“In Chaos Magic, beliefs are not seen as ends in themselves, but as tools for creating desired effects. To fully realize this is to face a terrible freedom in which nothing is true and everything is permitted, which is to say that everything is possible, there are no certainties, and the consequences can be ghastly.”
Liber Kaos, Peter Carroll
What is Craft Brew Magick? Professor Harbinger is a strange beast, and so it was perhaps inevitable that he would be involved in the occult. Glorious Leader entered the occult through Chaos Magic. Chaos magic is perhaps the most pragmatic and opportunistic style of magic. It may be related to Bruce Lee’s Jeet Kune Do. Bruce summed up the philosophy of his own martial arts thus, “Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.”
Of course when you do this, you will end up with something apart from whatever you used as your base. You move from orthodoxy to heterodoxy. And if you elaborate and articulate your own way well enough, you create a new orthodoxy. And this is what has happened here. Professor Harbinger has created his own heretical orthodoxy. His practice changed so much from the sources upon which it drew that it no longer seemed honest to use those names.
And hence, Craft Brew Magick. Magick with a K, because it is both cool and silly. And remembering the friction there is important. Craft Brew to emphasize the small and experimental nature of the project. Your version of the practice will vary from the original vintage shown here. And in time you may need to coin your own name as well. But if you are to build your own way, you first need something to emulate. And thus, again, Craft Brew Magick.
Craft Brew Magick operates on two levels. The Craft Brew practitioner operates on the assumption that the power they work with may be entirely internal or not. And that it does not matter whether the things they do exist only in their own story, or in a larger world. Craft Brew Magick is the magic of the story. Practitioners use Craft Brew Magick to alter their story, to shape and the control the narrative and thus their own lives.
Principia
“The shaman is not merely a sick man or a madman;
-Terence McKenna, The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens & the I Ching
he is a sick man who has healed himself.”
Thus we have the Principia: The Principles of the Practice. First there is Mentalism: The Law of Mental Theater, which holds that we operate in the world of stories. Or as noted in the Ars Holistica, “We Live in the Shadowlands. We die in the Bonelands.” The fields in which we play are the fields of our imagination. Everything you experience is in your mind. The real world exists but is beyond your ability to understand completely. Second there is Sympathy: The Law of Sympathetic Connections, which holds that everything leaves a trace. All connections remain. This is analogous to the occult principle of correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.” Third we have Mutation: The Law of Endless Change, which holds that nothing is still. Everything changes. Or, as noted by Heraclitus, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Conceptus
“All depictions of gods are attempts to understand the mind of man.”
From the Ars Holistica
From Principia, we move on to Conceptus, The Concepts of the Art. First we have Creo: The Way of Creation. Craft Brew Magick is the art of building castles in the sky. Or more accurately, Craft Brew Magick is the art of building castles in the mind. The practitioner crafts Dragon Marks to map the darkness of their mind and make the darkness navigable. Second we have Gnosis: The Way of Belief. To operate as a practitioner of any magic, one must learn to achieve a heightened state of knowing. In Craft Brew Magick, this is the Weaver Mind: the ability to choose to believe something for the purpose of using it as tool. Or as noted in the Ars Holistica, “I do not care if the Fairy Tale is true. I care if the Fairy Tale is useful.” Finally, there is Kia: The Way of Unity. The practitioner must understand that any separation between the practitioner and the rest of creation is imagined. This is the Firebird Soul, the understanding that everything is contiguous and cannot be separated, and that apparent separation is an illusion created by Mystery. Mystery here is understood best in the same way that the Tao is explained in the Tao Te Ching, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The Nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth; The Named is the mother of all things.”
Radices
“I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong.”
– H.P. Lovecraft
From Conceptus, we arrive at Radices: Root Work. The Radices is divided into Mythic Ecology and Magical Substrate. Mythic Ecology is what sustains the Magick, the way you order your mind in order to make it habitable to entities. Magical Substrate is what underlies the Magick, the things you add to your mind to aid your magic and feed the ecology. Mythic Ecology is built on a base of symbols and sigils, upon which the practitioner builds Hypersigils and Fiction Suits. And from these tools, the practitioner crafts Reliquaries and Artifacts to aid them in their daily life. The whole of this operation forms the practitioners personal Mythopoeia. Mythic Substrate is built upon the classical art of memory, with mind palaces and symbolic bootstrapping; the use of symbols and contrived knowledge to order the mind of the practitioner into a usable state. The idea is to provide the practitioner with Informational Gravel that can foster a healthy mythic ecosystem and the more esoteric things the practitioner wishes to build in their inner world.
Ludos and Mendacium
Robert A. Heinlein
“Progress doesn’t come from early risers
— progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”
After learning and doing the work of the Radices, the practitioner moves on to Ludos: Game Work. Ludos is divided into, Aleatoricism or Dice Magick, Channeling or Entity Magick, and Psychodrama or Ego Magick. Aleatoricism is the practice of using apparently random or semi-random generation to effect change by subverting and sidestepping the conscious mind. Channeling is the practice of using story to mythologize one’s life and is subdivided into Evocation and Invocation. Psychodrama is the practice of using ceremony to mythologize one’s life
Parallel to Ludos is Mendacium: Lying Work. Mendacium is the practice of lying to oneself so convincingly that the story changes around us. Mendacium is composed of Thoughtforms or Imagination Magick, Synchromysticism or Intention Magick, and Incantation: or Spoken Magick. Thoughtforms is the art of building narrative assistants to aid the practitioner. Synchromysticism is built upon Apophenia and Pareidolia, and is the art of mythologizing coincidences and working synchronicity into the narrative of a practitioner’s life. Incantation are spoken workings designed to drag the narrative world into the practitioner’s living experience.
in tenebris libertas est
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 