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AlteredAgain
Visual Alchemist



Registered: 04/27/06
Posts: 11,181
Loc: Solar Circuit
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How to Hex a Generation
#7496300 - 10/08/07 04:32 AM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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Future historians of Western esotericism will likely see the time elapsed between the founding of the Theosophical Society on September 8th, 1875 and the upcoming "Timewave Zero" point of December 21, 2012 as a single 137-year span of mass initiation and flaky wierdness, a period of Western thought that may be regarded as a Renaissance, Enlightenment or Dark Age depending on what follows it. We are currently living through a climax point of that mass initiation and flaky weirdness. While magic has never totally gone away, in the preceding century it has slowly returned to high visibility within culture, in a wholly new form all gussied up for the Third Millennium - the revelation of the living universe and the divinity of all.
The climax that we are currently experiencing, as facilitated and presaged by the rise of global communications technology, is the transition from a culture informed by magic into a wholly magical culture, and it has been planned and orchestrated from the beginning. Generation Hex, as much as the term applies to the young magicians of the world, are the terminal initiates of this period, and those whose general task it will be to actualize the transition.
New magicians and new shamans are born every day nowadays. That so many new people are embracing this kind of high insanity may well be a hopeful sign that there's still a bit of sense left in the world after all.
Every culture has its hidden tradition, its dark place in the hills outside of town where you go in case you see through the Game of Civilization. Despite its outward gross materialism, this culture has traditionally had many. There are always little tears in and tunnels under the fence built up around "the way things really are" if you look closely enough, and it is an innately human drive to go exploring outside of those walls. Though few may accept the challenge, the call will come through in any way it can find.

In the 1990s, when many people were first socialized into and awakened to the magical world, that call seemed ubiquitous in popular culture to an extent that it hadn't been since the late 1960s and early 1970s. The occult and uniquely initiatory landscape of that time has now become largely clichéd - gray aliens, chaos magic, raves, Ecstasy, new media and "information wars."
The Internet itself is a kind of mass indoctrination into nonlinear structure and co-explored ethereal realms - manifested in the nineties' aura of millennial dread and expectation as not only a network of computers but also a new metaphor for human endeavor. We were transitioning into an information age, and the ideas of connectivity, of convergence, of speed and data transfer became guiding ideas for not only business but also for the human experience itself. The boundless, anarchic, "revenge of the nerds" optimism of those who spearheaded this revolution - which in its initial stages was a massive empowerment of the fringe and rejected elements of society, from "geek" to "guru" - precipitated a Gnostic fervor that not only would the information age bring humanity together in a nonhierarchical, nonlinear, loved-up whole but that it might, in fact, herald a completely new stage in the growth of the human organism.

The corporatization of the Internet wasn't far behind, and it is important to note how the Internet quickly became not only strip-malled but also how quickly strip malls took on the hypertext approach of the Internet. Logos forming links around the globe, beckoning the citizenry of the world to partake of purchasing experiences interchangeable from one country to the next. Connectivity as the new face of globalization, that qlipphotic, distorted and perverse reflection of world convergence and unity, and its manservant, monoculture, collaborating in the dissolution of the nation state and its replacement with a locked-down, perfectly mechanized, imagination-free global "culture," a planetary Vision of Sorrow.
More than a decade and one dot-com crash on, the hopeful idea that the "information revolution" would spark a jump in human consciousness seems not totally disproven; it has, at least, provided a mutation in the organization of capital. However it ended up, it should be noted that the atmosphere surrounding the emergence of communications technology has been a wholly mystic one - as the species is, yet again, forced to deal with the significance of the fire it continues to steal from heaven.
Similarly, the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent End of History hypothesis created a playing field in which history was no longer a dialectic between competing superpowers but a static millennial anguish in which the "last humans" could only contemplate their own entropy - or, as was shortly revealed, rediscover their roots in pure Crusade barbarism.
The Western youth who grew up and came into consciousness after the fall of the Berlin Wall, often (aptly as well as tackily) referred to as Millennials, occupy an apocalyptic liminal space which is largely characterized by the absence of meaning and the subsequent fetishization of nihilism - not out of a sense of rebellion, as even rebellion itself has long since become solely an expression of the marketplace - but simply because there is nothing else to fetishize.
American youth, in particular, have grown up in a cultural landscape dominated first by the suicidal self-loathing we recognized in Kurt Cobain's Ritalin gaze, the retreat into infantilism and willful ignorance personified by the bubble-gum teen acts of the late 1990s and, after September 11, a new dark age of youth culture so reactionary, McCarthyist and utterly devoid of meaning or humanity that its faceless and barren "stars" are no longer distinguishable from the corporate concerns that support them. The Abyss is our congenital state.
The Twentieth Centrury was a period of mankind learning how to destroy the planet and then struggling with the ramifications of what that meant. Now we are left with globalization, corporate media hegemony, a world without secrets, in which all information is known, in which every man and woman is a star on reality television or on their blog, in which every sex act is immediately digitized and placed on the Internet, in which every main street in the world sports the same coffee shop and the same fast food restaurant selling the same processed swill and the same bookstore hawking the same information. And in those bookstores, and on the Internet, and in the cinemas, are the keys to the secrets of the universe, made available everywhere by your friendly neighborhood monoculture constantly in need of new and interesting things to sell, and those keys are just waiting to be put to use. We have become so desensitized and jaded by information overload that our only choices are willful ignorance and self-chosen stupor, or to embrace the mystery itself.

As Zorn Zuckermann once remarked, "the Twentieth Century [was] so much a time of everything losing its magic, that the only thing left is magic itself."
Since the 1960s we have seen the shockwaves of the occult revival and the chaos magic revolution (which sought to dispose of the high theatricality of occultism and get magic back to its most functional aspects) and, much more importantly, the mass publication and availability of the practical secrets of magic and the growth of the Internet, both of which have effectively created a landscape where learning magic and connecting up with like-minded people aren't a problem anymore. The question is no longer Is there such a thing as magic, and where can I find out about it?, the question is What do we do with magic?
And the answer is, how far can you see?
How far can you reach?
Magic is a deceptive word, and also the most appropriate one possible.
Magic can be seen as an alternative way of knowing, as well as an alternative way of doing and being, and when these alternate ways are followed in one's life one becomes immediately capable of spewing reams of paper in an effort to describe "just what magic is," trying one's best to keep to safe and rational concepts and never quite hitting the mark, The amount of dreck available in the New Age section of your local chain megabookstore should more than attest to this face (the sheer tackiness of most of this material acts as a smokescreen for the atomic energy source hidden within).
There are magic moments, the magic of creativity, a magic look in the eyes, events that occur "as if by magic," and these are all accurate descriptors of the magic - that is, the sheer wonderment - of life itself. This incredible feeling of the mystery of life itself. The feeling that anything is possible, that we don't have to do things the way they've always been done, that the universe is indeed intelligent and is indeed guiding and aiding us in our coming to consciousness if we so care to listen (Pronoia). There is also the magic that is a set of practices and an evolutionary path, a discipline and journey that takes one directly to the heart of that sheer wonderment. The art and science of mystery. And at the center of that art and science are the methods of using sex, trance, inspiration and language to wake the individual and the world itself from its sleep of millennia, its addiction to hollow symbols and self-destruction.

Everything else has been stripped away. It now falls to this generation to make the evolutionary jump.
That is, to use magic and become magic.
To awaken the world to its potential.
Here's Tom with the weather.
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Booby
Agent Mulder

Registered: 09/14/05
Posts: 3,781
Last seen: 14 years, 1 month
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: AlteredAgain]
#7496353 - 10/08/07 05:07 AM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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Nice article.
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lavod
Seal Whisperer


Registered: 06/23/06
Posts: 5,440
Loc: Over the rainbow
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Booby]
#7497635 - 10/08/07 01:55 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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93 Nice article? Thats one of the best mrp has ever seen! In particular, I like how chaos magick is incorporated.
I remember an interview of Carl McCoy in saying that the 60's and 70's were really an age where Crowley's ideas began to come to frutition, although the hippy generation, for the most part, was unable to properly activate them. Yet, through the 80's and 90's, we see a massive upheaval of chaos(which, must I cautiously add, dovetails rather well with Thelema). The ideas layed forth by Spare and enlivened of late by people like Carroll, Hine, and Wilson became enacted upon the consensus reality of what is classified as the "civilized" world.
We see that the chaos upheaval coincides with the age of the computer, the solid state organism and the manifest antithesis of the human brain. We see the rise of punk, industrial and goth music. The beginning of acceptance of sexual fetish and masochism.
R.A.W's model of genetic imperatives, imprints, conditioning, and learning not only applies to the individual, but the mass as a whole. Consciousness shattering ideas are implanted into the mass when new ground is broken by individuals facilitated to do so(Leary's futants). Yet, these ideas never initially come to frutition for a generation or more, just as an individual never begins to realize hir own implants until (s)he sheds hir skin as a blue Maynard would wail. Conditioning, on the other hand, is'nt initiated by an individual, or even a group of individuals, but becomes an entity within itself. And you can damn well draw a parallel to the ideas of chaos magick with that!
This is indeed a radical new age. We see television, computers, and even music destroying oral communication between people. The school systems are being severly dumbed down. We see a money driven(blast, i forget the proper word) world government forming and taking on a mind of it's own. Wars have shifted from the territorial circuit to the semantic circuit. But alas, there is way! Jump in that river and cross that desert upon camelback. Thou knowest. 93 93/93
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Middleman

Registered: 07/11/99
Posts: 8,399
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: lavod]
#7497834 - 10/08/07 03:02 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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You Bet, You Betcha, You Bet-ter Listen...
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Booby
Agent Mulder

Registered: 09/14/05
Posts: 3,781
Last seen: 14 years, 1 month
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Middleman]
#7497889 - 10/08/07 03:12 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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Quote:
Middleman said: You Bet, You Betcha, You Bet-ter Listen...
..To what could amount to nothing more than a conspiratorial ploy?
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Middleman

Registered: 07/11/99
Posts: 8,399
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Booby]
#7497957 - 10/08/07 03:26 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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You believe him don't you? Please believe what he just said...
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Booby
Agent Mulder

Registered: 09/14/05
Posts: 3,781
Last seen: 14 years, 1 month
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Middleman]
#7498014 - 10/08/07 03:38 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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What's in it for you?
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leery11
I Tell You What!


Registered: 06/24/05
Posts: 5,998
Last seen: 8 years, 9 months
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Booby]
#7498082 - 10/08/07 03:48 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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What is there to believe?
-------------------- I am the MacDaddy of Heimlich County, I play it Straight Up Yo! ....I embrace my desire to feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow, to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human...... Om Namah Shivaya, I tell you What!
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Middleman

Registered: 07/11/99
Posts: 8,399
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Booby]
#7498091 - 10/08/07 03:50 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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You are not catching my references to the Camel / Mama Hippo and the words of our prophet Maynard...
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leery11
I Tell You What!


Registered: 06/24/05
Posts: 5,998
Last seen: 8 years, 9 months
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Middleman]
#7498127 - 10/08/07 03:59 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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The latter was caught with glimpses of his own voice shining through.
depending on whom you are speaking I do not quite grasp what you mean by camel and hippo
-------------------- I am the MacDaddy of Heimlich County, I play it Straight Up Yo! ....I embrace my desire to feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow, to feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human...... Om Namah Shivaya, I tell you What!
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Booby
Agent Mulder

Registered: 09/14/05
Posts: 3,781
Last seen: 14 years, 1 month
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Middleman]
#7498129 - 10/08/07 03:59 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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You're right, I'm not the brightest spark in the universe. Don't let my lack of enthusiasm dampen your spirits, I'll just watch your creative geniuses at play.
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Middleman

Registered: 07/11/99
Posts: 8,399
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Booby]
#7498166 - 10/08/07 04:07 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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I didn't say you weren't bright.
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Booby
Agent Mulder

Registered: 09/14/05
Posts: 3,781
Last seen: 14 years, 1 month
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Middleman]
#7498195 - 10/08/07 04:12 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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None the less I'm not catching all the references.
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PhanTomCat
Teh Cat....



Registered: 09/07/04
Posts: 5,908
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Last seen: 14 years, 11 months
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: AlteredAgain]
#7498912 - 10/08/07 06:43 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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I have nothing to add with the weather, but I muchly enjoyed the read.... 
>^;;^<
-------------------- I'll be your midnight French Fry.... "The most important things in life that are often ignored, are the things that one cannot see...." >^;;^<
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Icelander
The Minstrel in the Gallery



Registered: 03/15/05
Posts: 95,368
Loc: underbelly
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: AlteredAgain]
#7501190 - 10/09/07 10:50 AM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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I like the purty colors.
-------------------- "Don't believe everything you think". -Anom. " All that lives was born to die"-Anom. With much wisdom comes much sorrow, The more knowledge, the more grief. Ecclesiastes circa 350 BC
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lavod
Seal Whisperer


Registered: 06/23/06
Posts: 5,440
Loc: Over the rainbow
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: Icelander]
#7503388 - 10/09/07 10:21 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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93 Pardon the off-topication(aside from a bit of obscure humor for those with a clue) , but I owe a buddy some homage and do'nt think a new thread is warranted. No comment on the matter, please carry on as is.
[image]http:// [/image]
93 93/93
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AlteredAgain
Visual Alchemist



Registered: 04/27/06
Posts: 11,181
Loc: Solar Circuit
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: lavod]
#7504272 - 10/10/07 05:47 AM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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is there a purpose for placing your sigil in a zip-lock bag?
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lavod
Seal Whisperer


Registered: 06/23/06
Posts: 5,440
Loc: Over the rainbow
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: AlteredAgain]
#7505548 - 10/10/07 02:08 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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Quote:
AlteredAgain said: is there a purpose for placing your sigil in a zip-lock bag?
93 Well, it's actually the seal of the goetic demon Orobas. Traditionally, goetic seals are to be inscribed with blood of owl and kept in a brass bottle topped with a lead cap. Although I do have a bit of "smells and bells" in me, I'm no Lisiewski and feel these steps not entirely necessary. However, since the above seal was used to effect, I feel it proper to at least preserve it for later use in a container of sorts. Plus, it's a respect thing as well for the goetic equivalent of mr. Ed. I do'nt take such care in dealing with sigils. Actually, I can see how sealing a sigil might act as a hindrance. 93 93/93
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DebuteMachine

Registered: 09/29/06
Posts: 6,457
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Re: How to Hex a Generation [Re: lavod]
#7510332 - 10/11/07 07:34 PM (16 years, 3 months ago) |
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This.... was a little too much for me.
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AlteredAgain
Visual Alchemist



Registered: 04/27/06
Posts: 11,181
Loc: Solar Circuit
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really? auto mechanics goes right over my head.
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