Opening the Book of Life: Entry into the Zoetic Magical Current

To write magically of the process of writing the magical grimoire is itself a self-referential conjuration of the gnosis of Ipseity, the reference-point to which all self-understandings must themselves refer, in order to be other than “dead selves.” If the Zos is “the Body, considered as a whole,” the Zoetic current is the Life-blood that flows through that “hole,” the empty-space, the empty-point of absence wherein the presence of magic may be manifest; the point from which all forms, letters, glyphs, sigils derive; the stop between all sounds and silences.Even were I not myself empty of identity, an anonymous scribe, “I” still could take no credit for the forms and words embodied in any grimoire even were my “body” considered as its whole, the very totality of “Pharaon,” since any named identity is itself host to a legion of Other selves, Other possibilities, Other potentialities – can flesh itself, amorphous, temporal, mortal, have a name? Even Immortal Flesh would be of necessity only a vehicle for identity formulated of meanings: an intersection with the other-wise unknown and other-wise unknowable kia. The chaos of their intersections seems to order itself to currents of power; yet who, even when riding a current, can claim to own or control it? Even to direct it, requires not fullness, but emptiness, that the magician might become filled with its power.

Thus initiation into the Life of the Zoetic magical current, as all artists and scribes alike will know, is not a matter of building up an eidolon of Self and filling it with its own desires, but rather a matter of emptying the Body of Self entirely, that the Entirety of Magic might itself be apprehended and enfleshed, the current flowing in, rushing in as its own Ipseity upon the otherwise self-less and soul-less form, to be reified in spilling out as its words and formulae, its glyphs and powers. This act of “channeling,” though accurately called such, differs well from the act of “channeling” fixed selves, dead selves, common to the so-called “New” Age, itself a resurgence of the most necrotic philos imaginable. Rather, to channel the Zoetic magical current is to come to embody those “selfless” Selves which – in, of, by, and through themselves – embody and channel the anonymous and formless Ipseity which itself reflexively formulates that very magical current. Identification with the nameless, formulation of the formless, creation of the uncreated – this is the Art of congress with the Body of Life, and the means by which the dead Letters of otherwise unnameable books of Dead Names may be vivified and brought not just “back” to Life, but into Life as New Life.

The Current may be felt as an “ontological pressure” akin to that which manifests pre-existent but unmanifest Books of Death like the Necronomicon, but while those dead works are brought into existence by the collective belief and collective desire, thereby relying fully upon the personification and Naming which is itself an act of Murder of Belief, the Death of Possibility that collapses into specific form, the pressure to embody a Book of Life into Life flows in reverse; the endless creation of possibilities out of non-belief, the perception of a gap in context, a failure of expectation, that may through spontaneous mutation into form, become an incarnation of the success of desire: the laughter of endless Creation as the gnosis of surprise.

It is said that every magician must write hir own Book; but to become an embodiment of this current, an Eidolon of the Zoetia, one must write the Book of the Other. Whether this Book be One or Many, only the Scribe can know; whether the Scribe be One or Many, only the Other can know, but the process of initiation into this Knowledge remains personal for each. This does not mean it is personal in the sense of implying “solitude,” although the act of writing may, for some, appear to be a solitary one. Rather, it is personal in the sense of depending on the spontaneous creation of a form to express the intents and desires of the Current, a mask to speak through, a role to play and to enflesh; an image to reflect through the mirror of Art. To believe this image to be “one’s own” or “oneself” may still be to express the Current, but rather as its tool or its servant. Perhaps the primary mystery of Zoetic magic is that the “Self” is necessarily merely a component or extension of the Legion of Selves, the Whole Body of Life, which become formulated in any act of Creation, and which utilize its person to become more fully themselves; thus, in order to be other than a vehicle of the Current, the Scribe who is also a Magician must actually embody the totality of the Current itself, and become its Whole Body. Only thus can the Magician “consider hirself as Whole,” and know hirself as the Zos.

This, however, is not a matter of contemplation, much less “self-reflection,” as much as the actual practice of “the” Art; for without the physical expression of the Self into Flesh and the expression of the Self-as-Flesh, the Zoetic gnosis remains “A-Zoetic” and therefore Dead. Thus the “self-as-dream.” the identification of Ipseity with illusory form, however personal, can only write the Book of Death, wherein all Magicians inscribe their Names. To inscribe the Name of the Other, however, requires the endless gnosis of Zoetia, the plurality of the Zos, the Legion of Selves; in exchange for participation in this endless process of inscribing Otherness into the Flesh, the magician escapes the confining prison of Self, passing through the absolute Singularity of Ipseity into the Manifold Alterity of limitless possibility.

Of course, this “initiation,” by definition, is the beginning of the Zoetic process; were it the goal, no Art would ever actually be manifest, but only the ideas and eidolons of it, and in such manner do many magicians who seek this Current of Life actually lose themselves in their own Death. Rather, willed formulation of an Ipseity of Otherness is the only means by which Alterity is ever born from the Womb of Potential Possibilities into the Actuality of Flesh; all else is mere mysticism, and thanatoic mysticism at that.

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