On Agency and other matters
One day in 2020, I ambled into my study and turned on my computer, and … nothing. My heart skipped a beat. I felt a sense of dread steal over me. Checking the startup options, I saw that not only had the SSD drive on which the operating system lives failed but also one of the disks in my RAID array had gone too. It was a palpable shock. All that was on the computer – work in progress, layout jobs for clients, photos, games, videos, half-sorted digital libraries … gone. More than that, I was cut off from the wider world of social media and the internet, extended knowledge repositories, news, friends; and the full panoply of digital life in networked culture.
I knew, with a sinking feeling, that I hadn’t backed everything up. That full backupness was an ideal I often preached to others, but was lamentably lacking in achieving that idyllic state. The feeling of frustration, as I struggled to comprehend this state of affairs was intensified by my identification with being computer-savvy. I had spent years in IT Ops, doing everything from desktop and network support to Mac/Windows integration, running Servers and firewalls, and learning the arcane languages of code and protocols. Oh sure, I’ve had computers crash terminally on me before, but somehow, in the Covid pandemic, it was different. I don’t think I had fully appreciated, up until that point, how much I’d come to consider the computer an extension of self. It was almost as though I’d woken up to find some part of myself missing.
This example serves to illustrate the complexity of our contemporary, networked lives – that it is at once simple and complex, seamless and yet, fragile. Our computers provide the illusion of control and mastery over our environment, yet at the same time, that agency is illusory. We go online and interact, argue, read, download, watch, and participate; swim in a sea of information – yet we are at the mercy of hidden complexities we don’t have to consider; banks of distributed server farms, the undersea cables, the layers of protocols and code – until, that is, something goes down, and we are bereft.
It is this tension between apparent simplicities and hidden complexities – and how we assume, exercise, and feel a sense of agency within that web of complexities which is contemporary life that interests me here, and a line of flight that takes in magic, too.
The notion that “magic works” has become something of an axiom, an assertion that cannot be questioned – at least by its practitioners. After all, it is simple. You perform an act of magic – a spell, ritual, sigil, etc., and the desired result is obtained. Therefore “it works”. Surely this is enough?
In 1999, London was hit by a spate of nail bombings. Over three successive weekends in April, three nail bombs were detonated in public places. The first was in Brixton (where I was living at the time); the second in Brick Lane, one of the areas with a large Bangladeshi community; the third, at the Admiral Duncan pub, one of the centres of London’s gay community. It was horrific. I’d been out shopping the day of the Brixton bomb, and might well have been caught up in the blast, which injured 48 people, thanks to the four-inch nails packed around the explosives. The Admiral Duncan bomb killed three people and injured over 70 others, some of whom had to have limbs amputated as a result of their injuries.
We felt we had to do “something”, but what? Together with my partner and a friend, we performed a ritual to “expose” the identity of the then-unknown perpetrator. Shortly afterward (the Admiral Duncan bombing had taken place on 30 April), on the 2nd May, it was announced that the police had arrested and charged a 22-year-old man, David Copeland – a neo-nazi militant with a background in right-wing political movements with murder. Copeland went to trial the following year and was given six life sentences.
Initially, it seemed to me that our ritual had “worked” in that simplistic cause-and-effect equation that often underpins magical discourse. You do a spell, a ritual, whatever, and you get a “result”. Simple. But was it? It struck me that police arrests do not happen out of the blue, as it were. It seemed obvious, the more I thought about it, that there were hidden connections, networks of relationships, an investigation that had happened behind the scenes. In other words, there were hidden complexities involved. It seemed to me that to claim – even to ourselves – that it was “our ritual” that led to the identification and arrest of Copeland would be nothing more than hubris. That to claim responsibility and agency over this complex network of events, involving multiple actors, was unethical, even whilst it allowed us to feel that we had achieved something and proved to ourselves, once again, that “magic works”. I was glad that we’d done the ritual, but I began to mull over two interrelated ideas. Firstly the relationship between magical operation and outcome was far more complex than I had initially supposed. Secondly, what was important here was our exercise of agency, of feeling that we had some measure of control in a complex and frightening situation.
I find myself increasingly returning to this issue of agency. In attributing success to our magical efforts, do we unknowingly negate the agency of others? It seems that at times, we are prone to. I remember an incident in the early 90s as I vigorously threw my way into the London occult scene. I met a guy at a London occult meeting, chatted him up, and went home with him. I don’t need to be explicit about the rest. But the next day, the guy’s ex-lover somewhat triumphantly declared that he’d known we would hook up because he’d done a spell to ensure it happened. And I was really angry at that like I had no say in the matter; my agency (and that of the other guy) in the situation had been negated because he’d done a spell.
At times I wonder if magic is a shield against the very complexity of the world and its incomprehensible powers, unknowable and beyond our reach.
Non-Explanations and Servitors
I increasingly find magical explanations for this or that phenomenon facile and tedious. Explanations as objects are interesting. To an extent, I think that they shape experiences, but at the same time, they also constrain experience – they set boundaries and limits on what we believe we can do or what is possible. Consider, for example, Chaos Servitors. Chaos Servitors seem to have come to be considered to be a core element of Chaos Magic, judging from the amount of attention they have received. I didn’t start playing around with Chaos Servitors until the late 1980s. I was facilitating a small magical group in Leeds at the time, and I thought that Chaos Servitors – as briefly set out in Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Null, would be a fun thing for us to explore as a group. Of course, Liber Null was not the only source of information on the subject – there was a great deal of “lore” on the subject of thought forms, most of which seems to have been uncritically repeated (and indeed continues to be so). One of the strong contentions was that if you weren’t careful, thought forms could go out of control (NB: I’ve never found this to be the case). With this in mind, we came up with what seemed to us to be a simple solution – that when a servitor had accomplished its assigned task (whatever that was, and however long it took) – it simply self-destructed. That way it wouldn’t float around on the astral plane bothering people, if that’s how you like to think of things.
I continued to play around with servitors throughout the late 80s and early 1990s, and for a while did servitor creation workshops up and down the UK and beyond. It was great fun for a while. In one workshop we created a servitor that lived in a teapot, its task being to get people in a group talking to each other productively (as opposed to arguing) when the tea was poured out. In another workshop, we created the cat-on-a-skateboard servitor Goflowolfog (as featured in Condensed Chaos) whose task was to get traffic of various sorts flowing. It was the Goflowolfog exercise that led me to shift my ideas about Chaos Servitors down a slightly different pathway. Firstly, there was the idea that once Goflowolfog had been “created” then anyone with access to his instruction set – his name, appearance, how to invoke him, and how to thank him – could use him. I thought at the time that the more people who used Goflowolfog – and reported their successes to each other, this would boost his reputation for getting things done. Somehow that idea became blurred with the belief that the more “energy” you give a servitor, the more “powerful” it becomes, which I’ve always found to be a rather odd notion. It was also in this period, again drawing on computer analogies, that I started to think about the possibilities of viral, or self-replicating servitors.
Another axiomatic belief is that servitors have to be created or empowered through ritual. They have to be “charged” with intention or “energy”. But is this necessary? No! Yes, group rituals can be enormous fun, but it’s not altogether necessary if you don’t want to. Around the same time, as I was mulling over my experiences with group servitor workshops, I had an “ideas” servitor on the go. Its task was to help me analyze and come up with different ways of approaching a problem. Frequently, I found, I “invoked” this servitor by momentarily stepping out of a space where a conversation was going on – often by going to the toilet – then coming back with an “idea”. I began to think that what was important here was not so much the idea of an “astral entity” somehow influencing me, but the actual behavior – that it was a means of distracting myself from previous flows of thought.
I started to think of servitors less in terms of them being “astral entities” and more in terms of Terminate-and-stay-resident programs (again I’m showing my age here as a DOS hacker). Routines of behavior or thought that – once set in motion, just do their job, requiring no thought or management. And of course, anyone with access to that piece of code can use the program.
The Pixie
For the last twenty years or so my partner and I have lived with an entity we call “the pixie”. I guess you could call it a spirit, or a servitor, but we don’t. The pixie finds things we misplace around the flat. Scissors. My spectacles. A particular carving knife. Ordinary things. It’s a simple enough transaction. We lose something, and we ask the pixie to find it for us. When the lost item turns up, as it invariably does, then we pay the pixie. The pixie “likes” £1 coins. Or £2 coins. Not loose change though. The pixie lives in a plant pot on the kitchen shelf. Occasionally, when the pile of coins threatens to spill out of the pot, my partner takes them and buys the pixie a present – a small crystal perhaps. Something nice and shiny. On one occasion, I had to borrow some money from the pixie, so I left him an IOU.
The pixie isn’t anything special – I think he came out of a Christmas cracker originally. But how did we “create” him? We didn’t. We didn’t do a ritual in the sense of empowering him with energy or magical intent or anything like that. We just started taking it for granted – unreflexively – that the pixie found things and deserved payment for doing so. It “works” insofar as we lose things and then find them again. If we stopped paying the pixie, would he stop finding things for us? It’s possible, but we’re happy with the arrangement, so why upset things? He might, after all, start hiding things from us (and there is a good deal of pixie-related folklore that suggests that such is the case).
This is magic at its simplest level, if you like, which I would never have attempted had I still been limited by essentially nineteenth-century accounts of “mental contagion” – which is how Theosophists such as Charles Webster Leadbeater and Annie Besant attempted to account for how ideas circulated in society between individuals and which gave rise to the notion of the “thought-form” (see this post for some related discussion).
That’s all for now.
