seeing as this is my blog and i can do anything i want in it, over the next few weeks, i will run a few pieces on some people that i'd really like to have over for a few drinks one evening, not becuase of any other reason than it would be really intresting to see how the conversation goes. so unrestricted by time and space, consider William Burroughs arriving exactly on time followed by these two remarkable people, curtousy of wikipedia.

Dr. Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich (March 24, 1897–November 3, 1957) was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and author, who was trained in Vienna by Sigmund Freud.
In the 1930s, Reich said he had discovered a physical energy, which he called "orgone," and which he said was contained in the atmosphere and in all living matter. He developed instruments — orgone accumulators — to detect and harness the energy, which he said could be used to treat illnesses like cancer. His views were not accepted by the mainstream scientific community.
When his Mass Psychology of Fascism, published in 1933, was banned by the Nazis, Reich realized he was in danger and hurriedly left Germany, spending time in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway before moving to the United States in 1939 to continue his research. In 1947, following a series of articles about orgone in The New Republic and Harper's, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) began an investigation into Reich's claims about orgone therapy, and won an injunction against its promotion as a medical treatment. Charged with contempt of court for violating the injunction, Reich conducted his own defense, which involved sending the judge all his books to read. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
In August 1956, several tons of his publications were burned by the FDA. He died of heart failure in jail just over a year later, one day before he was due to apply for parole.

Early life and career
Wilhelm Reich was born in Dobrzanica, a village near Lemberg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Ukraine. His parents, Leon Reich, a prosperous farmer, and Cecilia Roniger, were Jewish. Shortly after his birth, the family moved south to a farm in Jujinetz, near Chernivtsi, Bukovina. He attributed his later interest in the study of sex and the biological basis of the emotions to his upbringing on his father's farm where, as he later put it, the "natural life functions" were never hidden from him. He was taught at home until he was 13 when his mother committed suicide after being discovered having an affair with Reich's tutor.
Reich fled his home when the Russian army invaded shortly after his father's death in 1914. In his Passion of Youth, he wrote: "I never saw either my homeland or my possessions again. Of a well-to-do past, nothing was left."
He joined the Austrian Army, serving from 1915-18, for the last two years as a lieutenant. In 1918, when the war ended, he entered the medical school at the University of Vienna. As an undergraduate, he was drawn to the work of Sigmund Freud, who became aware of Reich's work in 1919 when Reich organized a seminar on sexology. Reich was accepted for membership of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association in October 1920 at the age of 23. According to the Wilhelm Reich Museum's biography, he was allowed to complete his six-year medical degree in four years because he was a war veteran, and received his M.D. in July 1922. He worked in Internal Medicine at University Hospital, Vienna, and studied neuropsychiatry from 1922-24 at the Neurological and Psychiatric Clinic under Professor Wagner-Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1927.


The early development of orgone therapy
In 1922, Reich set up private practice as a psychoanalyst, and became first clinical assistant, and later vice-director, at Freud's Polyanalytic Polyclinic. He joined the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna in 1924, and conducted research into the social causes of neurosis. It was at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association that Reich met Annie Pink, a fellow analyst-in-training. They married, and had their first daughter, Eva, in 1924 and a second daughter in 1928, but Reich was unable to control his interest in other women. The marriage was not a happy one, and did not last.
Reich developed a theory that the ability to feel sexual love depended on a physical ability to make love with what he called "orgastic potency." He attempted to "measure" the male orgasm, noting that four distinct phases occurred physiologically: first, the psychosexual build-up or tension; second. the tumescence of the penis, with an accompanying "charge," which Reich measured electrically; third, an electrical discharge at the moment of orgasm, and fourth, the relaxation of the penis. He believed the force that he measured was a distinct type of energy present in all life forms. He called it "orgone."
He was a prolific writer for psychoanalytic journals in Europe, and his book Character Analysis brought forth a small revolution in the practice of psychoanalysis itself, and is still used today as a textbook for analytically-oriented classes in medical schools. Originally psychoanalysis was focused on the treatment of neurotic symptoms. Character Analysis was a major step in the development of what today would be called ego psychology. In Reich's view a person's entire character (or personality), not only individual symptoms, could be looked at and treated as a neurotic phenomenon. The book also introduced Reich's theory of "body armoring." He argued that unreleased psychosexual energy could produce actual physical blocks within muscles and organs, and that these act as a "body armor," preventing the release of the energy. An orgasm was one way to break through the armor. These ideas developed into a general theory of the importance of a healthy sex life to overall well-being, a theory compatible with Freud's views.
Reich agreed with Freud that sexual development was the origin of mental disorder. They both believed that most psychological states were dictated by unconscious processes; that infant sexuality develops early but is repressed, and that this has important consequences for mental health. They were both atheists, believing that morality is a repression of the sexuality of individuals imposed on them as they move from childhood to maturity. At that time a Marxist, Reich argued that the source of sexual repression was bourgeois morality and the socio-economic structures that produced it. As sexual repression was the cause of the neuroses, the best cure would be to have an active, guilt-free sex life. He argued that such a liberation could come about only through a morality not imposed by a repressive economic structure. In 1928, he joined the Austrian Communist Party and founded the Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research, which organized counselling centers for workers—in contrast to Freud, who was perceived as treating only the bourgeoisie.
Reich employed an unusual therapeutic method. He used touch to accompany the talking cure, taking an active role in sessions, feeling his patients' chests to check their breathing, repositioning their bodies, and sometimes requiring them to remove their clothes, so that men were treated wearing shorts and women in bra and panties. These methods caused a split between Reich and the rest of the psychoanalytic community.
In 1930, he moved his practice to Berlin and joined the Communist Party of Germany, becoming its spokesman. His best-known book, The Sexual Revolution, was published at this time in Vienna. Advocating free contraceptives and abortion on demand, he again set up clinics in working-class areas and taught sex education, but eventually became too outspoken even for the communists, and he was expelled from the party in 1933.
In the same year, The Mass Psychology of Fascism was published, in which Reich categorized fascism as a symptom of sexual repression. The book was banned by the Nazis when they came to power. Reich was expelled from the International Psychological Association in 1934 for political militancy. German newspapers started attacking him as a womanizer, a communist, and a Jew who advocated free love. He realized he was in danger and hurriedly left Germany disguised as a tourist on a ski trip to Austria. He spent some years in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, before leaving for the U.S. in 1939.

The bion experiments
From 1934-37, based for most of the period in Oslo, Reich conducted experiments seeking the origins of life. He examined protozoa, single-celled creatures with nuclei that, like animals, display mobility and heterotrophy, meaning they require organic matter to obtain carbon for growth. He grew cultured vesicles using grass, beach sand, iron, and animal tissue, boiling them, adding potassium and gelatin. Having heated the materials to incandescence with a heat-torch, he noted bright, glowing, blue vesicles, which, he claimed, could be cultured, and which gave off an observable radiant energy, which he called orgone. He named the vesicles "bions" and believed they were a rudimentary form of life, or halfway between life and non-life. When he poured the cooled mixture onto growth media, bacteria were born. Reich dismissed the idea that the bacteria were already present in the air, or in the sand and other materials he used. Reich's The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life was published in Oslo in 1938, leading to attacks in the press that he was a "Jew pornographer" who was daring to meddle with the origins of life.


T-bacilli
In 1936, in Beyond Psychology, Reich wrote that:
Since everything is antithetically arranged, there must be two different types of single-celled organisms: (a) life-destroying organisms or organisms that form through organic decay, (b) life-promoting organisms that form from inorganic material that comes to life.
This idea led Reich to believe he had found the cause of cancer. He called the life-destroying organisms "T-bacill," with the T standing for Thanatos, Greek for death. He described in The Cancer Biopathy how he had found them in a culture of rotting cancerous tissue obtained from a local hospital. He wrote that T-bacilli were formed from the disintegration of protein. He claimed they were 0.2 to 0.5 micrometre in length, shaped like lancets, and when injected into mice, they caused inflammation and cancer. He concluded that when orgone energy diminishes in cells, through ageing or injury, the cells undergo "bionous degeneration" or death. At some point, the deadly T-bacilli start to form in the cells. Death from cancer, he believed, was caused by an overwhelming growth of the T-bacilli.

Orgone accumulators and cloudbusters


In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. Reich's ex-wife and daughters had already left for the U.S., and in August 1939, Reich sailed out of Norway on the last boat to leave before the war began. He settled in Forest Hills, Long Island, and in 1946, married Ilse Ollendorf, with whom he had a son, Peter.
It was during this period, according to some researchers, that Reich appeared to suffer a breakdown. They say that he became paranoid and revised parts of his earlier works to remove references to Marxist theory. Reich's defenders say that Reich's revisions were minor, confined only to the English-speaking American period of his work, and were primarily sexological, clinical, or scientific in nature. Reich was one of the first of the European socialists to break ranks completely with the Communist Party; for example, in his book Mass Psychology of Fascism, which he wrote after a trip to Russia, he identified communism as "Red Fascism". His defenders say that the charge of paranoia is intended to discredit Reich's critique of Marxism. American writer Jim Martin alleges that many of those who have attacked Reich's biophysical research—on the orgone accumulator, for example—are themselves leftist and Marxist (Martin 2000).
In 1940, Reich built boxes — orgone accumulators — to concentrate orgone energy in the atmosphere, some for lab animals, and some large enough for a human being to sit inside. He now believed orgone was a type of primordial cosmic energy, blue in color, which he claimed was omnipresent and responsible for such things as weather, the color of the sky, gravity, the formation of galaxies, and the biological expressions of emotion and sexuality. Composed of alternating layers of ferrous metals and insulators with a high-dielectrical constant, his orgone accumulators had the appearance of a large hollow "capacitor". He believed that sitting inside the box might provide a treatment for cancer and other illnesses. It was the construction of these boxes that caught the attention of the press, and wild rumors spread that they were "sex boxes" which caused uncontrollable erections.
Reich also designed a "cloudbuster" with which he said he could manipulate streams of orgone energy in the atmosphere to induce rain by forcing clouds to form and disperse. Based on experiments with the orgone accumulator, he argued that orgone energy was a negatively-entropic force in nature which was responsible for concentrating and organizing matter. During one drought-relief expedition to Arizona, he claimed to have observed UFOs, and speculated that orgone might be used for the propulsion of UFOs.
According to his theory, illness was primarily caused by depletion or blockages of the orgone energy within the body. He conducted clinical tests of the orgone accumulator on people suffering from a variety of illnesses. The patient would sit within the accumulator and absorb the "concentrated orgone energy". He built smaller, more portable accumulator-blankets of the same layered construction for application to parts of the body. The effects observed were claimed to boost the immune system, even to the point of destroying certain types of tumors, though Reich was hesitant to claim this constituted a "cure." The orgone accumulator was also tested on mice with cancer, and on plant-growth, the results convincing Reich that the benefits of orgone therapy could not be attributed to a placebo effect. He had, he believed, developed a grand unified theory of physical and mental health.

Orgone experiment with Einstein
In 1940, Reich wrote to Albert Einstein saying he had a scientific discovery he wanted to discuss, and on January 13, 1941, he went to visit Einstein in Princeton. They talked for five hours, and Einstein agreed to test an orgone accumulator, which Reich had made out of a Faraday cage made of galvanized steel and insulated by wood and paper on the outside. Einstein agreed with Reich that if, as Reich suggested, an object's temperature could be raised without an apparent heating source, it would be "a bomb" in physics.
Reich supplied the device during their second meeting, and Einstein performed the experiment in his basement, which involved taking the temperature atop, inside, and near the device. He also stripped the device down to its Faraday cage to compare temperatures. Over the course of a week, in both cases, Einstein observed a rise in temperature, and confirmed Reich's finding in a published letter. Since Einstein could offer no explanation for the finding, Reich concluded that the heat was the result of a novel form of energy—orgone energy—that had accumulated inside the Faraday cage. However, one of Einstein's colleagues at Princeton, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld, interpreted the phenomenon as resulting from thermal convection currents, though he failed to provide an experimental demonstration of his contention. Einstein concurred that the experiment could be explained by convection.
Over the next three years of correspondence, Reich and Einstein disagreed on the interpretation of the experiment. The entire correspondence between Reich and Einstein was published by Reich's press as The Einstein Affair in 1953. In 2001, the neo-Reichians Paulo Correa and Alexandra Correa reproduced the experiment and introduced controls that they say rule out the possibility of convection as an explanation (see Aetherometry). A similar experiment was independently carried out by their supporter Eugene Mallove.


The Brady articles and the FDA
Reich with his wife Ilse and their son Peter, who wrote A Book of Dreams about his close relationship with his father, how they would go cloudbusting together, and his bewilderment when Reich died in prison when Peter was 13 years old.
In 1947, Reich was attacked in The New Republic and Harpers in a series of articles written by Mildred Brady, a freelance writer. Jim Martin writes that Michael Straight, a former member of the Cambridge Apostles and friend of some of those involved in the Soviet-Cambridge spy ring, was the publisher of the Brady articles, and that the attack on Reich may have been prompted by Reich's turning his back on Marxism (Martin, 2000). The articles triggered an investigation of Reich by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who believed he was peddling a quack cancer cure. Reich had already been investigated by the FBI because he was an immigrant with a communist background. According to an FBI press release dated February 25, 2000:
This German immigrant described himself as the Associate Professor of Medical Psychology, Director of the Orgone Institute, President and research physician of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, and discoverer of biological or life energy. A 1940 security investigation was begun to determine the extent of Reich's communist commitments. In 1947, a security investigation concluded that neither the Orgone Project nor any of its staff were engaged in subversive activities or were in violation of any statute within the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Though cleared of suspicion of subversive activities, the FDA investigation continued. On February 10, 1954, acting on allegations in the Brady articles, they filed a complaint seeking a permanent injunction under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to prevent interstate shipment of orgone-therapy equipment and literature. Reich refused to appear in court, apparently believing that no court was in a position to evaluate his work. On February 25, he wrote to Judge Clifford:
My factual position in the case as well as in the world of science of today does not permit me to enter the case against the Food and Drug Administration, since such action would, in my mind, imply admission of the authority of this special branch of the government to pass judgment on primordial, pre-atomic cosmic orgone energy."
Because of Reich's failure to appear, Judge Clifford granted the injunction on March 19, 1954. The ruling stated that all written material, including books, papers and pamphlets that mentioned "orgone energy" had to be destroyed, and that further copies of Reich's books could not be published, including his revised classics like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, unless the words "orgone energy" were deleted.


Imprisonment and death
In May 1956, Reich was arrested for technical violation of the injunction when an associate moved some orgone-therapy equipment across a state line, and Reich was charged with contempt of court. Once again, he refused to arrange a legal defense. He was brought in chains to the courthouse in Portland, Maine. Representing himself, he admitted to having violated the injunction and arranged for the judge to be sent copies of his books. He was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
Dr. Morton Herskowitz, a fellow psychiatrist and friend of Reich's wrote of the trial:
Because he viewed himself as a historical figure, he was making a historical point, and to make that point he had conducted the trial that way. If I had been in his shoes, I would have wanted to escape jail, I would have wanted to be free, etc. I would have conducted the trial on a strictly legal basis because the lawyers had said, "We can win this case for you. Their case is so weak, so when you let us do our thing we can get you off." But he wouldn't do it.
On June 5, 1956, FDA officials traveled to Orgonon, Reich's 200-acre (80-hectare) estate near Rangeley, Maine, where they destroyed the accumulators, and on June 26, burned many of his books. On August 25, 1956 and again on March 17, 1960, [15] the remaining six tons of his books, journals and papers were burned in the 25th Street public incinerator in New York's lower east side (Gansevoort incinerator). In March 1957, he was sent to Danbury Federal Prison, where a psychiatrist examined him, recording: "Paranoia manifested by delusions of grandiosity and persecution and ideas of reference."
Reich died in his sleep of heart failure on November 3, 1957 in the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, one day before he was due to apply for parole. He was buried in Orgonon. At his own instruction, his granite headstone said simply:
Wilhelm Reich
Born March 24, 1897Died November 3, 1957
Not one psychiatric or established scientific journal carried an obituary. Time Magazine noted:
Died. Wilhelm Reich, 60, once-famed psychoanalyst, associate, and follower of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Wilhelm Reich Foundation, lately better known for unorthodox sex and energy theories; of a heart attack in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, Pa; where he was serving a two-year term for distributing his invention, the "orgone energy accumulator" (in violation of the Food and Drug Act), a telephone-booth-size device which supposedly gathered energy from the atmosphere, and could cure, while the patient sat inside, common colds, cancer and impotence.


Status of Reich's work
As of 2005, the mainstream scientific community pays little attention to Reich's work, but he is popular in other areas, particularly psychotherapy. Nearly all of his publications have been reprinted, save for his research journals which are available only as photocopies via the Wilhelm Reich Museum. The first editions are not available: Reich continously amended his books throughout his life, and the owners of Reich's intellectual property actively forbid anything other than the latest revised versions to be reprinted. In the late 1960s, the publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux republished Reich's major works. Reich's earlier books, particularly The Mass Psychology of Fascism, are regarded as historically valuable.
William Steig, Norman Mailer, William S. Burroughs, and Orson Bean have all undergone Reich's orgone therapy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Reich's ideas on social and sexual freedom enjoyed a revival and most of his books were reprinted and widely read, including by the loosely defined "New Left" and students' movements in Europe and the U.S., though often with considerable distortion of his ideas.


His influence is strongly felt in psychotherapy. He was a forerunner of body-oriented, emotions-based psychotherapies, influencing Fritz Perls' Gestalt therapy and Arthur Janov's primal therapy. See also Neo-Reichian massage. His pupil Alexander Lowen, the founder of bioenergetic analysis, Charles Kelley, the founder of Radix Therapy, and James DeMeo of the Orgone Biophysical Research Laboratory ensure that his research receives widespread attention. Many practising psychoanalysts give credence to his theory of character, and his book Character Analysis is still used as a textbook. The American College of Orgonomy, originally led by Dr. Elsworth Baker, and the Institute for Orgonomic Science led by Dr. Morton Herskowitz, still use Reich's original therapeutic methods. Don Croft has invented a simple, modified cloudbuster that he claims converts dead orgone in the atmosphere into positive orgone in order to dispel chemtrails and to repel harmful alien spacecraft.
Reich's life and work continue to influence popular culture, with references to orgone and cloudbusting found in songs by Clutch, Hawkwind, Pop Will Eat Itself, Turbonegro and Patti Smith. Kate Bush's song, "Cloudbusting," describes Reich's arrest and incarceration through the eyes of Reich's son, Peter, who wrote his father's story in A Book of Dreams, published in 1973. Frank Zappa was also influenced by Reich's work. The philosopher and science fiction author Robert Anton Wilson wrote a play, Wilhelm Reich in Hell, based on his life. A film about Reich's teachings called W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism was made in 1971 by Yugoslavian director Dusan Makavejev.


and seated next to him would be ...Mr. Nietzsche.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844–August 25, 1900), a German philologist and philosopher, produced critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered around a basic question regarding the positive and negative attitudes of various systems of morality toward life. Beyond the unique themes dealt with in his works, Nietzsche's powerful literary style and subtle approach distinguish his writings. Although largely overlooked during his short yet astonishingly productive working life, which ended with a mental collapse in 1889, Nietzsche received recognition during the second half of the 20th century as a highly significant figure in modern philosophy.

Life
Youth (1844 – 1869)
Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in the small town of Röcken, near Leipzig, in the then Prussian province of Saxony. His name, given by his father, comes from King Frederick William IV of Prussia, who celebrated his 49th birthday on the day of Nietzsche's birth. Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig (1813 – 1849), a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler (1826 – 1897), married in 1843. His sister, Elisabeth, was born in 1846, followed by his brother Ludwig Joseph in 1848. After the death of their father in 1849 and the young brother in 1850, the family moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother and his father's two unmarried sisters under the (formal) guardianship of a local magistrate, Bernhard Dächsel. After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856 the family could afford their own house.


During this time the young Nietzsche attended a boys' school and later a private school, where he became friends with Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, both of whom came from respected families. In 1854 he began to attend the Domgymnasium in Naumburg, but after he showed particular talents in music and language, the internationally-recognized Schulpforta admitted him as a pupil, and there he continued his studies from 1858 to 1864. Here he became friends with Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. He also found time to work on poems and musical compositions. At Schulpforta Nietzsche received an important introduction to literature, particularly that of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and for the first time experienced a distance from his family life in a small-town Christian environment.
After graduation, in 1864, Nietzsche commenced studies in theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn. For a short time he and Deussen became members of the Burschenschaft Frankonia. After one semester and to the anger of his mother, he stopped his studies in theology, and concentrated on philology, with Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, whom he followed to the University of Leipzig the next year. There, he became close friends with fellow student Erwin Rohde. Nietzsche's first philological publications appeared soon after.
In 1865, Nietzsche became acquainted with the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, and he read Friedrich Albert Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus in 1866. He found both of these encounters stimulating: they encouraged him to expand his horizons beyond philology and to continue his schooling. Nietzsche also owned a copy of Philipp Mainländer's Die Philosophie der Erlösung, a work which, like Schopenhauer's philosophy, expressed pessimism. In 1867, Nietzsche signed up for one year of voluntary service with the Prussian artillery division in Naumburg. However, a bad riding-accident in March 1868 left him unfit for service. Consequently Nietzsche turned his attention to his studies again, completing them and first meeting with Richard Wagner later that year.
Professor at Basel (1869 – 1879)
Due in part to Ritschl's support, Nietzsche received an extraordinary offer to become professor of classical philology at the University of Basel before having completed his doctorate degree or certificate for teaching. During his philological work in Basel he discovered that the ancient poetic meter related only to the length of syllables, different from the modern, accentuating meter. After moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship: for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless. Nevertheless, he served on the Prussian side during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 as a medical orderly. In his short time in the military he experienced much, and witnessed the traumatic effects of battle. He also contracted diphtheria and dysentery. On returning to Basel in 1870, Nietzsche observed the establishment of the German Empire and the following era of Otto von Bismarck as an outsider and with a degree of skepticism regarding its genuineness. At the University, he delivered his inaugural lecture, "On Homer's Personality". Nietzsche also met Franz Overbeck, a professor of theology, who remained his friend throughout his life. The historian Jacob Burckhardt, whose lectures Nietzsche frequently attended, became another very influential colleague.
Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868, and (some time later) Wagner's wife Cosima. Nietzsche admired both greatly, and during his time at Basel frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in the Canton of Lucerne. The Wagners brought Nietzsche into their most intimate circle, and enjoyed the attention he gave to the beginning of the Festival House in Bayreuth. In 1870, he gave Cosima Wagner the manuscript of 'The Genesis of the Tragic Idea' as a birthday gift. In 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. However, his classical philological colleagues, including Ritschl, expressed little enthusiasm for the work, in which Nietzsche forewent a precise philological method to employ a style of philosophical speculation. In a polemic, Philology of the Future, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff dampened the book's reception and increased its notoriety. In response, Rohde (by now a professor in Kiel) and Wagner came to Nietzsche's defense. Nietzsche remarked freely about the isolation he felt within the philological community and attempted (unsuccessfully) to attain a position in philosophy at Basel.


Between 1873 and 1876, Nietzsche published separately four long essays: David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. (These four later appeared in a collected edition under the title, Untimely Meditations.) The four essays shared the orientation of a cultural critique, challenging the developing German culture along lines suggested by Schopenhauer and Wagner. Starting in 1873, Nietzsche also accumulated the notes later posthumously published as Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. During this time, in the circle of the Wagners, Nietzsche met Malwida von Meysenbug and Hans von Bülow, and also began a friendship with Paul Rée, who after 1876 influenced him in dismissing the pessimism in his early writings. However, his disappointment with the Bayreuth Festival of 1876, where the banality of the shows and the baseness of the public repelled him, caused him in the end to distance himself from Wagner.
With the publication of Human, All Too Human in 1878, a book of aphorisms on subjects ranging from metaphysics to morality and from religion to the sexes, Nietzsche's departure from the philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer became evident. Nietzsche's friendship with Deussen and Rohde cooled as well. Nietzsche in this time attempted to find a wife — to no avail. In 1879, after a significant decline in health, Nietzsche had to resign his position at Basel. (Since his childhood, various disruptive illnesses had plagued him — moments of shortsightedness practically to the degree of blindness, migraine headaches, and violent stomach attacks. The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions, which continued to affect him through his years at Basel, forcing him to take longer and longer holidays until regular work became no longer practical.)
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Free philosopher (1879 – 1888)
Driven by his illness to find more compatible climates, Nietzsche traveled frequently, and lived until 1889 as an independent author in different cities. He spent many summers in Sils Maria, near St. Moritz in Switzerland, and many winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin, and in the French city of Nice. He occasionally returned to Naumburg to visit his family, and especially during this time, he and his sister had repeated periods of conflict and reconciliation. He lived on his pension from Basel, but also received aid from friends. A past student of his, Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz), became a sort of private secretary to Nietzsche. To the end of his life, Gast and Overbeck remained consistently faithful friends. Malwida von Meysenbug remained like a motherly patron even outside the Wagner circle. Soon Nietzsche made contact with the music critic Carl Fuchs. Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book (or major section of a book) each year until 1888, his last year of writing, during which he completed five. In 1879, Nietzsche published Mixed Opinions and Maxims, which followed the aphoristic form of Human, All Too Human. The following year, he published The Wanderer and His Shadow. Both appeared as the second part of the second edition of Human, All-Too-Human.

Lou Salomé, Paul Rée and Nietzsche, 1882.
In 1881 Nietzsche published Daybreak: Reflections on Moral Prejudices, and in 1882 the first part of The Gay Science. That year he also met Lou Salomé through Malwida von Meysenbug and Paul Rée. Nietzsche and Salomé spent the summer together in Tautenburg in Thuringia, often with Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth as chaperone. However, Nietzsche regarded Salomé less as an equal partner than as a gifted student. He fell in love with her and pursued her despite their mutual friend Rée. When he asked to marry her, Salomé refused. Nietzsche's relationship with Rée and Salomé broke up in the winter of 1882/1883, partially due to intrigues conducted by his sister Elisabeth. (Lou Salomé eventually came to correspond with Sigmund Freud, introducing him to Nietzsche's thought.) In the face of renewed fits of illness, in near isolation after a falling-out with his mother and sister regarding Salomé, and plagued by suicidal thoughts, Nietzsche fled to Rapallo, where in only ten days he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
After severing philosophical ties to Schopenhauer and social ties to Wagner, Nietzsche had few remaining friends. Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and his readers received it only to the degree prescribed by politeness. Nietzsche recognized this and maintained his solitude, even though he often complained about it. He gave up his short-lived plan to become a poet in public, and was troubled by concerns about his publications. His books were as good as unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra, and only a fraction of these were distributed among close friends.
In 1886 Nietzsche printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense. With this book and with the appearance in 1886–1887 of second editions of his earlier works (The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, and The Gay Science), he saw his work completed for the time and hoped that soon a readership would develop. In fact, interest in Nietzsche's thought did increase at this time, even if rather slowly and hardly perceived by him. During these years Nietzsche met Meta von Salis, Carl Spitteler, and also Gottfried Keller. In 1886, his sister Elisabeth married the anti-Semite Bernhard Förster and traveled to Paraguay to found a "Germanic" colony, a plan to which Nietzsche responded with laughter. Through correspondence, Nietzsche's relationship with Elisabeth continued on the path of conflict and reconciliation, but she would not see him again in person until after his collapse. He continued to have frequent and painful attacks of illness, which made prolonged work impossible. In 1887 Nietzsche quickly wrote the polemic On the Genealogy of Morals. He also exchanged letters with Hippolyte Taine, and then also with Georg Brandes, whom both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche inspired. Brandes, who had started to teach the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard in the 1870s, wrote to Nietzsche asking him to read Kierkegaard, to which Nietzsche replied that he would. In the beginning of 1888, Brandes delivered one of the first lectures on Nietzsche's philosophy in Copenhagen.
In the same year, Nietzsche wrote five books, based on his voluminous notes for the long-planned work, The Will to Power. His health seemed to improve, and he spent the summer in high spirits. In the fall of 1888 his writings and letters began to reveal an overestimation of his status and 'fate'. He overestimated the increasing response to his writings, above all, for the recent polemic, The Case of Wagner. On his 44th birthday, after completing The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo, which presents itself to his readers in order that they "[h]ear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else." (Preface, sec. 1, tr. Walter Kaufmann) In December, Nietzsche began a correspondence with August Strindberg, and thought that, short of an international breakthrough, he would attempt to buy back his older writings from the publisher and have them translated into other European languages. Moreover, he planned the publication of the compilation Nietzsche Contra Wagner and of the poems Dionysian Dithyrambs.

Mental breakdown and death (1889 – 1900)
On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche had a mental collapse. That day two Turinese policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin. What actually happened remains unknown. The often-repeated (and apocryphal) tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around the horse’s neck to protect it, and collapsed to the ground. In the following few days, he sent short writings to a number of friends, including Cosima Wagner and Jacob Burckhardt, which showed signs of a breakdown. To his former colleague Burckhardt he wrote: 'I have had Caiphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.' (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann)
On January 6, 1889, Burckhardt showed the letter he had received from Nietzsche to Overbeck. The following day Overbeck received a similarly revealing letter, and decided Nietzsche must be brought back to Basel. Overbeck traveled to Turin and brought Nietzsche to a psychiatric clinic in Basel. By that time, Nietzsche appeared fully in the grip of insanity, and his mother Franziska decided to transfer him to a clinic in Jena under the direction of Otto Binswanger. From November 1889 to February 1890, Julius Langbehn attempted to cure Nietzsche, claiming that the doctors' methods were ineffective to cure Nietzsche's condition. Langbehn assumed greater and greater control of Nietzsche until his secrecy discredited him. In March 1890 Franziska removed Nietzsche from the clinic, and in May 1890 brought him to her home in Naumburg. During this process, Overbeck and Gast contemplated what to do with Nietzsche's unpublished works. In January 1889 they proceeded with the planned release of The Twilight of the Idols, by that time already printed and bound. In February, they ordered a 50-copy private edition of Nietzsche Contra Wagner, but the publisher C. G. Naumann secretly printed 100. Overbeck and Gast decided to withhold publishing Der Antichrist and Ecce Homo

due to their more radical content. Nietzsche's reception and recognition enjoyed their first surge.
In 1893, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth returned from Paraguay after the suicide of her husband. She read and studied Nietzsche's works, and piece by piece took control of them and of their publication. Overbeck eventually sufferred dismissal, and Gast finally co-operated. After the death of Franziska in 1897 Nietzsche lived in Weimar, where Elisabeth cared for him and allowed people, including Rudolf Steiner, to visit her uncommunicative brother.
Early commentators frequently diagnosed a syphilitic infection as the cause of the breakdown; however, some of Nietzsche's symptoms seem inconsistent with typical cases of syphilis. Some have diagnosed a form of brain cancer. Others suggest that Nietzsche experienced a mystical awakening, similar to the mast-state studied by Meher Baba. While most commentators regard Nietzsche's breakdown as unrelated to his philosophy, some, including Georges Bataille and René Girard, argue for considering his breakdown as a symptom of a psychological maladjustment brought on by his philosophy.
On August 25, 1900 Nietzsche died after contracting pneumonia. At the wish of Elisabeth, he was buried beside his father at the church in Röcken. His friend, Gast, gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!" (Note that Nietzsche had pointed out in Ecce Homo how he did not wish to be called "holy".)
Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche compiled The Will to Power from notes he had written; and published it posthumously. (She had married an anti-Semitic agitator, and her brother had opposed her marriage from the beginning because he did not share her husband's anti-Semitic views.) Since his sister arranged the book, the general consensus holds that it does not reflect Nietzsche's intent. Indeed, Mazzino Montinari, the editor of Nietzsche's Nachlass, called it a forgery. The content of The Will to Power has given rise to accusations that Nietzsche shared views similar to those of the Nazis.


Key concepts
In his preface to The Portable Nietzsche, the prominent translator of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann, expressed the view that, although Nietzsche's ideas may often seem contradictory, a thorough understanding of Nietzsche's free-thinking nature may also yield an explanation of his paradoxes. In addition to this, perspectivism intimates a thesis regarding the seeming contradictions in Nietzsche's writings, suggesting that Nietzsche used multiple viewpoints in his work as a means of challenging his reader to consider various approaches toward an issue. The thesis, however, does not claim that Nietzsche himself regarded all ideas as equally valid. Nietzsche's disagreements with many other philosophers, such as Kant, Plato, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza, populate his texts. Whether one views the conflicting elements in his writings as intentional or not, his various ideas continue to have influence.
Nihilism and God is dead
Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for meaning. He diagnosed nihilism as a latent presence within the very foundations of European culture, and saw it as a necessary and approaching destiny. The religious worldview had already suffered a number of challenges from contrary perspectives grounded in philosophical skepticism, and in modern science's evolutionary and heliocentric theory. Nietzsche saw this intellectual condition as a new challenge to European culture, which had extended itself beyond a sort of point-of-no-return. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead", which first appeared in his work in section 108 of The Gay Science, again in section 125 with the parable of "The Madman", and even more famously in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The statement, typically placed in quotation marks, accentuated the crisis that Nietzsche argued that Western culture must face and transcend in the wake of the irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations, moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.

Master morality and slave morality
Nietzsche argued that two types of morality existed: a master morality that springs actively from the 'noble man', and a slave morality that develops reactively within the weak man. These two moralities do not present simple inversions of one another, they form two different value systems; master morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'bad' whereas slave morality fits actions into a scale of 'good' or 'evil'.

Christianity as an institution and Jesus
In his book the Anti-Christ, Nietzsche fights against how Christianity has become an ideology set forth by institutions like churches, and how churches have failed to represent the life of Jesus. Nietzsche finds it important to distinguish between the religion of Christianity and the person of Jesus. Nietzsche attacked Christian religion as represented by churches and institutions for what he called its "transvaluation" of healthy instinctive values. Transvaluation consists of the process by which one can view the meaning of a concept or ideology from a "higher" context. Nietzsche went beyond agnostic and atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, who simply regarded Christianity as untrue. He claimed that the Apostle Paul may have deliberately propagated Christianity as a subversive religion (a "psychological warfare weapon") within the Roman Empire as a form of covert revenge for the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and of the Second Temple in 70 AD during the Jewish War of 66 - 73 AD. Nietzsche contrasts the Christians with Jesus, whom he regarded as a unique individual, and argues he established his own moral evaluations. As such, Jesus represents a kind of step towards his ideation of the overman. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche claims that, unlike the overman, who embraces life, Jesus denied reality in favor of his "kingdom of God". Jesus's refusal to defend himself, and subsequent death, logically followed from this total disengagement. Nietzsche goes further to analyze the history of Christianity, finding it has progressively distorted the teachings of Jesus more and more. He criticizes the early Christians for turning Jesus into a martyr and Jesus's life into the story of the redemption of mankind in order to dominate the masses; and finds the Apostles cowardly, vulgar, and resentful. He argues that successive generations further misunderstood the life of Jesus as the influence of Christianity grew. By the 19th century, Nietzsche concludes, Christianity had become so worldly as to parody itself — a total inversion of a worldview which was, in the beginning, nihilistic, thus implying the "death of God".

Amor fati and the eternal recurrence
Nietzsche encountered the idea of the eternal recurrence in the works of Heinrich Heine, who speculated that one day a person would be born with the same thought-processes as himself, and that the same applied to every other individual. Nietzsche expanded on this thought to form his theory, which he put forth in The Gay Science and developed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In Nietzsche's reading of Schopenhauer, he came across the idea of eternal recurrence. Schopenhauer claimed that a person who unconditionally affirms life would do so even if everything that has happened were to happen again repeatedly. On a few occasions in his notebooks, Nietzsche discusses the possibility of the Eternal Recurrence as cosmological truth (see Arthur Danto, Nietzsche as Philosopher for a detailed analysis of these efforts), but in the works he prepared for publication, he treats it as the ultimate method of life-affirmation. According to Nietzsche, it would require a sincere Amor Fati (Love of Fate), not simply to endure, but to wish for the eternal recurrence of all events exactly as they occurred — all of the pain and joy, the embarrassment and glory. Nietzsche calls the idea "horrifying and paralyzing", and he also characterizes the burden of this idea as the "heaviest weight" imaginable (das schwerste Gewicht). The wish for the eternal return of all events would mark the ultimate affirmation of life. According to a few interpreters, the eternal return represents more than merely an intellectual concept or challenge: it resembles a koan, or a psychological device that occupies one's entire consciousness, stimulating a transformation of consciousness known as metanoia.
Nehamas wrote in Nietzsche: Life as Literature of three ways of seeing the eternal recurrence: "(A) My life will recur in exactly identical fashion." This expresses a totally fatalistic approach to the idea. "(B) My life may recur in exactly identical fashion." This second view conditionally asserts cosmology, but fails to capture what Nietzsche refers to in The Gay Science, 341. Finally, "(C) If my life were to recur, then it could recur only in identical fashion." Nehemas shows that this interpretation exists totally independently of physics and does not presuppose the truth of cosmology. Nehamas' draws the conclusion that if individuals constitute themselves through their actions , then they can only maintain themselves in their current state by living in a reoccurrence of past actions.
Übermensch

Some controversy exists over who or what Nietzsche considered the Übermensch (in English, "overman" or "superman") to be or to represent. Some evidence suggests that Nietzsche remained skeptical about individual identity and the notion of the subject, but whether there was a concrete example of the Übermensch remains unclear in certain respects. For instance, the interpretation of Nietzsche as the "Nazi Philosopher" (an interpretation spearheaded mainly by his sister,[3]) has come for the English-speaking world to suggest the Übermensch as Hitler- or Mussolini-like, but modern interpretations of Nietzsche, especially after the work of Walter Kaufmann, suggest that Nietzsche's vision of the overman aligns more with the concept of a Renaissance type of man, similar to and indeed inspired by the creative figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.


Place in contemporary ethical theory
Nietzsche's work addresses ethics from several perspectives: meta-ethics, normative ethics, and descriptive ethics.
In the field of meta-ethics, one can perhaps most usefully classify Nietzsche as a moral skeptic; meaning that he claims that all ethical statements are false, because any kind of correspondence between ethical statements and "moral facts" remains illusory. (This forms part of a more general claim that no universally true fact exists, roughly because none of them more than "appear" to correspond to reality). Instead, ethical statements (like all statements) remain mere "interpretations."
Sometimes Nietzsche may seem to have very definite opinions on what he regards as moral or as immoral. Note, however, that one can explain Nietzsche's moral opinions without attributing to him the claim of their truth. For Nietzsche, after all, we needn't disregard a statement merely because it expresses something false. On the contrary, he depicts falsehood as essential for "life". Interestingly enough, he mentions a "dishonest lie", (discussing Wagner in The Case of Wagner) as opposed to an "honest" one, recommending further to consult Plato with regards to the latter, which should give some idea of the layers of paradox in his work.
In the juncture between normative ethics and descriptive ethics, Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality" and "slave morality". Although he recognizes that not everyone holds either scheme in a clearly delineated fashion without some syncretism, he presents them in contrast to one another. Some of the contrasts in master vs. slave morality include:
_ "good" and "bad" interpretations vs. "good" and "evil" interpretations
_ "aristocratic" vs. "part of the 'herd'"
_ determines values independently of predetermined foundations (nature) vs. determines values on predetermined, unquestioned foundations (Christianity).
Nietzsche elaborated these ideas in his book On the Genealogy of Morals, in which he also introduced the key concept of ressentiment as the basis for the slave morality. Nietzsche's primarily negative assessment of the ethical and moralistic teachings of the world's monotheistic religions followed from his earlier considerations of the questions of God and morality in the works The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. These considerations led Nietzsche to the idea of eternal recurrence and to the (in)famous phrase, "God is dead". Nietzsche primarily meant that, for all practical purposes, his contemporaries lived as if God were dead, though they had not yet recognized it. Nietzsche believed this "death" had already started to undermine the foundations of morality and would lead to moral relativism and moral nihilism. As a response to the dangers of these trends he believed in re-evaluating the foundations of morality to better understand the origins and motives underlying them, so that individuals might decide for themselves whether to regard a moral value as born of an outdated or misguided cultural imposition or as something they wish to hold true.
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Social and political views
Main article: Nietzsche's social and political views
While readers may discern a political tone in Nietzsche's writings, his work does not in any sense propose or outline a "political project". The man who stated that "[t]he will to a system is a lack of integrity" advocated consistently in never devising or advocating a specific system of governance, enquiry, or ethics — just as, as an advocate of individual struggle and self-realization, he never concerned himself with mass movements or with the organization of groups and political parties. In this sense, one could almost call Nietzsche an anti-political thinker. Walter Kaufmann put forward the view that the powerful individualism expressed in his writings would cause disaster if introduced to the public realm of politics. Later writers, led by the French intellectual Left, have proposed ways of using Nietzschean theory in what has become known as the "politics of difference" — particularly in formulating theories of political resistance and sexual and moral difference.
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Nietzsche's influence and reception
Nietzsche's reception has proved a rather confused and complex affair. Many Germans eventually discovered his appeals for greater individualism and personality development in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but responded to those appeals in diverging ways. He had some following among left-wing Germans in the 1890s; in 1894–95, German conservatives wanted to ban his work as subversive. By the First World War, however, he had acquired a reputation as a source of right-wing German militarism. The Dreyfus Affair (ca 1894 - 1906) provides another example of his reception: the French anti-semitic Right labelled the Jewish and Leftist intellectuals who defended Alfred Dreyfus as "Nietzscheans".
During the interbellum, certain Nazis employed a highly selective reading of Nietzsche's work to advance their ideology, notably Alfred Baeumler in his reading of The Will to Power. The era of Nazi rule (1933 – 1945) saw Nietzsche's writings widely studied in German (and, after 1938, Austrian) schools and universities. The Nazis viewed Nietzsche as one of their "founding fathers". Although there exist few — if any — similarities between Nietzsche's views and Nazism (see political views), phrases like "the will to power" became common in Nazi circles. The wide popularity of Nietzsche among Nazis stemmed in part from the endeavors of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the editor of Nietzsche's work after his 1889 breakdown, and an eventual Nazi sympathizer. Nietzsche himself thoroughly disapproved of his sister's anti-Semitic views; in a letter to her he wrote:

You have committed one of the greatest stupidities—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. … It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well) is as pronounced as possible.


Moreover, Mazzino Montinari, while editing Nietzsche's posthumous works in the 1960s, found that Förster-Nietzsche, while editing the posthumous fragments making up The Will to Power, had cut extracts, changed their order, and added titles of her own invention [1].
The psychologist Carl Jung recognized Nietzsche's importance early on: he held a seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra in 1934[3]. According to Ernest Jones, biographer and personal acquaintance of Sigmund Freud, Freud frequently referred to Nietzsche as having "more penetrating knowledge of himself than any man who ever lived or was likely to live" (Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud). Yet Jones also reports that Freud emphatically denied that Nietzsche's writings influenced his own psychological discoveries. Moreover, Freud took no interest in philosophy while a medical student, forming his opinion about Nietzsche later in life.
Early twentieth-century thinkers influenced by Nietzsche include: philosophers Georg Brandes, Henri Bergson, Martin Buber, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Emil Cioran, Aleister Crowley, and Muhammad Iqbal; sociologist Max Weber; theologian Paul Tillich; novelists Hermann Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, and D. H. Lawrence; psychologists Alfred Adler, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and Rollo May; popular philosopher Ayn Rand; poets Rainer Maria Rilke, and William Butler Yeats; playwrights George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill; and author Menno ter Braak. American writer H.L. Mencken avidly read and translated Nietzsche's works and has gained the soubriquet "the American Nietzsche".
In 1936 Martin Heidegger lectured on the "Will to Power as a Work of Art"; he later published four large volumes of lectures on Nietzsche. Thomas Mann's essays mention Nietzsche with respect. One of the characters in Mann's 1947 novel Doktor Faustus represents Nietzsche fictionally. In 1938 the German existentialist Karl Jaspers wrote the following about the influence of Nietzsche and the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:

The contemporary philosophical situation is determined by the fact that two philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who did not count in their times and, for a long time, remained without influence in the history of philosophy, have continually grown in significance. Philosophers after Hegel have increasingly returned to face them, and they stand today unquestioned as the authentically great thinkers of their age. ... The effect of both is immeasurably great, even greater in general thinking than in technical philosophy ...


The appropriation of Nietzsche's work by the Nazis, combined with the rise of analytic philosophy, ensured that British and American academic philosophers would almost completely ignore him until at least 1950. Even George Santayana, an American philosopher whose life and work betray some similarity to Nietzsche's, dismissed Nietzsche in his 1916 Egotism in German Philosophy as a "prophet of Romanticism". Analytic philosophers, if they mentioned Nietzsche at all, characterized him as a literary figure rather than as a philosopher. Nietzsche's present stature in the English-speaking world owes much to the exegetical writings and improved Nietzsche translations by the German-American philosopher Walter Kaufmann, beginning with the 1950 publication of the first edition of his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.

It is evident at once that Nietzsche is far superior to Kant and Hegel as a stylist; but it also seems that as a philosopher he represents a sharp decline—and men have not been lacking who have not considered him a philosopher at all—because he had no “system.” Yet this argument is hardly cogent. Schelling and Hegel, Spinoza and Aquinas had their systems; in Kant's and Plato's case the word is far less applicable; and of the many important philosophers who very definitely did not have systems one need only mention Socrates and many of the pre-Socratics. Not only can one defend Nietzsche on this score—how many philosophers today have systems?—but one must add that he had strong philosophic reasons for not having a system.

Nietzsche's influence on continental philosophy increased dramatically after the second World War, especially among the French intellectual Left and post-structuralists. Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Michel Foucault all owe a heavy debt to Nietzsche. Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski wrote monographs drawing new attention to his work, and a 1972 conference at Cérisy-la-Salle ranks as the most important event in France for a generation's reception of Nietzsche.
Harold Bloom has described Nietzsche as "Emerson's belated rival". Bloom's theory of the "anxiety of influence" betrays a Nietzschean influence. Others influenced by Nietzsche include "Death of God" theologian Thomas Altizer; novelists Nikos Kazantzakis, Mikhail Artsybashev, and Lu Xun; musician Jim Morrison; Anton LaVey; the Church of Satan; and Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Ha! Validation. Big meeting today, all went well, up until the final 15 mins when i said something, and it was totally misinterpreted by the control freak, fuck she hammered into me like a frenzied shark high on the scent of blood, it was buisness as usual for me as this is what she does, never listens, always defensive, intimidated everytime i speak. anyway what made it different was it was witnessed by a co worker who rang me up later and couldn't believe it. i was just glad that finally some one saw what i have to deal with, sometimes when i talk about everyday experiences with people, people think i am nuts, paranoid, but i am always reminded by the fantastic Burroughs quote, 'a paranoid is just some one with all the facts.' there's a difference when you're superconcious, you're sensitive enough to tune in to peoples responses and reactions, you can see the thought bubbles over their heads and the fear in their eyes, especially if they know you are smart.
Actually while we are on the subject of old Bill, Burroughs is my fave writer, there can be no doubt he was eons ahead of his time, not just a writer, a Magickian, his word experiments were pure magick and what a great story teller, yeah i always get pulled up by people becuase they are cought up in the political correctness of it all, ohh he hated women, ooh he used drugs, ohhh, he was gay, yeah well he was no saint but then neither am i. and at the end of the day he was a great writer and i don't care what he did in his personal life. the fact he took drugs and was gay just makes him more intresting. fuck man the guy was married to a woman he loved, his life was never the same after he shot her, Burroughs was the fucking real deal, he wrote becuase he was a writer, he had to feed the need and anyone who knows anything about writing knows what that's like. Yeah it took fucking guts and a strong constitution to go trecking down to south america and search for yage (dmt) in the late 40's early 50's, yeah that cat was no pussy, he was twice the man old Hemingway was, fucked around with all the drugs, travel and sex any extreme Psychonaut could and then wrote it all up. Yeah Burroughs was the first to really get a grip on the meme machine, he used words as technology and techology as words, he travelled in time, fucked with the system, he was a fractal freak, some of those paintings are amazing, the very idea that you can shoot a canvas with a shotgun filled with paint, fuck i miss Burroughs but fortunatly he left a body of work that can be re read and re read and each time it's read its like something new. And you know what i love about Burroughs, he was a serious dude but he was a very funny man. Heres a snippet for your reading pleasure, its a bit long and i suggest you print it out, grab a coffee and enjoy.



The Mayan Caper
(Excerpt from The Soft Machine)
William S. Burroughs

A Russian scientist has said: "We will travel not only in space but in time as well" — I have just returned from a thousand-year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw — And to tell you how such time trips are made — It is a precise operation — It is difficult — It is dangerous — It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply — But it belongs to anyone who has the courage and know-how to enter — It belongs to you —

I started my trip in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites — When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know — In fact you see it all on a subliminal level — Now when I fold today's paper in with yesterday's paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday's paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday — I did this eight hours a day for three months — I went back as far as the papers went — I dug out old magazines and forgotten novels and letters — I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos —

The next step was carried out in a film studio — I learned to talk and think backward on all levels — This was done by running film and sound track backward — For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger — First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motion — The same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm — (It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio — My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment —

I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists — The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatan, British Honduras, and Guatemala — I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report — The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted in the codices as a God pouring water on the earth — The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end — The absolute power of the priests, who formed about 2 percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar — The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten — Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals — Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type — They had no plows. Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a strata of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day — Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing — The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start — A few days' miscalculation and the year's crop is lost —

The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated — It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar — There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa — Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken — More routine work — I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English — I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts — the next step was to find a "vessel" — We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatan — This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans — (The physical type has undergone little alteration) — He was illiterate — He had a history of epilepsy — He was what mediums call a "sensitive" — For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine — (I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point — Unlike Aztec it is an easy language.) It was time now for "the transfer operation" — "I" was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan — The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it — I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate — "He is the best transfer artist in the industry" I was told "For a price."

We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo — He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film — I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another — He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body — The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy's back from the base of the spine to the neck — The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter — The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with "the hanging technique" — The patient's neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body — This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous — For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion — Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly — His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan's naked body:

"This subject is riddled with parasites — If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues — (nameless assholes) — you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites — My technique is quite different — I operate with molds — Your body will remain here intact in deepfreeze — On your return, if you do return, you can have it back." He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life — "You could do with a stomach tuck, young man — But one thing at a time — The transfer operation will take some weeks — And I warn you it will be expensive."

I told him that cost was no object — The News was behind me all the way — He nodded briefly: "Come back at this time tomorrow." When we returned to the doctor's office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor's cool removed grey eyes — "This is my photographer — I will make my molds from his negatives." The photographer told me his name was Jiminez — ("Just call me 'Jimmy the Take'") — We followed the "Take" to a studio in the same building equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops — He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies — Three times a week we went to the doctor's office — He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal — And ran the clicking box up and down our spines — Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula — The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and orgasm and several times I found myself vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel — The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skills, was still dangerous enough.

At the end of three weeks he indicated the time has come to operate — He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights — With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum — Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns — From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fitting together a composite being — I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain —

The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves — He also gave me another drug which, if injected into a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night. "Don't let the sun come up on you or it's curtains — zero eaten by crab — And now there is the matter of my fee."

I handed him a brief case of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky.

The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help — I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot — I took a plane to Mérida where I set about contacting a "broker" who could put me in touch with a "time guide" — Most of these so-called "brokers" are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception — I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements — I found this "broker" in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints — I produced a bottle of aguardiente and the broker immediately threw down a plastic cup of the raw spirit and sat there swaying back and forth on a stool while I explained my business — He indicated that what I wanted was extremely difficult — Also dangerous and illegal — He could get into trouble — Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police — He would have to think about it — He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor — The following day I called again — He had thought it over and perhaps — In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with aguardiente — And he poured another glass of spirits slopping full — Extremely dissatisfied with the way things were going I left — As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me.

"Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes? — Muy know good one — Him," he gestured back toward the hut. "No good borracho son bitch bastard — Take mucho dinero — No do nothing — You come with me, Meester."

Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond — A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted — The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette — He passed it around and we all smoked — The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect — How soon? — He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white — The glasses were marked with symbols — He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words — He pointed to a symbol on the green glass, "Then — One hour" — He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot — As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy — I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons — A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room — The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit — I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers — The broker opened the boy's shirt and pulled off his pants — The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm — A green light filled the room and burned through the boy's flesh — Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan — The words curled out his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils — I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel — The broker smiled and held out a hand — I passed over his fee — The boy was putting on his clothes — He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut — We were walking along a jungle hut the boy ahead his whole body alert and twitching like a dog — We walked many hours and it was dawn when we came to a clearing where I could see a number of workers with sharp sticks and gourds of seed planting corn — The boy touched my shoulder and disappeared up the path in jungle dawn mist —

As I stepped forward into the clearing and addressed one of the workers, I felt the crushing weight of evil insect control forcing my thoughts and feelings into prearranged molds, squeezing my spirit in a soft invisible vise — The worker looked at me with dead eyes empty of curiosity or welcome and silently handed me a planting stick — It was not unusual for strangers to wander in out of the jungle since the whole area was ravaged by soil exhaustion — So my presence occasioned no comment — I worked until sundown — I was assigned to a hut by an overseer who carried a carved stick and wore an elaborate headdress indicating his rank — I lay down in the hammock and immediately felt stabbing probes of telepathic interrogation — I turned on the thoughts of a half-witted young Indian — After some hours the invisible presence withdrew — I had passed the first test —

During the months that followed I worked in the fields — The monotony of this existence made my disguise as a mental defective quite easy — I learned that one could be transferred from field work to rock carving the stellae after a long apprenticeship and only after the priests were satisfied that any thought of resistance was forever extinguished — I decided to retain the anonymous status of a field worker and keep as far as possible out of notice —

A continuous round of festivals occupied our evenings and holidays — On these occasions the priests appeared in elaborate costumes, often disguised as centipedes or lobsters — Sacrifices were rare, but I witnessed one revolting ceremony in which a young captive was tied to a stake and the priests tore his sex off with white-hot copper claws — I learned also something of the horrible punishments meted out to anyone who dared challenge or even think of challenging the controllers: Death in the Ovens: The violator was placed in a construction of interlocking copper grills — The grills were then heated to white heat and slowly closed on his body. Death In Centipede: The "criminal" was strapped to a couch and eaten alive by giant centipedes — These executions were carried out secretly in rooms under the temple.

I made recordings of the festivals and the continuous music like a shrill insect frequency that followed the workers all day in the fields — However, I knew that to play these recordings would invite immediate detection — I needed not only the sound track of control but the image track as well before I could take definitive action — I have explained that the Mayan control system depends on the calendar and the codices which contain symbols representing all states of thought and feeling possible to human animals living under such limited circumstances — These are the instruments with which they rotate and control units of thought — I found out also that the priests themselves do not understand exactly how the system works and that I undoubtedly knew more about it than they did as a result of my intensive training and studies — The technicians who had devised the control system had died out and the present line of priests were in the position of some one who knows what buttons to push in order to set a machine in motion, but would have no idea how to fix that machine if it broke down, or to construct another if the machine were destroyed — If I could gain access to the codices and mix the sound and image track the priests would go on pressing the old buttons with unexpected results — In order to accomplish the purpose I prostituted myself to one of the priests — (Most distasteful thing I ever stood still for) — During the sex act he metamorphosed himself into a green crab from the waist up, retaining human legs and genitals that secreted a caustic erogenous slime, while a horrible stench filled the hut — I was able to endure these horrible encounters by promising myself the pleasure of killing this disgusting monster when the time came — And my reputation as an idiot was by now so well established that I escaped all but the most routine control measures —

The priest had me transferred to janitor work in the temple where I witnessed some executions and saw the prisoners torn body and soul into writhing insect fragments by the ovens, and learned that the giant centipedes were born in the ovens from these mutilated screaming fragments — It was time to act — Using the drug the doctor had given me, I took over the priest's body, gained access to the room where the codices were kept, and photographed the books — Equipped now with sound and image track of the control machine I was in position to dismantle it — I had only to mix the order of recordings and the order of images and the changed order would be picked up and fed back into the machine — I had recordings of all agricultural operations, cutting and burning brush etc. — I now correlated the recordings of burning brush with the image track of this operation, and shuffled the time so that the order to burn came late and a year's crop was lost — Famine weakening control lines, I cut radio static into the control music and festival recordings together with sound and image track rebellion.

"Cut word lines — Cut music lines — Smash the control images — Smash the control machine — Burn the books — Kill the priests — Kill! Kill! Kill! — "

Inexorably as the machine had controlled thought feeling and sensory impressions of the workers, the machine now gave the order to dismantle itself and kill the priests — I had the satisfaction of seeing the overseer pegged out in the field, his intestines perforated with hot planting sticks and crammed with corn — I broke out my camera gun and rushed the temple — This weapon takes and vibrates image to radio static — You see the priests were nothing but word and image, an old film rolling on and on with dead actors — Priests and temple guards went up in silver smoke as I blasted my way into the control room and burned the codices — Earthquake tremors under my feet I got out of there fast, blocks of limestone raining all around me — A great weight fell from the sky, winds of the earth whipping palm trees to the ground — Tidal waves rolled over the Mayan control calendar.

"anything you need to control you have a problem with."
robert downey junior on oprah

a friend sent me this quote, i kinda like it, it makes me think and question everything, and that's a good thing, healthy and possibly the only cure against complacency. i'd like to know about the context in which it was said, what oprah said in response ect, its a point which could stimulate a very interesting discussion. i mean although i agree with it and the philosophy behind it, i also think that there's nothing wrong with having a problem, i mean if you didn't try to fill your fridge with milk you would have nothing to pour over your cereal, that's a problem. if one the other hand he's referring to some sort of quasi mystical concept then he's on a pretty interesting path. the idea of giving up control has only been attempted by the very foolish or the very brave, and its only the halfway point of a process, i'd be interested to know peoples personal experiences of this, for example one that springs to mind was working with a young aggressive sex offender who attacked me with a carving knife, he just stormed out from the kitchen towards me with the knife raised at my chest, he was screaming and filled with rage, i am not sure how or why but i just went straight into the death posture, head up, arms out and smiled, i felt like the sun and the knife stopped an inch above my chest, possibly less and the young man just fell down upon his knees sobbing. there are plenty of moments i have surrendered, some spontaneously some planned, some last seconds, some years. Maybe Downey's just stating the fact. In which case, who says, 'drugs are bad for you?'

Check out my pics of the furs uploaded on my entry 6th of the 5th, suitably Psychadelic i hope.

Thursday July 6, 2006 for sydney australia, nsw in Standard Time
Thursday is ruled by the planet Jupiter
Remember: Hours connected by a path, the flow is from the hour into the day.

Day Hours
7:01 AM - 7:51 AM Jupiter
7:51 AM - 8:41 AM Mars ______spiritual force and strength
8:41 AM - 9:30 AM Sun ______Excessive self-admonition or over cautiousness
9:30 AM - 10:20 AM Venus ______Ill Fortune, Hardship, although not as bad as it appears
10:20 AM - 11:10 AM Mercury
11:10 AM - 12:00 PM Moon
12:00 PM - 12:50 PM Saturn
0:00 PM - 12:050 PM Saturn
12:50 PM - 1:40 PM Jupiter
1:40 PM - 2:30 PM Mars ______spiritual force and strength
2:30 PM - 3:19 PM Sun ______Excessive self-admonition or over cautiousness
3:19 PM - 4:09 PM Venus ______Ill Fortune, Hardship, although not as bad as it appears
4:09 PM - 4:59 PM Mercury

Night Hours
4:59 PM - 6:09 PM Moon
6:09 PM - 7:19 PM Saturn
7:19 PM - 8:30 PM Jupiter
8:30 PM - 9:40 PM Mars ______spiritual force and strength
9:40 PM - 10:50 PM Sun ______Excessive self-admonition or over cautiousness
10:50 PM - 12:00 AM Venus ______Ill Fortune, Hardship, although not as bad as it appears
12:00 AM - 1:10 AM Mercury
1:10 AM - 2:20 AM Moon
2:20 AM - 3:30 AM Saturn
3:30 AM - 4:41 AM Jupiter
4:41 AM - 5:51 AM Mars ______spiritual force and strength
5:51 AM - 7:01 AM Sun ______Excessive self-admonition or over cautiousness

mmm, not quite sure of what to make of Lisiewski's book, it seems pretty reasonable, if you have the belief that rocks in space can influence your behavior and circumstance, i'll keep you posted on how it's working out for me, i think that if one takes on any investigative approach that has any value in esoteric terms the scientific method should be used, that is use it over a period of time and see if you get results that can be repeated. as for yesterday, yeah it was not the best of days and i think i was somewhat influenced by the prediction, again its hard to tell what comes first. there's a whole other part that lisiewski uses based on paths and corresponding tarot cards, it's a well thought out system and I can't say it has no merit yet, but personally i wish that there was an easier way that did not involve so much calculation, time zones etc. still i'm being slightly lazy. all systems require work = effort in this level of reality, unless you're totally quantic which i skip in and out of at an increasingly unpredictable rate.
bumped in to an old friend of mine in a bookshop, madame lash, we had a coffee together and i recommended her a sci fi book hyperion by dan simmons, or pandoras star by peter hamilton, which she ended up buying.
i'm immersing myself in trying to get some art work arranged for the 'exhibition' i keep trying to plan, it's ever evasive, slipping further away, as i struggle trying to get the money to invest in my work. there are 5 pieces now, huge massive glass images, vibrant and filled with magick, aesthetically pleasing and sculpture like, perfect for some big fat corp to buy and hang in their board room. ha! My friend Lash who is an artist refuses to sell her work to any company, she believes that art should be available for the public to access and i agree, however i am slightly more mercenary than she is in this context.

For the last 2-3 weeks i have been reading Dr. Lisiewski's book on kabbalistic cycles. It was all going well up until i reached the bit about calculating planetry hours, here's where it got very mathmatical, i was totally stumped despite my getting almost there, then breakthrough, i worked it out. So armed with this information i constructed the chart below for tomorrow, lets see what happens. I must admit i found his book on the grimorie of Heptameron a lot easier to understand, and except for the summoning of the demon on a concrete surface, it's much more straight forwards.

This chart is the planetary hours calculated for
Tuesday July 4, 2006 for sydney australia, in Standard Time

Tuesday is ruled by the planet Mars
Remember: for hours connected by a path, the flow is from the hour into the day.

Day Hours
7:01 AM - 7:51 AM Mars
7:51 AM - 8:41 AM Sun ______inharmonious, conflict, injustice, unequilibrium
8:41 AM - 9:30 AM Venus
9:30 AM - 10:20 AM Mercury ______self-centeredness, and exclusive concern for ones own self
10:20 AM - 11:10 AM Moon
11:10 AM - 11:59 AM Saturn ______Overcoming Odds and Obstructions only after battle
11:59 AM - 12:49 PM Jupiter ______Physical Power and Strength
12:49 PM - 1:39 PM Mars
1:39 PM - 2:29 PM Sun ______inharmonious, conflict, injustice, unequilibrium
2:29 PM - 3:18 PM Venus
3:18 PM - 4:08 PM Mercury ______self-centeredness, and exclusive concern for ones own self
4:08 PM - 4:58 PM Moon

Night Hours
4:58 PM - 6:08 PM Saturn ______Overcoming Odds and Obstructions only after battle
6:08 PM - 7:19 PM Jupiter ______Physical Power and Strength
7:19 PM - 8:29 PM Mars
8:29 PM - 9:39 PM Sun ______inharmonious, conflict, injustice, unequilibrium
9:39 PM - 10:49 PM Venus
10:49 PM - 12:00 AM Mercury ______self-centeredness, and exclusive concern for ones own self
12:00 AM - 1:10 AM Moon
1:10 AM - 2:20 AM Saturn ______Overcoming Odds and Obstructions only after battle
2:20 AM - 3:30 AM Jupiter ______Physical Power and Strength
3:30 AM - 4:41 AM Mars
4:41 AM - 5:51 AM Sun ______inharmonious, conflict, injustice, unequilibrium
5:51 AM - 7:01 AM Venus

Chaos - the absence of form and order - above all other words chaos haunts Western man. It fills his mind with visions of seas running into rivers, men giving birth to frogs, fish flying through grassy clouds. It is the unnamed heart of every horror story - the unexpected, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, the lawless - chaos.

From the very beginning of his history, Western man has sought to defeat this most relentless of enemies - chaos. He has searched for words and gestures to tame the chaotic, arbitrary wills of his earliest Gods. He has created the image of an all powerful deity who not only brought order out of nothingness but is the essence of the law. He has chosen innumerable tyrannies, preferring the loss of his very soul to the sight of dogs running wild in his streets. He has examined the world around him, hoping to find inflexible laws. He has almost destroyed the original conditions of his planet - the very processes that make his life possible - in order to control every facet of his existence, often sacrificing his deepest instincts on the altar of his need for stability. And where he could neither find nor impose order, he has devised myths, dogmas, convoluted philosophical speculations, occult formulae and sterile scientific theories, murdering anyone who dared question these fancies - all to deny the terror he feels when faced with what he cannot understand.
From the darkest past to this very second, his image of the wise one has been of someone who knew the secret law hidden beneath the seemingly arbitrary world around him. His vision of the magician has been of someone who could exploit that law to bend to his will the ever-changing event of life.
Yet, beginning in the late Sixties and continuing into the present, voices from England (that least chaotic of countries, home of manicured gardens, tea at four, and a class system that fixes each person's place with their first breath) have proclaimed chaos the only reality, the true source of all Magick. Angry, and at times shrill, they scream denunciations at those who proclaim the quest for divine order. They worship that most ancient enemy - chaos.

To understand this rebellion. we must first explore the traditions that spawned it. Since in a work of this scope we cannot examine the entire body of occult though we shall have to limit ourselves to those streams most relevant to Chaos Magick.
Let's begin in Medieval Europe. It was during this period that three branches of occultism developed that still influence Western magical thought to this day - Wicca, Satanism, and Ceremonial Magick.

Of the three, Satanism is the easiest to discuss - and dismiss. Because of the Church's continuous interest in the subject, Satanism is the most carefully recorded and best researched of the three branches. Its basic concepts are also the simplest: the complete reversal of Christian beliefs. The Satanist performs the Latin Mass backwards, mocking it. He extols greed instead of charity, revenge instead of forgiveness. Just as the Christian views Christ as a personal savior who will reward a lifetime of servile deprivation with an eternity of bliss after death, the Satanist sees the Devil - whom, by the way, the Christian identifies as the enemy of divine order, Chaos Incarnate - as a personal savior who will reward him with earthly power and riches for raping his neighbor's wife. In both cases, the object of worship is viewed as an external master whose will must be obeyed. Unlike Wicca and Ceremonial Magick Satanism seems to have changed little since the day of its birth. From the beginning to the present, its strongest current has been a cry against the unnatural sexual morality advocated by Christianity. In the Middle Ages, it might have been an extreme and rather dangerous form of therapy for sexual hang-ups. In the succeeding ages, it seems an excuse to party and perhaps, a way of gaining the less physically attractive a greater number of sex partners. As soon as the Church stopped burning its advocates Satanism has been a pose to shock the more socially conventional. This is especially true today, when Satanism is the slogan of a number of rock bands - a device by which to offend the parents of pimply faced adolescents, stir up their already overactive hormones and add the illusion of substance to shrieking wails and infernal noise.

Unlike Satanism, until recently Ceremonial Magick has not presented itself as a rebellion against Christianity. Ceremonialists had in fact, been careful to avoid anything the Church would consider heretical. Often they were devout men who felt they were exploring the deeper mysteries of the Christian faith. In his rituals he invoked the protection of the God of the Jews and the Christians and the aid of the archangels and angels of the Judeo-Christian pantheon. If he had to evoke demons, he did so in the name of the Lord and he only called upon those devils his God had bound to the service of mankind. He was never persecuted by the Church. There was and is a strong class and sex bias within Ceremonial Magick - its practitioners have traditionally been aristocratic men. This bias permeated the entire field. Its rituals were addressed to male entities; they were long, practical only by those with a great deal of leisure; they were often in Greek and Latin and involved knowledge of geometry and mathematics, all hallmarks of the learned class; and it required lavish robes and tools which only the rich could afford. Most indicative of its class bias was its curiously scientific orientation. Like a scientist, the Ceremonialist believed the desired effect could only be attained by using the proper tools in the proper procedure - any deviation brought certain failure. Like the scientist - which he often was by the way - the Ceremonialist sought knowledge. Having little material need, he often sought the secrets of the visible and invisible universe purely for the knowing. Though the Ceremonialist most often worked alone, he usually learned his art in a lodge - moving up through its ranks, guarding the secret teachings of his own station, while slavishly obeying his superiors in hopes of eventual promotion. The lodge's hierarchical structure paralleled the Ceremonialist's view of the universe, every rank representing a clearly defined plane that he had thoroughly examined and mastered.

Though it has retained much of this bias - the lodges, the expensive equipment, the hierarchical view of the universe - unlike Satanism, Ceremonial Magick has evolved and changed. The agents of these changes were the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and its best known member Aleister Crowley. The first change came in relation to the beings addressed. While retaining the Judeo-Christian hosts, the Golden Dawn also addressed gods from the Egyptian and Greco-Roman pantheons, often dressing in robes and headgear suggestive of the deities invoked. After Crowley went on his own, he continued to address the old gods. Furthermore, he denied the existence of an all powerful godhead at the top of the universal hierarchy. He proclaimed the goal of the Magician to be "the attainment of the knowledge and conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel," the fulfillment of his "true will," and the realization of his own divinity. Although some Magicians were influenced by the work of Carl Jung, who considered all gods to be arch typical images projected by a collective unconscious, and by Eastern philosophies, which we shall touch on later; others were beginning to take a more psychologically oriented approach to their work. There is little doubt that Crowley believed the Holy Guardian Angel to be an entity external to oneself, one of a number of intelligences operating from other dimensions of existence. To Crowley, the realization of the Magician's divinity did not mean his absorption into the absolute; it meant the fulfillment of his individual line of evolution. Tirelessly, Crowley worked - writing new rituals in English, founding the Astrum Argentum and restructuring the Ordo Templis Orientalis, adapting Oriental concepts, synthesizing the various magical traditions - Greek, Egyptian, Hermetic, Cabalistic, and Masonic - into a new system, which he publicized in endless books. Aside from bringing Magick back into the public eye, Crowley's greatest contribution was his forthright admission of the true source of Magical Power - sexual energy. Having openly proclaimed the secret, he reveled in the notoriety that followed - acknowledging his use of drugs and orgiastic indulgence to facilitate entry into altered states of consciousness, espousing Thelema, a philosophy of absolute personal freedom (or license as his critics charged) and styling himself, "The Beast 666," Crowley went out of his way to shock. In so doing, he opened himself to needless misunderstandings and, in many quarters, was branded a Black practitioner. In spite of his evil reputation, and despite the existence of more traditional Judeo-Christian oriented ideas - notably those of Dion Fortune and Israel Regardie, both Cabalists - Crowley is widely considered the fountain from which flows all modern Ceremonial Magick.

Wicca, the third branch, is perhaps the hardest to write about. Without lending undue credence to its Medieval persecutors, who associated it with Satanism, the works of Margaret Murray, who considered the religion of prehistoric man, and the mostly self glorifying "traditions" of its modern adherents, almost nothing can be said of its past. A few things, however, seems readily apparent - the most important of which is, that in every way the Wiccan stood in contrast to the Ceremonial Magician. First and foremost, the Wiccan practiced a religion opposed to Christianity, doubtless a continuation of ancient local beliefs, though what these beliefs were is hard to say with certainty. It was because of their rejection of Christ that Wiccans were murdered by the Church. In an age where Church and state were one, religious tolerance was considered the gateway to anarchy. Where the Medieval Ceremonialist was an aristocratic man of the city, the Wiccan was always a peasant and most often a woman; where the Ceremonialist practiced alone, performing complicated rituals in Latin and Greek, summoning Angels and Demons to teach him the mysteries of the universe, the Wiccan commonly celebrated the phenomena of the changing seasons, chanting simple rhymes in order to secure a better harvest or a mate. The Ceremonialist practiced the mystic "Art," the Wiccan practiced "The Craft." Much of these differences continue to this day. The modern Wiccan still works within a coven and, though he may live in an urban apartment and have no knowledge of agriculture, he still celebrates the precession of the seasons, chanting in rhyme for whatever he may need. Where modern Wicca differs from its Medieval roots is difficult to say - hereditary Witches, descendants of Wiccans who survived the "Burning Times," are incredibly secretive about the beliefs and practices that they have inherited from their ancestors. Even if they were not, it would be impossible to tell how much the original ideas were distorted, added to, and subtracted from as they were handed down from generation to generation. Therefore, it is also impossible to tell how much Gerald Gardner ‹ the father of modern Wicca - preserved from the past and how much, despite his claims to the contrary, he actually created. Whatever the case might be, just as most modern Ceremonial Magick flows from Crowley, modern Wicca derives from Gardner. Although agricultural symbolism abounds in Gardners rituals and, by extension, those of most modern Wiccans. Much of it seems so much like rhymed and simplified versions of Ceremonialist rites that rumor assigns their true authorship to Gardner's good friend Aleister Crowley. In contrast to Ceremonialism, however, what distinguishes modern Wicca is its relentless feminism. Wiccans worship a dual godhead - a God, often identified with the Sun, Mars, Pan, or Horus, and a Goddess, often identified with the Moon, the Earth, Venus, or Isis.
In all guises, the Goddess is considered dominant. She gives birth to the God, who is both son and consort. She is considered eternal, while the God suffers continuous death and rebirth, symbolized by the procession of the seasons. The phases of the Lunar Goddess ‹ waxing, full, and waning - are identified with the three phases of a woman's sexual life cycle - maiden, mother, crone. The basic ideas are elaborated upon in a variety of ways. Women are always considered wiser, more psychically powerful, and spiritually developed than men and, while Wiccan rituals are performed by a Priest and a Priestess, the Priestess is always the absolute authority. The Priest is always her servant. An observer well versed in psychology might detect in Wiccan rituals a subtle form of female sadism and male masochism. Many Wiccans advocate Matriarchy - a social system in which women hold ultimate political power. Unlike the Ceremonialists, who tends to time his rituals according to intricate astrological calculations, the Wiccan performs her Magick to the phases of the moon - works of expansion are begun during the new, and culminate during the full moon; works of constriction are done in reverse. Identifying the Earth with the Goddess and seeking to keep close to its agricultural roots, modern Wicca is keenly interested in Ecology. Wicca today is highly image conscious, always downplaying its popular association with curses and orgies. Much work is done for psychic healing. It's feminism and concern for public opinion gives it a unique attitude towards sex - on the other hand, its alleged derivation from ancient fertility cults and its feminist focus on women's sexuality force it to acknowledge sex as a source of Magickal power; on the other hand, its regard for appearances makes it champion monogamy. The perfect coven is comprised of loving, deeply committed couples. No Crowleyite orgies, please. In regards to the God and Goddess, most Wiccans are unclear as to whether they are to be considered as the male and female aspects of a single deity, or as two distinct entities. Though the Wiccan Grace has a line stating that the Goddess is to be found within oneself, most Wiccans treat her as an external being. Beginning with Alex Sanders, many have broken away from Gardnerianism, forming endless offshoots, almost all of which have retained the Feminist emphasis. Modern Wicca could be called the religion of the Women's Liberation Movement.

The three streams of Western Occultism described above can be considered the orthodoxy from which Chaos Magick derives and against which it rebels. Before we can explore Chaos Magick more fully, we must pause briefly to examine four other tends that have influenced it deeply: Jungianism, Parapsychology, Physics, and Eastern Philosophy.

Of Carl Jung's work, we need say little, except that his theory of archetypes - universal images that symbolize human experiences and aspects of the human mind - has definitely determined Chaos Magick's view of all Gods. Though most Chaos practitioners might consider science as just another system, they cannot help but be influenced by parapsychological research, which suggests that psychic ability may be a function of the human mind - making possible the idea of Magickal power without disembodied assistance. Quantum Physics, with its indeterminate and often theoretical particles, must find a cozy corner in his heart. But Eastern philosophy is his biggest source, and we cannot understand his special definition of Chaos - the cornerstone of his ideas - and how it differs from the traditional, Western view without understanding Asian thought.

Whatever their superficial differences in terminology and practical approach, the three great streams of Eastern philosophy - Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism - are united in proclaiming that the Universe is one vast, ever-changing whole, beyond all concepts, categories, and definitions. The Hindu calls it Brahman, and his gods, like the theoretical particles of Quantum Physics, are merely symbols of its cosmological aspects. To the Buddhist, it is the Void - that beyond all designation and description - and his pantheon of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are, like Jung's archetypes, symbols of psychological states. The Taoist simply calls it the Tao, the Way. Furthermore, they agree that man's inner nature - which the Hindu calls "Atman," the Buddhist "no soul," and the Taoist "Non Self" - is identical with that of the universe. In all three religions to existentially know these two things is considered Enlightenment - liberation from views and opinions, all of which can only be falsehood, bondage, and illusion.

Here lies the difference between the traditional and the Chaos practitioner's definition of that fearful word - Chaos. To the Chaos practitioner, Chaos is not the absence of order, but - to paraphrase Henry Miller - an order beyond understanding. It is analogous to the Hindu's Brahman, the Buddhist's Void, the Taoist's Tao, and the Ancient Anglo Saxon's Wyrd. It is constantly changing - it can be experienced, but is beyond intellectual categorization. Order is, at best, the aspect of indescribable reality that our sensory equipment permits us to perceive - the bee sees the flower differently than a human being. At worst, Order is simply an illusionary pattern projected by our prejudices. To Albert Einstein's claim that God does not play dice with the Universe, the Chaos practitioner might answer that the universe is god - if one has to use such an emotionally loaded word - and He's the only thing He can ever play with. Since he believes that reality is ultimately indescribable, he renounces all dogma, taking ideas and practices from everywhere, combining them as suits the situation, dropping them when they no longer apply. In an unknowable universe no belief is valid: yet every belief is valid so long as the believer recognizes it as a tool, a necessary illusion, and so long as it continues to work for him.
The entire pattern of Chaos Magick can be readily seen at a quick glance at the thoughts of the man its practitioners consider its father - Austin Osman Spare. Once a member of the Golden Dawn and an associate of Crowley's until disagreement severed their relationship, Spare ceaselessly denounced religion, science, and Ceremonial Magick. His attacks on all three were founded upon the same premise: in a universe that defies description, all systems of belief can only be false. Since man is part of the universe and therefore already God, all religion can offer him is false idols that keeps him from sensing his true divinity. From the very first, Spare saw that science is itself a form of religion, an attempt to name the unnamable, a system of categories that dismisses anything it cannot contain. Ceremonial Magick, he considered an overly complicated waste of time - perpetrated upon the gullible by greedy charlatans - that keeps man from discovering his true source of power, which is within himself. Spare preached the need for absolute simplicity in all magickal workings and, instead of prayer and ritual, he considered as the ultimate Magick technique the creation of and meditation upon the Sigil ‹ a personal design of stylized letters expressing a desire yet concealing it from the conscious mind. Sigils have traditionally been the design on Magick talismans, but Spare asserted that their power was not intrinsic to the lines and figures of the design - their power came from their effect upon the deepest layers of the unconscious mind. Therefore, one had to create one's own design, which had to be simple enough to be easily visualized and complex enough for the conscious mind to forget its original meaning.

In his work on Sigilization, we see the Eastern influence on Spare's ideas. Though the Sigil is to be created under the influence of a desperate desire, and is to be visualized and meditated upon while the obsession persists, it can have no Magical effect until one has exhausted the desire, forgotten the meaning of the Sigil, and become completely indifferent to the desire and the symbol that represents it. To Spare, meditation meant to hold the Sigil in the mind's eye until it gradually excluded all other thoughts and then faded from consciousness, leaving the mind vacuous - the polar opposite to fixing one's mind upon a symbol, pondering its meaning, fighting off all other ideas, and focusing all of one's concentrated will upon its realization. Anyone with even a superficial knowledge of the Hindu or Buddhist tantra will recognize this as the practice of the Tantrika, who performs identical visualizations upon Yantras - geometric designs representing cosmic and psychological forces, Yantras are the basic patterns behind Mandalas - and considers the fulfillment of a desire as a step towards detachment from all desires.

As if that were not enough, Spare's concept of the universe seems like Asian ideas rephrased. The absolute, he called Kia a word that has no meaning in any Western language and resembles the Japanese word "ki," which means the vital breath behind all life. Note how closely Spare's words echo those of Lao Tzu. Spare: "Of name, it has no need, to designate, I call it Kia . . .the Kia which can be expressed in conceivable ideas is not the eternal Kia." Lao Tzu: "The Tao that can be said is not the Tao . . . Of itself, it has no name . . . for lack of a better word I call it "The Tao." The Kia - which could just as easily be called Chaos - is beyond description, a complete whole, without divisible parts, an inconceivable zero. Yet it manifests itself in apparent dualities - male and female, light and darkness, birth and death. In Spare's formula, from nothing comes two. But the poles of each duality are not absolute unto itself; each is like an arm linked together by a torso, which in this case cannot be described. The dualities always arise together. Joy emerges with anguish, faith with doubt. Therefore the mind cannot avoid conflict and contradiction. Spare's solution is not to choose between opposing urges but to observe them simultaneously - a state of mind which fixes its consciousness, for example, upon dawn and dusk, twilight hours that are neither day nor night. "Neither-Neither" at once recalls the Hindu "Neti-Neti," not this/not that, Nargajuna's dialectical negations whereby nothing can be said to exist or not to exist, the non choosing of the Taoist hermit, and the non-discriminating awareness of the Zen Master. He also urges that the ego rests in a state of self love - which is not to be confused with narcissism - a state wherein it is happily absorbed in the joy of its own existence and does not have the need to continuously aggrandize itself by endless conquest and acquisition. As the Upanishads say: "Let the Self find refuge in the Self."

During his lifetime Spare a brilliant artist, who produced a series of striking automatic drawings never received the attention that was given his former associate, Crowley. What little notice came his way was mostly bad. Art critics hated his work and many occultists, including Crowley, considered him a Black Magician. His ideas - which he communicated in short books, written in an exhortatory, denunciatory, declamatory style reminiscent of "Thus Spoke Zarathrusta" have only recently been given the consideration they deserve.
Perhaps it is the highest compliment to a man who hated doctrine that those responsible for the rediscovery of his work do not take him as an absolute authority. While Ray Sherwin, Julian Wilde, and "The Circle of Chaos" may praise Spare's work, they consider him a point of departure, an influence on an forerunner of their own endeavors. Unlike the followers of Crowley, they have not turned Spare into a Golden Ass. Spare's disciples (how they would probably hate that term) differ from him as much as they differ from each other. The major difference is that Spare's successors, while critical of it, do not reject ritual out of hand.

Before we go into a point by point examination of how Chaos Magick differs from conventional occultism, a brief review of the work of the practitioners who have become known in America would be helpful.

Of the "Circle of Chaos,_ we can say very little. They are an eclectic collection of diverse occultists who came together in the middle Sixties - partly in reaction against the growing sectarianism and commercialism within the occult world. They have created a set of rituals weaving different strands from the traditions of their various members. So far, they have published only one book, "The Rites of Chaos," copy-written under the name "Paula Pagani." It is a collection of seasonal rituals, rhymed celebrations of the traditional Wiccan holidays. Originally known as "The Circle of the Wyrd," the "Circle of Chaos" is basically Wiccan in style, if not completely in substance.
In the truest sense, the same cannot truly be said of Julian Wilde. He considers himself a Shamanistic Tantric Wiccan and is every bit as eclectic as that designation implies. By his own account, he has studied Wicca, Cabala, Shamanism, Zen and Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, has used sex and drugs and Rock n' Roll as aids to achieving trance, and has been influenced by the writings of Carlos Castenada and Michael Moorcock. His "Grimoire of Chaos Magick" - a fragment of his personal Book of Shadows which he has had published as a collection of suggestions to like-minded souls - is a slim yet extraordinary book. His writing style is even fiercer and more denunciatory than Spare's. His invocations are free verses, full of striking images conveyed in a barbaric yet majestic language - between their lines one glimpses a man who has survived almost every kind of personal catastrophe. As if to prove the sincerity of his commitment to eclecticism, his book contains both a bitter attack on and a ritual by - Aleister Crowley. Wilde is the founder of the Church of Ka'atas, an entity that does not exist in the legal sense of the word and is just a name for those who more or less share his views. He is truly, as he describes himself, a Chaos Warrior.

Ray Sherwin is perhaps the most conventional of the Chaos practitioners. As a member of the I.O.T. - an English lodge that broke away from the O.T.O. - he is a Ceremonial Magician. Unlike Spare and Wilde, his books are written in a calm, analytical style, systematically exploring points of practical concern to the Magician. A point worth noting is that the I.O.T. - unlike other Chaos practitioners - considers Chaos as one end of a duality, the other end being Cosmos/Order. Sherwin does not seem to fully subscribe to this view, but he does not completely refute it, taking a stance of maybe/maybe not.

Having gotten a general view of Chaos Magick, now we shall take a point by point look at how its practitioners differ from orthodox occultism and from each other. Unfortunately, we shall have to limit most of this discussion to the views of Spare, Wilde, and Sherwin, since "The Circle of Chaos" has only published their seasonal rituals.

Source of Power: What the Magician considers the source of his power determines the rest of his practice. Obviously, the Satanist believes that his power is a gift from his master, the Devil. The Ceremonialist believes that his power derives, through a series of astral entities, ultimately from the Lord of Hosts, the most high God - a Crowleyite would say that only the astral beings exist and give power. And the Wiccan places his trust in the Goddess, the God, and the elementals. But all of the Chaos practitioners agreed that as yet undiscovered energies within the human subconscious are the true source of Magick. They share this view with Eastern philosophy, parapsychology, and such modern theorists of Magick as Isaac Bonewitz.

Preparatory Exercises: Most Magical traditions contain a body of exercises designed to open the novice to Magical influences, which must be mastered before he's allowed to progress to ritual work. Doubtless, the modern Satanist considers a few orgies and a couple of hundred pounds of the strongest grass he can buy sufficient to the task. Both modern Wiccans and Ceremonialists concentrate on astral projection and on visualization - usually on the tattwas and the Major Arcana of the Tarot. Spare, on the other hand, places all the emphasis on the death posture - in which one totally relaxes one's body and keeps one's mind as blank as possible for as long as possible, a practice useful in developing the neither/neither state of mind. And Wilde has created a whole new set of exercises. The most interesting of these is a meditation, based on Tibetan Tantra, in which one visualizes one's body melting down completely then rebuilding itself from nothing, and another meditation in which one visualizes the chakras - psychic centers arranged one atop the other on the spine, a yogic concept - as modern rooms connected by a spiral staircase. True to form, Wilde says that one does not have to believe in the literal existence of the chakras. The noteworthy aspect of all these exercises is that they attempt to put the practitioner in touch with his deeper self not with external entities and planes.

Divination: Usually, the next step in the novice's training is learning various methods of forecasting coming events. Wiccans tend to concentrate on the Magick Mirror, the crystal ball, and occasionally on reading the patterns of tea leaves and the like. Both Ceremonialists and Wiccans place great store by the Tarot. In recent years, the I Ching and the Runes have become popular, and in some quarters the Ouija board is experiencing a revival. Medieval occultists thought that divinatory methods were channels through which the Gods, Demi Angels, and spirits communicate with men. Even Crowley believed that their operations depended upon astral intelligences. Though there are still those who hold to the older view, most modern practitioners view divinatory devices as means to focus the conscious mind, allowing the subconscious to present its knowledge of the future. All Chaos practitioners agree with the modern view. Wilde takes it a step further by suggesting that palmistry and astrology, which most occultists see as objective "sciences," are also focusing devices. To Wilde - who has designed his own version of the Major Arcana of the Tarot for his private use - the arrangement of planets on a horoscope or lines on a palm probably have no meaning other than what they suggest to the interpreter's psychic faculties.

Initiation: In all occult traditions, both Western and Eastern, initiation is considered the death of the old being and the simultaneous birth of the Magickal Person. Usually, it is though that Magickal power is conferred - either by a disembodied entity or, in the Eastern tradition, by the teacher - upon the initiate during the ceremony. Chaos practitioners have a more complex view of the process. To Spare, initiation was as much of a farce as any other ceremony. Sherwin and Wilde agree that in an of itself initiation means nothing more than acceptance into a particular group of practitioners. Wilde takes the Shamanistic view that real initiation is a product of severe personal crisis caught in a situation from which there is no normal avenue, of escape, the Individual spontaneously summons up previously unsuspected power from his subconscious. While agreeing with Wilde's view, Sherwin believes that it is the responsibility of the initiating group to artificially produce a controlled crisis in the initiate a practice employed by the ancient mystery schools of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and the Masonic orders.

Ritual and Ceremony: Traditional practitioners of Magick have seen ritual as a performance that pleased the Gods so much that they would grant the performer's request as a kind of rewiring of cosmic circuitry towards a specific goal. Getting every detail of the ceremony has always been considered of utmost importance to the success of the operation - one mistake meant failure. Modern Wicca, however, acknowledges that intent determines the effectiveness of the rite more than perfection of its form. Chaos Magick agrees with modern Wicca - and again goes quite a few steps further. Both Wilde and Sherwin view ritual as a form of theater, designed to arouse the performer's emotion to a fever pitch and then discharge it outwards - a catharsis that leaves the magician drained of the obsession and puts his mind in Spare's detached "neither/neither" state. They believe that Magick cannot do its work so long as the magician consciously wishes the operation to succeed. In order to get his wish, it must no longer be his wish. Unlike the various traditions of Ceremonialists and Wiccans, all of which employ specific methods of casting a Circle, each of them claiming that their way is the only right one - Wilde, Sherwin, and the Circle of Chaos advise the practitioner to cast his/her Circle any way they want. While traditional magicians of all persuasions demand that rituals done for specific goals must be performed with the appropriate incenses, oils, and colored candles, Wilde suggests using the most mind-blowing incenses and the most garishly colored candles one can find for all rituals. He also suggests visualizing various animals as the Guardians of the Circle, instead of the traditional Lords of the Elements. Sherwin suggests visualizing either beings from outer space, garbed in appropriate "B-movie" costumes, or naked sex objects at the four watchtowers. Believing that the source of power lies within the practitioner, Wilde suggests that the Magician arouse her/his anger, hatred, sadness, grief and, most especially, lust - suggesting that before the ritual one either masturbate or have somebody fellate one, stopping before orgasm, saving sexual release until the high point of the rite. He believes that petitionary prayers to the gods should be composed spontaneously at the ritual's high point. Sherwin, for his part, refutes the theory that specific rituals should be done at specific times, reasoning that no people are observably affected by the phases of the moon and that the tables assigning certain days and hours to certain planets were drawn up before the discovery of Neptune, Uranus and Pluto and are therefore invalid. The best time to perform a ritual is when the need and opportunity present themselves, although again this depends upon the belief of the magician.

The Gods of Chaos: Because Chaos practitioners consider their gods as projections of their own minds, their attitude towards them is eclectic and orthodox Magicians would say irreverent. Wilde’s Grimoire lists a potpourri of divinities from a hodgepodge of pantheons. He says that Gods can be adapted from the words of writers such as Tolkein, and further states that any God who doesn't provide a minimum of service should be forgotten. In general, Chaos practitioners prefer to concentrate on recently rediscovered or newly created deities. Among the rediscovered, some favorites are Baphomet, an androgynous horned god who, in the 12th century, the Knights Templar used as a Cabalistic symbol, was written about in the l9th century by Eliphas Levi and is considered by Wilde as the sum total of all universal forces and the personification of active Chaos. Another favorite is Eris, Goddess of Discord a long-forgotten Greek divinity who was considered (in Hesiod's "Theogeny") as being the more savage, female half of Eros, ‘God of Love.’
To the ancient Greeks, Eros and Eris together comprised an androgynous Aphrodite. The Circle of Chaos pays reverence to Thataneros - a divinity created by Thessalonius Loyola who represents the Freudian principle of Sex and Death. Wilde has created K'atas a wise old Oriental man with green eyes, who functions as a calm guide through the Chaotic storm. Taking Chaos theory to its furthest extreme; it might be said that a comic book hero like Superman might be the best protector for someone who can feel no affinity with a classic warrior god such as Mars.

Magickal Works: Unlike Wilde, who has nothing new to add to the techniques of Practical Magick he suggests that one buy traditional spell and candle burning books and adapt their teachings to one's need. Sherwin's experiments have led him to some interesting innovations. As if to send a shiver through Spare's body, Sherwin maintains that Sigils are best vitalized through intense rituals. Taking Spare's work yet another step further, Sherwin believes that one should excerpt certain syllables from the sentence that has been sigilized and then chant them as a sort of nonsense mantra while meditating on the Sigil.
As we can see, the practitioners of Chaos Magick are both united and distinguished from each other by their emphasis on experimentation and individual experience. Chaos Magick is not a new or different kind of Magick. It is a set of working principles - some new, some ancient, - which the individual practitioner can creatively reinterpret to suit his own needs.

here's the awful truth about being me, people being shallow, brainwashed, pre conditioned apes (down under) look at me, they see a black guy, a physical guy with a mean looking face, some one who dosn't talk a lot or make dumb conversation, and immediatley they feel threatened or intimidated, males often acknowledge me by a respectful nod or some primal unconcious sign, females often just avoid me or are attracted to what they think is the protective instinct that a guy who looks like me may generate. unfortunatly due to my mental status and creative output, men are instantly devoid of anything for me to relate to, unless it's art or philosophy and women tend to just wanna fuck and run becuase i don't have any thing of intrest to offer in the way of security or physiological needs, my love is expansive, yet focused on those that feed my soul not drain it. i don't need freinds and i don't seek them. consequently being nice dosn't come easy, but i am nice, i am extreemly emerssed in humanity having worked for 30 years with the homeless, orphans, victims of child abuse, offenders, drug and alcohol users, mentally ill, autistic, downs syndrome, pychiatric illness and various forms of youth work. i am increasingly aware of the power and control that seems to perpetuate human interaction. so when i am accused of being intimidating it really is a projection of the accuser based on their fear. this actually happens a lot, in situations i am innocent of, i know myself extreemly well, i am intimidating on an intellectual level but to say people fear me is insane.
when this happens (at work) i am usually accused and then told no one will take it further and left to deal with the situation alone. no support, no friends to proccess it with, no recourse. it's a strange world where you can be accused of something and then abandoned by the system that accuses you, i think i rather be held accountable and at least have recourse. anyway at the end of the day people make their judgements, and i don't really have any control over them, i hope that one day people in this country, learn to break through their fears and preconcieved notions that dark skinned people are not neccessarily thugs or villans.
personnally this may be a long time comming, aborigional australia has been living with this for 220 years.
now don't get me wrong i know that i am partly responsible for how i present in the world, however it's never my intentions to make enemies or have people think the worst of me, far from it. but the road to hell is paved with good intentions and this seems to be the truth in my life.

okay here's my solution to the middle east crisis, you get all the teenagers from both sides, send them on a p and o cruise, make sure they are all wearing the same clothes, slip them some love drugs, the cruise lasts one year and by the time all the girls are pregnant no one's going to know who's baby is whose, therefore you have introduced a third element into the conflict. these children are divided up and sent back to the two countries and as a result neither side will know who is their ligitimate child and therefore stop killing. as time passes the next generation will never believe in their families absolute fundamentalism and eventually as they grow they will give up religion all together.