Absurd Moment

- To start our interview tell the readers how did you first get into Magick and Occultism in general and in what ways does it change your current life?
I first became interested in the occult at the age of seventeen. Up until that time I thought the occult was nonsense. What first piqued my interest was a picture by the occult artist Austin Osman Spare, which I came across in a school library book. I read some Jung as part of my school sociology course, and what struck me about the Spare print was that it seemed to reflect Jung's ideas about the unconscious. So I started to look for books on the occult in the local library. In 1977 there wasn't an awful lot on offer, so I ended up reading Mme Blavastky's "The Secret Doctrine" and other such weighty tomes. I think the first book on actual magic that I read was David Conway's "Magic: An Occult Primer". I was already into meditation, but I started to try out visualisation exercises and so forth. By that time I'd also begun to experiment with psychedelics, and reading books by William S. Burroughs, etc., so I guess one thing led to another.
As for my current life, I don't have much time for formal ritual stuff. My current job is very demanding, and to be honest, I'm not interested any more in doing huge long rituals other than occasionally. At the moment I'm sufficing with a simple series of meditations which can be done anywhere.

- When did you first meet with other people involved in Magick and why?
After first getting interested in the occult, it took me five years or so before I met anyone else who was into it as 'seriously' as I felt myself to be at the time. I had just started a Degree in Behavioural Sciences and, quite fortuitously, one of the other guys on the course had an older sister who just finished that course. She was a member of a magical order - The Order of the Cubic Stone - and I was, at the time, considering doing their basic training course. She had been into magic for several years and we had many fascinating conversations, she lent me books I'd never come across and enabled me to see that there was a whole magical subculture in the UK which I'd been previously unaware of. After I finished the degree, I moved back to my home town and hooked up with a wiccan coven for a while. By the mid-1980s I had been in a number of small magical groups and had gained enough confidence to start groups of my own. I was for a few years involved in larger organisations such as TOPY, the Illuminates of Thanateros and AMOOKOS. Up until fairly recently, I'd say most of my magical explorations have been in relation to groups. I think it boils down to what a friend in a group I'm currently in said - it's about "good fellowship". That's being able to discuss ideas, experiences, feelings with other people in a space where there are no "right answers", and people are interested in you as a person, rather than playing stupid status games. Whilst working in groups, I've pushed myself to do stuff that I probably wouldn't have made time for on my own - making masks, musical instruments, incense, ritual gear, writing vast amounts of 'training papers' etc., and of course, being in a group sometimes allows you to do really cool stuff. As a member of the IOT I did a coast-to-coast tour of the USA, promoting Condensed Chaos, during which I met William S. Burroughs (a long-time hero of mine) and being a member of TOPY got me onstage in the UK with Genesis P-Orridge. Of course these are rather obvious 'highlights' and I've participated in some fantastic group ritual events, nearly fallen off a mountain in Wales, and had some amazing conversations down the years.

- Would you agree with me when saying that Occult knowledge is something that one acquires as being very personal and by that reason always works differently from person to person?
In general, yes. But it's very useful - indeed, necessary, in my opinion, that the individual magician can discuss her or his results, experiences & ideas with others who share the same interests.

- Please elucidate our readers on the books you've written and what are the themes you explore within each one of them? Are you satisfied with what you've accomplished so far both as a writer and on personal levels?
Tall order! I first started writing for occult magazines in the late 1970's, initially because I wanted to subscribe, but couldn't afford the subscription fees. By the mid-80's I was writing for a wide variety of UK & German small press occult journals, and in 1987, started (with Rodney Orpheus) "Pagan News" which ran for about five years, on and off. "Pagan News" was a news-oriented pagan 'zine, which covered a wide range of occult subjects and initially ran as a monthly publication - which meant that we were getting it out every three weeks! How we did it, on virtually no start-up capital and me being unemployed at the time, seems a bit of a mystery in retrospect. Doing Pagan News also led to a major career change for me. Up until then, my professional background was mental health (I'd also trained as an occupational therapist for three years) but as I began to get more into DTP, I decided that this was what I wanted to concentrate on. It took a while to bridge the gap, but I've spent the last ten years or so working in publishing.
I then went on to publish a series of 'chapbooks' on various aspects of magic. The first of these was the "shamanic trilogy" which was released between 1989-91 and comprised of 2 booklets looking at practical exercises and a third, which attempted to deal with some ofthe issues around using shamanic techniques in a modern, urban environment. This trilogy is out of print but is available at my website [www.phhine.ndirect.co.uk] as free pdf e-books. I then did an anthology of material from the Esoteric Order of Dagon (a network of magicians interested in exploring Lovecraftian magic). And the last two chapbooks (published in 1992 in association with Chaos International) were "Condensed Chaos" and "Chaos Servitors: A User Guide." In 1993, I released my first 'book' "Prime Chaos" as a limited edition of a 1000 copies, via Chaos International Publications. By this time, I was a member of the Illuminates of Thanateros magical order, and it was at one of their international shindigs that I met the late Bob Williams, who very generously offered to make the rounds of the US-based professional occult publishers on my behalf. In April 1994, Bob called me up and said that New Falcon publications were interested in a book from me and could I have a 60,000 word ms ready by August - which didn't give me a lot of time! So for months I wrote like a mad thing, drawing on the large number of articles I'd accumulated from my 80's writing binge, and got a manuscript together. Bob put up $2,000 towards the publication costs, and when the book was released, he and other USA IOT members arranged for me to come out to the States and do some workshops and meet William S. Burroughs, who'd kindly written some ad copy for the book, and who had been a long-time hero of mine. "Condensed" is a kind of introductory book on the Chaos approach to magic - though I feel it would be useful to anyone interested in magic. It's based on my own experiences in doing practical magic, from stuff I did years ago to things which were still crystallising in my mind at the time of writing it. I tried (how successfully I don't know) to keep the emphasis on practical technique rather than theory, since IMO a lot of what passes for magical theory is just one writer's opinion that gets treated as immutable laws. The original chapbook, by the way, has been retitled "Oven-Ready Chaos" and is available on my website as a pdf file, in English or German. "Prime Chaos" is a sort of 'companion' to "Condensed", being a rewrite of the original book, released by New Falcon in 1999. Like "Condensed" it deals with stuff which arose out of my own experiences, so the biggest section of it covers magical group dynamics, and there are also sections devoted to Lovecraftian magic and Discordian stuff. In 1994 I expanded the original Lovecraftian magic stuff from "Prime Chaos" and released it as a chapbook "The Pseudonomicon". This was later re-released in a revised edition from Dagon Productions [www.dagonproductions.com] and has just gone out of print. I am slowly putting down ideas for a third revision.
I guess I'm fairly satisfied with the stuff I've done so far. At the moment I don't really have a burning desire to embark on another major writing venture, plus I don't have as much time to write as I used to. At one time, writing & self-publishing was a major source of income to me, and since I am now paid to produce magazines & website material, that's no longer the case. I see no reason to churn out book after book and try and hold onto the fiction of being an "occult author" - appearing at conferences, etc. Been there, done that - time to move on.

- "Knowledge is power", and for many people I know that are into Occultism they are not of the opinion that one should divulgate theories or empiric knowledge to the masses for they are not worthy of working with such grand Arts and secrets. Do you agree that one should expose these elder themes totally for free & for the mind of people who may not be ready to receive, and perceive this sort of experiences?
For a start, I don't think that "knowledge is power" when it comes to magic - "Doing is power" is far more appropriate, since anyone can acquire knowledge but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can apply it practically. As for not divulging "theories or empiric knowledge to the masses for they are not worthy of working with such grand Arts and secrets" I think that's just bollocks. Anyone can purchase books on magic or find a plethora of information on the world-wide web. Whether or not they understand what they read or choose to apply it for themselves is another matter. But this whole "I'm special 'cos I'm a magician and can therefore look down on the masses” is just self-aggrandising crap. For a long time, I've been interested in releasing freely-available material. In the mid-80's, together with some friends, I released a free 'chain-book' on chaos magic. This was just some collated, unbound materials - the idea being that if you liked the idea, you added to it and passed it on. We released this under the auspices of the "Lincoln/Leeds Order Of Neuromancers" (L.O.O.N) and it's since found its way onto the web in a variety of formats. We wrote a bunch of articles under a variety of pseudonyms (Magu Magoo was one of my favourites) and soon had letters from people wanting to join the order, not realising it didn't exist. More recently, royalties from the 2 New Falcon books have enabled me to get online and post a lot more free material on my ever-expanding website. Occasionally I get emails from people saying "I've revealed secrets" but I don't take them very seriously. Writing under a pseudonym can be an interesting magical exercise. I once interviewed Pat Mills (former editor of 2000AD) who said that he consciously created characters which he more or less invoked in order to get dialogue from. I've tried this on a number of occasions, and was once informed by someone who thought that one particular pseudoynm was a 'real' person that 'he' was a much better writer than I was!

- What do you think it is then, that it took so long for Occult knowledge to come out of secrecy and into the open?
Hm, that's a complicated one. Obviously the growth of literacy and cheap publishing are factors - from what, the 16th century onwards? There do seem to be periods in history when occultism was definitely in fashion - probably from around the 17th century. A lot of popular occult literature stemmed from western travellers going to India and describing the "blasphemous rites of the Hindoos" (sic) or from victorian archeologists poking around in long barrows or pyramids and then forming theories about what they'd found. From the 19th century onwards, there's been a lot of - let's say, codification of occult literature. Mme Blavastky, the Golden Dawn, Gurdjieff, Crowley et al - were not so much 'revealing' something which was long hidden but synthesising new wholes from disparate shards and making it accessible through book publishing. Nowadays, we are mainly just continuing that trend on a bigger scale, along with what Peter Koenig has called the "McDonaldisation of Occulture" - serving "esoteric wisdom" up in bite-size chunks - easily digestible & increasingly standardised. As Pete Carroll, once quipped, it's amazing how much occult theory passes from book to book without any intervening thought. To my mind, some of the most informative books on occultism are being written not by occultists, but by anthropologists and ethnologists who are actually visiting and researching the magical cultures they are writing about, rather than just reproducing secondhand ideas. Of course, the idea remains popular that occultism is somehow 'ancient' when a great deal of it dates back to around the 17th century.
At another level though, magic still remains 'secret' in the sense that despite the fact you can go into most decent bookshops and find shelf-fulls of stuff, and the great mass of info on the world-wide web, it's still relatively harder to get into the occult subsculture itself. Obviously it's easier in some places than others, such as the major population centres as opposed to small towns. Also, many occult groups are not really interested in proselytising or making themselves easily accessible to outsiders. This is particularly true for the more esoteric genres. For example, I first became interested in tantra in 1982. I heard that there was a western-based group which drew it's ideas directly from an Indian tantric sect, but it wasn't until 1987 that I met up with someone who was not only an initiate of this group, but was willing to grant initiation into the tradition.

- Are you pro or against the use of drugs in order to enter altered states of consciousness? Even if one can do it without the use of drugs it's always a different perspective to be under the influence of it and may contribute to the enrichment of perception or even the confidence of ones inner-strength, don't you think so?
Oh I'm fairly pro-drugs, though personally I've never found them to be particularly effective personally, at least for magical actions. Most magical cultures, both historical and contemporary have recourse to conciousness-altering substances of one sort or another. I think that the injunctions against using drugs are fairly modern and restricted to a few western magical authors who tend to make absolutist statements about magic.

- What do you think it happens to consciousness after physical death?
This is not really an issue which concerns me one way or another.

- Where do you see this new direction in magick and thinking going, and why do we need it now?
If by "new direction" you mean chaos magic - I don't know where it's going and it's not something which particularly concerns me either. I would like to see more occult writing which challenges established theories and ideas, rather than just parroting them. It would be a pity, though, to my mind, if "chaos" became a seperate genre within occultism as a whole - I'd prefer to see the "C-word" get dropped off and the useful ideas of chaos magic absorbed into mainstream occultism. The problem is of course, that occultism doesn't advance in a linear fashion, in the same way that science does, for example. Old (and outdated) ideas get recycled and churned out time and time again.

- It is suggested that when one draws sigils, or just the outlines of the various names over magical talismans, we are really drawing the literal energetic patter of the forces invoked. Does this happen only while drawing or merely in the act of focalisation? Or under both actions?
Well I don't believe that "we are really drawing the literal energetic pattern of the forces" in any absolute sense. IMO, it's at best a metaphor, and the problem with metaphors is that people in western (euroamerican) culture tend to literalise them, especially those involved in occultism.

- Some people believe that there is a limit to how far one can go while incarnate. That we can't really experience some of the higher levels of the Qabalah Tree. Is that an obsolete statement, or is it just pretty relative?
I don't know. I'm not into the Qabalah, and I've never really been into that whole hierarchical structuring of experience.

- The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some spectacular things together. What do you think created such a fusion between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?
I wasn't aware that they were 'merging' particularly - and as for science and art's fusion, I thought that it began with the Futurist movement in the 30's - but not being well up on art movements, I can't really say.

- I was reading something you wrote about Chaos silliness where you said that humour is important in magick. You've also written that rituals can be silly and no less effective than ones when you keep a straight face. I wonder how can one keep a certain level of concentration while being laughing or acting silly?
Not every ritual involves keeping "a certain level of concentration". The "Mass of Chaos 'H'" in "Prime Chaos" is an example. The aim of the ritual is to 'banish' magical pomposity (albeit momentarily) – all that 'we are an elite', 'we're better than other people' crap.

- What is your understanding of anti-matter?
Not much. I'm not very scientifically-oriented, so for me it's just something that gets mentioned on Star Trek/Voyager occasionally.

- It was also very nice to know that you like to summon the Ancient Ones from H.P. Lovecrafts' realm of fantasy. In your opinion do you think mythical figures from pantheons that were worshipped in the past have greater power than the Cthulhu Mythos creatures? To be precise, when summoning a specific mythological entity can it be stronger than a fictitious/imaginary creature or vice-versa?
This is an often-debated question. For me, what matters is the degree of affinity that one has with an entity - to what extent one has an emotional connection to it. There's also an assumption, it seems to me, that "mythical figures in the past" are somehow unchanging and fixed. That's not true. If you look into the history of deities in different pantheons, you'll find that some of them appear to change quite radically at different stages of a culture's history. Chaldean descriptions of Hecate, for example, are quite different to the potted biographies of her which appear in modern books on Witchcraft. Modern Indian descriptions of Durga as being a loving mother-goddess are notably different from medieval tantric descriptions of her as a bloodthirsty battle-goddess. Obviously, anyone doing magical work with a particular entity is going to be influenced by what they've read or heard about it, which in turn is going influence their experiences. What's interesting about the Cthulhu Mythos entities of course, is that there is little in the way of detail concerning them - for me they represent entry-points to particular liminal states of consciousness rather than being distinct entities in the way that 'deities' tend to be thought of. In the end, where does one draw the line at what's 'real' or 'imaginary'? Harry Potter is probably 'real' to millions of children.

- Are there any divinities that you have more affinity for?
Well I have close affinities with several Tantric deities - Ganesha and Kali in particular, as I've been interacting with them magically (meditation, ritual, vision, etc.) for a number of years, now - nearly twenty years, with Kali.

- Please care to explain the importance of homosexuality, particularly in the magickal context in which you inhabit?
Well, I don't know that it is 'important'. What important, for me, is that if you are gay or bisexual and into the occult, and if you've been exposed to a lot of homophobic twaddle from occult authors (two examples being Gareth Knight's "Homosexuality, like drugs, is a technique of black magic." or Kenneth Grant's stirring "Thus the blasphemy of the homosexual formula, for it denies Babalon and breeds devils in chaos.") I think it's important to read some positive articles. There's a lot of homophobia in western occultism, which IMO is just prejudice turned into 'occult laws'. There's a lot of twaddle about homosexuality and a lot of nonsense about sexuality in general - it seems that unlike the rest of society, a lot of occultists have acquired an almost victorian prudishness about sexuality. I recall Let's take "Sodomy & Sorcery" as an example, since you're publishing it along with this interview. This article caused a lot of raised eyebrows and some comment on the UK occult scene when it was first published. I think the reason it did this was that generally, sexual magic gets talked about in the third person, in a way that divorces it from direct experience. It also tends to get smothered in symbolism - VIII degree, IX degree, XI degree - roses, flowers, rods, cups - it's all so coy. And of course the whole subject of taking it up the arse upsets people too - look at how many Thelemites nervously skirt around the fact that Crowley liked it up the bum from black men. But anyway, here I am directly talking about passive anal sex and what it feels like, and how this related to my occult experience. Many years ago I took a transexual (MTF) partner to an occult soiree - now some of the people there were definitely into that "Oh I'm above the herd, I'm spiritually advanced" attitude, but they were seriously freaked, which made me question their self-proclaimed 'superiority'. I'll admit I took some small pleasure in turning up at such parties with a boy and a girl in tow and watch the confusion as people tried to sort out who was doing who. For me there's a wider issue here, which is that despite a recent rush of books on sexual magic or facile writings about 'tantra', there's been no real attempt (as far as I know) by magicians to look at descriptions of gender, which for me is a core issue, since descriptions of gender have vast effects on our lives, both privately and communally. This is an area which I'm currently researching into, and what I'm finding is that, in the main, occult 'explanations' of gender tend to be extremely deterministic, and - surprise surprise, tend to follow the bipolar models of gender differentiation which have their roots in 19th century victorian science.

- The more we try to find out what it is, the less we know. Do you remember any particular example when you felt like this? Also, could this be a correct way of describing Esoterism and the way magick works around and within us?
It's probably a way of describing everything! Certainly, in modern occultism, it seems to me that some people try and create grand theories which account for everything, much in the way that Victorian scientists did. That seems to me to be a project which is doomed to failure. One very useful approach I gained from training as an Occupational Therapist was to take a multi-disciplinary approach to problems. For example, if you have a client who's needs can be met by using psychotherapy - fine, but if the range of problems they have indicates a behaviourist approach, you switch to that instead. And I tend to approach magic in the same way - using a different range of techniques & explanatory models, depending on the situation and how I want to tackle it.

- Before finishing this inquest, what advices can you give to aspiring students of the hidden arts?
Okay. Try things out. Don't just sit there reading loads of books. Don't mistake someone's opinion for truth with a big 'T'. If you don't like one author's approach, try something else or make up your own. Have adventures and take time off occasionally. If you want to aspire to the stars you need your feet planted
firmly on the ground.

- Thank you very much for your time Phil, are there any items we have not covered that you would like to speak about?
Not unless you want to hear about the perfidy of design houses who can't get their ads in on time or people who seem to think website graphics will reproduce perfectly at 2500 dpi? Thought not.

from "Descending the Abyss" booklet - 16/11/01
Conducted by NM
+ info: http://www.philhine.org.uk/