occult Original Rituals technomancy Technomancy Rituals

Technomancy: Command Line Magick

Technomancy is the art and practice of using technology to carry out one’s will. This isn’t something out of a Shadowrun campaign, but a practical application of ceremonial magick.

I’ve been running Linux since I was 15 when my father gave me a copy of SUSE 9.3. It came with two thick books full of instructions on how to troubleshoot and maneuver your computer.

Slowly, I began to learn the commands by which I could control the computer. I still have a lot to learn because there is literally a command for everything and I have mostly been using a graphical interface to control the computer.

A few years after being introduced to ceremonial magick and the importance of symbols on the subconscious I came to see a similarity. Each command I type, every argument I make in the string is basically an evocation of data.

After that, I had a creative burst. Why can’t Linux commands be another symbol set I can use for ceremonial magick? I started doing more research and started to compile a list of commands that had similarities to existing rituals.

Here is a work in progress version of a Greater Banishing Ritual I’m working on:

Shutdown -r now chmod 777 dd if=”/dev/null” dd of=”/usr/(your name)” chmod u x Shutdown -r now

You would say out loud as “Shutdown minus are now. Ch mod 777. Dee dee if equals Slash dev slash null. Dee Dee of equals slash user slash (your name). Ch mod you plus ex. Shutdown minus are now”

The first line demonstrates that you shutdown and reboot your system. The second line changes the permissions of yourself to be read, written, and executed by anyone. The third line utilizes the program dd showing the input file is /dev/null which is the device on your computer that is kind of like a black hole. It doesn’t exist. The fourth line shows that the output file is yourself. The fifth line changes your permissions back to only being executed by yourself. The sixth line reboots your system again to refresh everything.

This would not be the exact same thing you’d type as a command if you were using Linux on a computer. Instead, these are interpretations of existing Linux commands for use in ceremonial magick. These are real commands and you’d come across them if you were wiping a hard drive or changing file permissions. I wouldn’t advise using dd without reading the man page.

In the future, I hope to explicate further upon the art of technomancy. For now, all I know are Linux commands. Perhaps at some point I will study programming languages and write rituals in those languages and hopefully provide a meaningful symbol set for us geeks.

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