatisfactory, Polygamy and Polyandry is unsatisfactory and presumably Homosexuality is unsatisfactory, if the renetic merry-go-round of partner exchanges in that discipline is anything to go by.



Nothing in the spectrum of possible sexualities provides a perfect long term solution, but this is the price we pay for occupying the pinnacle of mammalian evolution. So much of our art, culture, politics and technology arises precisely out of our sexual yearnings, fears, desires and dissatisfactions. A society sexually at peace with itself would present a very dull spectacle indeed. It is generally if not invariably tha case that personal creativity and achievement are directly proportional to personal sexual turmoil. This is actually one of the major but often unrecognised techniques of sex magic. Inspire yourself with maximum sexual turmoil and confusion if you really want to find out what you are capable of in other fields. A tempestuous sex life is not a side effect of being a great artist for example. Rather it is the art which is the side effect of a tempestuous sex life. A fanatical religion does not create the suppression of celibacy. It is the tensions of celibacy which create a fanatical religion. Homosexuality is not a side effect of barracks life amongst elite suicide shock troops. Homosexuality creates elite suicide shock troops in the first place.

The Muse, the hypothetical source of inspiration, usually pictured in sexual terms, is the Muse only when one's relationship to her is unstable. Every possible moral pronouncement on sexual behaviour has doubtless been given a million times before, and it would be unseemly for a Chaoist to re-emphasise any of it. However, one thing seems reasonably certain. Any form of sexuality eventually invokes the whole gamut of ecstasy, self-disgust, fear, delight, boredom, anger, love, jealousy, rafe, self-pity, elation and confusion.It is these things which make us human and occasionally superhuman. To attempt to transcend them is to make oneself less than human, not more. Intensity of experience is the key to really being alive and given the choice I'd rather do it through love than war any day.



A dull sex life creates a dull person. Few people manage to achieve greatness in any field without propulsion that a turbulent emotional-sexual life supplies. This is the major secret of sex mgic, the two minor secrets involve the function of orgasm as gnosis and the projection of sexual glamours.

Anything held in the conscious mind at orgasm tends to reach down into the subconscious. Sexual abnormalities can readily be implanted or removed by this method. At orgasm sigils for enchantment or evocation can be empowered either by visualisation or by gazing at the sigil taped to one's partner's forehead for example. However this kind of work is often more conveniently performed auto-erotically. Although the gnosis offered by orgasm can in theory be used in support of any magical objective, it is generally unwise to use it for entropy or combat magic. No spell is ever totally insulted within the subconscious and any leakages which occur can implant quite detrimental associations with the sexuality.

At orgasm an invocation can be triggered, this operation being particularly effective if each partner assumes a god form. The moments following orgasm are a useful time for divinatory vision seeking. Prolonged sexual activity can also lead to stages of trance useful in visual and oracular divination or oracular states of possession in invocation.

The projection of Sexual Glamour for the purposes of attracting others depends on far more than simple physical appearance. Some of the most conventually pretty people lack it entirely, whilst some of the plainest enjoy its benefits to the limit.



To be attractive to another person one must offer them something which is a reflection of part of their self. If the offer becomes reciprocal then it can lead to that sense of completion which is most readily celebrated by physical intimacy. In most cultures it is conventional for the male to display a tough public exterior and for the female to display a softer persona, yet in a sexual encounter each will seek to reveal their concealed factors. The male will seek to show that he can be compassionate and valnerable as well as powerful, whilst the female seeks to display inner strength behind the outward signs and signals of passive receptivity. Incomplete personalities such as those which are machismo to the core, or consist of the polar opposite of this, are never sexually attractive to anyone except in the most transient sense.

Thus the philosophers of love have come to identify a certain androgyny in either sex as an important component of attraction. Some have taken the poetic license to express the quaint ideal that the male has a femal soul and the female a male one. This reflects the truism that to be attractive to others you must first become attracted to yourself. A few hours spent practising being attractive in front of a mirror is a valuable exercise. If you cannot get mildly excited about yourself, then don't expect anyone else to get wildly excited.

The "moon glance" technique is often effective. Basically one briefly closes the eyes and momentarily visualises a lunar crescent in silver behind the eyes with the horns of the moon projecting out of each side of the head behind the eyes. Then one glances into the eyes of a potential lover whilst visualising a silver radiance beaming from your eyes to theirs. This manoeuvre also has the effect of dilating the pupils and usually causes an involuntary smile. Both of these are universal sexual signals, the first of which acts subconsciously.



It is generally unwise to cast spells for the attraction of specific partners but better to conjure for suitable partners in general for oneself or others. One's subconscious usually has a far more subtle appreciation of who really is suitable.

Sexual magic is traditionally associated with the colours of purple (for passion) and silver (for the moon). However, the effectiveness of black clothing as either a sexual or an anti-sexual signal, depending on the style and cut, shows that black is in a sense the secret colour of sex, reflecting the biological and psychological relationship between sex and death.


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Monday, August 27, 2012

Why is it Reasonable to be Rational? by Colin Low

For at least two & a half thousand years, reason has been elevated above all other things. Reason has been elevated above instinct. Reason has been elevated above intuition. Reason has been elevated above God and religion. The single greatest factor in the decline of religion and religious authority has been its inability to deal with the consequences of permitting free rational debate.
What is reason? What is it about reason that gives it such power? Why has it effectively supplanted religion among the cultural elite?

To begin to understand what reason is, we have to go back two and a half thousand years, to the beginnings of philosophy in classical Greece. It was at this time that a community of people began to ask questions about the nature of reality, about human behaviour, about ethics and morality. A question generally implies a debate, and so, when one reads the dialogues of the philosopher Plato, one finds that these are structured as arguments or debates among a small group of people. A question is posed, such as that at the beginning of the dialogue Philebus:
“Socrates: Philebus was saying that enjoyment and pleasure and delight, and the class of feelings akin to them, are a good to every living being, whereas I contend, that not these, but wisdom and intelligence and memory, and their kindred, right opinion and true reasoning, are better and more desirable than pleasure ….”
When one studies these debates, it is clear that the participants already accept that there are styles of argument which are more productive than others. Someone will make a statement, and the other participants will either agree with it, or someone will make a new statement that contradicts or modifies the original position. The discussion proceeds in this way, and more and more material relevant to the discussion is introduced, and reconciled with previous statements, until the participants arrive at a much expanded understanding of the subject under debate. If there are mutually contradictory positions that cannot be reconciled, and participants are being reasonable (that is, playing by the same rules) then this is a genuine impasse that all recognise.
It seems from these very early applications of rational discussion that reason is an agreement about how language is used. For example, if Socrates maintains that the cat is on the mat, and he is being truthful, then no reasonable person would maintain that the cat is not on the mat. If Socrates maintains, as a general property of cats, that all cats are on the mat, then we cannot reasonably deduce that there are any cats in any other place. The recognition that logic is a characteristic of the use of language was made by Plato’s student Aristotle, who went on to codify the first rules of logic.
A more formal and abstract application of rational argument can be found in mathematics. The most famous of the classical mathematicians was Euclid, who lived in Alexandria sometime around 300BC. It is impossible to under-rate the importance of Euclid’s Elements. It is said that next to the Bible, it has been the most translated, published and studied book in the Western world. It was still being used as a standard textbook up to this century. The arguments in Euclid’s Elements offered something miraculous: it was possible to state a proposition, and show beyond any possible doubt that it was true. For all time. For all people. One could argue about beauty and good and evil and God until the cows came home, and get nowhere, but with Euclid you could walk up to Truth and shake its hand. A mathematician could sit down after breakfast, follow the agreed (and largely self-evident) rules of argument, and be famous by lunch-time. He or she could present the proof, and the world would make obeisance. It was a miracle. It had to be divine.
And so it happened. The argument went like this. Everything we see in this world is transitory. Nothing lasts. Nothing is eternal. If, like Plato, we want to ask what is real and true, then we cannot find it in the world we live in. It must exist outside of the phenomenal world of the senses. Mathematical truth exists outside of the world of the senses, and it is both real and eternally true. So mathematical truth must come from another realm of being, what Plato and his followers called the realm of the Intelligible. Just as physical reality is perceived by the senses, so human beings must have another faculty for apprehending the realm of the Intelligible. The followers of Plato believed this came about because we are not unitary beings: we have a divine soul that not only remembers the divine realm from which it has fallen into a corporeal body, but is still capable of apprehending the Intelligible realm, in part through contemplation of mathematics and mathematical truths.
It was at this juncture that philosophy took on mystical flavour that was largely undiluted even as recently as two hundred years ago, and forms the backdrop to Christianity (via profuse borrowings from Aristotle and the Platonist philosopher Plotinus), and the backdrop to the development of modern science (via Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton, all of whom subscribed to the belief that the mathematics of the Intelligible realm was a key to unlock the mysteries of the physical universe).
Let us now back up from all this profoundly accurate mysticism, and return to rationality, and ultimately, to language. Let us adopt the position that rationality is a structure imposed on the use of language. So the question “what is rationality” is in part subsumed within the question “what is language?”. In asking this question at the end of the second millenium we have an advantage over all predecessors. We live in an age when language, via computers, has taken on a new dominance. What began with argument and mathematics has given us a profound understanding of physical law, and in turn that has given us the technology to embody rationality in the form of computer programs. A computer program is encapsulated rationality. This in turn leads to a revolution in our comprehension of language.
This revolution can be stated succinctly. Everyday language is an encoding of the gross laws of physics as they appear to our physical senses. The way in which we structure the world into nameable objects, the relations between these objects, and the time-related processes in which they are involved, are influenced directly the gross physical properties of the world.
Rationality is not arbitrary at all. With some important caveats, it is universal. In order to begin to justify these assertions, it is necessary to look at language in more detail.
Much of the structure of language is spatial and temporal: in, out, behind, before, after, on, under, inside. Verbs not only provide relationships between subjects and objects; they also provide insight into when something happened. “I am running” conveys something different from “I was running” or “I will run”. Adjectives describe many objective attributes of things: big, small, light, heavy, rough, smooth, wet, dry. We understand that there is a degree of subjectivity, but there is an implicit frame of reference: the speaker. We understand that heavy for an average man is about 50 kilos, and less for the average woman. Rough makes me think of sand, or fabric; very rough makes me think of tree bark. I understand that when a French polisher says rough, it probably means “not quite a mirror finish”.
There is a great deal more to language than objective description. There are various social modes of inquiry - how are you, how do you feel, are you well, and so on. I can talk about subjective feelings, beliefs, opinions, but here I am on shaky ground. Much discussion centres around areas of subjectivity; people like to calibrate their feelings, beliefs and internal states with those of others. I can’t be certain what a person means when they say they have a “thumping headache”, because there is no way to share the experience. I have to refer to the memory of my own thumping headaches, and my memory of how I felt at the time. We know that the subjective experience of pain is extremely variable if only because people behave in very different ways - for example, we have many records of life and conditions in the British army in the early nineteenth century that will seem completely incredible to the modern reader.
Language is capable of encompassing much of what we experience, but it functions most efficiently in the realm of shared physical reality. This is the region of consensus. If the cat is on the mat for me, it is one the mat for you. If the cat is in the box, it is not out of the box. If the bottle is empty, it is not full, and if it is full, it is not empty. We can see the structure of rational discussion and logic emerging in simple propositions about shared physical existence.
Real life has boundaries. Lines on maps have finite width, and sometimes we cannot tell which country a tree lies in. The steel ruler I use to measure your height expands in the heat. Already we are beginning to think about ideals: the ideal line with no width, the perfect circle, the frictionless plane, the inelastic string. Mathematics begins where real life leaves off, by providing us with ideal objects with perfectly defined ideal properties.
Take the idea of containment. A container is something like a box with a lid that can contain things. I can put something in the box. I can take something out. I can ask how many things are in the box. I can even put one box inside another box. Real boxes are messy - they have lids, things can be half in and half out, I can’t put an elephant in a matchbox, and so on. The mathematician creates an ideal container called a set. A set is a pure abstraction of the idea of containment. I can put things in a set, and take things out. I can have a set composed of all even numbers, or a set of all people with green eyes. Much of mathematics can be formulated in terms of sets.
The point here is that ordinary language is rooted in our understanding of basic properties of the physical world. Mathematics takes the informal, imprecise language of everyday life and turns it into a formal language that applies to ideal objects with simple and totally defined properties. There are agreed methods of reasoning (the modus ponens) that allow mathematicians to get from A to Z - if A is known to be true, and there is a valid argument that gets us from A to Z (via B, C, D, ….), then Z is also true. Do not be intimidated by the unfamiliar symbols in mathematics. Mathematics is a linguistic exercise, and its symbols are no more alien than the letters in the Cyrillic, Greek or Hebrew alphabets. However, mathematics may be a linguistic exercise, but there is a miracle hidden in it.
The miracle (and it really does seem to be miraculous, no matter how often it is contemplated) is this. Take a simple mathematical model, in the belief that in some way the behaviour of the real world is guided by simple underlying principles. Let the choice of model be inspired by a deep personal intuition. Apply the model to some aspect of the behaviour of the real world. Check the predictions with experiments. Reel back in astonishment. They fit.
The most famous example of this, although it did not take place in the rather naïve order described above, took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the planets in the solar system had been observed for millennia, no one had produced an accurate model that accounted for their motions. Part of the reason for this was the long-held belief that the planets and sun moved around the Earth. Another part of the reason was the lack of sufficiently accurate observations. The second century Graeco-Roman astronomer Ptolemy had attempted a mathematical model based on circular orbits with epicycles, smaller circles that moved around the larger - this attempted to account for the fact that, seen from the Earth, the planets sometimes appear to move backwards along their orbits (moving “retrograde”). It did not work well by modern standards, but it was the right kind of idea, and it was not contradicted by the rough measurements available.
In the sixteenth century, the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546 - 1601) spent his life creating, with the crudest of instruments, a detailed catalogue of observations which he bequeathed to his pupil Johannes Kepler (1571 - 1630). It was Kepler, using the heliocentric ideas of Copernicus and the observations of Brahe who proposed the answer, and declared his three laws of planetary motion: that the orbits were elliptical with the sun at a focus, that a planet swept out equal distances in equal times, and the period of the orbit depended only on the distance from the sun.
It was Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)  however who performed the tour-de-force. Kepler had found an accurate rule that enabled one to predict the positions of planets. He had not found an explanation for why the orbits had that form. Given an arbitrary body set in motion about the sun, he could not predict in advance the path it would take, clearly a requirement for travelling about in a space ship, or for sending a satellite to Mars.
It was Newton who deduced the laws of motion and the law of gravitation, and who developed the mathematical tools necessary to solve general problems concerning gravitating bodies of any kind. His Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, the “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”, has been dubbed the most important scientific text of all time. Not only did it solve specific problems, it provided genuine and deep insight into the structure and mechanism of the solar system, something that only a few hundred years earlier had been regarded as part of the divine realm. Newton took the first giant step in removing God from the creation. His was the first major act of disenchantment. He did it all in his head, and he told other people how it worked, not in general, but in detail, so that any person could understand and reproduce his method and calculations. He told other people how he did it by using marks on paper. By using language. We can still read his thoughts today, and reproduce his reasoning and calculations hundreds of years after his death.
This is the conclusive proof, if you are not already convinced, that mathematics is a language. A person makes marks on paper. Another person reads them. Given adequate intelligence and background, the second person can fully comprehend the substance and detail of what the first person is trying to convey (this is certainly true in most areas of mathematics).


We have now arrived at an important point. We began this essay by considering rationality as a convention in the use of language, and followed this convention into its formal use in mathematics. We have arrived at the magical discovery that there is a congruence between the formal use of language and the physical world we live in. There is nothing obvious about this. It took the human race hundreds of generations to arrive at this discovery. It is a discovery that owes as much to the rational mysticism of platonism and neoplatonism as any other human discipline. This congruence is an example of simulation.
The physicist David Deutsch has pointed out that our brains obey the laws of physics. There is no evidence that they do not, and a great deal of evidence, in the form of detailed models of cell function, that they do. But a human brain (such as Isaac Newton’s brain) can compute the paths the planets will take in the sky. We have also been able to manufacture complex machines that will do the same thing, and they also obey the laws of physics. (It would be impossible to design and manufacture a computer without an exceedingly good knowledge of the laws of physics in the first place.)
This means that a part of reality (a brain, a computer) can simulate another part of reality (the solar system) in detail. Deutsch calls this property, and it is a property of the real world we live in, self-similarity. That is, parts of reality can simulate, to an arbitrary degree of precision, other parts of reality.
To give an example, in the University of Oxford there is the world’s most realistic simulation of a human heart, composed of millions of simulated nerve and muscle cells, which in turn are composed a dozens of simulated ion channels in a simulated cell membrane. The simulation is now so accurate it can be used to study heart disease and the effects of drugs. Simulations are now used routinely in many areas of industry because it is less costly and just as accurate to simulate a system. Deutsch comments:
Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds and our artifacts) of understanding it. There are mathematical symbols in physical reality. The fact that it is we who put them there does not make them any less physical. In those symbols - in our planetariums, books, films and computer memories, and in our brains - there are images of physical reality at large, images not just of the appearance of objects, but of the structure of reality. There are laws and explanations, reductive and emergent. There are descriptions and explanations of the Big Bang and of sub-nuclear particles and processes; there are mathematical abstractions; fiction; art; morality; shadow photons; parallel universes. To the extent that these symbols, images and theories are true - that is, they resemble in appropriate respects the concrete or abstract things they refer to - their existence gives reality a new form of self-similarity, the self-similarity we call knowledge.
Deutsch’s point here is profound. Once we abandon the Cartesian duality of mind and external reality, and treat our brains and computers as physical devices operating according to physical laws, then the ability of one physical system to simulate another comes as a surprise. It isn’t in any way obvious that this should be so. It is possible (Deutsch gives an example of a chess board world) to think of worlds that operate by laws which are not capable of supporting this self-similarity.
Deutsch also points out that this property is essential for life as we know it, in that living organisms embody knowledge of their environment in order to maintain their internal coherence. A universe without the self-similarity property would not be capable of supporting living organisms of any kind, far less human beings.
Deutsch’s arguments are not obscure. They derive from a long-standing question that dates from the origins of  computer science: what kinds of computation can a computer carry out.
The notion of a ‘computation’ or an ‘algorithm’ is not well defined, and in the 1930’s there were a number of proposals. That is, a number of mathematicians attempted to formalise their intuitive notions of ‘computation’, based on the kinds of paper-and-pencil computations that people had been doing for centuries. These quite different proposals were subsequently proved to be equivalent - that is, if you could compute something by one method, you could compute it by any other. Although there was no way to prove that this was the limit to computation, the limit was embodied in something called “The Church-Turing Hypothesis”, after the mathematicians Alonzo Church and Alan Turing. Without going into the details, one can liken this model of computation as equivalent to what you can do with a large piece of paper, a pencil, and a rubber. You can use silicon and electrons instead, and it will go a lot faster, but it can’t compute anything that the paper and pencil can’t.
We know that computers can be used to simulate physical systems. The question is, given the constraint on computation imposed by the Church-Turing Hypothesis, is there any limit to the kinds of physical system that can be simulated? This is a completely legitimate and well-posed question. Is there anything we know of in the laws of physics which cannot be simulated, even in principle.
The Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman was interested in this question. He realised a Church-Turing computer could not simulate a quantum mechanical system. This is important because the laws of physics are quantum mechanical. At the level of everyday life we do not observe many of these effects, and we have approximations (classical physics) which work at this level, but classical physics is just an approximation, a convenient rule of thumb that simplifies calculations involving objects on the scale of human beings. A Church-Turing computer can simulate behaviour at this human scale, but not behaviour on the tiny quantum mechanical scale. Imagine what it would be like if we could use computer simulation to simulate the behaviour of any system composed of objects larger than a billiard ball, but nothing smaller. What a bizarre situation! Certain types of system would be essentially unknowable in principle. We would live in a universe with a cosmic censor inking out parts of reality, and we'd never really be sure where the precise boundary between the knowable and the unknowable was.
This is not the kind of question that had ever been asked in the past. There had always been some kind of naive assumption of "Seek and ye shall find", even if it meant, like John Dee, we had to implore God for the answers. The idea of a structural Cloud of Unknowing built into the fabric of reality had never occured to anyone. The fact that we had already been able to perform basic mathematical calculations about quantum mechanical systems such as the hydrogen atom suggested that the situation was not as bad as it might be (that is, our brains can simulate the hydrogen atom in detail), and Feynman was able to propose a simple computer-like system that did simulate other quantum mechanical systems.
In 1985 I was given a paper by a colleague who had just returned from a visit to the University of Oxford. The paper was written by someone called David Deutsch, and in it he proposed that as computers were physical devices (just as pencil and paper is physical), then the types of computation possible would ultimately be limited by the kinds of physical devices we can build. He then went on to show, using the known laws of quantum mechanics, the theoretical existence of a “Universal Quantum Computer”, a computer based on quantum mechanics that could simulate any quantum mechanical system. The old Church-Turing Hypothesis had been formulated by mathematicians who had intuitively adopted models of computation based on everyday life (paper-and-pencil). The real world does not work that way.


Deutsch’s paper had an immense impact on me. Nearly fifteen years later it has had an immense impact on physics and computer science. People are building quantum computers. Deutsch has been awarded the Dirac Prize in recognition of the importance of his work. The theoretical framework for quantum computing is being laid down. We are as far from a useable quantum computer today as Alan Turing was from a Pentium PC, but the impact is far more than carrying out computations. This work is transforming our view of physics. In trying to explore the properties of complex quantum mechanical systems from the point of view of representing, computing and transmitting information, many new insights are being made. Some of these (for example, insights and experiments into a quantum mechanical phenomenon called entanglement or non-locality) will almost certainly lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of reality. 
It should be clear now that the phenomenon that Deutsch calls self-similarity isn’t a vague metaphysical principle. It is derived directly from what we know about the theoretical ability of a physical system (“the universal quantum computer”) to simulate any other physical system. This has been formulated by the physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose as “The Turing Principle”. In this form it is a statement as physically significant as Newton’s Laws of Motion, or the Laws of Thermodynamics, or Einstein’s Equivalence Principle. The Turing Principle is:
There exists an abstract universal computer whose repertoire includes any computation that any physically possible object can perform.
In his book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch proposes a number of variants, the strongest of which is:
It is possible to build a virtual reality generator whose repertoire includes every physical possible environment.
That is, we can build a system, a mechanism, out of physical matter available to us which can perfectly simulate any part of reality. It can simulate reality to the extent that (given an arbitrary clever programmer) if we were to interact with it, we would not know that it was a machine.
This is the idea of simulation/self-similarity in a form where it is a principle of physics. The laws of the physical universe appear to be constituted such that a physical system can simulate any other physical system on any scale to any degree of precision. This principle is a necessary condition for the existence of living organisms as we understand them - a living organism is a limited simulator of reality. How does a bird fly if it does not embody deep and extensive knowledge about air and gravity?
It now becomes apparent why the universe is comprehensible: it is comprehensible because has the property that it is possible to create physical devices that can simulate reality. The human brain is such a physical device.
The idea of self-similarity has a long history in European thought. During the Renaissance, when many (now considered) occult and hermetic ideas were current at the highest levels of intellectual debate, this idea was expressed in the form of the concepts of the macrocosmand the microcosm. The microcosm, or human being, was believed to be a simulacrum of the creation, and this provided a mechanism whereby the powers of the macrocosm (the stars and planets) could act on human beings. Conversely, a human being could exploit the congruence to influence the macrocosm, and some magical or theurgic systems exploited this idea that a human being could affect the supernal realms of the divine.

The idea of self similarity was almost certainly suggested by the Bible, which states
“And God created man in His image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them”.
The idea was further elaborated in Jewish Kabbalah in many differing forms, too complex to detail here, in which a human being was seen as a complete functioning simulacrum or embodiment of the divine powers that provided the dynamic basis for the visible creation. Another variant on the idea can be found in the legendary (but nevertheless highly influential) Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trimegistus, which again implies that the lower world is in some sense congruent with the upper world.
Another idea of great antiquity is that of “the world as a text” in the most literal sense. Jewish mystics believed that the whole of creation was detailed in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), and hence all the hidden mysteries of the creation were to be found there. The Kabbalist would study the Torah in the expectation that with divine guidance, operational mysteries such as secret names would be revealed. These names could then be used in practical and mystical workings. It was this belief in the operational potency of names (subroutines, procedures, URLs) concealed in the text of the Torah that gave rise to the title “Baal Shem”, or “Master of the Holy Name”.
This ancient idea of "the world as text" is no longer implausible; it is guaranteed by the Turing Principle. Consider the idea that we can decide to build a successively larger and larger computer to simulate more and more of reality. Perhaps we need an interlinked network of such megacomputers. This detail hardly matters - we can consider a network of computers to be one extremely large computer.
This computer is going to need a program. This program will embody all the laws of physics (we already know how to embody many of these laws), and so it will describe how every subatomic particle in the universe simulation will behave. The Turing Principle guarantees that we can write such a program. The important point is that the program does not have to grow in proportion to the size or complexity of the system under simulation.
To give an example, suppose I want to simulate how two million particles interact via gravity. The program that simulates two or three particles is just as complicated as the program that simulates two million, and we know we can simulate two or three. The larger the number of particles, the more physical resources such as memory I will need in my computer, and the longer the computation will take, but the program does not become more complicated.
As we simulate more and more of the universe, we will reach a point where the program does not become more complex. We can then print it out onto paper and deposit it in a library. This program contains everything you need to know to carry out a perfect simulation of reality. Of course, it needs a computer to run on, so it would be useful for the program to contain a complete simulation of the computer it was designed for. If this sounds improbable, consider that many computer games written in the early 1980s were written for computers that no longer exist, so enthusiasts have written simulators for most of these early computers, and run these games on current PCs, which provide perfect simulations of early Atari and Sinclair computers.
So there we have it: the “world as a text”. The idea is not in the least far fetched. The Turing Principle guarantees that such a text can be created. A computer program is a purely rational exercise, akin to writing a proof in mathematics (when I worked as a computer science lecturer in the University of London, first-year students were taught to prove their programs correct by using standard mathematical proof techniques).
I am now in a position to propose an answer to the question posed by the title of this essay: why is it reasonable to be rational?
Rationality is a specialised use of language that mirrors properties of physical reality. In the form of mathematics, rationality leads to the ability to carry out simulations of physical systems, and this ability to simulate reality led directly to the scientific and technological revolution of the last three centuries.
An even more specialised form of mathematical language is the computer program, and this leads in turn to even more sophisticated simulations of reality. These simulations are now used routinely to design aeroplanes, to crash-test virtual cars, to evaluate the effects of virtual drugs, to design new medicines. The most sophisticated physical simulator we know of is the human brain: it can fly aeroplanes to the edge of space at several times the speed of sound, drive cars at hundreds of miles an hour, compute the trajectory of a tennis or cricket ball flying at over a hundred miles an hour, perform the most incredible gymnastics and acrobatics, juggle several balls, balance the most incredible assortment of junk, climb vertical surfaces, and spot a member of the opposite sex in the most improbable circumstances. We can echo the sentiment of Hermes Trimegistus that “A great miracle, Asclepius, is man.”
It is reasonable to be rational because the laws of physics make simulation possible. Living beings exploit this fact in order to exist. There would be no living beings if such simulation was not possible. Knowledge, whether genetic or acquired, whether dispositional or propositional, is the basis for survival in a hostile and changing environment. A paramecium or amoeba is as miraculous on a small scale as a human being, in their ability to transform simple substances into complex proteins and enzymes, their ability to reproduce and so pass on the knowledge of how to use the raw stuff of the world to maintain coherency. Life is no less a miracle and no less a wonder just because it is rationally comprehensible. Its miracle is based in something just as mysterious as a divine craftsman: the miracle of self-similarity, the congruence of part to whole, an extraordinary closure of the idea that we are made in the image of God.
Rationality is a way of using language such that language can be used to simulate complex physical systems. The rational use of language provides us with access to the “deep structures” underlying physical reality, such as the Hilbert Space model of quantum mechanics. We can use language to create programs for universal simulators. The Neoplatonic idea that reason has the power to grasp the forms or archetypes underpinning reality, an intuition based on an inspired guess about the significance of reason and mathematics, is validated.

There is more.
The Turing Principle states that complete simulation of any physical system is possible. With sufficient resources, it would be possible to simulate the universe. From the point of view of a self-conscious organism simulating the universe, the ancient mystical goal of the union of microcosm and macrocosm would be achieved. To simulate the universe I would simulate you, perfectly, and I would simulate myself, perfectly. I would have perfect knowledge (within the limits of physical law) of all that is. Deutsch equates this point with the Omega Point the physicist Frank Tipler, who owes a debt to the Christian philosopher and theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Western mysticism still exists against a dualistic backdrop of body and spirit, and the belief that the subject of mysticism is spirit, where true knowledge can be found. The creation is disenchanted, a dead thing, mechanical. The human body is a dead thing, mechanical, a “conscious corpse”, as one of the books of the Corpus Hermeticum puts it. This is a relic of beliefs that can be found in the writings of Plato, and are probably much older.
Deutsch presents us with a monist view of a world in which there is no Platonic Intelligible, no metaphysical dual of the real world, no hidden realm of secret knowledge to be wrested from angels by the power of secret names. His is a purely rational world, but it is no longer a disenchanted world, a world of clacking billiard balls and clicking gears. It is a world of infinite quantum parallelism, of non-locality, of entanglement, of multiple unseen dimensions, of black holes and space-time singularities. In a non-local, entangled world, there are no billiard balls. There is no matter. We have mathematics (the axiomatic Hilbert Space formulation of quantum mechanics) that provides superb simulations of this world, but the mathematical entities do not seem to correspond to any simple physical intuition. The idea that there are things with properties turns out to be unsustainable. Where there are properties, they don’t seem to exist anywhere in particular. It is a world a thousand times more mysterious and magical than anything to be found in the most extravagant works of mysticism.
“But,” the diehard dualist will protest, “It is still rational, it is still mechanical.”
There are arguments about that too. Roger Penrose has made the case, using rational argument of course, that human mathematical reasoning exceeds what is possible using reasoning automata. The sophistication of his argument excites admiration, and whether he is correct or not is to some extent, irrelevant.
It is irrelevant because whether we are automata or not, creativity is still creativity. Beauty is still beauty. Kindness and compassion are still kindness and compassion. Everything we know, in our genes, in our books, in our cultures, in our heads, keeps us alive on a lump of rock flying through an endless vacuum, keeps us one step ahead of the scythe. Set against the backdrop of geological time, it is a wild and desperate explosion of protoplasm that has reached the critical point of any simulation, the ability to include limited simulations of itself. We are self-conscious.
In the unimaginably vast and mysterious universe where we live we will find our angels and our devils, sages who are the living embodiment of wisdom, works of mysterious knowledge, and perhaps, the text that is the text of the world. We will find every imaginable form of life. All this is suggested by the Turing Principle, because it states that the universe is self-similar. This principle was arrived at, not through abstruse metaphysical arguments, but through a conceptually simple application of known laws of physics to the process of computation. The answer to the question: can one quantum mechanical system perfectly simulate another quantum mechanical system, is yes. This is an extraordinary and unexpected result of straightforward mathematical reasoning. As a conceptual breakthrough, it is as profound as Newton’s Laws of Motion. The ability of one part of the universe to simulate another is, in the most abstract sense, the phenomenon we call life. Life is as basic and universal a principle as gravitation. It can and will exist everywhere, in every possible embodiment.
Perhaps even in every imaginable embodiment, because imagination is a physical process that is self-similar to a thing imagined. That is, what is imagined can be simulated. A cave picture (a physical object) of a buffalo is self-similar to a buffalo (a physical object). Computer animations are self-similar to entities in the human imagination – that is how planes are designed these days, and questions about the physical behaviour of a complex flying object are now easier to answer with a computer simulation than with a wind tunnel. What we do today with silicon, we will do tomorrow with DNA. Every human artefact on this planet is a simulation of an imagined object and began its life in the human mind. There is little that is impossible. The Turing Principle restores enchantment to the universe, because it suggests that the phenomena of life and creativity are in physical fact something that human beings have always believed to be true: a well of unfathomable possibility, an endless unfolding of wonder and mystery.

One of the finest documents of the Renaissance is Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. It still has the power to move:
God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe, built this home, this universe we see all around us, a venerable temple of his godhead, through the sublime laws of his ineffable Mind. The expanse above the heavens he decorated with Intelligences, the spheres of heaven with living, eternal souls. The scabrous and dirty lower worlds he filled with animals of every kind. However, when the work was finished, the Great Artisan desired that there be some creature to think on the plan of his great work, and love its infinite beauty, and stand in awe at its immenseness. Therefore, when all was finished, as Moses and Timaeus tell us, He began to think about the creation of man. But he had no Archetype from which to fashion some new child, nor could he find in his vast treasure-houses anything which He might give to His new son, nor did the universe contain a single place from which the whole of creation might be surveyed. All was perfected, all created things stood in their proper place, the highest things in the highest places, the midmost things in the midmost places, and the lowest things in the lowest places. But God the Father would not fail, exhausted and defeated, in this last creative act. God's wisdom would not falter for lack of counsel in this need. God's love would not permit that he whose duty it was to praise God's creation should be forced to condemn himself as a creation of God.
Finally, the Great Artisan mandated that this creature who would receive nothing proper to himself shall have joint possession of whatever nature had been given to any other creature. He made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him "Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgement, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by Our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature. We have placed you at the world's centre so that you may survey everything else in the world. We have made you neither of heavenly nor of earthly stuff, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with free choice and dignity, you may fashion yourself into whatever form you choose. To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgement, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine."
Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man!
Freedom is about unconstrained choice. We are self-simulating simulators, and within the limits of physical law we can be (simulate) anything we want. Pico’s Oration was never more valid than now.
And the answer to the question: why is it reasonable to be rational? Rationality is how human beings become self-similar to the universe.