Bricolage, Gnosis, and the Magician’s toolkit

Reprogramming your mind with ritual

We can change the world through Magic, by changing our minds. However, changing perspectives on the level of perception is not as easy as it sounds. You can’t just decide to see the world differently. We need techniques powerful enough to reach down into the unconscious and reprogram it. That’s what ritual magic is for.   

But first: What the hell is Magic in this context? The canonical definition of “affecting change in accordance with Will” may be accurate, but not very helpful. Layman Pascal offered the following more elaborate definition: 

“The use of somatic and affective stimulation, intentionality & semantic suggestiveness to responsively organize emergent, contextualized patterns of human experiential unfolding into “enchanting” zones of transjectivity and synchronicity.”

That’s a mouthful. And it will hopefully make more sense as we go along. Now, let’s get practical.

Personal dabblings

For context, I’m spending most of my time in a rational, scientific, “reasonable” worldview. I have a strong aversion to New-Age aesthetics and fantasies. Yet, I’ve kept going back to magical views and techniques regularly since first getting cosmically triggered by Robert Anton Wilson almost 10 years ago. Why? 

Because they work. I’ll share my hypotheses on how below. The two techniques I’ve had the most interesting results with are divination (usually with the Tarot) and improvised ceremonial Magic.

The tarot: symbol & randomness

No, I’m not an aspiring fortune teller. If even Laplace’s Demon can’t hack deterministic chaos to predict the future, neither can a deck of cards. The Tarot is both a symbolic system and a pattern-breaker - a source of randomness pregnant with meaning. I tend to draw a card when I feel stuck, undecided, playful, or simply bored. 

I’ve spent a fair amount of time diving into the symbolism of the cards, primarily drawing from Tomberg’s elaborations and mapping the cards to the Tree of Life, as practiced in the Golden Dawn. The occasional Weird Studies episodes on the tarot are also great. The symbolism of the tarot helps establish a symbolic scaffolding, which is very useful in a ritual context. 

Divination practice stimulates systemic thinking (seeing how patterns connect) and invites lateral moves (thinking about situations differently). A good analogy of how divination works is how algorithms often benefit from some randomness to avoid overfitting. It also works as a projection surface for the unconscious: The personal meaning I project on the cards was already there somewhere in my mind, just waiting for an outlet. It’s a communication channel for the unconscious. 

Ritual Magic: Branching points 

If the tarot is a communication channel from the unconscious to the conscious, ritual works the other way around. It allows sending a message, usually an intention, from the conscious mind to the unconscious. Reprogramming low-level code, so to speak. I do a ritual if I want to change something fundamental or to reaffirm long-term goals or commitments. Ritual is for creating branching points in life. 

To my continued astonishment, my rituals tend to work. Sometimes so well that I’ve had to banish with a strong dose of agnosticism in order not to spiral off into full-on crackpottery. No, I don’t believe that my ritual changed the probability landscape to make exceedingly unlikely and deeply meaningful events happen… But it sure has seemed that way occasionally. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. If rituals and spells have causal power, they certainly don’t do so in a way that can be proven, reliably replicated, or otherwise domesticated. And I couldn’t care less if it’s all just self-hypnosis and placebo (it likely is) - if it works, it works. 

I loosely follow the Chaos Magic blueprint described below for my occasional rituals, filling out the basic structure with specifics depending on what I want to achieve. 

What is much more useful than the details of my idiosyncratic dabblings are the patterns and techniques that make ritual work in the first place. Finding your way into those will likely be more fruitful than any fixed script. 

Alignment and True Will

Before we get into the nuts and bolts, let’s talk about intention and will. Everything else really follows from that. Without a clear intention, you won’t be able to plan (e.g. selecting ritual actions, using corresponding symbols, etc.), much less perform an effective ritual. 

So, what do you want? 

That is, in a way, the most central question. If ritual is a weapon, intention is to aim it at a target. If you are conflicted about what you want, it will likely misfire. 

In the ideal case, you don’t just want something but you WANT it, in your bones. Clarifying your intention means creating alignment among different parts of the self and across multiple centers of intelligence (e.g. head, heart, gut). Visualization, symbolism, and other techniques can then extend that internal alignment and create a felt sense of connection with external forces. 

There are many warnings against trying to achieve narrow, egoistic goals that only come from a part of yourself (e.g. something you want merely on an intellectual level or worse because others want it). The term True Will is helpful, implying a participation in larger patterns than personal gratification. 

What is yours to do in this world? 

Will can also be understood as a capacity, a skill that can be trained. If the intention is aiming at the target, will is pulling the trigger. And that is much harder than the metaphor might suggest. This piece by Layman goes into more detail and includes some exercises for “will training”, e.g. acting on whims or carrying out random actions without resistance.  

The ritual Blueprint of Chaos Magic 

Chaos Magic is a movement that started in the 70ties and is all about abstracting away the paraphernalia to get to what makes magic work underneath. Function over form. Chaos Magic is fundamentally agnostic, it uses belief as a tool and often draws from diverse traditions. 

Create a cocktail of Hindu and Greek Gods? Sure, as long as it gets the job done. Hell, you can even throw in Marvel heroes if those have mythic resonance for you. 

Besides liberal sourcing of symbolically resonant material from all over the place, Chaos Magic has also systematized the logic behind various ritual forms and developed some of its own techniques. 

On the most abstract level, two key functions underlying rituals across traditions seem to be communication with the unconscious and altered states. Chaos Magic has invented a range of simple techniques for transmuting messages to become legible to the unconscious, most notably, Sigils. A conscious intention is artistically transformed to then be transported and anchored in the unconscious. Altered states are the fuel that allows the message to reach down there and for it to create an imprint. In Chaos Magic, altered states suitable for the task are called “Gnosis”, and often mark the climax (pun intended) of a ritual. 

The Chaos Magic blueprint for ritual looks something like this: 

1. Clarify intention, open up the space with ritual action

2. Establish the right mood through visualization and symbolism

3. Format the intention in a way that is legible by the unconscious 

4. Energise the transmuted intention

Depending on the aim of the ritual, the energized intention could be directed inward or outward, either physically or mentally. The suggestivity of drinking a potion that has been charged with healing intentions could indeed get rid of that stomach ache. The primordial rapture of shouting a spell into the wind might get the world to respond, or just open up our eyes to the affordances that have been there all along.

The Magician’s toolkit

Let’s dive deeper into what makes ritual magic work. What do hermetic rituals, pagan spells, and Hindu invocations of deities have in common? They all include different combinations of the same elements: 

• Ritual action, tempo, and grounding

• Visualisation & symbolism 

• Communication with the unconscious

• Energy and altered states (“Gnosis”) 

Note that these can be loosely mapped to the tools of the magician on the tarot card: 

the disk (earth), the cup (water), the sword (air), and the wand (fire)

The elements mutually support each other to create an effect strong enough to reprogram the mind on an unconscious level. They also enable a shift into the magical views previously discussed. Let’s look into them one by one.

Ritual action, tempo, and grounding

While rituals might be very different from one another (especially within Chaos Magic), most practitioners tend to use the same ritual actions at the beginning (and often also at the end) of a ritual. Acknowledging the cardinal directions, burning tobacco, or drawing a chalk circle all have similar functions: 

• Demarcating the ritual space

• Entering into shamanic zones 

• Grounding the intention 

Ritual action helps mark a transition from “everyday life” into the ritual. It also demarcates the ritual space (often physically). This part of a ritual tends to be more formulaic because it immensely benefits from repetition - entraining the body-mind to enter shamanic zones on command. 

It’s not just the physical action itself that creates this effect, but also the way it is executed. There is a sense of gravitas, an overflowing of meaning from each movement. This ritual tempo can be observed in Peruvian Ayahuasqueros and Catholic priests alike. Just a little bit slower than one would normally move, but with extreme precision and without hesitation. 

Even though rituals are often done in solitude (some might argue they are more effective that way), there is a distinct sense of performance. But performance for who? Oneself? An imagined higher power that is attentively watching? Probably something in between - that’s the “zone of transjectivity” in Layman’s initial definition. He wrote more about this strange performativity here. Yes, this post can also be read as Layman Pascal fan-fiction, so sign up for his Substack already. 

It’s not an accident that these initial ritual actions are called “banishing rituals” in ceremonial magic. They help set aside everyday concerns (and malicious demonic influences) and create focus for the duration of the ritual. A clean, sterile table for the magician to operate on her mind. 

Visualization and symbolic saturation 

After this foundation has been created, additional techniques help make that mood of ritual even stronger. And make no mistake, mood is central to the effectiveness of ritual. The ritual mood could include a sense of sacredness, but maybe also transgression or even the potential for danger. 

Visualization is omnipresent across magical lineages, from Archangels in (Western) ceremonial magic to Mandalas in Vajrayana Buddhism. Often, the entities or shapes imagined are highly symbolic. For example, the Archangels can be mapped to the four dimensions or elements, which in turn open up networks of symbolic associations. 

From a functional perspective, this achieves a range of things: 

• Enabling concentration by keeping the mind busy

• Keeping the mind on track through symbolism 

• Generating the right mood, supporting magical views

Visualisation requires concentration, which calms and collects the mind (which is required for everything that follows). Symbolic saturation supports this concentration by laying out semantic guardrails: the mind can follow the associations within the same memeplex and still stay “on the topic”. The more complex the visualization and symbolism, the more processing power is tied up in that activity. Focusing the mind by overwhelming it. Maybe most importantly, visualization supports the views of participation in larger patterns or interaction with powerful entities. It puts us in a certain magical mood.  

Communication with the unconscious 

Ritual transports energized intentions into the unconscious to affect specific change. However, the unconscious doesn't speak the same language. Here’s a quick table to outline some of the major differences between how the conscious and the unconscious mind operate: 

All of the elements used in ceremonial magic can be viewed through this frame of creating a gateway to the unconscious. This explains how prevalent symbolic action, images, archetypes, etc. are in rituals. For instance, picking the appropriate Gods, archetypes, and symbols for a given ritual is already fulfilling this function of translating into the language of the unconscious.  

There are also techniques to directly translate a conscious intention into a format that is understandable by the unconscious. Most often, images of various kinds. A variety of artistic practices are used in ritual for that reason. Chaos Magic has developed a minimal and accessible technique for this with Sigils. A Sigil is created by first formulating the intention, then crossing out any vowels and duplicated consonants, leaving only a few letters. These letters are then combined into an image that does not directly represent the intention but has been created with it as its basis. See Wikipedia’s example Sigils below.

It’s interesting how long a history there is to the use of art for magical and ritual purposes: The cave paintings at Lascaux, over 17 '000 years old, seem to be at least religious in origin (given their motifs and that caves had likely been used as temples). It’s plausible they were even spells designed to bring about what they depict (e.g. the slaying of prey animals). This Weird Studies episode discussed the topic in more detail. 

Note that cave paintings were found hidden away in the deepest corners of caves. They were not created to be exhibited like in a gallery, but likely kept secret or at least inaccessible. A similar pattern is used in Chaos Magic in that the Sigils are usually destroyed after use. What is more, it is even better to forget the sigil after it has been used in a ritual. The ultimate secrecy is even obscuring it from yourself. This aspect of secrecy could be related to the psychological effect of sharing one’s goals hurting the likelihood of actually achieving them (see this study, for example). 

Energy and altered states (Gnosis) 

The last step in the Chaos Magic blueprint is Gnosis - generating the energy to anchor an intention in the unconscious. Peter Carroll’s Chaos Magic classic “Liber Null and Psychonaut” distinguishes between the inhibitory and excitatory modes of Gnosis. 

Examples of the inhibitory mode include:

• “Death posture”

• Trance or concentration 

• Sleeplessness

• Fasting

• Sensory deprivation 

Examples of the excitatory mode include:

• Sexual excitation

• Emotional arousal 

• Pain 

• Dancing or chanting

• Sensory overload

My personal favorite is working with the breath: breath-holds or hyperventilation are incredibly fast and effective. There are drugs too, of course, but I would not recommend that amount of force. 

Finally, there is also the use of transgression for generating Gnosis. Of course, the infamous Aleister Crowley was very fond of this method but it can also be found in various forms of tantrism. By breaking social norms, a certain amount of energy is liberated. 

Generating energy and intensity is what unites this eclectic list of activities. From a psychological perspective, there are a range of cogent explanations of why this would work as a means to affect change in the unconscious: Notions of trauma or imprinting seem analogous in that an intense experience leads to lasting change. Neural annealing provides another interesting explanation - the increased energy is needed to break previous psychological patterns and create new ones. Just like a metal can only be poured into a new form after having melted through enough heat. 

The lattice of Ritual Magic

I believe the blueprint of Chaos Magic and the four elements/tools of the Magician outlined above are a concise and pretty robust overview of the different techniques used and how they fit together. Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to it. My write-up carries the bias of my own experiences and ways of thinking. There are many other possibilities of how different techniques and elements could be combined into functional magical rituals. 

To open things up a little bit, I’m proposing the Lattice of Ritual Magic below. 

There is no requirement to check all these boxes, but the more of the elements above are involved, the more likely we are looking at a powerful magical ritual. Arguably, any intersection of multiple elements could constitute a functional ritual. 

Finally, it’s important to remember not to get caught up in packaging: what happens internally is so much more important than what’s observable from the outside. All of these techniques are merely scaffolding to create impactful experiences and internal shifts.

The most advanced magicians don’t need any external crutches - they are working magic with every thought, intention, and action. No bells and whistles needed.