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