serpent.antonchanning.com » anarchy

Open Occult Networks: Where to go from here?

Anton Channing — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 15:18:01 +0000

A while ago, about the time KIA was entering version 4 I wrote an article giving a history of KIA’s progress, entitled ‘KIA Network, Forum and Wiki Integrated‘. I mostly intended this as a promotional announcement about how KIA had evolved to encompass a social network, a forum and a wiki with single sign on (a big achievement for me at the time, as I’d been planning it for years), but I also gave a look back on how KIA had got to where it was back then, including its logo history and name changes.

One of the things about KIA has always been its openness, and whilst I am not aware of anyone taking advantage of it yet, the fact the logos are released as creative commons, means anyone so inclined can take them in modified or unmodified form, and use them in their own projects (provided they release any modifications and redistributions on the same license). This was to facilitate the growth of KIA as a decentralised movement that didn’t revolve solely around activities on kiamagic.com. However this hasn’t happened as far as I’m aware, and I’m left wondering if its even necessary. Probably a valuable contribution regardless of necessity.

The reason is that free open occult network already exists and doesn’t need to revolve around any particular image, flag or name in order to exist. KIA can be seen as a small part, or node, within an already existing open occult network that spans all cultures across the globe. Another such node within this network might be Free Illuminism (aka Congregational Illuminism). This describes itself as a bottom-up, decentralised open system, non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian. They say that by doing away with hierarchy, they do away with the pointless politics that can prove so much distraction in the work. They say they have ‘an ever-growing number of sincere and dedicated Illuminists who have voluntarily come together in free association with each other to work in unity, openness and peace.’ This sounds good to me, and rather in tune with what KIA has been trying to achieve since its inception. To me, KIA and Free Illuminism seem eminently compatible, to the extent they seem like different names for the same thing.

Other examples include the growing number of open source occult resources and wiki’s on various occult subjects that can share content with each other via permissive licenses.

Perhaps the importance of KIA within that network relates to the importance of what we do together within it. How well it delivers something of value to its participants given the effort of their contributions. This of course leads to the question ‘what do we consider something of value?’ We may have to answer that each for ourselves, but to really take things forward some kind of consensus on where to from here may need to be reached. This may include common esoteric projects as well as simply developing more features for the website. Back in its early days, KIA didn’t shy away from big collaborative rituals that spanned the world. This may or may not be what we are looking for today.

Another thing I have been looking into lately is the idea of hosting user websites on subdomains of kiamagic.com. The idea behind this was not so much to monetise KIA but to raise a fund that could be used to develop KIA further. This would likely be in the form purchasing the development of plugins for Elgg, which KIA would release on a GPL license. I have ideas for not yet existing plugins that would be great not just for KIA, but for all Elgg websites, but I don’t have the time develop these myself, nor the money to pay for them. Which is why I got the idea of a development fund. Of course, subdomain websites are not the only means by which money can be raised for this. I conceived of it as a way of giving something back to those that contribute.

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Freedom and Liberty in Democracy Today

Anton Channing — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:43:56 +0000

(Note: This article was originally written for Key64 and published a while back. However since they seem to be down at the moment I’ve decided to republish).

I was born in the UK in the year of 1974. The cold war was in full swing and I grew up with the threat of nuclear war hanging over. From an early age I came to understand that I was fortunate to have been born onto the side of the war where the people were free, the government democratically elected and no one lived in fear of the secret police. Or so I thought for some years in my childhood innocence.

As I grew into an adult I had become increasingly aware of the limits to freedom in the democratic West, and came to understand the degree to which people seemed to tolerate government intrusion into our lives. And I found them unacceptable. To begin with I knew not what to do about them. I found my friends and allies in the anarchist underbelly of society. A strange world full of beautiful subcultures that share as their common thread a healthy disrespect for authoritarian politics. Of course, some of these subcultures have a darker side, harbouring those with communist or even fascist leanings, and they are not always as obvious to spot as they should be having found many cunning ways to disguise themselves. Such is the sophistication of the hiding mechanisms, it seems like some of those with authoritarian leanings may have deceived even themselves.

The reasons people end up in the ‘counter culture’ are diverse, but are usually related to having a taste for something frowned upon by society at large, or even actually illegal. This can be as simple as holding a minority political view, or belonging to an unconventional religion. It can be attendance at raves and squat parties, if not actual squatting. It can be membership of direct action and protest movements. It can be smoking marijuana, and perhaps increasingly tobacco as it too becomes ostracised from the mainstream. Other things like motorcycles, or skate boards, surfing and extreme sports. Sexual attraction to the same sex, or both sexes, cross dressing and transsexualism are all unconventional enough to lead to counter culture. Even something as basic as an interest in non-mainstream music can lead one to the counter culture.

Of course, a lot of people meeting some of the criteria above will find themselves only on the fringes of counter culture. Others will attempt to hide their difference in a veneer of normality and a revulsion for anything else that causes them to stand out.

However, when I say underbelly, I do not wish to confuse counter culture with the underclass. The counter culture is made up of people from all walks of life, some living on benefits, some in low income employment, others are students, or in professional graduate jobs. Some run businesses, or work in creative media perhaps even as artists, poets, musicians and those with fairly successful acting careers. Some are quite wealthy and drive nice cars/have big houses. Whilst others are homeless and live on the street or in squats. However, those unfortunate enough to become jobless and homeless pretty much become counter culture by default since the dominant culture failed them they need to turn elsewhere for support. Counter culture is where they find that support. If they are lucky. It partly depends on how well evolved their local counter culture is.

Commitment and membership of the counter culture varies, many who think of themselves as part of it are only paying lip service, whilst yet others deeply ingrained within it may not see themselves as part of anything. What is more, it is deeply divided with many factions that dislike and distrust other factions. And yet if one has an understanding of their commonality, it is easy to move around within it and be liked by most of the diverse strains.

The single most important rule to get along in counter culture is to remember to never grass on anyone to the police for any activity the authorities unfairly classify as a crime or for which you know the punishment will be entirely disproportionate. Nor indeed to make undue fuss about such things when they have no negative impact upon your person or your freedom.

Manifestation of this counter cultural rule depends entirely on the innate sense of fairness common to the vast majority of human beings, and will vary greatly depending on the nature of the current injustices being perpetrated by the worlds governments.

For example, when being Jewish was a crime punishable by death in Nazi occupied Europe, many non-Jews recognised the unfairness of the ruling power and were willing to risk their own freedom, and even their own lives, in order to hide, feed and assist in the escaping of those directly persecuted. This is an extreme example from a particularly vicious totalitarian government, although we must remember that whilst they disbanded democracy in favour of dictatorship they could only do so because they were voted in using a system based almost exactly on the democratic model still officially in use in the modern day United States. It also demonstrates quite clearly that sometimes it is only by breaking and tolerating the breaking of unjust law that true justice can be served.

Another example closer to home would be those living in a post war democracy before the legalisation of homosexuality who recognised the injustice of their persecution, and who would knowingly keep the company of gay men without reporting them. In the modern day United Kingdom as I write this, it is still illegal for three or consenting gay men to have sex with one another. I remember reading somewhere that more people were arrested for homosexuality after it was legalised than before. I don’t know if that still holds true but it was fairly recently that a group of gay men were arrested for nothing more than making video of themselves having group sex. Making the video wasn’t the crime, it was just used as evidence that these men had illegal group sex. Still, whether people know it is illegal or not, I very much doubt I know many people that would go so far as to report group sex practising gay men to the police, and I certainly wouldn’t count such people amongst my friends.

Indeed I myself would not report any illegal activity to the authorities that occurred between consenting adults. Nor would any of my friends. It is all very well democratically elected governments passing laws that violate the sovereignty of consenting adults in their private lives, be it in the bedroom, a private party, a muddy field or an organised centre of recreation if no-one is actually willing to report violations of such unjust laws.

Of course, some misguided people are willing to report such things, sometimes even quite well meaning people. It is partly to make such people think about the true meaning of justice and liberty that I am writing articles like this one. Others however have quite hypocritically turned on their fellows out of spite or revenge. For example I know of an adept (second in command) of a magic order that got involved in a custody battle with an ex member of the same group. In the ensuing court case she actually had the nerve to out the father of her child as a witch in the hopes of prejudicing the court against him. Luckily freedom of religion is very much an excepted part of the modern legal system these days and so her tactic backfired. None the less she demonstrated considerable hypocrisy in her actions which are one of the many reasons I no longer count her as a friend or even someone to be trusted.

By this point I have come to notice that I have been bandying about terms such as ‘unjust law’, ‘individual sovereignty’ and ‘consenting adults’ without defining precisely what I mean by such terms. On the surface they seem self explanatory, but if we explore them deeper we find that they are not without ambiguities and each raise questions. Of what exactly is the individual sovereign? What makes a law unjust? How are adults able to grant or withdraw consent, and under what circumstances can we consider consent to have been broken?

These are valid questions and so for the purposes of this book I will attempt to define these ideas in as simple a form as possible.

Individual sovereignty means that the individual is sovereign of their own mind and body. It can also be extended to refer to sovereignty over personal possessions, and whilst I see this as a natural conclusion, at no point should it distract us from the core issue of sovereignty and ownership of ones own mind and body. Ownership of the mind is something we have come to take for granted in the democratic west. We can believe and think what we want although we are not always free to say it. Freedom of speech is of course a much touted cornerstone of democracy but in practise it has never been total. Slander and libel laws have ensured that. To say nothing of incitement to violence/crime and hatred laws. Thought however has never been a crime in a real democracy.

Of course, most democracies in the world are currently turning their backs on what democracy means, seeing in their majority vote a mandate to do exactly as they please, and so it is not surprising to see thought crimes starting to appear on the statute books. For example here in the UK a young woman was imprisoned for simply owning Jihadist literature. The UK is no stranger to terrorist attacks. Throughout my life there have been far worse troubles in Ulster, which often fed into the UK mainland, with far more dead than the Jihadists have so far caused, and yet it was never to my knowledge a crime in those days to simply own Irish Republican material. Nor when some neo-nazi’s nail bombed Soho did they make it illegal to own neo-nazi material. The tide it seems is turning back to its authoritarian roots.

Or perhaps it is just that the first wave of freedom broke and receded at the end of the seventies, the next wave arrived in time for the nineties but broke around the millennium. If this is cyclical the next wave should start in time for 2012, lets hope it reaches a bit further inland this time…

The freedom of an individuals mind is a cornerstone of democracy, whether or not it us under threat from current democracies, since without it the very discourse on which democracy is based becomes meaningless. But sovereignty of body is not something that has ever been fully recognised by any government, democratic or otherwise. Homosexuality has only been barely legal for a few decades, many democratic governments reserve the right to enforce conscription, even if they aren’t currently practising it, all control to a certain degree what medicine and recreational substances we are allowed, restrictions on who can get a sex change operation, the right to sell sexual services for money. You don’t have to look far to see that the law is full of instances where the government evidently feels it has the right to control what individuals can and can’t do with their own body, evidently feels that our bodies are its legal property.

Personally I do not feel this is a task that should fall within their remit. They are only elected officials. The only qualification they need to be appointed to their post is winning a national popularity contest based on sound bites, false promises, celebrity endorsements and having the best smile. Why should we trust such people with anything at all, much less our own bodies?

Many people are currently campaigning for all sorts of reforms to our legal and electoral systems. Some want cannabis legalised, others want a proportionally representative democracy, etc. And I am not saying that these aren’t worthy causes, but a movement I could really get behind would be one where the very legal right of government to violate the sovereignty of an individual was challenged. Imagine a world where we had successfully devested government of such power. This is the kind of world I would like to see achieved in my own lifetime. And that is why I am writing this, to help turn us back on track, so that once again we can move forwards towards a future of liberty and freedom from tyranny (instead of mistakenly assuming we’ve already got there as those with authoritarian outlook want us to believe). Let us continue the journey we started in the Enlightenment, rather than giving up and retreating back into totalitarian control.

With this in mind, it becomes clearer what I mean by consenting adults. For one adult to do something physically to another, consent must be given by the receiving party. If the technology exists to tamper with the contents of a persons mind, consent must similarly be obtained. We can see this in action already with regards to rape law, trials primarily concerned with determining whether consent for sex was given, or whether sex continued after consent was withdrawn.

Of course the problem is that the government presumes to intervene and make activities illegal despite consent being given. This is often done under the guise of ‘protecting the individual from themselves’ but is more often a pandering to the sensibilities of some influential religious group that are somehow offended by the activities involved and wish to suppress their practise, even amongst those who don’t subscribe to their teachings.

Just law is then all law that recognises the sovereignty of the individual over their own mind and body, recognises the right of consenting adults to be sovereign over their collective minds and bodies and protects that sovereignty from all who would violate it. Unjust law is law that permits or demands that such sovereignty be violated. This can be on an individual level, such as a law that permitted a man to rape a woman without consequence, or it can be on an organisational level, such as a law that required the authorities to arrest members of the public caught in certain sexual practises.

To summarise:

Individual Sovereignty is the absolute sovereign right of all individuals over their own minds and bodies.

Consenting Adults. Any activity in which all present consent, and are mentally mature enough to grant consent, have not been deliberately misinformed by others present with regards to the risks of the activities and are able to withdraw consent, is an activity that is taking place between consenting adults.

Unjust Law: Any law which fails to recognise the sovereignty of the individual or of consenting adults shall be deemed unjust.

15 Books

Anton Channing — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:54:43 +0000

This is a response to Seani Fool over at PagAnarchy.net who wrote a blog listing his 15 books that most shaped who he is today. Amongst others, he has asked me to share the 15 that most influence me currently.

1. The Apophenion: A Chaos Magic Paradigm by Peter J Carroll. I’m only half way through this book so I’m not sure if I should count it yet, but since this is about what is influencing me right now, and through my current action of reading it and enjoying it, it is occupying a lot of my thoughts. So far I think this is Carroll’s best book to date. It seems to expand a lot upon some of the concepts hinted at in PsyberMagick, and present them in a much more lucid and coherent arguement. It also ties various threads together in a way that appeals to the way I think.

2. Promethea by Alan Moore. I don’t care if it is a graphic novel (or more a series of graphic novels), it continues to inspire.

3. The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. Same applies to this one. I don’t care if Grant and Alan apparently don’t care much for each other, I’ve never met either of them, so its just about appreciating their respective creations.

4. Visual Magick and Seidways by Jan Fries. Okay, I know that’s two so I’m cheating a bit. But I think these two books compliment each other so well that I think they could be combined into one big volume. Possibly an even bigger one with Hellrunar thrown in for good measure. Reading both these books changed the way I performed and thought about magick forever, and helped liberate me from thinking of myself exclusively as a Chaos Magician.

5. PsyberMagick by Peter J Carroll. If I hadn’t read this book, I probably wouldn’t have signed up to the Illuminates of Thanateros all those years ago. As a result, reading it shaped the pretty much all the path of magic I have tread ever since, including the formation of KIA. It was the first Peter Carroll book I read to, didn’t read the others until after I was in the IoT. I loved the humour in it, and enjoyed the format even though I was yet to read Crowley’s Book of Lies at the time.

6. BLAST your way to MegaBuck$ with my SECRET sex power formula! and other reflections upon the spiritual path by Ramsey Dukes. This book was my introduction to Duke’s theories, including Johnstone’s Paradox. My life would never be the same again. I still think every so often about recreating an old command line program I made for doing magick by hacking into the computer that controls our universe. It worked a bloody treat.

7. Paradoxical Emblems of D A Freher. Reading this book caused me to make a choice. That choice changed my life and freed me from certain bad decisions I’d made in the past and certain undesirable associations I’d made. But not in the way that it made me think about those things. No. In the way that reading that book is an act of magick and the choice you make when reading it plants a seed.

8. Prometheus Rising by Robert Anton Wilson. Doesn’t guarantee you won’t get brainwashed again, but makes it a lot harder for someone to do so over a sustained length of time. See through the bullshit of those who would control you. Whoever they are.

9. The Devil and the Goddess by Gyrus. Proving that a book doesn’t need to have many pages to be brilliant. This book combined with Seidways by Jan Fries to really inspire me thoughts on the importance of serpent imagery in magick.

10. Anarchism, arguments for and against by Albert Meltzer. Another little booklet that has greatly inspired.

11. Spectacular Times. A series of booklets. About seeing through the lies and propaganda.

12. The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Not the definition of consciousness I feel comfortable, but other than getting into an arguement about what consciousness ‘is’, a damn good hypothesis about the way certain mind phenomena came to be.

13. Snowcrash by Neal Stephenson. A virtual reality internet, a hacker hero with deadly martial arts skills, futuristic skaters that harpoon cars to hitch rides and a bad guy who has a nuclear warhead in the sidecar of his motorbike. Strange religious cults, babalonian mythology, glossolalia, the Mafia and an America so taken over by corporations the state barely exists. Could a be kick arse movie if they did a good job of it. A rollercoaster of a read. Damn good author.

14. Principlia Discordia. Fnord.

15. The Way of the Sacred by Francis Huxley. The common currents and themes of the worlds religions and mystery traditions exposed. Another book with a lot to say about serpents in symbolic, mystical and mythological senses.

The Hidden War

Anton Channing — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:25:59 +0000

War. So simple a word. Three little letters. And it conjures images in our heads of planes, bombs, nukes, soldiers, guns, battles, tanks, rockets, guerrillas, knights, swords, imperial legions and barbarian hordes stretching from the dawn of civilisation to the present. We think of the suffering, the destruction, the loss of life, the wounded, the horrors, and so we think we know what war is. Some us have witnessed this death and destruction first hand, but many of us have simply heard tales, watched footage from tv, etc. So we think we know what war is.

If this is what we think of when we think of war, then I am not entirely convinced we do. From my perspective these things seem like attributes of war, or maybe expressions or consequences of war, rather than an understanding of war itself. I feel instinctively that war is something deeper, and I also feel So how can we understand war itself? My intention is to explore this theme in this article, as I don’t think war will ever go away, nor do I even think its constructive to want it to, but I do think we can build a world in which its more deadly and destructive expressions are.

As I was writing this article, a discussion started on the kiamagic.com forum about Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War”, which might be renamed “Basic Strategy for Dummy’s” these days despite widespread ‘use by analogy’ in various fields of human competition. Definitely worth a read, but following blindly no substitute for intelligence. In any case, in replying on the thread I came up with the following insight:

“Before deciding to fight, one has presumably asked themselves first the question ‘why?’

Probably to either gain or protect something you value or even need (either physical or abstract). Fair enough. But this raises other less obvious questions. Firstly, what do you stand to lose if you don’t win? And perhaps more importantly, what do you stand to lose even if you do win? Are these potential losses of even greater value/need to you than the loss from not fighting? Can they be protected against?”

So a big question to ask in deciding to whether to fight is determining or understanding what you are prepared to sacrifice in order to win. “Winning at any cost” may be a defiant battle cry but is hardly a sound basis on which to form a beneficial strategy. In any conflict one should understand how much one is willing to sacrifice, whilst only making those sacrifices where necessary. One should also understand how much is being sacrificed and when. But also, one should be very clear about one’s definition of a successful outcome.

I have no doubt that the generals involved in most of the conflicts both contemporary and historical understood this. I also doubt very much that the reasons they given to troops and populations or the levels of sacrifice they are prepared to endure have matched those they held in their heads. Indeed giving away one’s true objective and level’s of excepted sacrifice may put the general at a disadvantage compared to their opponent. Of course, the general does have to be clear about how much they can expect their troops and population to sacrifice also before this support. Although it can work the other way. Sometimes the public demands tough talk from a leader such that they must exaggerate in a big show of bravado. This can help to intimidate the enemy.

This could result in a major disadvantage for democratic leaders during a conflict, such that they would almost certainly have to find objectives to keep public support that may vary greatly from their true objectives. Indeed the true enemy they wage war against may not even be the one they tell the public. It is not inconceivable for example that a democratically elected government may not even care about winning some foreign adventure they are sending their troops to fight in. That may simply be a diversion to distract the public attention from laws designed to remove their freedoms, or simply make obscure changes to the law that may have otherwise . Their real opponent may be their own electorate. Seen from this light, it may be that America never intended to ‘win’ in Vietnam. It may not intend to actually ‘win’ in Afghanistan. If it does, great, if not it didn’t really matter, it was just a sacrifice it was prepared to make.

Allies may not even share objectives. They may simply be able to work together in a conflict in order to achieve entirely different goals, presuming they don’t have to step on each others toes too much in the process. Nor do they need to be truthful with each other.

I would suggest taking a non-dualist viewpoint on war, embracing the idea that multiple factions exist within any conflict, many of which form uneasy alliances with each other and that the strongest bonds may be more about shared ideology than loyalty to nationality. Although nationalism can be one of the ideologies involved in the struggle.

Armies, weapons and destruction therefore seem more like occasional symptoms of an underlying conflict between hundreds of ideological factions that takes place on many other levels.

For example during the cold war many in the west supported communism and many in the east supported democracy and/or capitalism. During WWII, many in Germany wished for a return to democracy, whilst an active faction of British Fascists, including at one point prominent newspapers such as the Daily Mail, wanted us to ally with Hitler. In the ongoing conflict between various capitalist democratic nations and fundamentalist Islam, we find many Muslims in fundamentalist countries would like democracy and whilst some living in democracies would support their conversion to a fundamentalist dictatorship. Things are rarely clear cut.

Choose your allies well, but try and understand who they are and how much and how little their objectives match your own. We are all in secret societies, whether we realise it or not…

Io Ares! Io Athena! Io Anarchons!

Freedom and Liberty in democracy today

Anton Channing — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 07:24:50 +0000

Just published on Key64.net:

http://key64.net/article/1329-freedom-and-liberty-in-democracy-today

The Kebele Community Cooperative

Anton Channing — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 22:40:24 +0000

I was in Bristol over the weekend and was going to do a day trip to London for the Zippy Picnic on the Saturday. However, I missed the train with a non open ticket, and found myself with a day in Bristol instead. If I’d known I would end up in a vegan cafe, I would have been more sensitive than to turn up in leather jeans. Of course, I myself am not vegan, but I do like vegan and vegetarian food, and have often been known to cook myself meals that would qualify as each. However, I am a big fan of good quality blue steak every now and then…

The cafe in question is run by the Kebele Community Cooperative, who also have a library of anarchist literature and two internet PC’s running Debian GNU/Linux. The food was good and the atmosphere was very friendly. Since getting home, I have done some research, and it appear that this cooperative started life as a squat.

I feel really inspired after my visit and plan to return next time I’m in Bristol with some time to spare. I highly recommend anyone in or visiting Bristol to do the same. Eat, talk to the members of the cooperative, possibly even sitting down eating with one of the people who prepared your food, donate some money, do some dishes, browse the library, buy some non-profit anarchist booklets and magazine, use the internet if you need to. This is not just a cafe, its a community. Don’t just eat there and leave, take part! Collaborate!

If anyone knows of any others around the world, feel free to leave a comment with a link…