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Title: Otherworlds Review: Afterwords
Author: The Otherworlds Review
Date: October 31, 2018
Language: en
Topics: spirituality, magic, Occult

The Otherworlds Review

Otherworlds Review: Afterwords

The Orphic initiators of antiquity, the Orpheotelestai, were said to

travel from city-state to city-state healing ancestral curses,

performing initiations, offering deliverance by way of sacrifice, and

distributing piles of magical books. One such book, the Orphic Hymns,

contains ritual technology for the invocation of the gods in nocturnal

rites. Another, the lesser known Orphic Lithica, functions as a handbook

on the magical uses of stones by the ritual practitioner. Stones figure

prominently in the reemergent magical traditions of the present, and

these traditions are beginning to wake up to the danger posed by the

commodification of sacred stone and plant allies. This danger is nowhere

more evidenced than in the aesthetic-extraction frenzy of crystal

addiction. Crystals are traded en masse, entirely divorced from the

worlds and cosmologies of meaning from which they emerge. Millions of

stone beings stand locked up in the museums, storefront display cases

and collections of stone hoarders spread throughout the empire; millions

waiting to be liberated by the illegalist arts and put into circulation

through the web of conspiracy between friends and accomplices as gifts.

Gift economics: the ancient anarchist tradition of passing talismans

from hand to hand to be mobilized in the process of co-creating free

lives. The Dionysian occultist Georges Bataille recognized that the act

of gifting imbued an object with otherworldly force and forged a

powerful bond between the recipient and the giver.

We submit these seven transmissions,

now bound together as another sacred book

, as a gift to the anarchist galaxy. In this, we recall that Dionysos

marked Ariadne’s apotheosis by placing a circlet upon her head and

thereafter raising it to the heavens as a constellation of seven stars.

This book is our crown. It hangs in the heavens challenging us – as with

the mystery cultists and theurgists – to uncover, following Kirsten

Brydum’s Spiritual Anarchism, the divinity within ourselves. In a sense,

this has always been the path of the anarchist: to realize our capacity

to engage the world at the level of story, to weave with meaning itself,

to actualize the miraculous. Among the higher anarchist epiphanies we

find the capacity to conjure – seemingly from nowhere – a black clad

group to lay ruin to the avenues where the powerful live. Like the

Harii, the shadow army who painted themselves black and ambushed the

Roman legions under the dark moon, the anarchists employ this magic to

interrupt (even momentarily) the ceaseless skyward piling of carnage

euphemized as development. This leap into the void has been debated,

refined and put into praxis by the practitioners of anarchist magic

around the world.

Shortly after the publication of our final communique, the repressive

apparatus of the occupied territory known as Ontario arrested seven

anarchists under suspicion of having taken part in one such nocturnal

conjuration. In their press conference, the mouthpieces of the State

begged the public’s assistance in identifying a yet unknown twenty-three

others believed to have conspired with the seven under arrest. 23

others. 23 masked ones. 23 in clandestinity. Here the State falls into

its own trap. For generations, chaos magicians (those committed to

finding the ways of magic) and Discordians (those devoted to Eris,

goddess of chaos) have studied the numerological mysteries and weirdness

of the number 23. This ritual inquiry permeated the work of several

groups, including the Temple of Psychic Youth:

What the central TOPY ritual consisted of, at least structurally, was

that on the 23^(rd) of each month, at 2300 hours, the dedicated adepts

would perform a sigilising ritual in and/or on an artwork designed by

themselves specifically for the desired goal. This piece of highly

charged talismanic art was then sent in to a TOPY “station” (bigger and

more administrative headquarters than the Access Points). The idea was

to “impose” or inspire self discipline and regularity, to unite with

other adepts in time, to initiate personal empirical research about

ritual magick and, not forgetting, to honor the weird synchronistic

concept of the number 23, as “inherited” from TOPY mentors William S.

Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The augmented level of 23 consecutive sent-in

“23-sigils” was reached by very few individuals connected to the TOPY

EUROPE headquarters. Usually, however, that level of commitment to an

experimental (yet communal) goal manifested itself in other ways too and

thus quite a few people were able to achieve quite a lot.

In this method, we see the diffuse and subversive potential of the

anarchist methodology applied to magic, the joining of forces together

for a particular effort and the subsequent diffusion of those forces

again when the aims have been achieved. We assume the incompetency of

the State and thus the radiant innocence of everyone they’ve ever

accused. All power to the ineffable 23 who evade capture, and what’s

more, understanding. The State claims to have identified seven but can

never capture 23, for that number belongs to the otherworlds. Sacrifice

opens a doorway between one world and another. We relinquish our

ownership of these seven stars – sacrifice them to the otherworlds – in

pious yearning for the twenty-three unwritten. This doorway is the

narrow gate, a state of exception, an inversion inflected upon reality,

a sun in the underworld, a black flame in ours.

A rare and anomalous stone, found only in a specific cave near Thunder

Bay, Ontario, was discovered in recent years – a chevron amethyst (a

stone itself born out of Dionysos’ regret following an episode of

killing rage against human civilization), similar to the “super seven”

stone of Brazil, but with inclusions of twenty-three metals and minerals

– known curiously as Auralite 23. This combination of elements is found

nowhere else in the world, and has lead some to theorize that the

ancient stone was formed either from the flux of creation early in the

earth’s creation or by a meteoric impact which brought the specific

combination of metals and minerals from the heavens and forged them into

a purple stone of primordial and otherworldy energy. The stone, like the

orphic initiates, is thus a child of earth and starry sky. Its

frequency, like the 23 appended to its name, is harmonized with the

anarchic frequency and nothing short of initiatory. During the solar

eclipse which inaugurated this project, we arranged eight of these

stones as a chaosphere pointing in all directions to the limits of this

world.

Birthed in eclipse, six issues were published under the full moon, one

under the dark moon. Six under the mirror of the sun, one when the moon

was fully masked up. In Hesiod one reads of the Golden Age in which

humanity had no need for agriculture because “the fruitful earth,

unforced, bore them fruit abundantly and without stint,” followed by the

Silver Age and then the Bronze Age, each epoch inferior to the previous

one. There is a primitivist memory of Eden embedded within this text,

but in the valuation of these metals and the pessimism about the

possibility of a different sequence of events, we see King Abacus rear

its ugly head. As anarchists and animists, we reject that imposition of

value and that determinism, but we can still see, following astrological

correspondences, that a Golden Age is a solar age and a Silver Age a

lunar one. Anarchy too has had its alternating solar and lunar phases:

solar when our orators and communards and propagandists of the deed

bring the blazing light of the Beautiful Idea to the world as a freely

given gift; lunar when we retreat into magic, mysticism, introspection,

and the reflective and nurturing aspects of our subterranean networks

and cultures. While we eschew periodization and progressivism, we posit

that the next aeon is naturally and necessarily a Stellar one, an age of

many suns.

Looking again at the six and one issues of this project, we see that the

full moon issues are Solar, and the dark moon issue Lunar. The end of

Otherworlds Review and the publication and dissemination of this book is

the beginning of the Stellar phase of the greater spiritual anarchist

project, an explosive and expansive leap into the multiplicitous

unknown. We quoted Feral Pines in our first issue: “Blow up the sun.”

Like all good insurrectionaries, we want to see our attacks reproduced

and generalized. Anyone can write and speak and act in the name of the

Otherworlds. We’re just “some anarchists,” after all. Nameless, masked,

collective, ethereal, everywhere. Like the FAI, CCF, ELF, and ALF before

us, among others.

Otherworlds Review is over, but the Otherworlds themselves are always

(t)here, and our texts contain keys and clues to the doors and guides by

which you might find us within. Just as the moon is a mirror, so too is

the word “Review” which we chose for our title. We wrote from the

perspective of the Otherworlds, gazing upon and analyzing the news and

events of the so-called material world, this chess-playing automaton of

yours. We looked back, we “re-viewed,” like the Angel of History, like

Epimetheus, like 2Pac “starin’ at the world through my rearview.” And in

doing so we held up a mirror by which you, the readers, might see

yourselves for the starry and Otherwordly insurgents you are. As we now

re-view the project itself, we offer you the invitation to participate

in an “Otherworlds Pre-view,” to direct your own gaze into the

Otherworlds and see what they have to offer for yourselves, to leap into

your Promethean and Luciferian potential. Just remember that the

Otherworlds will gaze back into you as well.

In seven stars you could glimpse a constellation. The most successful

strategies of war. You, the smudged rendering in these mirrors with your

claws and fangs, be free in your anarchist visioning and trajectory.

Autonomous magic, armored, spills freely into the fortified containers

of the vast heart of insurgent action, tended by the bright guides, dark

shadows, and burning black flames who reside in the throneless ruins at

the eternally obscured and readily revealed location of the Otherworlds.

If you’ve followed us this far, allow us to speak freely in these final

words:

Our transmissions have lead us, like all previous anarcho-spiritist

endeavors, to a chasm spreading out below us between the written word

and that which cannot be spoken. Now is the time to jump. Suffice to

say, the anarchists need magic and the magicians need anarchy. We must

equip ourselves with the songs of the green ones and the stars and

stones. Our situation demands the means to open onto other worlds. This

one will not be saved. The horizon of revolution has been metabolized by

a varied apocalypse spread throughout all layers of existence. Mere

survival is as insufficient as it is unlikely. We will have no meaning

but what we weave ourselves. The most dangerous among our enemies

already consciously employ ritual forms. We invite you to arm your

desire that you may fight back on all levels.

We have never fought alone. This is an invocation. A call, yes, but not

in the way the word has come to signify – within some corners of the

anarchist galaxy – a particular aesthetic. Our gesture aligns more with

the ancestral and experimental ritual techniques by which humans call to

presence the polyvalent divine.

We call, to this place and this moment, the anarchist spirit. We make

this invocation only by the grace of the multiple currents of

insurrectionary tradition which tend in this direction and we offer

thanks to those spirits who brought us to this point. We call to all

those ancestors of path whose lives and struggles lend us language and

means amidst the low key apocalypse of this decaying social order. Lend

us your wisdom so we might learn from your mistakes. Walk with us to

heal these generations worth of trauma. Hold us so that we might hold on

in turn.

Blessings to the original inhabitants of this land and to the war for

survival waged on this continent for more than five hundred years.

Blessings to those spirits brought to these shores as chattel, included

only as the outside, whose descendants foment slave insurgencies and

tend subterranean lines of flight, evading capture and slaying masters

in order to build worlds inside the void left by the two fifths of

humanity stolen in the foundational document of this so-called nation.

Blessings to the immigrant anarchist currents which have crisscrossed

this continent for generations – the conspirators, assassins,

translators, underground printers, forgers, propagandists by the deed,

teachers of the peoples’ chemistry, devotees of the Idea who’ve endured

waves of deportation to live without borders.

Blessings to the abolitionists, destroyers of the apparatuses of

capture, dreamers of negation against the prison world.

Blessings to the mystics, the queers, the ranters, the animists, the

walkers between veils, denizens of the liminal, the freaks – exiles from

all but the worlds built between us.

Blessings to the flesh, which provides the ground for revolutions that

will have occurred but remain imperceptible. Blessings to the forgotten.

Blessings to the wild and those who fight on its side. Blessings to all

that blooms and crawls and flies. Blessings to the waters and the

flames, to the stones and the stars and the trees that stretch between

them.

As this project draws to its close, we pray for the loving complicity of

all assembled spirits. As we speak, secret associations convene in the

name of spirit war. The collapse continues, may we meet it together and

joyously. Our enemies have stayed in power by appearing as, to quote

James Baldwin, “disenchanted, and in this, also lay the authority of

their curses.” The curse is lifted; their authority refused. Everything

is on the table. We do not lack for ways.

As penned by one of our high priestesses in her revolutionary letters:

ALL POWER

TO JOY, which will remake the world.

Written in blood and ash, our last words echo those spoken by countless

martyrs before us:

LONG LIVE ANARCHY!

• • •

APPENDICES

We receive and transmit the following submissions from our readers:

I Am Named After My Grandfather

On a very small peanut farm

outside of Montgomery, AL

there is a dusty trailer

full of memories

belonging to my grandfather

They are dead, like him.

Forgotten by time, apathy, estate lawyers, jealous second wife, dust

plaid cloth

drawings of trees

filing cabinets

carefully typed diary entries no one wants to read

mercury dimes

pictures of my grandmother

so many pictures of her

pictures of me before I left the family

aerial bombing photos from World War 2

little toy trucks

Alabama Trucking Association coasters

When she died, everything good of his died too.

Anything good that survived the basement furnace in Tennessee

where he worked as an orphan

died with that cancer.

I guess he didn’t trust himself with it.

old before he was old

looking back forever

spotted and cantankerous

a scots irish callous

swollen by whiskey, pipe smoke,

and the pride of whiteness.

He called me once

out of the blue

drunk

to complain about the sp*cs

at least they work

not like the n*****s

he said

HAHAHA coughing, gurgled, he broke up

I started yelling

and hung up the phone.

A 2 minute rehearsal for my relationship to my bloodline

He’s rotting now.

still dying

always resurfacing

being exorcised

He whispers in Charlottesville

and Charleston

and Las Vegas

everywhere

a bitter man calls his grandson with proud acid nostalgia on his tongue.

I threw out everything I was given

that survived the dusty death of that trailer

except for a framed “R”

made out of old quarters

It hides under my bed, as a reminder, I guess.

I don’t know of what.

To not store the only decency I have left

far away.

to trust myself with it

to open it

to feel something other than bitterness and anger

I’m trying not to live in that basement furnace

But living out in the open is getting dangerous

and there’s a storm coming

with my grandfather’s words

on the wind.

• • •

Sigils: A Simple Primer for the Brave

Sigils are user-crafted image-symbols charged with magical power. Magic

is a body of practices which approaches the undefinable, though accepted

definitions range from the traditional “science and art of causing

change in conformity with the will” to the more anarchic “spiritual

technology of organic belief.” The dayside reality in which we live and

struggle is traversed by hidden powers, beings, entire worlds, and they

contain unknown allies, untapped energies, even the spirits of our

fallen comrades and ancestors. Magical techniques such as sigil-craft

utilize natural forces which cannot be fully controlled by the

techno-industrial Authority or its state religion – Science – and they

remain potent tools of self-empowerment. No servant of order can take

away these secret weapons in our great mutiny.

Sigils are a profoundly accessible form of magic and range from the

exceedingly simple to the vastly complex; for the sake of brevity this

small text will only cover the basic components of sigil-craft and the

metaphysical powers that pertain to it. They operate by enshrouding

their creators’ intentions in the shadow of the collective unconscious,

and thereby smuggling those intentions through the internal checkpoint

which stands between our conscious and unconscious selves, a gate

guarded by the being chaos magicians call the Psychic Censor and we

anarchists know as the cop in our heads. The materials you will need are

simple: a piece of paper, a writing implement, your body, and an

instrument with which to eventually destroy the sigil you have created.

Step One: The Seeing

This step may appear to be the easiest aspect of the crafting process,

but it is by far the most difficult. Because sigils are images

formulated with intent and then cast out into the collective

dream-realms, the forms in which they manifest in our material world

rely on unpredictable, chaotic, and chance-based forces. Sigils are

simply ideas which are sent high into the formless aether and then

allowed to drift down into our dense materiality, like dust which rises

from the footprints of a desert wanderer and settles in a known shape.

Thus in order for a sigil (or any form of magical spell or charm) to

“work” the practitioner must be highly intentional and specific.

Utilizing a language you are fluent in is crucial to maintain the

clarity of your intention – many operatives simply write a sentence to

begin.

Step Two: The Grasping

One must consider every possible effect of a hope or idea becoming real.

Imagine yourself at distinct moments in as many possible futures as you

can. Your original expression may go through a number of refinements

before you are ready to unleash it. It can be common for desires

formulated and cast as sigils to become real via unexpected means, or

with unexpected consequences, and these unmeant outcomes are directly

related to the specificity of your original statement of intent. For

example, a former comrade once wrote “I want to see a raccoon” and the

next morning saw a dead, rotting raccoon in a ravine while walking along

a road; when they more clearly wrote “I want to see a raccoon playing on

an oak branch” (probably closer to their original hope) they saw a giant

raccoon frolicking on a mighty oak in the woods a week later. While any

event can have totally unforeseen outcomes, it is necessary to allow a

time of silence and deliberation before proceeding. There can be no real

quantification of this process: this is the time of understanding.

Step Three: The Scribing

Once the desire is sufficiently formed, it must be transmuted from

legibility into abstraction, from the realm of known symbols to the

realm of unknown icons. The methods by which one can accomplish this are

as many as the the Ways of Art. Some operatives create a sigil by

drawing or painting images which arise in their waking mind’s eye or

dreams while meditating on their statements of intent. Another simple

and proven method is to remove the vowels and repeating letters from the

statement and to combine the remaining consonants via multiple

re-drawings and simplifications into a single entity. The point of this

step in the craft is to lose sight of the original meaning of your

statement. It is important for the sigil to be scribed upon a sheet of

paper, cloth, skin or other object which can eventually be hidden or

destroyed.

Step Four: The Charging

A sigil, once realized, can then be filled with power from other planes

of reality and released. Because Western civilization has rooted out,

disembodied, or buried all cultural rituals used to reach gnosis, or

“true knowledge,” this step requires some experimentation and courage.

Techniques used to charge a sigil, like the arts of scribing, are

manifold, numberless, highly individual. The induction of pain, deep

meditation and breathing (as in the yogic practices of pranayama),

physical excitation by sprinting or dancing, the use of body-altering

medicines, and the experience of orgasm are all ancient practices used

to raise the fire of the spirit. Any action by which your normal,

reasonable self is able to reach a state of ekstasis – ecstasy — the

place where one is altered and one stands beside oneself as gods do.

This process essentially requires you, the operative, to induce a state

of transcendental consciousness, hold the completed sigil in your mind’s

eye, and imagine it filled with ecstatic power. Once this is

accomplished one must move immediately to the next step...

Step Five: The Casting

Imbued with energy, charged with eldritch light, the sigil is released

into the Void. The physical material of the sigil itself is usually then

destroyed – though in certain situations it can be hidden – and the

image must be forgotten. It is the forgetting which releases the

thought-form and gives it autonomous power. It is this willful

destruction of memory which gives you plausible deniability and allows

the sigil to make it past your internal Psychic Censor: anarchists and

other criminalized rebels have somewhat of a head start on this process,

as we must sometimes erase or obscure people, places, events, and times

in our memories to protect them in case we are caught by agents of the

Law. One ritual by which the charging and casting can be easily combined

is in the use of a candle: one simply draws the sigil on paper, holds it

to the candle’s flame, imagines the fire burning away the image, your

body, the world, the entire universe, and when the flame has consumed

the paper you allow it to burn the very tips of your fingers and release

the sigil with the pain.

Step Six: The Grounding

After a sigil is charged and cast, the operative would do well to engage

in some simple practices of banishment to cleanse the mind, body, and

space of working, so that you return to your normal “ground-state”

consciousness and unbind any psychic “anchors” by which the sigil may

remain tethered to you and hamper its effectiveness. Rituals of

banishment and grounding can be exceedingly simple: the burning of sage,

cedar, or other purifying incense, for example, is a pan-cultural

technology of auric cleansing that seldom fails to work, as are

bioenergetic practices such as qi gong. Spontaneous laughter can also

profoundly aid in breaking the link between a sigil and its creator and

returning the operative to the “sane” world. Even something as simple as

three deep breaths can serve to calm the body and mind. The energies

raised in the charging and casting phases of sigil-craft are partially

bioelectric in nature; they ascend like coiling flame up the spine and

tear across the firmament of the brain like lightning and can damage

your nervous system if not returned to their quiet source.