WV-001
“Now watch closely, everyone. I’m going to show you how to kill a god.”
-Lady Eboshi of Iron Town
What is your truth little human? What is your axiom? What is the core of your being? For what would you kill or die or sacrifice everything? This is where you start. If you think that the answer is nothing, then you are dead. If so, leave until you have something, a reason to live. I am not interested in hollow creatures, and will not teach the walking dead. A religion is primarily an answer to a question, to a problem. To Christians the problem is sin. To Buddhists, the problem is suffering. Combine these ideas and find your truth. This is where you must start.
What’s that? You’re overwhelmed and don’t know how to narrow this down. Well then. I am older than god and I exist as embodiment of an axiom and a truth. My path is an answer to a question. So I will tell you my path, and perhaps this will help you. I am the god of stories, although I am not a god at all. Why is there a god of stories? Because stories are life. Without stories you are a mere thing. Whales have songs and dogs have stories and wolves have choirs. The story give meaning to events. Nothing you do matters until it is passed on. The next generation is a continuing story, but only if there is a story to tell.
The universe seems to love creation, it keeps making more and more complicated things, despite this increased complexity speeding the universe towards heat death. Creation gives meaning and stories are meaning. Without a story, life is pointless, suffering is horrible, and nothing matters. With a story, life is a quest, suffering is heroic, and everything matters. I am the first god even if you’ve never worshipped me, because without my stories, no other god is possible. Of course this is all a lie, but never mind. When building your religion, you need to work in materials and media that your brain will remember. And your brain remembers two things better than anything else: places and stories.
So tell us a story. Don’t make it original, make it archetypal. Don’t make it contrary, make it follow traditions or if it has to be original then make it an obvious formula that repeats itself, maybe a cycle, maybe have the details mirror the outline. Make it predictable, because if its predictable, people can remember it. And give of a map, give us locations, give us a journey. Give us a quest, because a quest is a journey through a series of locations that is also a story. Now I said make it predictable. But here’s another secret Grandma Weaver will tell you. Make it shocking and memorable. Make it bawdy and vile, violent and sexy, horrifying and make sure you describe it and make sure you cross the line.
Why? Because you humans are fascinated by the taboo. Babies learn curse words remarkably fast. You need a series of mild taboos that can shock people, but can also be used to make things memorable as a result. Yes, make your stories predictable, and then give them shocking, visual and surprising details that are violent and sexy and boundary pushing. Because that’s what sells to your mammal biology.
If I were making a religion for spiders, it would involve the male spider being spared after mating. Because that would shock the audience. Does this seem contradictory? Then I am in good company.
WV-001a
As you finish the incantation everything goes black and you lose a sense of where you are. You are lost in darkness and then…. you don’t know.
You don’t realize that you’d lost consciousness until you wake up in a strange place where Transylvania meets H.R. Giger with massive interlaced Gothic architecture that seems almost alive and very very hungry.
The sky is red and writhing like a sea of boiling acid. The structure that stretch out above you are nearly all black of slate grey and seem built of some impossible stone. The sounds of thunder and winds are the only things you can hear and you pull yourselves to your feet.
You struggle to get your bearings when a voice cuts through the wind and echoes, disembodied between you.
WV-002
You may now realize, belatedly, as you open this forbidden book that what you’re doing is insane, and that you are most likely insane as well for trying. But the book is open in your hands now and so I expect that you will press on. Still, you should be struck by the absurdity of what you’re doing. You’re reading a book on magick in the age of science. And the book spells magick with a ‘k’ at that. Humanity has split the atom, traveled to the moon, created a virtual network of information that circles the globe. We have decoded the very code of life and made such ancient killers as polio and small box bow their heads on the chopping block before the power of our science. Why, you ought to wonder to yourself, are you reading a book on magick with a’k’?
Perhaps you feel that there might be more to life than the world of flesh and bone. Perhaps there lies a shadow cast by the Bonelands. Some Shadowlands? Perhaps you aren’t even interested in magick as magick. perhaps Demons and mystic pretensions bore you, but you think that the ritual aspects of magick might serve some higher social purpose that huamns need. Perhaps you are grappling with existential angst or depression. You suffer from a loss of purpose. You lack a mission or a reason to go on.
You are a fool of course. But we all are.
“I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars.”
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
WV-003
“Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”
Teller
So what is magick? Magick is the meaning we impose upon the Bonelands to create the Shadowlands. Magick is the symbols and stories, the meanings and myths that we use to interact with the cold unfeeling nihilistic Bonelands. Magick is the Shadowlands and anything we use within the Shadowlands to interact with the Bonelands. Which means, magick is the only reality any of us will ever know. But that does not require us to impose any supernatural component on the Bonelands. Supernatural, as a word, literally means beyond the natural, beyond scientific understanding. All of the supernatural is the purview of the Shadowlands. The supernatural components of anyone’s lives are non physical, they exist in the Shadowlands and not the Bonelands. Just like the human minds that invent them, magick cannot live in the Bonelands.
Science and Magick are the two ways to understand the universe. Magick understands the universe by imposing meaning. Science understands the universe by testing phenomena. Magick creates supernatural elements within the Shadowlands. Science uncovers physical phenomena within the Bonelands. Whenever Science attempts to uncover in the Bonelands supernatural elements that were created in the Shadowlands science finds nothing. Again and again Science shows that magick dies upon contact with the Shadowlands.
Why do supernaturalist claims keep appearing, despite repeated evidence? they return again and again like the undead because our brain is better adapted to them than to the reality of the world we live in. If we are to reconcile this, we must get used to the fact that we live in a fictional world and it die in the real one. people who take hallucinatory drugs are missing the point. We do not need to get our toes into the spirit realm. We live in the spirit realm. Science allows us to dip our toes into the real world.
But do not discount the Bonelands. If the magick is not congruent with the reality of the Bonelands then amount of ayahuasca or sigil work will save you. Magick is the space suit you where to navigate the Bonelands. The Shadowlands are the interface through which you view the Bonelands. Science is a Geiger counter to spot when you have stepped into danger. We need to accept that we aren’t well constructed to understand the reality of the universe, that any attempts to conceive the universe creates an imperfect simulation within which we live. But just because we cannot ever see the universe does not mean it cannot kill us. Because our monkey brains are badly suited to properly navigate the immensely complicated equations that rule our lives and the whole of the universe, we create simple heuristic systems to explain how we think the universe functions. They are universally, but some of them are useful. And of course all of them to some degree involve magical thinking.
“The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head.”
Terry Pratchett
WV-004
So just now I mentioned that everything is fiction. What do I mean by that?
Well let’s start with Alan Moore. Alan Moore is one of the comic book industries rock stars and most iconoclastic curmudgeons. He is also a ceremonial magician, and would likely take great offense at my using his magical theories to support chaos magic and pop magic. But I don’t care what he thinks.
Alan Moore describes all magick as language and all language as magic. To Alan Moore, the true medium of magic was the story. In the novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams, there exists a weapon that kills beings by showing them their insignificance to the universe measured against the vast scale of the universe itself. And this is where magic comes in for most of us. The universe if nearly fourteen billion years old, and the visible universe is thus fourteen billion light years across- because that’s how far light can travel in fourteen billion years. How much bigger is the actual universe? *Shrugs*
The Earth is about 4 and a half billion years old. Life on earth is about three and half billion years old…
And modern civilization is about ten thousand years old.
We are bizarrely tiny and ridiculously young by the scale of the universe.
We are so insignificant that early scholars who began working this out had real issues with it. The scale of our collective insignificance is staggering.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft wrote his Cthulhu Mythos stories about ancient unimaginable cosmic beings to explain the incomprehensible scope of the universe and its indifference to the fate of humanity.
We aren’t equipped to handle the scale of the universe. It makes our little heads a-splode.
WV-004a
Science is the study of Reality.
Religion is the study of Illusion.
– – Text Missing – –
The Body lives in World of Reality.
The Mind lives in the World of Illusion.
WV-005
Out amidst event horizons dwells the dying lights of logic
Here we hide and huddle from the frenzied fearsome fingers reaching
In our insular tiny tribe we try to tame the tales most toxic
vast and vapourous foggy fantasies built for blindness breaching
But Mystery looms large and luminous out across the alien sky
And Mystery grows with our advances, making a mystery of why we try.
We will will ourselves to meaning, pushing past our old unknown
A method now to pierce the misty border barring back our further lore
The human mind will hue much meaning from the humble rock, our home
we can stand and stride with giants, judging much and learning more
But when we wary walk among the unknown aeons, Mystery still slips within
When we whisper what we know, Mystery’s shadow silently still listens in
The horrid hand of humble Mystery harkens to our hidden fear
We will not whisper, and admit the mysteries that we do not know
Mystery makes mocking motions, pushing past our armored ears
We hear our unknowns in our dreams, daring us to outward go
Mystery can be our master, jailing us and judging crime
Or Mystery can be our maker, daring us to use our time
WV-006
“Eldritch Abominations are rarely big tentacled things. Not really. Do you want to know what a true Lovecraftian being looks like? Imagine the heat death of the universe. Imagine the event horizon of a black hole. Imagine the furnace heat at the heart of a star. Try to imagine the size or the age of the universe, or even just life on earth.”
“Why life on earth? I don’t see the big deal?”
“Do you know when life arose on Earth? How long ago?”
“A couple billion years ago I think.”
“Four billion would be a safe estimate in the minds of most people. Now that we’ve said that number, we’ve tamed it- reduced it a pair descriptive words to contain the tremendous extent of their meaning. Try to imagine a single billion of anything.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll help, here. You are one. Now visualize yourself and nine friends. Good, now visualize each of you with nine members of your family- immediate or extended. Good, that’s one hundred. Now imagine each person with travelling to a city to visit nine other friends and family members. That’s one thousand. How well are you managing to hold all of the people in your mind?”
“I’ve lost them.”
“Precisely. And yet if we were to do this again, that would take us only up to ten thousand. To invoke another iteration would bring us up to one hundred thousand, and then one million. If we turned the wheel again we would reach ten million, and if we continued our experiment a further stage we would reach one hundred million. And then finally, mercifully, the next turn would yield a billion.”
“That hurt my head to think about.”
“And when you transform that into years instead of people, we need four times that to look back to the beginning of life on Earth.”
“It boggles the mind.”
“That boggle is your Lovecraftian abomination. That point of incomprehension is what the elder beings really are, our inability to properly grasp scale of the universe and our insignificance to it.”
“So these things are just ways of explaining the crazy scale of existence?”
“Among other things. The mythologizing of concept or places humanizes them even as it dehumanizes them, gives them motives and things that the human mind can anticipate, which makes it possible to think about the unthinkable.”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“This is why places are anthropomorphized in mythology, why a tree is given a name, why a forest has a personality, why an ecosystem can weep. This is why an age or an era can die, or why a new paradigm might birth from an old one. None of this happens, but by understanding the universe this way, humans can more meaningfully interact with it. The Locust King sees everything as things. To steal a concept from modern video games, the Locust King sees all other beings not as other players- but as NPCs and enemies. He sees the land, not as an active agent in a multi-player game, but as a static game world. Only HE is the player character. To shift metaphors back to literature, only he is the subject, everything else- absoultely everything else- is simply an object to be used at his pleasure, and used up and discarded at his whim.”
WV-007
Regarding Chaos magic and Pop magic.
So this is book about Pop Magic. I want to be clear that this is not a talk about Chaos Magic. if that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere. What’s the difference? Well that’s a matter of opinion. In the early days the two terms were used interchangeably. However, since Grant Morrison’s article Pop Magic! was written, a non-existent distinction seems to have formed between Chaos Magic and Pop Magic. This talk is about Pop Magic as Grant Morrison describes it.
So…
As I said, the current use of the phrase Pop Magic comes from Grant Morrison’s article in the disinfo.com article of the same name. You should probably just read that article and avoid this talk altogether, truth be told. I’ll probably just lie to you for my own purposes and lead you astray.
Buuuuuut, since you’re here; Grant Morrison described Pop Magic as Naked Magic, or magic for the masses.
Morrison himself is a self-described Chaos Mage and Pop Magic is generally lumped in as a sub type or variation of Chaos Magic. Which is probably true, but totally misleading. Which I like a lot. It’s probably best to think of Choas Magic as Jazz and Pop magic as Free Jazz or improvisational Jazz. Of course all jazz is improvisational, so that tells you nothing- in fact probably less than nothing. Which is a good place to start.
Since I am contractually obligated, as a pop magician, to make heavy use of pop cultural references- let’s get started. In the tabletop Role-Playing game called ‘Mage: The Ascension’, magic is depicted as the forcing of your intent upon the universe. In game, the ease with which a mage can accomplish this feat is determined by how closely the mage’s intention matches the dominant story of reality at the time. As we live in an age when the ‘magics’ known as science and technology are ascendent, old school mages have a hard time doing their old rituals in the modern age.
Now to diverge to another tabletop role-paying game. This one is called In Nomine, and tells the story of the judeo-christian war in heaven. Players take the roles of angels and demons, and in game the angelic choir of Seraphim are depicted as angels of truth: able to detect lies and even finding lies painful to the point of potentially being injured by them. Now Lucifer was a seraphim and he and the other rebel seraphim fell when the war in heaven ended badly, and they were transformed into balseraph- demons of lies. But they retained their angelic nature, and as such were still harmed by lies.
So how does an angel of truth function as a demon of lies? They believe their own lies, and believe them so intensely that they fool their angelic nature. And so in these two fictional examples (because everything is fiction- but we’ll get to that) in these two examples we have the secret to magic- Pop Magic especially. Magic is lying to yourself so well, that the universe warps to match the lie.
WV-008
Q: What is magick?
A: There isn’t a man, woman or child on this planet that does not know what magick is. Don’t ask silly questions.
Q: Does magick work?
A: No.
– Alan Chapman, “Advanced Magick for Beginners”
There is, in the Bonelands, only phenomena. Any attempts at organizing the things of the Bonelands in to categories and ascribing meaning are going to be contrived and approximate at best, and arbitrary, inaccurate heuristics at worst. Every discipline systemization, from physics to cladistics, from philosophy to communism, from veganism to sufism to jedism, is a contrived system used as part of the shadowlands, a fiction suit for the believer and a fictional overlay for the world as they experience it. This is magick. Magic is the use of language and symbol to craft the tools that enable us to interact with a vast immeasurably big and impossibly immense uncaring universe.
So what is magick? And why is k important? Magick is pack of lies and deceptions. It’s poppycock and rubbish and you shold ignore anyone trying to teach you magick. The ‘K’ is there so that it sounds mystical, because if you ARE going to do magick, it has to feel mystical and powerful to work. If you’re going to change the world with nothing but a short a con, you need all the help you can get.
Why doesn’t magick work?
Magick doesn’t work, because you misrepresent what it is. You are not bending the Bonelands to your will, you are reshaping the Shadowlands to your desire and living at though this imagined world were real. The secret to winning at life it act out the life you want until the world starts accepting what you’re doing as normal. Magick doesn’t work, you do. But your mind is afraid, and magick is the con job that lets you get over that. Magick doesn’t work. And why you need it anyways.
So what form does magick take. If magick is the use of language and symbols to create a world more palatble to our fragile egos that the Bonelands can ever be, then the form of magick should be blazingly obvious. Magick is storytelling. Nothing more and nothing less. Now you may outraged by the suggestion. Where’s the summonings and the bindings and the sigils (trust me, we will get to the sigils)? Are you telling me magick doesn’t have any power greater than the power of a story?
But Christianity and Islam are both stories. Communism and Capitalism are both stories. Are you telling me these stories lack power? Gandhi told India a story. Thomas Jefferson and others told America a story. Darwin told a story, so did Winston Churchill speaking to a beleagured British populace under aerial siege by Nazi forces. Jim Carrey told himself a story, writing himself a check for $10 million dollars for acting services rendered and post dated it ten years in the future. Carrey achieved that goal just within his ten year time line with the payment he received for ‘Dumb and Dumber’.
I summoned by maternal grandfather yesterday to ask that very practical ghost his thoughts on magic. He pointed out that magic is making thoughts real. He turned an image in his mind into a log barn. He had to use his hands for the in between steps, but that was just a formality. It was his will and the power of his mind and his image. The story is what gives us the power. When we pick up a cup, we are moving it with our mind, because our mind sends the signals to our hand and arm to pick up that cup.
I can hear your outrage, but I’m being serious and I want to point out how important this is. You can chase the woo, or your can practice real magick and achieve real results.
WV-009
When you find yourself telling a person that you are not an idiot, the chances are that you’re creating the opposite impression.
What is a Hypersigil?
“The ‘hypersigil’ or ‘supersigil’ develops the sigil concept beyond the static image and incorporates elements such as characterization, drama, and plot. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension. My own comic book series The Invisibles was a six-year long sigil in the form of an occult adventure story which consumed and recreated my life during the period of its composition and execution. The hypersigil is an immensely powerful and sometimes dangerous method for actually altering reality in accordance with intent. Results can be remarkable and shocking”
– ‘Pop Magic’ by Grant Morrison from The Disinfo Book of Lies
“That makes no sense, and so do I!”
-Daffy Duck
The thing about sigils is that everything in the Shadowlands is a sigil. A Sigil is a fancy word for a symbol we’ve imbued with meaning. Which is to say ALL symbols. And all language is symbols. And the Shadowlands is made of stories. And of course, stories are made from language, which means they’re made from symbols, which means they’re made of sigils. So you live inside a sigil. Everything in your world is a sigil. You are awash in sigil work. You eat and breath and live sigil work. You think in sigil work. The only difference between sigil work as defined in most books of magick (and magic) and what you do every day, is that sigil work (as defined by magick books) means that you are consciously choosing symbols and imbuing them with meaning yourself and inserting these sigils into the sea of meaning that is the Shadowlands.
And sure, you can burn them or do horrible unmentionable things to empower them and then destroy them, but we know what’s really happening there don’t we? You’re playing.
The churches of the world don’t destroy their sigils, do they?
The corporations of the world don’t tell you to forget their sigils to make them work, do they?
So why are you?
I’ll tell you why. Because, you don’t want to have power. You are afraid of power. Because power means responsibility. You can’t have one without the other, and so you’d rather be helpless. You’d rather embrace the illusion of power, the fantasy of power, than actually empower yourself. You’d rather take your sigil work like a drug hit, a temporary high, and then the hangover. Nothing permanent. You’re a drug addicted slave, playing with the fantasy of freedom, you’re a Stockholm syndrome hostage working for your captor.
If you want a better life, build better symbols- and don’t flush them down the drain- put them to work. The only place sigil have power is in the Shadowlands. Things enter the Shadowlands by becoming lodged in your mind. Don’t forget your sigils, make them unforgettable and unavoidable. Sigils change the world by forcing change in you, and to do that they must have teeth, and they must sink those teeth into your backside and hold on until you start running towards the world you want.
The Shadowlands are built from language. And language lives in your head.
“Hell is only a word.”
-Sam Neil, Event Horizon
“In other words: Secret teachings aren’t ones that teachers keep to themselves. Secret teachings are ones that teachers have a hard time giving away.”
“I shook my head. I damn well had to shake my head, of course. I’ve never seen it spelled out, but it’s implicit in every text that —aside from forbidden (and probably illusory) lore like witchcraft and necromancy— there are no relevant secrets. There are plenty of things we don’t know and will never know, but everything we need to know has been revealed. If this isn’t the case, if Moses or Buddha or Jesus or Muhammad held something back for an inner circle, then revelation is incomplete —and by definition useless.”
– (Daniel Quinn: The Story of B, p. 34)
“It’s just an object. It doesn’t mean what you think.”
– River Tam, Firefly
WV-010
You wear a suit a lies every day. From your make up and/or your manscaping, from your clothes to your jewelry, from your perfume and cologne and aftershave, from your hairstyle and word choice, your catchphrase and your affectations, from the thing you like and the things you choose to like because of how they make you appear to other; from all this and much more you craft a suit of lies that you present to the world that says: “This is me”.
And as I’ve just said repeatedly, it’s all lies. But this doesn’t make it untrue. Or more accurately, this doesn’t mean that it remains untrue. You do where a fiction suit and you will where one for the rest of your life. The point here is to craft one that benefits you.
When building a fiction suit. There are rules; all of them unspoken and unwritten, but no less important. A fiction suit must be recognizable to both your subconscious and you community. Certain pieces of fashion or style are shorthand declarations of identity. To ignore these is dangerous and may provoke reactions that you do not wish. You do not have control over what certain symbols (linguistic or fashion based or otherwise) mean in the common cultural Shadowlands that you swim through. And if you do no craft your suit to send a message that others can easily read, they will read your fiction suit through the language of symbols that they do recognize and you may not like the results. A man in high heels meant one this in Pre-revolutionary France, another thing during the Summer of Love, and another thing at the Stonewall Riots. Symbols have meanings and the meanings change. The word nice used to mean gullible. The word awesome used to carry much greater weight. The word balcony is a recent import to the English language. The necktie evolved from the scarves worn by mercenary horsemen and the signals that the garment sends has changed through the centuries. Ignore the meaning in the community Shadowlands of the signals you send at your own peril. The peoplea round you can either reinforce the intended meaning of your Fiction suit or undercut that intended meaning by doing the opposite.
Successful people craft fiction suits that serve them, often by consciously emulating the fiction suits worn by those whose success they covet. Others craft a suit that spits in the face of their perceived competition to help them stand out from the crowd. Napolean crafted his fiction suit on Alexander the Great, Alexander did the opposite and crafted his suit in opposition to his famous father Philip of Macedon. Musicians and other performers can be quite painfully obvious in their emulation, I’ll be kind and not list examples here.
Biographies are a great place to start, autobiographies are tremendously useful but must be taken with a grain of salt. When you walk into another person’s Shadowlands, remember how much you lie to yourself when you assess this other person’s honesty. But sit down and craft the new you. Do research, choose your role models, mix and match so you can claim influences but deny that you are simply a copycat. Add things that will outrage (though how much outrage you must decide yourself) if nobody is angry about your position, then you aren’t saying anything worth hearing. Unless blending in is the goal of your fiction suit, you must make it your mission to craft a certain amount of provocation. Choose your allies and name them. Choose your enemies are mark them. Choose what you must do, what you will do, what you may do, what you won’t do and what you must never do. Build yourself the way a writer builds a character, build your character arc and build your character building moments.
You are the hero of your own story. This cliche has been done to death, but most avoid what that means. All heroes end up in the innermost cave at some point, staring down the apotheosis as a Christ metaphor- a sacrifice to achieve the dream. All heroes experience several setbacks where the character must either dig deep and use will power to move on, or must learn a lesson and cut the knot or take a third option. When cheap self help gurus tells you that you are the hero of your own story, they often forget to mention that the hero is frequently crucified at the climax of their story, it happened to Odin, and Jesus and Prometheus- so why not you? In other words: build your fiction suit not just to look good in the character introduction scene, when you walk on screen in slow motion with cape billowing and doves flying around you. Build you fiction suit with rules and remembers as to how you will deal with the taste of death in the third act, the betrayal in the second act, the setbacks on the road in the first act, and even how to deal with victory in the aftermath.
You will wear (where) a suit of lies, and the lies will burrow under your skin until you become your lies- make sure they’re good lies.
WV-0
“You don’t understand. I sold my soul to the devil.”
“There are so many devils. To which devil did you sell your soul?”
“Lucifer! Satan! The Morningstar! Who do you think?”
“Ah. Are you Catholic then?”
“Ummm. No. I guess I’m Christian, but I think my parents were Anglican.”
“Indeed, so Pop Culture Satan then, and not the original model. harder to nail down of course, fewer clear rules when negotiating. Less power, but you’re really feeding him quite a lot so that hardly matters.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you understand where devils live Clive? Do you know what powers the enforcement of their contracts? How they collect your soul?”
“Never really thought about it.”
“And that’s how they like it. But if you want to save your soul, you should really look at the process more carefully. Don’t look for a legal loop hole. This isn’t a dime store demon to whom you’ve sold you soul. This is a full blown devil, drunk on the power of the vox populi. The question you should ask is not: can I escape the terms of the contract? The question you should be asking is: can he enforce the terms of the contract?”
“Of course he can! He’s the devil!”
“No. He is not the devil. He is a devil. He is your devil. Where do you think gods and monsters live? They live in stories. And where do stories live?”
“I don’t know.”
“And that’s why he can enforce his contract. Because you don’t know where he’s hiding, and you don’t know what he’s capable of doing.”
“But if you knew where he hid, if you knew from where he was drawing all of the power that he has marshalled against you, if you knew that then you could take him to task. If you knew that, you could take his power. If you knew that, you could break him open. But you don’t. Your mind is too small to contain a god and your own self awareness both. And so you will sit in fear and your devil will devour your soul until you go mad in some feces spattered sanitarium wrapped in the warm embrace of a straight jacket. All this is your fate, because you lack the perspective to see where your devil gets his power. Good night Clive.”
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 