A Month Later, The Woman Turns Up

"So, as a result of all this, I’d just split up with my girlfriend. 

And I was like: 

“Okay, I want a new one and I want her to look exactly like this chick in the comic, coz she’s cool.”

So I did a sigil - a month later, the girl turns up. 

Then another one. 

Then another one. 

Then another one; 

Then another one. 

All aspects of this character. 

And then [I was like]: 

“Oh fuck, this is insane. 

Because it works and I’ve done something ridiculous. 

Because now I’m dealing with all these women who look like the character, but who I don’t get on with, or I can’t talk to, or I can’t deal with.....”

So I was told this stuff when I came out, and I’m just this little kid from Govan in Glasgow, which is a real dodgy area. And I didn’t go to university; I left school at eighteen. But suddenly, I found out that if you do these things that you’re told by Aleister Crowley, by Wilson, by all these people we read and all these people we’ve been consuming – but we don’t do it.

If you actually do what they say, things happen. Things occur, exactly as described. And we can all do it.

So I decided to put this to use in the comic book I was doing, this thing called The Invisibles. And the idea was to kind of get all this down on paper, and somehow look at it. Not to accept it as reality, but to accept it as purely:

“This is part of human experience. It’s a part of human experience that has been described to us for thousands and thousands of years – but for the last two hundred has been hidden and made occult. For some reason that we don’t understand – but it seems to have something to do with the industrial revolution and corporate culture.”

So these things happen. Magic works. And I found out when I was doing the comic that you could actually make magic happen by writing things, and changing the operating system of the universe. It works, and I’m here to tell you to try it when you go home tonight.

Because it fucking works.

And what happens if we all do it? If everyone in this room decides to take control of reality? I’m talking about reality; I’m talking about quantum physics; I’m talking about taking control of things from the quantum level up, from the molecular level up – and it works. This magic works.

So I’ll tell you something you can do, while I’m here. You know one of the best techniques, and one of the easiest techniques, to prove that this thing works is to practice sigil magic. The technique is simple: have a desire, tonight.

Go home and do this! Don’t listen to this shit! 

Don’t listen to my bullshit and think “yeah, we are the fucking counterculture!” 

DO IT! Do it – and we will change the world.

Because I did it. Coz I didn’t trust those guys. I didn’t trust Wilson and all those people who told me we could do this stuff. And I’m here to tell you: it works. And you can do it; we can all do it.

Number one: first thing you do is, you write down a desire. Make it something easy that’s likely to happen. Something possible, rather than say, y’know, “I’m going to be king of the moon” – which you may want to be, as we all do, but.. it’s kind of hard to be king of the moon. You’re gonna have to get a rocket and go up there.

Something easy. 

If you want to sigilise for a lottery win, make sure you buy a ticket or else it probably won’t work. 

So these are the conditions within the material universe that we live in.

What we’re really dealing with here is, as I say, some kind of operating system that can be hacked, using words. Words seem to be the binding agent of this.. thing. Whatever it is.

So I wrote this comic book – and as I wrote it, it became true. Things I would make the characters do became true.

The main character was.. I gave him a bald head and a leather jacket, because I thought people would like me when I they read the comic. 

Bald heads were really uncool back in 1992.

And it worked. I found that if I put the character through a situation where he’d been tortured; where his lungs had bust and he was being held in captivity; subjected to all these awful things. Two months later: I’m in hospital, two bust lungs, dying of blood poisoning; facing exactly the same shamanic trial that I put my character through.

So once I figured out that, I thought: the best thing to do is to give this guy an easy time in the future.

So as a result of all this, I’d just split up with my girlfriend. 

And I was like: 

“okay, I want a new one and I want her to look exactly like this chick in the comic, coz she’s cool.”

So I did a sigil - a month later, the girl turns up. 

Then another one. Then another one. Then another one; then another one. All aspects of this character. 

And then [I was like]: 

“Oh fuck, this is insane. Because it works and I’ve done something ridiculous. Because now I’m dealing with all these women who look like the character, but who I don’t get on with, or I can’t talk to, or I can’t deal with.”

And I began to realise a little bit about how this stuff works.

So beyond that, I decided: I won’t just use it to get laid, because it seems a pretty low-grade kind of way of dealing with magic. But man, it works! Believe me.

So I thought: how much could you effect reality by writing a comic that mimics reality, but pushed it in weird directions? So round about 1997, I decided that I would really seriously turn this thing into a super-sigil.

• And it was based on the idea that: if you look at cave art – the first art was done; the first writing that was done, basically as art. And if someone wanted to make something happen; like, if you were in the — like, if you were some fucked up caveman in a cave somewhere, worrying about your dinner. What do you do? 

• You draw a bison on the wall; stick some spears in it. 

• Go out, and the bison dies filled with spears.

“Hey, man! We can make this happen!”

Slowly, those things become words; they become abstractions – complexes of meaning. And you can take that basic idea, and – as we’ve seen – people like Austin Osmond Spare, the magician from the early part of the century, or Crowley, or the chaos magicians of the eighties who were a big influence on me – they used this stuff. And like I say, what you can do is this: go home, write down a desire; it’s quite simple, what you can say is: “It is my desire that my cat wins the Olympics.” Take out all the vowels..

- Write this down, for fuck’s sake! Don’t just listen; do it! Right? -

Take out the vowels, and you’ll be left with a string of consonants. Take out all the repeated consonants, and you’ll be left with a string of consonants with no repeats in it. X, Y, A, D, whatever. Turn that thing into a little image. Take the D, draw a big D. Then you’ve got a T; draw a big T on it.

Keep reducing it down until it looks magical.

And there are no rules for this thing. Do it until it looks magical.

At that point you now have a sigil. The sigil will work. You can project desire into reality, and change reality. It works!

Those must be the people who’ve done it.

So please, I mean, write this down, go home and do it. Check; verify the results.

Because – I was reading this thing in New Scientist this week and it said: the difference between bad science and good science is.. scientific procedure has three criteria. And the criteria are: that you can verify results; you can talk to other people who’ve done the thing and make sure that, you know, it works out. You can duplicate results. 

And also.. some other thing; I’ve forgotten. But yeah, two things is pretty good, innit? Two outta.. yeah.

This is verifiable. 

People have been telling us about this for thousands of years. 

The Tibetans have been telling us about this. 

The Mesopotamians have been telling us about this. 

And why has it been made ‘occult’?

Because: 

Coca-Cola have got the secret.

What you do is you create a sigil.

Coca-Cola is a sigil. The McDonalds “M” is a sigil.

These people are basically turning the world into themselves, using sigils.

And if we don’t reverse that process, and turn the world into Us using sigils, we’re going to be living in fucking McDonalds.

But McDonalds have no more power than us, apart from the fact – like what Doug [Rushkoff] said earlier – they’ve got some money.

Fuck it; who cares?

At the top levels of this stuff, no one’s using money anyway.

You think Rupert Murdoch, or the Queen, or Bill Clinton, or any of these fuckers use money? Of course they don’t.

They’ve realised that money is only useful to sell to the middle classes – the people in the middle who make things happen; who make things run.

We’ve been sold a fiction. There’s no such thing as money. Ignore it. At the higher levels..

No.. YEAH! HEY!

There is no money. These fuckers don’t use money. If Rupert Murdoch wants a Rolls Royce, they give him one. 

Because he’s Rupert Murdoch. 

And if they see him in a Rolls Royce, it means they get some status out of it.

So you’ve gotta understand, these people on the higher levels are operating on a hierarchy of exchange and barter.

On the lower levels – where I lived in Glasgow, which is one of the poorest cities in Europe – people are operating on a hierarchy of exchange that’s quite different: they steal shit, and then they sell it back, and they have their own little money... and they have this complete black market economy.

There’s only us in the middle who think money’s worth anything – and we chase it until we drop.

So forget it.

Where was I?