This article began in response to Jason Louv’s call for submissions for the coming book “Generation Hex.” However, the current political climate, and the absurdity of writing an anti-corporate monogram for publication by a corporation, forced me to rethink submitting this work for publication. Instead, this piece needs to be preserved in its degrading, uncopyrighted, all rites reversed form. Eris said so.
Despite their non-corporeality, corporations are able to display a wide range of behaviors in a conceptual framework of legal reality. Disconnected from the material plane, except in the way their influence is manifested, these entities grow, absorb each other, competing, altering their identities, renaming themselves, creating and losing capital, sway political parties, own and oversee property, pay taxes, sue, and be sued. Yet because of the nature of their existence, they cannot be imprisoned, physically coerced, or killed. Immortal legally, corporations as they are currently, are something of an egregore brought into being through the collective vision of the founders, an egregore that manifests through the collective will of the governing body and given qi, given energy through the financial investment of its stockholders. The political activist, when confronted with such an insular system, is forced to either buy enough stock in a corporation to create a voice in its decisions, something most individuals are not equipped financially to do, or to petition the courts and their congressional members to modify the laws regarding that corporation’s actions. The magical activist, however, has an entirely different perpective from which to work. And for a magical activist, those very attributes that make physical protest ineffectual to corporate growth are routes through which sympathetic associations can be formed.
In today’s world, a corporation hides behind its logos, holdings, and subsidiaries. The franchising, outsourcing, and reselling of products further removes the consumer from the corporation, all of these abstractions that proceed from the corporate egregore’s will through media. Thus constructing magical links through a corporate logo becomes highly ineffective if the intent of the ritual is to harm the corporation. The logos are the corporation’s magical tools, each additional logo brought into existence thus feeds the corporation’s overall energy base. What is needed is a magical link not generated from the egregore, but through which the egregore had been created.. it’s true name, a sigil constructed from cut-ups of its articles of incorporation, or an astrological chart based on its moment on incorporation. Fortunately for the magical activist, all of these bits of information are freely available to anyone with a web browser, (the internet being the grand grimoire of our generation.)
Determining that an egregore is both the holy guardian angel/superego and the shadow/id, of a groupmind, I started out on this project with a vague idea that corporations could be manipulated through a demonological perspective, a kind of pseudo-goetia for the stock market. A serious re-evaluation of the ritual presented in that and other grimoires is certainly in order, but the premise is the same. Working with corporate egregores with the intent to subvert and/or otherwise disperse that manifestation is toxic magic, and certain steps are important in such work to protect the worker. Egregores such as these that are purely profit-driven are a kind of energy vampire, existing through the energy put forth both by those that work within the corporation, its investors, and its consumer base. If called into a hostile environment into a spiritual presence, it would not hesitate to drain an attuned magician of all available energy as well, for that is in its nature.
This raises the issue of attunement. Upon approaching this issue, I was confronted by the same problem as using the corporate logo. Both invocation and evocation involve the magician psychicly attuning to the entity to provide a conduit for manifestation, effectively feeding the entity gnosis. While this is important in the psychiatric deconstructionist view of demonic entities being gradiations of shadowy unconscious energies one is calling up and mastering by way of the superego, it does little good when the intention is lessening the influence of an entity.
What is needed then is a convocation, a calling of the entities in question to conference. Convocation allows a magician to interact with spiritual entities without manifesting that entity. But before the calling out can occur, the ritual space for the entity to be confined must be created. It is here that the ‘narrowing of focus’ trully begins. The more baroque temple would probably sport ritual space for the magician and a space for the egregore delineated with chalk or paint, sand or ink. The more ornate, the more baroque, the more prcise, the stronger the psychic focus becomes. As this focus intensifies, the circle itself begins to produce a void, an energy vortex unspecific in its attraction.
A short overview of grimoires and mandalic art reveals some standard forms magical circles can take. There should be at least one circle for the egregore’s sigil to be placed at the point of convocation, and it is this circle which should be done last, should a second circle for the magician also be desired. This circle in summoning a demonic form would traditionally be ringed by three lines of holy and divine names, boundaries between the sigilic space in the center and the exterior or physical world. This is fine fore working within a religious paradigm, but corporations do not necessarily fear the same deities that a traditional demon would fear. Rather, I would suggest ringing such a circle with the names of the markets, NASDAQ, AMEX, or NYSE.. in the US, the SEC is the closest to a governing entity a corporate entity could fear, and an evocation of the SEC in such a ritual might also prove effacious. Franz Bardon’s magical writings suggest alternate routes through which to prepare the magic circle.
How, then, does one design a sigil by which to conjure? Sigils are a matter of taste and preference. Talismantic imagery can be mapped out on enochian tables using the stock symbol abreviations, transliterations of the corporation’s name into Hebrew, or bindrunes of some sort, or through an astrologically derived geometric nest of lines.. “Pseudo-goetic sigils by Phil Legard” was what I consulted in creating sigils for Halliburton(HAL), ConocoPhilips(COP.N), Boeing Aerospace(BA), and General Electric(GE). Upon completion of the boundry and the edges of the magic circle, the inner portion is then designed, culminating in the sigil’s presentation. The introduction of the sigil occurs not at the begining of the ritual, but at its midpoint. Finally, the circle and the sigil is ritually deconstructed, representing a release of the energy the entity has until now kept contained within itself. From this point on, energy must be allowed to slowly drain and defuse from the circle, a process that introduces entropy into the egregore. This ritual ends when there is no trace of the circle or the sigil, and the worker or workers have removed all trace of the corporate egregore’s energy from the ritual environment.
In simpler terms, what is being performed is the charging and creation of energy traps for these egregore forms – energy is fed primarily into the circle in which the sigil is placed. Remember, the sole intent of these rituals is to degrade and undervalue the stock price. Keeping this foremost in mind insures success in the operations. What I’ve discovered in working with devaluation is that the operation should be returned to multiple times – there’s a great deal of inertia. I performed two operations with the HAL sigil, one around Dec 25th or 26th, the second on March 9th, and in both cases the stock did seem to adjust itself after an initial drop. However, there was a drop. And, even more important, the more people work within this paradigm, the more effective these magical assaults will eventually become…
(K) 2004 ‘All Rites Reversed’
if you read this, you must make a copy of it and give it to someone else to read.
Related Linkage
previous posts
- on magical circles
- corporate entities as magical egregores
- what I didn’t submit to Jason Louv referenced article
- cache of “Pseudo-Goetic Sigils by Phil Legard”Some sigils I’ve already constructed, (although I’ve only targeted HAL to date.)
- BA
- COP.N
- GE
- HAL
April 13, 2004 at 2:20 pm
Cool concept article. I’d like to do something like this out at Burning Man this year. Will the article end up in Gen Hex in any form? I’ve linked it from my blog. Cheers!
April 13, 2004 at 7:24 pm
Very intriguing essay.
I imagine all those Playboy bunny sigils being charged for decades would the reverse of this.
April 14, 2004 at 12:22 am
from Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe’s Stolen Lightning: A Social Theory of Magic, page 434–
How Odd the Corporation. Consider some of the strange attributes of the dominant corporate non-persons of our era, “magical” attributes built into them by legal fictions. For one thing, these “legal persons” are almost ectoplasm in their increasing independence: they are independent of people. (First stockholders wither away with “managerial revolution,” as Burnham showed; then managers lose power as it “passes down into the technostructure,” as Galbraith shows; finally, with automation, many workers are not needed either.) Corporations are independent also of place, of nationality, of stated purposes (no more ultra vires suits) or anyone’s goals. During World War II, some split so their subsidiaries could fight on both sides, to reunite later. Prolific, they spawn other corporations. The first, according to Maine, were created by the state. (John P. Davis thought they were created by the church; Mauss and Maine have noticed their beginnings in certain legal fictions attending Roman testamentary arrangements.) In the end, they even become free of the profit motive; they cause governments to prop them up (e.g., Lockheed). They have mysterious powers that ordinary individuals do not possess: Their taxes are lower; they do not liquidate their property at death but are immortal; they have limited liability while individuals do not. They started as voluntary assocations but become governments that ever individuals from membership. Instead of being regulated by governmental authorities, they often capture these and turn them into additional independent, policy-free, autonomous, impersonal entities. Today the form runs away with itself. The inter vivas form, which Maine thought the original legal fiction, can now be summoned by any citizen like a genie from a bottle. Even without a lawyer, any citizen of the United States, simply by using the forms contained in books like Dacey’s How to Avoid Probate, can create dozens of non-persons who are recognized at law, have to file tax returns, and can outlive him, can live forever, in fact. The population of non-persons exceeds the population of persons. Increasingly they influence our basic political thought: John Locke, who was so influential with the men who drafted the U.S. Constitution, wrote political philosophy at night but in the daytime, in his regular employment, he drafted corporate charters. In our daily lives, we increasingly confront or work for, or are entangled by, these legal non-persons, and they feed our growing helplessness. In the 1930s, as the TNEC Report showed, any businessman in the glass industry had to contend with a formidable non-person called the Hartford Empire Company, which was nothing but a collection of paper assets manipulated by some legal fictions controlling a patent monopoly. Non-persons are invulnerable to all of our magics except legal magic. Most of our symbolic powers are disarmed this way.
The non-persons create their own social force fields, thereby defeating the “general will” or “reason” or the rational state, just as they baffle the individuals who at one time projected this state. They refract law like power prisms; they bend general rules to particular cases. Increasingly they are ruled by compacts, agreements with other powers rather than general laws, as Neumann showed for pre-Nazi big industry. They fight law, then settle out of court on ad hoc basis that reflects their power, thus refracting law.
Originally corporations were powerful engines that individuals or groups of peoples used to get rich; they still provide a living but personal control wanes (Berle charts a progress from “real stockholder control” by one or a few until 1900, to “working control” by a group in 1914-1928, to “management control” after 1929, to “emerging fiduciary control” in the 1960s.) For long periods, some people are on top of these organizations, they ride the lion, they have power; but even they are retired or fired or early retired or forced out in the end. Meanwhile, they try to amass enough money to be “independent.” Wealth increasingly turns back into pure money (which is mana) as ownership evaporates, what Barzelon calls “the paper economy.” Berle has shown that the percent of personal wealth held in cash, securities or other paper has grown enormously; real property passes into the hands of non-persons. Thus property, power, status translate back into mere money, which derives from mana, from magic, and is simply some fractional value notation for a quality-space position in a consensus that is no longer there. The dream of the strivers, however, increasingly becomes a matter of simply trying to amass enough of this money to get free–free to do what? Simply to be free of the system, of the non-persons, of the organization of organizations, of the helplessness built in. Community and nomos have vanished so thoroughly that egos strive increasingly just to amass enough coined and minted magical power to escape from pseudo-community into private worlds. The desire for capital to escape arises at a time when engineered inflation and government tax policies make such escape increasingly difficult, but the urge feeds the transformation of property into paper, of capitalism into finance capitalism, with all its heightened potential for magical manipulations. Economic status and economic wealth are pursued as economic power slips out of the hands of even the managerial class.
This is one reason, perhaps, why they applauded as their own children in the 1960s attacked the non-persons–and thereby discovered the surprising vulnerabilities of these powers and at the same time rediscovered the potential for community in the political process. In participation and in activism, a fairly sizeable portion of the population recovers its symbolic powers in a fight that shores up the Individual as a social institution. In doing so they may indeed stay healthier than the groups who try instead to puff up the self while abandoning defense of the outer walls.
April 14, 2004 at 1:00 am
tate – thank you
That made me realize one really powerful tulpa to evoke that can grind a corporation down would be Bartleby (mantra – “I would prefer not to” – or some barbarous transliteration thereof)
I’m definately going to find a copy of “Stolen Lightning: A Social Theory of Magic”
& lvx23 (nice blog btw, I’m gonna blogroll it) I don’t know what j. louv will think of this – I can’t remember what my last emaill said – something like ‘nevermind, use it if you want, or don’t’ but he never replied..
so for the record, if this piece does end up in Gen Hex I’d like it if any money that I would have made is burned instead. Maybe disinfo co. could send me a polaroid of burning cash every so often.
incidentally, if he does read this, he’d be bound by (k) to produce copies for others, so anything’s possible.
sauceruney – good point. (ov power!) then again bunny sigil’s probably ripe for sublimination, I bet you could use it in all sorts of things as a kinda battery. it could end up being like the occult version of asprin, lose its trademark status to the collective unconscious’ array of archetypal imagery
April 14, 2004 at 1:12 am
Disinfo has got you now, all tangled up in their web. Interesting ideas to play with, wu. Thank you for sharing.
April 14, 2004 at 4:32 am
Stolen Lightning: A Social Theory of Magic:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0826400590/qid%3D1081942143/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr%5F11%5F1/002-2578729-9974413
Seems to be out of print though.
August 3, 2004 at 12:45 am
lvx23 on corporate egregores
August 3, 2004 at 12:46 am
http://www.key23.net/occulture/archives/2004/08/02/the-corporate-egregore/
help if I post the url
July 29, 2008 at 10:01 am
Fuck yeah, I’ll probably be quoting this in a brainsturbator. I especially dig the feedback @ the end, most of the metastudies show that being able to get feedback has a strong positive effect on psi, especially ESP potential.
What I love is the image of 2019, when there will be a whole contingent of magick/techno/hippie weirdos reading the business section every day….