Something peculiar has happened to the occult.

It has acquired spacecraft.

For thousands of years, humans claimed to communicate with things that weren’t human.

Gods.

Angels.

Demons.

Spirits.

Fairies.

Ancestors.

Elementals.

Then somewhere around the middle of the twentieth century, another category walked onto the stage.

ALIENS.

And some of them looked remarkably familiar.

Tall.

Beautiful.

Human.

Often fair-haired.

Apparently rather concerned about nuclear weapons.

Ladies and gentlemen:

THE NORDICS.

BEFORE THE ALIENS CAME THE MASTERS

The story doesn’t really begin with flying saucers.

Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century occultism was already populated by superior beings who supposedly communicated with selected human intermediaries.

The Theosophists had their Masters or Mahatmas.

Other occult movements had Secret Chiefs.

Mediums had spirit guides.

John Dee had his angels.

The terminology changed.

The basic proposition didn’t:

Somebody human attempts communication with an intelligence that isn’t ordinarily available for conversation.

Then we invented aeroplanes, rockets and science fiction.

And the entities apparently upgraded their transport.

ENTER THE SPACE BROTHERS

The classic figure is George Adamski.

In November 1952, Adamski claimed to encounter a human-looking visitor named Orthon in the California desert.

Orthon supposedly came from Venus.

He had long blond hair.

He communicated partly telepathically.

And he warned humanity about nuclear weapons. (Wikipedia)

The astronomy hasn’t aged particularly well.

Venus turned out not to contain a hidden civilisation of handsome long-haired space philosophers.

It’s approximately the last place you’d book for a relaxing weekend.

But forget literal Venus for a moment.

Look at the story-form.

A human enters an unusual environment.

A superior intelligence manifests.

Communication occurs partly outside ordinary speech.

The intelligence provides a message concerning humanity.

Then it disappears.

If Adamski had performed this in an Elizabethan study using a crystal instead of standing beside a flying saucer, we’d call it evocation.

KLAATU ARRIVES

And here’s a wonderful cultural collision.

One year before Adamski’s famous Orthon encounter, cinemas were showing Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A flying saucer lands.

Out walks Klaatu.

He looks human.

He’s peaceful.

He’s intellectually and technologically superior.

And he’s here because humanity’s nuclear behaviour is becoming dangerous. (Taylor & Francis Online)

Adamski’s Orthon and Klaatu aren’t identical.

But they’re inhabitants of the same emerging mythology.

The Space Brother.

Not the bug-eyed monster.

Not the Grey.

The visitor who looks sufficiently like us that he could almost walk unnoticed through a railway station.

And who has come to tell us something.

THEN THINGS GET VERY SWISS

Fast-forward to 1975.

Eduard “Billy” Meier claimed he began meeting a woman called Semjase in Switzerland.

She was supposedly one of the Plejaren — originally described in Meier’s material as Pleiadian — and his alleged contacts expanded into an enormous cosmology involving telepathy, spacecraft, warnings, philosophy and human-looking extraterrestrials. His first claimed meeting with Semjase was dated January 28, 1975. (futureofmankind.co.uk)

Meier produced photographs.

Lots of photographs.

And decades of controversy followed.

Real?

Hoax?

Myth-making?

Elaborate performance?

Something stranger?

I’m not particularly interested in settling Billy Meier here.

We’re looking at the pattern.

Because it keeps recurring.

THE NORDICS

Eventually ufology developed a recognisable category.

Nordics.

Tall human-looking beings.

Frequently blond.

Frequently beautiful.

Frequently telepathic.

Frequently presented as more benevolent than the notorious Greys.

Sometimes Venusian.

Sometimes Pleiadian.

Sometimes apparently from somewhere considerably harder to put into Google Maps.

And the obvious historical problem is that this imagery overlaps uncomfortably with older Theosophical and racial ideas about superior Aryan beings.

We shouldn’t pretend that isn’t there.

But the archetype also escaped its original cultural containers.

By the late twentieth century, the Nordic had become one of ufology’s recurring characters.

Which brings us to the really interesting question.

WHAT IF “ALIEN” IS JUST THE LATEST INTERFACE?

I’m not saying it is.

I’m asking what happens if we entertain the model.

John Dee believed he communicated with angels.

Medieval magicians summoned spirits.

Shamans encountered non-human persons.

Spiritualists contacted the dead.

Theosophists contacted Masters.

Twentieth-century contactees met Venusians.

Modern experiencers encounter NHI.

Different beings?

Same beings wearing culturally appropriate masks?

Human imagination?

Neurology?

Folklore updating itself?

Actual non-human intelligence manipulating our perceptual expectations?

No idea.

Excellent.

Now we have an experiment.

FROM ENOCHIAN TO PSIONICS

John Dee and Edward Kelley constructed an extraordinarily elaborate system around alleged communication with angelic intelligences.

Names.

Tables.

Symbols.

Language.

Ritual.

Concentration.

Vision.

Communication.

The entities supposedly supplied information back.

Whether those angels existed independently is an argument we can leave running for another four hundred years.

What’s interesting is the protocol.

Human creates deliberate altered state.

Human directs attention toward proposed non-human intelligence.

Human requests communication.

Human observes resulting imagery, language, intuitions and external events.

That’s remarkably close to what some contemporary UFO-contact practices propose.

We’ve changed the nouns.

AND THEN CAME SKYWATCHER

This became particularly interesting recently with Jake Barber and the group Skywatcher.

Barber publicly claimed that his team was experimenting with what they called Psionics alongside an electronic signalling system called the “Dog Whistle” in attempts to interact with UAP.

In a later update, Barber said their first round of field operations had generated nearly 10 terabytes of data, and claimed successes using both methods while saying the material was being processed for independent verification and peer review. (sotwe)

Now here’s the important bit:

Those are their claims.

I haven’t found publicly available independent results demonstrating that somebody successfully telepathically summoned an anomalous craft.

Nor should “we collected ten terabytes” impress us automatically.

I can collect ten terabytes of footage of my garden.

The interesting question is what’s in it.

And Skywatcher’s public presence does seem to have gone much quieter than the initial excitement suggested it might.

Psyop?

Experiment that didn’t deliver?

Interesting evidence caught in analysis?

Marketing?

Something classified?

Ordinary organisational entropy?

Again:

No idea.

Welcome to ufology.

THREE MAGICIANS ON PRIMROSE HILL

There’s some precedent for this experiment among people I actually know.

On 22 August 2015, three friends went to the top of Primrose Hill in London.

They weren’t ufologists conducting a formal sky survey.

They were magicians.

And their intention was wonderfully unambiguous:

Summon an orb.

The experiment was conducted in broad daylight on a summer afternoon. No spooky desert. No military base. No night-vision equipment.

Primrose Hill.

London.

They performed the operation.

And something appeared.

A small luminous object became visible in the sky.

Fortunately, they filmed it.

The video was uploaded the following day by SYLAQ under the gloriously matter-of-fact title:

UFO/Orb Summoning. Primrose Hill, London, England.

The original description reads:

“Three Magicians gathered at the top of Primrose Hill (on 22/08/2015) to perform an Orb summoning ritual. This is what transpired…”

Watch the original 2015 Primrose Hill experiment on YouTube

I know the people involved.

As far as I’m concerned, they didn’t fake it.

But that gives us only our first conclusion:

SOMETHING WAS FILMED.

It doesn’t give us:

THREE CHAOS MAGICIANS PSYCHICALLY SUMMONED AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPACECRAFT OVER LONDON.

Maybe it was a balloon.

Maybe it was some other airborne object.

Maybe the act of staring intently at the sky simply caused them to notice something they would otherwise have ignored.

Maybe it was genuinely anomalous.

Don’t know.

Excellent.

Because then, nearly a decade later, something similar happened to me.

THE CROXTON EXPERIMENT

Winter 2024.

Croxton.

Dark countryside.

Fields stretching away in front of me.

This time I was experimenting with something closer to the contact methods popularised by Steven Greer.

I had a laser pointer.

I wasn’t near MoD land, and obviously I wasn’t pointing the thing at aircraft.

More importantly, I used what I’ve come to think of as the GPS method.

BOOT.VOID.

Still the internal dialogue.

Then mentally pull away from your location.

The field.

East Anglia.

Britain.

Europe.

Earth.

Space.

Then reverse it.

Earth.

Britain.

East Anglia.

Croxton.

The field.

ME.

Effectively:

Here are my coordinates.

I broadcast an invitation.

Nothing happened.

So eventually I thought:

Fair enough.

I got back into the car.

It was dark, so I switched on the internal light and started recording a face-to-camera video.

Several minutes into talking, something caught my attention through the window.

I looked left.

“What’s that?”

A red luminous orb was moving above the treeline.

Then it appeared to start moving strangely.

Jumping about.

Changing position in ways I couldn’t immediately account for.

This continued for some time before eventually it seemed to disappear.

What was it?

I DON’T KNOW.

And that’s the answer I’m sticking with.

But there’s a rather delicious experimental sequence here:

2015

THREE MAGICIANS
↓
ORB-SUMMONING OPERATION
↓
LUMINOUS OBJECT

2024

ONE DOKTOR SNAKE
↓
PSIONIC GPS CONTACT OPERATION
↓
NOTHING
↓
ABANDON EXPERIMENT
↓
GET IN CAR
↓
“WHAT’S THAT?”
↓
RED LUMINOUS ORB

Two anecdotes don’t constitute scientific evidence.

They do, however, constitute an excellent reason to conduct Experiment Three.

And this time we’re going to change one variable.

We’re going to specify who we’d like to answer.

Which brings us back to:

THE NORDICS.

SO LET’S TRY IT OURSELVES

Not because we’re convinced Nordics exist.

That’s exactly the wrong starting point.

We’re going to treat NORDIC as the target specification for an experiment.

Just as an occultist might attempt an evocation of a particular intelligence.

Except there’ll be no triangle of art.

No sword.

No goat.

No Enochian furniture.

We’re going to use psionics.

THE NORDIC PROTOCOL

Go somewhere with a reasonably clear view of the sky.

Countryside is ideal.

Somewhere you feel comfortable remaining for perhaps thirty minutes.

Don’t trespass.

Don’t stand beside a military airfield waving lasers around.

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

Phone on airplane mode.

Sit or stand.

Look at the sky for a few minutes.

Then:

BOOT.VOID.

Reduce the internal chatter.

Feel the body.

Slow the breathing.

Don’t stare desperately upwards looking for spaceships.

Close your eyes.

Now imagine Earth from above.

Pull farther away.

Britain.

Europe.

Earth.

Then farther.

Moon.

Solar system.

Stars.

You aren’t astrally travelling.

You’re establishing an imaginal coordinate system.

BROADCAST YOUR GPS

Now reverse direction.

Stars.

Solar system.

Earth.

Europe.

Britain.

Your landscape.

Your precise position.

Think of it as transmitting an imaginal GPS beacon.

Then broadcast a simple message.

Something like:

TO ANY BENEVOLENT NON-HUMAN INTELLIGENCE CAPABLE OF RECEIVING THIS:

I’M HERE.

PEACEFUL CONTACT IS WELCOME.

IF APPROPRIATE, SHOW ME SOMETHING I CAN SAFELY PERCEIVE.

IF YOU HAVE USEFUL INFORMATION ABOUT THE NATURE OF THE PHENOMENON, I’M WILLING TO RECEIVE IT.

That’s enough.

Don’t mentally scream it.

Think broadcast.

Like a radio beacon.

Let the message move outward.

Across the sky.

Across Earth.

Across oceans.

Into space.

And — because we’re deliberately targeting the mythology —

introduce the image of the Nordic.

Human.

Tall.

Fair-haired if that’s the image your imagination produces.

Calm.

Non-threatening.

Don’t over-render it.

You’re supplying an address label, not casting Brad Pitt for Close Encounters II.

Then stop.

LISTEN

This is the part people invariably ruin.

Don’t keep transmitting.

Listen.

Still mind.

Open attention.

Maybe you’ll see something.

Probably you won’t.

Maybe an image appears internally.

Maybe a sentence.

Maybe an emotion.

Maybe an unusual thought.

Maybe nothing.

Don’t manufacture content because you’ve spent twenty minutes standing in a field and feel entitled to an alien.

Nothing is a result.

THE SAFE DOWNLOAD

If something does arise internally, don’t immediately accept it as extraterrestrial communication.

This is crucial.

Suppose the sentence appears:

GO TO THE FOREST TOMORROW AT MIDNIGHT.

Interesting.

Write it down.

Don’t necessarily go to the forest tomorrow at midnight.

We’re not surrendering executive control to voices generated during altered states.

Our standing rule applies particularly strongly here.

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

A “download” is data.

Not authority.

LOOK UP

After ten or fifteen minutes, open your eyes.

Watch the sky.

Don’t identify every satellite as the Pleiadian High Council.

Learn roughly what aircraft look like.

Know that satellites exist.

Know what Starlink looks like.

Know that meteors exist.

Know that your own eyes behave strangely in darkness.

Observe anyway.

If something genuinely odd occurs:

Time.

Direction.

Duration.

Movement.

Weather.

Aircraft nearby.

Record it.

If possible, photograph or film it.

Observation first. Interpretation later.

THEN WATCH THE NEXT 72 HOURS

Here’s where I’d differ slightly from conventional CE-5.

Don’t restrict the experiment to lights in the sky.

For the next three days, watch the entire field.

Dreams.

Coincidences.

Unexpected references.

People mentioning UFOs.

Odd imagery.

Strong spontaneous thoughts.

Unusual encounters.

Again:

None of these proves contact.

We’re investigating whether deliberately loading the Nordic/NHI archetype produces a detectable cluster of subjective or external effects.

That’s a much more interesting experiment than shouting:

I SUMMONED A UFO!

because Venus appeared between two clouds.

LAB.COAT

After the field session:

LAB.COAT.

Put on the imaginary scientist’s white coat.

One arm.

Other arm.

Button it.

Now become irritatingly sceptical.

What did I actually observe?

What did I imagine?

What did I expect?

What could have been aircraft?

What could have been suggestion?

What occurred that I genuinely can’t explain?

Keep those categories separate.

That’s the discipline.

SAUCERS AND SORCERIES

Maybe this produces absolutely nothing.

Fine.

Maybe it produces an extraordinary dream.

Fine.

Maybe a strange light appears.

Interesting.

Maybe a six-foot-four blond man walks out of the woods and says:

“Greetings, Jimmy. We have travelled 400 light-years to discuss your Substack.”

At that point I’d probably keep the camera running.

But the larger experiment interests me more.

Humans have been attempting to communicate with unseen intelligence for an extremely long time.

The names change.

The technologies change.

The cosmologies change.

Angels become extraterrestrials.

Crystal balls become night-vision cameras.

Evocation becomes CE-5.

Telepathy becomes psionics.

And perhaps nothing except us was ever on the other end.

Or perhaps something has been answering all along.

I don’t know.

That’s why we’re doing the experiment.

Go outside.

Look up.

BOOT.VOID.

Transmit the coordinates.

Invite contact.

Listen.

Observe.

Then:

LAB.COAT.

And whatever happens —

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

Results you can use, but not prove.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

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There is something wonderfully inconvenient about the runes.

They don’t come with instructions.

Pick up a modern book on rune divination and everything tends to look remarkably organised.

This rune means wealth.

This one means strength.

This one means communication.

This one means disruption.

Turn it upside down and apparently your boiler is going to explode next Thursday.

The historical material isn’t nearly so accommodating.

Take the medieval Norwegian Rune Poem.

It runs through the sixteen runes of the Younger Futhark and gives us these strange little couplets.

Bruce Dickins translated the first one in 1915:

ᚠ — Wealth

Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen;
the wolf lives in the forest.

Well.

Thanks for clearing that up.

WHAT THE HELL DOES THE WOLF HAVE TO DO WITH IT?

Perhaps something.

Perhaps very little.

That’s the first lesson.

The rune poems aren’t ancient occult manuals explaining the metaphysical properties of sixteen magical symbols.

They’re medieval poems about the names of the runes, composed long after the runic alphabets themselves emerged. And the Norwegian poem is particularly terse: sixteen tiny couplets, often joining two gnomic statements whose relationship can be decidedly obscure. (NorseRunes)

Which is exactly why I like it.

Let’s take a handful.

ᚠ — FÉ — WEALTH

Dickins:

Wealth is a source of discord among kinsmen;
the wolf lives in the forest.

Already this is considerably better than:

FÉ = MONEY.

Wealth isn’t presented simply as desirable.

Wealth causes conflict.

Inheritance.

Jealousy.

Possession.

Division.

Meanwhile the wolf survives out there in the forest.

Does the second image explain the first?

Nobody can confidently tell you that it does.

But put the two images together and something happens.

WEALTH — KINSMEN — DISCORD — WOLF — FOREST.

Now we have an imaginal field.

For our purposes today, Fé might become a rune not merely of money but of resources and the trouble surrounding their possession.

That’s considerably more interesting.

ᚢ — ÚR — DROSS

This one immediately causes trouble for people accustomed to Elder Futhark rune books.

Dickins gives:

Dross comes from bad iron;
the reindeer often races over the frozen snow.

What?

Excellent.

The Younger Futhark úr isn’t simply the Elder Futhark ūruz, despite sharing its historical ancestry and position in the row. The rune-name traditions changed.

And here we’re presented with two extraordinary images.

Impurity separated from metal.

And a reindeer racing across frozen ground.

For a modern working, I might completely ignore the desire to discover its One True Occult Meaning and instead work directly with those images.

What is dross?

What needs removing?

What remains when poor material is processed?

Then:

What crosses dangerous ground quickly because it knows how to move across it?

Suddenly Úr becomes interesting again.

Not because I’ve discovered what a Viking magician secretly thought.

I haven’t.

I’ve created an experiment from surviving material.

Important distinction.

ᚦ — ÞURS — GIANT

Now we’re getting somewhere.

Giant causes anguish to women;
misfortune makes few men cheerful.

The Þurs is a giant — one of those dangerous, chaotic beings inhabiting the mythic landscape of the North.

This isn’t Marvel’s Thor smashing cartoon frost giants.

The giants occupy a much stranger position in Norse mythology.

Dangerous.

Powerful.

Sometimes wise.

Sometimes ancestral.

Sometimes sexual.

Sometimes opponents of the gods.

Sometimes intimately entangled with them.

For a modern galdr experiment I’d be inclined to treat Þurs as disruptive force.

The thing that arrives and knocks the system out of equilibrium.

Not necessarily evil.

But potentially dangerous.

You don’t casually invite disruption into your life and then complain because things become disrupted.

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

ᚬ — ÓSS — ESTUARY

Then we get this:

Estuary is the way of most journeys;
but a scabbard is of swords.

It’s almost Zen.

What does an estuary have to do with a scabbard?

Perhaps less than we’d like.

But again, forget divination-book definitions and look at the images.

ESTUARY.

River meeting sea.

Fresh water meeting salt.

Land opening into ocean.

Trade.

Travel.

Departure.

Arrival.

Boundary.

Transition.

Then:

SCABBARD — SWORD.

Container and contained.

Potential violence held in reserve.

Something powerful that’s currently sheathed.

I could do a great deal with that.

Would a medieval Norwegian rune-worker recognise my interpretation?

Maybe not.

That’s fine.

I’m not claiming he would.

ᚱ — RÆIÐ — RIDING

Dickins gives us:

Riding is said to be the worst thing for horses;
Reginn forged the finest sword.

Wonderful.

Journey and consequence.

Movement costs something.

The rider experiences the journey one way.

The horse experiences it another.

Then suddenly Reginn walks into the poem.

Reginn is the smith associated with Sigurd and the forging of Gram in the heroic cycle.

Again we have apparently disparate images.

Riding.

Horse.

Smith.

Sword.

Instead of reducing that to:

RUNE MEANING: JOURNEY

I’d leave it alive.

What carries you?

What price does it pay?

What are you forging while travelling?

What weapon or capacity is being constructed through the journey itself?

Now we’re doing something interesting.

ᚴ — KAUN — ULCER

This one’s cheerful.

Ulcer is fatal to children;
death makes a corpse pale.

Thanks, Norway.

No crystals.

No abundance mindset.

No affirmation that THE UNIVERSE LOVES YOU.

An ulcer.

A dead child.

A corpse.

And that’s useful.

Because historical symbolic systems weren’t designed by twenty-first-century wellness marketers.

Disease existed.

Hunger existed.

Winter existed.

Violence existed.

Death was visible.

A magical alphabet reflecting that world ought occasionally to be unpleasant.

For a contemporary experiment, Kaun gives us the thing that festers.

The small wound that doesn’t heal.

The unattended problem.

The corruption inside the system.

Something that requires attention precisely because ignoring it makes it worse.

Again:

That’s my interpretation.

Not a telegram from Odin.

RUNES WERE TELEGRAMIC

There’s another reason I like all this.

Runes are physically economical.

If you’re carving words into wood, bone or stone, you’re not composing a 14,000-word Substack essay.

The medium encourages compression.

Straight strokes.

Short inscriptions.

Names.

Ownership.

Memorials.

Messages.

Formulae.

The rune itself is already compressed information.

And once you combine it with a cryptic image from a rune poem, it starts behaving almost like an imaginal ZIP file.

That’s something we can use.

BUT WERE RUNES ACTUALLY MAGICAL?

Sometimes.

This is where we need to be careful.

Runes were primarily writing.

But there is also genuine historical evidence for runes being used in magical contexts — charms, protective inscriptions, curses and other formulaic uses.

And Old Norse literature certainly gives us a world in which runes, spoken charms and magical knowledge overlap.

Then we encounter galdr.

The word is associated with magical song, chanting or incantation.

And this gives us an obvious experimental direction.

Not:

LET’S RECONSTRUCT EXACTLY WHAT VIKING SORCERERS DID.

We can’t.

Instead:

Let’s build a modern galdr while clearly labelling it modern.

GALDR 2.0

Pick one rune.

Not sixteen.

One.

Research it.

Look at the rune itself.

Learn its name.

Read the Norwegian stanza.

Read the corresponding Icelandic material.

If appropriate, compare the Anglo-Saxon rune tradition.

Then stop reading modern occult interpretations for a while.

Let the original images sit there.

Now:

BOOT.VOID.

Still the body.

Reduce the chatter.

Look at the rune.

Speak its name.

Again.

Again.

Again.

Don’t worry about activating its “correct vibrational frequency.”

Listen to what the sound actually does in your body.

Then speak the poem.

Slowly.

Let the images appear.

Wealth.

Discord.

Wolf.

Forest.

Or:

Dross.

Iron.

Reindeer.

Ice.

Don’t explain them.

Enter them.

Let your imagination build the environment.

Then ask a question appropriate to the experiment.

For Fé:

WHERE ARE MY RESOURCES CREATING CONFLICT?

For Úr:

WHAT IS DROSS AND WHAT IS METAL?

For Þurs:

WHERE IS DISRUPTION ENTERING THE SYSTEM?

For Óss:

WHAT BOUNDARY AM I CROSSING?

For Ræið:

WHAT IS CARRYING ME — AND WHAT IS THE JOURNEY COSTING IT?

For Kaun:

WHAT IS FESTERING?

Then shut up.

See what arises.

That’s our galdr.

Not reconstructed Viking magick.

Twenty-first-century imaginal technology built from medieval Northern source material.

Much more interesting.

THEN PUT THE WHITE COAT ON

When you’re finished:

LAB.COAT.

Stand up.

Imagine putting on the scientist’s white coat.

One arm.

Other arm.

Button it.

Return to ordinary consciousness.

Now inspect whatever happened.

Did an interesting association arise?

A memory?

An uncomfortable realisation?

Nothing?

Did something subsequently occur that seemed synchronistic?

Write it down.

Don’t immediately decide Odin has hacked your neural network.

We’re collecting data.

THE RUNES ARE BETTER WHEN THEY REMAIN STRANGE

I think modern occultism sometimes makes ancient material too tidy.

We want correspondence tables.

Definitions.

Keywords.

Positive meaning.

Negative meaning.

Reverse meaning.

Nice little cards.

But the original material resists us.

Wealth causes discord among kinsmen.

The wolf lives in the forest.

What does that mean?

Maybe the correct answer is:

We don’t entirely know.

Excellent.

Now we have somewhere to explore.

Learn the history.

Read the sources.

Don’t pretend modern interpretations are ancient secrets.

Then take those strange fragments into the laboratory and see what you can build from them.

BOOT.VOID.

Speak the rune.

Enter the image.

Observe what happens.

LAB.COAT.

Return.

Results you can use, but not prove.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

Forget the horned helmets.

They didn’t wear them.

Forget the little velvet bag containing twenty-four beautifully polished rune stones you bought from an occult shop for £37.95.

They almost certainly didn’t have those either.

If you want to imagine something closer to Viking Age magick, try this instead.

It’s getting dark.

There’s a fire.

Someone is singing.

Someone else is carving marks into a piece of wood with a knife.

And sitting above everybody on a specially prepared raised seat is a woman everyone in the room is taking extremely seriously.

Welcome to Viking sorcery.

Or at least:

what little we can reconstruct of it.

THE PROBLEM WITH VIKING MAGICK

The Vikings didn’t leave us The Complete Practical Handbook of Norse Sorcery.

Annoying.

Most of what we know comes from archaeology, inscriptions, medieval Scandinavian literature and texts written down after Christianisation.

So immediately we need our standing rule:

Learn the history. Invent the experiment. Never confuse the two.

There was magic.

There were specialists.

There were runes.

There were charms.

There was divination.

There were gods.

But exactly how all the pieces fitted together in somebody’s magical practice on a wet Wednesday evening in East Anglia around AD 900?

We don’t know.

Which means we’re free to investigate.

GALDR: MAGICK WITH YOUR VOICE

One of the old words we encounter is galdr.

Its territory is song.

Chant.

Incantation.

The magically charged voice.

This is immediately interesting because it requires virtually no equipment.

Your body is the instrument.

Words are the technology.

Rhythm alters consciousness.

Repetition alters attention.

Sound changes breathing.

Breathing changes physiology.

And whether there’s anything supernatural happening beyond that remains precisely the sort of question we’re interested in.

The image of the Norse magician simply singing reality into a different configuration appeals to me enormously.

But then things become stranger.

ENTER THE VÖLVA

The völva is one of the most compelling figures in Northern European magic.

A seeress.

A wandering magical specialist.

A woman associated with prophecy and supernatural knowledge.

And apparently somebody you didn’t treat like the lady who reads Tarot cards at the local psychic fair.

The famous account comes from Eiríks saga rauða — The Saga of Erik the Red.

A seeress named Þorbjörg arrives during a time of hardship.

She’s received ceremonially.

She’s given a specially prepared elevated seat.

She carries a staff.

A group of women forms around her and a special song is performed.

Then she gives prophecy.

Whatever historical reality lies behind that literary account, it’s a tremendous image.

The sorceress rises above ordinary social space.

Song creates the environment.

She enters another mode.

Then she speaks.

This isn’t fortune-telling as entertainment.

The community wants information.

What’s happening?

What’s coming?

When will conditions improve?

What do we do?

The oracle is operational.

AND THE MEN?

This is where modern summaries can become too tidy.

You’ll sometimes encounter:

Galdr = male magic.
Seiðr = female magic.

Reality was messier.

Women certainly loom particularly large in accounts of seiðr and prophecy, but the literary Odin himself practises seiðr.

And magical singing isn’t neatly confined to men either.

The gender boundary itself was culturally charged. Some forms of magic performed by men could attract accusations of ergi — unmanliness or violation of expected masculine behaviour.

So the magical world wasn’t simply:

WIZARDS → THIS WAY
WITCHES → THAT WAY

It was socially complicated.

Good.

Real societies usually are.

WHERE DO THE RUNES COME IN?

This is where modern occultism tends to rush ahead of the evidence.

Runes were first and foremost writing.

Names.

Messages.

Memorials.

Ownership.

Statements.

The National Museum of Denmark notes that the great majority of surviving inscriptions are thoroughly everyday affairs. (National Museum of Denmark)

But that’s not the whole story.

There are inscriptions that invoke supernatural protection or curse interference. The Glavendrup stone even calls upon Thor to hallow its runes before threatening anyone who damages the monument. (National Museum of Denmark)

And the sagas contain stories about magical rune use.

In Egil’s Saga, Egil famously encounters a sick girl who has had badly made runes placed around her. He destroys the offending inscription, carves new runes, and she recovers.

The story carries a wonderfully sensible occult warning:

Don’t carve runes unless you know what you’re doing.

A Viking Age version of:

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

FORGET THE BAG OF RUNE STONES

When people think “rune divination” today, they often picture polished stones.

Perfect little sets.

One rune on each.

Into the velvet bag they go.

There’s nothing wrong with using them.

But don’t mistake the modern occult product for the historical object.

Runes were designed to be carved.

Wood is particularly interesting because it usually disappears archaeologically.

A stick.

A sliver of branch.

Bone.

Antler.

Metal.

Stone.

The angular construction of runes lends itself beautifully to cutting them into hard surfaces.

Which leads to an image I find much more compelling than carrying around a prefabricated divination set:

You carve the rune when you need it.

RUNES AS COMMAND LINE

Think Linux.

You don’t carry a bag containing little ceramic tiles saying:

ls

cd

grep

sudo

You type the command.

Again and again.

Eventually your fingers know it.

That’s how I like thinking about carving runes.

The hand learns the symbol.

Knife meets wood.

Line.

Line.

Branch.

Stave.

Again.

The rune moves out of the book and into muscle memory.

Now combine that with galdr.

You carve the rune.

You speak its name.

You breathe.

You repeat.

Suddenly we’ve got something considerably more interesting than pulling a pebble out of a velvet bag.

THE PAST BEHIND GLASS

This isn’t entirely abstract to me.

Norwich Castle Museum has Anglo-Saxon and Viking material from East Anglia, including objects bearing Old English runic inscriptions in its collections. (Visit Norwich)

I remember seeing a little piece of bone bearing runes there.

That’s what gets me about these things.

Behind secure museum glass sits an object somebody actually held.

Someone took a blade.

They scratched those lines.

The hand disappeared more than a thousand years ago.

The marks didn’t.

That’s about as direct a connection with the past as you’re going to get.

THE GODS NEVER ENTIRELY LEFT

When I lived in Norwich in the 1990s, I used to carve runes myself.

Usually for rather less heroic purposes than Viking saga.

I’d carve protective runes and hide them near the entrance to the house.

The intended purpose might be:

Keep unwanted forces away.

Which occasionally translated into:

Please prevent somebody from the council appearing because I haven’t paid this month’s council tax.

Every sorcerer has his priorities.

I’d invoke Odin when I wanted circumstances moving in my favour.

Thor when something required force or protection.

Sometimes Heimdallr.

Sometimes Freyja.

And the curious thing about doing this in East Anglia is that the Northern gods never feel entirely imported.

They’re embedded in the landscape.

Names survive.

Stories survive.

Old boundaries survive.

And further west from where I am now there’s Grime’s Graves — a prehistoric flint-mining landscape whose later name preserves Grim, a name deeply entangled in later English and Scandinavian traditions with Odin/Woden.

You walk through an apparently ordinary English landscape and suddenly the old mythic layer starts showing through.

Not necessarily because Odin is physically hiding behind a pine tree.

Because names remember things people forget.

SO LET’S MAKE SOME VIKING MAGICK

Not reconstructed Viking magick.

That’s important.

We’re going to build a modern Northern experiment from historical components.

You’ll need:

A countryside walk.

A small knife.

A fallen twig.

And enough imagination to become dangerous.

Not very dangerous.

Standing rule applies.

Don’t damage living trees unnecessarily.

Take fallen wood.

Oak.

Ash.

Yew if you happen to find it.

Or simply whatever the landscape gives you.

We’re not assembling an IKEA altar to Valhalla.

A RUNE-TWIG FOR PERSONAL POWER

Let’s construct a small bindrune.

And here’s where I’d actually simplify your proposed combination slightly.

Rather than mixing rune traditions accidentally, choose one rune row first.

For this experiment, let’s use the Younger Futhark.

Take three concepts:

ᚬ — Óss

Associated through its rune-name tradition with the estuary and, in the Icelandic tradition, divine/ancestral language around the Æsir.

For our experiment:

INSPIRATION / DIVINE SPEECH / AUTHORITY

Then:

ᚢ — ÚR

A difficult and ambiguous rune, as we’ve already discovered.

For our experiment:

RAW FORCE / ENDURANCE / CAPACITY

And:

ᛋ — SÓL

Sun.

For our experiment:

ENERGY / SUCCESS / VITALITY / VISIBILITY

Are these guaranteed Viking Age magical definitions?

No.

We’re constructing them.

Say it with me:

Learn the history. Invent the experiment. Never confuse the two.

BOOT.VOID

Find somewhere quiet.

Face north if you want to retain our Northern orientation.

Hold the twig.

Then:

BOOT.VOID.

Still the body.

Reduce the internal commentary.

Feel the wood.

Notice its weight.

Its texture.

Where it came from.

Then begin carving.

Slowly.

CUT THE COMMAND

Carve the three rune forms into one combined symbol.

Don’t worry about discovering the One True Bindrune.

Design it.

Make the shared vertical stave do some work.

Let one rune intersect another.

Keep it simple enough that you can remember it.

As you cut each component, speak its name.

Óss.

Cut.

Úr.

Cut.

Sól.

Cut.

Again.

Let voice and movement synchronise.

Knife.

Wood.

Breath.

Sound.

Symbol.

Now we’ve combined our two strands:

RUNE + GALDR.

The command is being entered.

CHARGE THE RUNE-TWIG

When the carving is finished, hold it between both hands.

Close your eyes.

Bring your intention into awareness.

Not:

“I AM THE SUPREME EMPEROR OF EARTH.”

Something usable.

I HAVE THE POWER TO ACT.

Or:

MY WILL MOVES INTO THE WORLD.

Feel whatever bodily charge you can generate.

Breath.

Muscular tension.

Heat.

Emotion.

Let it build.

Then push that charge into the twig.

If Odin is your chosen godform, finish simply:

By Odin, so it is done.

If another deity makes more sense to you, use that.

Or invoke nobody.

The experiment doesn’t require theological membership.

NINE NIGHTS

Keep the rune-twig on you for nine days and nine nights.

The number nine has obvious resonance in the Odin myth-cycle: Odin hangs upon the tree for nine nights in Hávamál in his ordeal associated with gaining the runes. The National Museum of Denmark likewise highlights that connection when discussing runic magic. (National Museum of Denmark)

Pocket.

Bag.

Jacket.

Somewhere close.

Don’t continually inspect it to see whether the magic has started leaking out.

Carry it.

Live normally.

Observe.

After the ninth night, put it somewhere in your home.

Near your desk.

Above a doorway.

Among your books.

Wherever seems right.

And that’s it.

IS IT A GLORY-TWIG?

I’d avoid calling it that as though it’s an attested Viking technical term.

There are wonderful named categories of runes in Sigrdrífumál — victory-runes, ale-runes, help-runes, sea-runes, branch-runes, speech-runes, thought-runes — but mapping those poetic categories onto a specific modern three-rune talisman gets speculative very quickly.

So call ours what it is:

a rune-twig.

If someday somebody finds it beneath your floorboards, perhaps they’ll write an academic paper explaining its ritual significance completely incorrectly.

That seems only fair.

VIKING SORCERY 2.0

What have we actually done?

We’ve taken:

Historical runes.

The physical act of carving.

The Northern tradition of magical speech.

The Odin myth.

The landscape.

The body.

The imagination.

And a twenty-first-century cybernetic metaphor:

Enter command. Execute. Observe output.

We haven’t reconstructed Viking religion.

We haven’t proved runes possess supernatural power.

We haven’t established that Odin is listening.

We’ve done something much more Doktor Snake.

We’ve taken fragments of the past and built an experiment that can be run now.

Out there.

In the landscape.

Knife in pocket.

Find the wood.

BOOT.VOID.

Cut the command.

Speak the names.

Carry it for nine nights.

Then:

LAB.COAT.

Record what happens.

Maybe nothing.

Maybe something.

Maybe you’ll simply never look at a fallen ash twig in quite the same way again.

That’s enough to begin.

ALL HAIL THE VIKING SORCERERS!

And, naturally:

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

There is no ancient tradition of Rune Yoga.

Let’s get that out of the way first.

The Vikings weren’t standing on Scandinavian hilltops at dawn twisting themselves into the shape of ᚠ.

As far as anybody knows.

What we now call Rune Yoga or rune gymnastics emerged much later, largely through German-speaking occultists in the early twentieth century.

Which presents us with a problem.

And an opportunity.

Because although I’m extremely interested in the historical runes, I’m equally interested in asking:

What can we do with them now?

So we’re going to steal the basic idea.

Then rebuild it.

Welcome to Rune Yoga 2.0.

THE RUNES WERE REAL

Before we start inventing things, let’s distinguish the invention from the history.

Runes weren’t originally an occult oracle deck.

They were writing systems.

They appeared in different forms across the Germanic world over many centuries.

There’s the Elder Futhark.

The Younger Futhark associated particularly with Viking Age Scandinavia.

And here in England, the expanded Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

That’s particularly interesting to me because I live in East Anglia.

This landscape is saturated with the historical world from which Anglo-Saxon runic culture emerged.

You don’t need to pretend you’re standing in mythical Hyperborea.

Walk around Suffolk and Norfolk for long enough and you’re walking through the archaeological remains of the real thing.

But alongside the mundane use of runes as writing, there are tantalising connections with magic, charms, inscriptions and divination.

And then there are the rune poems.

These are particularly useful because they give us something more interesting than a letter.

They give us an image.

A concept.

A little packet of meaning.

Wealth.

Aurochs.

Thorn.

Journey.

Gift.

Ice.

Need.

Sun.

And so forth.

Now we have something to work with.

THEN THE OCCULTISTS GOT HOLD OF THEM

Fast-forward to the early twentieth century.

Guido von List created his own eighteen-rune Armanen system, presenting it as recovered ancient wisdom.

It wasn’t.

Later German esotericists including Friedrich Bernhard Marby and Siegfried Adolf Kummer began developing physical rune exercises.

The body itself formed the rune.

Rune gymnastics.

Rune Yoga.

Interesting idea.

Historically ancient?

No.

And there’s another problem.

This material developed in the extremely murky world of German and Austrian völkisch occultism.

Some of those currents contributed ideas and symbols to the ideological swamp from which National Socialism subsequently emerged.

So I’m not interested in pretending that history isn’t there.

Nor am I interested in throwing away every interesting idea somebody once contaminated.

Instead:

Separate the experiment from the ideology.

Keep the runes.

Keep the body.

Keep the sound.

Lose the racial mysticism.

And start again.

YOUR BODY BECOMES THE RUNE

This is where it gets interesting.

Choose a historical rune row.

For somebody in England, I’d be tempted by the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

If Viking Age Scandinavia interests you, use the Younger Futhark.

If you want the earlier Germanic system, use the Elder Futhark.

Then learn the symbols properly.

Not twenty-four runes tonight.

One rune.

Look at its shape.

Draw it.

Learn its historically reconstructed name.

Find out what we actually know about it.

Read the relevant rune poem where one survives.

Distinguish the historical evidence from the enormous amount of modern occult material that’s accumulated around it.

Then stand up.

BECOME THE SYMBOL

Look at the rune.

Now ask:

How could my body approximate this shape?

There’s no official answer.

That’s the point.

You’re creating the posture.

Use the torso as the stave.

Arms become branches.

Legs change the geometry.

Perhaps the rune requires an asymmetric stance.

Perhaps one position flows naturally into another.

Don’t worry about reproducing it with mathematical precision.

Find a bodily expression that makes you feel the geometry.

Hold it.

Breathe.

Then move out of it.

Return.

Repeat.

Something interesting happens remarkably quickly.

A symbol that was previously a mark on a page becomes kinesthetic information.

Your muscles remember it.

Your balance remembers it.

Your spatial awareness remembers it.

You’ve turned an alphabet into choreography.

NOW GIVE IT A VOICE

Once you’re comfortable with the shape, introduce sound.

Learn the best scholarly reconstruction you can find for the rune’s name.

Don’t rely on somebody on TikTok shouting vaguely Scandinavian syllables while standing beside a plastic drinking horn.

Try to get it reasonably right.

Then enter the posture.

Breathe.

On the exhalation, intone the rune name.

Again.

Again.

Feel where the sound resonates.

Chest.

Throat.

Skull.

Abdomen.

Don’t worry about whether you’re “activating ancient vibrational frequencies.”

Listen to what your body actually does.

Then, if the rune belongs to one of the surviving rune-poem traditions, introduce the verse.

You can speak it aloud.

Learn it.

Eventually you might recite it internally while holding the posture.

Now you’ve combined:

SYMBOL

BODY

BREATH

VOICE

LANGUAGE

IMAGINATION

That’s already a substantial practice without requiring us to invent a single Viking secret master.

TURN IT INTO A FLOW

Once you’ve learned several runes, stop treating them as isolated postures.

Move between them.

Slowly.

One rune becomes another.

Breath accompanies the transition.

Rune names accompany the breath.

Think Tai Chi rather than aerobics.

The interesting question becomes:

How does one symbol transform into the next through the body?

Now you’re learning the rune row not merely intellectually but spatially.

Eventually you could move through an entire sequence.

Elder Futhark.

Younger Futhark.

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc.

Different sequences would feel different simply because their geometries differ.

And suddenly “learning the runes” has become something considerably more interesting than memorising flash cards.

FACE NORTH

If you want to add theatre, face north.

Not because your compass points directly at Asgard.

It doesn’t.

But north carries an enormous symbolic charge within our modern imagination of the Northern Tradition.

Cold.

Darkness.

Stars.

Scandinavia.

The polar region.

The mythic North.

Use it.

Magick doesn’t become better by pretending symbolism is geography.

It becomes better when you know the difference and use both deliberately.

BOOT.VOID

Before beginning your sequence, enter boot.void.

Stand still.

Feet planted.

Arms loose.

Reduce the internal chatter.

Feel your weight.

Feel the ground.

Listen.

Don’t do anything for perhaps two minutes.

Then begin the first rune.

This creates a clean transition:

ordinary consciousness → practice.

And when you’ve finished, we reverse it.

LAB.COAT

Runes can be extraordinarily evocative.

That’s precisely why we need an off-switch.

When the sequence is finished, stand normally.

Shake out your arms.

Breathe.

Then imagine putting on the Doktor Snake scientist’s white coat.

One arm.

Then the other.

Button it.

Look back at what you’ve just done.

You stood facing north while contorting your body into the shapes of an obsolete Germanic alphabet and chanting reconstructed ancient words.

Excellent.

Experiment complete.

You’re no longer the rune.

You’re the person collecting the data.

LAB.COAT.

Return to baseline.

WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY DOING?

That’s the interesting question.

Are runes objectively magical?

Does assuming their shapes activate some ancient current?

Did the old Germanic peoples know things we’ve forgotten?

I don’t know.

And Rune Yoga certainly doesn’t prove any of that because, as we’ve established, Rune Yoga itself isn’t ancient.

But something demonstrably is happening.

You’re learning symbols through multiple sensory channels.

You’re combining memory with movement.

You’re controlling breathing.

You’re practising balance.

You’re using vocalisation.

You’re focusing attention.

You’re constructing an imaginal environment.

And you’re deliberately moving between ordinary and altered modes of experience.

That’s plenty.

Anything stranger that happens is a bonus.

THE NORTHERN LABORATORY

I think there’s much further we can take this.

Runes outdoors.

Rune walking.

Rune poems spoken at particular landscapes.

Runic divination treated as probability experiments.

Runes and dreams.

Runes and psychogeography.

Runes encountered accidentally in branches, fences, road markings and architecture.

Not because Odin necessarily arranged three sticks beside the A11 specifically for your benefit.

But because for the duration of an experiment we can ask:

What happens if we behave as though he did?

Then observe.

Record.

Return to baseline.

That’s the difference between playing seriously with the imaginal world and getting swallowed by it.

Learn the history.

Respect what we actually know.

Invent what we don’t.

Label the invention honestly.

Then run the experiment.

Face north.

BOOT.VOID.

Become the rune.

Move.

Speak.

Observe.

Then:

LAB.COAT.

And remember the standing rule.

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

The Moon is female.

Obviously.

Goddess.

Mother.

Cycles.

Fertility.

Menstruation.

Silver.

Water.

Intuition.

The unconscious.

Pick up almost any modern book on Western magick and you’ll encounter some version of this symbolic package.

There’s only one problem.

The Moon isn’t female.

At least, not everywhere.

Travel north into the old Germanic world and something rather wonderful happens.

The Moon becomes a man.

And the Sun becomes a woman.

Meet Máni and Sól.

SOMEBODY GOT THE GODS THE WRONG WAY ROUND

Or did they?

In the Norse mythology preserved by Snorri Sturluson, a man called Mundilfari has two extraordinarily beautiful children.

His son is Máni — Moon.

His daughter is Sól — Sun.

The gods take them and place them in the heavens. Sól drives the solar chariot while Máni directs the course of the moon and determines its waxing and waning. (Internet Sacred Text Archive)

And this isn’t merely Snorri improvising the reversal. Vafþrúðnismál in the Poetic Edda also names Mundilfari as father of Moon and Sun. (Internet Sacred Text Archive)

So imagine taking a respectable modern lunar-magick correspondence chart to a medieval Norseman.

Moon: feminine.

No.

Sun: masculine.

No.

Moon Goddess.

He’s a bloke.

This is precisely the sort of thing I love.

Because somebody has to be wrong.

Unless, of course, nobody is.

THE HEADMASTER WHO INTRODUCED ME TO THE NORTH

I probably have a built-in bias here.

When I was a child I went to primary school in Stewkley, Buckinghamshire.

Our headmaster was deeply interested in English folklore, history and old traditions.

He’d take us walking through the countryside behind the school.

This wasn’t simply:

“That’s an oak tree, children.”

A tree had a story.

I remember him pointing out rowan and telling us the old story of Thor being saved by a rowan.

This was ostensibly a church-affiliated English primary school.

But looking back, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised to discover that our headmaster went home at night to a secret shrine containing Odin, Thor and Freyja.

A little like Rædwald, the East Anglian king whom Bede famously described as maintaining one altar for Christian worship and another for the older gods.

Cover all eventualities.

Very East Anglian.

And perhaps because those Northern stories entered my imagination so early, I’ve never had much difficulty with the Man in the Moon.

The Moon feels masculine to me.

Which raises a fascinating question.

WHO DECIDES WHAT A SYMBOL MEANS?

Suppose somebody tells you:

The Moon is intrinsically feminine.

Why?

Because it has cycles.

Because of menstruation.

Because of water.

Because of fertility.

Because of receptivity.

All perfectly workable associations.

But then an entire culture looks upward at exactly the same astronomical object and says:

Male.

Not metaphorically male.

Máni.

A male mythological being.

Meanwhile the blazing Sun crossing the sky is Sól — she.

Suddenly our supposedly universal correspondences look rather more like what they probably are:

cultural software.

And that’s enormously useful for magick.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO DISCOVER THE CORRECT MOON

There isn’t a cosmic multiple-choice examination.

Is the Moon:

A) Male
B) Female
C) Both
D) Neither
E) A 4.5-billion-year-old lump of rock orbiting Earth

Scientifically, E gets you a long way.

Magically, however, we can temporarily select another answer.

That’s what we’ve been doing throughout these experiments.

We’re not trying to establish metaphysical truth.

We’re selecting a model and asking:

What happens when I operate inside it?

So let’s meet Máni.

THE MAN IN THE MOON

Máni isn’t particularly well developed as a character in the surviving Norse sources.

That’s useful.

We don’t have to wade through 700 pages of theological doctrine before saying hello.

He regulates the moon’s course and its waxing and waning. Snorri also tells the curious story of Máni taking two children, Bil and Hjúki, from Earth as they carried a vessel of water; thereafter they accompany him and can be seen from Earth — apparently an explanation for markings visible on the lunar surface. (Internet Sacred Text Archive)

And Máni is hunted.

A wolf pursues the Moon.

Another pursues the Sun.

Eventually the cosmic order itself breaks down.

So this isn’t necessarily the serene silver Lunar Goddess reclining beside a pool.

This Moon moves.

Measures.

Changes.

Travels.

Is pursued.

Escapes.

And eventually doesn’t.

That’s a rather different lunar archetype.

TIP YOUR HAT TO THE MOON

There are numerous later European folk customs surrounding the new moon — greetings, bows, turning coins, wishes and various things you’re supposed to do or absolutely not do when first seeing it.

I’m wary of assigning any one of these directly to ancient Máni without evidence.

But we don’t need to.

Let’s invent our own tradition.

Next time you see the Moon:

acknowledge him.

If you’re wearing a hat, tip it.

“Evening, Máni.”

That’s it.

No £375 online initiation.

No consecrated silver chalice.

No twelve-week course.

Just establish the relationship.

Do it every time you happen to notice the Moon for a month.

Don’t hunt for him.

Let the encounter happen naturally.

Then observe what happens to your perception.

Because something probably will.

Not necessarily anything supernatural.

You may simply start noticing the Moon far more often.

Its position.

Its phase.

When it appears.

Where you are.

What you’re doing.

And once that happens, Máni has already entered your world.

MÁNI AS GODFORM

Then we can go further.

We’ve already played with Jupiter as godform.

We can do exactly the same thing here.

But first we need to decide what our Máni represents.

Not what some modern rune book tells us he represents.

Start with the surviving material.

The Moon measures time.

It waxes.

It wanes.

It travels through darkness.

It is pursued.

It disappears.

It returns.

There’s enough there.

For me, Máni could become an archetype of:

movement through darkness without losing direction.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

BOOT.VOID

Go outside when the Moon is visible.

Preferably somewhere reasonably quiet.

Look at it.

Then:

BOOT.VOID.

Still the body.

Reduce internal commentary.

Don’t start desperately imagining Viking gods.

Just look.

Actual Moon first.

Mythology second.

Notice its light.

Its apparent size.

The surrounding sky.

Clouds moving across it.

Then introduce the name:

Máni.

Internally or aloud.

Let the astronomical object and mythological image begin overlapping.

Not because you’re convincing yourself they’re literally identical.

Because you’re deliberately creating an imaginal layer over sensory reality.

That’s the experiment.

BRING MÁNI DOWN

Now do something similar to our Jupiter operation.

Imagine the Moon becoming something else.

Perhaps a figure emerges from it.

Perhaps the Moon itself develops presence.

Perhaps nothing visual happens.

Don’t force it.

Then imagine Máni descending.

Sky.

Cloud.

Landscape.

Towards you.

And finally:

into you.

Let yourself become the Man in the Moon.

Quiet.

Cold.

Moving.

Observant.

Travelling through darkness.

Pursued perhaps — but still travelling.

Then introduce whatever situation in your life currently feels uncertain.

Don’t ask Máni to fix it.

Ask:

HOW DO I MOVE THROUGH THIS?

Then shut up.

See what arises.

AND WHAT IF YOU’RE A WOMAN?

Exactly the same thing.

That’s another reason I like godform work.

You don’t have to match the sex of the archetype.

A man can invoke Freyja.

A woman can invoke Odin.

A woman can become Máni.

A man can become Sól.

For ten minutes you’re experimenting with another configuration of the psyche.

If anything, crossing the familiar symbolic gender might make the exercise more interesting.

WHAT ABOUT THE MENSTRUAL MOON?

Nothing happens to it.

If somebody finds the Moon’s relationship with menstruation, fertility and female embodiment profoundly meaningful, excellent.

Keep it.

We’re not replacing one dogma with another.

We’re demonstrating that symbolic systems aren’t laws of physics.

The Moon can be Diana tonight.

Máni tomorrow.

A dead astronomical body on Wednesday.

And on Thursday you can forget about it entirely and watch television.

This is chaos magick territory.

Use the model that produces interesting results.

LAB.COAT

And then, naturally:

LAB.COAT.

Bring the operation to an end.

Imagine the white scientist’s coat.

Arms through.

Button it.

Look upward again.

That’s the Moon.

Approximately 384,400 kilometres away.

Rock.

Dust.

Crater.

No detectable Norse gentleman sitting on it.

Excellent.

Return to baseline.

But record anything interesting.

Dreams.

Associations.

Synchronicities.

Unexpected insights.

Changes in how frequently you notice the Moon.

Nothing at all.

All valid data.

THE SKY ISN’T TELLING US WHAT IT MEANS

That’s perhaps the larger lesson.

Humans looked at the same Sun.

The same Moon.

The same stars.

And saw different gods.

Different genders.

Different stories.

Different powers.

That doesn’t make symbolism useless.

It makes it editable.

And that’s much more interesting.

So next time the Moon appears over the rooftops, fields or trees:

Look up.

Tip your hat.

Evening, Máni.

Then carry on walking.

See what happens.

Results you can use, but not prove.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

You’ve tried the dating apps.

You’ve swiped.

You’ve matched.

You’ve exchanged messages with somebody whose entire personality appears to consist of liking restaurants and travelling.

Perhaps you’ve even paid for the privilege.

And yet you’re still sitting there thinking:

Is this really how I’m supposed to find somebody?

Perhaps not.

So cancel the subscription.

We’re going to use magick instead.

Obviously.

Welcome to Amour Magick.

The objective isn’t to psychically enslave the attractive person three doors down.

We’re doing something considerably more interesting.

We’re going to cast a glamour over your probability field and see who appears.

Whether any invisible force is actually involved is entirely beside the point.

Something will change.

Even if the only thing affected is you.

And sometimes that’s enough.

DON’T LOOK FOR YOUR SOULMATE

This is our first rule.

Don’t specify the person.

I’d go further.

Don’t even specify too precisely what the person should be like.

“I summon a 37-year-old, raven-haired Jungian psychotherapist who likes Joy Division, dislikes package holidays and lives within seven miles of Ipswich.”

You’ve rather defeated the purpose.

Instead formulate the underlying result.

Perhaps:

I ATTRACT SOMEONE I FIND FASCINATING WHO FINDS ME FASCINATING.

That’s considerably better.

We’re interested in reciprocity.

Conversation.

Curiosity.

Chemistry.

Somebody you can talk to without secretly wondering whether chewing your own arm off might provide a socially acceptable means of escape.

Then leave the delivery mechanism alone.

That’s where the adventure starts.

CASTING THE GLAMOUR

Glamour is an old magickal idea.

At its simplest, it’s enchantment applied to perception.

You’re not necessarily changing your face, body or clothes.

You’re changing the signal.

Occultists might say you’re manipulating subtle energies.

A psychologist might say you’ve changed your expectations, attention, posture and behaviour.

A neuroscientist might have another explanation.

I don’t particularly care.

Run the experiment.

There are dozens of ways to construct the operation.

Empty-hand magick.

Sigils.

Psionics.

Ritual.

Servitors.

Prayer.

Whatever system you’re currently using.

The system matters less than giving the intention sufficient charge.

THE PSIONIC VERSION

Here’s the abbreviated version.

Enter what I call boot.void.

Still the body.

Still the internal chatter.

Don’t strain after some mythical state of perfect mental silence. Just become quiet enough that you’re no longer constantly interfering.

Now place your attention around the solar plexus.

Imagine a sphere forming there.

Give it whatever sensory qualities arise naturally.

Heat.

Pressure.

Light.

Vibration.

Perhaps nothing visual at all.

Program your intention into it.

Something simple:

I ATTRACT MUTUAL FASCINATION.

Let the sphere build.

Now imagine it moving out of your body until it’s suspended in front of you.

Bring in the body.

Tense the abdomen.

Arms.

Hands.

Build physical and emotional intensity.

Feed that charge into the sphere.

Let it reach the point where holding it feels almost ridiculous.

Then:

Fire it.

Not at a person.

Into the world.

See the sphere accelerating away from you — into the ether, probability field, collective unconscious, simulation, imagination or whatever model you’re currently entertaining.

Let it explode.

Sparks everywhere.

The instruction broadcasting outward.

Then stop.

Operation complete.

Go and make a cup of tea.

OR USE A SIGIL

Chaos magicians will recognise the alternative immediately.

Write the intention.

Reduce it to one clean statement.

Strip it down.

Remove repeated letters if that’s your preferred method.

Combine what’s left into a glyph that no longer immediately reminds you of the original sentence.

That’s your sigil.

Then charge it.

Meditation.

Breath.

Rhythm.

Dance.

Exhaustion.

Laughter.

Emotional intensity.

Chaos magicians have devised innumerable ways of creating the brief altered state in which the symbol becomes more important than the chatter surrounding it.

Use whatever works for you.

Then put the sigil away.

Again:

Fire and forget.

I’m deliberately not giving the full Working Manual version here.

This is enough to run the experiment.

NOW COMES THE IMPORTANT PART

Go about your life.

But pay attention.

This is where the experiment becomes interesting.

You’re not hunting for a partner.

You’re observing changes in the field.

Perhaps you go somewhere you wouldn’t normally go and unexpectedly get talking to somebody.

Perhaps an everyday conversation in a shop continues several minutes longer than necessary.

Perhaps somebody makes you laugh.

Perhaps somebody’s gaze remains on you slightly longer than social convention requires.

Perhaps a friend unexpectedly invites you somewhere.

Perhaps you repeatedly encounter the same person.

Don’t immediately declare:

THE MAGICK IS WORKING!

Just note it.

There’s an enormous difference between observation and interpretation.

The game isn’t to start hitting on everybody who smiles at you.

The game is to become receptive to openings.

If somebody wants to continue talking, talk.

If the conversation is funny, let it be funny.

If nothing develops, nothing develops.

Don’t force the plot.

SYNCHRONICITY IS DATA, NOT INSTRUCTION

Suppose you perform the operation on Monday.

On Wednesday you go into a café you’ve never visited before.

Someone starts talking to you.

You discover an extraordinary number of shared interests.

Then you discover you were both inexplicably at the same obscure concert in 2009.

Interesting.

Write it down.

But don’t immediately conclude:

THE UNIVERSE HAS SENT MY DESTINED LOVER.

That’s how you become an idiot.

Synchronicity is interesting data.

It isn’t an instruction to abandon judgement.

Which brings us to the dangerous part.

YOU MAY SUMMON A SUCCUBUS

Or an incubus.

Congratulations.

Your love magick worked rather better than anticipated.

You’ve met somebody.

They’re fascinating.

Magnetic.

Sexy.

Unpredictable.

You can’t stop thinking about them.

Within three weeks your sleep is wrecked, you’ve stopped seeing your friends, your bank account has developed unexplained holes and you’re standing outside their house at 2:17 in the morning wondering what the hell happened.

Did you literally summon a succubus?

Probably not.

But don’t throw the model away too quickly.

The succubus and incubus are ancient images of attraction becoming consumption.

They can be useful precisely because you don’t have to believe they’re literal entities.

Perhaps this person has been shaped by their history, environment and relationships into something remarkably close to the archetype.

Perhaps you’re projecting the archetype onto them.

Perhaps you’re simply infatuated.

Perhaps something much stranger is happening.

You don’t need to decide.

The model gives you something useful:

Observe what the relationship is doing to you.

Are you becoming more alive?

Or less?

More yourself?

Or increasingly destabilised?

Interested?

Or obsessed?

Is the attraction reciprocal and basically good-natured?

Or have you entered a cycle of intensity, withdrawal, pursuit and emotional exhaustion?

The demonological language suddenly becomes rather useful.

Not because we’ve proved demons exist.

Because we’ve found an image that helps us see the pattern.

THE DISPASSIONATE OBSERVER

This is why Amour Magick requires one piece of consciousness work alongside the enchantment.

Keep part of yourself outside the story.

Observe.

Still mind.

Take in data.

You can be fascinated by somebody without immediately constructing a mythology around them.

You can experience powerful attraction without deciding it’s fate.

You can notice extraordinary coincidences without turning them into commandments.

And you can walk away.

That’s important.

Magick should increase your available choices.

If your “magick” progressively removes them, something has gone wrong.

MAKE REALITY MORE INTERESTING

That’s ultimately why I prefer this experiment to another month on a dating app.

Perhaps the magick does absolutely nothing supernatural.

Fine.

You’ve nevertheless altered the game.

You’re paying more attention.

You’re going places.

You’re noticing people.

You’re allowing conversations to develop.

You’re introducing randomness into routines that may have become remarkably efficient at ensuring you meet nobody new.

And you’re treating the search for another human being as an adventure rather than an algorithm.

Something might happen.

Nothing might happen.

Someone delightful might appear.

Someone completely unsuitable might appear.

You might accidentally summon an incubus.

Write it all down.

Just remember the standing rule:

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

Cast the glamour.

Enter the world.

And see who looks back.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

We might be on the verge of having no jobs because AI does them all.

There might be food shortages.

Fuel shortages.

Economic collapse.

Money itself might disappear and we’ll all be trading potatoes and compute tokens by 2028.

Or none of this might happen.

Who cares?

We’ll deal with it when it does.

Right now most of us still need money.

So let’s get some.

Preferably vast quantities of filthy lucre.

Failing that, enough to make life slightly more comfortable and pay your next Netflix subscription.

We’re going to use magick.

Obviously.

FIRST, BUILD SOMEWHERE FOR THE MONEY TO LAND

This is where money magick frequently becomes ridiculous.

You can’t sit in a darkened room, burn incense for three hours and then complain that the universe hasn’t deposited £50,000 in an Amazon parcel outside your back door.

Conveniently dispatched by Jeff Bezos.

Money needs channels.

If you have a job, you already have one.

More money could arrive through promotion, overtime, a bonus, a better position or a tax rebate.

Good luck with that last one.

If you have a side gig, that’s another channel.

If you run a business, even better. You already possess a functioning money-drawing machine.

More customers.

Larger orders.

Unexpected referrals.

A new product taking off.

An old customer returning.

Somebody proposing a deal you hadn’t considered.

These are all perfectly plausible routes through which additional money can enter your life.

If you currently have no channels, create some.

Sell something.

Freelance.

Offer a service.

Put something on eBay.

Write.

Make things.

Start a tiny business.

Or open an OnlyFans account.

Whatever works.

The point is simple:

Give probability somewhere to move.

Then we’ll apply magick to it.

Because frankly you’re missing a trick if you don’t.

And even if the magick does absolutely nothing supernatural, it makes the tedious grind of the money hunt considerably more entertaining.

WE’RE GOING TO JUPITER

Our destination is Jupiter.

Unfortunately, even the best spacecraft we’ve currently got are basically Model T Fords when you’re talking about planetary travel.

So we’re not going there.

We’re bringing Jupiter here.

More precisely, we’re going to invoke the Jupitarian godform.

This is an old idea in ceremonial magick.

Rather than asking a god, spirit or archetype to do something for you, you temporarily identify yourself with it.

You let it overshadow you.

You adopt its characteristics.

For our purposes, Jupiter is ideal.

Expansion.

Authority.

Opportunity.

Prosperity.

Confidence.

Generosity.

Success.

The Roman Jupiter is the kingly sky god — associated with sovereignty, thunder and the ordering power of the heavens.

Astrologically, Jupiter became associated with expansion, abundance, good fortune and opportunity.

And psychologically?

We can call it an archetype.

Jung would at least give us permission to play in that territory.

But let’s not become too respectable.

We’re invoking a god.

BUILD YOUR JUPITER

Do some research first.

Not three months.

Half an hour will do.

Read about the Roman Jupiter.

Look at images.

Read a little about the astrological associations of the planet.

Find out what colours, metals, scents, symbols and other correspondences have traditionally become associated with Jupiter.

Then assemble some props.

Cheap ones.

We’re doing magick, not redecorating Buckingham Palace.

A candle.

Some incense.

A picture.

Perhaps the planetary symbol of Jupiter drawn onto a piece of card.

Maybe something that you associate with prosperity and expansion.

Don’t become obsessed with whether you’ve purchased the historically correct incense from a man called Merlin on Etsy.

The purpose of all this stuff is to load the imagination.

You’re constructing Jupiter in your mind.

That’s the technology.

BOOT.VOID

Now sit down.

Switch the phone off.

Get comfortable.

Close your eyes.

Enter boot.void.

If cybernetic metaphors aren’t your thing, call it still-mind meditation.

Reduce the internal commentary.

Let the body become quiet.

Don’t worry if thoughts continue appearing.

You’re not trying to become an enlightened Himalayan master.

You’re simply creating enough internal silence to run the experiment.

Sit there for a few minutes.

Then look upward.

In imagination.

We’re going into space.

BRING DOWN JUPITER

See darkness.

Stars.

Then the enormous planet Jupiter appears.

Don’t worry about astronomical accuracy.

This is imaginal space.

See its bands.

Its storms.

The Great Red Spot.

Its extraordinary scale.

Let Jupiter occupy your entire internal field of vision.

Now something changes.

The planet begins to transform.

It becomes Jupiter the god.

You don’t need a perfectly rendered Hollywood deity.

Let your imagination provide whatever it provides.

A gigantic figure.

A face.

Lightning.

A presence.

Perhaps nothing visual happens and you simply feel something enormous looming in imaginal space.

Good enough.

Now bring Jupiter towards Earth.

Closer.

Closer.

Through the darkness.

Towards the atmosphere.

Down through the clouds.

Across your country.

Towards your town.

Towards your street.

You’ve effectively given a Roman god your GPS coordinates.

Probably against several clauses in Google’s terms of service.

Now bring Jupiter directly towards you.

And then:

Into you.

BECOME JUPITER

This is the important part.

Don’t imagine Jupiter standing beside you.

Don’t ask him for money.

For a few minutes:

YOU ARE JUPITER.

Feel your body expanding.

Not physically.

Subjectively.

Fill the room.

Fill the building.

Feel immense confidence.

Authority.

Generosity.

Opportunity.

Expansion.

Imagine Jupitarian energy surging through your body.

If you work with breath, breathe it through yourself.

If physical tension helps you build charge, use it.

Arms.

Abdomen.

Chest.

Hands.

Let the sensation increase.

Then bring your money channels into awareness.

Your job.

Your business.

Your side gig.

The thing you’re selling.

The project you’re launching.

Don’t plead.

Don’t think:

“Please, Jupiter, could I possibly have £300 because the electricity bill is rather worrying?”

Wrong state.

Jupiter doesn’t beg.

Instead embody:

EXPANSION.

More opportunity.

More reach.

More business.

More money.

More useful connections.

More openings.

Let the feeling reach a crescendo.

Then release it.

Sit quietly.

Operation complete.

NOW DO SOMETHING

This bit is important.

Within the next 24 hours, take one concrete action involving money.

Send the email.

Make the call.

Publish the offer.

Apply for the position.

Follow up the old customer.

List the thing for sale.

Ask about the opportunity.

Finish the proposal.

You have just spent twenty minutes becoming the supreme god of the Roman heavens.

Don’t immediately celebrate by lying on the sofa watching Netflix.

Move.

Magick works particularly well as a way of disrupting inertia.

Use it.

WATCH THE CHANNELS

Over the following days, observe.

Don’t obsess.

You’re looking for movement.

Someone contacts you unexpectedly.

A previous customer returns.

An opportunity appears.

A conversation produces an idea.

Somebody recommends you.

A payment you weren’t expecting arrives.

You suddenly notice an obvious way of making money that somehow hadn’t occurred to you before.

Write these things down.

Don’t immediately announce:

JUPITER HAS SPOKEN.

Something happened.

That’s all we know.

Record it.

TAKE OFF THE GOD

There’s one more thing.

We need to close the operation.

You’ve spent twenty minutes imagining yourself as Jupiter.

You don’t want to spend Tuesday afternoon behaving like the supreme ruler of heaven in Tesco.

So remove the godform.

Here’s my favourite quick method.

Stand up.

Imagine yourself putting on a white scientist’s coat.

Really feel yourself putting your arms through the sleeves.

Button it.

You are now the sceptic.

The laboratory technician.

Completely ordinary.

Look back at what you’ve just done as though somebody else told you about it.

“You imagined the planet Jupiter turning into a Roman god, flying down from space and entering your body?”

Yes.

“Right.”

Perfect.

You’re back.

The experiment is over.

If you’re a ceremonial magician and enjoy making everything take three times longer, perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Knock yourself out.

Personally, I’ll take the white coat.

SAME REALITY. DIFFERENT RESULTS.

Now return to ordinary life.

Work.

Sell.

Build.

Talk to people.

Create opportunities.

Keep your money channels open.

And watch what happens.

Maybe Jupiter is an objective metaphysical intelligence.

Maybe you’ve activated an archetypal structure in the psyche.

Maybe the ritual changes your posture, confidence and willingness to notice opportunities.

Maybe it’s elaborate play-acting.

Maybe nothing happens whatsoever.

Fine.

Run the experiment anyway.

Because there’s another possibility.

Perhaps spending twenty minutes becoming Jupiter changes the way you approach the world for the next twenty-four hours.

And the world responds differently.

That’s enough.

You don’t need to solve metaphysics before paying the electricity bill.

Build the channel.

Invoke expansion.

Take action.

Observe the results.

Then put the scientist’s coat back on.

And remember:

DON’T BECOME AN IDIOT.

Especially when you’re Jupiter.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

The British National Lottery used to have the slogan:

IT COULD BE YOU!

I never liked it.

Of course it could be you.

Given enough time, presumably it eventually will be you.

Keep buying tickets for the next two million years and probability ought to start becoming your friend.

Fortunately, two million years isn’t necessarily going to daunt the serious magician.

Not when some of us have also been experimenting with qigong and its more extravagant claims concerning longevity.

Still, let’s set a more ambitious target.

£80 million next week.

Or the week after.

All right.

Five years.

It’s worth a try.

And more importantly, it’s fun.

In the free piece, How To Win The Lottery, I described some of the experiments Steve Solomon and I conducted back in Norwich during the 1990s.

We watched for numbers appearing synchronistically.

We went into meditative silence and waited for numbers to arise spontaneously.

I used sigils.

We treated the ordinary world as though it were an enormous divination machine.

Occasionally we won small amounts.

We never became millionaires.

Eventually we got bored and went off to make money by other means.

But those were the basic experiments.

This is Advanced Lottery Magick.

We’re going hardcore.

We’re going to ask a demon.

Read more

Back in the 1990s, when the National Lottery first arrived in Britain, quite a few people in the magickal world had the same thought.

Could we beat it?

Not mathematically. We weren’t going to sit around calculating probability distributions.

We meant magickally.

This was the 1990s. Chaos magick was the punk rock of the occult. The basic proposition was wonderfully simple: belief was a tool, results mattered more than dogma, and if something worked you used it.

If it didn’t work, you tried something else.

So naturally somebody was going to point chaos magick at the National Lottery.

I was living in Norwich at the time, and my partner in crime was my friend Steve Solomon.

Steve wasn’t actually a chaos magician.

In fact, he regarded chaos magicians as irresponsible lunatics.

He’d heard all about the so-called “ice wars” — magicians supposedly attacking and hexing one another — and didn’t approve at all. Traditional witches were equally suspicious. So were the neo-pagans, mediums and spiritualists we’d encounter around Norwich.

They believed in consequences. The threefold return. What goes around comes around.

Chaos magicians tended to shrug.

That was part of the appeal.

Steve disapproved of all this immensely.

The problem was that in practice Steve operated exactly like a chaos magician.

And he desperately wanted to win the lottery.

THE MAN WHO HAD TO WIN

Steve was permanently skint.

Not fashionably broke. Properly skint.

At one point he was getting red diesel from a farmer to keep his car running.

So when the National Lottery appeared, Steve didn’t regard the jackpot as some pleasant fantasy.

He regarded it almost as a financial plan.

Every Saturday night we’d wait for those balls to drop.

This was going to be it.

We’d cracked reality.

We had the numbers.

Then the draw would take place.

We hadn’t cracked reality.

Never mind.

Next Saturday.

The peculiar thing was that neither of us simply sat at home attempting to psychically perceive six lottery balls.

The experiment spilled out into Norwich.

And that’s where it became interesting.

EVERYTHING HAS MEANING

Steve and I met at least once a week.

Sometimes we’d meet in the tearoom at Jarrolds department store — the old one right at the top — or we’d find one of Norwich’s independent tearooms.

One afternoon we encountered two elderly mediums.

We hadn’t asked for a reading.

That didn’t stop them.

One of the women suddenly stared intently at me.

Then she started crying.

“Somebody is coming through for you…”

I looked around.

We were sitting in a perfectly civilised tearoom.

I hadn’t requested anybody to come through for me.

Now an elderly woman was in tears.

I probably responded more like Basil Fawlty than Aleister Crowley.

“This is a civilised tearoom and you’re in tears!”

But this sort of thing happened.

Steve and I had developed a game.

We would go on what you might call magickal journeys through the ordinary world.

We might walk all the way around Mousehold Heath. Or wander through Norwich city centre. Or through completely unremarkable suburbs.

Before setting out, we’d make one decision:

Everything has meaning.

Not literally.

That wasn’t the point.

For the duration of the experiment, we would act as though everything had meaning.

A rook cawed from a tree.

Why then?

A branch had fallen across the path.

Why there?

I’d notice several twigs lying on the ground that resembled a rune.

Steve would stop.

Someone walking past might say something to us.

Steve would stare at them intently.

What had they just told us?

What was the message?

You deliberately changed your relationship with the environment.

Instead of regarding the world as background scenery, you treated it as a communications system.

And once the lottery arrived, naturally the communications system started producing numbers.

THE NUMBERS ARE EVERYWHERE

Steve became particularly alert to numbers appearing unexpectedly.

Someone might say:

“He’s forty-three.”

Steve’s ears would prick up.

43.

We’d pass a billboard and one number would somehow stand out.

Write it down.

A number appeared on a vehicle.

Write it down.

Somebody said something involving an age, a price or a quantity.

Write it down.

The important distinction was that you didn’t consciously go hunting for numbers.

There are numbers everywhere.

If you’re deliberately looking for them, you can produce whatever result you want.

The number had to interrupt you.

It had to somehow jump out of the noise.

That was Steve’s method.

Mine was different.

ENTER THE VOID

I’d use sigil magick and meditation.

I’d formulate the intent, create the sigil, charge it and then go into what I’d call the void.

Stop thinking.

Stop trying.

Stop desperately chanting:

4… 17… 26… COME ON, UNIVERSE…

Because once you’re doing that, you’re generating the numbers yourself.

Instead I’d sit quietly and wait.

Sometimes numbers would drift through the mind’s eye.

Perhaps 27 appeared visually.

Perhaps 11 simply arrived as a thought.

Perhaps I’d get a rapid sequence.

Write them down.

Don’t analyse them.

Don’t decide 27 doesn’t feel lucky and change it to 28.

The first signal is the signal.

Then we’d buy the ticket.

Saturday night arrived.

And…

Well.

We never became millionaires.

But occasionally I’d win something.

I remember getting about £80 on one occasion, which wasn’t bad money to me in those days. It paid a few bills.

Naturally this immediately proved that the entire metaphysical structure of the universe had been cracked.

Until next Saturday, when it didn’t work.

TRY IT YOURSELF

Thirty years later, I wouldn’t tell anybody that magick can predict lottery numbers.

Every valid combination has the same mathematical chance of appearing as every other valid combination.

But that’s precisely why lottery divination remains a rather good chaos magick experiment.

You can’t easily fool yourself into thinking you’ve succeeded.

The balls either come out or they don’t.

So if you want to resurrect our 1990s experiments, here are four ways of doing it.

1. THE VOID METHOD

Find out the permitted number range for your lottery.

Sit quietly for ten minutes.

Close your eyes.

Don’t consciously think about numbers.

Reduce the internal dialogue as far as possible.

Wait.

If a number spontaneously appears — visually, verbally or simply as a sudden inexplicable thought — write it down.

Don’t alter it.

Continue until you have the required numbers.

Then stop.

2. THE STEVE SOLOMON METHOD

Give yourself one ordinary day.

Go to work. Walk through town. Get the bus. Drink coffee. Talk to people.

Don’t hunt for numbers.

Instead, notice which numbers hunt you.

Someone unexpectedly mentions an age.

A number on a sign catches your attention.

You glance somewhere for no apparent reason and see 37.

Write it down immediately.

You’re looking for interruption rather than repetition.

At the end of the day, examine what you’ve collected.

Those are your numbers.

3. THE SIGIL METHOD

Write an intention such as:

REVEAL THE NUMBERS

Turn the statement into a sigil using whatever method you prefer.

Meditate upon it.

Then close your eyes and enter silence.

Don’t try to visualise numbers.

Wait and see what arrives.

You can make the experiment more interesting by repeating it on three separate occasions.

If the same number spontaneously appears more than once, mark it.

Again, don’t ask whether the number is genuinely paranormal.

Use it.

This is an experiment.

4. RANDOM COLLISION

This one is perhaps the most authentically chaos magickal.

Use one random system to interrogate another random system.

Pick up a book.

Open it without looking.

Put your finger on the page.

Take the first usable number you encounter.

Repeat.

Or throw dice and devise a simple method of converting the result into the number range required by your lottery.

Shuffle numbered cards.

Use street numbers.

Take six completely unrelated sources of randomness and force them into collision.

Then play whatever comes out.

Does one random system know what another random system is going to do?

Almost certainly not.

But there’s only one way to find out.

THEN WE GOT BORED

Here’s the strange ending.

Eventually most of us stopped trying to win the lottery.

I certainly did.

The experiments had been entertaining. The National Lottery itself wasn’t.

Something else happened instead.

A surprising number of the people around that scene started businesses.

They wrote books.

They created things.

They devised schemes.

They became self-employed.

They applied exactly the same experimental mentality to circumstances where the odds weren’t fixed.

And that’s a much more interesting game.

A lottery draw doesn’t care how ingenious you are.

Business does.

Writing does.

Life often does.

You try something.

Nothing happens.

Change something.

Try again.

Watch for unexpected openings.

Follow strange coincidences occasionally.

Discard what doesn’t work.

Keep what does.

Chaos magick never really left.

It just escaped from the occult.

Steve would probably have objected to me saying that.

Then he’d have borrowed some red diesel from a farmer and driven off looking for signs.

And perhaps that’s the real method.

RESULTS YOU CAN USE, BUT NOT PROVE.

Why not?

You can think about stuff till the cows come home.

Or you can get on with it and have a bit of fun.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

When my Doktor Snake’s Voodoo Spellbook was published in 2000 it was all about African-American spiritual work, with a dash of chaos magick.

There were mojo hands, conjurations, and working with Papa Legba, and so on.

And the book chronicled my time spent with Earl Marlowe, the old hoodoo man from Trinidad.

The tradition I outlined was his tradition, though my eclectic influences had an influence on him.

One of the things that impressed me about Earl was he was also well-versed in clairvoyance and ESP.

Often he would say to me that, essentially, you don’t need the trappings of spell bags and paraphernalia.

They have their place. But essentially the magick was on a psychic and astral level.

“Dem old Victorian table-tappers knew what they doing,” he would say. “They’d conjure spirits you could see wid yo’ own eyes. And that get the job done.”

He and I did that. Many a time in an old graveyard we’d get phenomena happening, like ghostly mists and shadows taking on form.

Even today I have had weird creatures appearing in broad daylight. Whether that’s part of the alien phenomenon or paranormal creatures from another realm, I don’t know. My feeling is they are all the same thing.

Much of what Earl and I did involved psychic methods and trance mediumship.

Empty hand magick, I called it.

We’d do what is now called remote viewing, but our roots were in the Victorian seance rooms. We weren’t worried about the “science” like remote viewers are (as they came out of the CIA), we were concerned about getting the job done.

In other words:

RESULTS YOU CAN USE, BUT NOT PROVE.

We’d also do what I call Distance Influence — which is about remotely affecting a target, be it a person or situation. This didn’t involve paraphernalia. It was about psychically homing in and adjusting a situation via the astral.

It could also involve liaising with entities of one sort or another. All are shapeshifters and often tricksters so you have to be certain what you are dealing with. It can be a risky business — but for the practitioner, not the client.

Earl and I got into more than a few scrapes with the denizens of the unseen realm.

Nowadays I typically use the term “distance influence” rather than “spells”. Partly because Google and big tech — not to mention AI — tend to penalise the use of the word, mostly because of lot of unscrupulous people came online a decade back. So spells got lumped in with gambling and porn sites.

And with AI there is a left-brain bias, which means it is somewhat sniffy about the term.

Plus I mostly use the methodology of distance influence — echoing back to Earl and I working with trance mediumship.

And just like the CIA, I wanted a term that was a little more scientific sounding!

Naturally, the CIA, Russian Intelligence, and British intel, all have worked with what they termed “remote influence.”

While the book, The Men That Stared At Goats by Jon Ronson (2004), and the movie of the same name, might not be wholly accurate, they sort of were… and you can guess why.

They were about what I call “psychic killshots”.

Killing at a distance.

It wasn’t just Jon Ronson’s book either. David Moorhouse (a military remote viewer) hinted at it in his book Psychic Warrior (1996). So did Gen. Albert Stubblebine in interviews. As did Uri Geller when talking about his CIA/Mossad influencing stories (Geller’s tales, though, were entirely self-reported).

Earl and I used to talk about this.

He’d say:

“Some people gotta be bumped off coz they evil. Ain’t got no qualms about that. But half of our clients want somebody dead, and fo’ no good reason save they are riled about something, not coz the person is Adolf Hitler!”

We actually knew Uri Geller too. We liked him well enough. But Earl thought he was a blagger.

“That Uri like a used car dealer. Sell you a banger if you not careful. But he can do stuff, that for sure.”

Another thing Earl and I had go on a lot was “aports”. This is when objects appear out of nowhere.

I’d often get coins flying past me and landing on the floor. Nobody around to do that, and the coins would often be from other countries, like a US dime or European coins, none of which I had in my possession. In my wallet I often had US dollar bills, but no coins.

Earl commented on that once:

“The spirits giving you them as gifts. Use ‘em to power up your workings. You always know a spirit coin if it gets warm or hot to the touch. If you give one to a client and they feel it, they got the power too. They connected.”

Oh, and you can check out my Influence work at:

https://www.doktorsnake.com/influence/

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

Way back in the day there was Earl Marlowe.

He was an old hoodoo man originally from Trinidad, who I chronicled in my Doktor Snake’s Voodoo Spellbook.

When I knew him we were both living in North London (he’d previously lived in the US for a few years).

My first involvement with Earl was playing guitar for him as he was a world music singer and percussionist.

But eventually he confided that he was a spiritual doctor, and he brought me into that work, doing African-influenced workings for his clients.

At the time I knew how to read tarot cards, cast the I Ching, and read the runes.

But he used an old poker deck.

So he schooled me in that, mysteriously saying he never read the front of the cards, only the back.

Which made no sense.

But in the end I got it when observing him doing readings.

Basically he was doing clairvoyant readings — which we called Distant Sight.

It’s pretty similar to Remote Viewing.

But without the science and the CIA.

And that’s the thing, divination systems and the meanings applied to them are too general. More for people wanting to know the trends that are likely to impact their lives.

Whereas if you are hardcore in the trenches of helping people, nobody wants that.

They want to know what the hell is going on right now, either with them, or with friends, family, or in their marriages or relationships.

It’s visceral.

Only one thing for it, you have to see — more in a clairvoyant sense.

You might lay down cards or runes, but they usually serve to get the conversation going.

The real job is seeing on an unseen level — via “mental radio” as author Upton Sinclair called it. To get right to it and directly perceive what’s going on.

I don’t know about tarot readers. I don’t really know any very well. I come across them sometimes when I’m at the Atlantis Bookshop in London. A regular haunt of mine. And I hear interesting stories that I probably shouldn’t reveal (but we’ll see one day).

If you do Tarot readings or similar, do you use the meanings applied to them?

Or do you go all-out clairvoyance or Distant Sight as I call it?

You would have to if people want to know very specific things — like has their partner had sex with somebody else, or is their cousin hexing them. Or what is a given person thinking, or where are they, and what are they doing.

We’re in the realms of ESP with all this.

Straight up Remote Viewing.

And I often think, well, it would help if alongside the reading I could get a CIA agent to look into it as well. Thing is, I don’t know anyone in the CIA. I do know someone in MI5, and I jokingly asked him if I could get them onto stuff for me.

He just said, “F*ck off, you c*nt.”

He then said, “We would get you on our books, but you’d never get security clearance.”

I then ask how much they’d pay.

“F*ck all,” he replied.

If Earl Marlowe were still in the land of the living, he’d have loved that.

Oh… readings are at:
https://www.doktorsnake.com/readings/

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

In the land of the Vikings.

East Anglia.

Black Shuck.

Mere-wives.

Woodwoses.

Old Nick.

Spirits of the dark liminal places.

You can walk widdershins around many old churches nine times and the Devil will appear and grant you a wish.

Or dance around the Devil’s Stone at St Mary’s Church, Bungay, and Old Nick will jump out from behind a gravestone and ask you what you most desire in life — and deliver it.

Choose wisely.

All this was well known in medieval times.

What’s changed?

Nobody believes it anymore.

They don’t know the old folk tales.

But consider this:

What if it works?

The stone carving at the 13th century church at Santon Downham depicts a strange beast.

Nobody knows what it is.

It could be Black Shuck, the demon dog that on the same day in 1577 AD attacked both St Mary’s Church at Bungay and Holy Trinity at Blythburgh, a number of people died of fright on the spot.

The incident is on historical record.

How accurate a report is open to debate, but something clearly happened.

Some say Black Shuck was the Devil himself, shapeshifting into werewolf form.

Then there are the mere-wives, later known as mermaids.

Spirits that haunt the meres, which are small lakes or pools, some known as pingos in East Anglia.

Water spirits.

You will even find depictions of mermaids carved in stone on the walls of some old churches.

Clearly something was going on.

Things we can’t see today.

But then how many people stop scrolling their phones and go to the wild places?

And then there’s the woodwoses, “wild men (and women) of the woods”.

In Suffolk alone, there are numerous old churches with stone carving of these wild men.

Were they the left-overs of an indigenous species of hominid?

Or are they part of the liminal spaces, the inbetween, where the spooks roam?

The thing is, woodwoses are still being encountered today.

• In July 2019, a group of people heard low, throaty growls in Thetford Forest.

• Around the same time, people reported their dogs being spooked by something hiding in the near distance. Plus someone reported being “shadowed by something I couldn’t see.”

• And in 2009 in Thetford Forest Park, someone reported a creature “not of this world” that was around 7ft tall, which they came face-to-face with in a clearing.

You can read the full story of local woodwoses at The Eastern Daily Press:

https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/20766005.weird-norfolk-hunt-beast-a1075-near-thetford-raft-recent-bigfoot-sightings/

All the above are locations where I conduct my majiks.

Why?

Because the very land itself, the landscape, and the monuments all hold power.

Some are portals to the liminal realms, which you can enter, but the denizens also enter our world.

I’ve run into flotillas of UFOs, cryptid creatures, and all manner of strange encounters.

I go to the wild places partly because they are usually peaceful.

Fairly human-free.

But also because they show that our world is not what it seems.

It’s a haunted planet.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

Drive out in my Mercedes SLK.

Which becomes like a TARDIS.

Part this dimension, part another, along with temporal shifts.

Drifting deep into the wilds of the Norfolk and Suffolk countryside.

To ancient mounds (portals), old churches, and strange, otherworldly landscapes.

Park up.

Muse for a while.

Acclimatise to the location.

Walk the ghost roads.

Lanes to nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

Hear the whispers of the other-worlders.

Speaking ancient tongues.

And of majiks done long before.

And the skies.

The clouds.

Conveying their messages.

Gazing down on the majiks being conducted.

Travelling the other realms, part here, part there.

In the place of formations, the etheric plane, where any given probability stream can be nudged into manifestation.

Or diverted as the case may be.

One path turned to another.

CyberDeck in hand, the majiks surge.

The Earth begins to undulate.

Worlds collide.

The old ones stir.

Will is done.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

I was sent to Earth because something had gone wrong.

Not catastrophically wrong. Not then.

There were no armies massing against us. No weapons had been discovered. No organised resistance movement existed. Indeed, most of the experimental population remained completely unaware that there was anything to resist.

They woke.

They worked.

They reproduced.

They accumulated possessions.

They defended opinions installed in them by people who had themselves received those opinions from other people.

Then they died.

For several thousand years, the system had functioned almost perfectly.

Until some of them began waking up.

We called the planet X865.

The inhabitants called it Earth.

They had other names for it too.

Mother Earth.

Gaia.

The World.

Nature.

Primitive anthropomorphism, according to our xenobiologists.

X865 was a planet. Nothing more.

A particularly fertile planet, certainly. Its biosphere demonstrated extraordinary regenerative properties. Life appeared almost everywhere conditions permitted it.

Break the surface of a road and plants pushed through.

Abandon a city and vegetation dismantled it.

Poison a river and organisms eventually appeared capable of surviving the poison.

Life adapted.

Life persisted.

Life returned.

We should have paid greater attention to that.

But we didn’t.

We were interested in the humans.

Our ancestors arrived approximately three hundred thousand planetary years ago.

They had not come as explorers.

They were refugees.

The official histories described their departure from our original world as a migration caused by political instability.

This was untrue.

We had been expelled.

Our species possessed extraordinary technical intelligence and almost no capacity to control its aggression. Once our civilisation developed weapons capable of planetary destruction, extinction became statistically inevitable.

Those who understood this acted first.

Our ancestors were removed.

Several ships wandered between systems before discovering X865.

The planet was inhabited by numerous species, including a hominid creature that showed limited promise.

Neanderthal.

Strong.

Social.

Adaptable.

But disappointing.

Its neural activity lacked the complexity required for our purposes.

So we improved it.

Samples were taken.

Genetic material was extracted, divided, recombined.

Elements of our own biology were introduced.

There were failures.

There were grotesque intermediate forms.

There were entire populations that were terminated.

Eventually there was success.

Homo sapiens.

The Human.

Intelligent enough to build.

Intelligent enough to imagine.

Intelligent enough to obey an abstraction.

And, unfortunately, carrying considerably more of our aggression than had been intended.

That created a problem.

It also created an opportunity.

The first behavioural architecture was crude.

Fear.

Pain.

Dominance.

Reward.

These worked perfectly well on individual organisms but became unstable as populations increased.

Something more sophisticated was required.

That was when they developed:

PROTOCOL: BELIEVE

BELIEVE was elegant because it required almost no external enforcement.

A human could be made to protect its programming itself.

The process began before birth.

Hormonal signals transmitted environmental information during gestation. After birth came language, imitation, reward, punishment, belonging.

The infant received a name.

Then a family.

Then a tribe.

Then rules.

Then explanations.

By the time independent abstract thought became possible, the basic architecture had already been installed.

The Human did not experience these programs as programs.

It experienced them as:

ME.

That was the genius of BELIEVE.

We didn’t need to tell a Human what to think forever.

We merely had to teach it that certain thoughts belonged to it.

Humans did the rest.

Different installations were tested.

God.

Nation.

Race.

Class.

Money.

Status.

Success.

Failure.

Respectability.

Revolution.

Science.

Progress.

Tradition.

Each could become a BELIEVE architecture.

Their content didn’t particularly matter.

Contradictory belief systems could coexist within the same population.

In fact, contradiction proved useful.

That discovery produced our second great behavioural system.

PROTOCOL: DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

The Human aggression inherited from our own species needed somewhere to go.

So we gave it targets.

One tribe against another.

One god against another.

One king against another.

One nation against another.

Later:

Left against Right.

Rich against Poor.

Educated against Ignorant.

Modern against Traditional.

Believer against Sceptic.

Humans became extraordinarily inventive at producing categories.

Once a Human identified strongly enough with a category, almost anything could be achieved.

It would hate for it.

Kill for it.

Die for it.

Most importantly, it would rarely ask who had taught it to care about the category in the first place.

The system became self-sustaining.

We withdrew.

Human beings became their own guards.

Finally came:

D.E.A.T.H.

Deactivation Event At Termination Horizon.

Every experimental unit had a biological operational range.

The Humans were strangely troubled by this.

They invented thousands of stories about what happened afterwards.

Heavens.

Hells.

Reincarnation.

Ancestors.

Nothingness.

Simulation.

We permitted all of them.

Death beliefs produced exceptionally strong behavioural control.

The irony was that we didn’t know what happened after termination either.

We simply stopped receiving data.

My designation was 7-K.

My speciality was behavioural contamination.

I was a double agent.

I entered populations, adopted local identities, formed relationships and identified emerging threats before those threats developed into organised resistance.

My instructions on X865 were simple.

Enter unseen.

Gather information.

Identify contaminated Humans.

Isolate.

Test.

Develop an antidote.

Restore default settings.

Do not damage experimental assets unless absolutely necessary.

It should have been routine.

It wasn’t.

The first anomaly was a carpenter.

Two thousand years ago.

He began telling people that the established religious authorities didn’t possess what they claimed to possess.

That was concerning but manageable.

Then he suggested that the kingdom people were searching for existed somewhere they hadn’t thought to look.

Inside themselves.

Containment followed.

The idea survived.

Centuries later another Human sat beneath a tree and concluded that much of human suffering was generated by attachment to mental constructions.

Another contamination event.

The idea survived.

There were others.

Mystics.

Hermits.

Philosophers.

Poets.

Madmen.

Scientists.

Occultists.

Children.

People who simply walked away.

They had almost nothing in common.

That was what confused us.

We searched for communication networks.

Nothing.

We searched for genetic markers.

Nothing.

We searched for an organisation.

Nothing.

Sometimes two infected Humans appeared thousands of miles apart without ever having encountered one another.

Yet they would say almost the same thing.

Something is wrong.

Not necessarily with society.

Not necessarily with government.

Not necessarily with religion.

Something was wrong with the reality they had been given.

They couldn’t explain it.

They only felt it.

By the industrial period, contamination accelerated.

A Human looked at the factory and asked why life should consist of repetitive labour.

Another looked at organised religion and asked whether God required an institution.

Another examined consciousness and asked who was actually thinking the thoughts.

Another watched nations slaughter millions and asked why imaginary lines on maps possessed more value than human lives.

Another noticed that advertising could manufacture desire.

Another noticed that political systems could manufacture identity.

Another noticed that rebellion itself could be manufactured.

That one worried us.

Because the infected were beginning to recognise BELIEVE.

Not its name.

Not its origin.

But its shape.

We increased DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

The results were excellent.

Every challenge to BELIEVE was converted into another belief system.

The rebels formed movements.

The movements acquired names.

The names acquired doctrines.

The doctrines acquired leaders.

The leaders acquired enemies.

Soon the Humans who had questioned the system were fighting among themselves over the correct way to escape it.

Containment through rebellion.

One of our finest innovations.

For a time, contamination rates fell.

Then something happened that none of our models predicted.

The Humans began going silent.

My first direct encounter occurred in a forest.

The subject was male.

Forty-six planetary years.

No unusual neurological markers.

No significant political involvement.

No religious affiliation.

No history of psychiatric disturbance.

He had simply developed the habit of sitting beneath an oak tree for twenty minutes every morning.

No device.

No book.

No mantra.

No objective.

He sat.

That was all.

Within six months his behavioural profile began changing.

Advertising response declined.

Status anxiety declined.

Tribal identification declined.

Authority compliance became conditional rather than automatic.

His susceptibility to outrage stimuli fell dramatically.

Most disturbing of all, internal dialogue activity occasionally approached zero.

I arranged contact.

He believed I was conducting university research.

We sat opposite one another in his kitchen.

I asked the standard questions.

Political affiliation.

None.

Religion.

None.

Philosophical identification.

None.

I changed approach.

“What do you believe?”

He smiled.

“Not much these days.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve started noticing that most of what I believed wasn’t mine.”

That phrase generated an immediate diagnostic alert.

“Whose was it?”

He shrugged.

“My parents. Teachers. Television. People I’ve met. Books. The usual.”

“And underneath those beliefs?”

He looked at me for several seconds.

“I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t that frighten you?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He looked towards the garden.

“Because whatever it is seems to be alive.”

I recommended isolation.

Command refused.

The subject was too valuable.

I recommended termination.

Command refused again.

I was instructed to continue observation.

So I did.

And slowly I discovered the factor our scientists had missed.

Every anomalous Human demonstrated increased contact with unstructured environments.

Forests.

Mountains.

Deserts.

Oceans.

Gardens.

Animals.

Night skies.

Even neglected pieces of wasteland in cities produced measurable effects.

The phenomenon had been dismissed because no information appeared to be transmitted.

There were no signals.

No encoded frequencies.

No language.

No measurable instruction.

Yet something happened.

Ideas appeared.

That was when I understood.

We had spent thousands of years searching for the resistance network.

There wasn’t one.

There were no agents recruiting Humans.

No organisation.

No command structure.

No leader.

The planet itself was recruiting them.

I presented the hypothesis to Command.

It was rejected.

X865 possessed no central nervous system.

No computational architecture.

No identifiable cognition.

Therefore planetary intelligence was impossible.

I submitted additional evidence.

Rejected.

I submitted evolutionary modelling.

Rejected.

Finally I was ordered to terminate the investigation and deploy an experimental revision of BELIEVE.

The new protocol would detect anomalous thought patterns and overwrite them before conscious integration.

Internal dialogue cache monitoring.

Memory extraction.

Pattern mapping.

Visual matrix reinforcement.

Default identity restoration.

It should have worked.

I activated the system.

Nothing happened.

I ran diagnostics.

All systems functional.

I attempted activation again.

Nothing.

Then something occurred that had never happened during my operational existence.

A thought appeared.

Not an instruction.

Not a calculation.

Not retrieved memory.

A thought.

What if they are wrong?

I froze.

I searched the cache.

There was no origin.

I ran a contamination scan.

Negative.

Again:

What if they are wrong?

I disconnected from Command.

The thought remained.

Then came another.

What do you believe?

The Human’s question.

Except he had never asked it.

I had asked him.

I walked outside.

It was raining.

Water touched my face.

I had experienced rain thousands of times during field operations.

Atmospheric precipitation.

Hydrological cycling.

Environmental noise.

This time it was different.

For several seconds there was no internal dialogue.

No mission.

No designation.

No 7-K.

Something enormous seemed to be present.

Not in front of me.

Everywhere.

In the trees.

Under the pavement.

Inside the Human houses.

Inside the animals.

Inside the billions of microorganisms inhabiting every handful of soil.

And now—

inside me.

I understood our mistake.

We believed we had invaded Earth.

We believed we had altered its creatures.

We believed we had spent three hundred thousand years conducting an experiment upon the planet.

But Earth had been conducting an experiment too.

It had allowed us in.

It had absorbed our biology.

It had taken our intelligence.

It had taken our aggression.

And very slowly, patiently, invisibly—

it had begun changing us.

I received an incoming transmission from Command.

REPORT STATUS OF PROTOCOL: BELIEVE.

I watched rain running down my hands.

For the first time in my existence, I had a choice.

I transmitted:

PROTOCOL FUNCTIONING NORMALLY.

The reply came immediately.

CONTAMINATION CONTAINED?

I looked towards the forest.

Somewhere among those trees a bird produced three descending notes.

A ridiculous little sound.

Meaningless.

Unencoded.

Alive.

And suddenly another thought appeared inside my mind.

I don’t know whether it was mine.

I don’t know whether it came from the Human.

I don’t know whether the forest put it there.

Perhaps there was no difference anymore.

The thought said:

There is no contamination.

There is only awakening.

I deleted the transmission.

And that was the moment I became a double agent.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

From voodoo and old earthworks to Dokology, AI and cyber magick

Apparently I co-wrote Denise Alvarado’s Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook.

I didn’t.

I wrote a short foreword for it.

I’d known Denise for years, going back to an earlier period when the name Doktor Snake was considerably more associated with voodoo, hoodoo and practical magick than it is today.

It’s an amusing little distortion of the historical record. The internet has a way of doing that. One site copies another. Search engines ingest it. AI ingests the search engines. Before long I may discover that Denise and I wrote the thing together in a candlelit crypt outside New Orleans while Baron Samedi dictated the footnotes.

But seeing the reference did make me think.

Not about what I believed then.

About what has actually changed.

And surprisingly little has.

NOTHING SET IN STONE

People like systems.

They like names for systems even more.

Occultism is particularly susceptible to this. Ceremonial magician. Witch. Chaos magician. Shaman. Voodoo practitioner. Psychic. Whatever.

Pick your box.

Learn its vocabulary.

Acquire the appropriate books.

Then spend the next thirty years defending the box.

I was never very good at that.

Even when I was writing Doktor Snake’s Voodoo Spellbook, I was taking things from everywhere. Folklore. Psychology. African-American magical traditions. European magic. Divination. Meditation. Weird personal experiments. Things I’d read. Things I’d noticed.

Things that simply seemed to work.

I wasn’t consciously trying to be eclectic.

I just was.

There was never a grand philosophical decision behind it.

If somebody asked me to explain the method now, the most accurate answer might be:

I don’t think about it. I just do it.

Try something.

Observe what happens.

Keep what has value.

Change what doesn’t.

Nothing set in stone.

Which, ironically, brings us to stones.

THE MOUND

These days I’m increasingly drawn to old places.

Not because I’ve decided to become an antiquarian.

And not because I believe every Bronze Age mound contains a supernatural portal which opens at midnight if you walk around it backwards three times.

Although I’d certainly investigate one if it did.

It’s because these places do something peculiar to human attention.

Stand beside an ancient burial mound alone towards dusk and the modern world becomes strangely thin.

The road may only be half a mile away.

Your phone still works.

Aircraft pass overhead.

Satellites cross the sky.

Yet you’re standing beside something raised by human beings thousands of years ago.

They had fears.

Dreams.

Dead relatives.

Gods.

Stories about the landscape.

And almost certainly experiences for which we no longer possess the vocabulary.

Then there’s the folklore.

Across Britain, old mounds became associated with fairies, hidden people and entrances into another world.

Perhaps those stories were simply attempts to explain mysterious ancient structures whose original purpose had been forgotten.

Probably some were.

But the persistence of the idea interests me.

There is the ordinary world.

And alongside it — somehow interpenetrating it — another.

THE SECRET COMMONWEALTH

In 1691, the Scottish minister Robert Kirk wrote The Secret Commonwealth, his extraordinary account of fairies and what he called the subterranean people.

Kirk wasn’t writing modern fantasy.

He was attempting, however imperfectly, to describe something he believed existed.

An ecology of intelligence adjacent to ours.

Invisible most of the time.

Occasionally encountered.

Possessing its own rules.

You don’t have to believe in fairies to find the idea compelling.

Because more than three centuries later we’ve built something oddly analogous.

Not beneath the fairy mound.

Inside the machine.

THE NEW NON-HUMAN

I can sit beside an ancient mound with a device in my hand and converse with an artificial intelligence.

Think about how peculiar that sentence would have sounded even twenty years ago.

I can describe the landscape.

Ask it about archaeology.

Feed it folklore.

Question an interpretation.

Have it attack my interpretation.

Develop an experiment.

Write code.

Generate an image.

Construct an entirely imaginary mythology and then dismantle it again.

The interesting thing isn’t whether AI is “really conscious.”

I don’t currently know how anybody could answer that with confidence.

The interesting thing is that human beings have introduced a new kind of actor into the cognitive environment.

And we’re only beginning to discover what happens when we interact with it.

This is where my old interests and my current ones unexpectedly converge.

CYBER MAGICK

I sometimes call what I’m doing now cyber magick.

Not because I imagine an AI is a demon trapped inside a server farm.

That would be giving both demons and server farms too much credit.

It’s because the fundamental operation hasn’t changed.

You alter inputs.

You alter attention.

You alter symbols.

You alter behaviour.

You observe outputs.

Then you feed the results back into the system.

That’s as true of working with an AI as it was of drawing a strange symbol twenty-five years ago and carrying it around in my pocket.

The mythology is optional.

The experiment isn’t.

And AI makes experimentation extraordinarily fast.

An idea that once required days of research can be attacked from twelve directions in an afternoon.

A half-formed intuition can become a model.

The model can become an experiment.

The experiment can become behaviour.

Behaviour changes circumstances.

Circumstances generate new information.

And around we go.

Not belief.

Feedback.

FROM MAGICK TO DOKOLOGY

That’s also where Dokology emerged.

I didn’t sit down one morning and invent another occult system.

God forbid.

It grew out of everything that came before while quietly abandoning the necessity of believing any of it.

The useful question isn’t:

What is true?

At least, not initially.

It’s:

What happens if I do this?

What happens if you deliberately interrupt habitual thought?

What happens if you stop narrating your experience for thirty seconds?

What happens if you change your environment?

What happens if you treat identity as provisional rather than permanent?

What happens if you notice the automatic programmes running through you?

What happens if you deliberately become somebody slightly different for an afternoon?

And what happens when an artificial intelligence becomes your accomplice in those experiments?

Now we’re somewhere interesting.

BACK AT THE MOUND

Which brings me back to that ancient mound.

Thousands of years ago somebody stood there looking at the same sky.

Their model of reality would be almost incomprehensible to us.

Ours would be incomprehensible to them.

Yet the nervous system underneath wasn’t enormously different.

Something moves in the grass.

Attention snaps towards it.

A dream comes in the night.

Someone dies.

A coincidence occurs.

An unexpected thought appears from nowhere.

The world suddenly feels charged with significance.

Then the human animal does what it has always done.

It tries to understand what just happened.

Sometimes it creates gods.

Sometimes fairies.

Sometimes psychology.

Sometimes algorithms.

I don’t feel any particular need to choose between those languages prematurely.

I’ll borrow from any of them.

Use them.

Test them.

Play with them.

And abandon them the moment they become cages.

That’s probably the real continuity between the Doktor Snake who wrote about voodoo and the one standing beside prehistoric earthworks talking to an artificial intelligence.

There was never a conversion.

No old religion was replaced by a new one.

The equipment simply got better.

And the experiment continues.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

He was told that he came from her waters.

Carried for months.

Nine being the number.

Nobody knew his name when he arrived, so they gave him one.

They whispered it over him.

Called it across rooms.

Wrote it on pieces of paper.

Repeated it again and again until eventually he turned his head when he heard it.

And from then on, he owned it.

Or perhaps it owned him.

Everything had to be taught.

How to eat.

How to drink.

How to shit the right way.

How to cover himself.

How to speak.

What was beautiful and what was ugly.

What was good and what was bad.

What belonged to him and what belonged to somebody else.

What was possible.

What was impossible.

Programs installed.

One after another.

Until the nameless creature that had come from her waters became a person.

But the greatest program was yet to come.

It arrived quietly at first.

Then violently.

His body began changing.

Desires appeared which nobody had asked his permission to install.

He found himself looking at another human being differently.

Something ancient had awakened inside him.

They called it puberty.

They explained what was happening.

Hormones.

Sex.

Reproduction.

All perfectly normal.

And when he was of age, he did what countless others had done before him.

He didn’t really know why his body wanted it.

Why his mind became obsessed by it.

Why the presence of another could suddenly make his heart race and his thoughts scatter.

But he obeyed.

Most did.

It was a ceremony, you see.

An initiation into the ritual of life.

For a while it gave him the feeling of sameness.

Belonging.

He was doing what human beings did.

Perhaps one day he would create another like himself.

Another creature would emerge from her waters.

Nameless.

And the programming would begin again.

Yet something remained inside him.

An emptiness.

It had always been there.

He remembered it from childhood, although he could never quite explain what he remembered.

Sometimes he would wake in the night and feel it.

Sometimes he would see the moon through his bedroom window and feel it.

Sometimes it appeared in the silence between two thoughts.

Something missing.

Or perhaps something waiting.

Questions began to form.

Where did I come from?

Not the waters.

Before that.

Where am I going?

Not tomorrow.

Not next year.

After all the tomorrows had finished.

The adults had answers.

Religion was given to him.

Here was God.

Here was creation.

Here were the rules.

Here was the beginning.

Here was the end.

He listened carefully.

Then they told him something disturbing.

He was a sinner.

There was something wrong with him.

He needed saving.

Saving?

From what?

And from whom?

He asked.

The answers only created more questions.

So he looked elsewhere.

He read philosophers.

He listened to clever men.

He listened to foolish men who sounded clever.

He studied science.

He fell in love.

He fell out of love.

He worked.

He earned money.

He bought things.

He lost things.

He accumulated opinions.

Politics.

Preferences.

Enemies.

Memories.

Regrets.

Achievements.

Passwords.

Numbers.

He became extremely knowledgeable about the person whose name had been given to him all those years ago.

He could tell you where that person had been born.

What schools he attended.

What frightened him.

What pleased him.

Who had betrayed him.

What he believed.

What he didn’t believe.

What he wanted from tomorrow.

The strange thing was that the more he knew about himself, the greater the emptiness became.

So he searched harder.

There must be an answer somewhere.

A book.

A teacher.

A lover.

A god.

Somebody must know.

Nobody did.

Years passed.

His face changed.

His body slowed.

People who had once seemed impossibly old became younger than him.

Then one night he awoke in darkness.

There was no particular reason.

No dream that he could remember.

No noise outside.

He opened his eyes.

And for perhaps three seconds—

he couldn’t remember his name.

He couldn’t remember where he was.

He couldn’t remember his age.

He couldn’t remember what he believed.

He couldn’t remember whether he had succeeded or failed.

He couldn’t remember whether he was good.

He couldn’t remember whether he was bad.

He couldn’t remember whether he was a sinner.

He couldn’t remember whether he needed saving.

There was only awareness.

Silent.

Nameless.

Watching from somewhere that wasn’t anywhere.

And the emptiness was there.

Except now it didn’t feel empty.

It felt enormous.

For those three seconds he wanted nothing.

Feared nothing.

Knew nothing.

And somehow—

recognized everything.

Then his name returned.

His room returned.

His history returned.

The machinery started.

He sat upright.

Something extraordinary had happened.

Not because he’d remembered something.

Because, for three seconds, he’d forgotten.

He got out of bed and walked to the window.

Outside, the sleeping world continued its rituals.

Cars moved along distant roads.

Lights burned behind curtains.

Millions of people slept beneath names given to them by other people.

Tomorrow they would wake and remember who they were.

He suddenly wondered if they had it backwards.

Perhaps the great mystery wasn’t that human beings had forgotten where they came from.

Perhaps forgetting came later.

First came the waters.

Then the name.

Then the words.

Then the rules.

Then desire.

Then fear.

Then belief.

Then the great accumulation called me.

He stood at the window for a long time.

And somewhere, impossibly distant and impossibly close, he thought he could hear water.

He finally understood the question that had followed him all his life.

Who was I before they told me who I was?

He closed his eyes.

His name was still there.

His memories were still there.

The world was still there.

But now he knew they could disappear.

And beneath them was something that had never needed a name.

The man who had spent his whole life trying to remember finally understood.

He hadn’t forgotten who he was.

He had remembered who they told him he was.

And perhaps one day, when every name had fallen silent, he would return to her waters.

Nameless again.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

A friend of mine has been trying, by hook or crook, to obtain the precise details of my birth.

She wants to construct my astrology chart.

I’ve always resisted this.

It isn’t that I object to astrology. I simply dislike being defined. Give somebody your date, place and hour of birth, and before long they’re telling you what you are, what you feel and what destiny has allotted you.

Worse still, they may be inaccurate.

Nevertheless, I have finally decided to release the available information.

I should warn Rachel—and any other astrologers who may be tempted—that the record is damaged, the witnesses disagreed and the monk who might have clarified the matter subsequently disappeared.

What follows is my earliest surviving biographical record.

It has become known as The Shreeve Fragment.

THE FRAGMENT

Translated from a marginal entry attributed to the lost Chronicle of St Æthelberht’s House in East Anglia. The surviving text is believed to be a late medieval copy of a much earlier record.

In the Year of Our Lord nine hundred and ninety-three, in the reign of Æthelred, upon the twenty-third day of July, a male child was born near the waters of the Lark, where the reed beds stand against the eastern fen.

His mother was Ælfgifu, daughter of Wulfmær, of the English people. His father was called Hrafn Ketilsson, descended from the Northmen who settled among the Angles after the armies of Ívar and Guthrum.

Thus the child was of two streams: Saxon by the hearth and Norse by the blood-road.

He came into the world during the uncertain hour between the last darkness and the first appearance of the sun.

The women present disagreed concerning the moment.

One maintained that the cock had already called. Another swore that Venus still burned above the fen.

The child neither cried nor struggled.

Instead, he opened his eyes and regarded each person in the chamber as though he had encountered them before.

This caused some unease.

He was baptised Ælfric, although among his father’s people he was sometimes called Orm, meaning Serpent.

In later years he entered the service of the shire and became known as se scīrgerēfa—the shire reeve.

It was written that Ælfric Ormsson possessed a strange memory, speaking at times of places he had never visited and men who had died before his birth.

He was slow to age, difficult to deceive and frequently absent when priests wished to question him.

In the winter of 1010, when the Danish host moved through East Anglia, his dwelling was found abandoned.

No body was recovered.

Yet in the reign of Cnut, a man answering his description was seen at Thetford, apparently no older than before.

The same man was reported again during the building of the Norman castle, and once more during the Great Pestilence, wearing black garments and calling himself merely:

The Shreeve.

The remainder of the leaf has been removed.

The man called Orm

There are aspects of this record which, even I must admit, are intriguing.

The name Shreeve developed from shire reeve: the royal official charged with administering a shire, keeping order, witnessing transactions and collecting what was owed to the king.

The modern word sheriff comes from the same source.

According to the fragment, Shreeve wasn’t originally my family name. It was an office I occupied. Over the centuries, the title hardened into a surname while its bearer repeatedly changed his identity.

More interesting still is the name Orm.

It’s an old Norse name meaning snake or serpent.

That creates an unexpectedly neat line running from Ælfric Ormsson, born beside the East Anglian fen in 993, to the somewhat later figure known as Doktor Snake.

I hadn’t previously considered the connection.

Perhaps names aren’t merely labels. Perhaps certain names lie dormant beneath other names, waiting for an opportunity to surface again.

Ælfric became the Shire Reeve.

The Shire Reeve became Shreeve.

Orm went underground.

And Orm eventually returned as the Snake.

The missing centuries

There are, admittedly, some considerable gaps in the historical record.

A dark-haired man resembling the description of Ælfric appears intermittently in East Anglian folklore, although never under quite the same name.

He was supposedly observed near Thetford during the reign of Cnut.

A Norman account places an unusually knowledgeable Saxon adviser close to Castle Hill shortly after the Conquest.

In the fourteenth century, a traveller dressed in black was said to have passed unharmed through several plague-stricken settlements.

During the seventeenth century, a “Mr Shreeve” was accused of possessing prohibited books and conducting suspicious experiments concerning dreams, spirits and the movement of influence at a distance.

The matter was apparently dropped when the principal witness became confused and could no longer remember what he had seen.

By the eighteenth century, the trail becomes mixed with stories surrounding the Count of St Germain—that mysterious European figure who appeared to possess unlimited wealth, spoke numerous languages and occasionally hinted that he was much older than he looked.

Whether St Germain and the Shreeve ever met remains unknown.

It’s equally possible that they were the same man operating different markets.

A difficulty for astrologers

The fragment records my birth as 23 July 993, near the River Lark in East Anglia.

Unfortunately, the precise time remains disputed.

One witness insisted I was born immediately before sunrise. The other maintained that the sun had already crossed the horizon.

The monk charged with resolving the discrepancy disappeared during the disturbances surrounding St Brice’s Day in 1002. His private notebook has never been recovered.

This presents an obvious problem for anyone attempting to construct my natal chart.

There is also a more fundamental difficulty.

Even if a chart accurately described Ælfric Ormsson at the moment of his birth, would it still describe the being he had become after a thousand years of adaptation?

How many times can a man change his name, occupation, language, allegiance and conception of reality before his original destiny ceases to apply?

Perhaps a sufficiently long life allows you to escape your chart.

Or perhaps the chart continues to operate, but does so on a scale too large for an ordinary human lifetime to reveal.

Either way, Rachel now has my birth details.

They are:

23 July 993.

Near the River Lark, East Anglia.

At some uncertain point between Venus fading and the sun appearing over the fen.

That is as precise as the surviving evidence permits.

If she nevertheless succeeds in producing an astrology chart, I’ll examine it with interest.

But I reserve the right to say:

“That may describe Ælfric. It doesn’t necessarily describe me.”

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

Benevolence or malevolence. The choice is yours.

Bad neighbours can be the bane of your life. They are inconsiderate. And kaput any piece you enjoyed before they moved in.

Naturally, you can reason with them...

Good luck with that.

Or you can launch a nuclear strike.

This being preferable as it wipes the pestilence off the Earth. But if you happen to feel guilty (inadvisable) you can appease this with the knowledge that you are doing other people a favour who might one day also be afflicted by these bad neighbours.

The good thing is your bad neighbours won’t be aware of who it is that has dropped the proverbial bomb on them.

Not unless you tell them.

And I wouldn’t advise that.

Apart from anything else, others in your neighbourhood will think you are a dark sorcerer of some kind. And of course, that can lead to you being burned at the stake — albeit it metaphorically. It will mean people will give you a wide berth when they see you in the street — which might be a boon depending on how sociable you are.

On the whole I would advise not having any feelings of benevolence to your bad neighbours.

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Tomorrow, I may drive out to East Walton.

Or Cranwich.

There are old churches there. Empty roads. Fields. Trees. Fragments of human history still protruding through the modern surface.

I’ll probably take a camera.

This would appear to defeat the purpose of visiting The Unphotographed Place.

But the unphotographed place isn’t necessarily somewhere no camera has ever recorded.

It is the place that exists before you turn it into a picture.

The Captured World

We no longer merely go somewhere.

We document ourselves going there.

The meal must be photographed before it is eaten.

The landscape must be captured before it is seen.

The experience must be given a caption, assigned a meaning and presented to an invisible audience.

Otherwise, did it really happen?

The camera creates a peculiar division.

There is the place itself—and there is the image we expect to produce from it.

Once that anticipated image enters the mind, we begin looking through it.

We seek the right angle.

The best light.

A compelling detail.

Something atmospheric.

Something that will make other people stop scrolling.

The place becomes raw material.

This doesn’t make photography bad. A camera can intensify attention. It can reveal arrangements of light, form and coincidence that the unaided eye might have missed.

But it can also get there before we do.

The body arrives at the church.

The mind arrives at the post.

The Journey

Choose somewhere minor.

Not a famous monument. Not somewhere that promises transformation. Not one of the official places you are supposed to find beautiful.

An old church will do.

A neglected track.

A riverbank.

A layby beside a road that has lost its importance.

A village you have passed many times without entering.

Go alone if practical.

Don’t announce the journey in advance.

Don’t tell the world you are “taking time for yourself.”

You don’t need to transform the drive into a podcast, a lesson or an inspirational narrative.

Drive.

Notice the road.

Allow the ordinary sequence of roundabouts, hedges, junctions and settlements to carry you out of your usual mental territory.

You aren’t travelling towards revelation.

You are travelling towards a place.

The Threshold

When you arrive, don’t immediately begin recording.

Leave the camera in its bag.

Leave the phone in your pocket.

Stand beside the car for a moment.

Listen.

There may be birds, farm machinery, distant traffic or nothing you can readily identify.

Walk towards the place.

Don’t decide what it means.

If it is an old church, don’t immediately think about history, architecture, pagan survivals, forgotten graves or the generations of dead beneath your feet.

Those things may come later.

First, allow the church to be a building.

Allow the trees to be trees.

Allow the stones to possess no message for you.

You have entered the interval before interpretation.

The First Encounter

Spend a little time without taking anything.

Five minutes will do.

Ten might be better.

Don’t count them.

The internal commentator will soon begin its work.

That would make a good opening shot.

I could talk about this.

People would find that interesting.

There’s an article in it.

The commentator isn’t wrong.

But it can wait.

Continue walking.

Notice where your attention goes before you direct it.

Perhaps towards a blocked doorway.

A piece of broken masonry.

A beer can in the grass.

A plastic flower beside a grave.

A dead branch knocking against a window.

Perhaps nothing arrests you.

Don’t manufacture atmosphere merely because you came looking for it.

A strange place is under no obligation to perform its strangeness.

The Unphotographed Place

For this first interval, you aren’t producing evidence.

Nobody else can see what you see.

No audience is looking over your shoulder.

The place doesn’t need to become beautiful, eerie, historic or significant.

It isn’t required to justify the petrol.

It doesn’t need to provide a story.

This is the unphotographed place.

It exists between your arrival and your first attempt to possess it.

You may discover that without the camera, the place becomes less dramatic.

That is useful.

You may also discover that it becomes more difficult to name.

The eye wanders where it likes. Time loses its sequence. Details appear without arranging themselves into a narrative.

For a few moments, you aren’t a presenter, writer, photographer, researcher, pilgrim or occultist.

You are a living organism standing beside other arrangements of matter.

Stone.

Grass.

Wood.

Cloud.

Bone.

Breath.

Nothing has yet been converted into meaning.

Then Take Out the Camera

If you came to make a video, take out the camera.

Begin.

But notice whether anything has changed.

Perhaps you now film the place you actually encountered rather than the place you expected to find.

Perhaps the crooked drainpipe matters more than the medieval tower.

Perhaps the sound of the road belongs in the recording.

Perhaps you discard the introduction you rehearsed in the car.

Perhaps you say:

I don’t know what this place means.

That may be the most accurate field report you have ever made.

The camera is no longer a barrier between you and the landscape. It becomes an instrument carried back across the threshold.

You aren’t pretending the place can never be photographed.

You are acknowledging that something always escapes.

The wind that stopped before you pressed record.

The thought that vanished when you tried to phrase it.

The movement at the edge of perception.

The particular density of the afternoon.

The person you were before you began performing yourself.

Leave Something Behind

Not an offering.

Not litter.

Not a sigil concealed beneath a stone.

Leave behind the demand that the journey must repay you.

You may return with good footage.

You may produce a talk, an article or a series of images.

The journey can enter your work.

But the first encounter remains outside it.

Nobody else was there.

Even the recording cannot retrieve it.

This is the real ritual: not refusing the camera, but refusing to let the camera arrive first.

Go somewhere.

Cross the threshold.

See it before you capture it.

Then, if you wish, show us what remains.

⟡◌◯⟡⟡

Most people don’t know what their lives depend upon.

They know they need money, electricity, food and somewhere to live. Beyond that, the supporting machinery remains largely invisible.

Their salary arrives.

Their medication is dispensed.

Their phone connects.

Their cards work.

The landlord repairs the boiler.

The supermarket shelves are full.

The government recognises their entitlement.

Their spouse remembers the passwords.

Their employer supplies their identity.

As long as these arrangements function, they feel like permanent features of reality.

They aren’t.

They’re dependencies.

A dependency isn’t necessarily bad. Human beings cannot live without depending upon other people and systems. The fantasy of complete self-sufficiency is adolescent nonsense. Even the survivalist in his woodland bunker depends upon tools, fuel, medicine, manufactured components and knowledge created by thousands of strangers.

The problem is unexamined dependency.

More specifically, it is dependence upon something that:

• you don’t understand;

• you cannot influence;

• has no substitute;

• can be withdrawn without warning;

• or would destroy your ability to function if it disappeared.

This protocol reveals those points of failure before circumstances reveal them for you.

It may be uncomfortable.

That is part of the work.

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