The Voodou, Hoodoo, What-You-Don't-Dare-Do People

"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."

Grant Morrison 

"Do you know much about voodoo? That's a fascinating practice. 

No real doctrine of faith to speak of - more an arrangement of superstitions; the most well-known of which is the voodoo doll.

You see, a mockup of an individual is subjected to various pokes and prods.

The desired result is that the individual will feel those effects."

Loki/Kevin Smith

"The Black Ark was too black and too dread. Even though I am black, I have to burn it down, to save me brain. It was too black. It want to eat me up!"

Lee Scratch Perry

" “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.

Bacon's New Atlantis, 

beyond the Pillars of Heracles

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.

The Shakes-Spear Tulpa 

(w. skullet)

Avatar of the High Priest and Devotee of Pallas-Athena,

The Spear-Shaker

The Golem of Avon

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.

King Mob/Gideon Stargrave/Grant Morrison

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?

(And the other thing is: I hate talking at people, so if anyone wants to join in just put your hand up. Coz I fucking hate just talking at people.)

So… having figured these weird things out, having thought about this and having been through this experience, which was exactly the experience I’d been promised by Wilson, McKenna, Philip K. Dick – everyone, they promised this thing, and it works. You can get the experience. 

Do what they told you to do, and it will happen – I promise you. 

You will meet the aliens; they will talk to you. 

The Golden Dawn called this “Knowledge & Conversation Of The Holy Guardian Angel”.

So it’s been around for a while; it’s accessible to everyone. 

Magick is accessible to everyone. 

The means of altering reality are accessible to everyone.

And when everyone starts doing it, we’re going to start to get to see desire manifest on a gigantic scale. Everyone’s desire. 

What happens when *everyone’s* desire becomes manifest?

Does the universe have to split up into a billion to accommodate it? Do we all have to suddenly understand that we’re all in the same place, and that we can all share in each others’ desires?

I don’t know. 

I’m just here to talk about this stuff.

LEE PERRY and the BLACK ARK STUDIO 

In 1973 Lee Perry was having a nap in the backyard of his family home in Kingston and
had a strange dream, hearing the strangest sounds and music never heard before. After
awakening he reflected on the dream, took it as a singn from the Almighty and decided
to build his own studio on this very spot. After completion in 1974 it was named 'THE
BLACK ARK' and one of the biggest mysticisms of Reggae music - and music in general -
should have it's origin there.

The studio was equipped with comparatively simple equipment through all it's time: a
four-track 1/4-inch TEAC reel-to-reel, 16-track Soundcraft board, Mutron phaser, a
Grantham spring reverb and a Roland Space Echo. But with these means only, completely
independent ways of production and lots of time to experiment Lee Perry created the
100% unique sound and style that will identify him forever. 

He shot pistols, broke glass, ran tapes backwards, and used samples of crying babies, falling rain, animal sounds and TV-show audience to create music and cleaned the tapeheads with his T-Shirt and blew Ganja smoke into running tapes to alter the sound. 

With records like 'DUB REVOLUTION' or 'BLACKBOARD JUNGLE DUB' the dirty and magical quality of the BLACK ARK sound was formed, never to be re-created.

In these surroundings only Lee Perry's production skills reached a new level, he
played the mixing desk like an instrument (roll over the pic above!), modulated
everything with phaser and delays and made the 4-track-machine sounding like a 20-
track:

"It was only four tracks on the machine," Perry explains, "but I was picking up twenty from the extra terrestrial squad. (...) I see the studio must be like a living thing, a life itself. The machine must be live and intelligent. Then I put my mind into the machine and the machine perform reality. Invisible thought waves - you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls and the knobs or you jack it into the jack panel. The jack panel is the brain itself, so you got to patch up the brain and make the brain a living man, that the brain can take what you sending into it and live." 

The aura of the BLACK ARK studio attracted many musicians, newcomers and veterans
alike, and countless timeless classics were created there. The 'OPEN THE GATE'-Box on
Trojan is an extraordinary document for the productions of that time and one of the
best Reggae records ever put to vinyl. Check out tracks like 'WORDS', Leroy Sibbles'
'GARDEN OF LIFE' or the milestone 'CONGOMAN' by the Congos (recently re-edited by
Carl Craig). Each song - great in themselves already - comes along with a dub version
that all have a deepness in them with no words to describe it. An absolutely
essential release!

Additionally to his achievements of stretching Dub over it's breaking point and
defining a new musical dimension of its own, Lee Perry was also a gifted riddim-
master and song- writer. Loads of classic riddims were created by him in this
era and - like 'POLICE AND THIEVES', 'SOULFIRE' or 'I CHASE THE DEVIL' - even reached
Top Ten status in England. And that is the big difference between him and King Tubby:
while Tubby RE-CREATED (in this time) Lee Perry CREATED. The music done by him in the
BLACK ARK studio present the pinnacle of Jamaican creativity, Reggae at its highest
heights and greatest power. 

But constant production and constant use of weed and booze took its physical and
mental toll in the late 70ies. Additionally the overall political situation in
Jamaica became almost civil-war-like, the streets being dangerous, looters hanging
around the studio and local gangsters pushing Scratch for protection money. Unable to
take that strain his wife and children left him and Perry started to walk the slim
line between reality and fantasy, reason and madness. Visitors and journalists
arrived at the Black Ark to find Perry worshipping bananas, eating money or spouting
long and violent diatribes. So in this time the BLACK ARK as a 'living brain', as he
described it before, ceased to function.

Perry spent much of his time vandalizing the Black Ark then, covering the once
colourful decor in bizarre and profane grafitty and splotches of black paint. Reels
of master tapes lay strewn on the floor, and the recording equipment was next to
useless due to water damage from a leaky roof. The once proud studio was now little
more than a junkyard. 

Then in 1979 Lee Perry burnt the studio down and left Jamaica for good. The whole
story of it is not clear until now, it's one more legend surrounding the mythos

Perry, but as a reason for this final step - and point of no return - he said: 

"The Black Ark was too black and too dread. Even though I am black, I have to burn it
down, to save my brain. It was too black. It want to eat me up!"

He spent some time in New York and England in the 80ies and finally married a Swiss
bussiness woman, who became his manager afterwards. The releases he turned out after
the death of the BLACK ARK never reached that quality again. He now lives in Zurich /
Switzerland. 

RECORDS:

Additional to the records mentioned before check out 'SUPER APE', an unforgettable
dub session with the Upsetters, 'JAH LION', 'HEART OF THE CONGOS' by the CONGOS,
'ITAL CORNER' with Prince Jazzbo or 'KUNG FU MEETS THE DRAGON'. All highly
recommended!