Retroactive Causation and Magic

by Edward Wilson on 2008-01-09 09:40:10

Retroactivity has been a recurrent theme in my explorations of reality. I suspect that my first exposure to the idea was in a science fiction presentation of time travel (specifically Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) but the first time I remember taking it seriously was when I read a piece by Peter Carroll on retroactive enchantment. Retroactivity is the idea that actions taken in the present or the future can affect the past and therefore the affect can proceed the cause. My first experience with this was an experiment based on Peter
Carroll’s ideas of shadow time. On my way to work on public transit I
realized that I was going to be late. There was no way that I could
make it to my work on time and the situation was completely out of my
hands. I entered an altered state of consciousness that Carroll refers
to as gnosis (a horrible misnomer… don’t get me started) and
concentrated on my will that I not be late, reality be damned, time be
skewed but I must not be late. I visualized this new reality
travelling backwards through shadow time (there is no guarantee I
understood the concept at the time) and re-writing the situation. When
I arrived at my place of work I wasn’t late, I was EARLY. The time I
was scheduled for was different than the one I had written down. You
can write it off as coincidence if you like, I’m not going to tell you
how to punctuate your existence but I was in a situation where being
late was inevitable and through an application of will and imagination
arrived early. In this example the affect preceded the cause by about
a week or two.

My most recent experience with retroactive causation took place August
of 2007 at the esoZone event in Portland Oregon. The Weaponized Art
theatre group Foolish People were performing and I, wanting to
get the most out of the experience was front and center. This may have
been kind of foolish of me as the experience was with out a doubt
intense. At one point I had a knife up to my throat. Leaving off the
bulk of what their ritual was about I’ll jump to the conclusion they
were working on implanting a state they referred to as Eden and a
Noumenal Engine retroactively in the experience of participants of the
ritual. John Harrigan of Foolish People had already explained ritual
as he understood it and it had struck a cord as I realized that I had
been enacting the pattern he described even before I had any interest
in magic. At the end of the ritual performance John Harrigan and the
other members of Foolish People walked through the audience and drew
symbols on the audience’s foreheads in ash. The ash of a muse’s still
born baby. The symbol that John drew on my forehead was the first
occult symbol that mattered to me at all. This combined with the
retroactive Eden activation and the talk he had given combined to give
me the sense that my past had been programmed by John Harrigan. The
effect was that I experienced my years of magic work as being a direct
result of a working done this year. It was a very intense moment for
me and I wrote my revelations on my arm in sharpie.

These are just two of the more memorable experiences of retroactivity
from my life. If you start messing around with magical practice you’ll
find plenty of them over the course of experimentation. Whenever you
attempt to inflict your will on the universe retroactivity becomes
possible. Many times the result you get will only be possible if
conditions were set before you enacted your working. After a while
this can confuse the very idea of causation. Was attending esoZone the
result of my past experiences of magic or was my interest in magic an
affect of the ritual of the Foolish People? It creates of causation an
Ouroborus or Mobius strip. I was at esoZone as a result of my magical
practice and my magical practice was a result of my attending esoZone
and I was at esoZone because…

Even before chaos magic was called chaos magic it was based on
spacetime manipulation and retroactive causation. Along with his more
well known techniques such as sigils and the death posture Austin
Osman Spare made use of one he called atavistic resurgence. The
practice involved evoking a trance state and traveling backwards along
his evolutionary path of descendence until he reached a point where
the ancestor had traits that suited what he needed. This ancestor was
rarely human. He would then return to present time with the aspect in
question and perform what he needed the aspect for. For example he was
known to have used a sigil and trance state to call upon himself the
strength of a tiger. The model of time that Spare’s technique of
atavistic resurgence implies is the time tree model explained by Kurt
Vonnegut in his Slaughterhouse Five and displayed graphically in Grant
Morrison’s The Invisibles.

Recently the “many worlds” model of quantum mechanics was experimentally
confirmed. Whenever there are two or more ways for a pilot wave or
indeterminant state to collapse into observable reality it collapse
into both. One of those possible realities is the one we observe but
the other possibility exists somewhere else as another reality or
world. This pretty much means that any thing you could want exists in
another reality as long as it is physically possible for it to have
happened. One mechanism for sorcery would then to shift our
attention/intention backwards along the time tree until the point when
the universe had the choice to go in the direction you want it to or
in the direction you’ve experienced it to. Now just give it a push to
go back along the line the way you’d rather it go. A warning, if you
manage to jump the track of reality as you know it to one where your
desire is now suddenly true this can be a very disorienting experience
and many things you had no intention of changing will be different.
Far better in many ways to find a desire that is possible in the
future of the track you are on and push reality to choose the forks in
the road that lead to your desire.

Edward Wilson is a freelance writer that has been part of the occult community for over 9 years. Edward, known online as Fenris23, specializes in rediscovering magical techniques in the fields of psychology and sociology. His current project, Memetics in Theory and Practice, has already been described as the most dangerous book in the world and is being co-authored with Wes Unruh.

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