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New Thinking Allowed Audio Podcast
Robert Anton Wilson and the Origins of Chaos Magick with Gabriel Kennedy
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Gabriel Kennedy
The most famous chaos magician in the world, I'd say right now, and one who really, you know, is flying the torch and has been doing so for years very well is Grant Morrison, the Scottish comic books writer and essentially comic books legend at this point. He is a great case study in utilizing magic and chaos magic to make your life more fun and to get rich in the meantime doing so. And I think he carries the torch of what Wilson was about.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Keep watching to learn more.
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New Thinking Allowed Announcer
For early access to our videos and livestream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingallowed.org New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website@cihs.edu Book 4 in the.
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New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. 70 Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology now available on Amazon.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Thinking Allowed Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore the relationship between Robert Anton Wilson and the origins of chaos Magic. My guest is Gabriel Kennedy, also known as Prop Anand, who is a multimedia artist concentrating on the written word, visual art and music. He first interviewed Robert anton Wilson in 2003. Wilson died, as I recall, in 2006 and was an original member of the maybe Logic Academy in which Wilson was an instructor. Gabriel has released music and created street art as Prop Anon. He has also released music with his band Hail Heiress and his first book is Chapel the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Gabriel is based in Southern California and now I switch over to the Internet video. Welcome Gabriel. It's a pleasure to be with you once again.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Hi Jeffrey, thank you for having me. Great to see you.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Likewise. Today we're going to be talking about Chaos Magic and Robert Anton Wilson's inspiration for this whole very significant movement within the the esoteric community today. And I'm sure at this point there are going to be viewers who haven't witnessed the previous interviews we did about Bob Wilson. So let's begin with at least a short synopsis of who he was and why he's an important figure today, nearly two decades after his passing.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Sure. Robert Anton Wilson was an American novelist, underground journalist, sort of scholar of the Western esoteric tradition in the countercultural sense, in the best part of the word. He was a non academic public intellectual if you will, who wrote for had a 45 year career, roughly produced around over 30 books in which he discussed a wide array of topics from political paranoia to psychology to strange belief systems and magic. He was a gateway introducer for many people within the counterculture into the world of say Thelema magic, Aleister Crowley and then later chaos magick.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
I might mention parenthetically that I've interviewed Bob Wilson. He was a friend of mine in the years when I lived in Berkeley and I knew his family as well. He was definitely a key figure in the counterculture in Berkeley back in the 70s and 80s and 90s when I lived in the San Francisco Bay area.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Oh yeah. His influence I'd say started immediately with the publication of illuminatus trilogy in 1975, which he co wrote with Robert Shea, which has been described as many things, but it's also the Ur myth, a type of bible in a sense of discordianism, the religion disguised as a joke or joke disguised as a religion that both Wilson and Shea were a part of and created by Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill, which essentially is a know the worship of the goddess of Chaos. And that had a huge impact actually in the counterculture. This way of thinking about goddess religion and the character of Eris and the disruption that she brings to the situation. And it inspired a whole generation of searchers, artists, performers, magicians that came into their own in the late 70s, early 80s and into the 90s. Illuminatis specifically, I think because of the stage adaptation, the play that Ken Campbell constructed from that book and performed in London in 1977 and 78. It was a big success within the British counterculture and it sort of bifurc two types of careers for Robert Anton Wilson. One in America, where he still made a large impact, but then one in the UK where I think because of this play it was like a needle injection straight into the vein of British counterculture in the late 70s. And the amount of amazingly cool artists that were either watching the play from the audience or were involved in the play. Our Legion there, there are many British UK artists and magicians that were involved in that or watching that, as I said. So Illuminatis was a, you know, a seismic influence on, on many people when it came out. And then of course successively through, through the generations over the last 50 years.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
I would say it was a big influence on me at the time as well. I think it was brilliantly written. But many of our viewers, even if they're familiar with Greek mythology, will not be familiar with the goddess Eris and the formation of Discordianism. So let's go into the myth of Eris and the golden apple. I think it would be very important as sort of a seed for the emergence of chaos magic. Sure.
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Gabriel Kennedy
And this story in particular after Phil Heinz, sort of one of the foundational thinkers of chaos magick, when he came across the story of Eris and the Discordians and whatnot, it completely altered his practice, his magical practice, and it pretty much led to his interaction with chaos magick. But briefly, the story of Eris is that her meddling and mischievousness over being snubbed, let's say, to go to a party on Mount Olympus in the days of ancient Greece, basically started, started a war. And she rolled a golden apple into, you know, a ballroom full of Greek goddesses. And on the apple was inscribed the Kalisti, which supposed to translate to the fairest one or the prettiest one, meaning, you know, only the prettiest goddess is deserving of this golden apple. And by doing that, she, you know, took advantage of their, their egos and they fought over who was deserving of this golden apple and as I said, started a war. So in 19, in the late 1950s, Kerry Thornley and Greg Hill were at a bowling alley in Whittier, Southern California in LA county. And they swore that they had a vision of Eris appear sort of Big Lebowski style, you know, out of the, the ceiling rafters, the popcorn ceiling rafters of a smoke filled with bowling alley in the desert sands of Whittier, California. And the vision struck them and inspired them to start this religion and, or joke or art project that centers the notion of chaos in understanding the truths of existence, that any order that we place on anything is order onto chaos itself. And chaos is, you know, incomprehensible to our small, puny human brains. So we need to put things in its proper perspective and recognize the role that chaos plays in everything. And that, of course, took off Wilson and Shay's Illuminatus trilogy added so much to the religious text that already existed within Discordianism at the time was the Principia Discordia, which was written mostly by Thornley and Hill. But then Wilson added his own magical touch to it and later on and. But Illuminati's trilogy, as I said, was the big book that really, you know, was an amplifier for, for this, you know, belief system, if you will. And as I said, when Ken Campbell staged the play for Illuminatis in, in the uk and, and Ken Campbell was a really special stage performer or director the way that, you know, he's seen as this great anarchist man of the stage in England and he truly was the way that he constructed his plays. And the first sort of the. One of the things he did before Luminatus Trilogy was, was put together a tour where the acting troupe did plays in different pubs, small in in England. He was inspired by the Living Theater, which was a theater group out of New York City that were really sort of revolutionary. They were inspired by, I think it was, well, the Theater of Cruelty, which I'm not. I think that was Artois, Antonin Artois and basically breaking the fourth Wall and, and, and getting the audience to be a part of the show. It was the 60s. Everything was about happening and breaking the fourth wall. And Wilson of course incorporates that in Illuminati's trilogy as well when they break the fourth wall in the final act and whatnot. And Campbell was truly inspired by things that the Living Theater were able to do in confronting the audience. And other people inspired by the Living Theater were Jim Morrison who after seeing the Living Theater one night in New York went and got arrested in Florida for indecent exposure in Miami, Florid wanting to bring, bring the drama to the crowd. But Campbell did something a little more than Jim Morrison and he, you know, eventually and essentially constructed this 10 hour play for adapting Illuminatus Trilogy. And besides, well, zeroing in on notable people who were involved in it or say for this conversation in the crowd, one of the persons watching was a man named Peter Carroll who was a young occultist who had read illuminatus trilogy in 1975. And he watched the play from. At London's Roundhouse Theater which was sort of like the ascent of, of this play that started in a wild warehouse and you know, eventually ended up at the National Theater eventually. And he was blown away by it. He was absolutely blown away by it. And it immediately inspired his, his magical career. Peter Carroll, like many in, in the Scene, I guess at that time, was influenced by Aleister Crowley. Aleister Crowley and Thelema and the Golden Dawn. Those were the big sort of magical. However, he and, and friends, people like Bob Williams and and others were a little tired of maybe the ceremonial pomp involved and they also inspired by the culture which was this, you know, punk rock, get to the heart of the matter, let's get it going sort of attitude. And he ended up. Creating a group with, with Bob Williams and called the Illuminates of Thanateros which thanateros is a, you know, compound word combining thanatos, death and eros, sex. So establishing sex and death as two sort of philosophical pillars within this chaos magic approach, that essentially these are two phenomenon that ultimately bring different types of gnosis. I'll get to that in a moment. So Carol, along with Bob Williams and others, puts put together this little meeting group. And another pivotal thinker within this milieu was a writer named Ray Sherwin, an occultist named Ray Sherwin, who produced a book called the Book of Results. Both the Book of Results and Carol's first book, Liber Null, were published around the late 70s, or say 1980 around. And these are two fundamental foundational texts for chaos magic and the understanding of what chaos magic. And then a few other books and another writer named Phil Heinz sort of fill out the trifecta of the holy trinity of chaos magic. And Ray Sherwin's huge contribution was to draw further attention on an occultist, a British occultist, an artist named Austin Osman Spahr, who was active and around at the early part of the 20th century. As I said, he was an artist, he was an illustrator. He produced two books that I know of, you know, one in 1913, one in 1921, where he discusses this technique called sigils, sigil magic. And as far as I know, he's the first one. This is a huge innovation or a revolution within the Western esoteric tradition. And a sigil is a tool that magicians, and especially chaos magicians, use to achieve their desires, essentially. And it's very simple. You write down your specific desire, and then you seek to cross out all the vowels and repeated consonants in that. So say the desire is, I desire to make $200 in the next hour or whatnot, right? And then so cross out all the vowels and repeated consonants and construct an image from the remaining imagery. And then stage two is to charge this. This image in a state of gnosis. And gnosis within chaos magick is. Well, it's going into an altered state of consciousness. And one achieves that through inhibitory or excitatory ways. Inhibitory, a death posture, meditation, damping down, calming the. The system down to achieve silence. Excitatory sounds, exactly what it is. It's sex, drugs and rock and roll. It's utilizing drums, trance music, music, sex. To achieve this state of gnosis. When the goal is to charge this sigil image with as much energy as you can, then immediately when you're done out of the gnosis state and you've envisioned this, you have to discard the, the sigil, burn it, throw it to the wind, flush it down the toilet. And this is the trick, what Carol calls sleight of mind. This is the difficult part of chaos magic, where you then have to completely forget about this desire. You cannot, as Crowley said, lust after results. And you then have to occupy your mind with, and Carol recommends something meaningless, occupy your mind with something else to completely forget about your wish and desire. And that lets the unconscious mind sort of work its magic and you bypass your conscious awareness and, and also subconscious resistance. And sometimes the sigils work, sometimes they don't. The sigil is the main component of, and the main characteristic of chaos magick. This is what differentiates it from Thelema and Golden dawn in the most respect and most part. And then the other major influence, of which there's a few. But in this conversation I'll just name three William S. Burroughs, his cut up method, the. The method that he and artist Byron Geysen created, where they cut up stories and spliced them on a page.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Which.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Had a huge influence on the whole 1970s counterculture through punk rock into writers like Robert Anton Wilson, and then into the occult scene, where artists and magicians like, say, Genesis Peorage and then later Phil Hein utilized cut ups and adapted them for magical practices, which is really interesting. And finally, the third, I'd say mega influence is the work of Robert Anton Wilson. Not just because of the work that he produced, but people like Pete Carroll, besides watching the play later, made a journey and a trek to visit the old wise man and to have a personal connection with him, of which he met. He met Bob twice. The biggest maxim or tool of Bob's influence is the idea that belief is a tool to be used to acquire your desires. And one can pick up beliefs and discard beliefs and get better at it. And belief is a major part of your magic.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
In one of our previous conversations, you used a term attributed to Bob Wilson called, if I recall correctly, reality tunnels. And I think that that's the idea of a belief system is a particular reality tunnel that you can choose or discard.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Oh, for sure. And that whole idea is part of that belief as a tool and therefore was a big influence on Pete Carroll, Phil Hein, and then, of course, I, I can't fail to mention the most famous chaos magician in the world, I'd say, right now. And one who really, you know, is flying the torch and has been doing so for years very well is Grant Morrison, the Scottish comic books writer and essentially comic books legend. At this point, he is a great case study in utilizing magic and chaos magic to make your life more fun and to get rich in the meantime doing so. And I think he carries the torch of what Wilson was about very well as an artist slash, especially writer slash magician.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Now, I understand that you were part of a program in the early part of this century called the maybe Logic Academy. Bob Wilson was one of the instructors there. And so was Pete Carroll talking specifically about Chaos Magick.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Correct? Yes. And those are some great classes. And I should also state I'd like to put out a sort of sociological, historical understanding of Chaos magic, because it's been nearly 50 years that it's been around now, so it's got a lot of history. And I recently watched a nice little interview of sorts between Pete Carroll and the host on this, you know, channel called Angela Symposium of where Carol provides sort of three, three phases of the evolution of chaos magic. And I think it's really applicable to understanding this development because as the reason why we're talking right now is because chaos magic is so popular today, I think we're in the fourth phase, this sort of social media TikTok chaos magic phase now. But it started out in the late 70s as a grassroots phase, which that's where all religions start out as very charismatic and everyone was into. And for about 10 years, perhaps that was the case as it was spreading throughout the UK and slowly maybe getting to the states. And then phase two was this institutionalization, commercialization phase, where suddenly, not so, not so suddenly, but the books that were once published on, you know, handed out in handmade newsletters, were now published in commercial publishing houses. So that starts to happen sort of in the late 80s and early 90s and in the mid-90s. That's where the first wave of popularity, I think, occurs. And Phil Hein and Grant Morrison both played a major role in that. But Wilson was still an influence. And so. But by 2005, when Pete Carroll is teaching classes at the maybe Logic Academy, which was essentially a social network that Robert Anton Wilson started, along with a director friend named Lance Boucher, who's the director of the movie maybe Logic, the Lies and Ideas of Robert Anton Wilson, they started the maybe Logic Academy in 2004, and I was a member of that the whole time in its existence. Wilson only lived for three more years. He died in 2007. But the Academy kept going for a number of years after, after that, and Bob taught his courses and then brought in a bunch of people to teach their courses. I would say that I guess it was around 2005, then perhaps when the third phase of the evolution of Chaos magic occurs, which is what is, you know, they perhaps Angela and Pete Carroll call the disruption phase, the digital disruption phase. So this is where Chaos magic goes, you know, into the realm of cyberspace. And those were great classes. The. The first, as I said, Carol taught two classes there, one in the spring of 2005, and then the other in the spring of 2006. And the first one was basically, you could just call it chaos magic 101 through Carol's system, because that's one of the things components of Chaos magic is to sort of make it your own, right? Make your own servitors, make your own, you know, like it's a Bushido, just make it your own. And. But with anything that's worthwhile, having structures help a lot. And in that first class, it was a basic chaos magic 101, as I said, Pete Carroll sort of led the participants along with getting comfortable in the phases of a magical working, if you will. So there are, you know, five stages, perhaps of a magical working, at least how Carol broke it down. And it was, it was. It was a full education. I could go into detail if you want, Jeffrey, but yeah, and then the next class was interesting, too. I could tell you a little more about that.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
Well, I would like you to go into detail mostly because I'm still ignorant about chaos magick, I gather, though it's not strictly about chaos. It's about finding a balance between chaos and order. I mean, even the very idea of calling it a magical system implies a structure, an order to things.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Yes, for sure. And it was that paradox that I'd say that the. These practitioners tried to walk. And that's, I would say, an influence from Wilson as well, but influence, excuse me, Wilson, of course, is influenced by. Just bring it back to the Taoists, if you will, learning to live in a state of paradox. So how do you put lightning in a bottle? How do you contain chaos? That's an oxymoronic sort of state, you know, thought. Right. And. And they were aware of this. This Phil Hein said recently in an interview, how do you briefly, briefly describe chaos magic? Because the descriptions change over time. And he said essentially it's a system, an occult system of magic that's skeptical of the occult. So you're doing these things from a place of being very skeptical, these magical operations, and not being a true believer, if you will. However, thanks to the work of Robert Anton Wilson and others, you Chaos Magicians are aware of the role that perception plays and how much the observer brings to the observed. So yes, it's ironic that here is this group that's seeking to systematize chaos and eventually that sort of became attention that was in the organization that, you know, led to some tension. And it wasn't just in the IoT, it was also within the temple of Psychic Youth which was Genesis Peorage and his crew of wild counterculture artists, occultists who came about in around 1981. And they were influenced by cast magic and William Burroughs and all this wild stuff. And Genesis put together this organization that was about smash and control. Like William Burroughs said, you have to smash the control images and smash the control machine. It's all about smashing control. However, a, it was an anti cult, ironically set up to mirror a cult, but over time started acting like a cult. So that disbanded as soon as the members, including Genesis perhaps understood, whoa, this is becoming very cult like now let's disband this. And these are the possible pitfalls and dangers that you know, a sincere seeker seeks or encounters when seeking, you know, illumination. And illumination is, is a, say a major part of Pete Carroll's system. It's these five pillars perhaps of a magical working, as I said. And within that 2005 class, that's what he had students do one week at a time. The first week is, was dedicated to enchantment and setting basically a magical intention to achieve something over a long period of time. Enchantment takes time for, for these spells to work. You know, according to Carol, simply enchantment just means getting what you want by casting spells. And I should mention the second class that Carol taught at the maybe Logic Academy was really interesting actually. He basically applied chaos magic. He fused it with the business course. So Carol was sort of teaching Business 101 through the lens and perspective of chaos magic. And for many people, I'd say, myself included, I was not a business minded sort of individual. For many years of my life I dedicated as much energy as I could to art and seeing the world through artists eyes. And you know, business and magic were not high. Excuse me, business was not high on the list. So that class was pivotal. Personally it was extremely inspiring. Pete Carroll used starting a business or pursuing wealth magic as a personal case study for participants in his second class. So for instance, he asked us to work these five sort of stages of a magical working around, forming one's own business and you know, increasing wealth in one's life. So I thought that was super interesting. Runs counter to the narrative of the idea of poor righteous teachers, it's, you know, be a paid righteous teacher, if you will. And you know, briefly I'll mention the other four stages of what it, you know, to achieving a magical working. There's divination, which is using your intuition or inner sight to conjure an image or to, you know, see possible futures and whatnot. There's evocation, which for Carol is you're, you're calling up servitors or, or spirits or demons or AI or you're creating your own servitors, which they recommend. Actually don't call anything up from a book. Create your own and those servitors will do your bidding in an independent fashion. So you can't micromanage your, your servitors. You know, think about, it's like King Solomon and the Goetia and he got all these lower demons to build the temple for him and whatnot. And then invocation of course is calling in inside yourself deities, godheads, etc. And Robert Anton Wilson of course provided a detailed exploration of his own work doing that in Cosmic Trigger, volume one. And I should mention that it wasn't just Illuminatus trilogy that has had a huge impact on chaos magic, it was his. His two non fiction books, Cosmic Trigger, Volume 1 and Prometheus Rising. Prometheus Rising presents a detailed explanation of his and Leary's eight circuit model of intelligence. And the Cosmic trigger provides a great discussion of the role that quantum physics and the discoveries of in quantum entanglement, how that would reflect on parapsychology. Wilson of course in Cosmic Trigger Volume 1, said that there was plenty of room through this interpretation of quantum physics that he was working with for parapsychology to exist. Pete Carroll I think was very inspired by that and has implemented that. And really taking that to the next level in his work, he goes so far as to get very specific, applying quantum physics. And he's created three equations of magic, basically, you know, three propositions that, that could determine, you know, how magical workings would turn out. So he's gotten very, very specific and I think he was very much influenced by Wilson in that, in that regard. And finally illumination, illumination is pretty much what it sounds like you, you've become illuminated with, with new knowledge perhaps. And the way that Carol worked all this in to his Chaos business class, which was again very interesting, was to invoke the godhead of the sort of the business person godhead, your ideal image of what a business person is. And, and this is what you're invoking. And again that especially at that time of my life, I. I got a real kick out of that. I thought it was entertaining and kind of funny and, and. But the more I look back and I'm really glad I saved all these files and actually viewers can check all this out. I've published my commentary and presentation of these two classes on my Medium page. So you could check out Gabriel Kennedy at Medium, where I go really into detail looking at these two classes. My own avatar of Propaganda Anonymous, which I plugged in to the underground music scene of New York City and beyond. And then it later, for brevity's sake, chopped it down to Propanon. But Propaganda Anonymous was more than just a cool name. It was a sort of approach to viewing the world that we live in now. And I came up with this name 23 years ago or more, which was a way to analyze the fact that we are living in a world where propaganda is increasing exponentially and sent from more and more anonymous places. So we have no idea where these thoughts or where these suggestions and commercials propaganda is coming from. So we are living in an increasingly magical world and where automatic thoughts have immediate consequence. And I think the more one educates oneself in magic, the better suited they are to living in this sort of current media chaos, fear. And one other major sort of part of the Chaos Magic approach, I suppose is. And it's encapsulated within the image of Chaos magic, which is, as I said, it's the chaos sphere. It's the black sphere with eight arrows pointing in all directions from it. And I think that Carol was somewhat influenced by Wilson and Leary's 8th Circuit model of intelligence for that. Although of course the number eight is a sacred number going all the way back to Pythagoras, where that's where Leary got his inspiration from the law of octaves and so on. But what Carol and the Chaos Magicians do with the. In explaining, utilizing the Chaos sphere to explain this approach to magic, I think is really interesting and important. He ascribes a color to each of the eight arrows. So it's almost like Roy G. Biv. It's yellow, red, orange, purple, black, blue, green, and octarine. Octarine is sort of a fictional color. It comes from a Terry Pratchett book called the Color of Magic. And it's basically to signify it's your own personal pure magic. It's. According to Carol, we all have this. The inner Chaos Magician who is really already knows what's what to do. In a sense, this sounds similar to John C. Lilly's metaprogrammer identity, if you will. And then where, where Wilson took it and put it in his 8th Circuit model of intelligence of the self metaprogrammer, which I think Lilly utilized that term as well, which means that you can essentially reprogram yourself or you can cause change within yourself at a deeper level than habits. You can re imprint yourself, you can fundamentally change your response to life.
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Jeffrey Mishlove
And.
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Gabriel Kennedy
Octarine magic and whatnot taps into, I think, something similar. There's a similarity between a self metaprogrammer and the inner chaos magician, if you will. Yeah, so each, each color has an association to a type of magic that's practiced. So yellow is ego magic, red is war magic, orange is thinking magic, purple is sex magic, black is death magic, blue is wealth magic, green is love magic, and octarine, as I said, is pure magic. The, the course in chaos magic and business was a, also sort of a case study, a full exploration of wealth magic. And Carol provided some other techniques for practicing this, which are probably techniques, maybe similar ones used in personal finance classes and whatnot. So for instance, he asked students to create eight boxes and maybe with construction paper taped to a shoe box, every color of the, of the chaos sphere. So have a yellow box, a blue box or red box, for instance. And every week of that class we worked with different boxes. And so in a black, in the blue box, put in invocations of calling in the ideal business person that is within you, within the black box, put all your fears about how you can mess this up if you want to start your own business, etc. Etc. And it was a really interesting, interesting class. As I said, I got a lot out of it and I don't know if he's done anything like that since, but it really, it really sort of proved the value of his system to me. And that's a lot of time on Pete Carroll because I think he's fairly fundamental in chaos magic. But as I said, he's one of the foundational thinkers. Phil Hein, another huge thinker in that world, he came along a little later. He discovered or first read illuminatus Trilogy in 1985. Pete Carroll read it in 1975. So as I said, he's one of the original generations to read it. Phil Hein read Luminatus in 85. He was inspired by the goddess Eris and started infusing them within his pagan rituals and making Eris the goddess in all these kind of supplications and devotions, which led him to the Iot and After that, he produced two big books, influential books, Condensed Chaos and Prime Chaos I. And then Grant Morrison, who was already sort of practicing Thelema and, you know, other types of poetic magic, really starts working with chaos magic around the early 90s, perhaps a little sooner. But he's working on it with the purpose of creating a book which gets published in 1994. And it's his grand opus, as far as I'm concerned. It's the Invisibles. The Invisibles was Grant Morrison's legendary comic book that lasted six. Ran for six seasons, if you will, 1994-2000. It is his, and he said it, his version of Illuminatus trilogy for the generation of the 90s. He was greatly influenced by Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, Aleister Crowley and the Chaos Magic crew. Phil Heine, I think, was. Was an influence. And the Invisibles becomes what he calls his hyper Sigil. He. The whole comic book series is a magical act. And Morrison was already producing very interesting kind of postmodern breaking the fourth wall and. And playing with the whole structure of comic books to begin with in comics like Doom Patrol and. And other Animal man and other things that he produced. But the Invisibles is this. It epitomizes everything that he's great at. And the. The role that Wilson plays in the background of that is palpable. And of course, Morrison was also inspired by exercises that Wilson recommended in Prometheus Rising, which were exercises in sort of playing with your reality tunnel, but with that, your notion of identity. That identity is a lot more slippery than we give it credit for. It's not as fixed, it's not as rigid. And Chaos Magic sort of offers this realm where people can play in this fluid space. And they discover what Carol calls Kia, which is like the life force which. That you could. That's what it's all about, is being able to tap into this and then sort of direct the wave and the current to kind of help you surf a really big wave, metaphysically speaking. And that's exactly what Morrison did. I mean, he was already achieved commercial success with a book called Arkham Asylum, which was a Batman comic. But when the Invisibles hit like his. His life went to like, another plateau. And he'll, you know, he'll talk about it in a great way. And I think that, as I said, he. He epitomizes the. The promise in some ways of what chaos magic can bring because he's a serious practitioner. He. He plugged in specific rituals into the. The comic book itself. And I remember first reading the Invisibles, I was struck by some of these rituals and, and chaos magic utilizes. This is where the cut up method comes in. Applies the cut up method to different forms of media, right? Especially say photographs, television. And he had one character, this character King Mob was being tortured in a prison and another character, Fanny, was circling the prison in a car with another character and she was taking pictures of the prison from different perspectives and then with a Polaroid camera and then laid the pictures out on the ground and did some sort of magical spell and that allowed them to break into the prison. So there was more to it. But that's the, that's the, the gist of it. Such things I found to be really exciting when I first encountered them. It's, you know, culture jamming and reality hacking utilizing the images and, and phrases of authoritarianism against themselves. And yeah, the Invisibles was, was, was. And as I said, Morrison called it a hyper sigil. And I believe it really was. It's a, it's a magical, just like Illuminatus, it's a magical book. And I first encountered all of this watching Morrison speak at the, the now legendary disinfo.com conference, which I write about in my book Chapel the Life and Thought Crimes of Robert Anton Wilson. Yeah, I was able to attend that conference. I was 20 years old, living not far from Manhattan. It was held at the Hammerstein Ballroom, organized by Richard Metzger. And the whole thing was like, sort of like a chaos magic, like ritual. It was really, really fun and really inspiring. And I never knew, I never heard of Grant Morrison, Genesis Pure Douglas Rushkoff, Kenneth Anger. I never heard of any of these people. I went to go see Bob speak, right, and what a treat to then get to be introduced to these, this next generation of great magicians and writers and yeah, discovering hearing Morrison speak. And now it's the legendary talk. It's all over the Internet. It's when he shouts into the microphone, microphone and spills beer on himself. And you know, it's very, very entertaining. But that's when he tells the crowd to make a sigil. Construct a sigil. He tells, tells people what a sigil is. And that's the first time I ever heard of a sigil. And then of course he said, you know, just do it, do it and see what happens, you know, and that sort of experimentational application I really thought was cool too. And of course they get that from Bob and Bob gets that from Crowley, but every generation adds like a new iteration of really interesting stuff to it. And I, and That's what Morrison did. He sort of introduced me to chaos magic, and I read the Invisibles, then shortly after that event, and then started practicing sort of sigil magic myself. And I never really practiced it in such a disciplined manner as, say, Pete Carroll. But now every time I touch back. Excuse me, every time I sort of touch in again with the work, just like with Bob, I'm constantly learning, like, the three equations of chaos magic, which is all about how you can tell the likelihood of a magic spell working, the probability of it working, and also how you can work a spell to thwart something from happening. Cal breaks it down to specifics. You know, an act of magic is as strong as your. Your state of gnosis and your magical link. And, you know, you have to enter the state of gnosis and then achieve the link with this mental image in your mind. Really see, conjure the image to utilize a term from Wynn Hanman, the legendary acting teacher, and. And make it real. And, you know, this is sort of tangential, but no one. People have mentioned this, but acting is extremely magical. Acting training is like, like, it's like a magical practice to reading about chaos magic, some of the parts of it, and how important it is to utilize your imagination and creative visualization. This is the method that, you know, Lee Strasberg and. And Stanislavski taught and Stella Adler taught. Harvey Keitel once spoke about utilizing the method. And like, you're shaving and you have to feel the blade on your skin. Blade is not there. And the power of the imagination, really, and how much magic depends on that? Of course, imagination. Magi Magus. Right. And to the point that, say, an actor like Michael Chekov, the great Russian actor, when he performed Hamlet, he left the crowd shocked and amazed because when he was speaking, when Hamlet was speaking to his dead ghost of a father, the crowd saw Hamlet's father because Michael Chekov was able to conjure the image so well and project it out. I mean, this is highly inspiring stuff.
- [53:11]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Gabriel, the title of your book is Chapel Perilous, and I'm under the impression it implies a whole worldview that Bob embodied. And as we discussed in our previous interviews, his life was punctuated by various traumas. So I wonder how that metaphor of Chapel Perilous, which I have seen repeated in the literature of people who practice chaos magic. What's the significance of that phrase?
- [53:43]
Gabriel Kennedy
I think it's extremely significant. I mean, not just in, say, the practice of magic or a. You're walking a path of a wisdom tradition. Perhaps it's akin to I think GI Gurgis term about, I think, what he called the terror of the situation, and which Bob paraphrased, which Wilson paraphrased as the horror of the situation, that humans have a great capacity for, as Wilson says, living in one's dreams, enduring reality. It is not easy again to see the naked lunch at the end of your spoon or yourself in the mirror sometimes when you're really looking so. Or personally partaking in, say, a meditation retreat. The teacher may tell a student, your mind is like a bucket of water that looks clear, but once you start meditating, it's an agitator. It's like a stick in this bucket. And then all this dirt rises to the surface, and then it looks pretty dirty. And the key is through compassion to scoop out some of this dirt. And we're all born with this dirt, if you will. And so Chapel Perilous. Seeing the terror of the situation. Just look around. Look at the state of the earth right now. Look at the state of the world we are collectively living through a chapel perilous. No one is going to save us except ourselves. Jesus is not coming from the sky. He's not coming from a ufo. He's not going to appear on the White House lawn. We have to find Jesus within ourselves and act compassionately towards one another. And specifically, you know that phrase. Wilson loved it. He took it from a. The T.S. eliot poem the Wasteland. And T.S. eliot was inspired to use that phrase from a book called From Ritual to Romance, which looks at the Arthurian legend. And it's about, you know, a sincere searcher wanting to drink from, you know, the chalice of immortality and godly wisdom. So I think it means just trying to stay focused on your path, and you are going to encounter the traumas from the vicissitudes of life. That's kind of part of the trip. And Wilson, Saying Cosmic Trigger, Volume 1, writes about that very well, touchingly.
- [56:38]
Jeffrey Mishlove
You.
- [56:38]
Gabriel Kennedy
Know, when he speaks about his own personal family dramas and traumas. But the power is in your ability to persevere. And Wilson had that grit in droves, as did others that he was inspired by. And that's one of the things that I really sought to communicate in my book was that his ability to remain as open as possible to every new situation because life will make you cynical, but to remain open while remaining skeptical and still searching for that refined experience of life, I think. And he encapsulated it perhaps well when he quoted the end of the. Of the Cantos by Ezra Pound. And I'll paraphrase and maybe butcher it, but it's sort of like what is the meaning of life? You know, like sit still, watch the wind move through the trees.
- [57:44]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Gabriel Kennedy, this has been a very enlightening conversation on many levels and I want to express my appreciation for the scholarship that you have put into your study of Bob Wilson and his many influences. Influences and in particular the influences that run into the world of magic. That's where I first met Bob long ago. We had many magical friends in common in those days, in the 1970s in Berkeley, California. And I'm glad to know that through you, that impulse is continuing in the world. So thank you very much for being with with me today.
- [58:30]
Gabriel Kennedy
Thank you Jeffrey.
- [58:31]
Jeffrey Mishlove
And for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you are the reason that we are here.
- [59:03]
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- [60:18]
Jeffrey Mishlove
Sa.