NMR ISSUE 54

Aspect in Astrology
Bardic Source Book
Because I am a Witch My Love
Blessing for a Child
Complete Book of Spells, Curses
Earth Magic
Fetish Stones
Finding Your Totem, Discovering Your Guardian
Gleanings 54
How to Use Magick with a Straight Face
Kingdoms of the Faerje Realm
Language and the Doctrine of Signatures
Mountains, Meadows and Moonbeams
New Twist on Tinctures
On the Invocation of Eris:
Pagan Nudity
People of the Earth:
Shapeshifter Tarot
Teen Witch:
The Great Spirit Goddess
The Lore of the Oak
The Samhain Host: Remembering the Dead
The Sun Goddess:
The Well of Remembrance:
To Light a Sacred Flame:
Worship of the Goddess: The Lost Art

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On the Invocation of Eris:

Chaos as Prerequisite to Change

By D. Rose Hartmann

"In a dark time, the eye begins to see"—Theodore Roethke

The goddess Eris (or Discordia) is the midwife of Chaos, the bringer of creative destruction. For aspiring and experienced brain-change artists, she will be a most helpful handmaiden, a necessary preliminary, an archetype whose invocation is necessary if a New Order be wrought. Let me introduce you to her.

She is not revered for her manners, nor her beauty or grace, and as far as I know, there are no temples or statues or odes in her honor (although she is notably present as the tornado that blew Dorothy out of Kansas). Eris is a messenger of the Crone, in that she serves the crone's destructive wisdom, yet she is not as dark or old or wise as Hecate, but frenzied, flirtatious, quick to anger, mischievous, and "devil may care." Eris is a trickster, a willful reprobate who gets her kicks by shaking things up and stirring the soup. She is the catalytic force of Mary Poppins, who confused the emotionally dead Mr. Banks to the breaking point. Banks then threw off the myopic fetters of the bureaucracy he had enslaved himself with and opened to the love of his family for the first time. Eris was also the driving force of Timothy Leary, popularizer of LSD, the psychoactive substance that prompted millions to re-examine the belief systems, which were handed down by the previous generation.

Eris is an anthromorphization of the Tower Card in the Tarot as well as I Ching hexagram #23: Splitting Apart. Yet while the Book of Changes tells us that "Splitting Apart means Decay", no one can deny that decaying matter is the source of fertile compost. Likewise, Eris simultaneously brings the sorrows of "letting go" with the joys of creative opportunity. She's about High Risk—a force that aids in the transgression of our limits, boundaries, and restrictions.

The Upholders of the Status Quo or Dominant Culture in Vogue (currently referred to by many as the Patriarchal Entity) condemn Eris as a troublemaker, for she is a goddess of active rebellion. As the driving force of heresy—spiritual, political, and social— she takes pleasure in disrupting cultural patterns that have outlived their ability to provide real experience and enthusiastically rejecting the formalistic or robotic life which stale cultures often produce.

Eris assists evolution, and as she draws her life force from the eternal progression of contraries — not worrying about moral goods and evils — she works day and night to cure stasis of its stiffness. Yet while the hard-headed conservative might wage war against the idea that change is the only constant, the modern brain change technician works to plug into the Prima Potentia of Chaos, playing and flirting with Her maid-of-honor Eris, taking sweet-sour pleasure in the perpetual creation and destruction of perceived reality, death and rebirth. Eris comes disguised as crisis, but in crisis is opportunity. It is no coincidence that the Chinese symbols for the idea of crisis are identical to those for opportunity. The symbols are translated literally as "crisis is an opportunity riding the dangerous wind." Let us then Hail Eris! Or, as Marshall McLuhan put it, "BLESS culture shock as dislocation of Mind." Yes, Eris induces culture shock, dislocating the mind and forcing us to discover new meaning, and the symptoms of Breakdown are the harbingers of Breakthrough. As the Zen poem goes: Since My House Burned Down I Have A Better View Of The Rising Sun.

The force of the universe is free and amoral. Like any energy, it may be harnessed for evolution or regression, depending on the will of She who knows how to find and use it. It is easy to see why the Status Quo Police (as worshippers of the One and Only Reality) fear and hate the friends of Eris. And why they are on the march to anathematize the magicians, witches, shamen, avant-garde artists, filmmakers, scientists, and computer programmers (those who play in multiple realities), as sinners, criminals, reprobates, and children of the devil. Dion Fortune defines evil as "that which is moving in the opposite direction to evolution (and) as the principle of inertia which binds the, `good', the principle of creative movement." In a teleological universe, a universe that is going somewhere, the only evil is stagnancy.

The Greatest Taboo

Eris is famous for indirectly causing the Trojan War. Myth has it that having been intentionally overlooked when the invitations were sent for the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (discord is not a favorite during wedding vows); she disobeyed and crashed the party anyway. Spitefully, she rolled the famous Apple of Discord across the dance floor. The Apple, as the legend goes, was marked "For the Fairest" and was claimed by Athene, Aphrodite, and Hera. Since only one of the three could be THE fairest, Paris was called to judge the first beauty contest. Aphrodite won by bribing him with the most beautiful woman in the world, who just happened to be Helen of Troy and the "possession" (as women were in those barbaric days) of another man. So the Trojan War began.

That Eris's apple rolling, rather than the lust and desire of Paris, is blamed for the War, seems a tad unfair to me. A plot, more likely, to tarnish the name of the midwife of Chaos. Perhaps it is fitting to make an analogy with a story of another Chaotic midwife, Eve. In the Judeo-Christian tradition it was Eve who abruptly destroyed the Status Quo, the reality, of Eden. Like Eris, Eve rebelled against the gods (Elohim is plural) by her willful and fateful act of disobedience. Her eating of the infamous apple indirectly caused the exile of herself and her boyfriend Adam from the Garden. The direct cause of exile was the wrath of the gods who didn't want competition from the likes of their creation. So here we are, out of the safe cultivated, harmonious and static, and into the wild, changing, dangerous, and discordant. However, the Wild World Beyond the Garden is THE place where the party is happening, nonstop. Like Joseph Campbell said in his conversation with Bill Moyers, "When Eve said yes to the serpent, she said yes to the adventure of life."

It is interesting to note that Apples play an important role in the stories of both Eris and Eve. Is it only coincidental that an apple when cut horizontally reveals the five-pointed star or pentacle (try it yourself)—a symbol feared by the patriarchal systems then and now? Coincidentally, this article is being written on a Macintosh, an Apple computer, which has been programmed to say "Hail Eris!" as an alert signal.

Many theorists see the myth of The Fall as representative of WoMan's evolutionary move from innocence (blind faith, obedience, and dependence) and toward experience (consciousness, the ability to self-reflect, will to change and create change). Thus interpreted, "falling" was a very fortunate move, a rite of passage, and an opportunity to come into our own. Similarly, Humpty's "great" fall, can be read "great" meaning "terrible" or "great" meaning "supreme", "fortuitous", or "wonderful". And even though War is never pleasant, the battle of Troy was the catalyst for much change and progress (not to mention a fertile sea of archetype and myth from which artist and poets of past and present might fish from). As pulleys of the rope of time and change, reality makers and brain change technicians can't afford to waste time quibbling as to what is "right" and what is "wrong." To eat beef in India is a sin. To eat beef in Texas makes you a real man! If we are not moving forward, we are moving back.

Creating Change

Occult magick, witchcraft and shamanism are concerned with the re-ordering of reality through the re-ordering of consciousness and the accessing of will. The magician aims to change self, consciousness, and/or peripheral reality in accord with will. Through magickal practice and ritual the magician aims to cultivate the consciousness necessary to manifest such change.

Most occult practices presume a sympathetic model of the planet or universe—a web of life, if you like. The idea that the basic energies can be manipulated is based on the realization that from a certain dimension or when in a more "sensitive" state of perception, all things are interconnected. The paradoxical idea that we are One, yet Many. While in the reality-tunnel of our "normal" state of consciousness, we believe ourselves as autonomic, individual, and not connected to the whole. It is not far-fetched to entertain the concept that we are as yet unable to perceive `higher' levels of existence.

Take a model world called Flatland. Flatland is two-dimensional and populated by squares who know left and right, back and forth (width and length), but have never experienced the three-dimensional attribute of up and down (height), and therefore cannot fathom to understand up and down. Edwin Abbott, a Shakespearean scholar, tells an amusing fiction set in Flatland which illustrates some possible problems we might face when questioning so-called extra-dimensional or divine communication. Paraphrased, the story goes:

One lovely day a three-dimensional creature is flying above Flatland when he sees a congenial looking square enter a house. The 3-D creature decides to say hello, but the Flatlander cannot see the 3-D creature that is hovering above his house and hears the voice coming from within him. He questions his sanity. The 3-D creature is irritated at being called a figment of imagination and decides to fly beneath the square and kick him into this alternative dimension called UP. The Flatlander floats in UP for an ecstatic while before dropping back into his own 2-Dimensional world. He tries to explain to his friends that he had ventured into some "mystic" dimension called UP. Of course, the fellow Flatlanders, having no such experience, pat the poor deranged fellow on the back and suggest a visit to the local psychiatrist.

You get the picture.

Vacationing in Alternity

When you alter your reality through ritual, sex, drugs, sensory deprivation, or what you will, "normal" reality ceases to be and we can access a seemingly "mystic" dimension. Whether it is a dimension of the mind or an actual dimension of space — an "alternity" to use the term coined by Dr. John Lilly to describe such states. Magicians and Shamans of yore knew that too much time spent in the mundane world and "normal" consciousness would cause them to "forget" alternity and thus sabotage the success of their magick, whether it is healing, precognition, or controlling weather. They knew that the common world-view of individual separateness worked as a wall to block the underlying magickal sympathetic reality while bombarding them with doubt, interference, reactionary thinking, and criticism. That is why they took care to break their routine now and then incorporating such acts fasting in the desert, strange rites, ingestion of drugs, vision quests, prolonged sexual abstinence and/or activity, and sometimes even masochism, into their lifestyles. Harvard psychologist William James believed altered states of consciousness are the key to magical powers, the key to becoming the artist of our own lives. Altered states lets us put off the cloak of culture and tune into the primary self where the future rests ripe for manipulation, if you will. Dr. James said, "Actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from out of which they were chosen." Who has done the choosing, you, your mom, your government, and your teacher? Who will do the choosing in the future?

Magical reality pre-supposes the existence of a free-for-all power source — that "divine" energy which has its center everywhere and circumference nowhere Variously called the Archetypal World, the Life-force, Void, Atman, Tao, Anima Mundi, Spirit, Chaos, God, etc. This is the stuff from which magick, inspiration and genius stems. It is the threads which connect us to the ancient mind, the Great Memory, the Akashic Records, or the Aboriginal Dreamtime, holding the potential of future as well as the tapestry of the past. It is the force which, upon amalgamation and application of conscious will, allows us to speak the language of our primal ancestors: animals, insects, plants, algae, stones, rivers, and, earlier still, the stars, and perhaps, even, to communicate with our future selves.

Shakespeare, the enigmatic playwright (or corporation of playwrights as the controversy goes), is (are) said to be linked to the secret societies which flourished during the Renaissance period. Many agree that Shakespeare had hidden occult knowledge within his (their) plays, and while studying him in graduate school, I attended to culling any occult material I could. I found a lot, but most relevant to this article is the comedy "As You Like It" which, to me, confirms the "magickal" idea that communication with Gaia, or the Big Mind of Universe, is achieved by shucking off the mask of culture. In the play Touchstone, the Archetypal Wise Fool, tells us that when he is "exempt from the public haunt he might find tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones and good in everything."

It has now been confirmed that Magick is an evolutionary Science

We hold the information of the Universe within our DNA and it only makes sense to me that we should be capable of accessing this information by turning on the yet untapped circuits of our neural system. That humans have evolved to a point where they must take responsibility for further evolution of the species — intentional evolution — is a controversial, but fascinating, concept which has interested scientists, intellectuals, and mystics as varied as Gurdjieff, Aldous Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Houston, John Lilly, and Aleister Crowley.

The film Altered States depicts the protagonist, a scientist very loosely modeled on Dr. John Lilly, traveling backwards through his genetic memory as he experiments with sensory deprivation tanks combined with neuro active chemicals. He devolves into apeman, and further into an amorphous blob of pulsating energy — pure chaos. Where the film exaggerated real experiments by showing the protagonist actually change into an ape (and eat the flesh of live animals at the zoo), the point it makes is relevant.

Real-life experiments conducted by Dr. Lilly suggested that it was possible to "visit" our selves in various states of evolution, but of course physical transformation did not occur. It was the mind, which took a ride on a genetic elevator of sorts, allowing re-cognition and realization of the primeval consciousness and/or cosmic consciousness. The point is that we can access the Self beneath the programming and choose to change our minds/realities, become the meta-programmers of our brains rather than the puppets of the culture we were bread in by applying the magickal formula: Will + Imagination + Altered States.

The inter-connected model of the universe or web of life is no longer the limited to those of a mystical/magickal mindset, but is also a model chosen by many internationally recognized physicists as it works in accord with the scientific system of Quantum Inseparability Principle. Bell' s Theorem puts forth the concept of non-locality, which notes that on a sub-atomic level every particle is connected to every other particle. The idea of information being able to "travel" faster than light or "information without transportation" would certainly explain the concept of synchronicity, magickal coincidence, and telepathy. Dr. David Bohm speculates that the universe might not only prove to be non-local, but holographic as well. This model fits perfectly with the age-old idea that WoMan, along with everything else in the world, is a microcosm of the whole, containing all the information of the whole — past, present, and future.

"As above, so below" says the Emerald Tablet of the Hermes Trismegistis, while Carl Sagan tells us that "the very matter that makes us up was generated by long ago in red giant stars." We, along with the blade of grass and the fierce tiger, are literally the children of stars. As within, so without. One needs only to plug into Source to know it, to play it, to create with it, to become alike to the very god/desses we have for so long projected onto the images we worship.

Summoning Eris

Mystics, Magicians, and brain-change technicians alike employ ritual to invoke the archetypal mind (which is simply the art of tuning into those "cosmic" signals we normally edit) and to expose and make accessible our power source—the potential energy of Chaos. We enter a "non-local" state where our definitions of reality, our masks of personality, temporarily fall away. Who we believe we are at any given moment is always fiction, for we are another thing a moment later; or as W.B Yeats implied we cannot "know the dancer from the dance." Eris aids in dissolving the protective circle of self-concept by scrambling our programs, confusing us, and ferrying us into the space of No-Form, the lap of Chaos: Hence, we find ourselves in reach of magickal power, in a state of trance, ready to dance a new reality for ourselves. As William Burroughs astutely commented, "escape routes open in times of chaos."

Emptied of prior definition and highly impressionable, we use whatever means or rituals we choose to change the station to a reality more in accord with our will, or create a wholly new one. Brain-change technicians are meta-programmers who dance through dozens of virtual realities. We re-program ourselves, clothing ourselves with new belief systems or realities as creatively and as often AS WE WILL. (As I see it, the more often we change, the faster we evolve.)

As we commit ourselves to a practice of magickal crucifixions, moving through processes of dis-identification and re-definition of our perceived selves and realities, our normal reality changes to a magickal reality, and we soon re-cognize that we are no-thing, everything, and something. The WoMan who practices the art of reality shaping understands what Hassan I Sabbah meant when he said that "Nothing is true, everything is permissible."

Formal ritual performed in this Concept-Free state, whether Crowley-style invocations or a Catholic Exorcism, has a high success rate, evoking or invoking what spirits, angels, demons, gods, or goddesses, in the form and style you expect, and as you will. Plugged into the source of your power —the Chaotic Pool of Potent—you may wish to employ your concentrated will and imagination, thereby utilizing this force to "charge" your magickal tools, talismans, and amulets, or to project your desire into the Cornucopian Womb of the Universe. Remember your "tools" could be pen, hammer or guitar. One of my magickal tools is my computer.

The Will is very effective when applied in the dimension of potential (Chaos), more so, I think, than when applied to the denser astral or physical planes, where it is can be refracted by opposing wills or sabotaged by your own reactionary mental processes. Your magick will work, so be certain that you want that which you will. Also, it helps to have some sort of symbol of your desire at hand to concentrate upon or verbalize— a word or mental image will do — so you won't need to regain "normal" consciousness in order to remember the purpose of your ritual. Formal invocations should be memorized.

How shall I invoke Thee?

There are thousands of ways to invoke Eris. You might devote yourself to meditation on the TOWER card, or better yet, draw or paint your own. It helps to get out of your head where all your programs, as well as the potential re-actions to your current programs and future programs exist. Forget the mind; get into your body instead. Prior to practicing brain-change rituals, prepare yourself and your space by breaking apart "normal" reality.

Perform a frenzied Erisian dance, whirling like a crazy dervish until you don't know which way is which. Stand on your head for an hour, indulge in extended sexual practice or tantra (prolonged sexual activity is perhaps the simplest and most pleasurable way to alter consciousness), or have sex with an unusual person under unusual circumstances. Throw yourself into an extreme emotional state (terror, devotion, or anger), drum until you become the beat, give your ear to dissonant music, or stare at a cubist painting until you understand it. Hold your breath or try Kriya Yoga techniques. Laugh for the sake of laughter and nothing else (try listening to the song "I Love to Laugh," available on the Mary Poppins soundtrack, for a couple hours). Talk gibberish or practice Socratic dialectic with yourself.

Invoking Eris in your daily life will take some of the tedium out of mundane tasks and greatly speed up your passage into a magickal multiple FUN reality. A good way to start is to break habits and replace them with new ones, then break the new habits and replace them, and so on. Or walk in a different way, talk to strangers, act "out of character" (tell your friends you're performing an experiment), wear clothing which is not your style, explore new routes to work, eat exotic foods, eat on the floor, eat without utensils, write with the hand you don't write with, try to believe in ideas you abhor (except during elections), make love to someone who is not your "type".

Sex with "unattractive" partners is said to have been a favored method of self-concept disintegration for at least one notorious brain-change expert. When pleasure is combined with repulsion, two contrary values are married, your judgment is dissolved, and you are lifted beyond duality into oneness.

As you give your former "static" reality various Erisian jolts, make sure you continuously question your beliefs about the world, your ideas of your self, your goals and desires. Be brutally "honest" with yourself and beg your friends to do the same. Find out where you are and why; you can search your "soul" more effectively than any therapist can. What is important is that you 1) recognize the foundations, scaffolds, and walls of your "normal" reality and 2) demolish them and build anew. To maintain residence in magickal reality, keep turning the channel, again and again and again. If you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards! Evolve!

As we become expert brain-change technicians and enter the realm of magick, synchonicities become common occurrences and wishes begin to come true so frequently that one refrains from wishing carelessly. Things just fall into place. Thus, we are no longer had to put aside time specifically for such practices; instead, we live magickally. Eris, as the midwife of Chaos, helps to provide us with the necessary dis-orientation and disillusionment, both in our rituals and our everyday lives, so we may more easily cast off the shells which separate our essential spark, in all its marvelous and ancient luminosity, from that of everything else in the universe. And so we realize that "All the World's a Stage" and "Every Man and Woman is a Star," thus becoming the directors, producers, and actors of our lives.