Interview Meme
Jun. 8th, 2003 04:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
masque12This is an interview that shetakaey gave me. I think the idea is that I post this to my LiveJournal, and then if someone wants to be interviewed by me, they reply to it and then I ask them five different questions. I guess if someone else wants to interview me again, they can do that, too. Some kind of viral meme. My reply ended up being a damn near complete magical autobiography, and really long, so click here, to read it.
1) Tell me about your spiritual development from the beginning until you joined the TOS.
Shit, that's a fucking long story.
OK. I was born Roman Catholic, which I remained until I reached the age of reason, about 8 or 9 years old. That was when I got interested in mythology, Greek, specifically, and though I didn't believe in the Greek gods, I thought they were a lot cooler than the Christian one. I remember one conversation I had with someone, I can't remember who, where I was asking if the Greek gods could exist along with God, with maybe him being their boss or something. Whoever it was tried to tell me that the Greek gods were made up, but I couldn't understand why they were made up and "God" wasn't. That was the specific moment when I started to lose my faith and question religion and the things people told me about it. I spent most of the time from then on being an agnostic/atheist, although I didn't know those words until a few years later, even being as well read as I was.
I found out about Wicca when I was in high school, actually the summer I turned 17. I was working at a Boy Scout camp that summer, and one of my buddies was a Wiccan. That was where I participated in my first ritual, and where I learned that magic WAS real, something that I'll always be grateful for. The dude's name was Brian Harpster or something. I wish I could find him, I have no idea whatever happened to him.
In any case, I was a de facto Wiccan for a while, although I never was part of a group or anything. I bought Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book, a bunch of Scott Cunningham, shit like that. I did a few rituals here and there for a few months, kind of off/on. I sort of lost interest for a while between 17 and 19, which is when I started to actively do ritual again. That's when I found the list Pagans in Houston, right as it was starting up (my now wife was the original founder of the list.) Until then I had no idea there was a big group of pagans in my area. (We were slow to get internet access.) I started to go to PNO's and shit, and a few people were cool, but I didn't have much in common with most of them.
At this point I was kind of questioning my paganism. I mean, I was interested in magic, but most of the pagans I knew were more into the religious aspect of it, which I never really jibed with. First off, all I ever heard about was the "Goddess", but the "God" was rarely mentioned. I was of the school of thought that the whole point of paganism was supposed to be a balance between the two energies, but most pagans seemed way more focused on the feminine. There's nothing wrong with the feminine, but I'm a guy, dammit. So that was one problem. The other problem was that the whole thing just didn't seem real to me. I mean, I really tried to believe in the "Goddess" and "God", but I never could. It seemed as arbitrary as the Christian God. I just don't have any "faith" in anything. I find it impossible to accept something as true without evidence. I do work with godforms on occasion, but I never assume that they are real. I don't assume that they're unreal either, I just don't have enough evidence to decide either way. I generally don't worry about it.
So, I was leaving paganism behind, but I still was interested in magic. Results were what was important to me, not a fucking belief system (B.S., as Robert Anton Wilson likes to abbreviate). That was when I got interested in ceremonial magic. I think the first thing I picked up was Modern Magic, by Donald Michael Kraig. Now this shit was cool. It was focused more on results than belief, along with discipline. Maybe I'm a masochist, but I like having to look shit up in books, finding correspondences, all that crap. After all, all the cool magicians and wizards in movies and crap were always doing that shit. I know they were fictional, but goddamit, I love that aesthete. The scholarly, wizened wizard reading out of an arcane tome, bending demons to his Will; to me, THAT is magic. It jibed with my personality a lot more, but then, I'm a reader. Most of the pagans I knew just slapped some shit together that they found in a Llewellyn book and called it a ritual. That annoyed me, that and the fact that all they ever talked about was healing rituals and "celebrating nature." Fuck that. When I play D & D, I don't play the cleric, I play the WIZARD. Gimme the damn fireballs. There seemed to be no power in Wicca, at least not in a way I was interested in. That was the other thing that interested me in ceremonial magic, it was much more focused on developing the self into a powerful being. Paganism was just a religion, and the will of the gods was supreme. In ceremonial magic, MY Will was supreme.
OK, so now I was a ceremonialist. I started practicing the LBRP, etc. But i was back in a Judeo-Christian paradigm. Granted, there is a world of difference between Catholicism and Qabala, but still, I had even less use for JHVH than I did for "the Goddess." I really liked what I started to read in Crowley's stuff, and I was a Thelemite for a few months, but I still needed a good background in Qabala and the Golden Dawn to understand most of what the fuck he was saying. One day I found Liber Null and Psychonaut, by Peter Carroll. Holy fucking shit. That shit blew my mind. I could be a ceremonial magician AND not have to deal with JHVH if I didn't want to? Sign me up! After Carroll, I found Phil Hine's books, and I was sold. Enter masque the Chaos Magician. Hell, Chaos magician even sounded cooler, :-). Soon after, I found the Chaosmatrix site, with a TON of cool innovative shit to try out. I started casting sigils everywhere. Chaos magic was great, because I could do really simple, off the cuff stuff (one of my favorite techniques was to draw sigils on cigarettes and then smoke them), or I could do a big complicated ritual invoking Cthulhu. I read a lot, especially horror and science fiction, and now I realized I could use fictional entities in magic if I wanted! Best of both worlds!
The only problem with my transition to chaos magic was that I still had no real discipline. Thinking back, this is also probably the main reason I went to chaos magic so soon after going to (traditional, Golden Dawn/Thelemic) ceremonial magic. I was (and still am) a member of the Z(Cluster), a chaos magic list, but that didn't help much. My little brother introduced me to a friend of his named Mark Saunders who represented himself as a member of the Temple of Set (something I rather doubt, now), and that's how I got interested in them. I finally got around to reading LaVey, just to see what he was about. I had previously dismissed the Church of Satan as being Thelema for Dummies, being ignorant of what much of it was about. Knowing what i know now, I wouldn't say that about the CoS as a whole, having read Michael Aquino's history of it (they had some really cool people in there), but I still kind of feel that way about Anton's work specifically, with a few gems here and there. I had previously picked up Stephen Flowers Hermetic Magic because I was interested in Egypt, and then I found out he was in the Temple of Set. A Thelemite friend named Walter (everyone knows Walter) had recommended Don Webb's books to me at Thanksgiving that year, so I picked those up, too. One of my other on again/off again interests was the Runes, and then I found out that my favorite writer on the Runes, Edred Thorsson, was actually Stephen Flowers. What the fuck? Every damn writer that I really liked, not just kind of got something out of, but REALLY liked was in the fucking Temple of Set. OK, fine. I started reading their website, dug the hell out of it, and here I am, a member. I do still consider myself a chaos magician, technique wise (I've designed a fucking Star Wars working for my pylon, for chrissakes), but I really like the philosophy of the ToS, and the LHP. Hell, I've been on the LHP since i was eight years old and started questioning religion, I just have a name for it, now. I do have some slight disagreements with some of the Temple philosophy (I can't stand either Ayn Rand or Platonism), but as I see it, they aren't essential points, and I don't see those things as conflicts with my Xeper. And here I am.
2) What's the best Chinese restaurant in Houston, in your opinion?
Heh, heh, that's a switch. Well, the one I go to most right now is Lam Bo, a buffet place on Westheimer, right around Fountain View if I remember correctly. My favorite Asian food place right now is a Vietnamese place I went to with some people from my Pylon, but i can't think of the name of it right now.
3) As a satanist, do you believe in the spirit world; what are your feelings about spiritual evolution?
Well, it depends. I developed these views previous to becoming a Satanist/Setian (I actually prefer Setian, even though I say Satanist a lot on HPOL). They're MY views, in any case. Do I believe in the spirit world, i.e. a dimension where spirits go when they die and that can be possibly contacted by us? No. Now, I don't disbelieve it either, but I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me either way. My take is that I'll find out about it when I die. If it's there, cool. If not, well, I'll be past caring. I have seen something that could be considered a ghost, but it only happened once, and therefore I don't have a large enough data set to determine what it really was, either way. I'm generally skeptical of claims of the paranormal, simply because in most cases, the person doing the claiming seems to have research methods that are inadequate at best, more often downright disgraceful, once you actually look at their data, as opposed to simply listening to their claims and interpretations. I don't however, say that such things do NOT exist. I don't feel there's enough evidence to support that conclusion, either. I keep an open mind about it, but I also question everything I hear about it that is presented as "fact."
As for spiritual evolution, if you mean does one's "soul" evolve, well, I have no opinion on that, as I have no opinion on the existence of the soul. If it's there cool, if not, fuck it. I focus on evolving my Self in THIS life, which evolution I evaluate by how happy I am, how many of my goals get accomplished, how stable my financial life is, things like that. I generally try to be as objective as I can be, and I don't concern myself too much with things that I have no way of showing proof for, either way.
4) What are your favorite forms of entertainment?
Reading. I like watching movies, I play video games every now and then, and I also enjoy Role Playing games (my friend Blake is starting up a Call of Cthulhu campaign, I can't wait), but by far, I spend the majority of my time reading. I'm generally in the middle of about 5 books at any given time, and I almost always start a new one when I finish reading one. I actually get a little antsy if I'm only reading one or two, and I'll scrounge around to find another one to read to up the number. That might actually be evidence of some type of compulsive disorder, I haven't really given it a lot of thought until now, ;-).
5) If you could have one super power, what would it be and how would you use it?
There are two answers to this question, because I have two main types of moods.
Mood #1: Fucking furious. I have a rage problem, and while my medication does a good job of keeping it under control, I do get annoyed very easily, and certain people or situations can set me off. The superpower for this is of course, Wolverine, adamantium claws and all. Back in the day when I was big into superhero comics, Wolvie was always the shit. This was back in the early 90's, and a lot of buddies who were X-Men fans were switching their loyalties to Gambit, as his ass was trendy at the time, being new, but fuck Gambit. Wolverine is the fucking KING of superheroes, the best there is at what he does, and what he does best is BEATING THE LIVING SHIT out of ANYONE and EVERYONE. Wolverine forever. There is no one better, if you think so, you are WRONG. Bub.
Mood #2. Goofy as hell. When I'm not pissed off (which doesn't happen too often, these days), I'm a big, goofy bastard. Ask anyone. I constantly joke around, make obscure movie and Month Python references, and am in general, a big geek. (Ask Aeronfae about me going off on spam the first time I met him) In this mood, the best superhero and the superpowers I would want is of course, Spider-Man, king of the geeks. Unlike Spider-Man, who fights crime and shit, I would basically use it to screw around. Picture yourself getting fucked up at a party, and then I start climbing on the ceiling. Swinging around town on spiderwebs would rock. When I'm in a good mood, I'd have to be Spider-Man, just because to me, his powers are the most FUN.
Well, that was damn long, but hopefully it was enjoyable. I'm out.
1) Tell me about your spiritual development from the beginning until you joined the TOS.
Shit, that's a fucking long story.
OK. I was born Roman Catholic, which I remained until I reached the age of reason, about 8 or 9 years old. That was when I got interested in mythology, Greek, specifically, and though I didn't believe in the Greek gods, I thought they were a lot cooler than the Christian one. I remember one conversation I had with someone, I can't remember who, where I was asking if the Greek gods could exist along with God, with maybe him being their boss or something. Whoever it was tried to tell me that the Greek gods were made up, but I couldn't understand why they were made up and "God" wasn't. That was the specific moment when I started to lose my faith and question religion and the things people told me about it. I spent most of the time from then on being an agnostic/atheist, although I didn't know those words until a few years later, even being as well read as I was.
I found out about Wicca when I was in high school, actually the summer I turned 17. I was working at a Boy Scout camp that summer, and one of my buddies was a Wiccan. That was where I participated in my first ritual, and where I learned that magic WAS real, something that I'll always be grateful for. The dude's name was Brian Harpster or something. I wish I could find him, I have no idea whatever happened to him.
In any case, I was a de facto Wiccan for a while, although I never was part of a group or anything. I bought Uncle Bucky's Big Blue Book, a bunch of Scott Cunningham, shit like that. I did a few rituals here and there for a few months, kind of off/on. I sort of lost interest for a while between 17 and 19, which is when I started to actively do ritual again. That's when I found the list Pagans in Houston, right as it was starting up (my now wife was the original founder of the list.) Until then I had no idea there was a big group of pagans in my area. (We were slow to get internet access.) I started to go to PNO's and shit, and a few people were cool, but I didn't have much in common with most of them.
At this point I was kind of questioning my paganism. I mean, I was interested in magic, but most of the pagans I knew were more into the religious aspect of it, which I never really jibed with. First off, all I ever heard about was the "Goddess", but the "God" was rarely mentioned. I was of the school of thought that the whole point of paganism was supposed to be a balance between the two energies, but most pagans seemed way more focused on the feminine. There's nothing wrong with the feminine, but I'm a guy, dammit. So that was one problem. The other problem was that the whole thing just didn't seem real to me. I mean, I really tried to believe in the "Goddess" and "God", but I never could. It seemed as arbitrary as the Christian God. I just don't have any "faith" in anything. I find it impossible to accept something as true without evidence. I do work with godforms on occasion, but I never assume that they are real. I don't assume that they're unreal either, I just don't have enough evidence to decide either way. I generally don't worry about it.
So, I was leaving paganism behind, but I still was interested in magic. Results were what was important to me, not a fucking belief system (B.S., as Robert Anton Wilson likes to abbreviate). That was when I got interested in ceremonial magic. I think the first thing I picked up was Modern Magic, by Donald Michael Kraig. Now this shit was cool. It was focused more on results than belief, along with discipline. Maybe I'm a masochist, but I like having to look shit up in books, finding correspondences, all that crap. After all, all the cool magicians and wizards in movies and crap were always doing that shit. I know they were fictional, but goddamit, I love that aesthete. The scholarly, wizened wizard reading out of an arcane tome, bending demons to his Will; to me, THAT is magic. It jibed with my personality a lot more, but then, I'm a reader. Most of the pagans I knew just slapped some shit together that they found in a Llewellyn book and called it a ritual. That annoyed me, that and the fact that all they ever talked about was healing rituals and "celebrating nature." Fuck that. When I play D & D, I don't play the cleric, I play the WIZARD. Gimme the damn fireballs. There seemed to be no power in Wicca, at least not in a way I was interested in. That was the other thing that interested me in ceremonial magic, it was much more focused on developing the self into a powerful being. Paganism was just a religion, and the will of the gods was supreme. In ceremonial magic, MY Will was supreme.
OK, so now I was a ceremonialist. I started practicing the LBRP, etc. But i was back in a Judeo-Christian paradigm. Granted, there is a world of difference between Catholicism and Qabala, but still, I had even less use for JHVH than I did for "the Goddess." I really liked what I started to read in Crowley's stuff, and I was a Thelemite for a few months, but I still needed a good background in Qabala and the Golden Dawn to understand most of what the fuck he was saying. One day I found Liber Null and Psychonaut, by Peter Carroll. Holy fucking shit. That shit blew my mind. I could be a ceremonial magician AND not have to deal with JHVH if I didn't want to? Sign me up! After Carroll, I found Phil Hine's books, and I was sold. Enter masque the Chaos Magician. Hell, Chaos magician even sounded cooler, :-). Soon after, I found the Chaosmatrix site, with a TON of cool innovative shit to try out. I started casting sigils everywhere. Chaos magic was great, because I could do really simple, off the cuff stuff (one of my favorite techniques was to draw sigils on cigarettes and then smoke them), or I could do a big complicated ritual invoking Cthulhu. I read a lot, especially horror and science fiction, and now I realized I could use fictional entities in magic if I wanted! Best of both worlds!
The only problem with my transition to chaos magic was that I still had no real discipline. Thinking back, this is also probably the main reason I went to chaos magic so soon after going to (traditional, Golden Dawn/Thelemic) ceremonial magic. I was (and still am) a member of the Z(Cluster), a chaos magic list, but that didn't help much. My little brother introduced me to a friend of his named Mark Saunders who represented himself as a member of the Temple of Set (something I rather doubt, now), and that's how I got interested in them. I finally got around to reading LaVey, just to see what he was about. I had previously dismissed the Church of Satan as being Thelema for Dummies, being ignorant of what much of it was about. Knowing what i know now, I wouldn't say that about the CoS as a whole, having read Michael Aquino's history of it (they had some really cool people in there), but I still kind of feel that way about Anton's work specifically, with a few gems here and there. I had previously picked up Stephen Flowers Hermetic Magic because I was interested in Egypt, and then I found out he was in the Temple of Set. A Thelemite friend named Walter (everyone knows Walter) had recommended Don Webb's books to me at Thanksgiving that year, so I picked those up, too. One of my other on again/off again interests was the Runes, and then I found out that my favorite writer on the Runes, Edred Thorsson, was actually Stephen Flowers. What the fuck? Every damn writer that I really liked, not just kind of got something out of, but REALLY liked was in the fucking Temple of Set. OK, fine. I started reading their website, dug the hell out of it, and here I am, a member. I do still consider myself a chaos magician, technique wise (I've designed a fucking Star Wars working for my pylon, for chrissakes), but I really like the philosophy of the ToS, and the LHP. Hell, I've been on the LHP since i was eight years old and started questioning religion, I just have a name for it, now. I do have some slight disagreements with some of the Temple philosophy (I can't stand either Ayn Rand or Platonism), but as I see it, they aren't essential points, and I don't see those things as conflicts with my Xeper. And here I am.
2) What's the best Chinese restaurant in Houston, in your opinion?
Heh, heh, that's a switch. Well, the one I go to most right now is Lam Bo, a buffet place on Westheimer, right around Fountain View if I remember correctly. My favorite Asian food place right now is a Vietnamese place I went to with some people from my Pylon, but i can't think of the name of it right now.
3) As a satanist, do you believe in the spirit world; what are your feelings about spiritual evolution?
Well, it depends. I developed these views previous to becoming a Satanist/Setian (I actually prefer Setian, even though I say Satanist a lot on HPOL). They're MY views, in any case. Do I believe in the spirit world, i.e. a dimension where spirits go when they die and that can be possibly contacted by us? No. Now, I don't disbelieve it either, but I haven't seen enough evidence to convince me either way. My take is that I'll find out about it when I die. If it's there, cool. If not, well, I'll be past caring. I have seen something that could be considered a ghost, but it only happened once, and therefore I don't have a large enough data set to determine what it really was, either way. I'm generally skeptical of claims of the paranormal, simply because in most cases, the person doing the claiming seems to have research methods that are inadequate at best, more often downright disgraceful, once you actually look at their data, as opposed to simply listening to their claims and interpretations. I don't however, say that such things do NOT exist. I don't feel there's enough evidence to support that conclusion, either. I keep an open mind about it, but I also question everything I hear about it that is presented as "fact."
As for spiritual evolution, if you mean does one's "soul" evolve, well, I have no opinion on that, as I have no opinion on the existence of the soul. If it's there cool, if not, fuck it. I focus on evolving my Self in THIS life, which evolution I evaluate by how happy I am, how many of my goals get accomplished, how stable my financial life is, things like that. I generally try to be as objective as I can be, and I don't concern myself too much with things that I have no way of showing proof for, either way.
4) What are your favorite forms of entertainment?
Reading. I like watching movies, I play video games every now and then, and I also enjoy Role Playing games (my friend Blake is starting up a Call of Cthulhu campaign, I can't wait), but by far, I spend the majority of my time reading. I'm generally in the middle of about 5 books at any given time, and I almost always start a new one when I finish reading one. I actually get a little antsy if I'm only reading one or two, and I'll scrounge around to find another one to read to up the number. That might actually be evidence of some type of compulsive disorder, I haven't really given it a lot of thought until now, ;-).
5) If you could have one super power, what would it be and how would you use it?
There are two answers to this question, because I have two main types of moods.
Mood #1: Fucking furious. I have a rage problem, and while my medication does a good job of keeping it under control, I do get annoyed very easily, and certain people or situations can set me off. The superpower for this is of course, Wolverine, adamantium claws and all. Back in the day when I was big into superhero comics, Wolvie was always the shit. This was back in the early 90's, and a lot of buddies who were X-Men fans were switching their loyalties to Gambit, as his ass was trendy at the time, being new, but fuck Gambit. Wolverine is the fucking KING of superheroes, the best there is at what he does, and what he does best is BEATING THE LIVING SHIT out of ANYONE and EVERYONE. Wolverine forever. There is no one better, if you think so, you are WRONG. Bub.
Mood #2. Goofy as hell. When I'm not pissed off (which doesn't happen too often, these days), I'm a big, goofy bastard. Ask anyone. I constantly joke around, make obscure movie and Month Python references, and am in general, a big geek. (Ask Aeronfae about me going off on spam the first time I met him) In this mood, the best superhero and the superpowers I would want is of course, Spider-Man, king of the geeks. Unlike Spider-Man, who fights crime and shit, I would basically use it to screw around. Picture yourself getting fucked up at a party, and then I start climbing on the ceiling. Swinging around town on spiderwebs would rock. When I'm in a good mood, I'd have to be Spider-Man, just because to me, his powers are the most FUN.
Well, that was damn long, but hopefully it was enjoyable. I'm out.
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no subject
Date: 2003-06-08 11:40 pm (UTC)OK. Each question probably has several in it, but they are aspects of the primary questions.
1.) What exactly is this Meridjet thing you talk about? What sort of reality does it occupy, what is your relationship to it, and what do you think is the most objective explanation for it's existence that you can think of?
2.) What is your favorite movie, from a philosophical standpoint? In other words, regardless of the quality of the film and the enjoyment you get from it, what movie makes you think the most?
3.) What is biggest hindrance to your Will? What are you doing to overcome that hindrance?
4.) What book has had the most impact on your life? Feel free to isolate a particular aspect of your life.
5.) What was the defining initiatory experience of your life, and how does it continue to affect you?
no subject
Date: 2003-06-09 12:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-06-09 03:14 pm (UTC)