Magic is all about getting ‘their’ attention.

I’ve been rolling this description around and around in my head since Chris said it during his recent appearance on THC. Because I think it might be remarkable.

At first glance, it may look like a rephrase of the oft-used metaphor that grimoire magic in particular is a form of cosmic room service. Whilst such a pejorative metaphor certainly can be justified as a description of unsophisticated grimoire magic, getting their attention encompasses both this and… everything else. Everything from abduction to sacrifice to whatever was going on here. It models intentional and unintentional magic.

It also, as Chris points out, models why magical results tend to fall into two camps:

Nothing happens: Failed to gain attention. Entirely unexpected results, very often in face-meltingly weird situations: Gained attention. (Before moving on, consider the alarmingly high cancer rates among ufologists and paranormal researchers in light of the Classical Greek goetes‘ obsession with purification and expunging miasma.)

Visualise the tableau in this translation of The Third Hymn to Inanna: The Holy One, with ‘getting their attention’ in mind having also just followed the previous link about Dubai Atlantis.

The people of Sumer parade before you.

They play the sweet ala drums before you.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven! They beat the holy drums and timpani before you.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven! They play the holy harp and timpani before you.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, First Daughter of the Moon! The male prostitutes comb their hair before you.

They decorate the napes of their necks with coloured scarfs,

They drape the cloak of the gods about their shoulders.

The righteous man and woman walk before you.

They hold the soothing harp by their sides.

Those who follow wear the sword belt.

They grasp the spear in their hands. The people of Sumer parade before you. The women adorn their right side with men’s clothing.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven! The men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven! The people compete with jump ropes and coloured cords.

The people of Sumer parade before you. I say “Hail!” to Inanna, First Daughter of the Moon! The young men, who carry hoops, sing to you.

The maidens and coiffured priestesses walk before you,

They carry the sword and the double-edged axe.

The ascending kugarra priests raise their swords before you.

The priest, who covers his sword with blood, sprinkles blood,

He sprinkles blood over the throne of the court chamber.

The tigi-drum, the sem-drum and the ala-tambourine resound! In the heavens, the Holy One appears alone. My Lady looks in sweet wonder from heaven.

She looks in sweet wonder on all the lands

And on the people of Sumer as numerous as sheep.

Staying with the broad theme, Peter Grey republished one of his earlier essays on Babalon today, and this particular quotation is on point.

In the West we have been prone to treating goddesses as psychological constructs, and smudging the lines of kohl or chalk to suit our own designs. This too is a genuine attempt by a secular and disconnected culture to find a way back to magick. The revival of the grimoire tradition shows that an awareness is returning to magicians that the spirits are real and through trafficking with them, the world can be re-enchanted.

Trafficking with the spirits. We turn now to fiction, specifically Kate Griffin’s wonderful London novel, A Madness of Angels.

There is the story of the Bag Lady. She isn’t simply a bag lady – a lady who carries plastic bags of the strangest scrounged items she can get her hands on – she is The Bag Lady, the queen of all those who scuttle in the night, gibbering to themselves, and the voices only they can hear. She is the mistress of the mad old women in their slippers who ride the buses from terminal to terminal, she is the patron of the scrapyard girls who play with the rats, she is the lady of all dirty puddles. She has been in the city since the first old woman left alone in the dark decided to tell the dark why she was crying, and she is, of course, myth, and no one believes a word of it, including me. However, when the pigeons were nested for the night, it was to the Bag Lady that my gran would always offer her prayers.

Grant Morrison’s Nameless relates a similar tale of attention/contact.

There is a post sitting in my drafts about mind control, which I had started on Friday evening prior to the Paris attacks. It was an elaboration on something I said to Mikey during our recent chat about how I’m not sure where the mid-twentieth-century shadow state ‘consciousness tech’ went, because it hasn’t started reappearing in the real economy the way other shadow technologies such as NASA’s new EmDrive has. Or most technology, frankly. Found this via Jay. Everything in your iPhone came from military tech (and was then assembled by slaves):

I actually think the consciousness tech has resurfaced/is resurfacing, and its principal vectors are pharma -the US is 5% of the world’s population and consumes 80% of its prescription psychotropics- and broadcast technology. I think the broad Manchurian strategy of de-patterning and then re-patterning individuals is being deployed at scale via a combination of brutal, overt broadcast imagery, hidden brain entrainment technology and psychiatric medication.

But the time isn’t right for a number of reasons. Firstly, the response to Paris has either been a frenetic adoption of a full fearporn agenda or shrill protestations of ‘false flag’… and it is precisely this barrage from both ends of the spectrum that is the broadcast equivalent of Ewan Cameron’s MKULTRA experiments with electroshock therapy on the brain… people are so punchdrunk they can no longer discern reality… and that’s by design. (Hence ‘maintaining one’s coherence‘…. it rebuilds what the media seeks to bring down.) It’s much easier to convince you to do or be something when your grip on the real is so tenuous.

The second reason is although we seem to have reached peak ‘minority olympics’ with various agent provocateur’d campus groups tweeting the hashtag #fuckparis and comparing their lack of government funded safe spaces to crawling out from under the bloodied corpse of your husband and running for your life away from kalashnikov fire as being equal acts of ‘terrorism’… their windbagging hasn’t quite starved enough oxygen out of their own room for us to have a frank discussion about how this is exactly the sort of mind controlled nonsense I’m talking about: It is the complete inability to achieve perspective or discern reality… or even the idea that a trending topic on twitter isn’t actually reality… or that two things can happen in the world at once. Demographics, such as university students, that previously would unify around a vocal anti-war agenda are now accusing each other of being rapists and racists and this absurd behaviour is attracting the ire and disdain of the rest of society… thus are we all divided and conquered.

However, I do want to lift from the abandoned post two quotes from the second volume of Jacques Vallee’s journals, because they speak to how these two lines of enquiry -getting ‘attention’ and the general state of the world- intersect. The first is where he says -writing in the seventies and thus never having read his Red Book- that Jung doesn’t go far enough. This is how Inanna and the Bag Lady are both ‘things’.

Jung’s Memoirs summarize his theories on the collective unconscious. Because of the breakthroughs of science he is “seized with secret shudders and dark forebodings.” At stake here, he says, is a long-forgotten thing, the soul of Man. Who is in charge of it? […] Is it not in the name of the soul of man that “good” Christians, “good” Hindus and “good” Muslims are busy building atom bombs? The problem goes deeper than Carl Jung himself is willing to look.

The Mind War currently being waged -in addition to the actual war- against the entire planet, intentionally or not, is one giant game of ‘getting something’s attention’. And I mean that literally:

The existence and importance of similarity in vibration has also popped up in psi experiments. For example, individuals gifted at psychokinesis — the ability to affect physical objects with the mind — have described the experience as a feeling of resonance with those objects. A fascinating body of evidence has also been uncovered by Dean Radin and his colleague Roger Nelson at Princeton’s PEAR lab. Researchers at PEAR found that connected couples can influence random event generators (REGs) more effectively than individuals working alone. Because of this phenomenon, Radin and Nelson decided to test for even larger field effects by using these random devices as “antennae.” First they placed REGs at events where people were all focused on the same thing and therefore “vibrating” similarly — for example, at music festivals, religious events, and even at the Academy Awards. The results were as predicted; these venues did indeed cause the machines’ outputs to deviate from the norm [6, 7]. Then, in 1997, they decided to place REGs at fifty locations all over the world, run them continuously, and see if they could pick up on major world events. The results were astounding. Over the next ten years, Radin and Nelson studied the machines’ reactions to 205 major world events and discovered that they did indeed respond to events that were intense on a global level — especially those that were tragic. The most striking effects occurred in response to the events on 9/11, which caused the largest daily average correlation between the machines’ outputs. Even more amazing, this correlation became noticeable a few hours before the first of the twin towers was hit! [8, 9] An instance of collective precognition? Whereas world events less horrific than 9/11 probably evoke more varied vibratory responses in people (and therefore do not resonate and amplify each other as well), truly frightening events tend to evoke a more common, coherent response. As this study showed, when nearly all of the people on Earth “got onto the same wavelength” on 9/11, even machines noticed.

One more Vallee quotation, this time from the intro to the second volume.

Some day a perceptive historian may be able to document how and why intelligence agencies of the major countries took such a messy interest in parapsychology and aerial phenomena during the early Seventies. The argument that the Soviet adversary was researching the field provides only a tiny excuse for an answer. I have never forgotten the harsh lessons of the Pentacle Memorandum revealed in Volume One. This previously-secret document showed that the scientific debate about the phenomenon had been cynically manipulated by the military and the CIA. A panel of Nobel-level scientists assembled in 1953 to analyze the problem had never received full disclosure of the data.

Fighting a clean Mind War has some very specific rules.

Maintain your coherence. Do not decohere others. Avoid vectors of mind control.

And finally, to Peter Grey’s point above about re-enchanting the world… attract the attention of something more noble.