Liber Nought: Part 1
I’ve been reading the book Generation Hex the last few days and it has got me thinking and reminiscing. The book is full of essays from various magicians and occultists talking about how and why they got into the practice and study of magick and where it has led them (up until this point). Also where they think it is going. It is a pretty interesting read, even if the essays are kind of hit or miss.
The last five years or so have been up and down for me as far as my active interest in the occult and more importantly conscious magickal practice. I have never stopped being interested in it, or reflecting on it in my daily life and as a whole, but I have not taken any active steps to do anything. I have strayed away from most discussions on it as well. I am not sure why exactly, but I have. In the last couple of months though there has been something growing in me, my pineal gland has been twitching. I have started hunting down some books that I never got around to purchasing in the last 15+ years, of course a bunch of them are OOP now. I’ve also just had this overwhelming sense of something on the periphery just beyond sight. Certain events and chance meetings have made me reevaluate some of the sites I have run (chaostatic.com) and was in the process of building (Principia-Esoterica.com). Who knows where those two sites will be going.
I have decided to start this series of posts that allow me to trace my steps (as best as I can) to where I am at now. While I hope to make it an interesting read, this is more for me. I have never sat down and truly mapped out this aspect of me.
The Beginnings
I wish I could remember what got me into the occult in the first place. I really can’t remember. It’s always been something that has interested me. I remember really you being into ghost stories and the paranormal. I remember going to little dive theatres in NYC with my father to see stage magician acts. I think all these experiences and interests started me on the path. A lot of my entertainment also pointed me in that direction. All the heavy metal music with their mentions of Crowley, Lovecraftian elements, etc. Films like The Gate and countless other horror films. The idea of being able to bend and shape reality to your wants and desires is not only a wonderful thing to a 10 year old child, but it is also not too far out of the realm of possibilities to someone that age. We are all probably at our most imaginative and purely creative as a child. As we grow older our art and creativity come more from a reflection on our experiences and as answers the world around us, they don’t seem to come from as much an untouched place in our minds that unjaded youth provides.
Growing up in a non-practicing Christian home the obvious place to start looking is towards the perceived opposite: Satanism. Of course the “satanic panic” of the 80’s helped point me in that direction as well. Being only 11 or so, the majority of my time was spent listening to Death Metal, reading books (LaVey, Necronomicon, etc), traipsing around a cemetery at night, and doing some “rituals”. While I remember having fantastic results with some of the evocations, etc that my friends and I were messing around with it really was all fairly half-hearted. I knew what I was doing was working, I saw the results, but I didn’t care about the overall system.
I knew I needed to start shopping around.
To be continued…
I was trying to find a name of a band that did a song that I barely remember at this point. It was on a skateboard video put out by the company Gullwing called Full Power Trip. I have the VHS sitting in a box somewhere, I will probably have to dig it out. In my search I came across a great site that catalogs and has info and reviews on old skateboard videos: 
I Titor’d back to 1980 tonight. It was wonderful.
