A hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm--excerpt from fantasy novel La Maga

Leonard could now clearly hear his father griping to someone that the “folk-woman” (“Reverend Lady” Professor La Maga, that is) was in for it and that Leonard should be told to join his father in Dr. Bruno’s office on the other side of the pavilion. Dr. Giordano (Danny) Bruno was the dean of the graduate school and chief administrator of the secondary school.

Then, as if beaming with pride, Professor La Maga announced: “Mister Leonard de Lux, Junior. Can you explain to the class the origin of the term the ‘Conus magus maneuver’?”

As if awestruck, Leonard uttered, “Yes.”  He had spent the summer studying its legend and swimming in fantasies about how he had discovered its lost key.

 “Go ahead, then, Leonard. Please tell us,” the professor coached.

“In common parlance, the term ‘Conus magus maneuver’ means that a sorcerer or mage has pacified a foe, but the meaning, mostly among  sorcerers, is that the sorcerer has paralyzed his opponent—that the opponent is too mystified to act,” Leonard began.

“It’s an insult,” the professor announced to the class, “mostly uttered by ‘sore winners.’

Continue,” Professor La Maga requested.

“It’s a figure of speech,” Leonard said, “about a hostile magical practice—the Conus magus charm—which involves striking and then absorbing energy from an opponent.”

“And when is this hostile practice typically used?” questioned Professor La Maga.

“All the time, but no one ever admits it,” Leonard responded.

 “Indeed, it’s rampant even among Commons in the Outer Plane,” the professor confirmed. “Go on, Mr. Junior de Lux. We’re waiting to hear about the legend.”

“The term ‘Conus magus charm’ refers to the legendary charm of the same name, which is much more intense than the charm used today,” Leonard said. “According to legend, the original charm was discovered by a sorcerer named Mare Maré who lived around 250 BCE. He was a Melanesian sorcerer who was very familiar with venomous cone snails of the South Pacific, particularly the snail that millennia later would be christened ‘Conus magus’ by Outer Plane marine biologists,” Leonard explained.

 “He was a sea-charmer,” Professor La Maga interjected, adding that sea-charming was how Mare Maré “managed to cross great expanses of ocean long before the invention of luxury cruise liners. The name Mare Maré means ‘Nightmare of the Dark Sea.’”

The professor magically materialized the tapered shell of a cone snail. Grasping it between her thumb and forefinger, she held it out so all could see how harmless it looked: white with brown and tawny bands and dapples. Red, needle-like claws jutted out of the shell’s opening.

 “But this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg, isn’t it, Mister de Lux, Junior,” she said and lobbed the deadly creature into her audience. Students ducked and screeched, but the snail vanished in midair. 

Excerpt from Chapter 1 The Conus Magus Maneuver from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi. Available at amazon.com

Magic is potentiated when the self is effaced by pleasure and pain.

Austin Osman Spare

“Magic is potentiated when the self is effaced by pleasure and pain.” This statement is said by Leo de Lux to Mirelle Soleil in the fantasy fiction novel La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi by Soror ZSD23.  But what does this mean?  It means that paradigmatic shifts occur at the extremes of consciousness.  You have heard the adage “it is always darkest before dawn” or “I saw the light” or you have heard stories about people who claimed to have been “reborn” or who have claimed to become “enlightened” at a direly critical point during an emotional crisis.  This is the basic idea.

This idea that paradigmatic shifts occur at the extremes of consciousness is utilized in postmodern magic and was advanced by the  early 20th century sorcerer Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956) who potentiated his magic through inducing liminal states of consciousness usually either through orgasm or a condition he called the “death posture,” which was a (very not recommended) practice involving pseudo-catalepsy and auto asphyxiation.  Later, magical practitioners spoke of the potentiation of magical intention through excitatory or inhibitory techniques, recognized as key in shamanic and mystical initiatory experiences.  An example of an excitatory technique might be dancing to exhaustion or else engaging in some other activity past the point of tolerance (eg, “erotocomatose lucidity,” a practice brainstormed by one of Aleister Crowley’s lovers and possibly inspired by legendary Tantric sex practices, theoretically involving keeping a person in a state of sexual stimulation through “any means possible” until that person had an “enlightenment”-type experience or died). 

A resourceful and healthful rather than extreme or  self-harming example of an excitatory technique is found in Kundalini and other types of yoga in which a simple motion or posture is held or continued through and past the point of emotional and physical resistance.  The experience of breaking through physical resistance becomes a metaphor and method for breaking through psychological blocks.  When a psychological block is neutralized, thoughts and behaviors are reframed and neural pathways in the brain are rerouted.

An alternate example of how an excitatory technique might work and how an inhibitory technique might work is related to hypnotic technique.  Hypnotic-type suggestion best occurs in states of liminal consciousness.  These might be states between waking and sleep, during orgasm, states of shock or surprise, or deep self-absorbed focus or fixation.  In these states, there is a window of opportunity to bypass the mind’s critical factor, or what is known in magic as the psychic censor.  When the critical factor is bypassed, which is what occurs in hypnotic suggestion, new ways of thinking and behaving can be programmed into the subconscious mind.  A person who understands how to skillfully induce and embed hypnotic suggestion into her own mind or the minds of others could establish paradigmatic change with efficiency, grace, and ease and minimal drama, couldn’t she?

For long, people have thought of magic as something supernatural and spooky.  Even in manifestation spirituality, which is certainly a form of magic although some practitioners wish to think otherwise, people hold the idea that some divine spiritual force in the universe is magically making things happen for them or else they may be of the opinion that their personal-ego desires and quantum physics  are somehow related.  But what if magic was really a psychodynamic process?  What if magic and the ability to manifest one’s desires had nothing to do with spooky supernaturalism or belief in miracles but with the quality of belie f, perception, attitude, and behavior  and the effects these expressions have on interpersonal and intrapersonal interactions?  What if it was all about where one’s attention was placed and where, through skill, one could place someone else’s attention and perception and manipulate one’s own and others’ reactions and motives?

Excerpt from  Chapter 13 The Daughter from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi

Leo de Lux character study
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“If anyone asks, you’re a member of this house,” he said quietly and glared at her. “Understand what this means,” he snapped. “Do not cross me. Do not interfere with my designs or my momentum. Can you manage that, Mirelle?”

She nodded. The Consul huffed and grimaced. He stood up and approached his altar. “Alright, then. Stand here,” he commanded. Mirelle complied. The Consul grasped a highly polished diamond-shaped dagger from the altar and lightly pressed it against Mirelle’s breast bone. With his free hand, he gripped the back of the girl’s head and arched her neck into a taut and choking posture. He glared into her eyes, white to white. Mirelle felt her blood drain from fear of what he had in mind only to feel the rush of the hallmark of empowerment initiations—a hot, scintillating, and heady pulsation.

“‘Magic is potentiated when the self is effaced by pleasure or pain,’” the Consul lulled.

An electrically erotic sensation flooded through the dagger into Mirelle’s chest and through the man’s eyes into her brain. She relaxed into it. The searing stare and torturous grip became softer, until they seemed like a caress.

The Consul gently released his hold. He placed the dagger within inches of Mirelle’s brow. She focused on it past the light that was flooding her mind. The platinum grip had a ruby and citrine inlay of gems that spelled “de Lux.”

The man grinned as if he didn’t think Mirelle would believe what she would next see. A miniature angel with a lion on its breastplate and a flaming sword in hand emerged from the dagger and flew into her head. It generated a peculiar tickle as it snaked its way to her chest where it settled like a glowing ember.

He placed the dagger back on the altar and announced as if commanding the spirits there, “No one dare touch this child with malice! She belongs to me.” 

Sofia La Maga An Excerpt from La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi

 Leonard (Junior) and his buddies, Anil, Cary, and Bertrand, had gotten a glimpse of Sofia La Maga the day before. They gloated like the spoiled-brat junior elitist patricians they were that the hype about the professor was nonsense. It was just as Leonard’s father had insisted. Professor La Maga was nothing but a bedraggled kitchen witch.

She didn’t seem at all like the stories told about her. In fact, she roamed through the secondary school’s second-floor corridor as if she were roller-skating with three left feet and had the mental disposition of a hedgehog. 

She was a tall, slender but robust woman with the rough-and-tumble appearance of someone who had weathered hard climbs in exotic lands. Her clothes were rustic, quaintly worn, and embellished with savage jewelry: jangling bells and sashes of bone and fur, claws, shells, and spike-studded pods. Her Medusa-like mane was haphazardly plaited here and there and cluttered her face, blinding her as she toddled along.  She was gripping a mass of overstuffed folders, and from her arms dangled plastic bags filled with items that were heavy such that they swung like pendulums in the wake of her clumsy pace. The heels of her worn leather lace-up boots alternately caught on the frayed hem of an ankle-length skirt. It caused her to wobble pathetically as the heavy bags alternately beat against her ribs. 

No one offered assistance. They were busy gawking at her and probably thinking the same as Leonard and his pals were. This was the prodigy who had been gallivanting across exotic lands and speed-reading through mentorships with wild wizards, shamans, and anchorites? 

Available through amazon.com. See tab at the header of this page. 

Circles: Excerpt from The Savior at the End of Time on YouTube

He started drawing circles again until he had constructed an ouroboros—a serpent swallowing its own tail.

“If you really want to find peace and make peace, you have to kill this thing,” he said. Everyone nodded.

He made a rose bloom in the circular empty space framed by the ouroboros. A multitude of petals flared out. Watching them became a mesmerizing repast in which the sense of time was lost. A tiny light formed in the center of the rose. Looking at it gave a person an ecstatic and expansive feeling that made everything seem trivial and silly in comparison. Truly, looking into the speck of light in the center of the rose was like taking hold of a giddy and ineffable truth. So the lot of them sat gazing at it.

How much time passed in this pursuit was unknown—short or long—and it could not be measured in retrospect because no one could remember at what time the endeavor began. In any case, the Zosians sat mesmerized in gnostic bliss until, as occasionally occurred with the Entheos Mondo Amanita maneuver in which they were arrested, they began to startle and crash into queasiness, nausea, cramps, and diarrheal output.

Zosi was seething with quiet mirth. “Now that’s an opiate,” he exclaimed, and he bid them to make sure they each left the bathroom clean for the next person. 

Available in Kindle format from amazon.com. 

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About the Sorcerers and Magi Series --Listen to the Podcast

I started writing the Sorcerers and Magi series in 2003, which was the time that the Harry Potter series was gaining a lot of momentum.  I knew very many 30- to 60- year-olds who were very enthusiastic about the series.  Honestly, I never read the books, but I really enjoyed watching the movies. They—especially the earlier ones in the series—coddled me in the sweetest nostalgia of childhood and holiday movie extravaganzas—of treats from grandma and Christmas tinsel and that sort of thing.

One day in the late summer of 2003, I found myself watching a DVD of the second movie in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, every night for a week. I was particularly fascinated with the villainous Lucius Malfoy character, played by Jason Isaacs. I kept hoping that, as the series winded down to its denouement, that character would emerge as an antihero. That was not the case, but it inspired the development of my own antihero Leo de Lux. He starts out as a caustic and villainous but complex character and becomes an ambiguous hero and maintains that role throughout the series.

 So, after watching the second movie over and over again one week and wanting more stories but not managing to read the books, I started to make up episodes in my head so I could be entertained in between movies. I realized that I had built up a completely unique story. I dithered about whether I should write it down, because I was reluctant to invest the time in a writing project only to then beat my head against a brick wall trying to get someone of influence—an agent or publisher—to give me the time of day.  I couldn’t help myself, though, and got it into my head that I should simply pursue the  project for my own entertainment and insight.

Listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

The story I was entertaining was not a children’s story. It was a magical fantasy fiction story for adults. My aim, however, was to maintain a tone similar to that found within classic children’s fantasy fiction. My target audience was adults who like classic children’s literature—the work of C. S. Lewis, for example.  I did not initially intend to write a series, but as I completed the first draft of the first book La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, another story popped into my head, which I originally gave the provocative title.The Sex Lives of Sorcerers but renamed The Fallen Fairy. I ended up linking them in the progression of an underlying apocalyptic theme introduced in the first book that culminates in the third book, titled The Savior at the End of Time. I intend to write at least 2 more books in the series. One will be a prequel and one will begin where book 3 ends.

My story takes place in a parallel universe called the inner plane. It has a look and feel like our own. The structure of government is loosely based on the classical Roman paradigm. The same sort of powermongering and dog-eat-dog kind of stuff that goes on in our world also happens in this Inner Plane, with the idea that Inner Plane strongly influences how things roll in the Outer plane (our world, that is).  People from our world can enter the inner plane through dreams, trance or altered states of consciousness and through forbidden dabblings in the occult and sometimes they transition from the Outer to Inner Plane in my stories.

The term “Inner Plane” comes from a writer within the Western Mystery Tradition named Gareth Knight, who is an apologist for a type of Hermetic magic originating in the medieval era, called Magical Christianity, which is a type of gnostic—or self-revelatory (as opposed to dogmatic)—Christianity . The Inner Plane is basically the world within the mind. It is a place of archetypal forms, dreams, and ideas in general. This place is more commonly called the astral plane, referring the realm of thought and feeling.  In a sense, it is in incubation place where thought becomes paradigm and Reality.  Reference to the Inner Plane is also a tip of the hat to a form of philosophical Hinduism called Advaita Vedanta, which I have followed for very many years. A strong influence from this philosophy and Buddhism permeates the series.

I’m using fiction as a creative and playful way to express my long-time interests in spirituality, magic, and mysticism. The work is a product of my research, practice, and hands on experience.  My writing is a way to feed information back to myself—reaffirm and integrate it and also to entertain myself.

The main character of the first book, Sofia LaMaga, is something of an alter ego—or maybe someone who I would like to be. At the beginning of La Maga A Story about Sorcerers and Magi, we learn that Sofia has been living in political exile in a parallel plane coinciding with Tibet. Having received amnesty, she returns to her hometown where she becomes a high school teacher and wreaks havoc by forming a friendship with the juvenile delinquent teenaged son of the place’s governor, Leo de Lux. Because Sofia has been living in the environs of India and Tibet, she comes back steeped in the spirituality of those cultures.

When I was writing LaMaga, although I had all long-time background in eastern spirituality, I was also interested in folk magic and had been reminiscing about one of my great grandmothers who was said to be a stregona—that’s Italian for “sorceress.” Another word for that is “maga.” I began to explore Italian folk magic, and so that is why there is a lot referencing to Italian folk culture and evil eye lore in La Maga. My interest in folk magic led to interest in aspects of Western Occultism, including the work of Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley—big names in relation to the so-called Occult revival that took place at the turn of the 20^th century.

By the time I got to writing the second book, The Fallen Fairy, I had become interested in philosophical alchemy and medieval magic, and so we have underlying themes about alchemy and spiritual transformation as well as reincarnation, fairy lore, and sex magic in that book. When I got around to writing the third book, The Savior at the End of Time, I had become an enthusiast of a current in postmodern occultism called Chaos Magick and a related counterculture scene called Discordianism.

No, Really, listen to me discuss the series and the writing life in podcast #36 The Savior at the End of Time at EatSleepWrite.

That story, which recently became available as a Kindle ebook and will be available for download through smashwords.com—and also as a print edition—in the late fall,  is about a character named Aurelio Zosimo who  is being set up to be the poster boy of a utopian political movement, introduced in book 1 of the series. What inspired me to launch that story was the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which is my all-time favorite theater piece. It was around Easter time in 2006 and I was coming out of the winter blues. I was on a roll watching film and live theater versions of Jesus Christ  Superstar and got the idea to adapt the template of the gospel story to the third novel of the Sorcerers and Magi series. The premise is similar to that of The Who’s rock opera, Tommy or Jerzy Kasinsky’s novel Being There, in which a person who is a little “off” is haplessly fashioned into a leader or cult hero.

 We are told that Aurelio Zosimo has a plaque on his office door that says “Nothing is true, everything is permitted.” This is a famous slogan among  Chaos magicians that was picked up from the cult classic novel The Illuminatus! Triology, which is a wild-ride parody about conspiracy theories, secret societies, and the immanentization of the eschaton—that is, the hastening the end of the world—the apocalypse. There is an apocalyptic thread running through my series that culminates in this third book, and we find characters discussing the immanentization of the eschaton and Zosimo’s potential role in it in the third book.  

The Savior at the End of Time 3rd in the Sorcerers and Magi Series now Available in Kindle format

Chaos Magic meets Jesus Christ Superstar. The Savior at the End of Time, the third book in the Sorcerers and Magi series, will be available in Kindle format on July 4, 2013.

The tale is a veiled take on the Christ-story in which the unassuming and disheveled but oddly charismatic iconoclast, Professor Aurelio Zosimo, introduced in book one, is haplessly rendered into a new messiah for the Lions of Light agenda and the “Immanentization of the Eschaton.” The novel references the post-modern magical counterculture current of Chaos Magic. In this installment of the series, Leo de Lux and Sofia La Maga are at odds about their designs regarding Aurelio Zosimo. Both find themselves in over their heads as plot line of the series progresses toward an apocalyptic showdown and the revelation of portentous secrets.

The Sorcerers and Magi series offers thought-provoking ideas about finding oneself and one’s true purpose in the context of mystical magical fantasy and will be interest to adult fiction readers drawn to magia, mysticism, and spiritual philosophy. Book 1 in the series, La Maga A Story about Sorcerers andMagi, introduces us to the Inner Plane and its fragmented society of sorcerers, magi, and folk practitioners. There, the binding quality of love, transforms a father and son, shifts a paradigm, and gives a jump start to a utopian movement The Lions of Light. Magical fantasy is deftly woven with Eastern mysticism. In Book 2, The Sex Lives of Sorcerers, a hapless fairy incarnates as a woman in the world of “Commons” in the Outer Plane. Sorcerers from the Inner Plane swoop in to vie for her affections in the interests of love and occult power and opportunism. . As savior, a redeemer, and a siren, the story’s heroine circumspectly aids the Lions of Light and sets the stage for radical and illuminating transformations of all who come into contact with her. References to alchemy, medieval occultism, steganography, and sex magic permeate the text.