Maybe Magick: Notes from an Evolving Nervous System, published on Halloween, is the latest release from Hilaritas Press. It is a major new RAW anthology, with little overlap with previous books.
Mike Gathers, Dave Skelton (Lvx 15 in the comments here and at other RAW sites) and Oz Fritz, who worked with Rasa on the book, agreed to take my questions. I tried to get answers to questions many RAW fans would have about the book.
All of these guys worked really hard on their answers and I think it reflects their pride in the finished book.
RAWIllumination.net: Mike, in his "Editor's Note," Dave relates that the Maybe Magick project got started when you came up with the idea for the book and assembled an initial 15 works to be included. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with the idea and assembled the initial list?
Mike Gathers: It started with Lion of Light. I wanted to put together a Crowley book based on the newly discovered "Do What Thou Wilt" essay and the Realist "Great Beast" which was the piece that kicked off RAWilsonFans.org 25ish years ago. I combed through Martin's website, rawarchives.org, and RAWilsonFans.org for anything Crowley and/or magick related. We ended up with 5-6 substantial Crowley pieces that became Lion of Light, and I had a long list of leftovers that were mostly magick related. That list of leftovers was set aside for a couple of years while we worked on the RAW Politics book. Then I dusted it off, filtered through to pick the strongest candidates, and ended up with the original 15 pieces to start with.
RAWIllumination.net: After that initial group of 15 pieces had been nominated by Mike, was there a long back and forth among the three of you about them, and about other pieces that you were recommending to each other? And were you on the some page about what you wanted?
Oz Fritz: I was brought into the process later than Mike and Dave. Rasa is always a part of the editorial group. I don't recall how many articles were already included when I came in. Not long after I joined, Rasa did a page count when it seemed we might have all the articles worth using and it came back a little low, not much over 200 pages, I believe. Efforts were made to find additional pieces. A suggestion was made to have multiple Forwards and Afterwords, but that turned out not to be necessary. I received permission to use RAW's introduction to Visions in the Stone, by E. J. Gold. I also suggested getting a transcription of the talk on James Joyce from Uncle Bob Explains Everything. (There are two sets of talks with this title; this comes from the first set). I thought the discussion on synchronicities and prognostications in Finnegans Wake might work in Maybe Magick. When I opened the file,I saw that I also had his talk on Crowley. I thought I should listen to it since this is a book on Magick, but fully expecting to rule it out because this isn't a book on Crowley. It shocked me when it got to the part where RAW questions whether the Book of the Law is a hoax or not. This seems equivalent to asking a Christian to consider that the New Testament might be a fake. It really drove the point of Maybe Magick in practice home to me. I found this brilliant so transcribed the whole talk and submitted it. I also felt it gave a different perspective on RAW's thinking on the subject since he was answering questions rather than writing making it more spontaneous and less filtered. Although I did get help from software for the transcription, I found it quite laborious to edit all the talking to make sense on paper, so to speak. So I didn't check out the Joyce talk.Those were the only two articles I brought in; Mike and Dave found others. Near the end Nick Helweg-Larsen submitted 8 or so pieces one of which made it in. The three of us were mostly on the same page of what to include or exclude. Whenever there was a contrary opinion, it seemed easy and painless to convince the others, one way or another. I initially thought the E-prime article didn't qualify as Magick, but was persuaded to include it when Mike expressed the transformational experience he had using it. Now I'm glad I changed my mind.
Mike Gathers: Well at first it was just me working on the project. Around the time I finalized the list of 15, I saw Dave post publicly about how he'd like to help Hilaritas out, so I invited him in and asked him to do all the heavy lifting - convert all the photocopies and pdfs and web pages into a single document formatted to Rasa's liking. Dave knocked that out rather quickly and then Rasa estimated that we were looking at roughly 200 pages, so I began to comb through everything again to see what we could add in. And around that time I invited Oz to join the team. Having known Oz since the Maybe Logic Academy and worked with him on Lion of Light, I valued his expertise and trusted his judgement.
Bob's Undoing Yourself intro was already in the mix, and Dave suggested we look at Bob's intros to Hyatt's other books. Two of them were mostly New Falcon promotional fluff as I recall, but one of them was a banger, so that went in. Oz recommended Bob's intro to an EJ Gold book. This intro discussed the hero's journey, and I vividly remember it shifting something within me and expanding my perspective on what fit with the project. From there I added in another dozen or so pieces.
There was some back and forth. I remember voicing concerns about two or three pieces I was unsure about. Oz responded to at least one in particular, "That definitely needs to go in," which completely solidified its place in the book. I added an eprime piece in there which received some pushback, but to me, it's one of the most important pieces in the book, I argued why, and that seemed to satisfy the doubts. Dave was very passionate about the intro to the Parson's bio, Sex and Rockets, which is a superb piece, but only a small portion seemed to apply specifically to "maybe magick." Eventually Rasa suggested we include the excerpt which now sits right after the title page.
Maybe the other angle of note in this discussion is that Email to the Universe contains four pieces of solid "maybe magick" in my mind, but that's far too many to reprint. To reprint or not reprint was a huge point of debate in the RAW politics book, and the issue raised its head every now and then for Maybe Magick. There was some light banter of "well if we only reprint one (of the four from Email), I'd do this one" and "I'd print that other one," but in the end, we left them all out. Rasa did suggest a piece on dealing with black magick that had already found it's way into print. He really liked it, it fit perfectly with the theme, and he's the boss, so in it went. š¤£
I'm probably missing some other examples, but overall, I'd say we all worked really well together.
Dave Skelton: I think that's a great summary!
Only detail I can think to add from my POV is that I remember reading stuff across Martin's website, finding "Adventures in the HEAD Revolution" and advocating for its inclusion as being a very direct account of the evolution of Bob's thinking on these topics.
Oz Fritz at the Ancient Wave recording studio. Photo by Lorraine Gervais. Illustration for my 2016 interview with Oz.
RAWIllumination.net: What is your favorite piece in the book?
Dave Skelton: I really liked the abridged Liber NU piece, which is the "Each One Teach One #2" one-pager Bob sent out, I think, to a Discordian mailing list. I like it so much for a few reasons. First, I'd never previously seen anything like this from Bob - it gave me a new feeling for just how far into the depths with Crowley's work that Bob went. It covers work that takes one through intellectual work into a type of mystical surrender. It is compact compared to the original - it also removes the regalia and adds a suggested schedule. For a lot of people, who would never otherwise get deeply enough involved in Crowley's system to attempt work like this (which is explicitly meant for "Winners of Ordeal X", a designation originating The Book of the Law that Crowley never publicly defined), it is a way to try on some advanced work to see how it might suit you. By no means is this version easy. Working it whole-heartedly, a person will likely face stretches of time with discomfort and fear, perhaps learning something about themselves they would never have otherwise.
Oz Fritz: This could be the hardest question of the interview for me to give a direct response. The short answer is: I don't know yet. To say Maybe Magick is information rich seems a colossal understatement. When I took a Tarot workshop with Lon Duquette he advised reading The Book of Thoth every six months. "You'll find it reads like a different book each time," he said. I had a similar experience going through Maybe Magick on successive occasions. Though I've read the pieces three or four times, I don't feel they've been assimilated enough for me to form a strong enough opinion to have a favorite. Also, I've only read them on a screen so far. I tend to get much more out of a book holding it in my hands and reading it straight off the page without an electronic intermediary. I like them all – the opposite of what you're asking.
So with all that qualifying preamble, my current favorite is RAW's "Introduction to Visions in the Stone" because I know it so well and have read it several times from the book. I find it a very important piece as a primer on Cabala, the kind of Cabala found in RAW's fiction and sometimes his non-fiction. He teaches the reader to become aware of the cryptography of letter arrangement by first making it so blatantly obvious then showing it in a normal context. We spent some time recreating the graphic design of the giant initial letters that reveal a meaningful sequence. RAW shows the viewer how to use their reading attention in a different way to enable the perception of different levels of sense. It's also funny as hell. Runner ups include: "Evolution and the Law of Thelema," "Each One Teach One", "Do What Thou Wilt!,"Undoing Yourself Introduction" and "Crowley, Leary and Genetics."
Mike Gathers: First I want to add that I did completely overlook "Adventures in HEAD Hardware" and am glad Dave dug it up. I do remember that. And now I remember that Oz advocated for the Crowley excerpt from the Uncle Bob Explains Everything audio, and put a lot of energy into transcribing it. I've been completely burned out on Crowley since Lion of Light, didn't want this to become another Crowley book, and pushed back on it's inclusion. And I'm glad that he stood his ground and we included it.
My first hit when I saw the question was the eprime essay. To me, Wilson stands tall as a grand master of the Third Circuit, and when I take a 30,000' view of his body of work, I see Word Magick. Long ago, I made a one year commitment to eprime, and that process awakened me to neurological relativity in a way that I might best describe as psychedelic. And that says more about doing the work than the essay itself. Looking over the Table of Contents, I see so many ways I could go with this question. My second take would be "Art as Black Magick and Moral Subversion" and "The 23 Phenomenon" for the fun factor.
Mike Gathers (illustration for a notable Hilaritas podcast)
RAWIllumination.net: Oz, you apparently came up with the phrase "Gnostic agnosticism," can you explain what that is?
Oz Fritz: In one of the responses for the MLA Crowley 101 course I wrote about taking a gnostic approach to agnosticism. I like the paradox. The following week RAW used "Gnostic Agnosticism" as a header for something. There were a lot of people in the course, maybe 200 - 300 with many of them commenting so at the time I took it as a coincidence and affirmation.
I consider gnosis a direct experience of knowledge, a realization, as opposed to knowledge learned from a book or something someone told you. For me, the old cliche holds true that the more you come to know, the more you realize you don't know. I had a notable gnostic moment at a rock concert by The Who when I was about 20. They were playing the song "See Me, Feel Me;" the "Listening to you" ending chorus seemed to build and build with each repetition. Then they turned on the house lights in the coliseum and it shocked me out of my body. For about 30 seconds or so – it may have been shorter, it seemed eternal – I felt like I was everyone and everything in the building. My morphology temporarily expanded much more than I ever knew possible. What had happened? I don't know. Had could I get there again, at will? I don't know. It seemed like a vast expanse of the Unknown had opened up.
The gnostic approach to agnosticism is like saying "I don't know, but I won't stop trying to find out." The gnostic approach is to do the work, make the experiments without any expectation of definitively finding out what's going on. This approach is beautifully elaborated in Crowley's essay "The Soldier and the Hunchback" found in The Equinox Volume I Number I. Wilson had assigned that for study and asked questions about it in the first week of Crowley 101. The Soldier is ! While the Hunchback is ?. The exclamation point represents gnostic realization that invariably leads to more questions. The questions if worked with can lead to further realizations, then new questions and on and on in a series like this: !?!?!?!?!? etc, etc. One of RAW's questions for discussion: does it end with a ! or a ?.
Dave Skelton: I love that Who story. You had an extraordinary experience, and you come out of it asking, "What happened? I don't know." That seems to me a perfect illustration of Gnostic agnosticism. There's that quote from Crowley's Liber O that Wilson uses in Cosmic Trigger:
"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth and the Paths; of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things that may or may not exist.
It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things, certain results will follow; students are earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophical validity to any of them."
In the Equinox, right before Liber O, in Crowley's Editorial he equates Scientific Illuminism with Skeptical Theurgy - that sounds a bit like Gnostic agnosticism to me. Crowley says that his methods can lead to realizations that ordinary intellect can't reach and language can only hint at - gnosis. There are many possible explanations for such experiences. I think skepticism is a practical safeguard against, first and foremost, self-delusion.
My first experience in this realm, long before I had ever heard of Wilson or read any Crowley, had me flying out of my body into a transcendent realm of the pure Love of Christ. When I came back, my eyes poured tears of joy, and I told each of my (very skeptical) friends that Jesus loved them beyond their imagination. Seems a little embarrassing now, but given the Christian worldview I was raised in, I was largely pre-programmed to interpret transcendence that way. Some healthy agnosticism found me not much later.
Mike Gathers: Great answers.
Nothing to add from me.
Dave Skelton (Lvx15)
RAWIllumination.net: This book obviously is aimed at RAW fans interested in magick, but will it appeal to RAW fans in general?
Dave Skelton: I would think so. Magick is the emphasis, especially in the earliest pieces in the book, but the whole is connected to Bob's larger set of interests - how we build models of reality, forget that we did so, and then constrain ourselves accordingly. Another way of looking at the magick presented here is as a set of tools to enable us to become conscious of that process and enlarge the scope of our own possibilities. And then, of course, there is just the fact that Bob has an entertaining way of writing about anything.
Mike Gathers: In my heavily biased opinion, Maybe Magick, though not quite as epic in scope as Prometheus Rising or Quantum Psychology, belongs right alongside them. It uses magick as a doorway into perception, belief, and how the mind builds reality. Make of that what you Will.
Oz Fritz: Maybe Magick gives a serious presentation of vintage RAW writings. Any fan of his, whatever their interests, will want to see this body of his work, never before collected into one place. The scope of material ranges far beyond what is traditionally called magick. It includes essays on Discordian metaphysics, hypnosis, self-healing, his Sirius contact experience, the power of language, the optimism of "Facing the Future Fearlessly" and a whole lotta general philosophy, psychology and sociology from a contemporary scientific perspective. Consider the title in full: Maybe Magick: Notes from an Evolving Nervous System. Any fan of RAW will have great interest in those notes that have shaped one of the greatest and most important thinkers of modern times.
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